Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 4)

yeah just start yeah or hi and welcome to the fourth session of Quornomics and semiotic fatality with Nick Land and I'm gonna pass the mic off to him now okay thanks Theodore um so I among the few things that I think have been clearly signposted is I'm hoping that we're gonna at least one of the things we'll be talking about today and I am assuming further is this extremely enigmatic essay or chapter of a thousand plateaus called the geology of morals it obviously has a three-part title actually and all three parts of it are

yes um it's got a date as all the plateaus or chapters of a thousand letters have 10,000 BC now this is one of the things I've been racking my brains on this week as many many times before and I honestly have to just start off saying I've no idea why what that date is doing there so I mean that's That's I guess the first of probably many digressions. I'm not hugely optimistic about a neat solution to that, but that would be obviously fantastic. Maybe the main part of the title, the geology of morals is the least superficially confusing

part of it. obviously a play of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals and the role of geology in this section is something we'll see but again to start with the most kind of superficial type of approach to it when and I'm gonna I'll give a quote that I think I'll come back to you because it's so interesting and I want to they say Double articulation is so extremely varied that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case.

Now, I think there's a lot going on in this sentence, but to take it very straightforwardly, the relatively simple case, from the way the text then flows, seems to be using geology as the first instance of stratification. and obviously the word stratification is is drawn primarily from a geological discourse um who does the earth think it is a I've got a little answer to that but I'm just going to pause on so as a structural point

this course this this whole chapter is full of these doublings and two-sided this is and and says um has a lot to do but is no maybe sort of superficially on pages, hang on, 72 to 3 I think, yes, where the challenger who is supposedly giving a lecture now to an empty lecture hall runs very fast

through what has already been said and crucial to this is the fact that I'm in danger of getting things out of order here but that the abstract machine on the side of what he calls the plane of consistency of the body of that organ and the machinic assemblage that actually runs and operates the strata that produces stratification is a two-sided did I can't say phenomenon entity maybe I can get away with and I'm hoping that I can we can run the split between our

two modules exactly down that split between these two faces and so and one of the things that I hope to do today is to set up the sort of relevance of this text to people's at least tentative satisfaction and then go into some of the stranger consequences of dealing with it in this context in there to come. So the difficulties of this piece of writing.

One very prominent one, this is a philosophical essay or a story. the sort of the predominant statistical character of the text it's it's easier to mentally categorize it as a philosophical essay most of the sentences seem to be of a theoretical type but it's obviously framed within this peculiar story about a lecture presented by Professor Challenger, a fictional character who is himself, and I put that in inverted commas because they themselves put a question mark over his gender

identity among many other identities, is clearly an extremely cryptic and mutable character who begins at the start of the, I'll call it an essay, it seems to be a recognisable pedagogical figure and by the end of it, referencing Lovecraft's through the gate of the silver key, has completely lost identifiable characteristics. Maybe I should read that now actually because it's it's good this is this is their quote from the Lovecraft text where they say if that took a little bit back before that because it's really

nice they see Challenger or what remained him slowly hurried towards the plane of consistency following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assemblage servings a drum gate the particle clock with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute quote. The figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human and began a curious fascinated sort of shuffle towards the coffin shaped clock. the figure had now reached the abnormal clock and the watcher saw through the dense fumes of blurred black claw fumbling with the tall hieroglyph door

the fumbling made a queer clicking sound then the figure entered the coffin shape case and pulled the door shut after it the abnormal clicking went on beating up the dark cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate openings they say the mecha no sphere or rhizosphere so obviously there's a there's a framing of this strange piece of writing as something piece of Catholic yoga or perhaps even worse and the there's the constant menace of tilting over into that so I'm going to struggle at least at this stage to try

to constantly keep things as a restrained to confident steps as it's possible to be because these strange lines of speculation are constantly provoked by when to I think when answer my own little point earlier when the section of the book says who does the earth think it is one partial answer that surely is professor challenger that professor challenger is actually be is

the avatar corresponding that question okay that I think that the order to proceed is this these complications aside which are obviously significant I think there is there's a question in it in escape question why is stratoanalysis so difficult let me again just quote a little bit from this

They say, in fact Professor Chang'e was double, articulated twice, and that did not make things any easier. People never knew which of him was present. He claimed to have invented the discipline he was devoted by various names, rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micro-projects, pragmatics, the science of multiplicity. yet no one and clearly understood efforts or principles of this discipline work and I think there's two two ways to just depart from that immediately yes but I think it just needs to be said anyway is that obviously at the saddest

level of interpretation it just sounds as if they're saying professor challenge it is the two of them dollars and Guattari it's like there's a these little sort of I like not subtle blatant blatant hints that at least stabilize that interpretation it's obviously like it is this is the kind of the sound and least intriguing way to go with that but it's a way of just giving people something to hang on to momentarily. See this list of disciplines that they they outline

reinforces that. They say nobody clearly understood what the goals, method or principles of this discipline were. They're just being annoying. They're just saying they're just being arbitrarily obscure antist about it um I don't think that's the case I think it's important to ask the question why is strata analysis so difficult and I think we can come to a sort of age we can get to with that question that is to everything that we can do with that among the answers to

this and we've already seen one aspect of it in this question about extreme generality of double articulation there quasi stratification but we can also honestly i think what could we mean of the strata um the challenger is is in some respects a way of problematizing the transcendent theoretical subject this

weird avatar this fictional element it's an interrupt and interferes with the notion that we have some familiar notion of theoretical communication taking place here and i think that that's really important and integral to what they're doing because between the model and its object there is a relationship of stratification there's an obvious really uh un controllable reflexivity that immediately bursts into this we can't

we as soon as we think that we could simply just um produce a model of stratification of a kind that we're familiar with we have a theory of stratification the philosophy of stratification um we've already implicitly what stratification is as a topic because what stratification is as a topic is that which will grasp understanding will grasp the process by which a a model and an object to put in relationship with each other

and it will sorry I've confused myself with my my own syntax here that stratification envelops that relationship it's not something that can be conceived as an object on one side of the relationship and it's extremely important they're doing that they don't allow for the sake of convenience this issue to be set aside or or shell shelves I guess as strata to and what stratification is about what their model of stratification is about is the subsumption of structure

is a machine. Stratification, there is a stratact, the strata are a product. And so the relationship, the model and its object, in order to be posed at the level of transcendental philosophy, to be conceived as itself being the product of a machine of stratification. The machine of stratification eludes of the object within a theoretical discourse.

I think I already hinted last week about one of the ways that we could go with this and maybe even compelled to ultimately go about so and I certainly think weeks will kind of be on this path in our particular case which is which is dealing with QWERTY that we lose this we lose the presumption of a space of theoretical reflection outside of the object considered with our own relatively simple case of the

extremely varied phenomenon of which is chronomics doing that seriously and if we're doing it at the level of the transcendental then then we can't we can't simply situate our topic in the position of an object among other possible objects that could be the of theoretical attention that kind of cannot be the relation and as soon as you say that isn't the relation then obviously you get into the kind of complexities that just as philosophy leaving aside other issues this this essay so when they're talking then about trying to

find an extremely abstract general vocabulary for discussing the strata in all their vast variation from from physicochemical strata right through to what they call the alloplastic start strata of technology and and social structures the yeah we could get into a huge discussion I think partly we is

inescapable but I'm I don't think I'm going to try and run through that now because it would hog too much time I think we should we should engage that in a more dialogical mode about what that what that apparatus is that they're presenting us with there's a few things that that maybe can be said they want to say that there are three major stratic systems at least in this in this in this book they have this this triadic system there's basically one that is physico-chemical geological there's one

that is biological and there is one to repeat this term that is alloplastic and various phenomena can therefore be situated at these in these major stratic clusters and all of them Deleuze and Croucho Gattari are trying to do or I don't know whether I should say professor Challenger is trying to do in the end step is find a conceptual vocabulary that that is adequate to all of these three levels that captures stratification at its most extreme generality and I think the most consistent there's a there's a huge

