Germatics

Germatics Felix Rebolledo May 2021 In terms of an opening conception, there is an undeniable political dimension to the initiative of ‘prototyping social forms’ (PSF) which putatively would entail proposing novel modes of organizing relational being towards widespread adoption. These germs as causal agents of collective change would have as pragmatic end some transformative dismantling of established social order towards novel or innovative emergent reorganization. The germ as an instigator of change seeks to undo any persistent hold on subjectivity by the powers that be, the apparatus of sovereignty and governance, and dissolve any resolute general laws that flatten any saliency that diverges from the established. If the currently operative institutions as the form of interiority of a system are somehow inadequate or insufficient to deal with a situation, the introduction of a germ will have the effect of breaking down the ties that keep tightly reticulated systems static, unresponsive, and exclusive. The operative dictum is that if it’s fixed, it needs breaking. As such, the germ unbinds and disorganizes a tenacious and ineffectual existent to permit and induce the emergence of a fabric of immanent relations as a diffuse and polymorphous abstract machine that loosens the conventional and habitual of established operating procedures or practices. The germ is a specific form of exteriority that is positive in its agency — it is exterior because the apparatus of power has no dispositif of its own as interior agency that will allow the dismantling of any of its internal components or the dissolution of any of its constitutive structures — if anything, because its function is its own maintenance and the perpetuation of its status quo. And it is positive in that it is actively seeks to free up the binding of semiotic creative possibility that a closed system of semiosis wishes to conserve. The problem that a germ is invoked to resolve is neither the apparent problem that the germ will ultimately solve, nor the direct obstacle to the germ’s doing what it is intended to do; the apparent problem is the symptom of the underlying condition. The problem’s manifestation as problem is an indication that the real site of the problem exists in the organizational conditions that did not foresee the problem, that was unable to prevent it, that does not have the internal initiative nor the wherewithal to organize the effort, nor the persuasiveness, the organization, nor the power of the will to rally the resources to resolve the situation. The object of the germ’s deployment is the inherent fixity of the apparatus supposedly in place to stave off the kind of problems that the germ is being sought to resolve; its mission is overcoming the internal functional inertia that precludes the insertion of any other competing or challenging mechanisms that question its authority or sovereignty. Possibly, one of the upshots of the germ’s productivity is to dissolve existing social, political, legal networks in order to give a different group a kick at the can, or at least enable the apprehension of where the actual predicament lies. The processual germs that our research-creation initiative seeks to generate are abstract machines that produce becomings. The germ in itself is insignificant, but its function is not to transmit or relay its machinic message — it is not a cog, it is the (in)formation. Its machinic purpose is to leverage movement in other cogs, which in turn motivates other cogs, etc except that at some point it becomes apparent that these cogs are meshed in such a way that they turn together but leveraging each other’s movement as one giant circle jerk, which as it turns out are all in sync, marking time losing sight that the germ ought to be making time rather than representing it… not merely a mechanical time piece but a time machine. The germ’s contagion is “a machine against the apparatus” (D&G, 1987, p. 352) — it unties the bond and betrays the pact — the transduction that is produced is a transformative becoming. Contrary to the usual hylomorphic conception of using forms to model matter, the germs are not hylomorphic operators. They do not propose a model upon which the matter can be fashioned, but rather operate as catalysts for change. If the germs are conceived in terms of social forms, their onus is not to be topically applied onto the social to obtain desirable effects. The germs are neither subjective forms nor energic supplements or sinks that influence social or political processes one way or the other. In stead, the germs are ethical propositions that dissociate themselves from any moral stipulations — and rather than produce general forms or universals, they precipitate desire that foments change: they hasten the production of events as singularity conditions that replicate and are relayed through the collective. This is counter to an economic model that is applied far and wide as a policy or initiative that affects all simultaneously without regard to the singularity of the individual. Here the individuals relay the germ’s (in)formative advance as a transductive line that torches through the common fabric, like the leading edge of a grass fire, advancing as a flaming front of flame that leaves everything behind it scorched. This thin strip of fire that is the limitary horizon of advance, not only heralds the advance of regime change, it is the regime change-over in action, from what was there before to what change-over that leaves behind its passage the pre-individual detritus from which novelty will emerge. The transduction is the activity of the fire, but the germ is not the transduction