This is a draft translation of an early review by Yves Citton
Picture from The Brain from Planet Arous
In his latest work, Maurizio Lazzarato proposed designating as "noo-politics" the "new power relations that take memory—and its conatus (attention)—as their object." Noo-politics (as it is currently exercised through "wireless, audiovisual, and telematic networks, and through the constitution of public opinion, perception, and collective intelligence") effects "the modulation of flows of desires and beliefs, as well as of the forces (memory and attention) that circulate them within the cooperation between brains" (This neologism—which, as a footnote clarifies, is to be situated at the intersection of the Greek noûs ("the highest part of the soul, the intellect") and the Internet service provider Noos—is rooted in a tradition of thought that the author explicitly traces back to Gabriel Tarde and Leibniz. Just as Tarde took pains to clarify his relationship to Leibniz in a lengthy essay devoted to the link between "Monadology and Sociology," so too does Maurizio Lazzarato propose a "neo-monadology" that draws upon Leibniz for the concepts of "event" and "possible world"—the very concepts upon which he constructs his political analysis of early twenty-first-century social movements.
Over the last few years, a certain rift has been felt taking root within intellectual circles inspired by Deleuze. On one side stands a Spinozist lineage, which draws upon the Ethics and the Political Treatise for its conception of the actual movement of human societies—a movement articulated in terms of the power of the multitude, constituent self-organization, anti-humanist necessitarianism, the strategy of conatus, and the economy of affects. On the other side stands a Leibnizian lineage, which reasons in terms of the power of difference, monadic sensibility, infinitesimal bifurcations, pluralism, possible worlds, and the virtual. On one side, a lineage extending from Spinoza to the Deleuze of Expressionism in Philosophy, passing through Marx and Toni Negri; on the other, a lineage extending from Leibniz to the Deleuze of The Fold, passing through Tarde and American pragmatism. The first lineage reproaches Leibniz for his providentialism, his dualism, and his professions of faith—deemed too conciliatory toward Christian doctrines of free will and the soul; the second lineage reproaches Spinoza for stifling pluralism beneath the monism of a single substance, for crushing the possible and the virtual under the weight of necessity and the perfection of the real, and for flattening the event beneath the steamroller of a fully intelligible causality. Are these two traditions parallel, rival, or incompatible—or are they, rather, complementary and capable of being articulated together? Two recent publications—which will undoubtedly mark a milestone in the history of Spinozist exegesis—make it possible to build bridges—bridges that, in the final analysis, fall under the rubric of "noo-politics"—between the philosophy of immanent causality and the philosophy of the invention of the possible.
A Theory of the Trace
Spinoza et le signe: La genèse de l'imagination by Lorenzo Vinicuerra certainly proposes a meticulous reconstruction of the spinozist theory of the sign, grasped in a frame inspired by Peirce. As the subtitle indicates, this book takes part in a larger project, which consists in making sense of the entirety of imaginative activity, as has been conceptualized by Spinoza. Even more ambitiously, the author proposes a complete refounding of Spinozist ontology on unexpected yet illuminating bases, since they rest on the properties of "softness" and the notion of trace. I will characterize this redescription of Spinozist ontology through six main stages. a) From Sensation to Affection. After a first part devoted to a study of the notion of sensation and how Spinoza uses it to dispel the specter of skepticism and redefine the notions of astonishment and admiration (pp. 25-89), and after positing that sensation is a matter of connection and that “to perceive is always to affirm a relation” (54), Lorenzo Vinciguerra develops the most original dimension of his work in a second part titled "The body and its trace" (pg. 91-162). He begins by measuring the implications of the shift that Spinoza makes from the notion of sensatio to that of affectio, and shows how, since "all that can happen [contingere] to a body are affections" and "since the body, as a mode, is itself an affection of God", then "the affection of the body is always the affection of an affection" (96) - "the body being less the support than the immanent relation of its affections" and the affection being "always essentially a relation of relations" (105). Within this framework, “affection defines both what modifies the constitution of a thing and what constitutes it as essence” (107). Furthermore, “since I am an idea of a body, what is known of my existence is the result of an affection of the body, which always has its premise in something other than itself and not in the ego artificially reduced to the illusion of a transcendental isolation” (118). b) A general physics of the impression and the trace. The author proposes to characterize the mechanism of this process of affection by a tripartition of the soft, the hard, and the fluid. “Anything that is capable or lends itself to being covered [induere] with traces [vestigia] is soft”; “softness is that intermediate space, between hard and fluid, within which a body is modified by others, which leave their traces”; “hardness can be understood as that which most resists traceability, and therefore also that which most durably retains traces; and fluidness as that which, offering practically no resistance, hardly retains the traces of external bodies.” The result is that “any body, insofar