Introduction
In the following essay, we will undertake a critique of the discussion of nanotechnology[1] in the works of Nick Land as a prism by which we can undertake a larger critique of certain themes within his philosophy. Land regards nano-engineering as an insurgent horror vacui capable of reorganizing organic matter autonomously and against the negentropic feedback security reflexes of human anatomical structures:
The distinction between nature and culture cannot classify molecular machines and is already obsolesced by genetic engineering (wet nanotechnics). The hardware/software dichotomy succumbs at the same time. Nanotechnics dissolves matter into intensive singularities that are neutral between particles and signals and immanent to their emergent intelligence; melting Terra into a seething K- pulp (which, unlike grey goo, synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates).[2]
In sum, Land approaches what many would regard as the Existential Risk[3] posed by nanotechnology as a fortuitous juggernaut against the metastable machinics of the human race. Now, all of this might certainly strike the reader as a millenarian and cyber-punk project. But in fact, its philosophical predicate, immured beneath an obtuse textual cosmetic, is a rather strange resuscitation of older philosophical themes.
Cyberpunk Monadology
We might ask, tongue-in-cheek, if Land is the Leibniz of the Bladerunner generation. To be sure, he is a peculiar sort of Leibnizian, a nihilist one that is anti-vitalist, anti-compatiblist, and anti-rationalist. And although we might be inclined to regard such distinctions between Land and Leibniz as straining the credulity of any claim averring to some similitude between the two, we can nonetheless detect a thematic continuity passing from Leibniz to Land, warped along the way during its passage through Kant and Deleuze.
Unlike Leibniz, Land is distinctly anti-compatabilist inasmuch as he regards the machinic as noumenal, and thus inaccessible to the human subject, unlike Leibniz’s monad. And yet, Land ultimately deploys the noumenal nanomachine in a manner similar to Leibniz’s deployment of the monad. We find a dark variation of the Leibnizian thesis of “pre-established harmony” at play in Landian philosophy. Like Leibniz, Land eschews questions of causation by referring to the machine as a cybernetic noumenon[4] (and thus, not the causal consequence of any phenomena) and as having “come from the future”[5] as a programmatic issuance from the Outside. Similarly, Leibnizian philosophy figures the monad as that which “follow[s] its own laws”[6] (independent of material causation) as the programmatic[7] issuance of a divine actor. The function of the monad for Leibniz is the constitution of rationalist-compatibilist access to the divine for the human subject. Land’s nanomachines, on the other hand, operate under circumstances in which the human subject is presumed not to have such access.
Drawing from Bataille and Nietzsche, Land considers the divine in terms of its crisis, and regards such a crisis as concomitantly a crisis of humanism.[8] For Land, the divine, just like capital, is a dubious synthetic a priori that under conditions of crisis evinces a certain Kantian thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) that was operant but never accounted for. And yet, Land is not a staunch Kantian, for he embellishes with great detail upon the mechanics of the noumenal through his hyperstitions.[9] Automated cybernetic capitalism is conjectured by Land to be an organizing principle towards a noumenal technocapital singularity[10] or teleoplexy[11] that hints thematically at Leibnizian theology, despite its nihilist professions. In straying from Kant, Land arrives at an odd anti-vitalist and anti-compatibilist form of Leibnizian philosophy in which the nanomachine functions as the program of a Lovecraftian noumenon, as the substance of an anti-human rationalism.
The human lacks access to such a machinic substance, and the machine annihilates the human for precisely this reason. Land’s is a kind of Nietzschean-Kantian monadology, an exilic monadology that retains the divine as a programmer despite the loss of vitalism and compatibilism.
In this sense, Land exhibits millenarianism insofar as he prophesizes an auspicious change of circumstances that reify through an irruption or intensive event. All the more intriguing is Land’s position that such an event, one of annihilation, satisfies human desire, and is thus an auspicious development. Such a position owes to Land’s reading of Bataille regarding the human appetite for the limit-conditions of experience, achievable through expenditure and sacrifice.[12] Land’s “meltdown singularity” adds to Bataille’s philosophy the Deleuzoguattarian concept of “molecular desire”, of intensities and assemblages effectuated at the most discrete of scales.[13] Molecular desire is irreducible[14], but the human body can be reduced to molecules, recombined and resynthesized into wetware structures and artificial life through nanotechnological intervention, approaching technocapital singularity. Mutatis mutandis, this is actually quite Leibnizian. It is the irreducibility of the monad with respect to the divine substance that, for Leibniz, endows it with the faculty of producing “the best of all possible worlds”.[15] Land, although refusing to impute perfection to a world of human-divine interface, nonetheless accords it to the noumenal, “the thing[in-itself] as […] hideous in its perfection. Alien.”[16] A world without the human is an improvement for land, an ascendance achieved by a programmer noumenon that commands the nano-mutiny which disintegrates the human and reassembles into a well-calibrated architecture—“can what is playing you make it to level 2?”[17] If the monad functions as the substance of a pulchritudinous world for Leibniz to which the human is party, the nanomachine functions as the substance for a dark beauty for Land that overcomes its human buffer.