itself, it is "an operation, physical, biological, mental, social, by which an activity propagates from one place to another close within a domain, basing this propagation on a structuring of the domain operated from place to place. But contrary to Simondon’s conception of transduction, the transformative passage of the germ does not leave behind a set of informational instructions to restructure the remains or structure them anew — the germ’s transductive activity leaves behind a landscape of potential. And rather than destroy value, the ravaging of the common represents the opportunity to produce more value during re-construction and the rendering the virtual actual. The germ’s dissolutive potency lies not only in its emergent destructuration but in its epistemic innovation that is threatening to the State apparatus. The germ does not reproduce what was there prior to its transformative passage and neither does it follow the pre-existent organizational striations laid down as guiding any future development or evolution. Rather, the passage transforms the reticulation and concatenation of the semiotic by changing the conditions upon which it is environmentally based — by virtue of changing the landscape, that which is thought when engaging it and the modes of engaging with it also change, thereby introducing novelty into the mix. Were we to consider our germs as molar agents of change, they would have no pretensions of being applied en masse as pandemic contagion towards a widespread dissolution of social organization, and neither would they be looking to militate actively or purposely seek a specific outcome. These agents represent an activist praxis which looks for innovation and change at a social scale that is closer to home as a reflection of dwelling — at the local and the personal level expressed through the creative prototyping of unarchival practices as deconstructive constructivity. If the archive represents a storehouse of knowledge that acts as a depository of seeds that will eventually replicate the disciplinary tree of knowledge, the processual germ bank is a cache of unarchival kernels that seeks to unfetter processes of creation as rhizomatic proliferation of deterritorialization. The germs represent the undoing of the fascia that bind creative freedom to productive presuppositions, in order to release their creative potential and inventive promiscuity as unrestrained practices. Collectively, the germs embody a research creation methodology that banks on the productivity of process-production than on processual outcome as product. The productivity of these practices arises implicitly in the doing and not from the result as a done thing, and the value emerges in the transformative gesture itself as the wealth of information that arises out of novelty. The germs as contagious rehearse a perceptual semiotics in terms of coming to appreciate the value creation of how we participate interactively and dynamically in the world rather than producing a DIY instruction manual or recipe book. We look to locate germs as prototypes of social forms within semiotic production as part of tacit methods or practices of deterritorialization without necessarily pre-tracing the path of reterritorialization. This allows for a creative and innovative emergence of autonomous or immanent self-organization according to new paradigms of perception, of apprehension, where invoking method is not intended as a repeatable determination of truth, but as the description of the movement of thought as processual advancement. The germ serves to elaborate the notion of activism not in terms of a by-the-book methodology applicable in the macro-political realm towards a specific result, but as an informing of research-creation practices as une démarche à suivre whose engagement with creative practices is the prototypical resourcing we seek. There is an implicit or tacit science here, but not the science that we usually refer to as a “systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe”. It is a more personal mode of doing science, of performing semiotic creation anchored in private experience and the individual’s engagement with the world that does not claim to move to any specific foundational, common form. The social dimension of PSFs is an abstract machine that is not geared to a widespread ‘contractual’, social acceptance but simply a nominative attribute that identifies it and associates it with sign-function as its mode of existence in such a way that it does not fall into re-articulating modes of representation of the same elements in new trappings, but in the taking advantage of signs as springboards for creative differenciation, for transforming and morphing. It is immanent and emanative, a mode of cognizing emergent difference and going with the flow that changes us within and thereby changes what our body can do and ends up doing by changing our capacities and capabilities for interaction. To activate the notion of PSFs requires that we engage the notion of the prototype, the πρώτητύπος, (proto-typos), as the obvious first exemplar of a thing, the proto- of creation, that verifies its operation. But we do not wish to identify it as an object that is the first of its kind, or the first realization, or the first or primary type of anything that we produce and has a mechanical functional operativity in the world to be subsequently improved, refined or enhanced, or the exemplar from which copies, imitations, representations will be made, as a source of the common. The prototype is a variant repetition of the specific machine that is looking to be revealed by, through and within its emergence. If there is a