amount of vocabulary in s in this essay that we can pick up in pieces but I I think it's reasonable to say that the most consistent and insistent element of it is this distinction they make between content and expression. And for them content and expression is equivalent to double articulation. Double articulation is in a sense shorthand for articulation of content and articulation of expression. So when they show you, as the picture at the front of the essay, this lobster with its two twin pincers, its two claws that capture intensities always in two different ways with

two different articulations. Those two different articulations are articulation by content and articulation by expression. And in introducing this language they're wanting to break with what I think elsewhere they call the hylomorphic model that opposes forms and substances. So double articulation means both the side of content and the side of expression there are formed substances forms and substances of content forms and substances of expression

the the from someone coming out of the main european philosophical tradition the huge clue here is this quadratic structure because it's I think and I'm sort of hugely open to controversy on this point but I think that this is describing a diaconization matrix which we've been to before at various times that the absolute classic example obviously can't's analytic synthetic a pro a a posteriori distinctions producing a kind of a quadratic table

is it to use their language isomorphic with the apparatus they're putting together with this content and expression distinction and they're completely explicit about the fact that this for them is designed to draw a diagonal line so they have these intermittent invocations really of the earth of absolute de-territorialization of matter as an unformed or rather I should say unformatted which has not been stratified into forms and substances by or a distinction of content and expression to destratify that that is the

diagonal line it's the zone of intensities and intensity is the notion of intensities it's itself a diagonal construction as I think again and being repetitive but maybe it's worth being repetitive the intensities as in years quantities is a is an intrinsically diagonal concept that again that the the stratic the the way in which intensities are broken up is through a system of differentiation of the heterogeneous and the homogenous the quantitative and qualitative that that segments and breaks the intrinsic diagonal of a heterogeneous quantity of an intensity.

So they talk about this in lots of different from lots of different angles but they're all completely consistent that what strata do what strata as machines do is they seize intensities they stratify it, they articulate it always twice in terms of content and expression. The relationship between content and expression is the stratic relationship and between content and expression there is a diagonal line that links to the abstract machine on the body without organs. that is law I think we can say we're utter confidence that this is the line that Professor

Challenger takes throughout the course of the essay so as a story it's the story of Professor Challenger's stationary voyage on the diagonal line to absolute de-territorialization or the body of our organs the earth as unformed matter which which is in a sense I could say no doubt highly problematically I but is consummated in that in that little passage already read from the end of essay but I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna say much more about the structure of this of the of this theoretical

machinery now I hope that this can be part of our of our topic conversation I'm just going to say a few things about why we're talking about it in this course and very preliminarily I've again tried to do it a kind of to break this down into a threefold structure but I really think that that just emerged spontaneously from there and so first of all there's the the application of this text can simply take the form of

of a a twisted reading a reading from behind in Deleuze's sense of the sentence double articulations are extremely varied that we cannot begin with the general model only a relatively simple case in which we take chronomics as our relatively simple case perhaps with the shadow suggestion that This is not entirely original on our part, but that should be possibly postponed initially. And so what we are doing in this case is taking the discussion of chronomics from the papers that we've been looking at in the previous weeks

and seeing what is already being discussed in those papers the the socio-technological process of qwerty economics or chronomics as a case of stratification or to use a word that is ambivalent across both the essays we've seen and this one capture that the process of capture that is involved the process of capture that is instantiated and consolidated within QWERTY that is a process of stratification and that and that quernomics as it exists in this literature

is a particular case given of a process of stratification so we then subject it to the same kind of analytical approach that the Lozen-Kuotari do in this text we try to be specific about how that is is operating and how it produces a relative invariance a stable system that is there is the quality object in which it is a particular the keyboard as a particular formed substance

and according to some kind of a larger machinery that that preserves its regularity its stable relations it's what they call its unity of composition so that's I think the most schizophrenic level of approach of this the next the next stage which I think tilts us across into next week is to take quonomics as a stratoanalytical diagram

so in this case it's not just that the production of the QWERTY system is itself an instance of stratification but that QWERTY is actually the transcendental resource through which the stratoanalytical theory is able to proceed and the third level and actually in some ways I think this this is a maybe a little bit it's something that can be held on to perhaps a little bit more firm in some respect is is the relationship between the alphabet and QWERTY understood to

the conceptual resources that this essay produces where when they're comparing the earth the absolute de-territorialized unformed matter with the strata the strata for them is a is a system that is defined by i'm kind of quoting them maybe with this at this point relative de-territorializations and complementary re-territorializations um now this vocabulary i know is is rebarbative to people who've not been immersed in it so i think it i i fully understand that it will take some time to feel even remotely um i'm not saying we should get comfortable with it but but a certain sense of adept adeptness

would be helpful but I think that the case of the alphabet and QWERTY is actually an extremely productive and helpful illustration of what this vocabulary means like it's something actually to hang on to but obviously you have in the alphabetical sequence you have your series of letters all neatly in place and in the past in the course of the passage into QWERTY their order that their positions are scrambled

but they're scrambled not through passage to some absolute de-territorialization it's only a relative de-territorialization they're moved out of place but there is a complementary re-territorialization which is the qwerty system in which they are all resettled um so the whole language of uh of movement that you get throughout this essay and which is referring us always to the machine and the fact that structures involved always have to be produced by machine and this movement is in one sense can be captured by understanding the alphabet and the and the QWERTY sequence as involving some kind of static convulsion I said of re-territorial

de-territorialisms complementary re-territorialization that take you from one arrangement to and another another arrangement and that it's only between these two that we will find a code for or resources at the level of code that open up our diagonal line that will lie between the two that will lie between these within this convulsion and between between these two orders and these two settlements of science. Just really really quickly there's one other thing

that I wanted to say a bit about which is going back to this question of fiction and um it sort of seemed natural to sort of take that as a clue to to just briefly look at this uh essay of there called um sorry one second i've just lost my Yes, it's the eighth plateau, three novellas of what happened.

In that piece they make a distinction between the tale and it's all as one expects reading and it's complicated um but to to put a very crude gloss on it well in a certain sense it's prospective it's taking forward and the question that they think it is promoting is what is going to happen what happens next what how will this end up whereas the novella they say the question posed by the novella is what has happened what what could have happened and i think this is a really uh extremely um suggestive quernormic question um i think a lot

of it's it's one way of framing a lot of the stuff that i hope we're going to be doing in the subsequent weeks that when you when you look at the qwerty arrangement maybe primarily in its just core just as a sort of resequencing of the alphabet as if it were a novella as if you're seeing the this distribution and you're asking exactly this question what could have happened what is it what was the event that we're missing that took us from the alphabetical sequence arrangement you know what is the actual story

in this distribution in terms of some occulted that is now that leaves as evidence this of the keys and but I think that that's something that is sensibly kind of kicked so I think I'm gonna I'm gonna back out of monologue mode now and see what I look at the sidebar and I'll see what to say or talk about so um is it then correct to

kind of say that we can understand the quality keyboard is both like the stuff that we've been looking at it's the kind of temporary outcome of a like socio historical technical diachronic process of stratification in which you end up with this but it's also a kind of diagram for like it's the diagram for the process itself as well yes I think the second question which I'm totally committed to or the second issue is much more weird and problematic. So I think that the first articulation is I think really sound you know I think that you

it can be defended very easily. In that QWERTY is a complex kind of object you know we this I think that's haunted this module what exactly are you talking about an object when you talk about quality and I think that to say that what we're seeing that what this whole comics debate is about is a process of strategy that to use again they're slightly weird language that they that they sort of use right at the start of this discussion where they say first of they talk about the earth and deterritorialize the glacier, the giant molecule, the body of that organs, etc. But they say that however was not the

question at hand and now we're into the primary topic of this section. For this simultaneously occurs upon you at a very important inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others, stratification. you know beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others is actually a docking point for this QWERTY economics discussion. You know we've seen in the start it's the emphasis is all on how unfortunate it is you know we lost the Dvorak keyboard it was we've been locked out from it it's all very unfortunate and and on the other side there's all the things that can be said

