Whither Science

Correa & Correa Whither Science 2
Original Article
J Sci & Pol Thoughts 1, 2: 1-49 (2009)
WHITHER SCIENCE?
A SCIENCE WITHOUT ORIGINS:
NOMAD, MINOR SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD (2)
Paulo N. Correa 1, Alexandra N. Correa 1

1Aurora Biophysics Research Institute, Concord, Ontario Canada
II. A SCIENCE WITHOUT ORIGINS:

Nomad, minor science and the scientific method
Hooke has done nothing, and yet written in such a way, as if he knew and had sufficiently hinted all but what remained
to be determined by the drudgery of calculations and observations, excusing himself from that labour by reason of his
other business, whereas he should rather have excused himself by reason of his inability. For tis plain by his words that
he knew not how to go about it. Now is not this very fine? Mathematicians, that find out, settle, and do all the busi-
ness, must content themselves with being nothing but dry calculators and drudges; and another, that does nothing but
pretend and grasp at all things, must carry away all the inventions, as well as those that were to follow him, as of those
that went before.
I. Newton, in Correspondence, II
Even if the aether turned out to be an inertial frame, what right had anyone to assume that this frame was at rest in
substantival space, much less that the aether could be identified with substantival space?
L. Sklar, Space, Time and Spacetime, p. 197
1. The ambivalent eccentricities of science: Descartes and the Pre-Socratic proto-science

Descartes had failed to compose a multiplicity with his dualist series. He had foreclosed empiricism,
and lost sight of the relation between the terms - body and soul, sensation and intellection. But there
were eccentricities in Descartes, anti-cartesian flights that approach definition of relations that are
independent from the terms. It is not simply a matter of acknowledging that sentiment, affect and
imagination can and do impact the Cogito. As Jean Wahl put it - there are in this Descartes not only
two substances, body and soul, but a third, variously taken as their union, their indistinguishable mix,
or the intermediacy of animal spirits, functioning as a third, irreducible substance [1]. For there
is also a third Descartes. One that steps a little away from the old platonic dualism, where the joy of
Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

1
J Sci & Pol Thought, Vol. 2, 1:1-49 November 2009
a body is always perverse - entails a suffering for the soul - and symmetrically the joy of the soul a
suffering for the body. A rare Descartes who explicitly posits the idea of substance as the basic
concept of philosophy, even as he fails to grasp what Spinoza would later mean by a real parallelism
of soul and body. A Descartes who wanted algebra to reach clarity, who argued that there must be
a general science relating order and measure, a mathesis reduced not to conventional mathematics
(then arithmetic and geometry), but including the dynamic processes of music, optics, the mechan-
ics of motion and work; a Descartes that regards Space as seamless because it is occupied by a plenum
of particulate vortices, by a turbulent and subtle chaos or Aether. A Descartes that postulates that
the universe is full of swirls of invisible particles of a very fine substance; that their motion around
the Sun drags the planets along and is responsible for transmission of the force of gravity. Yet, this
Descartes was always barred by Descartes himself, by the dualism that relates Religion and Official
Science, by the metaphysical and not yet scientific nature of the method, his method. The very
world of substance is in Descartes philosophy precluded from science, which is banned to the world
of accident, and can never reach the real or final causes. This already leads Spinoza to criticize him
for mistaking attributes for substances. Likewise, the development of algebra in Descartes thought
must be subordinate to geometry; and the vortical and turbulent aether is grounded in metaphysical
thought and not in experiment or observation - and is thus devoid of any practical or scientific util-
ity or advantage, as it could not even explain Keplers Laws.
The eruption of a third Descartes in Descartes, is a sort of unconscious manifestation of a stronger

force in thought and cognition, a force pushing away dualism and idealism, pushing natural philos-
ophy towards monism and eccentric science. Such intrusions riddle the fabric of thought and the his-
tory of culture, and are everywhere made manifest by currents of naturalism and empiricism in phi-
losophy. They are the intrusions of eccentric science into metaphysical thought and Royal Science.
They are a timeless refrain that repeats across the centuries of antiquity, through despotism and civi-
lization, a vein that had already vexed the dominant priesthoods of Hellenic cultures and their repre-
sentation of the world. Indeed, it is the eruption of eccentric science that stands behind Anaxagoras,
Protagoras, or Aristotles flights from Athens - a refrain of flights - or leads to the prosecutions of
Theodorus or Diogenes of Apollonia. It is a science, or a kind of science, that harkens back to
Anaxagoras and beyond, into societies that are neither savage nor despotic or civilized - societies that
function as loose aggregates of mining and metallurgical artisan leagues often working in conjunction
with nomadic bands.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ran into the absolute necessity of distinguishing between Royal
Science and a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very difficult to classify, whose his-
tory is even difficult to follow [2]. Commenting on Michel Serres work - on what he has called
eccentric science - they define the basic characteristics of this other kind of science. The main defin-
ing trait is, to our view, that the model of thought which it employs can be described as smooth, based
on continua, one that does not striate either horizontally or vertically. Its object is not static - nor is
it beings or their apparent and illusory constancy - but the constant transformation or alteration of
beings, their becomings, the transitions and heterogeneities, the dynamics of processes. It aims, for
this very reason, to become a science of Time - in fact its ambition is to become a Physics of Time.

2
A Physics of motion and the living. Perhaps also for this very reason, this eccentric or minor science
has the most distant of its recent origins in the thought of Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca 500BC). As
Friederich Nietzsche put it:
(...) Heraclitus altogether denied being. (...) Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: I see nothing other
than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things. (...) You use names for things
as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one that you
stepped into before . [3]
Subsequently, this science can trace its development in the Hellenic world to Democritus of Abdera
(432-?BC) - atomism and vortical, curvilinear motion - and to Anaxagoras of Clazomena (ca 500BC)
-theory of chaos and ordered turbulence, or nous. Serres, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this
eccentric science has an hydraulic model - the model of Archimedean science: fluids are no longer
treated as solids, flow is seen as being turbulent, vortical, not parallel or laminar; the shortest path
between two points can be geometrically treated as a straight line but defines the length of a curve;
principles of buoyancy counteract the weight of a body, etc. Eccentric science could be defined by
the proposition from turba to turbo - from the bands or packets of atoms or inert matter, to the vor-
tices they populate while being ordered into jets.
Democritus is a peculiar example of eccentric science or proto-science - in that his doctrine of

Atomism is a precursor to the science of chemistry, and his invocation of an interstitial vacuum or
nothingness of being between the swirls of atoms presages the physical theories of the XXth centu-
ry regarding empty space. His doctrine was a reaction against Parmenides doctrine of being, of the
unity of Being, of its static and its non-divisible nature. Democritus admits the plenitude of being,
but makes it the property of the indivisible atom, thus dividing Being and beings into the very small,
to recover in some form the One of Parmenides at an infinitesimally small scale. Atoms, the indi-
visible units, possess no qualitative differences, only quantitative and geometric ones. Bodies and just
as well souls are composed of atoms, the atoms of the soul forming only a finer and more subtle mat-
ter than those of the body. Democritus atom is therefore just a finely fragmented Parmenidean One,
but in the process of this fragmentation Democritus introduces becoming and movement into Being.
Yet movement in space (which will later lead, in the thought of Epicurus, to the problem of the cli-
namen or the smallest deviation) is seen as requiring an empty space, and thus non-Being (no-thing)
or nothingness is said to exist and have a statute comparable to that of Being (some thing). Atoms,
their movement and empty space are alone said to be eternal.
Democritus presents us with an extraordinary anticipation - his thought presents elements of the
dualism of an Official Science yet to come in the age of civilization (one and multiple are merely
adjectives; there are no fundamental substances, only materials), anticipating its mysticism (the soul
exists but it is a fine matter composed of particles; the vacuum exists and is occupied by matter), and
just as well anticipating its mechanicism (its all about collisions and mechanical motion of the indi-
visible particles or atoms of Matter; Matter is and so is the Vacuum). But he also presents elements
of a science that is not official, an eccentric science - where all beings, bodies and souls are vortices of
atoms, all motion is vortical, and at a small enough scale being acquires becoming or motion. Most

3
importantly, his thought possesses those critical traits which, with Galileo, will lead to the enuncia-
tion and practice of the scientific method - the skepticism of the senses, of truths based on common
sense or on unquestioned sense-perception. But, much like in Descartes Discourse on Method, there
is in Democritus no skepticism of reason, which is taken to be the only source of legitimate or true
knowledge.
So Democritus is ambivalent - yet, many (Friederich Lange, Gordon Childe, Wilhelm Reich, Michel
Serres) have attributed to him the real epistemological break with Greek culture, with its Gods of
superstition and its city-State, mythical representation of knowledge. Reich will go as far as to view
the energy hypothesis of the soul atoms of Democritus as the first development of Greek philoso-
phy that leads to science and breaks away with superstition and fantasy, considering it a precursor of
his own theory of orgone energy. Democritus definitely marks the birth of scientific materialism in
Occidental thought, a development that would eventually lead to chemistry and particle physics. But
his ambivalence, in hindsight, appears to be a mix of two different sciences, one at once mechanistic
and spiritualizing (materialistic and metaphysical), and the other an eccentric, functional science. Yet
his thought was not science in either sense.
Perhaps the deeper, more enduring and eccentric subversion of Parmenidean dogmatism was
Anaxagoras thought: he rejects concepts such as origins in Time of Being, the creation of Being from
non-Being, the false transformation of nothing into something (we can already recognize here a basic
criticism of what became the modern-day cosmological doctrine of the Big Bang), and ridicules the
understanding of motion as change in motion. Anaxagoras claims that everything originates from
everything, and that the being of the universe is eternal. There are only transformations. He raises
the fundamental question of an eccentric science or natural philosophy: where does motion come
from, how does it work, how does it adhere to objects or beings (in free fall, in wind sails, etc)? The
motion that is perceived in the exteriority of things is only an illusion, an appearance, an interpreta-
tion by this or that sense, always projected onto a sense or other. The internal perception of motion
is that of a motor, but here Anaxagoras commits the same mistake as Democritus: he remains trapped
in the collision of substances of the same nature (material), in the collision of elements of matter,
while claiming the infinite existence of substances (the same error that, in Spinozas view, was made
by Descartes) of a different nature. The young Nietzsche wrote a beautiful passage on this topic:
To get past such argumentation, the opponents of the Eleatic unmoved unity were led astray by a prejudice originating
in sensation. It seems so unarguable that every true existent is a space-occupying body, a clump of material, large or small,
but in any case extended in space, so that two or more such clumps cannot occupy the same space. With such presup-
positions Anaxagoras, and later Democritus, assumed that the clumps would have to collide if they should hit one anoth-
er as they moved around, that they would contest for the same space, and that hence it is this strife between the clumps
which causes all change. In other words those wholly isolated, totally different, and forever unchanging substances were,
after all, not thought of as absolutely different, but rather they were felt to have a completely like substratum, a fragment
of space-filling matter, in addition to their specific, wholly unique property. In their participation in matter they were all
equal and alike and could therefore have an effect upon each other, i.e., collide. All change, in fact, depended not at all
on the differences between substances but on their similarity in so far as they all partake of matter. [4]
Yet, Anaxagoras tries to salvage the situation with one of the most creative ruptures with Hellenic cul-

4
ture - the enunciation of a natural physical principle of order, that which makes things and beings
intelligible. All substances are material, the substance of the soul or thought being an extremely del-
icate and sensitive material, a fine matter (nous) that interacts with all other substances of matter by
mechanical means, by means of pressures and impulses (to borrow Nietzsches words). Which leads
him to a new cosmology - the primal existence of the world only knows a chaos of material particles,
a mixture, without order, of all substances. Given sufficient time, one substance, a finer substance,
comes to preponderate over all others, comes to serve as the principle of order of all other substances. It
is the work of this substance to order primal chaos, to permit chaos to become cosmos:
This can only be the consequence of motion, but it must be a definite and a wisely instituted motion. Such a motion
is the means employed by the nous. [5]
Before nous comes to dominate, there is only inert matter, only the physicality of inertia. The nous
is, however, a fine matter that acts on all other matter to animate it, to confer upon it a definite state
of motion, one that orders the chaos into vortices, that confers to matter and beings an internal motor
principle, that lightens and counteracts inertia. All happens as if there is inertial matter and nonin-
ertial matter, the latter alone being the principle of order and life. Inertial matter is a multitude of
different substances, no different in material nature from the noninertial substance of thought, but
the latter is single and unique, because it alone is able to order the former, that is, all other substances.
Were left wondering if matter, in the Anaxagorean acception of the term, is not simply a general
qualification of physicality, of the physicality of flows or the physicality of energy, as if Anaxagoras
were speaking about two types of physicality or materiality, rather than two types of Matter; as if he
was acknowledging two types of energy, one inertial, and thus the source of all Matter, and the other
massfree or non-inertial, but no less physical, no less objective or devoid of materiality - when this
term is understood to designate objectivity of the existence of something to the senses, rather than
referred to the concept of Matter. Without the nous, there is no order to inertial energy, no order to
Matter. Matter is only ordered and moved in consistent ways by the nous, by the physicality of the
substance that thinks, by the thinking substance, by energy free of mass or inertia. The nous is the
principle of vortical motion - that which gathers, assembles, sediments and separates - and all worlds
are sustained by it.
It is in the thought of Anaxagoras - of which all that remains are scant fragments - that the eccentric
break with the representation of antiquity and with Parmenidean philosophy is most evident because
he introduces a superfine hydraulic model of the fluxes of Matter being guided by physical fluxes
without inertia, turbulence becoming a principle of dynamic order and awareness, not a given in
chaos. The nous becomes a presage of the concept and function of a dynamic, massfree Aether.
Anaxagoras returns Heraclitus to his rightful place, while beings are allowed to appear to be static
because their internal motion can be made consistent, can be ordered, it is being that is founded in
becoming and second to it: all is in motion, and for a little while all is separate or has a separate exis-
tence by the constancy and the individuality of its motion.
But neither Heraclitus, Anaxagoras nor Democritus were the creators of eccentric science, nor even

5
of an effective model of a minor science. Nietzsche accurately reflects Anaxagoras contribution when
he argues that, following Anaxagoras, becoming is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon [6].
One can clearly see natural philosophy grasping here for its self-sufficient and independent founda-
tion - that natural science can only be knowledge of becoming, of change, of states of motion. Yet,
an ethical foundation (one that ethically rejects submission of knowledge to morality) does not suf-
fice for the constitution of a science. Anaxagoras knew what path such a natural science had to take;
Anaxagoras knew that his concept of the nous was the outcome of his truly pure scientific method,
the method which in all cases and above all else asks not to what end something arises (causa finalis)
but how something arises (causa efficiens) [7]. Not the molar function, but the molecular function-
ing, the formative act, the how - that is what mattered to science according to Anaxagoras; thats the
aesthetic choice which is also ethical. Still, this was not enough to create a truly inductive-quantita-
tive method, a formal (logical and mathematical) and experimental method.
Serres, Deleuze and Guattari are entirely correct in seeing the first defined model of eccentric science
in Archimedean science. It is with Archimedes (287-212BC) that the principles of mechanics,
hydraulics and light are first mathematically and experimentally extracted in a manner that can or
should be qualified as scientific. In fact, long before Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei, it is
Archimedes who enunciates and applies the scientific method. He employs both deductive reasoning
and inductive-quantitative approaches, forming them into a single method: combines mathematics
and geometry with experiment to find new facts and make new deductions from them, and tests these
against further observations. Archimedes creates a forensic investigation of science as a method for the
production of science and its diversification into separate sciences, at the very moment of the formal
genesis of science. And so he contributes to mathematics (he describes the quadrature of the parabo-
la, determines the area of a segment of an ellipse or a hyperbola, creates and examines the properties
of the Archimedean spiral foreshadowing integral calculus, discovers the principle of the addition of
exponents), astronomy (he is perhaps the first to hold an heliocentric view) and optics (he invents
lenses, mirrors, parabolic reflectors), mechanics (mechanism of the lever); invents a new hydraulics
(the hydraulic principle for raising water, the Archimedean water screw) and treatments of gravity that
consider the neutralization or counteraction of gravity (the buoyancy principle - or how the weight of
a body immersed in a liquid is decreased by the weight of the displaced fluid). His mathematical and
geometrical work still proceeds propositionally, by theorems, but these are far more problems than the-
orems: the problem is not an obstacle: it is the surpassing of an obstacle, a pro-jection, in other
words, a war-machine [8]. The model of eccentric science is the problem, ie the war-machine : this
conception of science is bound up in an essential way with the war-machine: the problemata are the
war-machine. (...) It would seem that the war machine is projected into an abstract knowledge that
is formally different from the royal or imperial sciences. For the problemata are the concrete prob-
lems of each war-machine, problems of transmission of work, energy and motion, and determination
of impact (momenta). Archimedes applies all these new sciences or disciplines to the arts of war, to
engineer technological advantages to defend his native city of Syracuse against the encircling and
blockade by the Roman armies of Marcellus - inventing the compound pulley, cranes to drop large
rocks, the catapult, and possibly a gigantic parabolic mirror capable of focusing the suns rays on
enemy boats.