machinic quality to it, it would have to be expressed as an abstract machine, as a semiotic assemblage that ceaselessly drives signification and the production of difference in variegated repetition. We can move in the direction of prototyping as producing the exemplar, the first of a series of iterations, that over time becomes the staging of repetitions, into the realm of the practices of prototyping, of producing the prototype as the rendering actual of a vague notion, a productive constraining that enables actualization by channeling the expression of unwieldy abstract potential and invest it with physical heft and actual somatic existence. If the reader were to be expecting a technological object as the final elaboration of our process of invention, within the scope of our paper it would express itself in terms of a revelatory technology (Heidegger, 1993) that would produce a technological object revelatory of a human activity, a contrivance that brings us into a free relationship with the essence of that which concerns us in terms of generating a particular movement — this is what makes the technological mediation interesting as common, as a one-at-a-time mass medium… If we translate prototype literally as first impression, we tie the concept to practices of discerning and resolving what could be a first impression. How do we resolve the novel entity, object, body, from an undifferentiated background of pre-individual potential, when there are no pre-existing “hints”, clues, indices, to point the way, to direct our sense-making and individuate the thing? This is discerned by noticing that the body has done something, something different for a change, which as William James asserts, that a movement of thought is revealed or betrayed by a movement of the body. So by being consciously aware of the reactive movements of the body we can correlate that to the stimulus and response in order to discern the formation of a new neural pathway as interpretive of a new way of thinking. One can never make a first impression twice, but that does not corroborate nor substantiate the originality of the impression. The prototype is only saying that it is the first impression that has been recognized as such — for whatever was producing the impression could have been there all along but not making any cognizable impression because there was no “structure” that would permit the cognitive perception. We had no idea how to look for it nor to recognize it! Therefore, the prototype is not necessarily the objective creation of an objective thing, but the creation of the conditions that would permit its discernment. These conditions can be both internal as well as external: the internal would entail the intellectual capacitation that would facilitate the logical advance as intuitively inferential; the external entails the creation of environmental conditions propitious for creative innovation. One cannot induce things to appear, i.e. use the practical arts that lead to revelation, if one does not have the cognitive apparatus to cognize novelty. Thus, technics and its attendant techniques need to be in place whose primary affordances detect the appearance of difference as the resolution of change having occurred. If freedom is the essence of truth, freedom is the freeing up of associative valence towards novel relations and allowing them the logistical freedom or liberty to associate at will, so as to produce assemblages whose operative coherence constitutes truth value as a machinic operativity. We may not like or appreciate what has emerged, but its value is expressed in the creative activity that produced it as an origin of creative potential and in the finished entity as possible jump-off point for new possibility. The created object takes on new value not in itself but as creative object whose constitutive conditions of creation as the truly creative revelation, and the end products take on the rôle of a prehensile node as a hinge or fold that articulates advance from an established given past towards a future that is uncharted but opened up as exploratory possibility into novelty. There might be value in the prototype itself by virtue of what it can do, but its deeper, more significant value comes from its leveraging of the creative research-creation and its semiotic concreteness. In research-creation there is no “correctness” to the creativity or its product, just like there is no moral imperative that pushes towards the capitalization of the creative or merchandising the fruits of labor — the emphasis lies on rendering the process common. Thus, the productivity as objective results takes a back seat to the consideration of the operativity itself and creative pluralization of outcomes as potential. If the resistance to novel propositions is based on memorial preconceptions or ingrained habits, the function of germs within the practices of PSF is to dissolve and overcome those preconceptions and habits that resist novelty and constrain creativity. If for Heidegger, production is “an activity whose performance has a result, the finished structure, as its consequence”, for us production is found in the activity itself. What interests us is the (in)formation of activity, the technē of bringing forth the liberation of creation: a technē of technē, the arts and practices and techniques that liberate and free up the “making something appear”. Within this realm of productivity, the social takes on a different form. It is no longer an aggregation of interdependent individuals, but a shared commonality expressed through the transindividual of a common notion as a communal property in its most general generative sense. This