as it is capable of being a site of traces, that is, of bearing the marks of other bodies, can be considered as being more or less soft” (129) c) a rediscription of the notion of "bodies." It is the theoretical productivity of these tools that are at once simple and intuitive which is the principal charm of Lorenzo Vinciguerra's book. This physics of the trace makes it possible to grasp that the "constitution of a body, insofar as it is an affection, is only ever the result of all of these traces (innate and acquired) which make it.." (131). On the one hand, this definition of the body as a field of traceability closely overlaps with – and aptly illustrates for didactic purposes – the notion of “mode” that Spinoza places at the heart of his system: “nothing, therefore, suits its essence [of the trace] better than the definition of mode as that which is always in something else by which it also understands itself. Every trace is one of something that has taken place, that is no longer there, and in its place there is its imprint.”( 132) On the other hand, by taking traces (vestigia) for “the simplest modifications” (165) – corresponding to the elusive corpora simplicissima of classical physics – we arrive at a conception of the body particularly suited to overcoming the illusions of naive individualism, in that identity is no longer characterized from extension, but from the capacity to trace/be traced (to affect/be affected): “the exterior and the interior are therefore not given a priori in extension, but they constitute themselves as the result of a causal and semiotic relation. The body should not be imagined as a portion of extension which it would divide by its figure according to an outside and an inside, but as a certain way of being affected and of affecting, that is to say as a certain way of being traced, and a certain way of tracing extension and producing signs” (223). d) A semio-physics of the trace, the figure, and the form. With refinements that we leave to the reader to discover in the book itself, the argument proposes, on these bases, a characterization of bodies at three superimposed levels, according to which traces are arranged into figures, whose variations stabilize around individuating forms: “the figure of a body is given by a certain position or situation of its parts,” while “the form consists in the union, according to a certain law, which causes bodies to compose together one and the same body or individual” (139), with the consequence that “the form of a body is nothing other than the totality of the figures that it is given to assume [...] it is this power that allows one to pass from one figure to another, while preserving itself” (140). “The richness of the figures to which a body can lend itself thus reflects its power, that is to say, its capacity to be modified and to modify its surroundings.” While form expresses the internal law of the body, figure translates form in its relation to exteriority” (142). Thus, “a new articulation based on the relation traces-form-figure corrects and replaces the abstract conception of the body according to surfaces, lines, and bodies.”(144).
A Hermeneutics of the Image and the Sign. The third part of the work, entitled “Images and Signs” (165–234), uses this basic vocabulary to develop the representational dimension that can be invested in traces, figures, and forms. Reformulating the old sensualist adage, the author emphasizes that “nothing is in the image that was not in the trace” (169) and characterizes images in that they “signal the presence, real or fictitious, of an external object” (170). Drawing on the pragmatist approach, he articulates the representational function through a ternary structure that adds to the representative and the represented the third term, the interpretant, defined as “that or that in relation to which something [res] is represented and signified by images or signs,” or more precisely as “the semiological category embodied by any individual, which is expressed by the power of connection proper to the body and mind of that individual” (202). Defined as “a hardening of the image,” “harder, and therefore also more stable” than it, the sign “embodies a law, a habit” (217), which crystallizes singular traces under the homogenizing pressure of collective norms along the paths projected by imaginative activity: “just as the trace is that hollow lodged deep within the body, so too is the sign that relief that the image gains through the work of the imagination. It raises traces from their purely passive nature, enhances and articulates another plane of differences, on which images come to be placed” (217). f) A characterization of meaning as pertaining to sequence. The last part of the work, “On the Use of Signs” (237–298), analyzes what Spinoza writes about prophecies and revelation in light of the semiophysics established in the preceding chapters ([3]). Meaning appears to be located not in the trace itself, but in the sequences in which it is inscribed: “there are no traces that constitute pre-established units of meaning prior to their being linked together, because these depend on the process by and in which they are included: the chain must be considered as prior to its links” (199). This is borne out at the level of the image: “meaning is effected less by a single image than by the link that connects one to another. [...] If meaning, therefore, is a matter of memory, it is because the meaning of the image depends closely on the sequence that orients its meaning” (193). This also applies on the largest scale, that of the life of a body: "what defines the form of a body is the practice of the sequences of its figures, which its power allows it to assume" (157), this practice of the sequences, these skills, constituting the ingenium proper to each body, its complexion (162).
