This article is a substantially revised and expanded version of “Cibernética e ciências humanas,” published in Cadernos Zygmunt Bauman, vol. 16, no. 40, available at: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/bauman/article/view/154417
I would like to express my immense gratitude to Patricia Porto for her tremendous effort and invaluable contribution to this translation.
The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,
In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing
Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.
Wallace Stevens
Introduction
A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard.
Cormac McCarthy
The ubiquity of technology in contemporary society — with its intensification of control and surveillance, and with the general malaise that accompanies it — forces the question of how we arrived here and what role thought has played in the process. To investigate this honestly is to be forced back upon the very foundations of thought, and to propose something that departs, substantially, from the Western mainstream.
We begin with a brief survey of Western thought, articulating philosophy in the first instance and, where needed, science, politics, and spirituality. We then examine the influence of cybernetics on the human sciences and the way that influence has helped sustain the present system of cybernetic control. Finally, we consider certain known ways out and introduce the notion of intensity, which may carry us beyond thought itself.
Our aim is not to develop the ideas of the authors cited here in depth, but to show how a thought of intensities — or wisdom — has had its dance choreographed across the historical process, such that the great ideas that opened breathing room within control form an underground and continually interrupted current. This choreography does not issue from any totalizing plan; it can arise as much from local dynamics of stabilization as from situated, partial, and historically located strategic interventions, including their failures. The resonance between these factors, when misapprehended, gives rise to innumerable conspiracy theories.
A Very Brief Journey Through Western Thought
Unable to suppose the unthought,
we take refuge in thought,
as if thought were alien to it.
Edmond Jabès
In this section, rather than history or genealogy, we bring themes into resonance to provide substrate for the discussion. In 2021, the American anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and the English archaeologist David Wengrow (2021) published The Dawn of Everything. Drawing on recent research in their respective fields, on older but underused studies, and on a singular originality, the authors deliver a seismic shift in how we understand what is called “prehistory.” The term itself is problematized by the pair for flattening a multiplicity of historical events highly relevant to understanding humanity, presupposing a strategy of making less visible the capacities of societies to experiment with equality and to sustain it across millennia. For more than ninety percent of the time since the appearance of Homo sapiens, there have been highly egalitarian societies tending toward non-hierarchical organization. Contrary to authors such as Pierre Clastres, Deleuze, and Guattari, state forms during this period were experimented with and discarded, so that the state — often not constituted by any obvious ruling class — became constant and dominant only between 3,000 and 1,500 BCE. What made the state more dominant was its own effort to reduce the possibility of non-state forms of emergence: controlling territory and therefore the routes of escape, cultivating dependency, and so on. The Dawn of Everything problematizes several presuppositions of current progressive thought: class struggle as the engine of history — since stable classes did not exist; the notion that economy determines political and cultural forms (the book shows, among other things, that agriculture can coexist with equality and hunter-gathering with inequality, and that the agricultural revolution in the Fertile Crescent was itself a long, non-linear process); the myth of primitive communism, against which the book shows that equality is a deliberate, seasonal, and local practice and that states were blocked, centralizations reversed, without the need for revolution. From this it follows that human history is an open field, with no intrinsic necessity and no intrinsic direction of progress. This will resonate throughout the article, since insurrectionary thought, as we will see, tends to be minimized in favor of a supposedly progressive thought that is more easily captured by control, echoing a less dynamic narrative whose intensities are more domesticated. Despite the book’s consistency and the near absence of any sustained critique, anthropology, sociology, and history give no sign of revision in the face of The Dawn of Everything, a kind of bombshell that almost everyone pretends not to hear. James C. Scott, who was a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale and also an anarchist, brings further important detail on the character of the state that resonates with Graeber and Wengrow. According to Scott (1998), the state simplifies reality in order to make it administrable, reducing local knowledge to its own general logic, operating almost exclusively under the orientation of technical-scientific progress and scorning tradition. It is, moreover, authoritarian and therefore coercive, neutralizing local resistance and weakening civil society. In the “Cybernetics” section below, we will see how hybrid warfare and cognitive warfare replace the state with a complex network in which state leaders become a kind of CEO of conglomerates such as large investment funds, institutes, banks, think tanks, and their counterparts in the East.
From the very beginning of the civilizational process, a sophisticated intelligence of control of the imaginary is at work. During Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the Egyptian imaginary immanentized gods and humans, such that a just human act was conceived as an extension of the goddess Maat (Nunes Carreira, 1994). In the transition to the Middle and New Kingdoms, in a long non-linear process, an ontological shift occurred in which a transcendent plane exclusive to the gods was invented, accessible only to the pharaohs. Here was forged the illusion that would later, in the Middle Ages, constellate as “the divine right of kings.” Ancient Egypt produces an invention that will mark history profoundly: the association between the invention of transcendence and a supposed legitimation of power.
Around 540 BCE, in the city of Ephesus, in the region of Ionia — which would give us several pre-Socratic thinkers, among them Thales, Anaximander, and Parmenides — on the Anatolian peninsula, present-day Turkey, one of the most original thinkers in history appears: Heraclitus. Although Greek was spoken there, Ephesus was Persian territory, politically unstable, and its cosmology was hybrid; we are dealing with a port city that maintained trade routes with Persia (more commonly called Iran). Ephesus did not live under Hellenic rule — a circumstance decisive for grasping the singularity of Heraclitus’s thought, whose designation by philosophy textbooks as a “Greek philosopher” enacts a far from innocent historical erasure. For us, Heraclitus is the fiery sage: he spoke in unsolved riddles, probably in poetic form (Kahn, 2009), so that his thought and his writing were in full resonance with one another (Colli, 2013). His logos, on the interpretation we consider most consistent, can be understood as provisionally grounding, and his fire is a transformation without essential substance, whose permanence exists only while it burns, producing inconstant forms. His famous fragment on the river, often misunderstood, expresses an indistinction: river and the one who enters it confound one another and are never the same. We take fire in Heraclitus as something that escapes definition, one of the earliest pre-intensity appearances in the operative — not historical — sense we develop here.
