Deterritorial Investigations

Mold/Modulation, Analog/Digital (A Handful of Deleuze Quotes)

Posted on February 23, 2014 by edmundberger

Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992)

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables:
each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is
analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system
of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesnt necessarily mean binary). Enclosures
are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously
change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. (pg. 4)

The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or
administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never
saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses
together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each
member of that body In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a
signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are
regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The
numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find
ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become dividuals, and masses, samples,
data, markets, or banks. (pg. 6)

The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards
an owner state or private power but coded figures deformable and transformable of a single corporation
that now has only stockholders. (pg. 6)

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981)

The first question concerns use. For if geometry is not a part of painting, there are nonetheless properly pictorial
uses of geometry. We called one of these uses digital, not in direct reference to the hand, but in reference to
the basic units of a code. Once again, these basic units or elementary visual forms are indeed aesthetic and not
mathematic, inasmuch as they have completely internalized the manual movement that produces them. (pg.
112)

Analogical language, it is said, belongs to the right hemisphere of the brain or, better, to the nervous system,
whereas digital language belongs to the left hemisphere. Analogical language would be a language of relations,
which consists of expressive movements, paralinguistic signs, breaths and screams, and so on. One can question
whether or not this is a language properly speaking. But there is no doubt, for example, that Artauds theater
elevated scream-breaths to the state of language. More generally, painting elevates colors and lines to the state
of language, and it is an analogical language. One might even wonder if painting has not always been the
analogical language par excellence. When we speak of analogical language in animals, we do not consider their
possible songs, which belong to a different domain; rather we are essentially concerned with cries, variable
colors, and lines (attitudes, postures). (pgs. 113-114)

It seems [] that a digital code covers certain forms of similitude or analogy: analogy by isomorphism, or
analogy by produced resemblance. (pgs. 114-115)

Analogical synthesizers are modular: they establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous
elements, they introduce a literally unlimited possibility of connection between these elements, on a field of
presence or finite plane whose moments are all actual and sensible. Digital synthesizers, however, are
integral: their operation passes through a codification, through a homogenization and binarization of the data,
which is produced on a separate plane, infinite in principle, and whose sound will only be produced as the result
of a conversion-translation. A second difference appears at the level of filters. The primary function of the filter
is to modify the basic color of a sound, to constitute or vary its timbre. But digital filters proceed by an additive
synthesis of elementary codified formants, whereas the analogical filter usually acts through the subtraction of
frequencies (high-pass, low-pass . . . ) . What is added from one filter to the next are intensive subtractions,
and it is thus an addition of subtractions that constitutes modulation and sensible movement as a fall. In short,
it is perhaps the notion of modulation in general (and not similitude) that will enable us to understand the
nature of analogical language or the diagram. (pgs. 116-117)

Painting is the analogical art par excellence. It is even the form through which analogy becomes a language, or
finds its own language: by passing through a diagram. Abstract painting consequently poses a very particular
problem. Abstract painting obviously proceeds by code and program, implying operations of homogenization
and binarization that are constitutive of a digital code. But the abstractionists often happen to be great painters,
which means that they do not simply apply to painting a code that would be external to it; on the contrary, they
elaborate an intrinsically pictorial code. It is thus a paradoxical code, since instead of being opposed to analogy,
it takes analogy as its object; it is the digital expression of the analogical as such. Analogy will pass through a
code rather than passing through a diagram. It has a status that borders on the impossible. And in another way,
perhaps art informel also borders on the impossible, for by extending the diagram to the entire painting, it takes
the diagram for the analogical flux itself, rather than making the flux pass through the diagram. This time, it is
as if the diagram were directed toward itself, rather than being used or treated. It no longer goes beyond itself in
a code, but grounds itself in a scrambling. (pg. 117)
The diagram, the agent of analogical language, does not act as a code, but as a modulator. (pg. 120)

Gregory Bateson has a very interesting hypothesis on the language of dolphins in Steps to an Ecology of Mind
[] After having distinguished analogical language, founded on relations, and digital or vocal language, founded
on conventional signs, Bateson comes up against the problem of dolphins. Because of their adaptation to the
sea, they have renounced the kinesic and facial signs that characterize the analogical language of other
mammals; they nonetheless remained condemned to the analogical functions of this language, but found
themselves in the situation of having to vocalize them, to codify them as such. This is something like the
situation of the abstract painter. (pg. 188, note 7)

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)

There may be a greater or lesser number of intermediate states between the molecular and the molar; there may
be a greater or lesser number of exterior forces or organizing centers participating in the molar form. Doubtless,
these two factors are in an inverse relation to each other and indicate limit-cases. For example, the molar form
of expression may be of the mold type, mobilizing a maximum of exterior forces; or it may be of the
modulation type, bringing into play only a minimum number of them. Even in the case of the mold, however,
there are nearly instantaneous, interior intermediate states between the molecular content that assumes its own
specific forms and the determinate molar expression of the outside by the form of the mold. Conversely, even
when the multiplication and temporalization of the intermediate states testify to the endogenous character of
the molar form (as with crystals), a minimum of exterior forces still intervene in each of the stages. (pg. 58)

The synthesizer has taken the place of the old a priori synthetic judgment, and all functions change
accordingly. By placing all its components in continuous variation, music itself becomes a superlinear system, a
rhizome instead of a tree, and enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences,
ruptures, and breaks are a part. (pg. 95)

In analogical transformations, we often see sleep, drugs, and amorous rapture form expressions that translate
into presignifying regimes the subjective or signifying regimes one wishes to impose upon the expressions, but
which they resist by themselves imposing upon these regimes an unexpected segmentarity and polyvocality. (pg.
137)

Let us recall Nietzsches idea of the eternal return as a little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and
unthinkable forces of the Cosmos. We thus leave behind the assemblages to enter the age of the Machine, the
immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of forces to be harnessed. Vareses procedure, at the dawn
of this age, is exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing
sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy. If this
machine must have an assemblage, it is the synthesizer. By assembling modules, source elements, and elements
for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer
makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other
elements beyond sound matter. It unites disparate elements in the material, and transposes the parameters
from one formula to another. The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the
ground in a priori synthetic judgment: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not
form and matter, Grund and territory. (pg. 343)
what Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model for is taking form and matter to be two terms defined
separately, like the ends of two half-chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of
molding behind which there is a perpetually variable, continuous modulation that it is no longer possible to
grasp. The critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of
medium and intermediary dimension, of energetic, molecular dimensiona space unto itself that deploys its
materiality through matter, a number unto itself that propels its traits through form. (pg. 409)

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This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged abstract painting, analog, Artaud, Bateson, computers, control, Deleuze, digital, discipline, Guattari, mechanosphere,
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One Response to Mold/Modulation, Analog/Digital (A Handful of Deleuze Quotes)

dmfant says:
February 24, 2014 at 11:00 pm

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/24/282061990/if-you-think-youre-anonymous-online-think-again
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