Towards an Ontology of Writing
We can see what such a reconstruction of Spinozism can contribute to a noo-political reflection. It is part of a series of recent publications ([4]) which have in common the aim of highlighting more clearly how Spinozism cannot be reduced to a (vulgar) materialism: the theorization of the mens outlined in Ethics II and the conceptualization of affects developed in Ethics III-V open up a vast field for the study of what Maurizio Lazzarato designates (following Michel Foucault) as "the economy of souls", an economy which, through a rereading of Gabriel Tarde, brings "to its conclusion the desubstantialization of being begun with Leibniz" ([5]). The framework for reading proposed by Lorenzo Vinciguerra aims to “liberate Spinoza’s theory from a materialist interpretation, without, however, inclining towards idealism” (111) – which makes it more suitable for accounting for the range of realities that our era considers under the (ontologically problematic) heading of the immaterial. “Neither vestigia nor imagines are, properly speaking, bodies; and yet, they are corporeal, they belong to the attribute of extension and must be explained only from this perspective” (183). Once individuals and individuation processes are considered as simple accumulations and concretions of traces – always both traced and tracing – the behaviors of bodies and minds have a common ground on which noo-political analysis can be deployed, based on the (very “Tardian”) principle that “the human mind can be read as a field of connections of ideas which are linked and clash according to forces whose meaning often escapes us because we are unaware of their causes” (54). Far from such a conception of the immaterial opening the door to mystical deviations, magical thinking, the naiveté of free will or any substantialization of the "soul", the Spinozist framework guarantees that the explanation remains subject to the requirements of a rigorous causality, articulated by the notion of affection: "the concept which serves as a pivot and which allows us to articulate the system of causal relations of nature to that of a general semiology, is precisely the idea of affection, which is always at the same time the affection of the body (the trace, which is articulated with other traces) and the affection of the substance (the body which is articulated with other bodies)" (181). One of the great merits of Lorenzo Vinciguerra's book is therefore to invite us to think of Spinozist ontology as an ontology of writing ([6]): “The softness of the body is the place where bodies inscribe and write themselves by signaling and signifying to one another. Human meanings are part of this infinite process. Man is not its source. [...] It is hardly a metaphor to say that the soft body, whatever it may be (human or otherwise), is a space of writing, which nourishes what Baudelaire called 'the body.' Beneath the surface, other writings are preserved; other stratifications and sedimentations of marks work on it. The body lives from this dynamic relationship between depth and surface. [...] The body is thus a writing of writings, a chaining as much as a staging of marks, which is enriched and made more complex with experience” (167-168). To better account for the forms of life where the mechanisms specific to control societies massively overlap with those of disciplines, we are led to think of "the economy of souls" as a matter of inter-writing (and inter-reading, i.e., intel-lection). At once taking up and correcting the old fatalism which claimed that "everything is written up there", Spinozism can be summed up in the formula according to which "everything is written down here": each of our gestures is both scripted, insofar as it is the complex but inevitable result of the various conditionings (educational, erotic, advertising, propaganda, media) through which we pass the waves of imitations and the games of oppositions which structure social life - and scripting, insofar as it contributes (even if only infinitesimally) to relaying, reproducing, inflecting, deflecting, neutralizing or countering some of these conditionings.