6
It is this technological status that seems to relegate Archimedean science predominantly to the realm
of engineering, rather than to that of science - as Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenghers remark:
Archimedes status is merely that of an engineer; his mathematical analysis of the equilibrium of machines is not con-
sidered applicable to the world of nature, at least within the the framework of traditional physics [9].
It is a status that Deleuze and Guattari denote as the ambivalent figure of the military engineer.
Military because the war-machine may already be found at the service of a State - just as Archimedes
served the designs of the Syracusan city-State, a military State; in other words, because the war-
machine may already have become transformed into a military mechanism or be already issued from
it, arise within it. The war-machine is from the beginning entangled with the State, but it is an out-
side entangled with the inside of a State, just as eccentric science is a foreigner entangled with State
science. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is the very nature of State science, of Official Science,
to appropriate and alter the elements of nomad science. It is in nomad science that State science
searches for its new elements, nay more, searches for its paradigmatic changes. So eccentric science
is also the preferred source of problemata, a goldmine of new data, methods and concepts for Official
Science, a source to be constantly pilfered, adapted, altered, limited, striated, recuperated, co-opted.
Eccentric science was born with the war machine, with nomadism. But we only recognize its mark-
ers (eg Archimedes) where they are part of a war machine already captured and appropriated by a
State, part of a military mechanism, no longer nomadic. Later, in the Renaissance, again we see its
imprint: it is eccentric science that permits the autonomy of science towards religion, the autonomy
of method that becomes doubled by, reduced to, and converted into, the formal separation of Official
Science from religion. But with all that, eccentric science still gains no droit de cit - it remains a
mere springboard for the New Official Science, while constituting its properly speaking scientific
repressed. Unable to find for itself a place, either through a war machine that preserved the nomadic
vector, or beyond the tentacles of the new State officialdom of Official Science, eccentric science is
forced to become a war machine of its own, on its own. The underground of Official Science.
2. Spinozist monism and eccentric proto-science

Where, then, does the continuation of eccentric science - in the process of becoming a war machine
on its own - pass after Archimedes? Certainly, theres the systematic attempt of Lucretius, who
returns to Atomism. And, as we have pointed out, theres Galileos rupture, where the scientific
method itself is an intrusion of eccentric science; and there is even a third Descartes, one who pro-
poses that the vortical motion of an Aether is a principle of continuity of action. Knowledge is cer-
tainly not science without becoming able to take into account the number, the properties of quanti-
tative differences, the metric and geometric properties of the quantitative. But we would suggest that
the next step in the continuation of eccentric science comes from what Deleuze called expressionism
in natural philosophy, the monisms of Spinoza and Leibniz. When both distance themselves from
cartesianism, from a dualistic form of rationalism, they have in common a monist concept of knowl-

7
edge that is neither nominalist nor geometric. Paraphrasing Deleuze, the real or true knowledge is
a species or kind of expression, one that performs a dual transformation or superation: on one hand,
the representative content of an idea is overcome by discovery of the immanent content, the expressive
content of the idea, an uncovering of the intrinsic and absolute content of an adequate idea, its inner-
most essence; on the other hand, the formalization of the idea, the form of the expression, reaches a log-
ical or explicative mode. Science, or real knowledge, is about the production of adequate and self-
consistent ideas, and since this is a gradual process, science must form per force an open system.
Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) demolishes the cartesian dualism. Descartes, in his dualist
scheme, had proposed three substances - two finite, thinking and extended, soul and body, as the basis
of dualism; and a third, an infinite thinking substance that transcended the other two, God. God was
the only superation of the fundamental dualism of existence. Spinoza argues that substance is only
that which has independent existence and self-causation, that there is only one such substance, that
it is infinite and the very being that serves as cause to all that exists. He calls it God, but then pro-
poses that it is one with Nature, and immanent to soul and body - for we can conceive of God mod-
ified in an infinite series of ways as a thinking substance immanent to a diversity and multitude of
minds, or modified in an infinite series of ways as an extended substance embodied by a variety and
multitude of bodies. The mind is only the idea, adequate or inadequate, of the body, just as the body
is only the correlate extension of the mind. Body and mind are part of nature and part of God:
Body is part of Nature. As regards the human Mind, I think it too is part of Nature: since I state that there exists in
nature an infinite power of thought, which insofar as it is infinite, contains in itself objectively the whole of Nature, and
its thoughts proceed in the same way as Nature, which, to be sure, is its correlate, its ideated or conceived (ideatum).
Then I declare that the human mind is this same power, not insofar as it is infinite, and perceives the whole of Nature,
but insofar as it is finite and perceives only the human Body, and in this way I declare that the human Mind is a part of
a certain infinite intellect. [10]
It is evident that this monist-spinozist concept of substance is not a concept of a transcendence - as

is the concept of God-substance in Descartes - but an immanent concept, one that ascribes a princi-
ple to the universe - not as a beginning, but as a permanent, efficient and sufficient cause. The focus
of Spinozas inquiry is to understand how this principle is the cause of all that exists and is natural.
He is in search of the Aether (what being), which he calls God, and the aethereal causation of beings
and their motion:
As soon as is possible and rational, we should inquire whether there be any being (and if so, what being) that is the cause
of all things, so that its essence, represented in thought as an objective essence, may be the cause of all our ideas, and then
our mind will to the utmost possible extent reflect nature. For it will possess, objectively, natures essence, order and union.
Thus we can see that it is before all things necessary for us to deduce all our ideas from physical things - that is, from real
entities proceeding, so far as may be, according to the series of causes, from one real entity to another real entity, never
passing to universals and abstractions, either for the purpose of deducing some real entity from them, or deducing them
from some real entity. [11]
Finding the innermost essences of things and beings was the object of true or reflective knowledge, as
Spinoza called it. The more specialized and concrete an idea is, the more distinct and clear it

8
becomes, the closer it comes to the innermost essences of things and beings, and the more adequate
our idea of these things and beings becomes.
Spinozas practical philosophy of nature marks the moment when eccentric science tried to seize more
than Descartes ambivalence or even Galileos pragmatic experimentalism permitted. It was perhaps
a jump to the end of a luminous book that had not yet even began being written, the book of an
eccentric science that would growingly challenge any and every dogma of the New Official Science
for centuries thereafter. Like Galileos, Spinozas philosophy still searches for light and transparen-
cies. But it is also a proof that it is possible and necessary to experiment with logic, as possible and
necessary as to experiment with observations, perceptions and numbers.
How is Spinoza pertinent to our taking up Serres, Deleuze and Guattaris argument for the existence
of an eccentric science that insists beneath, aside and beyond every form of Official Science, religious,
imperial or democratic? The eccentricity of science is tied to the problem of the importance of num-
bers with respect to ideal figures or proportion (metrics versus geometry), and the relation between
numbers, ie qualities or elements that cannot be divided without changing in nature. When Spinoza
speaks of the manifestation of space (extensivity) and bodies as an extended substance, as the extend-
ed substance of God, and attributes to it, in Part I of the Ethics, the character of infinity, he is explic-
itly arguing against cartesianism - against the notion that since all extended substances can be mea-
sured by an external ruler, an infinite extension may still be measurable since it will be made up of
finitely extended parts. Spinoza argues this is an absurdity, that the substance extended is no less infi-
nite than the thinking substance is, and no less indivisible in nature either. He argues further that bod-
ies can meld, interpenetrate and thus the concrete existence of an extensivity is subject to perpetual
and indefinite variation (he anticipates a deeply aetherometric insight about the energetic nature of
Space).
What Spinoza does not make clear is how extensivity is infinite: it is because of Time, of its infinity
of flow, that infinity may be said to be fundamental to both existences of the single substance, in
extension and in intensity, in space and matter and in the soul. Extensivity persists in Time, just as
intensity exists in Time.
The problem of the function of quantity and quality (difference in kind) is compounded by still other
problems. Space, extensivity, movement and relative rest are Spinozas fundamental physical cate-
gories (notions of what is common to all things) that define the extended mode of existence of the
single substance. They form a set of qualities that permits measurement, finite counting and divisi-
bility. It is only insofar as this measurement is external to a body that quantity is conceived abstract-
ly as finite, divisible, and composed of parts, that it remains an imaginary quantity; the moment
that we consider quantity as it exists in the intellect, or insofar as extensivity itself is substance [12],
quantity exists no longer as measurement but as measure, as an intrinsic property of a substance, as an infi-
nite and indivisible quantity (a singular quantity or measure). Put in other terms: neither Space nor
Mind can exist other than by Time and in Time. And since Time is infinite, Space and Mind are also
infinite modes of the indefinite existence of God or Aether in all beings and things. Put further in

9
still other terms: only the numbers that are external to a being or a thing, qua imaginary or arbitrary
quantities, are finite and divisible; the numbers or the quantity that belong intrinsically to a thing or
a being, as part of their cause or their essence, those numbers or that quantity are non-divisible.
We should note how this is an argument that anticipates the concept of energy and the properties of
energy, in particular as the argument concerns the totality of energy and the concept of an energy unit
(an atom or monad). A quantity of energy may be finite, made up of a finite number of units, iden-
tical or different in size and kind. Yet, the variation in the finite number of units may be infinite if
all that can vary are the size and the number of the units. If a quantity of energy with a variable finite
number of units is to be preserved indefinitely, then though that quantity may even be divisible into
any number of units, it is simply not divisible qua quantity, total quantity, that is preserved.
Furthermore, now consider each component unit. Though each unit may carry a finite quantity of
energy, it is not divisible, not without changing in nature or kind. And indeed, an atom is not divisi-
ble, not without changing in nature, nor is an elementary charge divisible (unlike what is assumed by
quark chromodynamics for massbound charges) or a quantum divisible; and when we destroy an ele-
mentary lepton, we obtain a photon or photons, not leptons. Each atom, elementary charge or quan-
tum has a measure, an indivisible measure, an intrinsic number, a single or singular number, an infi-
nitely single number that belongs to the essence of that physical object - as infinitely single as is the
number of a total quantity of energy to be indefinitely preserved. To understand quantity as the prop-
erty of a thing, we need to understand first the essence of the thing. Spinozas view of the role of the
quantitative in knowledge is to separate that which is referential or external measurement, from that
which is measure and thus part of what he calls the true codes of things, according to which all par-
ticular things take place and are arranged [11].
To conceive of things and beings properly, adequately, in accordance to their nature, one had to first
understand their ultimate essence, and then seek their internal essence or proximal causes, the inter-
nal codes, measures and properties of things. Then, the second part of the method consists in obtain-
ing the knowledge of the conditions of a good definition or an adequate idea, and the means to find-
ing them. This is the essence of the scientific method, since, in reality - says Spinoza - the knowl-
edge of an effect is nothing other than the acquisition of a more perfect knowledge of its cause.
Lastly, though not necessarily, he says, we may be able to relate and derive the properties of things
and beings from adequate ideas, from the system of adequate ideas, ie from true science.
In one other insight - which prefigures Reich - Spinoza holds that what bars us from forming ade-
quate ideas of things, beings and God, what bars us from science or actual knowledge, is our desire
to suffer, to remain slaves of our passions, beginning with our shunning of joyful passions. Spinoza
distinguishes between two types of affects (affectus): those that are a source of sadness (fear, anxiety,
hope, repentance), passive sentiments that prevent the formation of adequate ideas and do not go
beyond passion; and those active affects that are a source of joy, emotions that increase our power to
act. Only the latter permit an accordance with reason, and the development of its powers.
Spinoza frames the problem of knowledge in the same fashion as he frames that of action. Reason is

10
a sense, the sense of joy that is inherent to joyful passions; but it is still inadequate as such, as subject
even to joyful passions, for reason is also a power, a power to act in the form of understanding. The
act of knowing and its adequacy depend upon the kind of affect, sad or joyful, but even more so, it
depends upon an active joy - joy as an affection (affectio), a becoming reasonable. To think, to permit
reason to construct an adequate knowledge of nature, one must learn to avoid those passions which
are sad, but one must also go beyond the passions of joy, beyond its passive affections, to find its power
of active affection. One must learn to find joy as an active mode of existence, joy as an action, not a
passion; joy as a doing, not a pleasure; one must find gaiety as the condition for science, for a science
of the light (celerity) instead of a science of the heavy; for an eccentric, and not a Royal Science.
Knowledge is not knowledge, nor ethical, unless it is an active pursuit, a mode of life or existence, a
reason that acts, a joy that acts or affects, and no longer just an affected or passive joy. As with the
Stoics, Spinoza holds that freedom is only a life lived in accordance with reason, the active affection of
joy. Science, then, becomes the rational mode of life, of intelligence.
Reichs entire discourse about Reason and irrationality, with all its dualistic errors [13], owes far more
to Spinoza and Nietzsche than to Descartes, Friederich Hegel or Sigmund Freud. For Spinoza, as
for Nietzsche and Reich, reason is just another sense, one that only through joy can come to fruition,
and only does so when it is at last able to create, to discover, to invent - to invent joyful possibilities
of living, to act intelligently upon nature and upon itself, upon its own cognition and intellection, to
act in accordance with reason to the benefit of life and the living. To every adequate idea there
corresponds an object, and every body or object has a proper idea. When and if ideas or concepts are
adequate to things, they become proper ideas, the ideas of a scientific knowledge of nature. This
is, grosso modo, the fundamental thesis that is basic to Spinozist philosophy, but also to the founda-
tions of science, since the scientific method proposes a method to determine the adequacy of ideas, a
method to generate empirical or experimental concepts and correct them, by ascertaining - math-
ematically, logically and conceptually - their realms of effective validity, and thus to enable the con-
struction of a map of their articulations, the tissue or fabrica of science itself.
Hence, for Spinoza, science could not be reduced to merely obtaining experimental results, anymore
than it should limit itself to accepting observation (or even repetition or verification) as sufficient
proof of anything. Observation itself is not only subject to failure, insufficiency and interpretation,
but must become an element of an active principle, part of a process of systematic inquiry. The sci-
entific method is not merely a method for the production of new facts and observations, or for the
technological extension of our senses and perception. It is a method to test and gather knowledge,
factual knowledge, and the objective of the scientific procedure is to reach the construction of an open
system of knowledge that permits us to understand nature and better act with it (what Spinoza did
not elucidate, in this respect, is the variation of all the possible analyses that typically surround an
observation).
Spinozas philosophy had to pass through a critique of epistemology - to identify how the emotion-
al, social and political conditions under which we think are not conducive to the production of ideas
that are adequate to their objects. Something positive could be identified in the historical and cul-

11
tural course of inadequate ideas, but inadequate ideas would never be able to go beyond an articula-
tion of the contents of an arbitrary representation, or be other than subject to passive emotions. For
ideas to reach that movement of thought which is adequate to the movement of nature, they would
need a method to reach the expressive content of an idea; not just its formal elements, but the articula-
tion of its motion, its inner motion and variation, and thus its nature. Ideas could not be related as
pure forms - there is correspondence between body and mind, there is even qualified parallelism,
because the power to think and to know is proportional if not identical to the power to exist and to
act.
It was not in the understanding of Science as mathesis, as mathematics, that Spinoza differed so much
from Newton or from Boyle - that nature was written in mathematical letters, in numbers or num-
ber codes. But the letters, says Spinoza, are arbitrary, only the expression - in letters but independent
of them qua specific letters - having the ability to permit ideas that reach adequacy. Accordingly, the
numbers are written in nature but what matters are the relations between numbers, the differences in
kind that articulate the numbers, the numbers that are measures, single and indivisible. Spinoza
rejoins here the design of Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum - science is made up not of dispar
experiments and fragmentary laws, but grows gradually as an open system of general laws, of relations
that constitute specific articulations or functions that are intrinsic to processes, bodies and beings.
Spinozas naturalist philosophy is not yet a functional science, an eccentric science. It is more like an
assembly of epistemological conditions necessary to permit science to happen, conditions which were
contributed by an ethical philosophy, a theory of education (as he puts it), the whole science of med-
icine and the science of mechanics. The conditions he lays down force one to realize that science
is more than its empirical method; that it is a system, that the number it seeks is measure, not mea-
surement, and that without an understanding of quality, of differences in kind, of the essences of
beings and things, it can never reach their properties or measures. Spinozas thought constitutes the
laying down of a proto-scientific project, the conditions for scientific investigation and thought. It is
not yet science, though eccentric, and yet it is already beyond science, beyond the narrow view of sci-
ence that is official, post-scientific - as if it were a fully formed eccentric science that had reached
absolute knowledge.
There is an amusing episode involving the chemical investigations of Spinoza, which puts into evi-
dence the epochal limitations of scientific knowledge that force it into various states of ambiguity, and
how the inherent limitations to observation and the experimental method can only worsen the ambi-
guity. It is a reminder of the fallibility of claims to absolute or adequate knowledge. Niter, or Chile
saltpeter, is potassium or sodium nitrate (KNO3 or NaNO3), a non-flammable substance. Spirit of
niter or spirit of nitrous ether is essentially ethyl nitrite (C2H5NO2), obtained by the reaction of
potassium or sodium nitrite (KNO2 or NaNO2, which slowly oxidize into nitrates) in an ethyl alco-
hol mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids, in the cold. The spirit of niter is a very volatile and flam-
mable liquid that decomposes (under the action of air, light and humidity) by becoming acid upon
release of oxides of nitrogen. Robert Boyle asserted that niter and its spirit were different compounds
(heterogenous), whereas Spinoza argued that they were the same material substance (homogenous),