An intermediate step between Heraclitus and what was to follow is Parmenides. His famous poem admits many interpretations today, and none of them can claim canonical status. In his time, nearly the same as Heraclitus’s, language possessed a far greater semantic instability than today, so that thought itself carried an intrinsic poetics. If Parmenides’s thought can be considered a dialectic in some sense, it is in a sense different from the one that crystallized in the centuries to come; it is a way of demolishing any thought whatever (Colli, 1988). Among the interpretations of the poem, our greater affinity lies with the one that grasps it as an initiatory journey to learn how to die before dying (Kingsley, 2025). For us, this resonates with what the Eastern wisdoms call illumination. Because the term tends to generate many misinterpretations in the West, we will not retain it; but, roughly speaking, illumination occurs when an individual profoundly questions the bases of what “is,” so as to displace the centrality of the ego, apprehending oneself as univocal with what is. “What is” is something beyond what is understood by “cosmos,” for while “cosmos” names something like an open totality, we are dealing here with something that, by consistently grasping what “is,” collapses even what “is” — in other words, that problematizes ontological pretension itself. We will develop this in the sections “Deviations” and “Intensity.”
Between 428 and 347 BCE we have the life of Plato, by now in Athens. Plato set himself the mission of unifying Greek thought, chiefly for political reasons. The result was a dualistic ontology that ranks sensible, immanent elements below others that are merely intelligible, transcendent — elements that organize, under the yoke of reason, the mystical aspects of Greek culture (Dodds, 2002). Here we perceive a new stage in the relation between power and transcendence. To this end Plato gave another meaning to “love of wisdom,” which should have been adherence to what Heraclitus and Parmenides had produced. In his strategic thinking — the Republic forbade poets entry — Plato transformed philosophy into something beneath wisdom, casting his era as decadent in relation to the fullness of the wisdom of old. In this same movement he reduced Heraclitus’s wisdom to an “everything flows,” a phrase that still curses the fiery sage in philosophy textbooks today. The philosopher — whose terminology now gains institutional status — recounts in his Phaedrus the famous passage in which Thoth offered Pharaoh Thamus a new technology that would allow the preservation of the past: writing. Plato himself wrote there that serious people did not write seriously, which would put the seriousness of his own work into question (Colli, 1988).
Plato’s project proved a failure in his own time and an enormous success thereafter, extending to our own day, undergoing many changes but keeping its axis: the equivalence between power and the illusion of transcendence. The endeavor was taken up again, more modestly, in Middle Platonism (1st century BCE to 3rd century CE), in which transcendence is stabilized ontologically, in some resonance with the Roman Empire, opening the door to the forceful entry of Neoplatonism in Alexandria and Rome from the 1st century CE onward. The Neoplatonic hierarchy (One/Beautiful – Intellect – World Soul – individual soul – matter) is a descent that runs from non-being through transcendence to immanence, always aspiring to return to non-being (Plotinus, 1991). This hierarchy will be absorbed by Christianity, supplying the ontology of the Church’s domain: God is transcendent.
We now turn to a passage toward something more technical in thought: Ramon Llull was a theologian and beatified theologian of the Catholic Church, active in the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth century. We can say that Llull was one of the first authors who is genuinely “pre-cybernetic,” in creating his Ars Magna, in which divine attributes acquire formal relations by means of rotating discs (Fidora and Sierra, 2011). With the Ars Magna, Llull becomes a kind of technologist of the “transcendent,” opening space for Giordano Bruno and Leibniz. The art of memory is a memorization technique by means of images whose antecedents run from Simonides of Ceos to Thomas Aquinas, reaching its peak with Giordano Bruno (Yates, 2007), and especially useful before the dissemination of the printing press. Llull’s Ars Magna can be situated in that broader context, but with its own technical specificity: combinatorial discs were rotated, crossing divine attributes and producing formal relations among them — not to memorize, but to calculate connections and to convert interlocutors. The embryo here is not mnemonic but operative.
Giordano Bruno appears here in chronological order; this is not strictly an evolutionary line of “pre-cybernetism,” however, but a real break that retains certain well-delimited remnants. The Nolan was an Italian philosopher, theologian, and occultist in the sixteenth century. Bruno was an adept of magical mathematics, thinking the universe as an infinite field of relations. This idea, pruned of Bruno’s mystical concerns, also contributes — modestly — to the cybernetics to come. He intensifies Llull’s wheels by exchanging words and numbers for images and by increasing the number of discs (Bruno, 2008). If Llull wants control and conversion, Bruno in turn wants to produce a kind of ecstasy of thought. In Llull’s more “machinic” vein, many oracles — especially those that dispense with ritual — can be considered pre-cybernetic, such as astrology, the I Ching, and tarot. A great part of contemporary magic is somewhat cyberneticized, in the sense that its operations amount to a kind of algorithmization, protocols for operating symbols, incantations, and images, without necessarily producing any inner change, aiming more at the mythification of the magician’s persona than at any actual operation of wisdom. When Alan Turing, in 1939, proposes the computer as oracle, with binary yes-or-no answers, he completes the process of making oracles entirely cybernetic, inverting the original logic: where traditional oracles exhibit the indeterminate, Turing’s computer eliminates it.
Let us return to Giordano Bruno. The “academic without an academy” developed his technique called the art of bonds as an important part of his magic. For him, the bond is an operative relation whose source is love, in which a living power inclines toward another by means of imagination, desire, and the convenientia among things — acting without violence and producing real effects in the world (Bruno, 2012). Bruno gives few technical details of the practice, emphasizing the importance of vocal modulation and of images and clothing that draw the attention of the “bound one.” He also adds that the one being bound must be predisposed; a bond cannot be forced.
The Romanian historian Ioan Couliano, who was professor at the University of Chicago, offers a peculiar and pertinent appropriation of Bruno’s bonds in the contemporary world. Couliano (1987) holds that hypnosis and psychology fed on the art of bonds, such that the concept of transference between therapist and patient — conceptualized by Freud and Lacan, the situation necessary for the psychoanalytic process to occur — carries many features of the predisposition to bonds developed by Bruno. The historian goes further. Couliano writes that, at the time his book was produced, in the second half of the twentieth century, Bruno’s art of bonds was widely applied in public relations, propaganda, market research, advertising, censorship, espionage, and information manipulation.
It is important to register that magic was discredited in the imaginary. Not only through the Church’s imposition and its inquisitorial process, but also through legal changes and the advance of science, and through the change in the ontological status of language: words and things were no longer linked, so that the word began only to represent the thing (Clark, 2006). A severe blow to the imaginary that legitimized magic, since the witches’ conjuration, whose words directly affected the real, lost the system of belief that sustained it; the conjuration became, increasingly, laughable. With magic discredited, the bonds that magically linked the entire universe were transformed into individual psychic forces, so that demons came to be converted into affects and psychic illnesses. A situation made for the bonds to be employed otherwise, almost imperceptibly. Bruno’s bonds also have features that approach the intensity we will work with here; however, for the Nolan the bonds are only between the bound and do not constitute the bound, whereas the intensities are the unstable common out of which anything can constitute itself.