about the advantages that come from network effects, the economies of scale that come from it, that obviously have actually locked it in, that each stage instead of sort of again to go into the language, micro political decisions that do you actually invest perhaps largely in the hegemony of QWERTY, implicit in that are this whole series of advantages that you don't have to retrain, that you can draw on a pool of typists that will all understand the culture of the thing, that your system is being nurtured. So there's been a process of stratification that has kind of settled

on in the same kind of way that geological strata settle on a certain kind of rock. You can say it's unfortunate from the perspective of a certain perhaps fantastic perspective of absolute de-territorialization. These particles are locked into these structures. know it's it's a form of capture it's a type of intensive confinement but on the other hand there's a there's a constructive process that can be kind of practically by this set of and I think it's the same with QWERTY it's a certain it's a certain machinic

solution beneficial in some respects and disadvantages. I had a couple of girls trying to think through like the sort of concrete process of how the stratification of the keyboard as a diachronic process right I'll paste them into the sidebar I think that I think they're both completely insufficient but they were kind of useful with just getting a hold

on the on the system as it's outlined in that chapter but um I don't know I know if this is going to be like more annoying and confusing or not but no it's good to have it there it looks like the sort of thing that might take some yes anyway I think this is exactly what I was assuming is the type of discussion we're going to have is that how we can how we can do this mapping into it Yeah, like the first one is kind of, I guess, slightly more zoomed out.

So I was trying to think about what would constitute the substance of content and then the form of content in the first articulation. So first of all, in the first one, it was the substance of content is the selection of signs that will be used. So the alphabet and the numbers and arrow keys and things, whatever. And the form of content is the statistical ordering. So the QWERTY layout itself. And then you have the kind of like escape, possible escape route to the plane of consistency in between the two articulations. And that's where you get the possibility of or other kinds of organizations. Then you have the second articulation with the form of expression, which is the consolidation of it

via like kind of economic means as QWERTY, as a standard. then you get the substance of expression which is its kind of socio-technical effects on its users and then in the second one I was kind of trying to zoom in a little bit more and it was so first so again the selection the statistical selection of the alphabet the fact then that you had some kind of design limitations. So this is sort of form of content is the fact that you have a kind of two dimensional grid, a particular space that you can use to arrange this set

of signs. The form of expression is the constraints that are placed on it by not having, I forget what they're called, diagraphs, like words that will use two particular letters typed together in quick succession. Right, yes. It's digraphs, aren't they? Digraphs, yeah. So S-A-H and C-H and stuff. And then the substance of expression is the Quot-E layout. And then you have like another strata on top of that, which then kind of goes off into the effects of that in terms of culture. But I don't know if that's like going to be helpful at all, but it was sort of interesting to think of. I mean, the whole thing is kind of maddening, isn't it?

I can sort of see that. I can see that. It's very reminiscent. I mean, and they're constantly breaking up, you know, like every stratum is already internally stratified. There's this constant process of proliferation and internal splitting and then relations to epistrata and parastrata. So kind of neatness is always sort of frustrated by these, by these. I think it would be really good to try and talk about this. Let me just put, throw another one on and I'll see how compatible it is with this.

would take some thinking about it examples of content expression they obviously use is the perceptions and actions or the they have the face line in the alloplastic face language system and the hand tool section so and they and they aligners with content and expression explicitly by saying the hand tool is on the contents side and the face language stratum is on the so you've got in the alloplastic stratum you have you have this kind of this linguistic technological stratic system

so obviously neither is reducible to the other they both they both dated to a machine of machine of stratification reciprocally so I think the key on the keyboard is a really useful unit of analysis because the key is obviously seems sort of superficially to have two faces doesn't it it's it's a it's a tool in the sense that you you kind of press on the key to produce an action and it's statement in the fact that it invented it has both code and territory

has a position and it has a symbol is kind of expressive and so the key is a is puts you into this whole zone of zoo semiotics that they talk about icons of territoriality that you get in animals and your activity is related to a system of perception by this by this by this icon of territoriality so I think I think one of the ways that this content, that the keyboard is stratified as a content expression system is that the forms and substances of expression,

which I think is the codes and positions of the keys, as perceived within this, on this linguistic level of expression, are in a relationship of, as they say, non-correspondence and non-conformity, but isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition with a content of the key that when you depress that key you get producing a certain um it's an act of production it will produce a character depending on how the keyboard itself is being uh obviously de-territorialized from a from

electric typewriter into a computer interface offers a very set of the totalization so what is the content juiced it's not it's not stand but I but I think that those two of the key are pointing us into these two different sides of the of the strata now if I then say to myself well so how does this correspond know that correspond is a terrible word how do I then integrate that with what you said there I have to reflect

I was kind of taking the model that I used there from the description of physiochemical processes. So I hadn't quite like advanced into the space of thinking it under the alloplastic category. But I don't know also like how, I mean, these categories interact and everything gets like exponentially more confusing. but I don't know if it's more used to try and analyze it on it's because of this statement again so if I can just repeat it for the third time about when they say double articulation so extremely varied that we cannot begin with a general model only so all of these particular

strata are cases aren't they like you know the physicochemical strata the biological strata the the alloplastic strata and if we then try to apply them to the keyboard or to QWERTY I shouldn't say the keyboard that to me is a that's that's a that's probably a mistake to this to whatever QWERTY is a strata then we can expect it's gonna work because of the fact that the fact that we're dealing with a strata

So there's going to us what's Nick can you hear us? Let's just wait a second, you might come back.

Hi Nick, can you hear us? Sorry, I just got zapped by a breakdown. No problem. I'll take that as a sign that I should stop babbling for a minute.

Hang on, but I think I might have lost all the sidebar, which is like a bit catastrophic because... I can repost it. I can get it back without having to do that. so does it maybe I should say does anyone else have any immediate responses to amy's model of application of the

conceptual machinery of stratoanalysis onto the onto quaternomics as an object i shouldn't say object i should say special case I was just sort of thinking about earlier, I finally got, well once we sort of realized that it was the peristrata rather than the epistrata, I kind of finally clicked with seeing the numeric keypad as a peristratum, and I was reading that section of the geology of morals and they really focus on we have the peristratum as processual and then the

epistratum as motion based. So this is maybe like, a little loop back around to kind of being about the substratum question at the top of your notes Amy, but just like to start with, I do have that right, like movement versus process, I've lost it, where I was in geology of morals. But just, yeah, no, it's the other way around. It's every stride of our process in correspondence. It doesn't matter. But just in terms of mapping these movements across the keys, like the distribution of QWERTY as opposed to the order of the alphabet being a distribution of movements. And you see that with like your CHSH example, where a certain movement of the mouth,

because of aspiration basically becomes two letters and that maps to particular movements of hands, which is what interfaces it with the porting distribution. And this is where it kind of comes back up to the substratum question of the digital numerical system. It's like I was reading the history of the Universal History of Numbers book a couple of days ago, and somehow it just never really hit me that the reason that we learn A through Z, the quote-unquote order of the alphabet, ultimately is because we counted with it. Like that was, like, most of the alphabetic cultures, if I didn't realize, used, like, a purely, like, an alphabetic counting system and not so much, like, the Roman tallying system that, like, you know, or advanced tallying system.

