Monday, November 21, 2011

evento y pliegue

No se muy bien como voy a hacer con estos ds niveles, estoy escribiendo sobre la bien empirica marcha indigena del bicentenario y de golpe necesito leer esto para contestar preguntas que me surgen de q estoy hablando exactamente, por que elijo la marcha para empezar la tesis, donde empieza y termina la marcha, pfff en fin. y a la vez para que discutir con deleuze si no termino de entender nunca que quiere decir (en el buen sentido, no se si me puedo sentar a charlar con el o no), mas bien lo puedo incorporar torpemente y seguir adelante.  


from the Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley, the University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

That is clearly the first component or condition of both Whitehead's and Leibniz's definition of the event: extension. Extension exists when one element is stretched over the following ones, such that it is a whole and the following elements are its parts. Such a connection of whole-parts forms an infinite series that contains neither a final term nor a limit (the limits of our senses being excepted). The event is a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples, such as an audible wave, a luminous wave, or even an increasingly smaller part of space over the course of an increasingly shorter duration. For space and time are not limits but abstract coordinates of all series, that are themselves in extension: the minute, the second, the tenth of a second. . . . Then we can consider a second component of the event: extensive series have intrinsic properties (for example, height, intensity, timbre of a sound, a tint, a value, a saturation of color), which enter on their own account in new infinite series, now converging toward limits, with the relation among limits establishing a conjunction. Matter, or what fills space and time, offers characters that always determine its texture as a function of different materials that are part of it. No longer are these extensions but, as we have seen, intensions, intensities, or degrees. It is something rather than nothing, but also this rather than that: no longer the indefinite article, but the demonstrative pronoun. How remarkable that Whitehead's analysis, based on mathematics and physics, appears to be completely independent of Leibniz's work even though it coincides with it!
Then comes the third component, which is the individual. There the confrontation with Leibniz is the most direct. For Whitehead the individual is creativity, the formation of a New. No longer is it the indefinite or the demonstrative mood, but a personal mood. If we call an element everything that has parts and is a part, but also what has intrinsic features, we say that the individual is a "concrescence" of elements. This is something other than a connection or a conjunction. It is, rather, a prehension: an element is the given, the "datum" of another element that prehends it. Prehension is individual unity. Everything prehends its antecedents and its concomitants and, by degrees, prehends a world. The eye is a prehension of light. Living beings prehend water, soil, carbon, and salts. At a given moment the pyramid prehends Napoleon's soldiers (forty centuries are contemplating us), and inversely. We can say that "echoes, reflections, traces, prismatic deformations, perspective, thresholds, folds" are prehensions that somehow anticipate psychic life. The vector of prehension moves from the world to the subject, from the prehended datum to the prehending one (a "superject"); thus the data of a prehension are public elements, while the subject is the intimate or private element that expresses immediacy, individuality, and novelty. But the prehended, the datum, is itself a preexisting or coexisting prehension, such that all prehension is a prehension of prehension, and the event thus a "nexus of prehensions." Each new prehension becomes a datum. It becomes public, but for other prehensions that objectify it; the event is inseparably the objectification of one prehension and the subjectification of another; it is at once public and private, potential and real, participating in the becoming of another event and the subject of its own becoming.
Beyond the prehending and the prehended, prehension offers three other characteristics. First, the subjective form is the way by which the datum is expressed in the subject, or by which the subject actively prehends the datum (emotion, evaluation, project, conscience . . . ). It is the form in which the datum is folded in the subject, a "feeling" or manner, at least when prehension is positive. For there are negative prehensions that exist as long as the subject excludes certain data from its concrescence, and is thus only filled by the subjective form of this exclusion. Second, the subjective aim assures the passage from one datum to another in a prehension, or from one prehension to another in a becoming, and places the past in a present portending the future. Finally, satisfaction as a final phase, as self-enjoyment, marks the way by which the subject is filled with itself and attains a richer and richer private life, when prehension is filled with its own data. This is a biblical - and, too, a neo-Platonic - notion that English empiricism carried to its highest degree (notably with Samuel Butler). The plant sings of the glory of God, and while being filled all the more with itself it contemplates and intensely contracts the elements whence it proceeds. It feels in this prehension the self-enjoyment of its own becoming.