12
that the atoms of niter were at rest, but in the spirit of niter the same atoms were in motion. To test
his hypothesis, Spinoza carried out several experiments; in one of them, he allowed sand to absorb
the spirit of niter to demonstrate how in this restful or nonkinetic condition the substance was no
longer flammable, and thus behaved like niter did. Likewise, with the proper mixture of soot and sul-
phur, niter can be made incendiary and explosive as part of black powder. Chemistry today gives
Boyle reason, the spirit being a nitrite, and niter a nitrate, and thus they are chemically different com-
pounds. But Boyles argument as to flammability serving to distinguish the compounds, was plain
insufficient. So was his objection that by introducing sand into the spirit of niter, Spinoza had added
an extraneous factor. Boyle had to prove that this was the case, say, by showing that mixing the sodi-
um nitrate with sand and applying pressure, eg a sudden shock, caused the addition of sand to have
the opposite effect on niter that it did on its spirit, making niter explosive or flammable. Spinozas
argument is that the mere observation of a single difference is not sufficient to distinguish between
substances and could signal, just as well, different properties - like different kinetic states or phase
states of the same compound. In other words, Boyles observation, by itself, did not suffice for con-
cluding that niter and spirit of niter were different compounds. Spinoza was wrong about niter and
spirit of niter, but right about the insufficiency of Boyles demonstration.
3. Empiricism and functional thought

To be scientific, knowledge must be certain and have its certainties adequately qualified. Not certified
by some authority, but qualified by the method itself of the scientific inquiry, which is what ade-
quately operationally or practically means. This view is already the basis of the qualified skepticism
professed by David Hume (1711-1776): skepticism of established knowledge, of an Official Science
seconded by power, and skepticism of reason itself for being uncertain and inconsistent. Lack of this
skepticism is perhaps the deeper reason why knowledge has so much trouble in becoming scientific,
and why reason has so much trouble in becoming rational. Thought can be led to doubt the senses,
but it seems mostly unable to doubt reason, its own reasoning processes, and so it is ill-prepared to
understand what sense-perception actually conveys. Skepticism, above all, of knowledge (the truths
of sensation and perception) - this is perhaps the source of an eccentric science at the roots of the very
events that eventually led to the formal separation of Official Science from Religion. But skepticism
by itself is not a source of knowledge. Yet, skepticism of sense-perception, of reason and of the imag-
ination, is certainly one of sciences fundamental points of departure.
What was different and new about Humes thought was not his notion that the only source of under-
standing was sense-experience (the intelligible comes from the sensible), or was empirical - or that
imagination was the source of reflexive capacity, and not a representation, not an imaginary of fan-
tasy to which it had been reduced; what was different is that which, as Deleuze underlines, is the rela-
tionism common to all empiricism (eg William James, Bertrand Russell, Jean Wahl, etc): that the
relations are treated as being external to the terms. A relation is always a state of tension between two
ideas, and always external to them, at the middle, in an inbetween. Forcing thought to think rela-
tions in this manner is a process of experimentation that takes the relation as the real multiplicity - as
the empirical function. Humes arrangement does not put forth one more natural philosophy based

13
on the preeminence of being and its sensible vs intelligible terms, caught between sensations and
ideas, or fantasies and superstitions. As Deleuze emphasized, Humes insight is the realization that
there are two types of experience and two types of ideas, an experience of the terms and an experience
of the relations, an idea of the terms - sense-experience and intelligibility of thought - and an idea of
their relation - in natural philosophy, in logic, in mathematics, in art.
Hume distinguishes two types of relations - (1) those that can vary without their ideas varying, and
(2) those that vary when their ideas vary [14]. Relations of identity (logic), causality and spatiotem-
poral coordinatization belong to the first type, whereas relations of similarity, dissimilarity, propor-
tionality of quantity or number, comparison of quality, belong to the second type. Distance and con-
tiguity are spatial relations, relations that are constitutive of space and are established between distant
or contiguous objects, but independently of them. They can vary without their idea varying. And
they inflict their constraint upon our body and mind as an external power does. In the case of rela-
tions of the second type - those that vary when their idea varies - it is all about comparison: similar-
ity or dissimilarity compare qualities; proportionality compares quantities; intensity compares com-
binations of one and the other (degrees of quality).
Immanuel Kant reproached Hume for having turned mathematics into an analytical system of judge-
ment, a comparative propositional system where the relationships of quantity and number were
always comparative, always relative to the terms, to the properties of a quality and its associated num-
ber. Yet, the idea of an orange is indivisible and unquantifiable, and when one adds oranges the arith-
metic itself depends upon the notion of adding at least two objects of a kind, each of which must fit
the idea of an orange. Likewise, the distance between objects is a relation that only permits
geometrization (the operations of geometry) when it is doubled up by a length that can be externally
measured and thus made to serve as a ratio or measure for that distance. In fact, even for logic, Hume
takes the identity A=B as arising from the vicinity of the ideas of A and B, by their empirical associ-
ation, and likewise for B=C; but the logical conclusion - the principle of equivalence of identities -
given by the relation A=C can be invoked as a relationship between faraway objects, a relationship of
distance, only if the two separate similarities can be compared. The sign of identity, the equal sign,
is not a property of being or an absolute of identity, but the property of a relation, a relation of dis-
tance (vicinity vs remoteness) that entails a comparison, a qualified equivalence that denotes similar-
ity.
The real associationism of Hume is a conjunctive one - the logic of science is not the logic of being,
some form of ontology, but the logic of a conjunction, a synthesis between terms, a synthesis between
the terms (eg A=B, B=C) and the relation (eg A=C). And this is exactly what Aetherometry means
by functional thought - that the synthesis operates not just between the terms, but between the terms
and their varying relation (the relation that varies independently or not from the terms). Hume trans-
forms the syllogism into a particularity of a more general function. That is what a microfunction con-
sists of - a multiplicity that works, a variation that presents a continuum. The old despotic mysticism
held that all is one. But whether One was divisible or its Being all-encompassing, the multiple never
ceased being but an adjective of Being - a One that was multiple, a paganistic One, a pan-Oneness

14
which constituted the essence of polytheism. Dualism breaks this pan-One into two, but that does
not create a multiplicity, it does not create the thought of a conjunction or give any substance to the
multiple. It is still the same logic of Being that rules in dualism. A multiplicity is never in the terms,
in their number or totality - says Deleuze. And a multiplicity is not just in the inbetween of the
terms, in their relation, in that which joins them. It is only when the multiple becomes substantive,
when there is substance to all and to their differences - substance that inhabits each being, each thing,
each process, each relation - that a multiplicity can be found, even when there are only two terms to
be considered. A multiplicity lies not in the terms, or in their relation; it operates, it functions with
both terms and relations. It is a function composing with terms and relations, their conjunction as
an analytical synthesis.
4. The First Ambivalence: Proto-science or Pseudo-science?

Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Democritus or Archimedes were not, however, the inventors of eccentric sci-
ence. They mark perhaps its genesis anew - its refrain - in Occidental thought, the genesis of a
thought that thinks nature in a dynamic way, that contributes a mode of cognition based not on the-
orems, but on problems and their experimental solution in both practical and analytical terms. It
would appear that its roots are linked to a very different form of society that is neither savage, nor
despotic or civilized: a form of society dedicated to war - specifically, to waging war on State-forma-
tions. This eccentric science, its invention, appears to date at least to pre-Mesolithic times, to the
time of emergence of nomadic societies or war-machines. It is in all cases a kind of timeless science
that is threatening to the State or already in the hands of a war machine. A science that developed
by following mineral veins, by introducing the operations of separation and transformation (that, in
a real sense, constitute the roots of alchemy), by vortical occupation of space, by the turbulent treat-
ment of flows, by seeking speed and lightness rather than gravity, by the posing of problems rather
than by the dictation (or by the axiomatic consistency) of theorems - is a science whose roots are
much older than these Greek pre-Socratic philosophers of nature. And it is an eccentricity that
repeats across the ages with all of its ambivalences, polarizations and enmities.
It is, in fact, eccentric science that manifests itself in Copernicus, and in Galileos epistemological
rupture - to operate the very shift in paradigm that separated science from religion in the age of civ-
ilization, but also eventually permitted a new Official Science to emerge. And, as already discussed,
Descartes minor theory of Aether vortices, aiming to explain gravitational action without recourse
to action-at-a-distance, is another salient example of eccentric science, one that attempts to apply
Archimedean principles of buoyancy to the motions of cosmic bodies. Then there is Spinozas more
profound break, a monist break that remains - like most eccentric science - peripheral to the evolu-
tion of the New Official Science. Here, too, there is a deviation towards a smooth science, a minor
deviation from major Cartesianism, a recurrence of the other kind of science, an eccentricity.
So how does this vein of an eccentric science persist across the modern age? How has it remained a
track parallel to, but divergent from, that of Official Science? Does it form a continuum of its own,
does it reach thresholds of definition, does it gain a cumulative form or a model?

15
We would be tempted to answer these questions by saying that, yes, it persists across the epochs of
civilization, in fact as a vein continuously mined to bring about the paradigmatic shifts of the ever
Newer Official Science; yes, it is not just parallel to the latter, but its very repressed; yes, it forms its
own continuum, as an integral science, as an inquiry into the properties of the Aether, of the gener-
al and the proximal causes of effects, of a better understanding of motion and changes in motion, etc;
and yes, it gains a model, not gradually, but in fits and starts - it gains models that provide certainties,
certain certainties, no absolute certainty but absolutely some certainties. It gains these various mod-
els functionally, and these models tend towards some form of integration in a functionalist thought -
a thought of the innermost qualities and number codes of all that exists. But if we hold this, we
should at least summarily demonstrate that while indeed it is eccentric or minor science which insists
from within every major shift in Official Science, minor science is neither defined by these discover-
ies, nor by their recognition, nor still limited to them.
If it is reasonable to contend that the search for first principles or sufficient cause(s) is a search for the
properties of the Aether, then this would sufficiently describe the continuum of thought that charac-
terizes eccentric science. One may not include here, however, the theories of the luminiferous Aether,
since the static or stationary Aether was the quintessential concept of Official Physics in the classical
age of civilization. But theories of a dynamic Aether, theories that make kinematic considerations
regarding turbulent flow, such as those of Nikola Tesla, Alexandre Vronnet, Wilhelm Reich, Paul
Dirac or Harold Aspden, constitute a return of the eccentric vein or refrain of a minor science. Louis
de Broglies theory of Matter-Waves is another eccentric escapade attempting to go beyond quan-
tum-mechanics and uncovering a potentially smooth space of wave functions. We could even con-
tend that Albert Einsteins search for a dynamic gravitational Aether (his terms), which preoccu-
pied him for a while, was part of a vein of eccentricity that erupted just as General Relativity was
becoming accepted. Its failure, in fact, was one of the factors which later plunged Einstein into a
search far more characteristic of a Royal Science, the search for a Theory of Everything in the form
of a unified field theory.
But if we characterize eccentric science by its intrusion into Royal Science, by its feats in engineer-
ing, by its problematics or sets of problemata in the quality of being a war-machine, then we should
turn to that eccentric science that from the beginning has broken the ground for the great paradig-
matic shifts. In this sense, Rupert Hall has suggested that the deeper scientific influence of
Archimedes during the Renaissance is to be found in Johannes Kepler rather than in Galileo. The
prejudices of the latter - despite his ingrained admiration for Archimedes - often led him to erroneous
notions (beliefs) not based on the scientific method he had pioneered, but on unquestioned fiat: thus
he stuck to the perfectly circular nature of the planetarian orbitals, whereas Kepler extracted his three
laws from a laborious mathematical treatment of observational data, coupled to the realization that
application of the ellipse satisfied all the observed variations:
By contrast [to Galileos notions], the investigations of Kepler, who found strength to renounce the ancient prejudice,
reveal the true Archimedean spirit. [15]

16
Yet, as Hall does not fail to remark, if Kepler had not known the geometry of the ellipse from con-
ics, he would have been forced to resort to combinations of circular and rectilinear motions like his
predecessors [16]. The correct answer was a combination - of the laborious treatment of the data
and the realization that a previously known analytical function could fit the treatment, a recognition
of the intrinsic pattern of the data. If Kepler had not been prepared beforehand with knowledge of
analytical geometry, he would not have realized that the figure of the ellipse could fit the data, and
the data would have remained meaningless, an arbitrary and meaningless composite as it had been for
his predecessors (an extenuating circumstance for Galileos case). This, we have argued, is the deep-
er meaning of serendipity: a discovery, or a paradigmatic change, does not lie per se in the collection
of data, not in the observation per se. That is not the discovery. The discovery is what lies implicit
in the data, the datas potential if its pattern is recognized, realized, actualized, tested, verified, either
as a previously known analytical function or by the enunciation of a new function. When real, dis-
covery is an element of thought because it uncovers a relation in the process of proving its existence.
Robert Hooke, like Kepler at first, thought that the planetarian orbits would be more complex than
an ellipse - an ellipsoid. But he could neither come to define it, nor demonstrate, as Newton did,
that the elliptical model suffices for a dynamic account of Keplers First and Second Laws. Newton
refused for years to provide such a demonstration to Hooke, the proof that an inverse-square force
law yielded an elliptical orbit, even though it was his conflict with Hooke that had made him discover
it - just as that conflict had pushed him to abandon university, the Royal Society and even science.
Newtons reproach in the outburst quoted at the opening of this chapter, presents, in fact, the two
necessary components of science - that science requires, by its very nature, a relation between an
hypothesis and a mathematical theory that explains the hypothesis; and that the second task of sci-
ence is to confirm or invalidate this hypothesis by experiments and observations. Now, Hooke had
performed neither of these tasks. For his part, Newton, almost nonchalantly, had brought about the
convergence of two distinct series of proofs regarding force, centripetal and gravitational, with the
result that, though the relationship was axiomatic, it alone could account for Keplers discovery, for
the dynamics of the ellipse. Once again, this was a matter of eccentric science - and Newton could
clearly see what Hooke was up to: to pilfer eccentric science for the sake of the New Official Science,
by appropriating Newtons own proof of Keplers Third Law. Here was a nomad Newton escaping
the pincers of the Royal Society.
The question of science and which kind, when posed this way - with respect to the constant looting
of eccentric science by Royal or Official Science and the intrusions of eccentric science into Official
Science - assumes a very different aspect. On one hand, it makes perceptible the successive develop-
ments of distinct lines of inquiry that belong entirely to eccentric science; on the other hand, these
lines may penetrate entirely into Official Science (yes, always with a time lag), even appearing to make
indistinguishable which type of science they belong to; or, these lines may, instead, penetrate little or
not at all into the framework of Official Science, remain eccentric and gain a consistency of their own,
as if they formed a parallel track.

17
In the case of Astronomy, there is a penetration that is progressive and nearly complete; it appears to
tell us the story of a single science. The science of Astronomy proceeds by positing axioms that, in
being subject to the tests of observation, experimentation and repetition, can be successively correct-
ed and revised to approach, in decrements of error, the natural occurrence, its intrinsic structure or
pattern: thus, in this perspective, Euclidean space and Aristotelian naturalism would have approxi-
mated the truth of gross sense-perception, the Earth retaining its apparent central position, with the
result being a static geocentrism with perfect circles; then, Euclidean space and Galilean-Copernican
naturalism would have found a finer sense-perception, one that raised doubts as to the truth of gross
sense-perception - hence the Earth loses its central position, and heliocentrism is born (or, in fact,
reborn) while it retains the perfection of circular orbits; next, a first deviation occurs from that
Euclidean space, as the new method of naturalism or science permits still finer perceptions - helio-
centrism is retained, but the orbitals become ellipses; in the same breath, we move away from a the-
orematic science towards a science of solving concrete problems - such as how to account for the
observational data which does not fit the perfectly circular model, how to generate an ellipse from the
inverse-law. And in the process, Newton even discovers that the Sun, too, moves around a center in
the plane of the ecliptic. Slowly the entire solar system becomes decentered, de-heliocentered. But
then, the progression in the capacity of the description to acquire a greater accuracy stops. Once Royal
Science was able to absorb all these eccentricities - with much reluctance, repression and arbitrariness
- it stops. No other eccentricities may now penetrate into this domain - neither the motion of the
solar system transversely to the plane of the ecliptic, intuited or discovered by Giordano Bruno, nor
a real understanding of the galactic and supragalactic motions of the system, etc.
As one more instance of this asymmetric dynamics of eccentric and Royal sciences, an eccentric
Newton is followed by a re-centered Newton, a royal Newton. Eccentric science gives way, yet again,
to Royal Science. In fact, the mark of Newtons final victory over Hooke and others, is Newtons
Presidency of the Royal Society that he retained until his death. It is now that the metaphysics fly
high, beginning with the miraculous dogma of action-at-a-distance. Even as he demonstrated that
cartesian vortices could not account for the planetary motions, a royal Newton failed to realize that
the entire system forms a vortex moving transversely to the plane of the ecliptic, a gigantic vortex.
If a nomadic Newton, like Spinoza, worked against the framework of cartesianism, it was, once again
by the return of eccentric science that another monist, Leibniz, would make that vein of science work
against Newtonianism, against that which in Newton was not eccentric - that is, against royal astron-
omy. Reich commented on the subversive role of monists, on the eccentricity of their thought, their
scientific thought and their thought on science: We must admit that that the monists [Spinoza,
Leibniz], in their thinking, came closer to the truth [of science] than the mechanists [Newton], vital-
ists [Hans Driesch] dualists [Descartes], and others. [17]. Swiftly and poignantly, Leibniz placed the
problem facing an eccentric science of Mechanics and Gravity in Newtons conception of the universe
and God (as Spinoza had placed it in Descartes conceptions of nature and substance), which had
meanwhile become the new currency of Official Science: either one was obliged to agree with Newton
that, by his First Law, God was an imperfect workman who needed to tinker continually with his cre-
ation to set it right, constantly performing miracles to keep planets moving in their rightful orbits; or