Thinking about becoming active through community and complementarity
If conceiving of human reality in terms of traces and writing can aid in reconfiguring the essential questions of noopolitics, one can see that these questions quickly led to stumble over the distinction between the traces that individual endures and those which it imprints, between the passive and active elements of this process of writing. It is precisely this distinction between activity and passivity that Spinozism makes it possible to think, which Pascal Sévérac takes head on. The strength of this work lies first and foremost in its refusal to compromise with the strict determinism that Spinoza defends in all its consequences – consequences that are often disturbing, and with which the best interpreters of the Ethics often tend to circumvent. If everything is subject to causality without limit, if every phenomenon and every “choice” is determined, if we reEven if we specify, as is the case at the beginning of the fourth chapter entitled "Theory of the occupation of the mind", that "the active becoming of the body is in the multiplicity of connections that it establishes with other bodies" (202), we certainly see that these "connections" presuppose communities of convenience, but we still see poorly how to measure the activity in question.fuse to recognize the slightest element of “emptiness” in the constitution of the world and in “the implacable infinite series of finite causes” (81), then how can we not have to recognize that nothing can be other than it is, that the category of the “possible” – as it surfaces in a slogan like “Another world is possible” – is meaningless and, therefore, that everything is (as) perfect (as it can be)? Pascal Sévérac shows that the Deleuzian solution to this question, by positing individuals as being able to be "separated from their power", by attributing to them a "reserve of power" in the face of which their real behavior would be "in retreat", betrays the deep logic of Spinozian thought - which does not prevent it, moreover, from having made Spinozism rebound in particularly fruitful directions. The challenge of this this book consists in thinking the becoming active "from the idea that humanity is always completely what it can be" (29) acknowledging that "there is no power except when it is exhausted in its very activity"(40). This is the challenge posed by the first chapter (“An Ontology of Pure Activity”), an intimidating yet unavoidable and fascinating challenge, which the rest of the book takes up in the most convincing way. It would be impossible to follow step by step the rigorous argument patiently articulated by the author, with remarkable pedagogical skill, to “refound” the possibility of our becoming active (or even the very possibility of the category of “possible”). We will simply note how this reconstruction of Spinozism helps it to engage with noo-political thought. We can thus summarize the ontological foundation proposed by Spinozism by starting with the word used to express the state of being “constrained” (as opposed to being “free”): coactus. This word certainly indicates that every individual, insofar as it is a mode, can only exist and operate, under the constraint of another thing (coactus ab alio), but it also suggests that all action can only be thought from a kind of community of action, which is strongly acting with (coagere). Contrary to our well established habits of thought "To be active means, for one mode, not to render another mode passive, but rather to necessarily render it active: to act is to cause to act – in the sense that to be active is necessarily, for oneself, both to make another active and to be made active by another, who is himself active." (79). More precisely, two modes can only be the cause of another, Spinoza tells us, insofar as they "having something in common between them." The fact of operating ab alio "implies a minimum per communis" (90), and it is from the relationship between this other and this common that Pascal Sévérac proposes to derive "the only condition for a finite mode to be active": "it is necessary and sufficient that what through which this mode determines an effect be identical to what through which it is determined to produce this effect" (89). It follows that "to be constrained, for a finite mode, therefore always means in some way to already be active – to act by virtue of one's participation in the very activity" of this other who acts through him (91). Now, “being determined by something else through what one has in common with it—that is what the concept of suitability calls for” (93). This notion of complementarity plays a pivotal role on at least three levels. On the one hand, it requires and establishes a community among acting beings, who are led to organize themselves according to “thresholds of differentiation” or “levels of community” (105); on the other hand, it is the object of the deployment of what will be the principal form of human activity, rational knowledge, which aims to ensure an adequate identification of the “suitability, differences, and oppositions” between observed things (109); finally, it is precisely on the basis of such rational knowledge (of complentarity that human communities can erect their most beneficial institutions. Let us retain from this ontological infrastructure the lesson that it is only through co-action with others based on a community of suitability that individuals can hope to become active.