So that's the whole thing that we have that order A through Z in the first place. And so that mapping of that particular kind of counting to a movement-based uh sort of second kind of ordering two-dimensional ordering qwerty which is itself sort of like undergoes these selection effects from a third stratum of movement i don't know i was trying to sort of map that onto the peristratum epistratum substratum distinction like as it applies to qwerty if that makes sense yes it does it's i think it intersects a lot with what wanyang's also saying in the in the sidebar isn't it about about obviously there's there's this complicated process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization

going on just in typing as process so I mean the the typist the fingers of the typist are obviously re-territorialized on the keyboard and there's a de-territorialization of language into the keyboard that is that is um that I guess has the if we're using the language the complementary re-territorialization only is this re-territorialization of the of the hands on the keyboard so that that there's QWERTY as a system of stratification

is obviously this is obviously this stratic maybe I sorry because I don't want to suggest that it's it's necessarily completely captured by the alloplastic strata I'm I'm I may I maybe capture can hear but but thinking of it as something that is happening to the human organism you can obviously see how there is this there is this capture of a system of behavior a freeing of language and a capture of behavior in this kind of complementary

stratic arrangement that happens with with typing in general and and QWERTY is obviously the specific order of that strata and there's that yes like I think all of this in so so when you insist feedback that all of this is a particular re-articulation of cybernetics I think that that it's understanding stratification just is cybernetics the stratification if it's understood in the weird way that they do it of the fact that it's there was

always the earth there's always absolute territorial de-territorialization there's always the line of flight in the strata so stratification isn't the annulling or or neutralization or suppression of de-territorialization it's always imminent de-territorialization and but with that caveat it's actually a re-articulation of of cybernetic theory as a as a process of capture of intensities. Yeah, because I mean each, and it's interesting, it's just for any pair of keys,

like any on the board, any vector, a key being repeated, one to itself, each one of those is a feedback loop, it is explicitly based on a feedback loop, right? Like that position on the sort of orthodox QWERTY board was generated by this feedback loop across all of the uses of language of when you use these two letters together, like literally like operant conditioning of combining these letters. And then that in turn trains our hands through operant conditioning, which is another, you know, like a very basic cybernetic feedback loop to make those movements, to make them faster or slower. If it's, you know, you have to type G-E-K-T for some reason, German, I guess. Yeah. which is that kind of brings in that issue of English being the base language of it as well

or the origin language yeah that's a complicated question you mean that the the QWERTY arrangement is peculiarly conditioned by having an coming out of a lineage of English in particular. Right, I think like in terms of the operant conditioning effects that flow through from language to keyboard sort of motion encoding of language, that there has to be, in so far as the user population is much larger than English itself,

occurs pretty much cross-languages, you know, and the pictographic cases like that. Like there's no other conclusion that there is a flow of transformation that finds its first instance, or its last instance, I don't know whether you look at it, in specifically English and not non-English. Cybernetics. I don't know if the cybernetics, you know, it's a fine-grained question whether the cybernetics themselves are like, are in some sense like, an Anglo-cybernetics linguistically, or whether they are like sort of remapped and rendered chaotic entirely, even if they have as an initial determination these relationships between sounds and letters in English.

Sorry, I'm really, I'm just like meandering here. digressing Yeah, digressing exactly That was actually where I just got in rereading this morning. I think was the section about digression Sorry, I've just gone a bit silent because I was just trying to get a sense of what the

massive set of parastratic discussions were in the sidebar. So here let me just, I'm trying to get I think to a point where people feel that there's relatively confident steps so and I'm being drawn back to this to this epic um translation protocol that amy's provided with um

so we're because we're going to be confident that we're kind of we've interlocked with it if we're confident that we've identified in relation to to qwerty um a stratum of content and a stratum of expression and the let me just try and sort of hold a few things together that we've been talking about because this cybernetics the cybernetics point I think is this that that um content and expression

together compose a stratic system they are like the reason that uh the lesson for for instance talk about perception and action or I can't remember actually their exact vocabulary maybe motility and perception in the animal which is obviously the in a sense the classic cybernetic couple that it's a system that stabilizes the perceptions on the the perceptual system of the animal and the motor system of the animal are stratic and in Deleuze and Quartari senses

in that you can't reduce one to the other there isn't a dominant formalism on one side that from which you can derive the formalism on the other side there's a twin formalism in that the distinction between the motor system and the perceptual system is a real distinction that independently organized and but they are held together by their cybernetic interdependency that your actions will moderate modulate your perceptions in an organized way your

your cognitive perceptual system will modulate your behavior in a certain way and and the two together are cybernetically have a coherent cognitive perceptual system and you have a coherent behavioral system because it's together a a functional cybernetic loop there is a form of capture obviously both sides are captured by this you your your thoughts and perceptions all from straying beyond certain bounds they're brought back to a certain zone by the fact that tested and processed and adjusted by

your actions and your behavior and your behavior similarly regulated and pushed into forms of invariance by your perceptual and cognitive uh map of the world so these it's neither of them is is collapsible into into the other the two are a kind of coherent system between themselves and content and expression has to be i think like that you know it's it's it's a a dynamic stabilizing system in which um content and expression however they they they are manifested

in a particular particular stratum manifest this predictable cybernetic behavior of reciprocal stabilization that that the two that they capture each other within this loop or the loop captures and both because they they can't stray from it if they're actually brought back by the other and reciprocally so i think that this is something that we have to that has to apply in the qwerty case that that the it there can be no independence to the question of capture

how do how how have we been captured by quality and this question about what its actual stratic structure is because the because the way in which we identify these planes of content and expression is going to be the way that we describe its its cybernetic structure and so you have to think what are the kind of lines of deviance that are being inhibited on both the side of content and and the side of expression by their reciprocal or their reciprocal participation in a

a machine of stratification um and then and then so this is all supposed to this is me looping back to this discussion that we've got here in the in the sidebar about it like um if we if we're formulating this at this sort of a level that captures the whole

machine the whole machine has to encompass um the social and technological and economic reproduction of quality i think that's something um that doesn't seem to me a controversial a controversial part of this claim so what the the various kind of processes of um of deviation that are being suppressed by for instance include um migrating into different keyboard arrangements if if migrating into a different keyboard

arrangement is is what a one stratum is being prevented then the reciprocal stratum has to explain aviation isn't machinically plausible in the same way that maladaptive behavior is um acts as a control on on thoughts and perceptions that if you if an animal if an animal's thoughts and perceptions deviate in in certain ways that lead to it being behavior becoming uh

impractical non-viable um then then that those thoughts and perceptions will be kind of restrained and constrained and brought back within this system of capture and it and so that's the abstract mechanism that is that we're involved with in in qwertyomics in the same way we're captured we're captured by QWERTY by the fact that where that there's particular kind of range of lines of deviation that are being systematically constrained

Let me just try, I can tell this is not very helpful. This is like maybe a preliminary way of thinking through that reciprocality and very simple, maybe in the first articulation you have you have the alphabet that's here select your statistical selection then your your form of content is the limitations of the human hands and then the

expression is so coded by the form of originally the diagraph problem and like that being the original problem that made Quoti a possible solution and then the content of expression is is Quoti so you have a feedback between the limitation that's although the amalgamation of the of the alphabet and the human hand is something that has to be expressed in the in the double articulation and that they don't fall back into like I don't know I don't know because the diagraph problem sort of wasn't salient for very long but um but you don't get Dvorak and you don't

get these other things because QWERTY kind of gets there and solves the diagraph problem before the other formulations take hold so the reciprocality between the two articulations is this kind of limitation of the diagraph problem connecting to the kind of a human hand alphabet pair I mean that's just a really basic way of thinking that through but just to sort of practice understanding that the cybernetic relationship you're talking about I'll put it in here In the Delanda piece that I posted a little bit earlier on, he kind of contrasts stratification

with meshworks, and he talks about it in terms of cybernetics. And I think what he's kind of saying is that stratification is a reciprocal relation which enforces a kind of set of stable states which I guess you could understand as negative feedback. And then the meshwork is a cybernetic relationship which reinforces the possibility of lines of flight. So you get like this kind of mutually reinforcing ability to bring in new nodes and kind of consolidate drift. And so he says that I suppose as a mutually reinforcing auto-catalytic type of cybernetic diagram. I don't know if that's kind of helpful but... No it's helpful but it's partly it's helpful because it points us also to one complicated