Empiricism and Rationalism
We should be more specific in our description of Land’s use of Deleuze, however, for Land does not deploy Deleuze as a libidinal theorist, but an empiricist philosopher. As Robin Mackay writes, Land offers a “disturbing distillation of what Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism’. In Land’s work, this becomes the watchword for an experimental praxis-oriented entirely towards contact with the unknown.”[18] But we should not forget that Deleuzian empiricism refers from its most primordial formations to Hume.[19] As critics such as Chomsky have noted, Hume, despite making averments to the human possession of innate cognitive faculties, fails to sufficiently elaborate thereupon.[20] The paradox of induction expressed in Hume’s determinative skepticism is eased somewhat by Kant, who proposes the structure of nature to be at best a regulative principle, a kind of instrument to be used vis-à-vis a transcendental methodology of deduction.[21] Kant’s efforts are almost entirely nullified under Deleuze, especially in his collaboration with Guattari, whereby regulative cognitive structures are subject to Foucaultian social skepticism, and the Humean imagination is situated as emancipatory empiricism of intensities.[22] Such problematic moves are somewhat cloaked by the use of the abstract machine by Deleuze and Guattari. As a machine, the abstract machine presumably has certain determinative faculties, unbeknownst to us; what is left vague under Deleuze and Guattari becomes noumenal under Land. In an entirely empiricist manner, the abstract machine is framed by Deleuze and Guattari in terms of intensive[23] feedback (unlike, say, probabilistic notions of Bayesian machine learning). The consequence of a machinic approach as such is the redefinition by Deleuze and Guattari of philosophy as a practice of generating concepts as a neoteric means of engaging with the nature and knowledge of univocal being in a sensory manner.[24]
Land, of course, has been quite prolific in his creation of hyperstitional concepts.[25] However, to escape the crisis of profligate neologism and lore for its own sake, Land refers to the inanimate as a backdrop to his machinic animation. The predicate for his ‘desiring-production’ of concepts is the Deleuzian empiricist substrate, the ‘plane of consistency’ or ‘body-without-organs’. Just as for Land, Artaud’s “body-without-organs”[26] accommodates the machinic agent, for Leibniz, Arnauld’s “substance without parts”[27] accommodates the monad. However, Land’s desiring-machines are not genuinely empiricist; they operate as monads for a noumenal substance. In this way, Land somewhat clumsily navigates through the conundrum of the use of Spinoza’s immanence in his transcendental empiricism through his work on the virtual.[28] For Land, however, the vitalist linchpin of Deleuze’s reconciliation of Kant with Spinoza is unsustainable, especially when figured in the virtual, which by the 1990s becomes a realm of simulation, artificial intelligence, and inhuman machinery. Dissatisfied with the human project and impelled by Nietszche and Bataille, Land concludes, “death is a virtual object inducing convergence.”[29]
Conclusion
Oddly, Land desists from nihilism tout court. He retains a rationalist substance, ejecting it into a noumenal realm. Of course, rationalist substance has lingered in the background of both Kant and Deleuze. The monad serves as almost a means by which Kant figures the noumenon as a means of reconciling the inaccessibility of the Ding an sich and the Copernican subject.[30] And for Deleuze, the figure of the machine in his works derives not from Spinoza or Bergson, but from Leibnizian monadology.[31] This is apparent in Difference and Repetition, in which Deleuze contends that it is repetition itself that tenably effectuates the infinite.[32] Ultimately, Land opts for a kind of fatal hybridization of empiricism and rationalism, whereby the intensive subject is sacrificed through a machinic catastrophe that bequeaths the human to a noumenal substance. But it appears as though empiricism is ephemeral under such a model, whereas the Leibnizian themes are permanent. The noumenon programs human sacrifice in order to secure its own future.