Towards a Theory of the Occupation of Spirit
Even if we specify, as is the case at the beginning of the fourth chapter entitled "Theory of the occupation of the mind", that "the active becoming of the body is in the multiplicity of connections that it establishes with other bodies" (202), we certainly see that these "connections" presuppose communities of convenience, but we still see poorly how to measure the activity in question. If everyone constantly exhausts their inner power, if being constrained is already a form of activity, then all cats risk appearing equally gray in the twilight of an activity so diluted as to merge with passivity. More precisely: if the mind is at its maximum capacity at every moment (since it is denied any reserve of power), how can one extract from this utterly oppressive world the slightest prospect of an ethical project and of becoming active? Pascal Sévérac suggests that the key to becoming active can be found in an overlooked aspect of Spinoza's thought, that of the opposition between admiration and the simultaneous perception of multiple things. Adequate (or rational) knowledge requires in effect the perception of several things at once, in that it focuses not on one thing or another, but on relations (of suitability or unsuitability) between various things (204-214): “there is no understanding of the internal relationships between things (understanding of their suitsability, differences, and oppositions) except through simultaneous, plural contemplation” (244). In this sense, becoming active paradoxically implies the capacity to be affected, and by as many things as possible. In contrast to this "the mind is in admiration when the image of a thing is not connected, and therefore give, with other images (250), or as Spinoza puts it, "Wonder [admiratio] is an imagination of a thing in which the mind remains fixed because this singular imagination has no connection with the others" (EIIIDef.Affs4). Does this mean that it is enough to "want to make an effort" towards simultaneous plural contemplation and rational intellection to become active, and that those who would not want to make this effort would remain "behind" their power of thought? This is the road taken by Descartes and Cartesians in the previous century, in promoting a indecisiveness of attention (with, as its logical counterpart, a guilt-tripping of individual inattention). Pascal Sévérac suggests that Spinoza reconfigures the problem by showing that the spontaneous dynamic of thought is that of adequate knowledge: it is a matter of psychic automatism (and not of the free orientation of attention) that the mind simultaneously perceives a plurality of things and attempts to organize them according to relationships of suitability. An affective attention that makes us desire true knowledge may well redirect our thinking efforts afterward, but everything actually depends on the space available to the psychic automatism that produces adequate ideas to unfold in the individual's mind: "it is above all a question for the true idea given in our mind to occupy the space of thought" (223). Admiratio, which is opposed to simultaneous, multiple contemplations, thus stems from a phenomenon of blocked thought, an "impediment to thinking" whose structure is based on distraction. Now, this distractio – the non-guilt-inducing counterpart of Pascalian diversion – has the remarkable characteristics (a) of being “an impediment which is not felt as such”, (b) of “not enveloping any suffering by itself”, (c) of “accommodating oneself very well to joy” to the point of “polarizing the mind on the pursuit of enjoyment or joy” (235-236). As a passion for the success of their favorite football team, for the pursuit of wealth or titles of glory, the distracted thought develops a certain form of activity of thought (at times intense) and can perfectly accompany the joys (at times numerous), but it is only "the affirmation of the power of thinking in a dead end" (247), in that it leads to "the absorption of the mind in a single thought" (Sunday's victory, the bank account, the Legion of Honour) and attracts psychic automatism towards vicious circles which "disconnect it from other thoughts which would be able to broaden its field of consciousness, and free it from its fixed ideas or prejudices" (299). The central argument of the work can thus be summarized as follows: “Admiration is passive thought par excellence, that is to say, thought prevented from truly thinking, and all the more so because the impediment is not felt as such. This distraction of thought is fundamentally what prevents any becoming active, because it is what ‘blocks’ – without necessarily saddening it – the effort to act.”To unleash this effort, no supposition of an as-yet-unactualized inner power is required: the effort to act is in itself active becoming, and it suffices—but this is the whole difficulty—to remove the obstacles for the power to act to automatically assert itself. Intellectual activity is, in a certain way, nothing other than the affirmation of a thought that opens the circles of thought caught in wonder onto other horizons of thought. From this follows an ethical principle: “The affect that has the structure of admiration is evil; the affect that confines the body’s affective sensitivity to a single image, or a single chain of images, and thus separates the mind from all adequate thought, is evil” (300-301). Pascal Sévérac's book develops in its last third the theory of the model (exemplar) that is sketched out in the preface to Part Four of the Ethics, developing the dynamic role of fiction and the imaginary anticipation of the becoming active of the individual (304-327). Through a reflection on the harmfulness of "persistent affects" (327-336) and a detour through the equation proposed by Canguilhem between health and normative plurality (340-354), an (artificial) model of human life is sketched out, "commanding nothing other than to live through the multiplicity of these active norms which constitute each of the parts of our essence" (348), and defining active becoming "as a sensitive becoming, insofar as the aptitude to be affected falls under activity in the strong sense; but also as a firm becoming, insofar as the balanced body has the power, automatically, to link its images according to an order which, on the mental plane, is intellectual" (354).It is from such an exemplar that a field of possibility opens up within Spinozist determinism itself, not because of a given and as yet unused reserve of power, but because of the creation of a gap with respect to an artificial and imaginary norm which will have the mission of pulling reality towards (what this norm posits as) the highest – according to a mechanism relating to recursive looping and “the self-affection of essence” (338).