What Galileo and Descartes carry out at the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth century is a considerable shift in the imaginary. When Galileo says that “the book of nature is written in mathematical language,” he disqualifies the sensible world as language of the real, creating a homogeneous, measurable, formalizable mathematical and geometric field independent of perception and governed by universal laws (Pinguelli Rosa, 2005). Descartes radicalizes these ideas with his method, in which res extensa is a “true” world because geometric and mathematical, res cogitans a thinking subject separate from res extensa, and the sensible world confused and therefore deceptive. Here transcendence is stabilized as superior, no longer merely within the religious language of the Church. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Kant says there is no direct access to the thing-in-itself: what we perceive is not the real. This furnishes the basis of the principal current of Western thought down to our day.
Between Galileo-Descartes and Kant, we have a torsion of this project with Spinoza (2008). When his posthumous Ethics “demonstrated in geometrical order” appears, it brings the geometric-mathematical plane to bear on the sensible. If, on the one hand, the lens-polisher frees us from the illusion of transcendence, on the other he stabilizes the path by which the calculating machine will operate directly upon the sensible world, opening an ontological field for the coming cybernetic domination — in an operation analogous to the one Aristotle performed on Platonism. Spinoza gives the key for the world to be understood as self-organization, one of the principal precepts of cybernetics. This is not a critique of the ontology of pure immanence, but a warning that its operation is not only liberating, in spite of Spinoza’s intentions. In this connection, what we here call intensity can be recognized in Spinoza in the form of the affects, as variations of power in body and mind. Such variations, however, express the conatus, the tendency to persevere in being, which reinscribes intensity within a regime of continuity and maintenance. Even when the affects express intensive modulations, they remain tied to a dynamic that privileges conservation — something we will move away from in the “Intensity” section. If Spinoza creates a device against Cartesian dualism within a pure immanence, something of dualism subsists in his system: we have access only to two of God’s infinite attributes, extension and thought, and his kinds of knowledge are separated into adequate and inadequate. This “attenuated dualism” — a term that Bergson himself (1999) adopts in the preface to his Matter and Memory — will persist in immanent philosophy, as in the Bergsonian actual and virtual and their further development in the work of Gilles Deleuze, where the virtual is a kind of ontological reserve that guarantees the perpetuation of becoming. These guarantees — along with the attenuated dualism that permits the use of philosophy by power — will be an obstacle to overcome in this article.
Still in the seventeenth century, Leibniz takes the decisive step toward fashioning a computational imaginary: he creates differential and integral calculus (Newton independently produces a geometric version), treating motion and change as symbolic operation (Russell, 1968). From Llull’s ideas, Leibniz develops combinatorial logic, a calculation of possibilities that precedes symbolic logic; the incomplete characteristica universalis, which carries the notion, so dear to science, that nature is mathematizable, and that thought and decision can themselves be formalized such that truth becomes a result of calculation; and, finally, the binary system, in which the real can be translated into discrete decisions of “0 or 1,” “true or false,” “yes or no.” Leibniz also builds the first calculator and the ontological basis for his entire project of ubiquitous calculus: the Monadology. In the mid-twentieth century, Norbert Wiener will declare Leibniz the “patron saint” of cybernetics (Geoghegan, 2023).
Also in the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton plays a fundamental role in closing the world as a universal dynamic system: he posits it as governed by invariable mathematical laws, synchronized by a homogeneous time, and transforms force and intensity into formal parameters. Newton’s concept of gravity, for its part, was inspired by occult actions at a distance (Dobbs, 1984). He was a great scholar of alchemy, having written numerous alchemical, theological, and natural-philosophical texts; only his scientific work was published in his lifetime. Newton, the “last of the magicians,” by this editing of his works (probably because he lived in an inquisitorial world), consolidates scientific language as the dominant mode of understanding the world. The world becomes Newtonian, even though Newton himself was not. “Becoming Newtonian” involves furnishing the state with a violent administrative technique, as we saw above with James C. Scott. The next step was the discretization of the real introduced in different ways by Boltzmann and Planck, which does not yet constitute a cybernetic thought, but inaugurates a decisive condition in the way the real is conceived: as a space of states that is formalizable and quantizable (Wolff, 2008). This operation, although born of a crisis of classical determinism, opens the way for the subsequent translation of variation into information and of difference into control. These operations do not yet amount to cybernetics proper, but they install the formal conditions — discretization, calculation, self-regulation, and functional equivalence — that will allow its emergence in the twentieth century.
The thinker who interrupts this machinic process in philosophy is, without doubt, Nietzsche. The Buffoon of the Gods reclaims Heraclitus against the machine we have described here, from Plato to Kant, by thinking philosophy from forces (Nietzsche, 2011). Nietzsche departs from Schopenhauer’s “nihilism” in order to undertake his great, partially realized project of transvaluation. In this connection, it is important to mark his tortuous relation to what he called the eternal return: the experience in which the repetition of forces definitively dissolves the identity of the subject (Klossowski, 2000). Between contradictions and experimentations that fuse life and thought, Nietzsche attempts — and partly succeeds — to re-ontologize becoming on top of the shards he has left of the philosophy from Plato to Kant. On the one hand, Nietzsche intuited this nefarious world of ubiquitous calculus, in which forces have been domesticated by science; on the other, his philosophy reinstates such forces as something that can cease to be subjugated. These Nietzschean forces resonate with the intensities we raise here; however, as we will see in the proper section, they describe incidences without principle, without value or guarantee, capable of thickening and ceasing without demanding affirmation or heroism — and on this point they differ from Nietzsche’s forces, since he keeps them bound to an affirmative dynamic and to continuity. The intensity in this article presupposes neither affirmation, nor perseverance, nor return.
What Egypt invented as theological transcendence, Plato institutionalized as intelligible plane, Galileo and Descartes mathematized as true real, Leibniz formalized as ubiquitous calculus, and cybernetics realized — as we will see in the next section — as operative control. Each of these moments enacts, in distinct forms, one and the same tendency: the progressive disqualification of the sensible in favor of the legible and administrable stabilization of the real. Mathematics, whose oldest documented forms are closely tied to bookkeeping, measurement, and administration, runs through all these stages as the privileged technology of abstraction and capture.
Cybernetics
There is no escape from the tree by means of the tree.
