Morphogenetic Vibration Franco Berardi and Alessandro Sarti In the chapter The new aesthetic paradigm, in Chaosmose, Felix

Guattari speaks of the emergence of collective territories. The category of space, he writes, may be qualified as totally aestheticized.. objects relate to other objects in transversal, vibratory position, which is conferring a becoming that is ancestral, animal, vegetal, cosmic. These objects are riding each other aspects of this kind of polisemic transindividual subjectivity can be found in the world of childhood, of folly, of love passion, of artistic creation. We may speak of proto-aesthetic paradigm in order to underline that we are not speaking of institutionalized art, but to a dimension of rising creation, perpetually preceding itself. We are studying morphogenesis (the creation and emergence of new forms) by the point of view of vibration, of vibrant connectivity. Forms are emerging from the relation (interaction, interoperation inter-arousing) between the internal rhythm of connectivity and the external environment. The vibrant inter-action (inter-arousing inter-excitement) of a system with its environment is the beginning of a new form. The beginning of a new form is closely linked to the simondonian concept of individuation. The process of individuation is the process of self-definition of a new form. In the work On the origin and nature of Neurogeometry Alessandro Sarti and Giovanna Citti try to understand the problem of individuation by the point of view of neurogeometry, an particularly by the point of view of the neurophisiology of the vision process. They say: Many unsolved problems in mathematical and computational modeling of low level vision come from the holistic nature of visual perception, that is a characterizing tract already outlined by Gestalt theory. Most of the mathematical and computational models are able to provide an explanation of perceptual processes just at a very rudimental level and, from an epistemic point of view they are considered as reductionist due to the localist approach. On the other hand low level visual perception can be naturalized modeling the processing of the neural signal performed by the functional architecture of the primary visual cortex. The cortex has a modular structure, and is constituted by many families of cells, each one sensible to a specific feature of the image: position, orientation, scale, color, curvature, movement, stereo. Visual cells activated by the stimulus-image enter in communication through horizontal connectivity. Cells are constituting the nodes of a graph, and connectivity the branches. This would draw a large geometric inert graph if nervous cells wuere not behaving as oscillators.

The action potential has instead a vibratory and undulatory behavior. Therefore the neural signal is organized (is individuated) as the nodes of vibration of the graph itself. So the graph becomes an operator whose resonances are the perceptual units. Perceptual units emerge as vibratory modes of a graph of connectivity. This is a modality of generation of form. This modality is not of a logical or algorithmic kind, like in the Chomski generative grammar. It is not symbolic. Chomski is generative chains of symbols, in a way that is scarcely contextual. His generativity is long and narrow. The resonant generativity that we are trying to elaborate has absolutely contextual nature. It is wide and short. There are no infinite series, but the sudden emergence of a collective vibration. Simondon asks about the possibility of a form-generation, and calls individuation this process. He writes: We must consider in-formation as an operation of taking form, raising from the metastability of the system, whose meaning is created by dispar-action. Dispar-action means the movement of internal resonance in which the signal forces the pre-individual differences to communicate, although they are very different. Explicitly referring to Simondon, in Difference et Repetition Gilles Deleuze defines individuation as an intensive act that actualizes the differential relations of the preindividual field: We think that individuation is essentially intensive, and that the pre individual field is constituted of differential relations. Individuation is the act of intensity that brings the differential relations to actualize. Lets go back to the text of Sarti and Citti: J.Petitot and Y.Tondut introduced for the first time the notion of neurogeometry. They identified the structure of this layer of cortical cells with the Heisenberg group, and performed contour completion in this structure minimizing a suitable functional. The plasticity of the brain, i.e. its ability to reorganize neural pathways based on a new experiences through learning procedures, guarantees a strong connection between the design of our perceptual systems and the properties of the physical environment in which we live. Visual perception acts as a differentiation process of the entire field of view, articulating first figure and background in a global way. Then it proceeds in segmentation of the single structures by subsequent differentiations. In this perspective the global nature of visual processing can be understood just when the neurogeometric structure assumes an operatorial role. The perceptual differentiation process takes place as a spectral analysis of the neurogeometrical field. The eigenstates resulting by the spectral analysis will define the parts of the image in relation with the whole visual field, leading to the segmentation of the entire image.

In the theory of Jean Petitot and Rene Thoms, meaning (visual meaning, for instance) is generated as a topologic effect. An attantial syntaxis is ruling the relation between actors who enter the relation. When we meet and shake hands there is not creation of a new pattern of relation, we are simply repeating a gesture, in a space which is easily defined and recognized. But in conditions of extended criticality, of large complexity (billions of cells propagating and colliding, or billions of human beings following different projects, conflicting, and struggling for life) the morphodynamic topology explodes. Therefore we say that inert (quiescent, motionless) geometry enters in a vibratory condition. Individuation is the process of re-establishing harmonic relation. How happens that a collective territory (a crowd, a society a network) enters into vibration? It happens by resonation. We may try to understand Resonance in terms of relation between Rhythm and Refrain. Rhythm is the relation of a subjective flow of signs (musical, poetic, gestual signs) with the environment: cosmic environment, earthly environment, social environment. Rhythm is singular and collective. It is singularizing the sound of the world in a special modeling of the environmental sound. But it is able to trigger a process of agglutination, of sensitive and sensible communality. Sometime people start to sing the same song, and to dance the same dance. It can be dangerous, and on this kind of homogeneous subjectivation is based fascism, and modern totalitarianism in general. But it can happen in ironic and nomadic ways. People start to create a new song, and they do it together. Thats a movement. What is a movement? Is an event opening a new landscape. When a movement happen (in the field of art, in the field of social politics) The effect is this. Thanks to the movement (literally, a displacement) you are able to see thing that you did not see before. The refrain is an obsessive ritual that allows the singularity the conscious organism in continuous variation to find points of self-identification, and to territorialize itself and to perceive itself in relation to the surrounding world. The refrain is the mode of semiotization that allows a singularity (a group, a people, a nation, a sub-culture, a movement) to receive and project the world according to interindividual (reproducible and communicable) formats. In order for the cosmic, social and molecular universe to be filtered through individual perception, filter or models of semiotization must act, and these models in Guattaris parlance are called refrains. The perception of time by a society, a culture or a persona is also the model of a truly temporal refrain, that is, of particular rhythmic modulations that act as ways for accessing cosmic temporal becoming and tuning in it. From this perspective, universal time appears to be no more than a hypothetical projection, a time of generalized equivalence, a flattened capitalistic time: what is important are these partial modules of temporalization, operating in diverse domains (biological, Ethological, socio.cultural, machinic, cosmic) and out of which complex refrains constitute highly relative existential synchronies. Guattari, F.: Chaosmosis, 16). The essential stuff constituting a refrain is rhythm.

Singular refrains can create a common space of resonance, and the new form emerges as a new rhythm, and the new rhythm makes possible to see a new landscape. But this process is not locked, because every process of individuation is re-instituting the pre.individual by difference. When you see a form you create the background, the space-form that is not part of the individuated, but takes a new life for itself. So the process of individuation continuously re-starts and never ends. The concept of Becoming other is a wonderful way to understand the process of individuation, and simultaneously to understand the inconcludibility of individuation. But we should also ask: who is becoming other? Pre-individual is chemical, emotional, pulsional matter that is constituting the background, but also is filtering into the field of the individuated singularity. This is the reject (the removed, the forgotten, the obliterated, the put aside), but it is also the condition of a new process of individuation. We are never standing still, nonetheless we can say I.