Proposal for Division III Project (Senior Thesis)

tentative title - Clandestine Agency: Blueprints for a Machinic Economy

areas of study - Philosophy, Economics

description - Economics has as its object of inquiry the arrangements of productive, allocative, and consumptive forces composing material and social life, and specifically those arrangements involving humanity as their defining element. The way in which this inquiry is conducted, as a scientific analysis of empirical phenomena on the one hand, and a prescriptive formulation of policy and strategy on the other, will depend upon the philosophic conception of the relation between the former and the latter. Thus the concepts involved and the models in which they have determinate relations both account for and actively shape the passage or movement between arrangements as existing, actual things available for analysis, and arrangement as the process of actualization by which things are produced and situated as such, and which we hope to guide and direct strategically.

The problem I wish to raise is twofold: what are the concepts and conceptual models employed by economic theory, constituting its frame of reference, both currently and historically? And how does it understand the process by which concepts are created or recreated and related in models that are then applied to the actual world? Such a research program will require analysis of the key concepts in economic theory, including agency, free will and choice, individuality, the nature of social bodies, markets, corporations, utility and desire, exchange and value. My hypothesis is that analyzing these concepts along with the processes that engender them and relate them to each other and empirical reality will shed light on overlooked potentials for the conceptual composition of economic theory. Perhaps there are modifications to be made to existing concepts, other concepts to be created or taken up, dynamic new models to draw, a superior consistency and practicality to be attained. Perhaps an emphasis on the process of conceptualization will give new impetus and new insight to the positive and normative aspects of economics, and make room for an ethics of economy at the very heart of the field.

I plan to survey the history of economic theory, from Smith, Ricardo, and Bentham to Jevons, Walras and Keynes, as well as the more neglected Marxian and Institutionalist lines, reading them through this double problem. I will draw on histories of economic thought, especially the fine accounts provided by Philip Mirowski, among others, in order to map the processes of conceptual modeling at work in these different thinkers. To chart alternative directions and possibilities for economic concepts and models, I will look to the pioneering work of Herbert Spencer on decision, agency, and rationality; Fernand Braudel's rich accounts of the historical processes composing economic reality; the growing literature on non-linear dynamics and dissipative structures in economic systems; and to a lesser extent, the approaches of World-Systems analysis and neo-institutionalism.

Finally, I will construct my overall approach, both the analytic and creative aspects, by using the works of philosophers Manuel DeLanda, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Their canons, particularly those of the latter three, are very difficult and specialized, but I am confident I can mobilize the relevant concepts in a manner that will be clear and comprehensible for readers without a strong background in philosophy and the specific niche they occupy. In this way, I hope to channel the inspiration and conceptual creativity I find in their works into a project that will be accessable to economists and offer a renewed approach to the field of economic theory.

Critique and the 'Critical Point'

In Parables for the Virtual, Massumi says,

Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is "selected." [32]

This notion of the 'critical point' can help shed light on a mode of reading, approaching, and critiquing a philosophical work that does not fall into the traps of representation. A few days ago, I wrote some rough comments in response to this post from Zoēpolitics, which I'll elaborate on here. I was particularly responding to these statements:

"What if instead of reading these thinkers in terms of whether we agree or disagree with them, instead we were to consider the more general question of 'how they make us think'? What if, in other words, we were to read them against the grain of how they are 'normally' interpreted, in order to tease out the alternative potentialities they unlock?...In short, what if instead of spending so much time 'debunking' we were to 'foster' instead (Massumi)?"

'Fostering' certainly seems more fruitful, productive, and interesting than 'debunking'. The former seems to correspond to the affirmative sense of critique that Deleuze finds in Nietzsche, the latter to critique as Lyotard construes it in Libidinal Economy: caught hopelessly in the representational space of the prerogative being critiqued. The former rescues the most forceful and explosive particles from the thing criticized, engaging them with expressive traits that are themselves drawn out by the most forceful lines of the reader. Rather than sterilizing both in an ineffectual representation with only the most banal effects, it selects that which can escape such sterility, that which can free itself and fly into a pure differing, a pure creation, that which draws both into a becoming-other. It is a joyous affirmation of a difference in-between the reader and what was read. Only such an affirmation can bring forth something 'new' in the most extreme and authentic sense, the sense of attaining absolute deterritorialization.

Instead of responding to the solutions, the conclusions, the propositions of an argument, rejecting or accepting them, falling into a rigid binary, 'fostering' would seek out the problems, the complex problematic fields, of which the solutions are only effects. It would seek to rediscover the force of these problems, buried under calcified layers of understanding. The reader would negotiate these fields, these 'complexions', in order to find those sites of the most intense resonance between the constellations of problems composing the field and those composing the reader's own complexion. These are the sites of 'forced movement', where difference itself opens up in the new, in the line of flight. Here we might find a nomadic distribution of problems and solutions, the immanent evaluations of the Overman, of an Ethics. There is no longer an issue of interpreting and judging a representation, nor of representing one's reaction. Critique is no longer that of the conclusions, of what they represent as being 'good or bad', 'right or wrong', 'true or false'.