factor because as you say the model of capturing cybernetics is normally negative feedback. so it's so straightforward like deviation is cancelled out brought back um it was zoned on on some on some uh so sorry some some it's homed onto onto some zone like an ideal temperature or whatever the system is controlling what's weird and i think complicating about what we're dealing with now is that the lock-in mode of capture based upon positive feedback like network effects are a positive feedback effect you know the more the more people use qwerty the more useful qwerty

becomes so the more people use it you know that it's a cumulative positive feedback process that actually locks in quoting it it I think it has to be that there is some a higher level structure based on positive feedback in which that is encompassed like i think i think that the positive feedback element is um what they're calling relative de-territorialization and it's and it and and the complementary re-territorialization

is the closure of a larger scale homeostatic circuit that can absorb that process of amplification without it just escaping. So, I mean, I think that this is the sort of part of the translation task that that we have for this if we if we're trying to convert the theoretical models of these papers we were looking at in the first few weeks now into this model of stratification I think that that that

sort of the translation protocol between and involves this this question so all of the sorry I think I should not try to talk and think at the same time I I'll try and find an excuse to sort of um I was just gonna ask I I'm not sure how much I'm it's just very striking to me that with QWERTY and a lot of these platform things that as if if we take it as a sort of a platform um then platforms are

they're both the protocol they lock down certain things very strictly and then they don't care at all or they're enablers for generativity in many other dimensions, right? And that seems relevant to me because that's where the positive network effect comes from. It's because it's such a generative system, that's where the momentum and the positive network effect aspect comes from. It seems to me that without that generativity

you don't get that lock in to the same extent. It's like this is what I'm using to achieve all these things. That's really helpful. It sort of pushes pressure on the the protocol which is the constraint I yeah yes because they say here the question we must ask is what on a given stratum varies and what does not for the unity and diversity of a strata so I think that's where that's exactly where your point is here isn't that that there is a there is a systematic

distinction between the variable and constant elements of the stratum so on one level you look at you look at the QWERTY keyboard and there's all this stuff that is just rigidly locked down you know it just wouldn't be a QWERTY keyboard if those things didn't hold but I think you're totally right to say it's a mistake to just fixate entirely on that that those standard features slots for this process also a variation and plasticity and allow as you say for its kind of massive so yeah I think that's

that's really an important part of it for sure yes I think that that's a very very helpful I mean that that's also back to this question about yes how is how is the how is the process of runaway amplification of the system still stratic and it's stratic because of this structure isn't it because of the fact that there is a system of invariance that is the that is the definition of the platform or part of the definition of the platform that is continuous irrespective of its spread and

expansion into all of these. Right, and also like, yeah, it's exactly the variation that it allows that promotes the lock-in or that promotes the, that reinforces the structure, right? So the keyboard doesn't care whether you're, you know, typing, you know, poetry or, you know, making Facebook updates or whatever, right? It doesn't care whether you're writing a novel or a novelist, right?

there's absolutely no it doesn't matter about that variation except in certain subtle ways that we sort of talked about but that it's always in the context of mass degenerativity I yeah I okay struggling to map it beyond that but that seems critical it is I mean it seems like if we go back to these earlier these earlier pieces as if you try and nail down what is this machine of capture and obviously the one controlling factor that is emphasized a lot in the David piece very plausibly I would have thought

in culture isn't it that that obviously acts as a controlling a controlling factor in this system that you have this mass of typists learned QWERTY and familiarize themselves with QWERTY and and to retrain them all or to or to you to try to sell a kind of different layout of a keyboard or whatever and to their acquired typing culture is gonna is gonna fail the the manufacturing side and the technological design innovation side is

controlled by the the typing the typing culture app serves as the controlling node on that it seems they're suggesting like when they say sorry it's a whilst I'm just trying to remember what their exact language was for this thing about irreversible investment how did they say it again yes so they're locking features David's locking features is again technical

interrelatedness economies of scale and quasi irreversibility of investment and And that quasi-reversibility investment is the fact, is this typing culture. So that has to be, that acts as a constraint or a control on it in one way. I mean, it's strangely ambivalent because on the other side, as you say, the uses that it will be put to doesn't be in variations. If you've got this it's this kind of wave of expansion of this of this format a new unit use It's constantly again, so

You're going I'm just switch it delivers and quotari language It's always going to be a de-territorialization like you're you're moving beyond the particular user base into a bigger user base in the figure user base And so you're entering into these different territories just by the fact that it's growing. But on the other hand, this fixed base of acquired QWERTY format typing skills means that um that the the the there are a whole bunch of invariant features that are not up

for practical negotiation in that process of of transformation i mean it's kind of weird like if you think for instance sorry i'm not going to this hyper concrete level but that might be too concrete to be helpful but you think of a keyboard that is used for PC gaming by someone so they're not I think it's at all and they're just simply using the keys as instructions to play a game so there's a certain sort of you know de-territorialization and decoding of the keyboard that just happens with that

that it's like it's moved into a new territory it's recoded this key no longer means you produce the letter K but it means kill kill kill or some other thing in this game but even there it's going to be that it's gonna we return to the the gamer to is going to this gaming culture is also going to acquire this set of habits and familiar things with the keyboard that say you know I expect the button that that moves me sideways is going to be here and you know what I'm saying that even if the key even if the whole usage has been

totally transformed open to a whole habituation that is perhaps totally independent of the habituation of typing skills that the that the QWERTY typist has learned. Right I mean we might want to limit the tender but the two things this reminds me of of actually. So one is that there's this whole massively trivial and massively passionate debate among gamers which I'm not totally in the middle of the culture of but close enough to about the whole PC master race versus console type thing and that the relevant

of what we're talking about is that on the console you use a controller not a keyboard use this sort of dedicated you know device and there's various sort of in attempts to sort of i don't know um like competitions where pc gamers you know try to kill in games the the console gamers or whatever and and tend to be more effective right using the keyboard even though it's remap to a movement thing in combination with the mouse. I'm maybe not sure where to connect that exactly. The other one is you have this very passionate sort of subcultures starting to die away really

only now among programmers with editors. So the old text editors on the Unix, so Emacs and VI, this was a massively passionate area of debate. And so people would become locked in to very specific keyboard patterns because they came from a period where you didn't use a mouse, a lot of it. So you sort of, So these very almost like quite arbitrary keyboard patterns about I for insert and you know, colon Q for quit or whatever, people become extremely attached to it in exactly the same

way. You know, we're losing some abstraction but I mean the continuity of the protocol, you I've been reading the Bratton book he talks about the Thucyus paradox about four or five times of like Chipping rebuilt and isn't the same ship All right, yeah, so you replace all the wood in the ship But it's the same shape so it's still a thesis ship iron. That's exactly the case of the keyboard as well um And then you have this massively changing nature of work, where it's instead of like dictation being pushed to a female dominated typing pool, you have much more self-directed

writing and composition at the keyboard. Yeah, I'm drifting a bit too much away now. No, no, but this is back to this thing about you can't tell the difference between digression and non-digression. I mean, because those sort of relationships are obviously totally crucial. That little machine of the linguistic dictation typist machine is obviously crucial to this story. And if there was an explicit discussion of it in A Thousand Plateaus, I'm 100% sure that that would be highlighted as being something that at least as an episode

was was really was really crucial for sure and I mean what I'm sort of trying to trying to do is is trying to find the these these reciprocal dyads of mutual control of openness like you can see you can see obviously in that case that there's a kind of straightforward sociologically immediately familiar process of control where the typists behavior is controlled by the voice of dictation but you would also expect that

there is going to be some for it to be a kind of stable cybernetic loop that there is some reciprocal perhaps more subtle form of control that is operating the other way if only i mean to start with simply things like the speed of dictation speed is going to have as it's it's going to be restrained by typing speed for instance or I don't know I'd be surprised if there wasn't something more also more interesting than that that we could find but yes but then but but because we're talking about these mobile relationships of the this whole parastrata language I think is about

