I want to flag this issue for further analysis in the future, but one of the key features of more “advanced” units, objects, or systems is the dimension of memory. In Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence I already drew a lot of attention to this, but I’m not quite sure that I fully drew out the implications of systems that have the capacity for memory. In many respects, memory changes everything. The reason for this is that memory fundamentally transforms the causal circuit. Here we should think of memory as a scale with many gradations, ranging from simple organisms that have genetic memory to more complex systems such as psychic systems, social systems, and perhaps certain forms of artificial life and computers that have recollective memory.
If memory as a virtual dimension of a being is so important, then this is because it transforms the nature of the causal circuit both between entities and between one moment and another (and here it’s important that I define “moments” not as the smallest possible units of time, but rather as the smallest possible units within which an object can complete an operation, e.g., moments differ for entities such as the US congress and individual human minds). If memory so fundamentally transforms the functioning of a system, then this is because the immediate past no longer holds sovereignty over what takes place in the present. Rather, we get a threefold relation between present, immediate past moment, and the broader past that follows the system. Compare a simple allopoietic system like a rock and an autopoietic system like a bacterium. In the case of the rock the events that it currently enjoys in its ongoing self-reproduction will be a function of the event that immediately preceded the current event. We will get one phase of the rock passing into the next.
read on!
However, in the case of an autopoietic unit or system like a bacterium the event that immediately precedes its current state will not necessarily be determinative because it carries with it a genetic “memory” that, under certain conditions, can be reactivated in response to the immediately preceding event and in relation to the present. The consequence is that unlike perturbations of rocks where we get a one-to-one correlation between preceding event and outcome, an intervening term is introduced that can produce a surprising result in relation to the immediately preceding event. In the case of more complex units like animals, persons, social systems, and perhaps some computers, the dimension of memory is carried along with the system in its present like the tail of a comet that can be drawn upon by the system or object at will. My relation to my lover, for example, will not just result from the manner in which she or he immediately impacts me in the preceding moment, but will also result from the sedimented past that is activated in response to his or her “perturbation”. My response will also include all sorts of sedimentations of past interactions with people in the remote past. In short, the immediately preceding moment will not predelineate the subsequent moment.
Not only do complex autopoietic entities carry this remote past– superimposed on the present –along with themselves, but that cone of the past is ever growing. This is the meaning of Bergson’s cone of memory depicted to the right above. On the one hand, each moment contracts the remote past along with the immediate past of sensible stimuli, but also the past is perpetually growing in relation to the events of the present. It is this dimension of a past that is not the immediate past that complicates the responses of any complex autopoietic system and that allow for the creativity of these systems. A friend, for example, proposes some political course of action and I don’t simply respond to the perturbation of his speech according to the code of language and the internal dynamisms of my nervous system at this point in time, but suddenly recall the revolutionaries of the French Revolution and model my response based on my attachment to them.
This property of complex autopoietic systems such as animals, psychic systems, microbes, plants, social systems, etc., entails that we should be extremely cautious about speaking of these types of objects as having a fixed withdrawn essence that is invariant. The dimension of memory insures that these types of units will be creative, that their identity is necessarily processual, and that any talk of a fixed identity will necessarily be a moving target. They make themselves even as they are themselves.
Larval Subjects . 
January 5, 2012 at 4:15 am
Very interesting. I wonder though if there might be some kind of analogue to memory in the case of the rock. A rock that has been struck a number of times at equal velocity might respond to another impact by breaking in two. It’s not the event of being hit for the last time that’s determinative, but a cumulative effect. Is there an irreducible difference between this ‘memory’ and the memory of a life-form (once bitten twice shy)? Is not the memory of a life-form part of its current state – even if it relates to past events?
January 5, 2012 at 5:02 pm
We must be thinking along similar lines as I had a post yesterday on memory, though I was focusing on short-term memory and a line in A Thousand Plateaus that writing operates via short-term memory while reading relies on long-term memory. I won’t rehearse that post here. However I do have a couple questions I will import.
1. Should we look at long-term memories (i.e. generally anything that happened more than a minute ago, which would be retrieved from long-term memory) as separate objects with which we as subjects have relations?
2. If we view short-term (or working/active) memory as a separate mechanism from long-term memory, how should we characterize that relationship? In ATP, long-term memory appears to be the site where ideological capture would take place, while short-term memory is connected with rhizomes and becoming.
Of course these are human examples and might only apply to certain animals that have different mechanisms for short and long-term memory. I’m not sure how far that difference would extend among objects, though it is a little difficult for me to imagine how cognition would operate without some difference between information storage and information processing. Perhaps that’s just my anthropocentrism.
