<<TRANSMATHOME

II Lagoon Dynamics

Kant gives two fine illustrations of the effects of disequilibriated forces, where the dynamics of full space do not slide unproblematically into points and striations and mechanical relations, and in both cases, imagination is involved as an exacerbatory process of the destabilized relations of repulsion and attraction. In the first chapter, the schematizing function of imagination under the determination of understanding was mentioned briefly, as was the focus imaginarius, a subjective focus mediating the transition from the distributive unity of understanding to the collective unity of reason. When the faculties are unhinged, and their relations not ordered by common sense, imagination comes to play a different rôle.

In the sublime, the inadequacy of imagination to fulfil its two theoretically assigned functions of apprehension and comprehension, and thus provide a qualified quantum of intuition to understanding, is felt as  pain and resolved by the superior might of reason into negative pleasure.  In its attempt to use nature as a schema for the presentation of the sublime, imagination becomes alternately attracted and repelled by natural might [Macht], and disengaged from sensibility and understanding, it moves vertically into a realm of incomparable quantity,  the magnitude of the supersensible, where reason asserts its dominance [Gewalt] over  the exertions of imagination. This is much written about however, so in this chapter a different example will be looked at.[144] The sublime recurs, however, in the context of a discussion of imagination in the next chapter.

Crossing water, ‘[o]n a trip from Pillau to Königsberg, if this can be called a voyage’, Immanuel Kant, Professor from Königsberg, grows seasick.[145] Diagnosing his condition, he pins the nausea down to ‘antiperistaltic movement of the intestines by the abdominal muscles’ reversing the cycle of ingestion and evacuation through the organism.[146] Swelling waters on the lagoon interfere with the successive and automatic compression of the tubular pathways in the body; ‘repeated rising and falling’ of the field of appearance, felt first as a disturbance in sight is, when ‘provoked, by imagination’, exacerbated and thrown into reverse.[147] If this reversal is not countermanded, the organism exports matter, the process of which through the body has been unbalanced by dynamic distortions in its environment. Regulated and directed wave-like contractions in the vermicular canals through which the organism injests and dispels waste are unable to negotiate an equilibrium with wavering uncertain waters, and excited to confusion. The proper organization, contents, and connections of the input/output channels running through the closed volume of a whole body become disordered. The irregular and unregulated flows of the waters play havoc with the regulated structure of the organism and under the provocation of imagination, sight turns back in on the organism and the outside world darkens. Kant’s analysis of this problem is instructive, since it is one of the few occasions on which he can indeed be said to occupy a dynamic space, not as an observer, but as an body interacting with the forces with which it connects.

 ‘Sight is the noblest of the senses’ Kant writes, and ‘comes closest to a pure intuition’ [148]; the purity of the light medium being imperceptible except through its special organ, the eye, the object seems independent of sensation. As said above, sensation was initially problematic in relation to attractive forces, either lacking a determinate object, or not felt at all, and Kant solved this difficulty  of an intensive distribution without determinate form or relation by negating the forces implicated with feeling and physical contact and collapsing matter into a point, a limit. On the water, however, such a resolution is precluded. The homogeneous space of universal attraction, the world organized as a laboratory in which sight is privileged, gives way to a turbulent and fluid heterogeneous field in continuous variation, to which none of the corporeal senses are adequate, and which effects their recoil back into the body in a refusal of their tentacular role on behalf of the empirical subject. The response is similar to that of the sublime; in both cases, what is looked for is a place of safety, from where the disturbance can be estimated as fearful, but the subject can be unafraid. In the  case of the sublime, this is culture. Kant writes:

‘[T]he vast ocean heaved up by storms cannot be called sublime. The sight of it is horrible; and one must already have filled one’s mind with all sorts of ideas if such an intuition is to attune it to a feeling that is itself sublime, inasmuch as the mind is induced to abandon sensibility and occupy itself with ideas containing a higher purposiveness’.[149]

Out on the lagoon, does Kant experience the sublime? Certainly, his description suggests he nduced to abandon sensibility. Whether cultural ideas are sufficient to sublimate his nausea? - this is unclear.

Light, the medium of sight, ‘unlike sound, is not merely a wave-like motion of a fluid element that spreads through space in all directions, but a radiation that determines a point in space for the object’.[150] And in the MFNS: ‘nothing prevents one’s thinking of light-matter as originally and indeed thoroughly fluid, without being divided into fixed particles’.[151] Whilst not composed of discrete quanta, illumination nonetheless determines a unit or quantum of intensity. In his discussion of forces, Kant contrasts a model of the diffusion of light provided by optics, ‘by means of rays diverging in a circle from a central point’ with one depicting the diffusion of repulsive forces across a spherical surface.[152]

The optical model returns a problem of empty space, not as proposed by the concept of action at a distance, but between the real elements filling space. If diffusion is represented in terms of lines, the actual continuum of intensive force becomes segmented, broken into discrete elements, repulsion as the filling of space becomes confused with the enclosure of space, and the only light is that of the lines, ‘as if there were always to be found places devoid of light between the rays’.[153] Kant is of course anxious to prevent an account of material force in terms of monads, or atomic elements, or suggest the possibility of real empty spaces increasing as the rays are further extended. In his preferred model ‘light diffuses itself everywhere from an illuminating point in spherical surfaces’ (Ibid.), from one point to all distances, not as rays, but in divergent circular waves. The degree of intensity then becomes a function of the extension of the diffusion surface across which it is distributed; the greater the extension, the less the illumination, the illuminating point remaining constant. Space remains full, in actual terms, but the conditions of its organization are given by a principle extrinsic to this space, which folds itself back over it and records movement on its surface in terms different to those which produced it.