Critique has become a gathering of forceful problems selected in and of, by and for the encounter between two complexions, raising their intensities to the critical threshold at which something new and different can emerge: new arrangements of problems, new pathways of solution, new connections with the outside. This emergence marks the overturning of everything implicated insofar as it becomes distributed in a field of differences, a smooth space. The theme of emergence is what leads me to quote Massumi, as the notion of the 'critical point' is precisely the threshold of intensity that, once crossed, opens onto an emergence of the new. Critique in the mode of 'fostering' would seek to map out these critical points, the points of transformation of formalizations of expression.

These points are nodes of 'machinic heterogenesis', as Guattari says, autopoietic nuclei that enter catalytic relations with expressive traits, the intensive features of a machine. These nodes or singularities constitute the 'critical points' of a structure (regime of signs), which, in forming catalytic couplings with elements of that structure (expressive traits), generate machinic arrangements that open onto other orders, other 'Universes of values'. This generation or heterogenesis is precisely where the biunivocality of content and expression imposed by stratafication gives way to intensive order of matter/sense or the plane of consistency: there is a double transversality, as the singularities of content (nodes or critical points) deterritorialize the form of expression (structure), and the traits of expression (machinic components, intensive features) deterritorialize the form of content (Universes, constellations of singularities composing the diagram or 'virtuality' of a structure).

Cartography has a double edge: mapping the singular nodes embedded in a structural order, marking points of potential transformation and machinic heterogenesis, points at which several different structural orders can become involved in a conjunction that belongs to a machinic order that is different in kind from structure; and diagramming the expressive traits that engage these nodes and are catalyzed by them, opening onto new 'Universes', new constellations of traits, new permutations of the machinic phylum. This twofold function should thereby shed light on the abstract machines at play, by mapping the domain in which they can function and diagramming the range of functional possibilities they manifest. The abstract machine can only act in the concrete arrangements formalized by expression, by the 'regimes' or 'structures' left cooling, stratifying, in the wake of the machinic phylum. Yet the abstract machine has open to it an unlimited resevoir of virtual components and their possible functions, defined by the Universes, the diagrams, the constellations of singularities drawn by the very cutting edges of the phylum.

Together, these functions work to elucidate the machinic plane of consistency which the abstract machines traverse, the whole intensive and micrological order underlying and conditioning the order of structures, regimes of expression, molar signifiance and subjectification (representation and identity). By mapping the critical points or nodes of transformation, and diagramming the machinic components that can engage them and open a bifurcation, planomenology will be attentive to the dynamic and singular arrangements composed by any given encounter. The critical points are those particles of content embedded in expressive formalizations that have the potential to destabilize and mutate that formalization. The machinic components are those particles of expression that constellate around the edges of the diagram of content, composing those most deterritorialized functional arrangements that open onto new Universes and new diagrammatic configurations. The simplest example pertaining to the reading of a work of philosophy would have the critical points as those promiscuous concepts or ambiguous propositions that have the most potential to overturn a reading and allow it involve several other 'understandings', or even invent new ones, while the machinic components would be those ideas, problems, interpretative tendencies, 'frames of reference', even delirious 'misunderstandings' of the reader that can potentially open the text onto new fields of reference and orientation.

Planomenology would necessitate a 'fostering' of critical points, singularities, autocatalytic nuclei and the heterogeneous machinic components that engage them and compose autopoietic arrangements. This requires a very different sense of 'critique': rather than attacking the logic of the propositions of an argument, one intensifies the catalytic couples constellated by critical points until they cross the threshold of transformation, reaching 'critical' intensity, bifurcating and giving rise to an unpredictable and genuine difference through the selective actualization of virtualities. Rather than judging and implicitly moralizing, leveling the differences, desingularizing the problems, subordinating the unique to the identity of a model, it would seek to create an ethos, that is, to bring forth the singular problematic of an encounter or event. Only by negotiating such a problematic in its irreducible singularity is the liberation of the new, the affirmation of chance, possible. Only by analyzing 'how it makes us think' as Jason says, how it composes or is itself a composition of thought and action, of matter/sense, will we attain the absolute singularity of an ethical evaluation, free from the moralizing judgment of representation and argument.

Desire and the Question

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes an unconscious that is composed of problems and questions; more precisely, a problematic field whose terms (problems) are distributed in the wake a question that is always displaced, out of place in its place, constantly mobilized in an evasion and escape. Problems show up as disguised, masked components of reality that share a clandestine solidarity, connected through lines of alliance drawn by the obscure movements of the question. The 'secret' that they share in is no more than a concealed opening onto pure difference: behind every mask is only the disparate; never a 'true face', but rather only another mask, another disguise, an endless repetition of disguise.