18
one had to realize that all the motions were the result of continual and synchronous impulses from a
medium, the product of a vortically ordered flow. Each planetary orbit was a layer of an aetherial vor-
tex, so claimed Leibniz and Jean Bernoulli. But Royal science had stopped assimilating well before
that, and thus this claim remained outside of it, as the eccentricity it always was.
Keplers proof that the burning-mirror must be a paraboloid is another return of eccentric science,
the return of an Archimedean investigation and of the problem of the sectioning of a cone - under
experimental conditions: the burning-mirror can be physically achieved (the requirement that the
rotating curve of the mirror surface fit an isosceles triangle was empirically known), but it was a math-
ematical analytical problem to discover the curve that would satisfy the physical requirement. Once
more, Kepler demonstrated that there are two phases to scientific experimentation - the collection of
observational data, and the experimentation with analytical methods (the same conclusion that
Newton came to in his confrontation with Hooke). There could not be less experimentation on the
level of theory and the analytical treatment of the data than there was at the level of the generation
of the data, the practical experimentation with synthetic methods, or the production and collection
of sense-empirical data.
So, in effect, there are two sciences, quite distinct in their model and methods, including their math-
ematical methodologies. But everywhere there is ambivalence - in the same scientist there now speaks
a nomad, an eccentric, and next it is a man of State, an official, a priest who speaks. Everywhere the
same ambivalence, the same schizze, the same oscillation of science between two methods, two kinds
of science, two ways of relating to Space (extensivity) and Time. And everywhere the same process -
first repression, then maybe rehabilitation, then fad - and the same classification: either it becomes
swallowed by Official Science and is no longer eccentric, nor ever was (historical revisionism, if by
nothing else then by loss of collective memory), or it can only fit in one of two other categories - pro-
toscience, where eccentric science is ready to be captured by State science and receive official recogni-
tion, or pseudo-science, into which eccentric science becomes discarded in contempt. Deleuze and
Guattari make a short list of such eccentric scientists and fields of investigation in ambivalent posi-
tions towards Official Science:
Democritus, Menaechmus, Archimedes, Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, Carnot, Poncelet, Perronet, etc: in each
case a monograph would be necessary to take into account the special situation of these savants whom State science used
only after restraining or disciplining them(...) [18].
An eccentric science recurs with the new atomism of John Dalton and with Antoine de Lavoisier,
but chemistry only achieves recognition as an Official Science when it integrates with a theory of
weight; until then it is still alchemy. The Gothic hypothesis of differential calculus (Gottfried
Leibniz and Isaac Newton, once more) has only a para-scientific status before it is absorbed into
Official Science. The same ambivalence and conversion of eccentric into Official Science is observed
in the transformation of Gaspard Monge and Jean-Victor Poncelets projective geometry into an ana-
lytical discipline; in the reduction of Nikola Teslas work with the electric Aether and power trans-
mission across distances to the classical Maxwellian-Hertzian theory of electromagnetism.

19
The ambivalence of scientists between the two sciences, Official and eccentric, Statal and nomadic,
Major and minor, Institutional and alternative, is part and parcel of the dilemma raised by two ways
of doing science: as a physics of routes and paths, versus a physics of waves and flows. Here we find
the most fundamental of the differences between the two models of science. The former is, to the
present day, taken from the physics of Official Science, from a physics that reproduces nature, that
represents it with symbolical measures, and that is eventually satisfied with measuring the abstract
probability of various approximations; whereas, the latter finds its model in a physics of continua, of
their internal rhythms, of their intrinsic measures, of the wave properties of all particles, be they iner-
tial or noninertial.
This ambivalence is, as Deleuze and Guattari pertinently indicate, also a political ambivalence, and
a political problem, just as it is a problem of science; it is the political problem intrinsic to science.
Husserls work in protogeometry serves as another example, on which they comment that, here,
we find a very accurate appreciation of the irreducibility of nomad science, but simultaneously the concern of a man of
the State, or one who sides with the State, to maintain a legislative and constituent primacy for royal science. Whenever
this primacy is taken for granted, nomad science is portrayed as a pre-scientific or para-scientific or subscientific agency.
[19]
When nomad science is absorbed by the State, when it becomes a part of Official Science, then it
becomes a protoscience - atomism and alchemy as the proto-sciences of chemistry, for example. But
when nomad science is part of a war machine, when it stands aside and irrespective of any State, when
it is pursued as eccentric, independent and self-sufficient, then it is classified by Official Science as a
pseudoscience. It is now an enemy of the State, a science having all the attributes (pre-science, sub-
science, para-science) of the simulation of science (note that all science is simulation, simulation of
nature) but lacking a representation that could be socially sanctioned, that could be recognized by insti-
tutional science.
Official Science has therefore a dilatory relationship with eccentric, minor science. What eccentric
science Official Science is unable or unwilling to import, it also cannot comprehend, throwing against
that eccentric science all it has - from sheer ignorance or silence on the matter, to tantrums and anath-
emas worthy of the old Catholic Inquisition, to outright suppression and expropriation of the scien-
tists means to carry on research. Nowadays, the control by Official science over science itself can be
exerted far more smoothly than ever, with the consensuses engendered by technobureaucrats
ensconced in peerdom systems and a media-based popularization of science that guarantees instant
recognition and engineered mass-support and capitalization.
Official Science has a fundamental inability to understand what makes science eccentric - an inca-
pacity to grasp the insights and processual treatments characteristic of eccentric science, and an inca-
pacity to appreciate the systematic approach to science that characterizes the treatment of science that
one calls eccentric. It always reduces nomad science to engineering, to technology, or explains away

20
its most critical findings. In essence, it refuses to recognize that -
nomad science is not a simple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the problem of these relations
[between science and technology] is brought out and resolved in an entirely different way than from the point of view of
royal science. [19]
There is a resistance to studying the difference between the two different treatments of science; a resis-
tance to learning a different treatment, to learning a practice of science that questions so-called estab-
lished notions or dogmas and what appears to our senses. It is an organized resistance, socially and
politically organized, but no less intrinsic to the fabric of Official Science. It is, at bottom, a resis-
tance to admitting that there is a different way of treating problems, of posing problems, of doing sci-
ence, a different approach to cognition, and a more adequate one at that. It is the resistance of a cer-
tain form of power, of its systems and mechanisms (science included), that were and are organized to
prevent human beings from acquiring adequate ideas of nature, its processes and its beings. Its an
irrational resistance that can be rationalized with religious or rationalist justifications. It is the ulti-
mate buttress of all stupidity. It is in this sense that one may well speak of a properly scientific armor
against realizing what is the nature of Nature.
5. The second ambivalence: an incomplete mathesis of energy and treatment of Space

Perhaps the great source of ambivalence between the problems of an eccentric science and the theo-
rems of Official Science, for all those philosophers and thinkers that got caught between the two sci-
ences, the two kinds of science or two ways of doing science, is the relation of movement and sub-
stance (or energy, more adequately speaking) to the most fundamental properties of perception, the
ontological properties of Space and Time.
This problem is already present in Democritus: if everywhere and in everything there are swirls of
particles of matter, they must occupy something, that something being space; hence space must be
empty, must be said to be and thought of as being empty, so that it can be occupied. Thus space
acquires the physical statute of no-thing, not-Being or emptiness, and is that which alone is contin-
uous (matter is fragmented into discontinuous atoms). Space can only serve to invoke a place, an
empty place, a place that requires the empty, the vacuum. In Physics, 208b, Aristotle defines
emptiness, the vacuum, as that which gives existence to place, to the concept of a place, as the pri-
vate space of a body. Space is a receptacle for matter, a form to be filled with matter.
Leucippus frames the problem that constituted the great dilemma of Greek philosophy in a manner
that forecloses understanding of what Space is (what it consists of ), just as it precludes an under-
standing of multiplicity and its unity - and thus, from our perspective, misses the nature of Aether as
plenum. Leucippus says (following what Bertrand Russell wrote in his History of Occidental
Philosophy, chapter IX on The Atomists) that the vacuum is non-Being, so that which is, in the nar-
rowest sense, must be an absolute plenum; yet, this plenum is not One, but an infinite multiple,
because from the true One no multiple could have come. The true One could not be the source

21
of the multiple because a perfect One could never be other than self-same identical and thus not sub-
ject to change or movement. What exists is multiple because it forms not a true One (a
Parmenidean One) but a motion in a vacuum. Without the vacuum there is no space for that motion,
no space for Matter to occupy and move through. Effectively, to expel from the philosophy of nature
the metaphysics of the true One, Leucippus introduces the notion of a vacuum which can only be
thought if we think its form as that of an empty abstract Space. The multiple is then that which exists
in a vacuum, while the latter that which permits the assignment of place. Here one finds the begin-
ning of what will be a lasting derangement for both the science of physics and the philosophy of
nature.
This problem returns as a refrain - and a new divide separating Descartes, Newton and Leibniz.
Descartes, here too, introduced a principle of eccentric science only to cast a damnation over its func-
tional(ist) utilization by invoking what became the basis of all materialisms, mechanical, dialectical
and atomistic. Descartes argues that there is no action at a distance, that all action involves conti-
guity, proximity, continuity, and thus some form of transmission. But then, since in a dualist phi-
losophy, Space or extension is merely the essence of Matter, it necessarily follows that Space is only
adjectival, not substantive; it is Matter that is a substance, not Space. There can be no empty Space,
says Descartes (thus differing from Leucipus on this), because Space is everywhere filled with Matter,
coarse or fine be it.
Conversely, Newton proposes that a relative concept of motion can only describe an appearance, an
objective appearance that can only be overcome if absolute motion may be determined in an absolute
space. Relative motion is always the subject of an equivalence - as between saying that the Sun moves
around the Earth or the Earth around the Sun. But action-at-a-distance requires an absolute space
that conveys the action without any invocation of the contiguity of a plenum, or of its true oneness,
or of a Space everywhere filled with Matter. Space, for Newton, is substantive, has a substantive being
(the form of the vacuum) and serves as absolute reference for motion.
Leibniz instead holds that neither Matter nor Space are substances, nor is there any corporeal sub-
stance just made up of extension and magnitude, as he says in First Truths. He agrees with
Spinoza in reproaching Descartes for having ill-defined Matter by the concept of extension, and
states that an infinite extension is merely imaginary. But Time and Space - he says in his (Inedit)
Refutation of Spinoza - are the orders of things, not things themselves. So, what does he mean by
order of things? Which order is Spaces? The answer he gives has at least a dual aspect: that exten-
sion is repetition of successive continua (extension est repetitio continua successiva), and that exten-
sion is always relative to something which must extend or spread out. Space for Leibniz, then, is
the order of things in extension and relative to something that is extensible. Where, then, does this
differ from Descartes? Did Descartes not conceive of extension as a seamless property of something,
Matter (no matter how fine), that is extensible? This is where the commentators of Leibniz most fre-
quently equivocate - and leave Leibnizs answer flitting in the wind. The answer is simply that
Leibniz refused both the Cartesian notion of a Space filled with Matter, and the Atomist notion of a

22
vacuum that permits the definition of an abstract Space. The something that expands was not Matter,
but a plenum that was extensible and of which Space was a property. The plenum was a continuum
of something extensible, what made spaces continuous, what created Space. Space was neither
absolute nor empty or infinite, and the vacuum did not exist. The question that remains, then, is
what is the substance of this plenum. To this, article 47 of Monadology answers that God alone is
the simple substance, the primitive Monad, the primitive unity, or the simple originary substance, all
the created or derived Monads being its productions. The something that expands to create Space
was God (or call it Aether), the simple substance which creates all the compound substances, all the
derived monads, all the acting multiplicities (only God and the derived monads are substances, the
One and its multiplicities, both substantive) and the system of their relations. Thus Leibnizs con-
cept of extension approaches Spinozas concept of extensivity as a property of God (see above).
Russell gives the victory in the three-way confrontation to Leibniz for having argued that Space was
only a system of relations in extensio, and cites Einsteins theory as the proof. But Einsteins theory(-
ies) either invokes contiguity of light fibers in empty space and appears to be cartesian (Special
Relativity), or instead (General Relativity) invokes a physical property of Space (elastic deformation)
or Spacetime that permits gravitational transmission and requires no motion. Thus the General
Theory rejoins Newtons substantivalism, with the difference that the Einsteinian Space interacts with
Matter. At the end of the day, the relations which Einstein chose are merely elastic, not energy or
kinetic relations, or their product. A system of elastic and geometric relations requires neither Matter
nor motion, nor energy.
So the question now becomes - just what kind of relations is Space composed of as a system? To say
that it is a system of divine relations, that the relations are divine ones, is hardly an illuminating
answer...
Leibniz could not be said to have won the contest; not yet and not really. For, if the relations which
Space systematizes are effectively relationships of energy, then the concept of elastic deformation
becomes nothing more than a metaphor for energy flux, energy order and conversion processes.
Moreover, it suffices to read Leibnizs contention in light of Humes theory of relations to immedi-
ately realize that Space is a property of energy, a form of energy relation distinct from the terms, from
any two bodies of Matter; that energy is the substance of Space, just as it is the substance of Matter,
and thus that Space - conceptually and perceptually - is at once the product of an energy relation and
a systematic or inherent form of expression of the energy relation. But Leibniz did not have the con-
cept of energy at his disposal (he actually enunciated it correctly for the energy of motion of a body,
but called it living force); and the query as to what is the simple substance was not one that could
be answered with metaphysics, or settled by pure nominalism (call it God or Aether). The energy
nature of the relation was far from apparent, and Space might be an order to things and yet those
things hardly appear to be something other than Matter simply because of calls them God - unless
things other than Matter are also considered to be as physical (not metaphysical) as Matter, and yet
not-Matter.

23
The question of the nature of Space haunts the very language of the physicist - not just the spoken
language (the semantics) that he uses, but the language of physical mathematics that he adopts. A
treatment of physics that solely relied on the concept of force could never articulate Space as a gen-
eral property of energy.
Reichs solution fares little better - as he must also take the ontological category of Space for granted,
as being a given, but a given now full of energy (Nequaqum vacuum):
It must be decided whether nature is an empty space with a few widely scattered specks [of Matter] or whether it is a
space full of cosmic primordial energy, a continuum that functions dynamically (...) [20]
But it is not a question that can be decided with a simple decision, or fiat. Precisely, the problem of
a definition and just conception of Space had failed to find the proper positioning which would per-
mit one to make that choice or determination, ie would permit finding a good or adequate solution.
Space can only be said to be full or empty for as long as it remains an abstract form, an ontological
category in our minds. Then it must be filled or emptied with Matter, at will or need, instead of being
grasped as a physical and general property of energy. To wit, observe how Serres, Deleuze and
Guattari further miss this realization - Space for them remains an ontological category, and the only
question that the differentiation between two distinct ways of doing and thinking science raises, con-
cerns the relationship between flows and Space, between movement of Matter and Space:
[The difference between an eccentric science and Official Science] is the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projec-
tive, or topological) space and a striated (metric) space: in the first case space is occupied without being counted, and in
the second case space is counted in order to be occupied . [21]
If one keeps solely to the notion of fundamental particles of Matter, wherein each particle cannot at
the same time occupy the same space as any other particle (Paulis exclusion principle), then all met-
ric space is arbitrary, striated, defined solely by exteriority of material things with respect to one
another, and by extension (not extensivity), and thus the contiguity of space itself (and with things
immersed in it) requires that we must think space as being empty. If it is empty and the metric is
arbitrary and striated, then smoothness can lie only in the action of these particles of Matter, in their
vectorial motion and its projective characteristics. The crux of the matter is that this space is only an
abstract space, a reconstructed, idealized space of understanding - a certain physical understanding,
one dominated by topological relations; not one based on energy, but on a certain geometric descrip-
tion of the relations of place, or emplacement. It is as imaginary as the absolute Space of Newton.
It is not the Space of energy, nor the Space that really serves as an order of things. It is not the Space
where things happen, or of something that happens. It seems to us that topology should have to
become more like morphogenesis, if it were to acquire dynamic properties and escape metric (or
metricized) spaces. The plastic deformation of modern topological theories of space, viz Relativity, is
no less subordinate to a metric - be it one of intervals, even unmeasurable ones; and this hardly suf-
fices to satisfy the criteria of an eccentric science.
Can space be occupied without being counted when and if nature speaks a language of numbers and