The Triple Imperative of Noo-Politics
Both the redefinition of the notion of "body" based on traceability and the highlighting of the co-action inherent in all active becoming demonstrate that these two major works seek to configure Spinozist thought in direct articulation with the ethical (how to conceive of action?) and political (how do social relations self-organize?) problems specific to our era of media overexposure. Thanks to them, Spinozist-inspired reflection can connect (more) effectively with the entire body of thought on the "economy of thought" and "ecology of the mind" that has developed from Gabriel Tarde to Bernard Stiegler, by way of Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, and Maurizio Lazzarato. The ontology of the writing of traces and the the theory of the occupation of the mind provide valuable analytical frameworks for anyone wishing to understand "the modulation of the flow of desires and beliefs and the forces, (memory and attention) which circulatin in the cooperation between minds" "To think about something other than what we usually think about – and perhaps to manage to think differently about the things we ordinarily think about – that is the goal of a liberating thinking activity." (Sévérac, 355) We can immediately see how such a categorical imperative is enough to condemn as oppressive – as Weapons of Mass Distraction – the vast majority of traces left in our brains by our daily television images. But far from simply condemning (easily) the rehashing of consensual (aesthetic and ideological) habits, these books allow us to theorize, for example, how the "breaking news," as it occupies the space of the television news, constitutes a disease comparable to the cancer of advertising: by fixing, week after week, the collective attention on "what is absolutely out of the ordinary" (two twins kidnapped by a bus driver, three grandfathers tied up in a village in Poitou), the news item blocks us in the structure of admiration, "in an imagination disconnected from all thoughts" (279), facing an object "of which we cannot understand anything" (128). Our passivity may be joyful when the spectacle machine multiplies our astonishment at the "extraordinary" beauty of stars or the wonders of new special effects, but this only reinforces our inability to think. However, one senses that the analytical tools offered by Lorenzo Vinciguerra and Pascal Sévérac do not provide any ready-made answers; their value lies rather in enabling us to ask better questions. If we clearly see that "affect is bad when it confines the body's affective sensitivity to a single image, or a single sequence of images, and thus separates the mind from any adequate thought," how can we introduce something "new," how can we break the circle of "what we usually think about," without falling into admiring paralysis? Under what aesthetic conditions (of non-redundancy, of displacements) does the audio-visual experience give rise to this "simultaneous plural perception" to which it seems to mechanically belong (images + sounds)? At what thresholds do the connections that the body establishes with other bodies risk saturating its capacity for thought (rather than enhancing it)? What degrees of softness or hardness in the face of the imprints that constitute our being best allow us to develop our capacity to be affected, without excessively reducing our capacity to resist mutilating impressions? This work of noo-political reflection, which, on the scale of human history, is still in its infancy, effectively invites us to approach politics from a different angle. The question—contrary to the vicious circles reproduced by polls—is not about what one thinks of X or Y (societal problem or female politician), but about thinking about the questioning itself in terms of the occupation of the noo-spheric space and in terms of tracing the flows of desires and beliefs. A triple imperative of noo-politics emerges from the reading of these two major books: a) rethink the (micro and macro) politics in terms of the tracing of collective bodies their relative softness which results from their ontological stats of "affections of affections" or "writing of writing"; (b) resist the regime of admiring occupation which currently blocks thought in the largest parts of the noosphere; (c) foster the imagination of a multiplicity of models and norms capable of forging new paths of individuation for our (inevitably) collective active becoming.
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