transindividual shared commonality has similar properties to language as that which belongs to no one yet belongs to all and manages to mediate sociality. Language is thus a technē of social (in)formation that is common property and constitutes a mode of revelation, of making things appear — as a making visible before us and as enabling of cognition or discernment. PSFs as a social praxis share with language this capability, for language does not have a monopoly on the semiotic of social forms. And so, the practices that we seek to develop are social through their transindividual micropolitical technē. Roman Jakobson initiates his elaboration of his study of linguistics and communication with a quote from D. M. MacKay that states that the primary aim of information theory is “to isolate from their particular contexts those abstract features of representations which can remain invariant under reformulation” and concludes that the linguistic analogue is the phonemic search for relational invariants (Jakobson, 1960). In terms of generating or prototyping Social Forms, we seek to discern emergent forms that may be archived and repeated at will, and copied or mimed as users deem fit. What the Prototyping Social Forms group has tried to do is to produce conditions conducive to speculative propositional experimentation according to the practices of research-creation in order to generate new forms as abstract machines of emergent semiotic possibility. However, traditional forms have operated in linguistic modes in the service of communication of content, whereas the forms or generative frameworks we are looking to generate look to be more inclusive in terms of the semiotic regimes they can be applied to in terms of instilling new forms of relation by which we can produce new models of self that are based on the creative invention of self and of appreciating our relationship with the world. We use the word appreciating in both the sense of valuing our existence and also of making our experience richer. These new forms do not purport to produce more coherent, adequate or verisimilar pictures of what are roundly accepted as Ideal, Universal or Standard representations of unchanging, static preconceived possibilities. Rather, they seek to overcome gravity through the joyful levity of introducing play, fabulation, contingency while incorporating processual complexity, multiplicitous densification, identitary dissolution, within heterogeneous, rhizomatic, communicational environments. The germs as processual forms serve two roles. Firstly, they promote the deconstruction and deterritorialization of existing structuration which has become so ankylosed that they cannot produce any free variation or creative openness, because the networks of relation are too rigidly massified and too inflexibly triangulated. Secondly, they leave open the landscape for new modes of territorializing: the point of these forms is not to free up participating elements in order to replicate existing representations, but to liberate these elements within themselves to participate freely in new assemblages. The germs are not representational overcodings of some putative underlying reality, but practices of dismantling, dissolution, deconstruction that till the ground towards new modes of cultivation. Unlike the seed that needs care and attention through all its phases to its becoming fruitful, the germ’s contagion is immediate in its effects: infection is directly clinamic — it activates inflection upon contact and deviates the becoming with minimal prevarication. This is not a moral quandary of sickness and health, of purity and taint, of sin and innocence, but an expression of the ethics of propagation where the pragmatic result is what is taken into account in terms of the capacity to act. The result is a transductive transformation of the existent texture of the experiential and not simply of its material conditions. The social is relational and even if its mediation is considered material, its agency is produced by the semantic informational — to the modes by which the infectiousness of contagion repurposes occupation: both as a taking up of space and as the activity of being-doing that transforms space-time according to a new organizational regime. This new organization is impermanent, evolutive, adaptive for the transformative effects of the agency of the germ are not readily accepted by the host; they might be summarily rejected or fully incorporated, or somewhere in between, but the contagion by a processual germ permanently alters the capacity of the body to act and to react, to be acted upon. Does this textural transformation constitute positive change? The processual germ enters a system because it finds a receptive host: the host might not have known how receptive it was, but it presented the optimal conditions to implant itself and propagate. The germ seeks to find a node that is well connected, that repeatedly strikes an influent node, that sits at the junction of various semantic chains to free-up the greatest number of elements and allow them to recombine afresh. For example, by not being adequately prepared nor steadfastly committed to fight COVID-19’s diffusion, much of Western society was actively susceptible in a passive mode to viral contagion. Society’s susceptibility, expressed in its present condition of being decimated by the virus, presents the right conditions, i.e. is receptive to the application of a remedial social form that will alter its receptivity, i.e. reduce its susceptibility to being infected or heighten its readiness or strategies to fight any new contagion. Prior to the pandemic, the infrastructure was in