24
their relations? This question can perhaps faster contribute to adequately posing the problem of an
eccentric science and its specific treatment of Space.
The problem can be summarized in various ways - it is a problem of whether Space itself, as an
abstract category or concept, has effectively any concrete existence in the form of an abstract space; it
is also a problem of the measurement of Space and Time - to the extent that vectorial, projective or
topological spaces are entirely subject - in their form and their measurement - to an external metric,
an exo-reference, a ruler that is no less external and arbitrary if it is deformed or deformable. The
problem is also inherent and analogous to Descartes failure to find the general algebraic language of
physics - since geometry results from the internal properties of bodies and the systems they compose,
and a geometrized algebra can only approximate these internal properties from without, by recourse
to an abstract extension, by employment of an external measure, by geometric representation. Some
other form of algebra would be needed in order to speak with the intrinsic properties of things and
processes.
But the problem has thereby become complex, as it is bound up with the logical and analytical treat-
ment of multiplicities and the articulation of differences in quantity and quality. Vectorial, projective
and topological spaces can be no less striated, no less metric, than static metric spaces. Space remains
an unquestioned ontological reality, an unquestioned given, and this state of affairs is buttressed by
the abstraction of Time from this space, and the factual exteriority of all elements of Matter. Even
when space is said to be full, it is still treated as the same ontological and sensible given, still unques-
tioned as an abstraction, as if it were an apriori form of perception and understanding. Deleuze and
Guattari sensed this problem when they spoke of an eccentric or minor science being one that devel-
ops rhythms, motion that is measured but by cadences, by internal or intrinsic measures, not by met-
ric measures. The argument should not slip into semantics, not even musicological semantics. But
cadences are endo-referenced or intrinsic measures that do not rectify fluctuations, they are an exam-
ple of metrics without striation. Indeed, the question of metrics has been improperly understood -
as if it eccentric were that which is uncertain or foggy, or unmetrical, and that which was metric had
to be static and well-defined.
The problem is that this empty and abstract space so unquestioningly accepted by Official Science
and by philosophy is not real, is not a physical space, is not a concrete reality or scientific concept. It
is, rather, a royal metaphor of Space, a royal space - the royal space of all physics which has not suc-
ceeded in becoming a physics of energy. Reich came very near the resolution of the problem when
he proposed that a dynamic Aether was massfree, ie composed of imponderable and non-inertial par-
ticles (the atomistic principle is transferred to a substance distinct from that of Matter, to become ver-
ily monadological). But Reich failed to take the next set of steps: since massfree energy is not sub-
ject to Paulis principle of spatial exclusion, massfree energy units or particles may occupy the same
abstract space at the same abstract instant of Time. Hence there is a continuum - not one of Matter
(an impossibility, since Matter exists only in the form of external and weighty atoms), nor one of
Matter and empty space (back to Democritus), but one of massfree energy. The abstract space one
speaks of is simply the sum of all the juxtaposed (in contiguity, and thus externality) and superim-

25
posed (in spatial coincidence) Spaces (or space-functions) of these massfree energy units, whether in
and through the particles of Matter, or in and through what appears to our senses as an abstract space
that seems empty. To get to this new plateau of expression and understanding, one (or Reich) would
have to demonstrate how each energy unit (each monad) already constitutes a physical, concrete
Space, a discrete Space, a discrete quantity of Space; how this is even true of the discrete mass-energy
structure of all particles of Matter - that they too, each on its own, constitute(s) a Space, an inertial
Space, and one that is limited by exteriority and contiguous (noncoincident) association. Finally, one
would have to demonstrate and identify the functions that permit the melding and separation of
those massfree-energy units that generates the appearance of an abstract space - and even more extra-
ordinarily, the melding of massfree energy that permits the constitution of all particles of Matter itself.
Space in abstract appears seamless because perfect contiguity and coincidence are properties of mass-
free energy, properties inherent to its Space-property. If there is a single continuum to nature, it is
the continuum of massfree energy, of its contiguous and melded Spaces, of its universal synchronisms.
The Aether, indeed, is neither inertial, as if at rest in a substantival Space, nor is it identifiable with
any substantival Space. Concrete space is a volume, the volume of a fluid of massfree energy, with
different densities of massfree energy existing in the same volume, with different degrees of energy
superimposition, never constant, but always finite for every beat of universal Time.
This, we think, is the real crux of the problem of an eccentric science, the problem growing in defi-
nition across different epochs: the inability to relate Matter and Space adequately because of a lack of
an adequate concept of energy, one that included an understanding of energy in its primary state,
which is, after all, massfree, and an understanding that Space such as we perceive it (a complex of
superimposed Spaces or Space-functions) is itself a product of energy. A resolution of this critical
problem requires that one would come to realize that energy could be so subtle as to not be Matter,
while being neither anti-Matter, nor non-Being. So subtle as to be the source of all motion of Matter,
even the internal source of the energy of Matter itself, Matter being nothing but that melding of mass-
free energy that generates inertia (it is in this sense that massfree energy is the virtuality of Matter, so
Anaxagoras cosmology is incorrect, and still a mere artifice for distinguishing chaos from cosmos).
To bring eccentric science to the realization of an adequate emplacement of the problem is no mean
feat - one is indeed constrained to identify that language of nature that employs self-referenced num-
ber relations, that employs metric relationships which are endo-referenced for each body in each rela-
tion or interaction, those singular numbers that are intrinsic to events. It is not because it is metric
that science is Official or Royal. It is because Official Science only recognizes metrics based on exter-
nal arbitrary measures, not the metrics intrinsic to a structure or a process. Vectorial, projective or
topological spaces can be no less striated than metric spaces - it all depends on the rectifications, the
corrections, the normalizations imported to generate a metric, even if it be a plastic or deformable
one. But none of these spaces are the Spaces of energy, or a Space function of energy. Which, in a
way, brings us back to the problem of Hume: the relation must be thought as distinct, independent
and external to the terms; but there is also more to the relation: space between the terms, between
the bodies, must be thought as a relation between the terms or elements, external to them and the
source of a sensory datum; but this space is only as thought seizes it in the abstract, so as to permit

26
one to speak of a perception of space which already subtends the abstract concept. The sensory
datum is first fabricated by that abstract notion, the order of things, the relationship between things
in extension. The moment, however, one speaks of the extensivity of things, of the way Matter par-
takes of Space (and if it didnt, nothing should prevent two elements of Matter from occupying the
same abstract space at the same time), one is no longer talking about a relation external to things but
about Space as it is intrinsic to things, thus raising the problem of what else Space is intrinsic to. For
things does not exhaust the complement of all possible elements of a relation; not all terms or ele-
ments are things. In other words, one is now referring to a relation which is intrinsic to things, con-
stitutive of things, and intrinsic to elements or terms other than things, constitutive of them. Hence,
there are relations that are external to the terms and there are relations that are constitutive of the
terms, intrinsic to them, such that a term is already a relation between other terms, and a relation a
term to other relations, an element of other relations. This is what Hume missed. And this is what
must be thought through without falling prey to dialectics (since terms are not things, not objects).
The Space which is a relation intrinsic to energy is an energy function, the very function that makes
possible the organization of our senses, what permits to conclude to the existence of an abstract space
shared by all things, and on which distances can be measured. It is not space that is full of energy, it
is energy which is full of Space and thus permits the phenomenon of our abstract perception of space
and the volume of things.
6. The third ambivalence - a physics or a metaphysics of Time?

A still deeper characteristic of eccentric science is its constant reach to become a physics of Time.
This, too, ties in intimately to its Aether problem, to its search for a dynamic Aether, as well as its
own existence as a war machine, as a non-Statal model of science or an alternative model of science.
When Hans Reichenbach talked about this subject [22], he was already posing, even if inadequately,
the problem of a beyond Relativity - a line of thought that would go beyond Relativitys fragmenta-
tion and reduction of Time, a line that was eccentric. Against the causal theory of time, Reichenbach
levelled the argument that one cannot establish a causal priority or causal relation without already
knowing, or having defined, an order to Time, time priorities or even some form of spatiotemporal
relations. He proposes that a theory of Time has two fundamental notions that we must distinguish:
the order of time and the direction of time. The first is a matter of causality, and the second, well,
either a matter of entropy (following Ludwig Boltzmanns proposal that the direction of Time is only
specified by energetically or thermodynamically irreversible processes), or a matter of arbitrary choice
between equivalent coordinative definitions. But to argue, as Reichenbach tried to, that the direc-
tion in time physically depends on entropy increasing or decreasing, and that simultaneity is a mat-
ter of coordinative definition, may not really be what is needed for the efflorescence of an eccentric
theory of Time.
Lets take the question of simultaneity first. We have no problem with Special Relativitys contention
that only local coincidence or noncoincidence of events can in principle be observed. And if all ener-
gy is considered to be electromagnetic, and its velocity of propagation is finite and fixed, then one

27
would also have no problem with asserting, as Reichenbach did, that the relativity of simultaneity is
independent from the relativity of motion, from the relativity of observers - it is just not independent
from the velocity of causal propagation. So, Reichenbach admits that it is indeed possible to con-
struct a consistent theory of an absolute simultaneity - even if he thinks this to be wrong - but it is
only possible because he takes the order of Time to be specified by the entropy vector.
The reader may already discern where we are going with this - in a direction very much put into evi-
dence by the excellent texts of Lawrence Sklar: that, with respect to causation, science should rather
adopt a spatiotemporal theory of cause, one closer to the premises of Hume, and one which, at the
very least, understands that epistemically, establishing the existence of the spatiotemporal relations is
antecedent to establishing the existence of even actual causal relations [23]. But, in summary fashion,
we shall go substantially beyond what Sklar considered. We shall take his fear of overstringent con-
straints to the maximum, because we shall propose that this antecedence of the spatiotemporal rela-
tion, as well as the foundation for a spatiotemporal continuum, are properties of energy, the energy
properties of that continuum, the intrinsic relation of the continuum. The direction in Time has
nothing to do with reversible or irreversible processes, anymore than it has to do with choices of coor-
dinative definitions for simultaneity, or with mistakes as to their interchangeability, or the false rela-
tivity (relationism) of observers that has now become fashionable. The direction in Time also has
nothing to do with whether velocities are relative or absolute, as if this meant finite or infinite accord-
ing to the magnitude of speed being involved. The direction of Time is the product of the motion of
energy, a consequence of the fact that energy is the substance of motion and a substance in motion.
Time has direction because all motion (and all transmission) takes time, finite time. Since energy is
neither created nor destroyed (it is the un-created), only converted or transferred, motion must be
perpetual - and thus the flux of Time must be eternal. That it takes time to propagate any signal,
electromagnetic or not, is a consequence of the fact that propagation is a motion and that all motion
takes time. This propagation does not need to have a limit, or a constant value, for motion to take
time. As long as it has a finite speed - rather than being instantaneous or its speed infinite (which are
metaphysical postulates) - it takes time.
Now, is this time that is taken always the same time, a universal Time, a single Time? That is where
the question of simultaneity comes in. For, locally, what is simultaneity? Locally, it has to be thought
of as the coincidence of two distinct events or fluxes. The most basic coincidence is that which keeps
a particle solidary with its wave - we should say with its waves, intrinsic and extrinsic. This most basic
coincidence is a relation intrinsic to energy. That is the coincidence which in Aetherometry is denot-
ed as the simultaneity of primary superimposition, one that is in fact immanent to the concept of ener-
gy and intrinsic to every energy unit, whatever its physical type: a unit of energy is always composed
by a particle and a phase wave, and by the conjunction of a group wave intrinsic to the particle with
that phase wave that is called extrinsic (aka the field wave). That conjunction is a synchronism, an
internal resonance to the event energy, a simultaneity denoted by synchronicity; it defines an ener-
gy unit as a self-consistent wave resonance, as a resonant synchronism of waves. That is the most local
of simultaneities, one defined for two waves or two wave functions. The generalization of simultaneity
from the most local to neighbouring and then distant spatiotemporal relations is the next level of the

28
problem. Here, too, one must point out how, in the case of massfree energy, energy units synchro-
nize by proximity and melding. Proximal synchronism of a plurality of units is in fact the basis for
the phenomenology of the field concept; the arrangement of energy units into pulsating lattices is
a consequence of resonant contiguity and, again, part of the field concept; and the melding of units,
within the same abstract or topological space, what we have termed secondary superimposition. The
local to distant relation, then, is embedded in the structure of energy and part of the same continu-
um of motion, or the ordered flow of energy. But one must equally point out that the proximal to
distant relationship is subject to the finite time of motion, and thus that every synchronism, every
energy resonance - primary, by contiguity or by melding - already presupposes a sequencing, a
diachronism, an event repetition (the infinite has bearing only on this repetition), precisely what
makes viable the identification of motion or the propagation of an effect. Simultaneity across dis-
tance results from resonant contiguity and resonant melding, and it is that which directly calls forth
the direction of Time as being that of an irreversible, diachronic, sequential order of simultaneities,
local and distant, involved in the synchronism of motion and the diachronicity of displacement and
propagation.
Causal order, therefore, is always order in Time. It should not be confused with the order of Time,
which is its physical direction. No causal order can therefore be ordered in Time so as to run con-
trary to the direction of Time, to the order of Time. It is here that the real distinction between a meta-
physics of Time and a physics of Time takes place. A metaphysics of Time is always a possible scien-
tific error. The plainest examples are the mainstream or accepted conventions of Newtonian action-
at-a-distance in classical Official Science, and the action-at-a-distance model of electromagnetism and
causation backward in time that characterizes the neo-relativistic thoughts of John Wheeler, Richard
Feynman, and current Official Science. Sklar might argue that one should consider these concepts
as scientific, but the simple scientific fact is that these are numerological and metaphysical concepts
of Time, of a spatialized Time whose order is arbitrarily postulated to obey any order of causation that
is supposed possible. Sklar himself has to admit to the implausability of the causal theory of time: it
is not the temporal that should be defined by the causal, but the causal whose existence is only made possi-
ble because of the temporal, because of that which modern science has so much trouble in admitting,
and makes so many efforts to ignore: the properties of Time - the microphysical reality of simultane-
ity, the contiguity of energy flux in propagation or motion (the real relativity of simultaneity as a func-
tion of a finite time for propagation of stimuli), the irreversible course of diachronicity, the eternity
or infinite duration of Time. All the absolutes that were never adequately distinguished, and then
were instead imagined to be mere consequences of states of motion, or of a geometric/topological
order to states of motion. If there is simultaneity, locally or at a distance, then simultaneous events
are such irrespective of observers and their states of motion. And Sklar certainly did a stupendous
job of pointing out the inconsistencies of the axiomatizations of Special Relativity in this respect.
However, as is obvious from a (micro-)functionalist perspective, the problem posed by an adequate

understanding of Time qua multiplicity on its own right is still, in essence, the same problem that
confronts any understanding of extensivity, Space and quantity, because both problems, that of Space
(or extensivity) and that of Time (or Simultaneity and Succession), are the indissociable problems of

29
a scientific theory of energy. Time, too, when thought as Universal, is a relation external to bodies
which, at the same time, is also a relation constitutive of those bodies, constitutive of the entire ener-
gy set of those bodies, constitutive of other elements, and thus intrinsic to energy. A thought of Time
- logical, ontological and even biological - obviously exists in eccentric thinkers such as Spinoza or
Bergson, outside of science, or aside from it. Nietzsche was perhaps the first to think in terms of a
physics of Time. Coherent biological or logical expressions, or concepts, of Time as Duration, finite
and infinite, have been possible without recourse to any effective physics of Time. But this does not
mean that these concepts may be consistent with that physics. As it happens with Bergsons
approach, his thought of Time is precisely inconsistent with a physics of Time that treats the latter as
a function of energy. In fact, paradoxically as it may seem, Bergson agrees with Einstein, when
Bergson consigned Time to the realm of metaphysics and psychology, both as simultaneity and as suc-
cession of instants, and left to Einstein everything else that could be spatialized, quantitated, mea-
sured, including the fictional time of Relativity - a spatialized Time.
What has for so long blocked physics from becoming a physics of Time? Certainly, Relativity is a
major obstacle on the way. But is it Relativity, or even Machian relationism, that are the real obsta-
cle?
It appears that the problem lies deeper; it lies where Deleuze actually thought it lay, but for the wrong
reasons - as we will now see: it lies in the distinction between manifolds, or multiplicities, for which
a concept of manifold or multiplicity is necessary. The concept of multiplicities that Deleuze pro-
posed, however, is not sufficient either for a theory of Time, a theory of Space, or for a physics of ener-
gy; in fact, it is only sufficient for metaphysics. Indeed, Deleuze does not so much overcome
Riemanns concept of a manifold or multiplicity as he adds to it, adds on the side the concept of
qualitative multiplicities which cannot be counted, and which encompass both Time as Duration
(Chronos), and Time as eternity (sub specie aeternitatis), or Aeon. Time would stand outside of any
possible grasp by science, and thus there would be no real physics of Time, only physics of spatialized
times - of times spatialized by a variety of possible metrics, of times already implicated in the work-
ings of actual or quantitative multiplicities (spatiotemporal states of affairs).
The deleuzian concept of two Times (one single and the other plural), of the dual nature of Time, is
based on Bergsons theory of the relationship between the present and the past - of the co-existence
of a chronological Time based on the diachronic succession of presents, and an immanent single,
undivided Time that insists with the depth of the past on every present. Pascal Chabot [24] speaks of
a Duration that is dual headed, of an experience of Time that comports two temporal jets, an actu-
al jet, psychological and successive, and a virtual jet, ontological and simultaneous, as if the expe-
rience of Time in any present was composed by an actual present and a virtual past, the latter unceas-
ingly drawing on the former, in the form of the experience of a present that does not cease to pass,
that is already past [25]. All would happen as if the manifold of Time contained both actual and vir-
tual multiplicities - something verily inconsistent that jumps to the eye when one contrasts it with the
manner in which Deleuze interpreted the manifold of Time (in Bergsons theory) as a virtual multi-
plicity composed by the simultaneity of two fluxes (or jets of Time) with respect to a third - the dura-