Francis Ponge
Cybernetics inherits what we have built so far — from Llull, something of Bruno, much of Galileo and Descartes, but above all Leibniz — which expresses the process of replacing wisdom with something calculable. It constitutes itself as such in the mid-twentieth century, with Norbert Wiener as central figure, surrounded by collaborators. We can define cybernetics as the formalization of the capacity to control processes (living or otherwise), transforming variation into information through its detectable distribution, and information into control, its fundamental objective (Ashby, 1970). It investigates how a system — machine, organism, mind, institution, society — remains stable, corrects deviations, and orients its behavior on the basis of signals that it itself produces and receives, evaluated according to standards, averages, and statistical regularities. Thermostat and brain, financial market, social media algorithm, and state bureaucracy can all be described cybernetically under the same formal scheme, however different they may be ontologically; that is, for cybernetics, what matters is not what something is but how it regulates itself. In Wiener’s classic formulation, life is defined as a negentropic entity, that is, as the capacity to maintain informational organization against entropy. This structural equivalence between life and control system displaces cessation from the ontological field to the technical field, converting the end into failure and death into noise. Decisive though it is for cybernetics, this reinforces the historical compulsion toward continuity, now in the form of an implicit ethics of information. Cybernetics popularized and reconfigured interdisciplinarity, whose formal language crosses several disciplines without grasping their internal precepts. This earned it immediate popularity in the human sciences, with the promise that scholars in sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, cultural studies, and so on could now have a common language, with the bonus of gaining some status of scientificity — thereby being induced to obey the same regime of control. Second-order cybernetics, theorized by Heinz von Foerster, Maturana, Varela, and others, includes the observer within the system, producing a description of reality and eliminating neutrality. First-order cybernetics tends to resonate more with structuralism, and second-order cybernetics with post-structuralism. Interdisciplinary practices tend to operate by translation and coordination between systems, which resonates with first-order schemes; whereas transdisciplinary proposals frequently incorporate the observer and a broader common plane, approaching second-order operations — without this constituting an identity between the fields.
Heidegger (2009), already in the 1960s, was one of the few who diagnosed the problem. On the one hand, he understood cybernetics as the metaphysical culmination of modern technology, such that being ceases to be a question and is replaced by mere functionality. Heidegger proposes a meditative thought against this cybernetic, calculative thought. Such a meditative thought listens to silence, which is the founder of language. Heidegger hopes that, from this, something meaningful may arise. The previous section traces, in large part, this intuition of Heidegger’s concerning the inexorable interlinkage of the process of metaphysics with cybernetics.
Code, by the historian of technology Bernard Geoghegan (2023), is another striking book that has received little discussion. It analyzes the reception of cybernetics by the human sciences, especially in France. A first question raised by Code is why cybernetics is so little spoken of today. The term became cursed because of its intrinsic relation to the context of the Second World War; today we speak more readily of its derivatives, such as Information Technology, machine learning, and so on. The relation of cybernetics to the human sciences begins inevitably with the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. He had already cooperated intensively with the U.S. government during the Second World War. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first U.S. intelligence agency, sent Bateson to Japan, where he produced fake news to confuse the Japanese army. Bateson also pushed for his concept of schismogenesis (a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from the interaction of groups) to be articulated with cybernetics for political ends (Job, 2024). We will see that this latter proposal of Bateson’s gained traction, unfolding into the hybrid wars that have become a widely deployed strategy in contemporary geopolitics. According to Geoghegan, the relation of the human sciences to cybernetics was not initially spontaneous. The Rockefeller Foundation initially played the role of principal sponsor, with the CIA and the Ford Foundation in a lesser role. Bateson’s key formulation, “information is a difference that makes a difference,” is already structurally compatible with the cybernetic definition of information — that is, a detectable variation in a system. Bateson’s very notion that it is not the individual that thinks but the system is exactly the idea of systems theories and circular coupling, the foundations of cybernetics. Bateson’s schismogenesis is analogous to positive feedback; his concept of the double bind is a recursive communicational pattern without logical exit — a typical meta-level system problem that cybernetics detects; his conception of epistemology is the adjustment of relevant differences in the system, and his ecology is the junction of organism, environment, and information circuits.
The European phase of this process begins with Roman Jakobson, founding linguist of structuralism. With him, language is thought as a formal system, analyzable by functions. Lévi-Strauss was Jakobson’s student and the gateway through which cybernetics entered the French human sciences. Geoghegan observes that cybernetics was received with greater irony and in a more “cacophonous” style among French intellectuals. With Lévi-Strauss, myth became a system of exchanges and culture itself a symbolic machine. With Lacan, an avid reader of Lévi-Strauss, psychoanalysis acquires its structuralist — and therefore cybernetic — face: the Lacanian slogan that “the unconscious is structured like a language” is perfect for cybernetics. In this cybernetic cultural cauldron, Roland Barthes installs myths, fashion, and advertising as self-regulating systems of signs, analyzable as codes. Geoghegan writes that Silicon Valley appropriates structuralist thought through structural abstraction, treating language, culture, desire, and myth as formal systems and thus regarding human processes as automatically processable. By codifying language, social behavior, and the unconscious, structuralism underwrites the idea that any human act can be coded, modeled, and optimized. Silicon Valley does not apply structuralism directly; it realizes it as technique, dispensing with critical reflection. From the idea of the unconscious it is inferred that the user does not quite know what they want, but desires. From myth, narratives are tested as patterns applicable ad infinitum. Programmers treat language as a differential vector space, which is analogous to Jakobson’s and Saussure’s conception of language.
Where Code shows the interest of U.S. government and institutions in linking cybernetics and structuralism, and shows the later use of that linkage in Silicon Valley, Frances Saunders (2008) describes how the CIA was interested in French thought as a less pragmatic alternative to Marxism. The CIA itself (1985) released documents confirming this interest, citing authors such as Foucault and Lévi-Strauss.