that isn't it's about these processes of abutments and adjacencies and contiguity between these different systems and and that is one critically important and then has just massively drifted apart and I don't know how much dictation happens now but I would have thought it's just minute and they and as simply something that's just come come apart and these and these legacy systems from that as you say have just been well from their discussion you would expect to be code a that the coding system was the really was tied up with the relationship

just of those strata and parastrata now as that's rearranged there's a there's a decoding that happens across there where they now have entered into this alternative I think much more relations involving direct communication with a computer and software rather than with with these kind of inherited social I mean your unique example would be that wouldn't it? Yeah, I'm trying to look at the other thing that I was reminded of, was that a sort of

of poetry musical performance about a week ago actually. And then one of the bits of this performance, okay, you had parts of it which are musical and then parts of it which are poetry. And there was part of it where there was a typewriter on the stage and they were typing. There was a person typing while the music was playing. Basically the typewriter is a musical instrument. And I was just trying to think about the reversibility, right? Because sort of when you play a musical instrument, you're playing off like sheet music or something like that, or you've memorized it. And it's sort of like the coded sheet music is playing you as a briot

and then it's expressed through the instrument. And we almost never think of, we don't tend to think of that at all as the way that keyboards work nowadays, but actually that's very much the way that dictation works. And then it reverses, or you can reverse it with these sort of compositional type things and also more subtle things. I think I have to chew on some of this. Yes. I think I just, the relationship between the typewriter as a musical instrument

was a was a prompt was a prompt to this relationship of composition or are you no no it's more of a prompt yeah i yeah Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah.

For some reason, I'm just still kind of hung up or just want to have at least one less confirmation about the distinction between epistrata and peristrata. Just like back to your point about about the use of keys for gaming like that it's usually you know AWDX for for different directions and sort of comparing that to the numeric at as or those specific examples of Peristrata that like drifting in fact fragmentation the surplus value of this sort of two-dimensional grid Code that allows it different over coded ways whereas I so yeah sorry Jay I'm sorry I'll shut up in a minute you get back to this but I think it's a really excellent example of the peristata immediately and

then maybe in a more complicated way the immediate way is that by being brought into adjacency with the with the game then the these keys are obviously then this process of decoding and recoding into movement keys so I think your question about the relationship between that and and the arrow keys on the same keyboard is more complicated and gets into is slightly perhaps more arcane yeah the arrow keys the numeric keypad is things that are built in that way but still like through segmented and fragmented,

but are not just like through this sheer like adjacency prompting a loop that drives these keys being used in this new way, just surely through functional adjacency. Yeah. I mean, the process obviously of decoding of the AWDX is much more dramatic, isn't it? Because there's no sense of them being vectors according to the actual, the code, the legacy code that is then carried forward into QWERTY at all. Right, there's just like no meaning to the idea when the keyboard, when the typewriter is invented and QWERTY is invented for the typewriter, that that's even, that's in no way held within that, is that those keys would be used for movement in a game, like that just doesn't exist in relation to it

until after the act. Yeah. I know that's that's that's their example of parastrata which is also I think locks onto their very famous wasp and orchid example where you have these completely these these functional transmutations that that occur by something being brought into proximity and that this process of reciprocal decoding recoding happening so you know a flower until it is brought into relationship with the wasp there's there's a functional there's a

functional logic to the parts of a flower tied up with you know its role in the reproduction of a plant or whatever maybe maybe my bole just actually shit like this and the whole thing is too original for that but anyway I'll try running with this and and big perpetually shut down that um you know there's there are these botanical structures that when they're brought into relationship with the wasp in this a parallel evolution then take on these things like just like the X key becomes down you know part of part of the flower is enters into this functional relationship with the sexual programming of the wasp that's completely alien to its botanical origin and it's just and

it's just a kind of decoding and recoding that comes out of this a relationship of a Jane adjacency or or I'm trying to think there's a whole vocabulary that comes along with that and I think it's really similar that at the abstract level with what it's interesting it reminds me of a simon in one of the movie like more recently translated in English things of this, like on the technical constitution of the technical object maybe, he kind of uses this sort of same structure to describe, it's like a kind of dynamo that involved mixing oil and water, and within like a certain range of boundary conditions, which he calls like

the schema of concretization. Oil and water, which have this just sort of like this exact relatively independent, a parallel, free relationship of different possible relations to each other are able to achieve this sort of technical interlock as a purely after-the-fact thing when they encounter this set of boundary conditions in which this particular configuration of their relationship is concretized. And if that is like, as sort of Simondon claims, is the general model for the formation of technical objects or technical operations, like using their material components, and seems to apply to the the wasp and the orchid as this sort of joint technology for perpetuating one of them that and then you know further with like these peristrata on the qwerty keyboard

where a particular domain of action like a game comes in contact with this other structure or technicalizes it or produces a new set of techniques or creative techniques which is to say a technology in the sort of classic sense of legion as like a laying out before you I mean do we think that like is that make the peristratic a sort of fundamental model for techniques or for the formation of that is that I don't know and since that's sort of the alloplastic or one half of the alloplastic double articulation that sort of regime of stratification. This language of parastrata and epistrata which is

which is challenging but it's pitched at the level of maximum generality isn't it? So all the strata from the physico-chemical, organic through the all are approachable in terms of this language so I'm I'm assuming that therefore it cut however the relationship goes the parastrotic can't from their point of view be delimited to the technical or technological but it But it could be inversely that the technical or technological is, has a necessary relationship

to what they call the parastrotic as a sort of fundamental static relationship. Yeah, that's very interesting. And that's like, that's definitely the hard thing about this that sort of like pitches you into this disoriented I need a gyroscope because I don't know was that every time you want to hold some onto something as specifically peristradic it's well it could just be strata and then this thing would be peristradic if I align according to a different you know origin or different orientation makes it hard to sort of lock on the line and stay on it I know there's a there's one claim they make that I find particularly daunting and I'm sure that it marks a threshold of comprehension when it when it clicks with this thing

whether you say the strata as a whole dissolve entirely into the epistrata and peristrata so I mean that that's a completely which seems to be basically saying everything that you think you've worked out about this is going to just fall apart into speeding cybernetically harmonized gunk at any moment. Right, right. Which I guess sort of demands that we've discussed the peristrata a lot, but then in terms of

what the epistrata are in contrast, maybe in the particular context of QWERTY, it seems like these sort of like layers of finger movements versus 2D organization versus phonetics and then like neurologic like typing cultural practices and so forth like that sort of these what is he I think he uses belts is the term he uses a lot describing the epistrata um that these are sort of these these belts that further flesh out like as you pass through each of the layers the stratification process that's being formed as opposed to sort of like annexing them as adjacent through Paris stratification is that does that scan um

so sorry jake i think you might have to you might have to just repeat that last sentence again the The one that ends with does that scan. Well, that does that scan was for the entire progression. But just that all of those things that seem, or at least to my mind, can be more intuitively pictured as a series of operational steps or operational layers where signals are passed through layers in a stack, through various manipulators like brain, hands, movements, keys and so on, whether that is specifically epistratic in contrast to the mode of machinic

adjacency, the particular mode of coding and recoding, which is specific to the peristrata in the case of these machinically adjacent sort of technical super positions, super impositions, super positions. Super positions is also a term that he uses actually, but I think he uses it in reference to epistrata, which makes sense, you know, each of these things superimposed over the last, the rest of the stack. But yeah, whether that contrasts effectively with these machinically adjacent elements like game movements and so forth, as epistrata versus peristrata there's

it's just this question about like well it's this thing that everyone is doing necessarily and it's echoing the confusion of the text about this movement back and forth between the concrete and the abstract isn't it so you know you're you're taking some particular concrete instance in this case to this interest in the hand movement and then to what extent how does that relate then to this highly abstracted vocabulary about the epistrata and um I mean I think it's like for me hazy I'm better but that's not to say that it's hey it would be

hazy after work because I'm taking it like the way they map it partly the epistrata for a start are kind of interstratta aren't they that's one of the ways they're trying to think about it So, you know, the strata dissolve, on the one hand, there's the set of adjacencies that the strata are involved in, and on the other hand, there's the set of kind of refinements or subdivisions between the strata. You complicate them in a sense vertically on one side to use a really crude sort of mental tool. and they say that the relationship between strata and parastrata is to do

coding and decoding and that the relationship of strata and epistrata is to do with territorialization de-territorialization I think which would then which would be an attachment to your question yeah that makes the hands wouldn't it like obviously that is the relation that the hands have to the keyboard it's part of a long sort of phylogenetic de-territorialization of the hand from something that clinging onto branches as an arboreal primate right there's a being radically de-territorialized on the in the technological stratum to to a you know key tapping key tapping apparatus but

But then re-territorialized by the standardization of QWERTY into these particular patterns and you know the protocol of key distribution and typing habits and typing skills and as you say then typing speed and all of that motor invariance. Right. D-territorialized to need these keys like represent the letters that are written on or is there spatial configuration enough by itself, which is re-territorialized as these various other uses for the keyboard. Yeah. So I'll just hop out and say my question in the sidebar really quick.