place to accept the social form, but not in a state of receptivity. The germ is similar to any object of thought, but it is also very different. It is similar in that it appears on the surface of becoming not as immanent emergence from within but as it is said in French, “as a hair in the soup”. In itself it is no big thing, but what it unclenches pragmatically, the subsequent movement generated is disproportionately out of scale. The germ is a mote in the eye, I, aye. Whereas an object of thought emerges organically from the pre-individual welter of possibility, the germ lans upon propitious conditions for its arrival, reception and propagation. And its success depends upon the propitiousness of the receptivity as material conditions. Its successful propagation depends upon how successful and how cleverly it fits in with the conditions a host offers or provides the germ. The germ is not opportunistic, it simply makes itself very much at home in the conditioning environment provided by the host. But in terms of emergent social forms, the germ is a machinic McGuffin. The germ is an agent of flux. It not only accelerates but is a catalytic device that induces dissolution, that renders fluid that which it comes in contact with and which might have been “solid” and “fixed”. The processual germ is an agent of deterritorialization that renders fluid the reticulated composition of a social milieu and allows participating semiotic components to to recombine afresh according to a formal amalgam of what was there before with the activist influx of novelty-creation that the processual germ injects. An ontological distinction needs to be made between the seed and the germ. They can both be made to inform the social in different ways and constitute two different modalities of producing social agency/subjectivity… one is arborescent and rooted, portable and implanted; the other functions through contagion and transduction, its propagation is self-propelled and [opportunistically] invasive and adaptive. The notion of the seed involves the idea of the clinical and concern, of tending and cultivating, of the archival for posterity; and its implantation feels more formally structuring and acculturating in that the temporality involves patience and waiting, nurturing and clinical concern. The notion of the germ and its propagative contagion at first feels more scientific and less artisanal… more high-tech lab and less hands in the soil. For germs, the scientific lab as repository is more for safekeeping, for security, for protection, as opposed to preservation of cultural heritage; and it feels better suited to articulate the textural and the textile as possibility within social fabric and process as immanent from the common of the social in that the advance of contagion is the immediate of its own mediation — the mediation as media and mediation is its own mediatic culture as modal milieu of processual advance as immediate transformation. The pragmatic functioning of a seed needs to be interpreted metaphorically in that the agency of a seed is at one remove from the notion it seeks to implant; on the other hand, the transductive action of the germ is directly transformational in the processual advancement, in its alteration of the social fabric, no matter how the social is defined. The processual germ bank as an experimental scientific milieu is also of a different nature from the processual seed bank, if anything because of their mode of activating change and producing new forms. As Simondon asserts in Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020), if we understand the event as constituted as the application of form over matter as constitutive of a hylomorphic object, an effective technical operation must institute a mediation between the form and the matter. The form does not act autonomously on the matter to produce the transformed technical individuation, it actually requires some technical participation to see it through — as such, the implementation of the germ as a social form takes on the character of the seed, for what defines the seed is this technical concern for seeing through the operation of (trans)formation as a before and after of (in)formation. So that for the successful implementation of the seed, the proper conditions need to be in place: the receptivity of the “social ground” has to be adequate to host the seed and the form has to be disposed for the ecosystem or milieu into which it will be implanted. Only then can we be certain that the seed can take root and allow the successful mediation between seed and soil to begin to effectuate change as a technical operation. Sometimes the most receptive “ground” is the most inhospitable of environments, but if the novel social form is to be accepted, the receptivity must be in place as somehow articulating the possibility of confidence in its transformative power — even if it is a passive willingness to receive the seed — the ground must somehow green-light the acceptance or the form has so much motivational power that it spurs a surge of contagion throughout the social body as acceptance. The space upon which the germ operates is indefinite and non-communicative even though what spreads a germ’s contagion is “communication” — its linkages of dissemination require contact but in the sense of association by connection which can simply be an over-arching selection or designation…. It’s a topological space that contains much more than containment. The manifold’s elements are polyvalent and so their agency is not restricted to one semiotic plane and so their activation or disactivation can result in functional blackouts on many planes and many fronts.