Code cites Deleuze and Guattari sparingly, but we can apply the book’s analytic apparatus to their theory. The first step was taken explicitly by Guattari (2004), as an analysand of Lacan, in his 1969 article “Machine and Structure,” in which the French thinker doubles down on the cybernetic wager and proposes to replace the concept of structure with machine. From there onward, in his joint work with Deleuze, concepts inspired by cybernetics will multiply: the machinic unconscious, the abstract machine, the war machine, the rhizome. The concept of the rhizome — with its characteristic that any point can connect to any other, as against arborescent thought (which would be tied to transcendence) — is a philosophical version of the graph (Deleuze and Guattari, 1995). A graph is an abstract mathematical structure composed of nodes and links between nodes, which do not describe substances but relations. A graph does not say what something is but what it connects to and how those connections are organized. Graphs are commonly used in electrical networks, logic circuits, communication systems, social relations, languages, cognitive processes, and so on. Deleuze and Guattari borrowed the graph in the version of Jean Petitot, mathematician and phenomenologist, who uses it to model morphodynamic fields, transitions of form, stabilities, instabilities, and so on. In other words, the rhizome is perfectly compatible with networks, the internet, distributed algorithms, and decentralized governance. If Deleuze (1992) was able to diagnose the surface of the problem we make explicit here in his article on societies of control, it is because he is, on the one hand, a critic and, on the other, part of the problem. The choice of the term “control” does not seem accidental: it is precisely the central objective of cybernetics from its very beginnings. The century, after all, became Deleuzian…
We can also apply this cybernetic infiltration to the anthropological strand of what is called the “ontological turn.” The philosopher Benoît Sibille (2025) shows how the ontological turn does not break with modernity but reconfigures it under a cybernetic ontology, in which humans and non-humans are reduced to elements of relational systems that are merely functional rather than experiential, substituting the human for an even more abstract point of view, namely the system. If we apply the proposals of Geoghegan and Sibille to Amerindian perspectivism, we perceive clearly the process of cybernetization that the ontological turn performs. Both Sibille and David Graeber (2020) disagree with the notion of ontology proposed by the ontological turn, though they attack different points. While Sibille shows the systemic and cybernetic reconfiguration of the ontological turn, Graeber attacks another point: the inflation of the term “ontology,” which comes to name worldviews or perspectives, converting cosmological divergences into a kind of culturalized idealism. Although Amerindian perspectivism declares itself anti-anthropocentric, for us it fractalizes anthropocentrism by stating that all beings observe themselves as human: perspectivism is anchored in the belief that the real is integrally intelligible through a general scheme of correlations (Verde, 2017). The relations between nature and culture are inverted: culture becomes this generalized humanity, and each point of view becomes a nature. Since the theoretical bases of perspectivism are Leibniz (the greatest pre-cybernetic author, as we have seen), Lévi-Strauss, and Deleuze, it is no surprise that a scheme resonant with cybernetics emerges. Cybernetic features abound in perspectivism: the idea that what something is does not matter, only how it relates; the notion that variation occurs within a stable space of possibilities, culminating in the ethnographic process itself, in which the anthropologist is a second-level observer who models the system. In other words, Amerindian perspectivism operates as an inverted Kantianism, in which a distributed transcendental structure stands in place of the transcendental subject, constituting a metaphysics of alterity compatible with universal translation. Amerindian perspectivism thus shows intense resonance with machine learning, not by identity of content but by structural affinity of operation, where models learn patterns from data, adjusting their own functioning on the basis of errors, successes, and statistical regularities. Just as a jaguar “sees” blood as beer, Spotify’s algorithm understands that for one user “samba” is relaxing and for another disruptive; or, on Google, two users perform the same search and receive different informational “worlds”; or, for each credit and risk system, the same user can be “risky” for one and “reliable” for another (Valentim and Pavesi, 2024). These structuralist and post-structuralist knowledges that have become “borgs” via cybernetics circulate more easily because their structure resonates intensely with cybernetic network techniques, which facilitates their possible viralization.
Deleuze (2000) proposes a reading of the Baroque on the basis of Leibniz’s philosophy, identifying in continuity, variation, and the notion of expression the conceptual operator of the fold, understood as a mode of articulation between interior and exterior. It is worth remembering, however, that this logic of expressive multiplicity and correlation of points of view does not begin with Leibniz: Giordano Bruno had already elaborated, before him, a conception of monads and of bonds that operate through affective inclination, imagination, and predisposition, anticipating a non-centralized regime of relations. In specific historical contexts, particularly in the Counter-Reformation after the Council of Trent, the Baroque operated as an aesthetic device for the reorganization of the sensible, in which images, movement, and theatricality played a central role in producing affective adherence (Hauser, 1998). Certain formal operators of this regime — continuous involvement, total environment, seduction of movement — reappear, re-industrialized, in later forms of mass entertainment, notably cinema. There is a resonance here with Couliano’s thesis, discussed in the previous section, according to which imagistic and affective bonds function as technologies of non-coercive adherence, traversing magic, propaganda, and entertainment. This same relational logic, now formalized and abstracted from its symbolic contexts, reappears in Amerindian perspectivism and, in a technically realized form, in machine learning, insofar as both operate through the correlation of multiple points of view without a privileged center, allowing the modeling of patterns and the orientation of interventions upon behavior. Here, correlation is no longer a heuristic or ethnographic resource but a technical operator of modeling and intervention.
Cybernetics is also the basis for hybrid wars and, above all, cognitive wars, which have become the norm of global governance today. Here cybernetics does not operate as general theory but as strategic practice of governance. Hybrid warfare is a form of conflict in which multiple instruments of power are combined in a coordinated, continuous, and ambiguous manner, without formal declaration of war, dissolving the boundary between war and peace (Korybko, 2018). The instruments are varied: military (conventional or irregular), economic (sanctions, financial shocks), legal (so-called lawfare, whose recent Brazilian examples were Operation Car Wash and the current imbalance among the Three Branches of government), diplomatic, informational, and, of course, cybernetic. Hybrid warfare proceeds by full-spectrum dominance, influencing both conservative and progressive discourse in order to intensify political schism. In this register, variation, information, and control are not analytic concepts but operative instruments of continuous intervention. In the case of progressive thought, the idea is also to elevate the less insurrectionary proposals, encouraging a discourse that is more demand-oriented than propositional. An explicit example is the influence of the Ford Foundation, which infiltrated Brazilian universities through grants and other funding, with the aim of preventing something like the Black Panther Party in Brazilian territory (Chaves, 2019). The Ford Foundation’s undertaking has proved a success, shaping much of antiracist discourse in Brazil today.
Cognitive warfare (NATO, 2021) is the set of operations designed to interfere with, modulate, or capture the processes of perception, interpretation, attention, and decision of individuals and groups, acting on beliefs, affects, habits, expectations, categories of thought, and so on. Here feedback regulation ceases to be an explanatory model and becomes a permanent environment for the modulation of experience. A recurring example is the bots on social networks that sustain far-right and far-left bubbles. Cognitive warfare prepares the terrain for hybrid warfare. In the Brazilian case, this was perceptible in the June 2013 protests, which were rapidly appropriated by the far right, culminating in their presidential victory in 2018 (Leirner, 2020). On account of hybrid and cognitive warfare, the ubiquity of contemporary cybernetic control reaches an unprecedented level, resonating with the excessive use of the internet today, generating the inevitably high indices of stress and all the health problems that follow. At this point, intelligibility is no longer an epistemic ideal but a resource of governance, whose function is to orient, anticipate, and capture behaviors.