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Deleuze’s argument with Kant - that he provides possible conditions for the production of representation, and not real conditions for the production of production is focused on this folded back surface,  on the stratified space it generates, and on the condition or idea implicated in the disjunction which elevates law above the real. In effect, his criticism is that Kant provides no real account of the conditions for the tactile and full space of the actual continuum, only ideal and possible conditions for the visual and empty space of continuous attraction in which these forces are enclosed. There is no transcendental account of the construction of the enclosure. A lex continuii in natura underpins an arborescent model of the species, in terms of which it is possible to ‘recognize a relationship of the different branches, as all spring from the same stem’ and a linear model of forces, in terms of which each is a function of substance, as the radical of power, underpins a striated model of space.[154]

The point is a centre of resonance, ‘un point d’accumulation, common un point de croisement quelque part derrière tous les yeux (a single point of accumulation that is like a point of intersection somewhere between the eyes)’[155]; sight and the coalesced intensive force figured as a mathematical point in the interests of theorizing action at a distance across empty space converge on the same model, the eyes of the subject, all implicated in the direction of the systematic ends of reason. In the case of sight, radiation determines a point in space for the object. In the case of action at a distance, force is represented ‘as converging at the attracting point from all points of the surrounding spherical surface’[156]; in both cases, for the direction of determination to be objectively valid, it must be a function of ‘all points of the surface’ and not determined by the illuminating centre.[157] Only thus can intensity be quantified as equal in all space, regardless of its compression or density, its connections, directions or speed. If it were a function of the illuminating centre, it would need to be understood as increasingly diffuse and, as mentioned above, would result in the absence of assignable quantity or position of intensive magnitudes. Besides, good sense may be eschatological, but it does not take its end as real: there is no real force of attraction, only a construction of it as a concept, a mathematical point, conceptual rule or moral future.

To describe the relations of horizontally diffuse and differential intensities in terms of a point, and ‘indicate the rectilinear direction, straight lines must be drawn from the surface and all its points to the illuminating point’.[158] These are the lines described by falling bodies, the pillars which striate space, pegging difference to points; the central illuminating point does not determine direction, merely organizes a resonance amongst all points on the sphere, effecting their communication within the interior space behind the eyes.***

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Kant’s nausea is the outcome of unanticipated alterations in the vectors of forces which precludes the smooth transformation from dynamics to mechanics or thermodynamics; there are aleatory lines departing from the rectilinear, directions outside anticipated variations, not forestalled by a rule or law, and the dynamics of the ocean do not translate into the substances and forms of the land. On Kant’s lagoon, the regularity of the body begins to breakdown; no more pure logical movement, continuous quality of medium. Instead of completing an indeterminate aesthetic space, ein Vorgriff, and driving objective production to the benefit and purposes of the ultimate substance of existence, intensities explode into the noise of the waves. Undirected and turbulent, they return on the body, also incomplete, only to be further exacerbated by an imagination unhinged, synthesizing without schema or rule. Kant’s desire for symmetry becomes ridiculous as the incompleteness of the imaginative circuit is mimicked or mirrored by a similarly incomplete organic circuit.  The geometric completeness of sight is unhinged, vision becomes waveform, and the body becomes a complex of channels and disordered reversals.

Its anticipatory systems failing it, an organism becomes ‘more conscious of the organ’s being affected than of the reference to an external object’[159];

‘In other words, the intensity of the sensation, in both cases, prevents us from arriving at a concept of the object and fixes our attention merely on the subjective representation, namely the alteration of the organ’. [160]

In an organism ‘just as each part exists only as a result of all the rest, so we also think of each part as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole, i.e., as an instrument or organ.’[161] Its turbulence connecting with a zone of the body, fomenting sudden, violent or unanticipated alterations of a single organ, here the eye, intense sensation disequilibriates the careful structure of the whole. Indeed, there is no whole, for the systematic interconnection of the parts of the body according to a principle of wholeness has broken down. Organs no longer exist for the sake of the others and of the whole, imagination no longer makes space for objects, and unity mutates into a chaos of traffic on a circuit, a congealed transformational zone, a direction and intensity of flows across an indeterminate non-organic body. The  object is the constant of subjectivity, its fetish. With its point gone, what could a subject be?