30
tion internal to something that lives and may observe or correlate events [26]. The flux of Time implied
for Bergson a triplicity of fluxes, not a duality. It is only with reference to the concept of simultane-
ity of temporal fluxes, that Bergson concludes to the existence of a single, universal Time for all sep-
arate fluxes of Time - a flux that cannot be divided, a flux that permits co-relation of events. Time
could only be divided into separate fluxes - that differ in nature - as and when the virtual multiplici-
ty of Time became embodied in actual spatiotemporal events or simultaneities. Thus, for Bergson,
Time is only a virtual multiplicity qua single, universal Time internal to all experiences of Duration,
there only being times (or separate timelines) when Time is seized by manifolds (or unfolded in the
form of a manifold). It was simultaneity that was double-headed - a simultaneity of all times in one
Time, in a single, virtual, infinite and universal Time, and the simultaneity of any two or more time-
lines in any present, each separate timeline or duration then having its own rhythm of passage.
Chabot also re-examined [27] the relationship between types of multiplicities in the thought of
Deleuze and Guattari. Beginning by distinguishing a multiplicity from a set or ensemble (a collec-
tion of elements having a common property [28]), by conceptualizing a multiplicity as a collection of
elements that have intrinsic connections, Chabot describes the two types of multiplicities in the deleu-
zo-guattarian system: actual multiplicities that can be divided without changing in nature, and vir-
tual multiplicities that cannot be divided without changing in nature. In fact, what Chabot means
to say is that the distinction is between actual multiplicities that can be divided without their intrin-
sic connections changing in nature, and virtual multiplicities that change in nature when their intrin-
sic connections are divided. Chabot gives as example of an actual multiplicity the number 10, as it
may be divided in any two parts that can recompose it (2*5 being the example that he gives). All
numerical magnitudes (grandeurs) or differences in degree of the same nature formed actual multi-
plicities. Conversely, virtual multiplicities are wholes that do not contain parts that are divisible ele-
ments [27]. As an example Chabot states that one must not say that 20 [of temperature] contains
10 as if 10 were half of 20; rather one should say that 20 envelops 10 [27]. Another example that
he gives of a virtual multiplicity are the relationships of speed, a given speed not being the sum of two
smaller ones. Indeed, in One Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari indicate that the two mul-
tiplicities stand for two different kinds of numbers - (1) numbers that measure magnitudes in order
to striate space (numbers that permit counting), and are divisible without changing their unit of mea-
surement [29], and numbers that change in nature and in their unit of measurement (they are differ-
entiated) each time they are divided [30]. We should note how far this presentation has already
moved away from Bergsons distinction between different types of multiplicities, where only actual
multiplicities were able to comport quantitative relations.
Chabot unnecessarily complicates matters by saying that numbers may either take recourse to a scale
or divide by differentiation. Yet, while certainly temperature and speed are differential numbers, they
may not be said to be numbers without scale, or even without a scale. The asymptotic behavior of
the speed of any particle of Matter at near-luminal speeds is shown by our work on Aetherometry to
be a superimposed energy effect (involving the superimposition of the self-energy of mass with the
field energy of the accelerating field) that protects the atomic and molecular integrity of Matter - pre-
cisely by limiting the absorption of field energy that becomes the kinetic energy of the particle of

31
Matter [31]. The entire asymptote - including the (near)proportional part of the curve - is the result
of the superimposition of two different physical processes with their own scales, one linear (for con-
version of field energy into kinetic energy) and the other exponential (for massfree field energy in
both electrical and thermal forms). Weve equally shown how the 1938 Ives and Stilwell experiment
[32] can be more exactly analyzed than is still possible today with the tools of Special Relativity, by
employing a consistent theory of the superimposition of waves to explain the observed Doppler shifts
and their differential elements.
Going further into the heart of the matter - into the core of the problem facing a science of energy -
we must say that the contrast between dimensionless numbers in sums, products or additions with
the same nondimensional unit of measurement (eg 10 of the same things), and numbers with a qual-
ified physical dimensionality - such as temperature and speed -, ie physical numbers, is not reducible
to the criterion that distinguishes multiplicities according to whether or not their division implies a
change in nature in the intrinsic connections of their elements or terms. Superimposed energy or
waves (or speeds), for instance, can be divided or separated into energy units or wavefunctions
(wavespeeds), respectively, without the dimensionality of the resulting, separate parts having to change
in nature (certainly not when the entire process is taken into account): the superimposition of two
waves results on a third wave (or on the superimposition of two third waves, to illustrate how the over-
all physical dimensionality does not change), just as the superimposition of distinct energy units
results in phase energy. Without in any way being an arithmetic addition, phase energy is a certain
way of summing up energy.
We have also demonstrated in our work on Aetherometry that temperature has the physical dimen-
sionality of length, and that, in the so-called absolute scale (the scale of temperature in degrees
Kelvin), it simply indexes multiples of the volumetric density of sensible heat in its kinetic and elec-
tromagnetic forms. Under STP conditions, the unit is provided by Boltzmanns constant [33]. In a
precise way (that of the superimposition of energy) and using the so-called scale of absolute temper-
ature, 20 is a certain sum of 10, of the addition into the same volume of space of two energy densi-
ties that, at the same pressure, each has the density corresponding to 10. So 20 may or may not be
divisible into 2*10, according, after all, to the scale one employs, provided the treatment of temper-
ature is energy-based (ie provided temperature is treated as an index of energy density).
If the entirety of the arguments and disagreements that we presented in the foregoing can be reduced
to the problem raised by possible distributions of numbers, then the difference is between numbers
distributed by addition, subtraction, division and multiplication - whether they are physical numbers
or are not treated as such - and numbers distributed by superimposition that appear to divide differ-
entially. Now, from an aetherometric perspective, the amusing part of the foregoing is that the dif-
ferent manifolds that Space and Time each compose on their own, are not differential manifolds (or
manifolds in a relationship of differential calculus), but superimposed manifolds, each having homo-
geneous physical dimensionalities also found in a relationship of superimposition. These relations
simply reflect the fact that Space and Time are merely the indissociable and commensurate manifold
properties of energy.

32
One of the most fundamental differences of Aetherometry towards the natural philosophy of Deleuze
and Guattari concerns precisely the treatment of multiplicities and its relation with the treatment of
the manifolds of Space and Time [34]. Remarkably, it is also a difference, and just as fundamental,
that Aetherometry has towards Relativity Theory (and not just Einsteins): the misunderstanding of
the difference between the manifolds of Space and Time, and the lopsided conceptualization of what
are multiplicities.
The problem of manifolds is all the more vexing as the concept of multiplicity is applied to each of
them. If we go back to Leibniz, whom Deleuze claims to follow in this respect, multiplicity is a con-
cept that applies as much to the Primitive Monad (God) as to the derived monads, as a multiplicity
of derived substances and a substance-multiplicity; only the multiplicity is substance, said only when
the multiple is substantive. A monad is a singular multiplicity. Now, in this very sense, Space is nei-
ther a multiplicity, nor a substance. To hold that it is a substance is, in a way, tantamount to think-
ing of it the way Descartes did - as if extension defined the essence of the corporeal substance, as if
space needed Matter in order to be defined as a substance. Furthermore, space is not treated by
Descartes as if it were a multiplicity. It is true that Spinoza treated extensivity as if it were an intrin-
sic property of bodies; he speaks of their extended substance - but then what he means is that one
of the modes of existence of substance is extensivity; he is not saying that Matter alone has substance
or is substance, nor that extension or space is a substance, nor still that it is a substance because of
Matter, no matter how hyperfine - but that it is in the nature of substance (so, now, read energy) to
have extensivity. So, neither abstract space as extension nor the extension of Matter constitute the
extensivity that is intrinsic to substance. Nor - to put the nail in the coffin of dualism - is space a
type of multiplicity, a multiplicity; it is neither a multiplicity when it is an abstract space - which is
only a way of mapping things; nor is it a multiplicity when it is Space, a concrete energy function.
Space constitutes a manifold because it is an attribute of energy. Space and Time are properties or
qualities of energy, are manifolds that synthesize a relation intrinsic to energy - a relation, a com-
mensurability, at once qualitative and quantitative. They are not multiplicities or types of multiplic-
ity - they are the extensive and intensive properties of energy, its fundamental modes of existence: ener-
gy in all of its manifestations exists in Space and in Time, insists with Space and with Time. It is ener-
gy which is extended, or better, extensible substance, volumetric substance, just as it is substance that
occurs and repeats, temporal substance. The extensions of an abstract space are a relation external to
bodies, locations, states of motion or energy fluxes; not so the extensivity and the volumetric rela-
tionships that constitute bodies, their states of motion or any and all energy fluxes. Energy alone is
substance - one as concept, multiple in form, expressed by change and the essence of all substances,
of all acting existents, of all monads, of all multiplicities; thus energy alone is the multiplicity. Thus
energy alone has substance. Space and Time are not substances or multiplicities - they are the man-
ifolds of energy, they are some of the elements intrinsic to energy as a relation, a relation of produc-
tion or superimposition. Space and Time are at once energy functions and the products of energy, of
its flux.
It is in this context that the difference between Aetherometry and Deleuzes thought is at its sharpest

33
and most irreducible tension. The difference is already apparent when we take as reference Deleuzes
structuralist period (before the creative encounters with Guattari took place), expressed as he did
during the defence of his doctoral thesis [35]: there, while stating that his objective is to address the
real spatiotemporal co-ordinates of the concept of multiplicity as substance, he introduces the
notion of virtual multiplicities that serve as the condition of experience by enveloping pure inten-
sities within a depth, within an intensive spatium that pre-exists as much every quality as it pre-exists
every extension - with this depth being but the potentiality [puissance] of a a pure unextended
[intendu] spatium. All happens as if, unlike the extended and extensible space of actual multi-
plicities, virtual multiplicities deployed an intensive space. Yet, whether in processes of biological
differentiation or in the simplest energy conversion, the potentiality of a resulting space - be it the
volumetric deployment of the converted energy or the volumetric, extensible form (morphology) of the
differentiated cells or tissues, etc - is not a design that exists in some unextended space before it is
incarnated into a concrete space, but just a possibility already encoded, in the case of simple energy
conversion, in an actual space (the space-function of the energy before conversion), and in the case of
biological processes in the actual spatial order or configuration of a group of activated genes (or, bet-
ter, cistrons) and their sequences, together with the spatial arrangement of the biological energy which
these genes may actually be able to mobilize in a cell or tissue. There is no pure unextended spatium
that only virtually exists in a DNA sequence, in a gene to speak loosely, and which only becomes
extensible by its translation into a process of differentiation or actualization. All conversions, differ-
entiations and transformations are processes involving conversion of actual energy, are conversions of
superimposed, co-ordinated Space and Time functions. Potentialities are not extra-energetic cate-
gories, and all virtualities are only potentialities of energy conversion processes encoded by actual
states of energy flux.
What was necessary for a physics of Time was (and is) a complex demonstration. It began by pre-
senting Space and Time as two types of manifolds (two series of number-relations), but not because
Space would be the domain of quantitative multiplicities, and Time the domain of qualitative mul-
tiplicities. Instead, both manifolds had to be conceived as different in kind or quality, but such that
both constituted at once, and commensurately, quantitative and qualitative relations. Simply put,
Space and Time had to be conceived as strict properties of energy, of the energy-concept or energy man-
ifestation. But to find Space and Time as properties of energy one also had to realize that Time is no
more a single line, an autistic frequency, a mere timeline, than it is reducible to Space. It is a man-
ifold because it is always produced by a minimum, local, very local, simultaneity of fluxes, of waves, a
resonant coincidence; it is always at least two fluxes, a multiplicity of two terms called synchronici-
ty, and one that only knows synchronization by relation to a third and an nth flux, through the phase
beat of the so-called quantum zwitterbewegung, as our dear friend Harold Aspden has proposed and
is fond of saying. The universality of Time, that which in the Newtonian world misleads us to think
of a single and separate line - a single timeline - is merely a gross representation of the synchronicity
of flows with regard to events, their permanent creation and their diachronic order. There is an
Absolute, Universal and Single Time, a single manifold of synchronous and diachronic properties,
and it is the expression of the singular energetic nature of the entire cosmos, of its profound unity of
function; thats how all is one. Indeed, in the aetherometric treatment of Time as a manifold of

34
timelines and an energy-function, it is already apparent that the times involved are not simply inter-
vals of Time that are made resonant, synchronized or are factually simultaneous. In their quality of
distinct and separate dimensions, they are already co-ordinated and commensurate frequencies,
deploying as much a property of simultaneity (the coherent interval of Time) as the property of a
diachronic beat (the coherent deployment of Time) that lies beyond any present and stretches as
much into the past as into any future [36]. Lastly, as our own research in Aetherometry attests, such
a demonstration would have to pass by the discovery of massfree energy as the real dynamic Aether,
and the understanding of how Matter is composed solely of particular Space and Time arrangements
of this Aether.
But enunciating a consistent and viable theory of Time and Aether, a theory that worked, would be
tantamount to being able to draw a map of the conjunction of all eccentric contributions to science!
For it would be the trail of eccentric science made to come to consciousness, as a science defined by
its method, a micro-functionalist method, that managed to extract concrete energy functions and ade-
quate concepts for Space and Time, without reducing one to the other, while demonstrating the dif-
ference between their intrinsic measures, and determining exactly their quantitative commensurability.
As Hume proposes it [37], one discovers space by the disposition of visible and tangible objects, by the
senses of sight and touch, and one discovers time in the perceptible succession or diachronicity of
changes in objects, in their motion, in their states of motion. But the space that our sense discovers
is not necessarily homogenous, independently of its obstacles or contours; it is a concrete volume of
energy, occupied by energy in varying densities and phases of superimposition, and it is the concrete
(felt) volume of all these volumes where motion (the motion of something) occurs (takes place, so
to speak). Just as the time of our motions or the sound we hear, is the Time of an internal beat, con-
stitutes a metric of Time internal to those motions, at whatever finite but absolute speed they occur.
At last, then, eccentric science would reveal, or have to reveal, its map of relations as the pursuit of
the functionalism of the finest, the subtlest, the most minor, imponderable, lightest or smallest pos-
sible, in thought and in science. So it is here, in the problem of manifolds and the finest possible per-
ception that eccentric science should be situated as an understanding that seeks the micrological func-
tions of energy and the physical nature of all spatiotemporal relations.
One by one, the ambivalences surface as so many ghostly obstacles on the only ethical path there is
to knowledge, that of eccentric science. The ambivalences excuse themselves by turning Ockhams
razor on its head - against science as congruent knowledge, not in its favor and with strict respect to
its method:
In any scientific revolution, in which many antecedently-held propositions are to be rejected as false, there seems to be
a principle of scientific conservatism, a principle that tells that as many as possible of the propositions previously held are
to be retained in the new theory. (...) The more fundamental the proposition to the previous physics, the greater the desire
to hold it intact. [38]
Sklar has reformulated what Thomas Kuhn himself had already identified as the ultimate source of
a properly-speaking scientific resistance to admitting new facts and the totality of their conse-

35
quences. It is as if Ockhams razor had two different discrete zones of applicability: to the analysis of
scientific data, and to the fit of a new discovery with respect to the overall tissue or fabric of science,
read of Official Science. A new discovery comes or breaks through when the razor is applied to the
data and the new variable is legitimized. But the impact it is allowed to have is (read for is, a moral-
istic and nonethical should be) inversely proportional to how fundamental or basic is its nature or
character, just so that the propositions - theorems and axioms - of Official Science be minimally dis-
rupted. In other words, this second sense is about power, about a certain form and expression of
power, about Potestas - it is not about science or the ethics of knowledge.
All the ambivalences permeating science, eccentric science, with respect to Space and number, Time
and manifolds, energy functions, etc, are at bottom concessions made by eccentric science to Royal
or mainstream science, to the royal power of Official Science. Concessions made with respect to the
potential impact of each and any discovery because of the insufficiency of thought or technique, or
because of political and military considerations. But Ockhams razor is part of the scientific method,
not a necessary part of the epistemological tissue of science designed to limit impact, nor a required
part of regulated competition in peer associations and through peer-review. It is not an excuse for
conservatism, as Sklar calls it, or suppression - one that somehow is no longer a razor when it comes
to the election of causal theories of Time to fill a dominant, mainstream, official role. This is a per-
version of an overextended logic of the razor itself. A minimized impact is one that never explores the
maximum impact, and so fails to test at least one of the limits of the system or relation that it preserves
or wants to preserve.
Discoveries in basic physics are precisely changes that propagate consistently to rectify a multiplicity
of concepts and functions. For a system that corrects by the minimum and must invoke uncertainty
of the unknown, or worse, an unknowable by definition (as by definition of a fundamental uncertain-
ty), to define and produce such a minimum certainly and unwittingly becomes a way to accumulate
systemic errors, far faster than in a system that computes by the known a maximum of possible changes,
and focuses on the periphery to extend its certainty or decrease that unknown by testing that maximum.
These are two different strategies for two different practices of science.
So, yes, the ambivalences are part of a properly scientific problem, for the reason that this problem is
the political problem of an unfinished war, an unfinished combat for the enunciation of a consistent
scientific theory of energy - one that does not succumb to the mechanisms of Royal Science, nor to
mysticism and metaphysics.
7. The problem of functional thought:

the ethics of knowledge and the aesthetics of art and of science
Religious mysticism and, later on, the mechanism of the New Official Science overcame primitive
animism. With the dualist mindset, even with the dualism that includes mutual causation between
body and soul (as in false parallelism), there is an assumed mysticism of affect, a transcendentalism
of sentiments or an autonomy of passions. What is felt (senti) by a body is already what is resent-