What is hidden, left out, obscured, is no more than the (non)-being or extra-being of the question: the disparate in itself. It is that pure opening of the question onto the yet to come - not any answer, real or possible, but that space of difference drawn by the desire to question, to bring forth something else. It is the force of desire that drives the question, always displacing it within the problematic field, thereby drawing this field as such and making of every problematic instance a disguise veiling the disparate. The disparate is the definitive characteristic of the question: the affirmation of chance, the aleatory instance in which all chance is affirmed and set free. The question, before seeking any specific answer, functions as an affirmation of any answer that might come, any approach, any complication that may, by chance, present itself. Insofar as the question affirms all of chance, all of the difference onto which it opens, it has the disparate at its heart as that ecstatic, vibrant, and untamable force of desire.

It is this force that is always displacing the question in the field it draws, and that is disguised in every problematic instance. Desire makes the real, 'makes the difference', through these elements of disguise and displacement: every component is itself a 'different' in relation to other 'differents' that hide no true face or identity, but only difference itself; this difference in itself is always displaced, in a movement that distributes the singular terms by virtue of their difference, abolishing all identity and resemblance. Every component exists only in terms of the problems in which it is implicated, and these problems exist only in the drawing of a problematic field by the question.

Hence, we have two figures of desire as it makes up the unconscious: the machinic components that disguise difference in intensive variations (stable states), connections and breaks of flows of force; and the instance of variation itself, bifurcation, in which the machinic connections are suspended and redistributed by the disjunctive synthesis of the Body without Organs. The problems or singular points, point-signs, whose constellation define the machinic components, compose a problematic field in the wake of the purely disjunctive instance of the question, the disparate or aleatory point. It is the composition of this field, and the conjunction of newly stabilizing states of solution (those generated by the distribution or 'posing' of problems) on it, that defines the cycle of the unconscious that 'terminates' in a nomadic subject capable of gathering or producing new problems and posing them through the instance of questioning.

What is Planomenology?

I pose the question only provisionally, as I hope to continue approaching it throughout my life, but it is perhaps an appropriate way to begin. The obvious cue is to phenomenology (as well as phantasmatology, a word Foucault coined to describe Deleuze's early metaphysics). Yet whereas Husserl intended phenomenology as methodological, I do not mean this to denote a method per se; rather, an approach to or prerogative on the ontological. Short of being systematic and exact, it should be anexact yet rigorous.

'Planomenon' is another word for the plane of consistency, perhaps the key concept in Deleuze and Guattari's later collaborations. The Planomenon is the Real as such, the ultimate 'object' of ontology, as the univocal Being of difference itself. It is the field of immanent difference, in which immanence is not ascribed to or said of any transcendent Identity or Actuality: immanence is immanent to immanence alone. Difference is no longer caught between the field of immanence and that to which it is immanent, thereby inscribed in the 'concept in general'. Rather, immanence differs from itself, in itself, by and for itself. This plane describes a field of pure differences or disparities, in which every term is a singularity - unique, unusual, problematic. It is on this plane that every singularity is consistent with every other, precisely as problems, as instances of a problematic field drawn in the course of questioning.

This kind of consistency is prior to and more profound than logical consistency, as contradiction has no meaning or relevance. Rather, it has a properly machinic consistency, that of the Mechanosphere: everything subsists in interconnected lines of flows and breaks, composed of a univocal flow of matter/sense (mening), a pure becoming. As such, it attains absolute deterritorialization, it is the real attaining this absolute limit. This occurs when the question, "What can this body do?", "Of what is this body capable?", is posed with its maximum force and efficacy, drawing a field that implicates and encompasses the entirety of the real. Every connection (of different to different, singularity to singularity) is raised to the height, the limit of its intensity. All of reality is constellated in a becoming-other of Being in which everything takes flight.

The machinic consistency of the Planomenon is thereby drawn not through a logical relation of terms without contradiction, but through a problematic relation of terms without limit, or whose only limit is the absolute of universal bifurcation in which everything is only as yet to come. The real becomes self-consistent in relation to what it can do, what might be coming. Therefore, planomenology will regard the real with an attention to such consistency, following the abstract lines drawn by absolute deterritorialization. Everything transcendent, every actuality, will come up against a force, a cruelty, so intense that it will attain its absolute limit, its vertigo, falling back on the plane of immanence. It is in this sense that Deleuze speaks of the 'transcendent exercise' of the faculties, in which they attain the pure immanence of a thought without image. Nothing can escape, or rather, nothing can avoid escaping, nothing can remain grounded on a substratum, as everything is carried off in a incessant and ruthless ungrounding.

'Planomenon' is literally defined as 'all free-living organisms; those organisms not rooted or attached to a substratum.' Its Greek root has the sense of 'drifting' or 'roaming', and it is related to 'planomania', meaning 'a compulsion to wander', or 'an intense desire to live free from social restraints or obligations'. It is when the question (of what are we capable?) is posed with sufficient force, that is, when there is an intense enough desire driving it, that absolute deterritorialization is attained, and the abstract line carries us off with an infinite speed. Discovering these lines and feeding them into the questioning, and thereby composing problematic machines with increasingly intense forced movements fueling them, is the aim and passion of planomenology. The object of planomenology is, therefore, the abstract line that clandestinely wanders through all of the real, connecting everything back to the univocal Being of difference, absolute Deterritorialization.