Saturday, May 5, 2007

Becoming: Degrees of Infinity

I am not at all going to try to summarize this chapter. It is better, I think, to discuss it in class. These are a couple things that I perhaps wrongly think are related. And I'd say post on whatever you want on that's related.


Language map of the world by color, ca. 1900. Languages are political entities, and the color demarcation of language territories do not represent borders of comprehension, or even flexible areas of change. There are several identical languages that are separated for nationalistic reasons, just as there are those that are mutually unintellgible but "dialects" of the same language.


Hypothetical dialectal areas engaging with one another (the groups can be seen as distnict to the extent that they share more meanings than beyond some political or geographic or whatever obstacle) entails becomings-other which do not yield any thing that is perceptible, since it is not truly faithful to anything like political distinctions. All the doctors in the world (for example, since they have jargons (a technical term, incidentally)) may be able to relate on certain topics, in certain vocabularies, but the intermittent occurence of the compatibilities make them impossible to map. They are constantly shifting, yielding words which are phonetically identical in two languages that mean different things. To map or anticipate these connections would be impossible, since "becoming does not yield anything other than itself".

Intelligibility of language behaves in a continuum. To describe these interactions in terms of their political titles (English, German, etc) only gets at a small part of the smooth shift experienced over the territory (geographical and historical) that connect them. Intelligibility is not even possible to observe through the demarcation of a single body, since we constantly use words to reproduce behaviors for non-linguistic goals. We are not especially intelligible to ourselves, and the words we use often confuse people. There is a multiplicitous becoming-intelligible consisting in the con-incidence of approximate shared usage. Private understandings (never private languages) proliferate.

"The plane of consistency" seems to me to be about levelling the importance of nodes of connection. To talk about intelligibility in terms of the political title of a language is to leave this plain, elevating certain properties that do not have anything to do with the function of intelligibility. We are perfectly allowed to take a look at the structure of intelligibility in terms of hierarchy and privelaged nodes -points of connection that serve to make more things intelligible, and to do this is to examine the machine of the transfer of intelligibility. This is what I think they are getting at by saying, "At n dimensions, it is called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere." (252). Any product of the intelligibility machine is local to the points that connected it, so that even geographically, the slang (for example) of one town does not behave as a degree of the town next to it. Each point in a shift of two langauges becoming one another is a particularity. The intersection of multiple lines of change yields unique entities, not degrees ("Norwegian omelette" is not the same as any other omellete, and is not readable in the terms of any other omelette, though each factor can be described as a degree of a certain force).

Another Thing
Integers (1,2,3,4...) are infinite. Between integers there are various other types of numberings, which are more densely packed in the number system. Transcendental numbers (non-terminating, non-repeating numbers like pi) are infinitely dense within the infinite system. On pg 254, they write, "there are smaller and larger inifinities, not by virtue of their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which their parts enter." The becoming of a thing into another, the multiplicitous proliferation of connections of that process, do not create a higher count of connections, but a formational utility specific to the forces involved. In other words, becoming entails a higher degree of infinity, an expanding of dimensions in the Mechanosphere, rather than a filiation of progress.

An analogy, and analogic thought, intends to make a movement based on compelling a correlation of qualities, which then implies that an unconnected by similar formation will behave in a similar manner. This movement reminds me of learning to drive. When I began to drive by myself, I realized that I had up until that point only ever learned a series of vectors to move me between two places, and had a lot of trouble recombining directions to figure out how to get somewhere from a novel starting point. But there were several moments when I drove over an overpass and saw the highway below me and recognized it as part of the trip to somewhere I was not then going (I was heading into town, and I realized that if I had been on the highway beneath me, I would have gone over the river). Suddenly I was travelling on a map, completely open to improvisation. I began to imagine what the place would look like from overhead, and what fields stood between points that I would never have considered traversing.