Source: Metastaseis by Iannis Xenakis
Ethics via Evance (Extract)
Evances represent paradigmatic shifts in reality that create processual systems that are uncodable in terms of the level of reality preceding them: i.e. mechanical being is illegible to pre-differentiated reality, sentient life as bound being is illegible to mechanical being and symbolic life as free being is illegible to all other layers. There is nothing intrinsic to what preceded any layer that could be used to anticipate its development and so it is with human subjectivity. Anticipation here must always be (paradoxically) retrojective, i.e. only possible a posteriori from the perspective of the end result, the thinking subject. And so part of the defining nature of evance is chance. The path is towards layerings of novel codings which manifest dimensional jumps in local negentropy and interact to manifest the relevant form of subjectivity which reflects the increasing complexity of the interactions of these layerings both functionally and temporally, with the phenomenological manifestation along the physical to mental spectrum dependent on the overall organization.
The historicity of overcoding technics is mirrored in ontogenesis. The newborn is bound being (affect and drive enacting sentience) and must be socially transformed by technics in a dialectic relationship of interiorization and exteriorization that develops it as free being (subjectivity) [7]. In this way, society can be viewed as the result of the exteriorization of subjectivities just as subjectivities can be viewed as the result of the interiorization of societies [7]. As technics are not directly encoded in genetic material (the codes are not mutually legible) the process of their development is not predetermined but contingent. Consequently, and in synchrony with our previous comments on legibility, we can say that society adds an extra layer of variability to life and so transcends life, just as life layers and transcends matter, and this occurs simultaneously with and is a necessary condition of the evance of technics.
These jumps can also be seen as an extension of a spectrum of reality from matter to drive and affect to sentience to technics / symbolization. Subjectivity is spread across the spectrum as it interacts with itself across divisions of the spectrum to manifest freedom. We can analogise here with the divisions of color in a light spectrum, with the proviso that extensions of the spectrum represent phenomenally distinct ways of being and therefore qualitative jumps rather than quantitative gradations.
- Matter: Undifferentiated substrate.
- Drive / Affect: Thermodynamic self-organization through valenced responsiveness
- Sentience: Reflexive aboutness,
- Technics/Symbolization: Reflective abstraction
Freedom then can be understood in this ontological cartography as a field of spectral self-modulation.
Temporal Semiotic Topology
The jumps can be further conceptualised as recursivities in spacetime. If matter represents extension in space, and drive represents what happens to extended differentiated spaces over time, then affect, sentience, and symbolizations can be conceptualised as recursions of spacetime, a dimensional “origami” of being summarized below:
- Matter = extension
- Drive = entropifying motion of extended being (1st-order temporality) environmentally conditioned through valence.
- Sentience = A self-world model, an aboutness, that requires a recursive enfolding of reality that creates an inseparable self-relation.
- Symbolization = A further level of recursion, a looping of time whereby self observes its self relation and can act on it or act against it. Linear causality is disrupted and local negentropification can be freely directed.
Source: Ethics via Evance – Paul R. Buckle – Academia.edu