Postscript on Philosophical Chemistry
Land’s engagement with nanotechnology is not entirely unique. Artists and philosophers often exploit the exciting prospect of nanotechnology in order to issue utopian (or dystopian) prophecies. Stellarc, for instance, claims that nanotechnology will “improve upon nature” and make bodies “ready for space travel.”[33] Rossi Braidotti views the application of nanotechnology to the body as an escape route from the Vitruvian and capitalist anthropic bio-politics.[34] However, the philosophically responsible approach would not be to issue utopian declaratives but to consider the possible worlds that nanotechnology can produce, and interrogate the logic of such worlds.[35] This is, in fact, precisely what Drexler did by offering his “grey goo” scenario[36] of runaway nanomachine omniphagy; not as a prophecy of doom, but as a possible scenario and an engineering problem.
In Engineering Philosophy, Reza Negarestani and Robin Mackay discuss the merits of a neo-rationalist philosophical analysis that evades both metaphysical beguilement and physical fascination. As they describe, the enterprise of philosophy is one of developing structural models through exercises in reason and logic that are distinct from physicality and do not defer to metaphysical solutions. Such an enterprise is contrasted with that of Land: “Nick mistakes rational agenthood with a perspectival phenomenal self (much like eliminativists) that can be explained away by some physical law, but the minded self is a-perspectival.”[37] The project of engineering philosophy bears semblance to the project of philosophical chemistry by Mackay and Negarestani a few years earlier: a practice of assaying for properties, constraints, morphisms, and invariants.[38] This might strike us as a better means of evaluating molecular nanotechnology. This neo-rationalist turn offers us a better means of assessing nanotechnology.
Self-assembling nanotechnology is often regarded as a kind of automated combinatorium. Eugene Thacker, for instance, describes nanotechnology as “combining biological and nonbiological components into assemblies such as the molecular sorting rotor (combined of rotor rods and biomolecular receptors, to form a nanotechnical ‘binding site’).”[39] For Thacker, such a combinatorial leverage is achieved due to the putative materialist indifference of nanomachines, the “nanotechnological perspective (‘all matter is matter’)[.]”[40] However, assuming an engineer’s position, we can respond that the development nanotechnology certainly cannot appraise matter indifferently as an equivalent malleable substance. It would be impossible to engineer molecular nanotechnology with such an impression of matter, for, ultimately, it has been the sensitivity to assaying specific properties of matter at the molecular scale that has produced nanotechnology.
Consider K. Eric Drexler’s PhD dissertation, “Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation”, a foundational work in the field of nanotechnology that offers a helpful guide for philosophical consideration of nanotechnology. In this captivating work, Drexler maintains that serviceable machines can be produced at the nano-scale through the delicate assaying of the properties of chemical durotaxis at such a scale. Key properties include steric repulsion, bond stiffness, continuum-mechanical shearing, anisotropy, moiety reactions, orbital shells and charge excitations, Van der Walls forces, stiffness, modal frequencies, elasticity variance, and piezochemistry. Drexler provides his own list: “fundamental chemical concepts as bonding, strain, reaction rates, transition states, orbital symmetry, steric hindrance, and equilibrium constants are all applicable; familiar chemical entities such as alkanes, alkenes, aromatic rings, functional groups, radicals, and carbenes are all of use.”[41] John M. Johansan describes Drexler well in Nanoarchitecture: A New Species of Architecture:
Physicist K. Eric Drexler, considered the founding father of nanotechnology, has advanced realistic procedures for designing simulated molecular structures. Accordingly, Drexler proposes that artificial DNA, or coding devices, be developed and employed in structuring matter to the service of mankind. Within the molecular structure, atoms of various chemical make-up are selected, assembled in particular patterns, and programmed to replicate themselves thus enabling immense workforces to produce products of almost any design.[42]
We might raise the question, then, of how philosophers can engage with nanotechnology in order to better engineer philosophy.