36
ed (re-senti) by it - the trace of the sensation or of the feeling, the prolongation of an emotion but
caught in a system of reaction that inverts the perceived and estranges the felt. A veil descends upon
feeling, perceiving and thinking. Reich speaks of a filter imposed upon organ-sensations by the cul-
tural structure of mystical man, a filter that was not present in animist cultures, in cultures without
a State. The imaginary takes over the animist representation, and provides no end of fantastic and
humanizing forms that distort perception. Perhaps the most critical factor is the dulling of percep-
tion, of sense-perception [39]. Reich speaks of a transference of organ sensations and their perception
into a realm of pathological perception of supernatural powers, a superposed world of representa-
tion of sense-perception. It is the reign of superstition, fed by magnified fears, by repression and dis-
tortion of organ-sensations and perception, with the strength of an imaginary condensed in the form
of religion - and in modernity, marketed daily by mass-media.
Spinoza speaks of a society where men are brought together by their passive affects, by their sad pas-
sions or sentiments - a culture of beings unable to form adequate notions, ie ideas having a non-rep-
resentational and expressive content, accurate ideas. Reich also underlines the fact that the break
introduced by the formal emancipation of the New Official Science, its mechanistic bend, is an aspect
of the same mystical character, a continuation of it. Ghosts and phantoms, superstition and imagi-
nation, return in full force with mechanism, with the ideology of mechanics - with mechanicism. It
is not just that mechanism leaves the religious question outside of the realm of science; it is that it
orders the world through static categories, also representing it as a shadow world where mystical
action at a distance occurs, or Platonic numbers and geometric forms alone have existence, or the
order and direction of time depend upon entropy and causation, etc. A static mechanics is often
attributed to Archimedes, whereas a dynamic one, a science of kinematics, is mostly attributed to
Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. Reich describes Kepler as an animist who sensed an animal force
at work in planetary orbits. But Archimedean mechanics is based on displacement problems, it is also
dynamic and not reducible to the simple lever; moreover, the simple introduction of motion is no
longer sufficient for being anathemized by Official Science - for the question that ultimately matters
in this regard is: which motion? Striated motion along straight lines, light rays or rehabilitated geo-
desics, motion that counts Space in order to occupy it - or vortical motion, wave motion, motion with
intrinsic measures, that occupies Space as it generates it, in the strictest of senses? What view of
dynamics is Royal, and what eccentric? The mechanistic representation of organ-sensations and
sense-perception, is no more or less distorting than the mystical projections of religious despotisms.
Mechanists remain attached to a form of irrationalism that obliges them to consider only machines
that increase their disorder by increasing their entropy, mechanical machines; or only systems that
involve mass-energy, seating all motion always and only in massbound particles (an old criticism
already made by Nietzsche [40]); or only systems of Matter, where the living is absent or has been
fixed, killed, made inert and inanimate like Matter. Even when they study the living, or consider
open systems such as autopoietic machines, most scientists rarely seize these systems other than
mechanically, never from a bioenergetic perspective, as energy systems or energy machines - not
mechanisms.
Dualism legated to us the soul as metaphysical essence and the body as a mechanism. But this divi-

37
sion is already a distortion of the real parallelism, the fact that the soul and the body have common
functioning principle: massfree energy, the energy responsible for all kinetic states of Matter, living or
nonliving, whether as latent energy, as Tesla radiation, or as sensible heat or electromagnetic energy.
The same dualism that hides the principle of all motion, that staticizes motion, also hides the relation
of thought and emotions to states of the soul and the body. In the animal state, action is a character-
istic of instinct, and all reactions, including those of awareness and a biological memory, are subject
to instinct. With animism, society worked on man to extract a system of reaction forces, conscious-
ness, that could be activated outside and beyond instinct, beyond the animal nature of man, by the
activity of culture itself and the memory of words, the language, that culture made possible. But then
this activity is denatured by the emergence of State societies; the active forces cease to be capable of
leading, dominating, ruling or commanding preconscious and conscious forces. Nietzsche says that
reactive forces can always manage to subtract themselves from the command of the active forces, but
they need to control culture to make this subtraction into a rule. It is the alliance of reactive forces
in despotic culture that permits their damming of active forces. It is now an image of a reactive force
that appears to signal the noble and the high in an inverted culture, and appears to command all
forces. The passions of savages traversed both sadness and joy - and their way of being in the world
was too close to animal instinct to permit such erosion of active forces, including the activity of the
culture they had invented. Only the bureaucratic, sedentarian revolution could have created human
beings who would be willing to let go of their fundamental freedom along with the unconscious activ-
ity of culture. Hence, the animist ideas of savages are closer to the movement and essence of things
and organs, their sensations and perceptions, than are the mystical phantasmagoric notions held by
peoples tyrannized by despotism. Savages desire differently, think differently, than the subjects of a
State do. Both kinds of human beings are led by passion to do something as a function of their own
idea of object - which is what desire is and what constitutes its difference toward instinct - but the
animist ideas of the savages are determined by a sentiment of passive joy, whereas those of State sub-
jects are determined by negative sentiments, passions of sadness and survival. Yes, there is irrational-
ism in animism, as there is irrationalism in mysticism. But the former is a reasonable irrationalism,
one that is not yet capable of forming adequate ideas but is searching for a sense, for the reasons of
Desire. Mysticism, conversely, brings irrationality to its peak, makes a cult of it, needs a Reason to
desire. And mechanism, with its cult of Official Science, stamps that irrationality as rational, scien-
tific even; finds that Reason.
No theory of pure numbers (magical, quantic, relativistic, uncertain, probabilistic) or theory exclu-
sively of Space or extension can ever lead to the formation of adequate ideas. No imperium of
Reason, or divinity of man, either. Even modern-day biology and medicine will not save us, as they
are replete with mechanisms, mysticism, dualism and hallucinatory alarmist fads. Without fads, there
is no funding in modernity. From our perspective, Reich was correct in criticizing Bergson for hav-
ing conceded to mechanistic science a correctness in the realm of inorganic nature or nonliving sys-
tems. Quite so, it was too soon for any such concession. The world of Matter, the motions,
exchanges, interactions of mass-energy, the existence of mechanisms for disorder, etc, none of this
really can be understood if energy, in particular massfree energy, is not understood; if the relation
between Space and Time, extensivity and diachronic synchronicity, is not understood as a functional

38
relation between distinct manifolds intrinsic to energy and flux; if all the properties, modes and attrib-
utes of a substance are not understood as energy functions.
One must not miscomprehend what is meant here. It is a scientific stance at the antipodes of that
which has gained the adherence of our epoch. Our epoch has in fact moved away from Albert
Einsteins viewpoint, for Einstein at least believed that science was only such when independent from
the existence and bias of observers. Yet, our epoch has moved toward a different form of relativism
than Einsteins proper - toward the relativism of the observer, the cheap psychology of relationism
with its pretentious and mediocre claims to cosmogonic grandeur. This was already the object of dis-
agreement between Einstein and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore on the nature of reality.
Tagore held that knowledge was always and only subjective, that even if absolute truth existed it
would always be inaccessible to science. Prigogine and Stengers say that, curiously enough the
development of modern science has given reason to Tagore, citing that no measurement or obser-
vation is any longer possible without reference to a theoretical framework [41]. Worse still, that it
has become apparent how science limits itself to filling a particular axiom (the framework) with mea-
surements, observations and experiments that only make sense if that axiom is assumed. The fad of
global warming (now called climate change) is perhaps one of the best examples of this. It is as if
science has become a conglomerate of various autistic, self-validating hypotheses that have fuzzy zones
of validity, each with its coordinative and normative definitions which, by definition, do not permit
crosstalk or interconnections, nor the formulation of a consistent framework that is anywhere inde-
pendent from every and any observer, and yet compatible with all those observers that are adequate
observers. It is the framework of an integrated science that is thereby relativized, and science as an exact
knowledge that is diminished. Thus, the plurality of observers and an implicit status of equality
between them has fragmented science into a general axiomatics of knowledge, one that refuses nature
to have a reality that may be adequately known. There are only disparate working hypotheses. A de
facto constatation becomes thereby glorified. What would previously have been considered an error,
can now become an accepted paradigm.
The perspective of eccentric science, it seems to us, is totally different: only when desire will become
able to form adequate (clear and concise) ideas of its object, will it become rational, come to find
reason as a sense amongst others; and for that it needs an active joy, an emotion that shirks sentiment
and human sentimentality, an emotion that creates (here, Bergson is indeed correct) and a method
that connects, that makes adequate connections, connections that function - the real functionalist
method of science. Writes Deleuze:
It is from an active joy that those desires which belong to reason are born, because they proceed from an adequate idea
[42].
The problem of science is the problem of an eccentric science - not the statistical and staticizing con-
cerns of Official Science. The problem of science is finding a functionalist method, a micrological,
nonstochastic method to generate adequate ideas and measures of things and events that are intrinsic
to them and to their relations; that method has logical and conscious steps, but it is above all the

39
method of an active joy, the joy that desires to think functionally, to see differently, to develop our
active forces, to liberate them from reaction and sad passions: to liberate our unconscious activity -
but this time beyond culture, beyond mysticism and metaphysics, and beyond Official Science. No
eccentric science is possible without this active joy. It is the gift of adequate knowledge, the joy of
comprehension (or, better, the joy to comprehend), and it is the gift of doing something for life, the
joy of a knowledge that acts, but acts because it can form adequate notions of things, beings and their
processes of change or motion. It is a joy that desires a functional understanding - mired neither in
the imaginary and its passions, nor in mechanisms and their necessity. Writes Reich:
The functionalist uses experiments to confirm or disconfirm his observations and the results of his thinking. He does
not replace thought and observations by experimentation. [He is not a pure experimentalist.] The mechanist does not
trust his thinking and observation, and he is right [not to trust them]. The functionalist does trust his senses and his
thinking. He differs from the mystic and the religious believer by knowing his uncertainties and by being able to control
them experimentally. He differs from the mechanist by including everything in his observation, by considering everything
as possible, by breaking down the barriers between the sciences because he comprehends their interconnections, and by
steadily and consistently progressing toward the simpler functioning principle. [43]
To think functionally, an active joy is required. To act or comprehend, reason must be able to form
adequate ideas. It needs the method of joy, an active joy that alone constitutes a rational desire. This
is the problem of functional thought, immensely compounded by the fact that one exists in a human-
ized world which everywhere hinders joy and generates sadness, multiplies it senselessly save for the
Logic of Power. No one can think adequately, if one is too sad to think. Since science is the collective
product of human thought, it cannot hope to be saved by its method alone - anymore than it can by
the cybernetic rule of automata that embody the methods and programs of science and engineering.
The real challenge of science is its minor becoming, but in the precise sense of a search for the func-
tions, the energy functions, which create the thing or the event - which create the thing-event and
the immanent sense-event of a thing or an event. All in one. An artwork is a thing-event when it
forms a complex of sensations or perceptions, a composition of sensational and perceptual elements.
The sense of this arrangement or composition is itself an event, the sense-event, the in-itselfness of
the event-art, of each art event, and it alone provides the intrinsic logic of the composition of that
artwork - a logic which is not separable from the knowledge of the logic of sensation, from the know-
how of a technique that operates with the synthetic functions of sensation, and which can only be
conveyed by the knowledge and mastery of media, materials and the elements of composition . Jorn
says that an act only becomes an event if it triggers a sensation or perception [44]. But such a trigger
can only occur if the act is functional, if the act sets up a function capable of giving sense to a com-
plex of sensations and perceptions that form the work of art. The sense, then, of the artwork lies in
the very functions of the sense-perception that it synthesizes. A concept or idea is also an arrange-
ment, a thing-event, synthesizing forms (linguistic and logical) with contents, with elements and
their relations, with the senses of those forms, with their functions - what they do and how, what they
relate and how. A sensation or a perception are no more separable from their sense than is a concept.
The sense of a sensation is a function, as is the sense of a concept; the senses of things, artwork or
natural things - the senses of sensations, perceptions - and the senses of ideas are, like the senses of

40
forces or values (axiology), their functions, their intrinsic articulations that inevitably call forth a con-
text (the context that alone confers sense); they are so whether or not they generate effectively a sen-
sation or perception, whether or not the ideas are adequate to the relations they supposedly encom-
pass. An idea is wrong if it cannot account for the relationships it seeks to establish, explain and con-
dense; if it decontextualizes the relation. And an idea is stupid if it seeks to establish no account of a
relation, or denies the existence of a relation so as to not have to account for it. Not all wrong ideas
are stupid, but all stupid ideas are by definition inadequate, and thus wrong. But that is not to say
that stupid ideas have no function - they function by paralyzing or denying thought, and their func-
tion is, as Spinoza clearly saw, to make us sad, to make those who think them and consume them sad
and impotent. They have a molar function - to serve a certain Power over and above Life. Likewise
with works of art, they can make us dream stupid ideas or notions, or they can make us intelligent,
capable of seeing something new, different, intelligent, capable of imparting joy, capable of making
us feel alive. All that separates us from our power to act, to become active or unfold the active nature
of desire - of our desires - is the production of sad sentiments, wrong percepts and poor thoughts by
art, philosophy and science. There is art, philosophy and science that only encourages superstition,
fantasy, ghosts, the fantastic and the imaginary. Asger Jorn may contend that only the fantastic may
animate reasoning and that intelligence is to turn the impossible into the possible, or the unknown
into the known [45]. Yet, futurism and fascism are there to remind us of the power of the fantastic
to render possible the most impossible horrors, the stupidest eulogies of Survival, or the knowledge
of the most useless and gratuitous. All to make us feel dead.
Jorn was wrong - there can be no isolated aesthetic foundation to knowledge or science, and art can-
not also be founded upon such an aesthetic principle if we are to differentiate it from science or phi-
losophy. Science is not a form invented by art, waiting for a content to fill it. Spinoza was also right
on this - the foundation of knowledge, and even the aesthetics of joining an experimental method or
program to a logico-mathematical method (as Spinoza hoped to accomplish and Galileo practiced) -
can only be extracted from an ethical concept of knowledge. By this, he meant the pursuit of a knowl-
edge of nature that proceeds from an active joy and aims at the constant sharpening of sense-percep-
tion. Art is not synthetic and philosophy and science analytic, as if in the negation of the scientific
attitude is where we or one finds the point of departure of an artistic attitude having a purity just as
perfect as is the quantitative knowledge afforded by science; for the artistic knowledge of an object
can only be expressed by and through quality [46]. No; the functions of art may indeed not depend
upon an external (exo-referencial) measurement of quantities, yet they are no less energy functions,
just as scientific functions are no less required to take quality, concrete sensory and perceptual qualia,
into account just because they are energy functions. It is the ethical conception of knowledge which
is coextensive to artistic creation or artistic knowledge - not because art should serve a system of con-
cepts, an ideational system or an ideology, but because art always plies one or the other of two possi-
ble regimes of human and animal emotions: a regime of the imaginary where art is representation and
justifies the perception of a dull, uninteresting and sad life, enforces it and lends it human sentiments
and identities; and a regime of creation or presentation, where art reaches for the energy fluxes, for finer
perceptions of energy, opens up new possibilities for the living, employs the sensational, perceptual
and conceptual functions constantly sharpened and isolated by science, to select from the impossible

41
only that impossible that matters, the impossible that makes Life possible - not more death, stupidi-
ty and horror.
Precisely then, one of the foundations of a minor art is ethical (the combat against obscurantism,
superstition) and shared with all minor philosophy and all minor science. Thus, a minor art cannot
shirk off the educative or formative function, it cannot retreat into the beautiful and close in the sen-
sational world between the beautiful and the heavy, the Good and the Evil. A pure aestheticism of
art is always an artistic moralism, an artistic ideology, a morality masquerading as art.
From the viewpoint of an ethical conception of all knowledge, whether artistic or analytic or syn-
thetic, there is no Good or Evil in nature, no moral dichotomy to be found in its fabric; all there is
are ethical differentiations, ethical differences and different modes of existence of these differences -
artistic, philosophic and scientific. Concepts that only serve to sadden are never adequate, can never
be the source of adequate ideas of things and processes; they are not really concepts but abortions of
concept; not even notions, but opinions, fantasies. Art that serves to sadden and block the grasp of
a relation is not art, but the ornament of a material and spiritual misery - it is bad art, but also stu-
pid art, also art that does not work, art whose use is only for a molar function, art whose knowledge
can only be inadequate, art whose sensations and perceptions are boring and infantilizing - whether
because it wants to limit itself to an aestheticism of living (a pretentious art of the living), or because
it claims an anti-aesthetic rationalism (indeed, precisely what Jorn fought against). There may be
good errors, but there are no joyful superstitions, no creative sadness, no adequate use of, or function
to, a wrong or stupid idea, and no functional science in a mechanism. It is rather the power of stu-
pid ideas that is always external to them; thats why stupid ideas only have molar functions, only serve
the designs of Power-Potestas. Stupid ideas are ideas without intrinsic power, thats why they approx-
imate empty forms which Power may employ to fill them with latent content. When it comes to sci-
ence or knowledge, they are useless. It matters to select which impossible one makes possible; it mat-
ters to be horrified by all the stupid impossibles which become possible with every day of moderni-
ty; it matters to find a science of the anomalous, the singular, the unexpected, the microfunctional,
even in what appears to us at first not to function. The task of science may adequately be defined as
a having to know the unknown, but it matters to know how the known is known or defined and
taken as such - as being known; not all knowns are equivalent, as if they existed in a relationship of
universal exchangeability or a relationship of necessary evolution. One can hardly valorize an art that
makes one see what is not there, cannot become or come-to-be, and is mere fancy of the imagination;
just as one cannot valorize any supposed known and well-established that resorts to such imagin-
ings, as did the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformation. What is taken to be a reality that is weirder than
we could imagine, is nothing but another imagination still weirder than reality is or needs to be. The
limit function of the speed of light is a shallow rivulet, a mere taboo; and the increase in inertial mass
a mere phenomenological metaphor, needed by those who seek not to comprehend the inertial and
gravitational nature of mass; those who avoid a consistent energy-based treatment of mass. The
known and known how matter, just as the impossible that is being made possible matters, must
matter - it is there that the entire struggle takes place; it is there that human beings struggle for their
slavery and servitude with the dedication which one might expect of those fighting for their libera-

