**Links to:** [[Mere machines]], [[Mereology]], [[Machine]], [[Determinism]], [[Knowledge]], [[Machine]], [[Poltergeist in the machine]], [[Machinic Unconscious]], [[BWO]], [[Architecture]], [[Structure]], etc. ### [[Postulate]]: _Mere machine_: it could be that what bothers us about the machine metaphor is nothing more than its industrious connotation. Though we like to think it has something to do with “agency” or, more classically, “free” will. Authors like Michael Levin present an constructivist, distributed image of agency, one which reveals how the aggregate that is an organism has both long-term goals (particularly understood as a self-centered synthesis with specific teloi) and shorter-range ones. These latter _support_ the longer-term ones (e.g., cell reproduction ensures specific aspects of what the organism perceives as health), often in terms of function and efficacy, but they fundamentally differ from those the longer-term teloi. The resulting, emerging machine, is an effect of how these disparate systems became bootstrapped evolutionarily (and those components, until we know any better, joined up by randomness and selection). The organism wants to survive because its parts want to survive. But the organism wants other things than its parts. But the fact that the organism keeps going means the parts keep going. **In any case: no to mechanism as “boring”, but yes to mechanism as intelligible (legible, repeatable: computable) set of operations.**     >I am interested in a totally different kind of unconscious. It is not the unconscious of specialists, but a region everyone can have access to with neither distress nor particular preparation: it is open to social and economic interactions and directly engaged with major historical currents. It is not centered exclusively around the family quarrels of the tragic heroes of ancient Greece. This unconscious, which I call “schizoanalytic,” as opposed to the psychoanalytic subconscious, is inspired more by the “model” of psychosis than that of neurosis on which psychoanalysis was built. I call it “machinic” because it is not necessarily centered around human subjectivity, but involves the most diverse material fluxes and social systems. Guattari, _Machinic unconscious_.     >Many philosophers say they are ‘mere symbols’. Take away the word mere and this is true. They are symbols; and symbols being the only things in the universe that have any importance, the word ‘mere’ is a great impertinence. In short, wherever there is thought there is Thirdness. > >Essential Peirce vol 2, p. 269.     L. Parisi: ![[parisi deleuze and guattari book machines.png]]     >The problem resides in the fact that the faculty of thought is identified with “the system of judgment,” and knowledge with the model of the proposition. Whether from its phenemenologico-constructivist or cognitivo-instructionist wings, contemporary anthropology has long discoursed on the severe limitations of this model in accounting for intellectual economies of the non-Occidental variety (or, if you prefer, of the nonmodern, nonliterate, nondoctrinal, and other "constitutive" absence varieties). In other words, anthropological discourse has devoted itself to the paradoxical enterprise of heaping proposition upon proposition on the subject of the nonpropositional essence of the discourse of the others, going on endlessly about what supposedly goes without saying. Viveiros de Castro (2009) 2014, p. 79. %% [[The being of “mere” machines and “mere” propositions notes]] %% ### Footnotes