More promising efforts in the field of studying nanotechnology include the work Cyrus C.M. Mody, who considers nanotechnology as an object of knowledge communities produced through scientific research practices;[43] Colin Milburn, who introduces nanotechnology from a game-studies angle;[44] Robin Hanson, who applies econometric forecasting methodologies to expected developments in nanotechnology;[45] John Barrow, who applies nanotechnology to cosmological evolutionary theory with reference to the Kardashev scale and the Fermi Paradox;[46] and Hugo Degaris, who refers to femtotechnology, attotechnology, and zeptotechnology as serving as an impetus for expanding the methodological considerations at play in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI).[47] These works are highlighted due to the fact that they study the technology from their respective fields, keeping to the rudiments of the fields, and resisting the urge to let the rush of the neoteric justify an abandonment of procedure.
Works Cited:
Adams, Robert Merrihew. Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1994.
Barrow, John. D. Impossibility: Limits of Science and the Science of Limits. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1998.
Braidotti, Rossi. The Posthuman. Cambridge, Polity: 2013.
Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. Digital Hypersititon. Falmouth, Urbanomic: 2017.
Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. Writings – 1997-2003. Falmouth, Urbanomic: 2017.
Chomsky, Noam. What Kind of Creatures are We? New York, Columbia University Press: 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York, Columbia University Press: 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibiz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London, Continuum: 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1980.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. New York, Columbia University Press: 1994.
De Garis, Hugo. “Best of H+: X-Tech and the Search for Infra Particle Intelligence”, h +, February 20, 2014. https://hplusmagazine.com/2014/02/20/x-tech-and-the-search-for-infra-particle-intelligence/
Drexler, K. Eric. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. New York, Random House: 1986.
Drexler, K. Eric. “Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation.” PhD diss, MIT, 1990. School of Architecture and Planning.
Garber, Daniel. Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2009.
Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume. Princeton, Princeton University Press: 2008.
Hanson, Robin. The Age of EM: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2016.
Johanson, John M. Nanoarchitecture: A New Species of Architecture. New York, Princeton Architectural Press: 2002.
Land, Nick. The Third for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. London: Routlege, 1992.
———Fanged Noumena – Collection Writings: 1987-2007. Falmouth, Urbanomic: 2011.
———. “Teleoplexy”. In #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avenessian. Falmouth, Urbanomic: 2014.
Negarestani, Reza. Intelligence and Spirit. Falmouth, Urbanomic: 2018.
Negarestani, Reza, and Robin Mackay. Engineering Philosophy. Falmouth, Urbanomic: 2018.
Mackay, Robin, and Reza Negarestani. “Editorial Introduction”. In Collapse Volume VII: Culinary Materialism. Falmouth, Urbanomic: 2012.
Milburn, Colin. Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter. Durham, Duke University Press: 2015.
Mody, Cyrus C.M. Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology. Cambridge, The MIT Press: 2011.
Peden, Knox. Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Phoenix, Chris, and Mike Treder. “Nanotechnology as Global Ctastrophic Risk”. In Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. ?irkovi?. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2008.
Strickland, Lloyd. Leibniz’s Monadology: A New Translation and Guide. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 2014.
Thacker, Eugene. Biomedia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2004.
Watkins, Eric. “On the Necessity and Nature of Simples: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and the Pre-Critical Kant.” In Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy – Volume III, edited by Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2006.
Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 2003.
Wilson, Catherine. “Confused Perceptions, Darkened Concepts: Some Features of Kant’s Leibniz-Critique.” In Kant and His Influence, edited by George MacDonald Ross and Tony McWalter. London, Continuum: 2005.
Zylinska, Joanna. The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. London, Continuum: 2002.
Endnotes:
[1] Provided here is an index of Land’s commentary on nanomachines. “Cybersex depends critically on data-suits, evaporating into the nanominiaturized molecular machinery of an artificial skin, until the sockets go in, shadowed by teleneurocontrol fields, and things begin to get really weird.” (Land, 2011: 343)“Cybergothic slams hyperheated critique into the ultramodern ‘vision thing’, telecommercialized retinas laser-fed on the multimedia fall-out from imploded futurity, videopacking brains with repetitive psycho-killer experiments in non-consensual wetware alteration: crazed AIs, replicants, terminators, cyberviruses, grey-goo nanohorrors . . . apocalypse market overdrive[.]”