42
tion or salvation. And so it is that the oppression exercised by nearly all forms of religion presents
itself as the very formula for salvation and freedom - and it is here that the history of nation-States
and mass-movements has always gone to find the source of its messianisms. Thus, one is inexorably
led to conclude that plenty of what is known and accepted is useless for a joyful life.
There is, accordingly, a primary non-aestheticism of knowledge (science and art) which is ethical -
which springs from the commitment of knowledge to the practicality of the living, from its subordi-
nation to an ethical concept of Life, as joyful knowledge; and there is also an aesthetic foundation
or principle to such a knowledge - expressed as an active life, in the aesthetics of joy, as a principle
of intensity. All happens as if in knowledge, art and science two independent and empirical princi-
ples or relations always had to be synthesized, one ethical and the other aesthetic. The difference,
then, between science on one hand, and art, and all other knowledge on the other, would be that sci-
ences aesthetical principle includes an experimental research method. But cant art also partake of
an aesthetic principle that employs an experimental research method, an experimentalist technique
that assesses the effects of the art work, that evaluates the affects it impacts? Was this not already part
of the situationist concept of situation? Perhaps this is where art and science will cross again, in the
employment of the experimental research method to generate the desired affects - desired in the
sense of a desire to effectively free affects from the constraints of power and its representation.
Precisely as Jorn points out [47], invention is already a scientific art, a becoming-art on the part of sci-
ence. In this respect, Jorn proposes that art antedates science in the very sense that invention comes
before discovery or any understanding, conferring upon the work of imagination a burden not unlike
that placed on it by Hume in his empiricist philosophy. Accordingly, Jorn defended an Imaginist
approach to art (Imaginist Bauhaus), arguing that culture and technique [art] are human inven-
tions, and that the essence of invention is the eruption of useless forms (or of an imaginary and dec-
orative utility [48]), which may or may not subsequently come to encompass a given function or
other. But more profoundly still, as A. Eddington and J.W. Sullivan argued in The Limitations of
Science, it is science which is an art (which Jorn acknowledges); Jorn agrees, citing Newton as an
example of a real scientific breakthrough because something new and completely different had been
joined to the formal logico-mathematical model: an experimental method, which Jorn argues is an aes-
thetic method (he speaks of the aesthetics of science, in this respect also, as the technique of science),
an aesthetics of the experience that plies itself to extract the new, unsuspected and unknown - in
Jorns words, to desinterestedly extract the concrete effect of sensorial qualities [49]. So, more
properly still, it is science that results from the fusion or synthesis of two arts - one formal and math-
ematical, and the other experimental or sensational (perceptual and sensorial).
Does one have to go to Jorns extreme - that useless form antedates any possible function - in order
to avoid the moralism and monstrosity of molar functionalism, the dictate of molar functions that
serve Potestas, into which the original Bauhaus degenerated? Invention, on its own account, is already
a form of knowledge (the invention of fire is not separable from the knowledge of how to repeat it at
will), and repetition is as intrinsic to its character as it is to discovery (qua condition for scientific ver-
ifiability). It is in the sense of technique that invention is an art and already a becoming-science on

43
the part of art. But the same could also be said of discovery. Jorn correctly sees that science cannot
return to its old determinist doctrine where function alone determines structure and form; but he
takes the probabilistic structure of science to mean that science is exclusively concerned with the rel-
ativity of truth and verifiability or confirmation, ie repetition. Inventions alone provide a justifica-
tion for scientific evolution, he says. Hence, in his view, the real distinction between the artist and
the scientist is that, in the former, the aesthetic attitude was purer [50]. But science is no more con-
demned to remaining probabilistic and relativistic than functions are condemned to have to be con-
ceptualized and perceived as molar functions, by their molar use or their human purpose, or than
the essence of art lies in invention. Perhaps in order to put the whole Imaginist discourse to rest,
all one needs is the simple realization that molar functions are always imaginary functions, func-
tions created by a molar logic of ensembles, sets, machines - functions that subordinate molecular
functions and are independent of their content (the content can be anything as long as it subjects);
that there are effectively two very different types of functions - those that obey an economy of ener-
gies, and those that obey a logic of Power, an economy of energy extraction. It is in this sense that
in culture, it has always been a structure of Power that provides for a form and its content all the pos-
sible functions, as social (collective) articulations that function. Science, and biology in particular,
knows enough to be forced to realize that function and structure in the molecular world emerge all
at once, form and formation being indissociable parts of the same autopoietic (self-constructive)
process. Molar functions that seek to subordinate the molecular proceed (by repression and antipro-
duction) inversely to the way molecular functions operate - as the former tend, instead, to be scoped
macroscopically (by production and ordered accumulation).
Science is not just the synthesis of two different arts, one formal and the other experimental - a func-
tional or scientific synthesis of two arts; it is a method to disengage the particular, the singular, the
different, a method to differentiate what is molar and what molecular, a method to know on the
spot so to speak, a method to investigate and permit finer perceptions of nature. It is a method to
find the differential articulations between form and structure, and function or functions. In this
sense, once again, there are two sciences - one, a science of the large numbers or molar ensembles, a
science of the inertial effects of mass, a science of weight and collision, a science filled with proba-
bilistic or statistical models, a science of striation that relies upon an arbitrary treatment of the num-
ber, upon a measure external to the materials and the interaction(s); and a science of the singular
numbers, a science of levity and imponderables, a science of energy - of kinetic states and massfree
energy - a science of the imperceptible, a science of how molecular functions come to overthrow, criss-
cross, undermine and evade all molar ensembles.
Furthermore, the formalism of science is not reducible to the domain of the quantitative - as if its
form were simply logico-mathematical. It encompasses a functional articulation of quantity and qual-
ity; how else could science come to understand the concrete effect of sensorial and perceptual qual-
ities? Imagination would not have known how to suffice in this respect, as reality constantly proves to
be at once more complex and simple than all the simplistic views that imagination can provide. Jorn
argues that one never knows what is the definitive destination of a new form [48] - and how this
applies to both art and science. But one is left wondering what is a definitive destination - and

44
whether one even exists. In fact, the molecular functionalist argument that Aetherometry continues
or prolongs is rather that any form, new or not, already carries its function, whether defined by a
molar use (a function of Power) or defined as a molecular function. Ornament, the beautiful form,
is not a useless form, anymore than powder or saltpetre is an empty form dedicated to the beautiful
for as long as its use is limited to fireworks - as as it was by the old Chinese Emperors. The beautiful
is not devoid of a function or use - it is not useless by definition. Ornament ornates something - it is
a function of something, and it is there - ornating something - as a function of a logic, an aesthetics,
of the beautiful. Fireworks do not constitute a form, an ornament, devoid of function, and which
might later on take on, as its final destination, the function of being the propellant of a missile. Jorn
misunderstands the nature of the Asiatic mode of production, the nature of the despotic Chinese
State: it was a State created against war, where the ornament was as necessary for establishing the
divine nature of the Emperor (fireworks: awe for the beautiful that roars) in the eyes of the people,
the peasantry, as it was necessary for the State to preclude the technological development of the means
of warfare - such as the use of powder in warfare - or the mining of metals for weaponry or com-
mercial exchange (the latter being as feared as war was). The ornament precisely had an Asiatic or
despotic function - a theatrical or spectacular use that befits the Power wielding it. And the use that
powder acquired in modern occidental weaponry is no more its final destination than fireworks were.
So, against Jorn, we have to say that the so-called empty form or new form is never empty. Even
when its content is self-same identical, even when it becomes pure fashion or vacuous, it still carries
and provides a content, a content function - all those molar organismic functions that it can gath-
er; it still obeys an internal logic, the logic of that beautiful that serves a certain form of power,
Potestas; it still plies a determined use of the logic of sensation, perception and thought. The clothes
may make the body - and thereby handicap it - but it is still a handicapped body that clothes dress,
still a body with organic functions, no matter how starved, distorted and dysfunctional are these
organic functions. What matters in art is: what is it good for? No art is good for nothing. Even orna-
ments serve a purpose, a molar function. If it is good for keeping us stupid, for infantilizing those
who make it and those who consume it - then its aesthetics is one of either anesthesia or reality
shock (propaganda). One might wonder whether it is art at all in either case, since all the technique
and invention it is left with is the inane reproduction of the vacuous - of the empty shell into which
all human interactions are converted - and thereby it is art only in the senses that (1) any manipula-
tion requires some technique, as Machiavelli would attest, and that (2) such manipulations only suc-
ceed by virtue of plying a certain technique, a certain form of art (if art be the right word) - and one
that relies, above all, upon an unbridled, futuristic imaginary. Art can never condemn itself to use-
less and empty forms, devoid of sense or function, unable to educate or form, and beautiful by its
imagination. One is not condemned to the anti-aestheticist positions of John Ruskin, William
Morris or Henry van de Velde - against which Jorn spoke, vehemently and well - simply by virtue of
rejecting Jorns reaction, the rule of the useless and the imaginist (or its function in the deforma-
tion of the image). What Jorn and so many other revolutionary artists seem to lose sight of, if it was
ever in their sights, is that art, like science, is only good when it is good for making us see or under-
stand something new and different, something that exists, something that is or is about to come,
something that is becoming or about to become, and yet is either imperceptible or even merely virtu-

45
al. Precisely, the logic that is intrinsic to the process of creation of a work of art is what may or may
not permit the work to induce such a perception, such a sensation, such breakthroughs, such antici-
pations of possible futures and such exorcisms of possible barbarisms. There is no place for opposing
rationalism or science to sensation or art. Reason is only one of the senses, and each and every sense
has its own reason. A work of art cannot make us see something new, cannot compose a new sensa-
tion with those who create it or consume it if its intrinsic logic, its composition, fails to crystallize the
data, the milieu and the form of that new sensation, that perception of the different, that induction of
thought and discovery, that potentially actual insight. It is this art which is nothing without science,
just as it is a minor science which is nothing, neither minor nor science, without art, without this art
or art in this sense.
REFERENCES
1. Wahl, J (1962) Tableau de la philosophie Franaise, Gallimard, France, pp. 25-26.

2. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) A thousand plateaus, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, p. 361.
3. Nietzsche, F (1869) Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks, Gateway Editions,
1962, Chicago, IL, pp. 51-52.
4. Idem, p. 94.
5. Idem, p.107.
6. Idem, p. 113.
7. Idem, p. 115.
8. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) A thousand plateaus, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, p. 362.
9. Prigogine, I & Stenghers, I (1984) Order out of chaos, Bantam Books, NY, NY, p. 39.
10. Spinoza, B (1665), Letter to H. Oldenburg, Nov. 20.
11. Spinoza, B (1677) Treatise on the improvement of understanding, II.
12. See Scholia to Prop. XV, Ethics, Part I.
13. See our upcoming work, Towards a Biosocial Theory: Reich, Deleuze and Aetherometry,
for a presentation of Deleuzes critique of Reich.
14. Our presentation here follows Deleuze, G (1953) Empirisme et subjectivit, P.U.F.,
France, p. 109-115, but aims at drawing out the idea that the relation is the principle of a continu-
ous variation between terms, their common functional principle, or the logical basis of (a real) mol-
ecular functionalism.
15. Hall, AR (1981) From Galileo to Newton, Dover Publications Inc, NY, NY, p. 81.
16. Idem, p. 87.
17. Reich, W (1944) Orgonotic pulsation - the differentiation of the orgone energy from
electromagnetism, Int J Sex-Eco & Orgone-Res, 3:97.
18. Deleuze & Guattari (1987) op. cit., p. 363.
19. Idem, p. 367.
20. Reich, W (1950) Ether, God & Devil, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY, 1973 ed., p. 81.

46
21. Deleuze & Guattari (1987) op. cit., pp. 361-362.

22. Reichenbach, H (1928) The philosophy of Space and Time, see Part 2, reprinted by
Dover Publications Inc, NY, NY, 1958.
23. Sklar, L (1974) Space, Time and Spacetime, UC Press, CA, p. 343.
24. Chabot, P (1998) Au seuil du virtuel, in Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, pp. 31-44, see pp. 42-43.
25. The present as a perpetually draining Time, and the past as the eternal persistance of
what (one) once was (to quote Chabot, p. 43), has been or was at one time. Note that this way of
presenting the problem is also limitative of the concept of Time-Aeon such as Deleuze presents it in
his Logique du Sens (Logic of Sense). There he speaks of an unlimited Aeon, where all becoming
is infinitely divided into past and future, always ducking the present; see Deleuze, G (1969)
Logique du sens, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, France, p. 14. Here, the infinity of Time is an
horizon line without start or finish, productive of all presents-with-their-pasts-and-futures whenever
intersected. Only the present exists in Time, and only past and future insist in Time.
26. See, for example, pp. 81-82 of Deleuze, G (1966) Le Bergsonisme, PUF, Paris,
France, or pp. 80-81 of the English edition, Zone Books, NY.
27. Chabot, op. cit., pp. 31-33.
28. Note that this is a different concept than Bernardo Bolzanos or Georg Cantors concept
of an ensemble as simply any collection of elements, no matter how dispar.
29. The same is to say, in a strictly algebraic sense, without changing its physical dimension-
ality.
30. Also notice that the argument is not that these numbers change their dimensional unit or
physical dimensionality (which means a real change in nature), but only change in the magnitude of
their unit of measurement (which actually does not imply any change in nature, just a change in
scale).
31. Correa, P & Correa, A (2008) The Gravitational Aether, Part II: Gravitational
Aetherometry (8), Antigravity Lift and Exotic Flight (III): The aetherometric theory of gravity and
the organized fear of knowing, Volume II of the Aetherometric Theory of Synchronicity (AToS),
Akronos Publishing, Concord, Canada, ABRI monograph AS3-II.10, pp. 29-34.
32. Correa, P, Correa, A, Askanas, M, Gryziecki, G and Sola-Soler, J (2008) A test of
Aetherometry vs relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz: the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment,
Volume I of the Aetherometric Theory of Synchronicity (AToS), Akronos Publishing, Concord,
Canada, ABRI monograph AS3-I.4.
33. Correa, P & Correa, A (2000) The cosmic background microwave radiation as evi-
dence for cosmological creation of electrons with minimum kinetic energy and for a minimum of
cosmic ambipolar massfree energy, Akronos Publishing, Concord, Canada, ABRI monograph
AS2-17C.
34. For a more detailed discussion of manifolds and an aetherometric treatment of thermo-
dynamics and energy systems, see the first part of Correa, P & Correa, A (2004) Nanometric func-
tions of bioenergy, Akronos Publishing, University of Toronto Press, Concord, Canada.
35. See Deleuze, G (1967) Mthode de dramatisation, in the posthumous edition of
Deleuzes texts and interviews entitled Lle Dserte, 2002, pp. 131-162.

47
36. Correa, P & Correa, A (2004) Notes on (micro)functionalism: orgonomic, molecular

and aetherometric functionalism, Akronos Publishing, Concord, Canada, ABRI monograph AS1-
08.
37. See for a commentary, Deleuze, G (1973) Empirisme et subjectivit, PUF, France, p.
99.
38. Sklar, op. cit., p. 336.
39. Reich (1950) op. cit., in particular pp. 91- 110.
40. See discussion in Correa, P & Correa, A (1997, 2001) The physics of the will to
power, Akronos Publishing, Concord, Canada, ABRI monograph AS1-02.
41. Prigogine, I & Stengers, I (1984) Order out of chaos, Bantam Books, NY, p. 293.
42. Deleuze, (1968) Spinoza et le problme de lexpression, Les ditions de minuit,
France, p. 263.
43. Reich (1950) op. cit., p. 109.
44. Jorn, A (1957) Pour la forme - ebauche dune methodologie des arts, re-edited in
2001 by Editions Allia, p. 46 (section on form and structure).
45. Idem, p. 47.
46. Idem, p. 65.
47. Idem, p. 61.
48. Idem, p. 43.
49. Idem, p. 60.
50. Idem, p. 64.

48

Whither Science

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Whither Science

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Whither Science

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Correa & Correa Whither Science 2

Paulo N. Correa 1, Alexandra N. Correa 1

II. A SCIENCE WITHOUT ORIGINS:

1. The ambivalent eccentricities of science: Descartes and the Pre-Socratic proto-science

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

The eruption of a third Descartes in Descartes, is a sort of unconscious manifestation of a stronger

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Democritus is a peculiar example of eccentric science or proto-science - in that his doctrine of

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

2. Spinozist monism and eccentric proto-science

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

It is evident that this monist-spinozist concept of substance is not a concept of a transcendence - as

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

3. Empiricism and functional thought

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

4. The First Ambivalence: Proto-science or Pseudo-science?

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

its most critical findings. In essence, it refuses to recognize that -

5. The second ambivalence: an incomplete mathesis of energy and treatment of Space

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

6. The third ambivalence - a physics or a metaphysics of Time?

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

However, as is obvious from a (micro-)functionalist perspective, the problem posed by an adequate

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

7. The problem of functional thought:

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484

Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2009 ISSN 1918-4484