It is urgent to discuss the limits of theories so traversed by cybernetics as structuralism and post-structuralism. This does not mean that these theories are invalid; clearly, they function well within certain contexts. A common case of a proposal that tends to be of little libertarian effectiveness is that of engendering cybernetic solutions while drawing on authors traversed by cybernetics: when it is identified that traditional forms of politics have failed and what is proposed is coordination without rigid centralization, organization without sovereignty, strategy without vanguard, direction without fixed command — precisely by means of feedback, adaptation, continuous adjustment, collective learning, experimentation, and strategic modulation (Nunes, 2023). Here feedback is presented as emancipation, when it already operates, on the side of power, as a normal mechanism of stabilization. The problem is that, with this strategy, one projects into the future what the present has already resolved on the side of power, arriving late on the adversary’s field, which already operates in the cybernetic paradigm demanding asymmetry, surveillance, and capacity for modulation — that is, the normal mode of operation of contemporary technopolitical states. Moreover, when these supposedly libertarian theories focus on the problem of fascism, they think the effect of the pre-cybernetization of thought as cause, treating capture as a political exception when it already operates as background technical condition, fetishizing the far-right buffoons who are there precisely to obscure its real causes. The fall of the buffoon does not dissolve the network; on the contrary, it recalibrates it: the most caricatural node is replaced by a more “free” bearer of the same form of control, which now operates with less visibility and greater institutional depth. In other words, and in light of the trajectory of the previous section, the problem is less how fascism arises today than how fascism is an almost natural unfolding of the way knowledge has constituted itself from Plato onward. Power does not always need to win; often it suffices to continue without seeming to be the same. By sacrificing contents and preserving forms, it converts the visible defeat of its bearers into structural recalibration, capturing even the affects of relief, overcoming, and hope that accompany its supposed fall.
The social contract has been slowly replaced in the West by a sophisticated and intricate scheme whose network involves the large investment funds, the Bank for International Settlements (the BIS — a kind of bank of the central banks, which operates, for example, in the directed distribution of financial crises, including in China) (Foster, 2022), the think tanks and how they direct the media, the institutes that infiltrate universities and NGOs (as we saw above), and the way all of this has its counterpart in the Chinese government (Kajitani et al., 2022), with the supposed strategic advantage of explicit state coordination, in contrast to privatized and distributed forms of governance (Glaser and Saunders, 2002). In short, the world is most likely not heading toward a multipolar world as progressive wishful thinking would have it, but rather tending to operate in a bipolar world, though with characteristics distinct from the Cold War. This shows how dated the “microphysics of power” has become — even functioning, by now, as a maintenance of power, by hindering an effective grasp of how power is organized today. At most it would explain how these instances of power direct the consumer to desire the acquisition of their smartphone, without accounting for the instances of power themselves. Progressive ideas anchor their critique in an outdated economic notion that the capitalist owns the means of production. The multinationals, however, are no longer the principal problem. The largest investment funds, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and others, manage capital comparable to or greater than the annual GDP of major national economies, managing the funds of and acting as shareholders of the largest companies in the world (Fichtner, Heemskerk, and Garcia-Bernardo, 2017). In addition to their reach including China, it is important to recall that one fund is the shareholder of another, building an unprecedented influence and thereby serving as a way around antitrust law (Bebchuk and Hirst, 2022).
As AIs advance, it is often asked how similar they have become to human beings. Perhaps the question should be reversed: given the slow process of pre-cybernetization and cybernetization of thought, are humans not the ones becoming increasingly machinic? Faced with the limit, demonstrated here, of the libertarian proposals issuing from knowledges so contaminated by cybernetics, we will analyze in the next section some deviations.
Deviations
But the world is not me.
But I am world.
And I thought of nothing else.
Daniil Kharms
In the previous sections, we observed that the so-called Greek “rational revolution” was a kind of institutionalization of the “love of wisdom,” causing metaphysics to gradually withdraw its legitimacy from the sensible, whose mathematization brought to the abstract plane a sophisticated technical creation. That technique was slowly “downloaded” by the philosophy of immanence and by post-structuralism, opening the way for a technoscientific takeover of the world through cybernetic control.
Three cases have appeared more exempt from the process of pre-cybernetization (from Plato to Kant) and cybernetization (Bateson, structuralists, and others) of philosophy and its unfoldings. One case prior to the institutionalization of philosophy, Heraclitus, and two posterior to it, Nietzsche and one of his most rigorous readers, Heidegger. Of Heraclitus, called “the Obscure,” we have access only to a few fragments. Nietzsche paid the price of physical illness, isolation, and, at the end of his life, madness, in addition to the fact that his work was partially absorbed by Nazism. The institutionalized Heidegger of Being and Time does not concern us, since he belongs to the institutionalization of philosophy, including the controversies of his rectorship in its involvement with Nazism. The late Heidegger, drawn upon in this article, became forcibly isolated, replacing his original theme with Clearing and presence.
As discussed in the last section, the mechanisms of power galvanized by cybernetics make any direct confrontation with the system difficult, with the insurrectionist always arriving out of phase. A legitimate question arises: are there forms of life sufficiently immune to capture by power without passing through extreme personal suffering and forced withdrawal? In this section we will discuss some authors who manage to bring elements meeting the criteria just listed.
Let us turn first to a tradition that includes both Western and Eastern authors: the apophatic tradition, or negative theology. Apophasis is the operation of language that withdraws predications rather than affirming them, and is not to be confused with “silence.” Negative theology systematically employs this negative way of apophasis in discourse about God. Within the apophatic tradition there are several currents: Neoplatonism, Eastern Christianity, medieval mysticism, Sufism, and Jewish mysticism. What they share is an enunciation that undoes the conditions of its own enunciation (Sells, 1994). A notable example is Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 52 (2024), commenting on the Gospel passage on the “poor in spirit,” culminating in one of the most beautiful Western koans: “I pray to God to empty me of God.”
In the East there are traditions understood under the term “non-dualism,” which interests us as a deviant practice. A caveat is in order concerning the Western appropriation of such traditions. The idea of non-dualism seems to us, in light of the issues raised in this article, somewhat contradictory, since it proposes a negation of the dual, thereby establishing a duality between what is dualism and what is not. We cannot conduct a consistent discussion of the question of translation here, but we take it that these currents deviate from the problem of dualism rather than constituting a tradition marked above all by the refusal of dualism — they simply propose to do something else. We are speaking of Advaita Vedanta, Kashmiri Shaivism, the Madhyamaka Buddhist school in India, and, beyond the non-dual question, Taoism in China. It is worth marking that even non-dual traditions, when institutionalized in the contemporary West as mindfulness, industrialized yoga, or corporate practices of presence, frequently come to operate in the cybernetic language criticized here. The regulation of attention, the modulation of affects, and the de-intensification of conflict then cease to function as deviation and come to serve the adaptation of subjects to ever more captured environments. In this sense, workers who meditate do not necessarily subvert the system; often they become more apt to persevere within it.