It's sort of a step away from this conversation, though. I'm still interested in the role that Locality is playing in the character of Professor Challenger that you were sort of posing at the beginning. I don't I don't really have anything to add to that but that's become very interesting to me yes I think it's really interesting because I think you know as I say just now this is just pure repetition of my power I think that you know it is a story so you know we're we're all I think I can speak for everyone being drawn naturally into this thing of treating earth's philosophy and as this discussion goes on you you find yourself more and more treating it as a theoretical text and but it is a story and it is the end this and

the story is structured by professor Challenger's voyage in place through the strata or diagonally through the strata to the this threshold of absolutely territorialization that we reach at the end of the thing and I'm personally but I realized deeply problematically utterly convinced that professor challenger is migrating across the keyboard in a way that I do not begin to

confidently grasp but you know I just have this really really strong sense that that is what's going on on that on that narrative level and we could ultimately like draw that line and and that line would then illustrate the philosophical discussion concretely um but I'm extremely reluctant at this point to even begin to get a definite on this although let me I'm sorry I'll have it immediately I'll immediately go back on what I've just promised and just try something kind of mad which is that if you know what is the plane of

consistency and so the plane of consistency is where there's no there's no stratic distinction between between signs and particles the plane of consistency is inhabited only by intensities and it's this space where anything whatsoever finds itself in machinic interconnection with everything else without segmentarity or or qualitative distinction and it seems to me that you know if you're looking at the keeper what what is the

image of that it's got it's got to be an inadequate image obviously but it surely has to be the spacebar you know the space I mean that is that you know that everything is consistent as just pure distribution in in space all the elements whatever of whatever kind that their plane of consistency is is at least they find its image in just pure spatial distribution so um and just a a kind of a sequence of any any signs or particles whatsoever just fragments of type

distributed in space by the space bar is gets us into this zone of just radical decoding So I would be amazed if Professor Challenger ends up anywhere other than the space bar. I mean, I sort of get this, sorry, there's a quote that I wanted to just add about this, where they say, sorry, one second. yeah on page 61 they have this passage where they say

oh shit is it page 61 why have i got that oh yeah here we go maps should be made of these things logical and technological maps one can lay out on the plane of consistency this is this is an extremely like graphic and sort of cartographic obviously mark of the ambition is now and one that is just in terms of this dodgy side of the chronomic enterprise absolutely irresistible this whole thing that it should be

that should be mapped of these three basic stradas laid out on the plane of consistency so yeah i probably should i shouldn't go any further down this this path right at the moment but just to say i think it's a really good question yes So what about this 10,000 BC thing? I had a couple of thoughts on it.

I don't want to go into the dodgy side of this whole thing too quickly either. But the first thing that I noticed was I read the Arthur Conan Doyle story when the world screamed this morning. And this relates really, really obliquely. But the first thing that is kind of noted by his interlocutor, Mr. Peelus-Jones, is that Challenger never dates his letters. And he's kind of annoyed by the fact that he sends an undated letter to him. And I like this kind of idea of the date. Yeah, it's already interesting, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's already a kind of territorialisation. and so maybe I don't know that goes like very clicks very obliquely into this

possibility that there's a kind of blank space before 10,000 BC which then marks some kind of moment of radical territorialization that's yes I mean there's a bunch of sort of preliminary questions I've got about this because one of them is this thing about and you know is there a is there a code to the dating system in thousand plateaus in general no like obviously that on the most naive level the each date has a kind of meaning in that text and usually they do this is kind of an exception of being so there's normally a kind

of superficial pretext for any of the dates given but is it that if it's the case that that all of the dates actually have some occult semiotic function just is camouflaged by its kind of superficial historical reference relevance then obviously what you would do with 10 000 bce that semiotic system and not something that you would uncover purely through its internal reference to that essay you know so that's just the kind of caution you know what i mean a caution on that i mean you'd expect i would expect redundancy and that i but the others clearly they have a pre they have

a local pretext what what more general function that they they might play so this one you yes you'd expect it would be the same and you could sort of discover what it means internally but but I would remain suspicious that there was something uncover about it so this is the only plateau in the in the book that that doesn't have a particular event that's referenced by the date or an uncoverable event I think so I think so

yeah I mean it's it's obviously what what makes it stick out so much and why it's not even remotely come from just that it's it starts off talking about geology and this is a date that's so bizarrely historical and recent that it you know what I mean if it was like 250 million BC then you would think okay you know or something they they could lock it onto some geologically significant date but that's just obviously not what's happening so it does make it stick out very dramatically like that yeah but actually I have to actually I'm sure the Conan Doyle

reference has to be telling us all kinds of things that I'm not taking it seriously enough well one way of thinking about it would be that you only have a kind of historically consistent dating system from that date that's marked at that plateau if you're reading it through this kind of idea that Challenger somehow is this this pre-date entity and the data system. Right, the most distant historical date. Yeah in the book, yeah. And Challenger is in the book, yeah. Yeah. He marks a kind of space where a dating system, the specific one that we have, is

re-imposed onto history. Right. Overlaid onto history. I wanted to ask if you what you kind of thought of this strange line in that framing narrative in the middle where he talks about he wants to make a computer program oh yeah that's really good for pure computers a something for pure computers isn't that yeah um challenger moreover had since had changed since the beginning of his

talk his voice had become hoarser broken occasionally by an apish cough his dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program for pure computers right or he was dreaming of an axiomatic axiomatic steel essentially stratification Challenger was addressing himself to memory only yeah um no it's fantastic it's I didn't is that one or two sentences but it's totally totally fantastic and there's lots going on in it I mean obviously obviously this one thing, axiomatics deals essentially with stratification. As I'm backing out and take onto what seems like firm ground a little bit from the apish

cough. Which, but that has a huge amount of content in it in itself, doesn't it? Because obviously the association that the whole discussion of axiomatics has in capitalism with schizophrenia is is that is the system of axiomatics so so then they're making an implicit a bit implicit relationship between stratification in general and pure capitalism that those two things are somehow being theoretically brought together and obviously the pure

computers thing reinforces that it reminds me of this it sort of brings us in a bit just in this level like I know I'm just retreating totally back into into crass philosophical mode but when they start talking about the alloplastic strata they say there is a peculiar position that self in in relation to the strata I'm actually not confident I can just grasp it yeah somewhere around around again the same around about page sometime after page 60 let me just see