(ibid, 347) “Is this ritual cannibalism or nano-engineering?” (397) “So this is how it feels to be a cyberian wet-weaponry module, clotted out of cat-tensed nanotechnic predation[.]” (399) “Microtropic scale-dynamics feed through to sub capitalised or nano-economic guerrilla commerce, populating the equatorial plane of tactility with parallel killers: neo-nomads, post-nuclear mutants, sub-polar infiltrators, K-invaders, junglists[.]” (406)
[2] (ibid, 451)
[3] See Drexler (1986); Phoenix and Treder in Bostrom and Cirkovic (2008)
[4] “The global human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history. The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside. […] Kantian transcendental philosophy critiques transcendent synthesis, which is to say: it aggresses against structures which depend upon projecting productive relations beyond their zone of effectiveness. […] Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a succession of thinkers influenced by their drift, have taken this restriction of critique to be a theological relic at the heart of Kant’s work: the attachment to a reformed doctrine of the soul, or noumenal subjectivity. This is why in Deleuzian critique syntheses are considered to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently constituted, or auto-productive.” (Land, 2011: 320-321)
[5] As Robin Mackay notes, “Land also appropriates the time-twisting plot of the Terminator series, which features a mechanoid assassin brought back in time to ensure its own future victory[.]” (ibid, 36) We can note the iteration of this motif as expressed in a number of instances. “Information streams in from Cyberia; the base of true revolution, hidden from terrestrial immuno-politics in the future[.]” (ibid, 292) “They are tropisms attesting to an infection by the future[.]” (315);“How could medicine be expected to cope with disorderings that come from the future? (ibid) “AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future[.]” (ibid, 326) “Journalistic-scientific actuality-reportage fails to scan abstract-material hyper-objects, screening out real cyberspace emergence, as it comes at us out of ‘front end’ netware from the near future[.]” (ibid, 402-403) “Neo-China arrives from the future[.]” (ibid, 442) “MIT codes tim(e) going backwards. A compacted technostreaming from out of the future – AI, downloading, swarm-robotics, nanotechnology . . . Crustal-matter pre paring for take-off.” (ibid, 559)
[6] “The doctrine espoused here, that of pre-established harmony, is the one for which Leibniz was most famous in his own lifetime (so much so that he even signed one of his later articles ‘by the author of the system of the pre-established harmony’). The doctrine holds that God so established things from the very beginning that the states of the body and the states of the soul are always in harmony, and are so entirely as a result of body and soul following their own laws rather than because there is any interaction between them, or because one is constantly adjusted to the other by an outside agency (such as God).” (Strickland, 2014: 143)
[7] “We now learn that there is more to a monad than simply an internal principle of change: it also contains something which dictates what its changes will be, and when. This ‘something’ contains a monad’s ‘orders’, as it were; in modern parlance, we would probably call it a script, or programme.” (Strickland, 2014: 62)
[8] “The loss of God is the loss of self, the definitive shattering of the anthropic image, so that the perdurant ego of servile humanity is dissolved into the solar energy flow.” (Land 1992, 88)
[9] See CCRU (2017,2018)
[10] “Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation” (Land, 2011: 338)“[[]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off[.]” (ibid, 441) “Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresh olds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 … Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” (ibid, 443)
[11] “Teleoplexy, or (self-reinforcing) cybernetic intensification, describes the wave-length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the cosmic rays. It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability, defining a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients socioeconomic selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures of productivity, competitiveness, and capital asset value” (Land in Mackay and Avenessian, 2014: 514); “teleoplexic hyper intelligence cannot be accomplished by anything other than itself.” (ibid, 520)
[12] “Expenditure, or sacrificial consumption, is not an appeal, an exchange, or a negotiation, but an uninhibited wastage that returns energy to its solar trajectory, releasing it back into the movement of dissipation that the terrestrial system – culminating in restricted human economies – momentarily arrests. Voluptuary destruction is the only end of energy, a process of liquidation that can be suspended by the acumulative efforts whose zenith form is that of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but only for a while.” (Land 1992, 33)
[13] “Revolutionary desire allies itself with the molecular death that repels the organism, facilitating uninhibited productive flows, whilst fascist desire invests the molar death that is distributed by the signifier; rigidly segmenting the production process according to the borders of transcendent identities.” (Land 2011, 277)