Let us comment on the case of Nāgārjuna, Buddhist master and founder of the Madhyamaka school (Middle Way), in India around the second and third centuries CE. His prasaṅga method is a kind of reductio ad absurdum through which is enacted what we may today call the deactivation of ontologies, withdrawing the foundation of being and of non-being, showing that nothing exists in itself (Nāgārjuna, 2016). His first statement in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is: “Never, nowhere, are there any knowable entities originating from themselves, from another, from both themselves and another, nor those devoid of cause,” eliminating thus all classical ontological possibilities of causality. On emptiness, he writes: “That which is known as ‘dependent co-origination’ we call emptiness. Emptiness is a dependent designation. It is, precisely, the middle way.” That is to say, emptiness is not depth, nothingness, or absolute negative, but the name of the absence of own-being. These considerations must not be confused with nihilism; Nāgārjuna denies the foundation of any thought, but retains ethics, the Buddhist path so long as it is necessary, and an operativity. Thus, “ultimate truth” is not a content but the ungraspability of any ultimate content. In his argumentation to bring thought to cessation, Nāgārjuna describes objects, not processes. His critique, however, works in the same way against the philosophies “of becoming.” In the next section, we take up his demolishing stance toward ontologies.
The American philosopher Eugene Thacker becomes important here because he articulates well the thinking of cybernetics, masters critically Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and its interlocutors, and François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy (how to think without deciding the real), is familiar with the work of Nāgārjuna and of the apophatics, and is interested in pessimism, especially in its cosmic strand from Lovecraft, with emphasis on Schopenhauer and his interlocutors. Thacker (2010) shows how Deleuze avoids the void, a theme that appears subtly only in his lectures on Spinoza. In this context, the American philosopher recovers Georges Bataille in his radicality, in saying that what is of interest in immanence is that the void is also immanent. Thacker (2011) conceptualizes the world-without-us, eliminating any vestige of humanism, proposing this world as indifferent to the human. Horror, in this context, would be the indirect experience of the world-without-us. Although void is itself a term we will problematize in the next section, the void in Thacker is a conceptual gain in relation to the horror vacui of post-structuralism.
These authors and traditions enact a deviation in relation to power and to philosophy as institution, recovering something that, for us, would be a wisdom. Deviation, for us, is the avoidance of direct confrontation, since, as we saw in the previous section, that direct struggle is lost from the outset. What is called for, then, is to inhabit instances that do not place themselves within the logic of “being against” (even if certain forms of militancy retain their importance), but that dance another dance — thinking, and going beyond thought itself. Such deviations as those presented here may constitute a provisional ethics; but, with respect to what we will set out in the next section, this provisional ethics is neither a priori, nor necessary as principle, nor contingent as mere chance. The provisional ethics does not prevent capture; it prevents capture from being naturalized. What is sought here is not freedom, since freedom implies opposition to some imprisonment. The provisional ethics inhabits provisionality.
It must be noted that all these authors and traditions maintain some foundation or path, so that there is a remainder by which they can be transduced by cybernetics: Taoism always maintains the tao itself, the path as such; the non-dual Indian lines maintain the unmanifest as absolute; the apophatics maintain an orientation of saying, living, or practicing; Thacker maintains the world-without-us and a stable notion of the void. Nāgārjuna maintains his ethics and teachings — but the intensities that follow do not aim to replace the Nāgārjunian demolition with a new base; they aim to name provisionally certain occurrences that remain thinkable even after every base has been withdrawn. In the next section, seeking, provisionally, to become uncapturable by power, we will use all these knowledges as a springboard to (un)think without any remainder of path or foundation, from the notion of intensity.
Intensity
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature does not exist,
That there are hills, valleys, plains,
That there are trees, flowers, grasses,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a real and true whole
Is a disease of our own ideas.
Alberto Caeiro
Intensity arises as a concept among the medieval philosophers, such as Duns Scotus and Nicole Oresme, with the aim of saving qualitative variation without reducing it to quantity. In Kant, its function was to contain intensity within the forms of experience; in Bergson, to dissolve intensity as a false problem in order to liberate duration; and in Deleuze, to make intensity the genetic motor of the real (Mader, 2017), whose greatest problem for us is that the philosopher guarantees the continuity of intensities by way of the virtual, as we have noted elsewhere. Modern science, for its part, translates intensity into a measurable and functional variable. Psychophysics constitutes a decisive moment of formalization of intensity, attempting to correlate sensible variations with measurable magnitudes (Fukusima and Landeira-Fernandez, 2012). With this, intensity comes to be treated as a function of stimulus and response, becoming partially integrable into regimes of control and prediction.
Intensity is not a concept to be defined, and there is no intensity in itself. We call provisionally by the name of intensity certain occurrences in which something insists before any stabilization. The name does not designate a “something” that exists; it seeks to apprehend certain occurrences in which something arises, thickens, rarefies, or ceases. It does not pretend to describe what things are, but to name provisionally certain modes of operation prior to the fixation of anything as defined. Thus, intensity as constructed here is not inscribed in: ontology (it does not describe being, much less its levels); philosophy (it proposes no system, foundation, or truth); method (it brings no techniques, path, or guarantees); value (there is no a priori valorization of more or less intensity); nor subjectivity (it does not depend on will, intention, or lucidity).
The occurrences here called intensities may cease, and absolute cessation remains an intrinsic possibility. This is not teleology; there is no fetishization of nothingness here — it is not nihilism. We deviate from the infinite operation of philosophical, religious, and scientific systems that guarantee eternity or operation without cessation. Cessation is neither a goal, nor a redemption, nor an error; it is merely an intrinsic possibility, not a promise, and it does not regress beneath what has been said — it does not call for revision, surpassing, or correction, since it presupposes no stable criterion and no normative retrospect. Should one conceive absolute cessation, it would no longer be appropriate to speak, properly, of a temporal “after,” nor of continuity, nor of impossibility.
Intensities operate through what we will call dança-se — a Portuguese expression we retain in the original, since no English rendering preserves it without distortion. Dança-se is an impersonal, middle-voice construction: it names neither a subject that dances, nor dance as an object, nor a process governed by an underlying principle. It names the impersonal occurring of dancing: a dancing of intensities that dances the dancing, does not configure itself as method, and may or may not alter its own operation of dancing. We use this vocabulary deliberately to avoid cybernetic relapses: dança-se does not mean “self-organization” (nor “self-management”) or “metastability.” In other words, we do not attribute conatus (the tendency to persevere) a priori to intensity. There may be cases in which power operates by choreographing what we here call dança-se. When excessively choreographed by power, dança-se can lose intensity. The plural dança-ses, which we use where the term insists across multiple incidences, marks distinct insistences, not discrete entities.