Sorry I think I'm probably just slowing everyone down I think I need to just go and hunt this down but but there is this peculiar position granted to technology because of the fact that it enters into all of these I guess parastratic relationships with all all the strata so you know I mean through engineering through everything that we

talk about as the Anthropocene through the physical chemical strata through biotechnology with the with the organic strata that the technology has this strange kind of a extreme parastrotic mobility in relation to the other strata that I think must be related to the thing that you've just cited about this particular relationships of pure stratification computers and in I'm gonna say implicitly capitalism because it's just like that I think that they just provide that by axiomatics and capitalism for them at the same thing

but if you're gonna drag me back the apes cough I don't know I take that that you see what is the what is the what is the challenger story and it's basically it's let me again see whether people think I'm going into controversial and unpersuasive territory but it seems to me clearly Challenger starts off as a kind of completely familiar ordinary lecturer you know he's human he's all his characteristics are kind of unquestioned giving giving a lecture his

sort of therefore that sort of transcendent quasi transcendent position of theory is installed it's a lecture room all those institutions and and and he ends up melting onto the body without organs having passed through the kind of particle clock or whatever you know okay disintegrated disidentified and so the intermediate steps epistrata they're there they're these thresholds of de-territorialization that take him from this initial position in steps through the strata I'm going to

say problematically down through the strata the body that organs often this diagonal path and that's the I say um so I'm just trying to think I've lost a bit of vocabulary here but I so I'll just ignore it as a story voyage that he's involved in so I'm going to take it that all of these other little things about him our clues are kind of indexes of thresholds of de-territorialization that he is passing through on this voyage what what is a

thing yeah um what what is a particle clock or what do they mean by that are they're talking about this idea of like signs on the on the body without organs that are particle signs or something like that or is a particle clock an actual thing? Well a particle clock actually I don't know I'm losing it in terms of what's come from Lovecraft and what hasn't here at intersection I have to do. The clock the clock is in Lovecraft. Yeah the weird clock but he doesn't call it a particle clock. No. No. so I mean yeah I endorse all of your reading and also your your question I mean it's it clearly is these these emission of particle science isn't it

intensive elements that are not divisible between being feeling to a a physical or semiotic register whether there's something more than that I don't know I would think so obviously I always tend to think so well if you um if you take a challenger as an avatar for Lovecraft's Randolph Carter I mean the the experience that Carter has is the experience of ego death basically. And he effectuates his return and exit from that.

I mean, like Challenger, right? They both end up with pincers. They both progressively, in these two stories, they both progressively lose their voice. yeah and this kind of I mean he and Randolph Carter disappears into his clock which is also a kind of sort of time-traveling vessel yes that he he moves between dimensionalities yeah because you know there's another reference in Thousand Plateaus to Randolph Carter's communion with Yogg-Sophoth I'm trying to I think I think it's probably in the becoming becoming woman becoming animal becoming perceptible piece but I I'm not saying it with total confidence but it's definitely

very explicit about the exact moment it's talking about dimensionality and that it's that exactly that same episode it's done there too yeah and the time travel thing is utterly crucial of course yeah because because of the fact that it's this thing going right through this about absolutely territorialization is imminent it's not something to become it's not something that's that's been built over and you know see there is that kind of implicit thing about there was always that retro chronic line open this man so yes for dates

think ability um this is maybe just a side question but the the example that does the less users you know in other places like what is philosophy of the when he's talking about what's it in he's like he kind of uses the example of the light of the cone and kind of cutting into the cone on different planes and you get completely different planes of imminence out of it like Lovecraft uses that image in this story as well and I was wondering if like the less maybe got it from that or if it was a kind of just a general way of thinking about I don't know moving through different sort of spatio-temporal I don't know it sounds very much like this the same to hunt it down I don't

think it's not the sort of thing that probably be unless let me just very quickly look whether Lovecraft will take us to it. I was also, just while you're looking, thinking about that particular line right where he talks about he wants to make a program for computers. First thing I thought of reading it in English was like like computers as also being you know the kind of original word for typists and how that kind of worked nicely this program for typists but then also in French it's ordinateur which is actually a biblical term in French so when I looked up the history of this

when they were figuring out what to name a computer this guy what was his name Jack Perret, he suggested using the word ordinator, which is a biblical word, to refer to God. So the God who arranges and who orders, assembles things. So you've got this idea of making this program for at once God and for typists. and then I was just kind of thinking like I haven't made any rigorous connections here but also that idea that the stratifications or the judgments of God and then when you kind of

said in the first or second lesson Quedi is a religion as well I kind of thought of it in relation to this use of the word ordinator in that particular No that's, it's good because I have a real a vice here that it comes from my an ancient path through this thing where which is tied up with the English language you know and a lot of the questions that we're dealing with to do with fatality and signs and tradition and I tend just as an inheritance of this previous uh this is all in very dodgy zone set of investigations to really overlook the fact that it

obviously is a french book you know um by taking it's like the same attitude actually i'm trying to be analytical about it as people about the king james version of the bible you know like um where these nutty Protestant cults, and I say that with the greatest respect because I'm in the same position with this, of just taking it that the English King James version of the Bible is somehow the word of God more thoroughly than the Greek and Hebrew, which is just whatever a kind of a distraction from this actual proper manifestation of the revelation of the scripture. whatever and and so that sense about about to learn qatari that it was like

you know the English is like the King King James worship of the to learn some Atari and exactly the same way and I but I do realize that that's extremely unsubstantiated it certainly shouldn't be an axiom no and I and I've tended to sort of lazily use it as an axia which I mustn't so I think your ordinator point is is crucial like that oh no I can't Theodore's just really trolling me now I can't believe he just said what he just said I was I'm kidding me the game is the worst it is such a bad translation I mean a lot of that comes

from the Vulgate because the Vulgate was a bad translation in the first place I I mean, it does some interesting things by being a bad translation, which is maybe part of your point. The whole Lucifer thing, just arbitrarily deciding the passages about the devil, we're going to use the term Lucifer, even though that's actually used as the best translation of the term for Christ, Lightbringer. That's a really interesting one where just a refusal to translate literally turned into a giant mythic thema of the medieval period up to now. Luciferian cults and all of that is rediscovered in modernity which maybe I'm just making your point for you as I as I ramble on Actually, I don't know. I'm actually traumatized to a point that I can't

Fair enough I'll leave off but so what about that weird line um he was he was addressing himself to memory yes was yeah I didn't know it's great I mean obviously that sort of that's that I sort of lost lost the thread of it but that was I think it's like you know it's clear that this kind of this journey this journey of destratification isn't either

progressive or regressive you know what I mean it's like it looks like he's simply because of the fact that we have this kind of particular historical construction of the strata they're constantly trying to attack it looks as if he's simply regressing back through time insofar as he loses his voice and it becomes an ape cough and these various accretions seem to be shared at certain point as these stratic accomplishments are shredded on the on the diagonal line of intensity but it but it can't be can't be constructed

historically in those ways we know so speaking of time I've completely lost track it's for right now just so we all know yes okay I think we can run a little bit longer but then we have to start prepping for the next class soon too sure okay well maybe there's if there's any kind of wrapping wrapping up kind of stuff that that people want to do let me just say just as a preliminary I hope I can be more helpful than this down the line but in terms of next week I think look I want to sort of start

actually looking at what is there on the keyboard you know and and sort of analyzing what we're seeing when they're seeing quite a keyboard but I'm reluctant right now to be more specific than that because I'm gonna try to sift here so that we start on stuff that seems relatively non-psychiatric and only get to the more gone material when we're just about to wrap up for for you so um I I'm gonna I'm I mean, I try and find sort of, it's basically, I think that, maybe I can just say proficiently,

let's try just talking about the alphabet and QWERTY and what has happened in that transition, just treating them as pieces of code and what that transition is from one to the other, how you construct query as a code and how you compare it to the alphabet and what what's going on there just in terms of you could almost see cryptography on some level but as as this as this semiotic object but there's a there might be just a minute for any other rapid wrapping up remarks people want to make or suggestions also if people have things they want to put on on the

agenda at this point. I will just quickly say that there's a thread started for the extra day of class. That's in the Google Classroom. If you guys go in and take a look at that, that'd be great. Okay, cool. Okay, is everyone done? If I disappear into the particle clock, is that cool with everyone? Super, thank you. Yes, okay. Have a good week everybody you too