**Links to**: [[11 Post-Control Script-Societies]], [[Scaling]], [[Biology]], [[Evolution]], [[Power]], [[Agency]], [[Freedom]], [[System]], [[Society]], [[Foucault]], [[Deleuze]], [[Postscript to the Societies of Control]], [[Control]], [[Cybernetics]], [[Discipline]], [[Embourgeoisement]]. **A provisional definition of function**: the characteristic operation or effect that an individuated entity, system, or process produces and (temporarily) allows to persist and evolve within its context of interaction. Functions reveal themselves as crucial/salient/relevant/etc. at the time of observation, in its a role within a larger system. This take allows us to focus on what something does rather than what something is (on identity), which has theoretical, practical and therefore political implications. Thinking about the tape and the machine again, about whose agency are making salient—the written or the writing?—it could be said that we only have subject/object re(ve)lations, or functions, through a lot of our languages: paths from x to y. Function allows us to move beyond that: we observe the _path(s)_, rather than the subject/object. This entry will be expanded in the future: #todo.   >Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. > >A. N. Whitehead, _Introduction to Mathematics_, p. 61.   >The opposition between engineering and the humanities can be caricatured as an opposition between positivism and hermeneutics, or between efficiency and reflexivity, but such a distinction, as Lyotard already noted while commenting on the Frankfurt School, is not acceptable, for the solution proposed by the latter “is no longer relevant” in postmodern societies, since this opposition ceases to function as a critical apparatus. > >Hui 2019, p. 211.   Or: critical function ceases, in other words. It could be observed that we only have subject/object re(ve)lations, or functions, through a lot of our languages: paths from x to y. Function allows us to move beyond that: we observe the _path(s)_, rather than the subject/object. “Classical philosophy makes a strict distinction between subject and predicate or substance and property, whereas mannerism puts both terms in variation, such that predication becomes a matter of folding. ‘The real definition of the individual is concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities.’” van Tuinen 2019, p. 78. See: [[06 Principle of Sufficient Interest]] and [[11 Post-Control Script-Societies]] for some unravelings on _function_. %% example: football players change, but the team remains supported as “the same”, each thing is uniquely individuated, but we are interested in the abstractive function it performs over time, because we track something _else_, not “the thing” but its function. Pupils pass through school, but we retain the pedagogics, the institutional functions. Example: friston aeon article “The way something moves through this space depends on its _Lyapunov_ _function_. This is a mathematical quantity that describes how a system is likely to behave under specific conditions. It returns the probability of being in any particular state as a function of that state (or, put differently, as a function of the system’s position in the state space, similar to how air pressure is a function of the density of air molecules at the point at which it’s measured). If we know the Lyapunov function for each state of the system, we can write down its flow from one state to the next – and so characterise the existence of the whole system in terms of that flow. It’s like knowing the height of a mountainous landscape at every location, and then being able to describe how a stream of water will run over its surface. The topography of the mountain stands for the Lyapunov function, and the movement of water describes how the system evolves over time.” connect to general intellect [[Ray Brassier]] in [[Concepts and Objects]]: "4. We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is not originarily infused with meaning. [[Meaning]] is a [[Function]] of conception and conception involves representation—though this is _not_ to say that conceptual representation can be construed in terms of word-world mappings. It falls to conceptual rationality to forge the explanatory bridge from thought to being." (p. 1) [[Indexx]], [[Representation]] __________________________________________________ Inspired by [[Paul North]] on likeness (pp 41-2), on the reciprocity of likeness that not 1 thing can be "like" but at least two things, and likeness runs in both directions. I'm thinking, likeness is a function, just like numbers are. Perhaps that's why 1 and 0 are therefore the only real numbers: presence and absence, and the comparisons/geschaald that ensue from both. In p. 53 Paul North also goes into Humean causality and explains how "The minimum number of ideas to be associated for causality is not two, but in fact four. A second pair follows the first. That is to say, after the second time that one billiard ball sends another rolling, the first time becomes an example of causality." So, number is indeed a function, or functions are represented by numbers, as we know. ____________ [[Deleuze]] [[Guattari]] [[A Thousand Plateaus]] "_Memories of a Spinozist, II._ There is another aspect to Spinoza. To every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these intensities come from external parts or from the individual's own parts. Affects are becomings. Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the _latitude_ of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or rather within the limits of that degree. _Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation_. In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects. This kind of study is called ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox. Von Uexkull, in defining animal worlds, looks for the active and passive affects of which the animal is capable in the individuated assemblage of which it is a part. For example, the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of the time the tick sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all that goes on in the immense forest. Its degree of power is indeed bounded by two limits: the optimal limit of the feast after which it dies, and the pessimal limit of the fast as it waits. It will be said that the tick's three affects assume generic and specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true from the standpoint of [[physiology]], but not from the standpoint of [[Ethics]]. Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longitude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body." pp. 256-257