Here, the threshold of a dança-se is not to be understood as a stable zone, nor as a structure of passage between dança-ses. These are incidences in which dança-ses cease to operate as such, without another necessarily constituting itself in their place. There is no guarantee of continuity or of transition, only incidences that may or may not persist. Intensity, if apprehended, can occur as non-deliberate opening. Not everything that occurs presents itself as apprehensible intensity. There are occurrences in which what takes place does not stabilize as experience or memory. They leave no recoverable trace, are not taken up, are not recognized, occurring without stabilizing any notion of passage.
Dança-se — including when it occurs by dancing other dança-ses — does not pre-exist intensities; it is not ground, medium, field, or plane, but the provisional name that only appears when there is insistence for a limited time. It does not found the event: it is an incidence of the insistence of dança-se, without closure, without self-regulation, without guarantee of continuity. Intensities only operate dança-se; the perceptual naming of “objects” is an incidence within certain shared habits and sensibilities, the term “object” being intrinsically imprecise. The fact that there is a named perception does not authorize generalization to regularity, stable correlation, or common regime: intensities may cease. Dança-ses do not guarantee permanence, meaning, finality, continuity, or value, nor do they found structure, system, center, or fixed boundaries — only thresholds.
Between what convention would name moments of dança-se, no “between” is posited as requirement — not even in the form of a “void.” The very formulation of an interval already presupposes segmentation, minimal continuity, and some kind of mediation. What is indicated here is that there is no guarantee of passage, of linkage, or of any regime that would secure transition. What is taken as continuity may result from later recomposition — narrative, habit, or external measurement — without authorizing the inference of a crossing. Lapses of attention, dreamless sleep, anesthesia are references that touch this problem without constituting a model. The observation does not authorize an “ontology of discontinuity,” for it is not a matter of affirming that everything is discontinuous, but of suspending the requirement that something must guarantee continuity. There may be passage, but nothing obliges that there be one, nor that there be anything between, nor that this be maintained.
Time can be inferred from the dança-se of intensities; it is not a prior axis, but a derived effect of intensity, not its foundation. Intensity operates as dança-se that presupposes no concepts; these dança-ses occur before becoming “objects,” without “before” implying temporal anteriority.
In certain insistences of dança-se, there is an inference of time and space as continuous. This continuity, however, is neither guaranteed nor necessary: with the requirement of continuity suspended, time and space come to occur incidentally, without founding function. Time-space is the name we give to certain insistences of dança-se in which it becomes possible to infer continuity.
The so-called “real,” dream, fiction, hallucination, and what is called “mediumistic experiences” are incidences of dança-se. The difference among them does not hold as categorial distinction, nor as a hierarchy of stability, nor as a gradation of truth. They are different dança-ses, and the naming that distinguishes them is an effect of certain habits and sensibilities, not a criterion of the concept itself. Perception does not operate here as an instance of verification; it is only one of the dança-ses that may or may not be danced.
What could be named co-incidence between dança-ses names nothing that could be stabilized as relation among them. It is not a matter of coexistence, nor of articulation, nor of a between that would link them. What insists as dança-se sustains itself only while it insists; it may not be maintained, without anything coming to substitute it. Passage, mediation, or transduction is not posed as requirement, nor as assured. Nor is there incompatibility to be maintained, for that would still suppose terms persisting as such. What fails is not the relation between dança-ses, but the very possibility of situating them as distinct or relatable. Nothing is resolved, but nothing is constituted as problem either. This is not ineffability, since there is here no excess over language, only the suspension of language’s function as instance of verification. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are here neither denied nor surpassed. They simply do not apply, since they presuppose that something can be re-conducted — by common formalization or by ontological ground — to an instance in which differences become tractable. There is no resistance, no alternative. It simply does not let itself be converted.
What we propose here is not Pyrrhonism, since it does not suspend judgment about the nature of things in order to pacify, even if, should an ataraxia arise, it would be welcome; it is not Stoicism, since intensity is not governed by logos and does not moralize certain incidences; nor does it limit itself to Hume’s critiques, since habitus is not a stabilizing effect. In more contemporary terms, intensity is also not the Lacanian real, since intensity is not a structural remainder, does not depend on lack, is not defined by impossibility, and certainly does not fix itself as traumatic limit; it is not Quentin Meillassoux’s hyper-chaos, since intensity affirms no necessity, not even of contingency, does not ontologize chance, and — it bears recalling — admits cessation without elevating it to a “principle”; and although it is not a priori humanist, it does not fetishize the inhuman. Even where there is insistence in dança-se, no equivalent of chaos is to be found there. Nor is there void as ground, originary absence, or negative plane. When the void appears, it is only as effect of the very absence of foundation, without consistency of its own, without operating as base, medium, or horizon. Intensity does not constitute a change of paradigm, but a provisional suspension of the paradigmatic logic itself, displacing the very regime that requires paradigms as the privileged form of intelligibility. Nothing of what we have built around intensity demands an indispensable axiom, since intensity does not impose itself even as an axiom.
Threshold
seeing all this —
all this this here —
folly for to see what —
glimpse —
seem to glimpse —
need to seem to glimpse —
afaint afar away over there what —
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what —
what —
what is the word —
what is the word
Samuel Beckett
The institutionalization of philosophy with Plato inaugurates a process that traverses science and modernity, namely, the requirement to stabilize the “real” in order to render it knowable and governable. Such a process, initially directed at the sensible, becomes progressively a historical device of domination: first epistemic, then political, economic, and technical. Slavery, colonization, and later algorithmic governance are not deviations from this process but its constitutive operations. What intensifies is not violence as such, but the abstraction of control.
This article does not propose an alternative to the institutionalization of philosophy nor to scientific practice as such, but the suspension of its central requirement: that the “real” must be stabilized to count as “real” — a requirement that, by silently converting itself into normative ontology, makes only the measurable, the modelable, or the predictable matter. Intensity does not oppose this regime, nor does it replace it; it operates in deviation, traversing its knowledges partially without integrating them as foundation.
To write of intensity inevitably provides material for its cybernetic transduction. Even so, cessation remains only as possibility — not as limit imposed upon these regimes, nor as an exterior that resists them, but as operation that may cease without owing anything to them, without answering them, without defining itself by their continuity or their failure. Writing, which does not found what traverses it, can only function here as springboard: dança-se.
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