[14] “[T]he Ecumenon [is] defined by the identity of molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations […] that imply concrete machines and their respective indexes, and constitute different molecules, specific substances, and irreducible forms.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 52)
[15] For useful commentary on the theme of ens perfectissimum in Leibniz, see the section entitled “Existence Irreducible” in Adams (1994: 170-176)
[16] Land 2011, 361
[17] Land 2011, 456
[18] See Mackay in Land (2011: 5)
[19] See Deleuze (1991)
[20] “Hume interprets our tendency to assign identity through time as a ‘natural propension,’ a kind of instinct, which constructs experience to conform to our modes of cognition— and in ways that seem sharply different from anything in the animal world. The ‘propension’ to ascribe identity where evidence shows diversity ‘is so great,’ Hume writes, that imagination creates concepts that bind a succession of related objects together, leading us ‘to imagine something unknown and mysterious, connecting the parts.’ Hence ascription of identity is a construction of the imagination, and the factors that enter into constructing these fictions become a topic of cognitive science, though Hume might have demurred if the imagination is indeed, as he thought, ‘a kind of magical faculty . . . [that] . . . is inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding,’ hence yet another mystery-for-humans.” (Chomsky, 2015: 51-52) “In a careful and informative study of Hume’s appendix to the Treatise, Galen Strawson argues, convincingly I think, that Hume finally came to realize that the difficulties he faces are far deeper. ‘It is evident,’ Hume concluded, ‘that there is a principle of connection between the different thoughts or ideas in the mind,’ a real connection, not one feigned by the imagination. But there is no place for such a really existing entity in his philosophy/psychology, so at the end his ‘hopes vanished.’” (ibid, 31-32)
[21] See Guyer (2008: 119)
[22] See Deleuze and Guattari (1980)
[23] “The concept is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies. But, in fact, it is not mixed up with the state of affairs in which it is effectuated. It does not have spatiotemporal coordinates, only intensive ordinates. It has no energy, only intensities.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1991, 21)“Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts.” (ibid, 36)
[24] See Deleuze and Guattari (1991)
[25] See the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit (2017, 2018)
[26] “Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BwOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/actual circuit.” (Land, 2011: 442-443)
[27] “[A]s with the term ‘simple substance’ or ‘substance without parts’ that appears in Leibniz’s vocabulary in the years just before, the term ‘‘monad’’ can almost always be interpreted in ways that are fully consistent with the corporeal substance view of the correspondence with Arnauld.” (Garber, 2009: 339)
[28] “Deleuze developed his own concept of the ‘virtual.’ Deleuze argued that the relation of the actual to the virtual could bever be confused with that between the possible and the real. Within this framework, developed in Bergsonian terms, Deleuze believed he was remaining true to Spinozist philosophy of pure immanence that recognized no transcendental beyond.” (Peden 2014, 220)
[29] Land 2011, 370
[30] “Kant’s monads may or may not have representations and be endowed with mental powers, but at least those monads that compose bodies must have physical forces and there can therefore be no lack of intelligibility between these forces and the physical properties of the bodies they cause.” (Watkins in Garber and Nadler, 2006: 304) “[T]he monad is a noumenal object in so far as it exists below the threshold of distinct perception.” (Wilson in Ross and McWalter, 2005: 95)
[31] “Plastic forces are thus more machinelike than they are mechanical, and they allow for the definition of Baroque machines. It might be claimed that mechanisms of inorganic nature already stretch to infinity because the motivating force is of an already infinite composition, or that the fold always refers to other folds. But it requires that each time, an external determination, or the direct action of the surroundings, is needed in order to pass from one level to another; without this we would have to stop, as with our mechanisms. The living organism, on the contrary, by virtue of preformation has an internal destiny that makes it move from fold to fold, or that makes machines from machines all the way to infinity.” (Deleuze, 1993: 8)
[32] “[Deleuze’s] claim is that, in both cases, representation returns to tame the infinite: In both cases, as well, it seems that infinite representation does not suffice to render the thought of difference independent of the simple analogy of essences, or of the simple similarity of properties.’ (DR, pp. 49, 70) More importantly, this return is inevitable due to the different ways in which they set up the structure of limits, identity and infinite. This allows Deleuze to develop his own arguments and concepts, in particular with respect to Leibniz[.]” (Williams, 2003: 70)
[33] See Zylinska (2002: 29)
[34] See Braidotti (2013: 59)
[35] See Negarestani (2018)
[36] See Drexler (1986)
[37] Negarestani and Mackay (2018: 13)
[38] See Collapse Volume VII (2012)
[39] Thacker (2004: 129)
[40] ibid
[41] See Drexler (1990: 22)
[42] See Johanson (2002: 151)
[43] See Mody (2011)
[44] See Milburn (2015)
[45] See Hanson (2016)
[46] See Barrow (1998)
[47] See De Garis (2014)