January 5, 2012 at 7:33 pm
One thing about relatively simple physical objects, such as hammers, is that you can imagine holding one and examining it, closely. You can easily think that such an object must be wholly available to you. The notion of withdrawal gets (much of) its (rhetorical) force from contradicting that illusion: No, it’s not, not even in principle, wholly available.
Once you consider very complex systems, such as those you’re considering in this post, the very complexity of the system works against any notion of complete comprehension. But that’s not the same as withdrawal, which is not about lots and lots of parts in rich cascades of relations. Rhetorically, our inability to deal with the complexity ‘bleeds’ into unfathomable withdrawing.
January 5, 2012 at 10:02 pm
Always interesting. But i’m a little confused by terminology. If a rock is allopoietic how can we say it is in self-reproduction? Isn’t this reserved for autopoietic entities? And the term self-reproduction is a little ambiguous (?) – doen’t you mean ‘self-production’. A mule is autopoietic but cannot reproduce….A rock is allopoietic – produced by some process independent of it…in fact in this perspective a rock has no ‘identity’. Only autopoietic systems have an identity – they keep their ‘organization’ invariant.
Varela wrote an interesting essay which mentions the derridian supplement in relation to the self-referential nature of autopoiesis (‘Unerstanding Origins’ Dupuy and Varela 1992). In this approach what derrida would see as erasing identity gives identity..!
Your comments on memory are valuable. Mario Crocco makes the same point in Palindrome. Entities without memory are the sum of their past (all their yesterdays are crammed into their now)…Entities with memory can, in the present, make sum selection of influences…
Crocco.
“In other words those circumstanced observers, although existing, like all nature, in only one physical instant every time, do presently consider non-present situations and sensations. Thus, since gnoseological apprehension – the observing or noetic act – is never found apart from causally efficacious semovience, each of those circumstanced observers can transform herself semoviently by affirming only a selection of her constitutive antecedents, which constitutive antecedents certainly include her mental contents.” (Crocco).
Referring back to your comments on vicarious causality. Yes, vicarious is still ‘related’ altho indirectly. For the Thomists the form of the other is assimilated vicariously, not in its substantial form (which is ‘withdrawn’). ‘Substantial forms are, in their own being unknown to us, they become known through accidents; in the interim there is nothing to stop us from taking congeries of accidents as standing for differences of substance.’ (Aquinas).
As for unchanging identites or essences Deely provides a useful summary in Intentionality and Semiotics.
An ‘essence’ is not an unchanging form across generations. What is meant is threefold:
1. an indiv existent has an internal constitution [organization?] by which the indiv tends toward stability and regularity btwn its generation and corruption
2. that this internal constition is a substantial form and not a complex of accidental forms – if the indiv is truly a natural unit, an unum per se.
3. there must be such natural units or ‘substances’ if the world is not simply one, because every many by definition presupposes ones.
But as you note these units can be viewed as ‘events’
For onticology it seems there is no absolute withdrawal. At different times different parts of the virtual can be actualized. For Harman there is something that will never be manifested. In fact he does sound like Aquinas. We know something by its accidents or characteristics. Harman’s trump card, after all the diagrams have been drawn is that a natural unit is a whole and we cannot know parts of wholes – it’s an all or nothing game! Harman has characterised his approach as an extended kantianism…
But perhaps I misunderstood – and if you are capable of not understanding Harman, god help the rest of us.
Harman/Aquinas’ notion of withdrawal also reminds me of Philo’s concept of god. God’s essence is incomprehensible to human beings. We can, however, apprehend his activities (energeiaei) and powers (dynameis).
Well, that’s enuf of me. I think there still needs to be teased out the difference mindful and mindless beings. Psyches come into being in a different way to, for example, rocks or submarines.
January 5, 2012 at 11:07 pm
Hi Paul,
I don’t follow M&V in the claim that allopoitic entities lack individuality. The language of self-reproduction in relation to allOpoitic entities is misleading. Allopoitic entities are sustained by force (gravity, electro-magnetism, etc), whereas autopoietic entities produce their own elements. Both perpetually encounter the treat of entropy and require constant activity to continue existing.
January 6, 2012 at 6:26 am
ok, I’m not sure where the term ‘self-reproduction’ comes from (you?). there is a diff btwn allo and auto….not that the world will change….there is a diff btwn rocks and autopoietic beings. I’m not even sure that ‘rocks’ have individuality….but I’ll leave that to the philosophers.
January 6, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Paul, yes, there’s a difference between autopoietic and allopoietic beings. I remarked on this in my last response to you.
January 6, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Yes Levi, you did remark on this. I guess I was just stumbling unnecessarily over the term ‘self-reproduction’ for rocks (allopoietic entities)….but it doesn’t really matter. These things would be cleared up in conversation v. quickly.
When you say in your comment that ‘the lang. of self-reproduction in relation to allopoietic entities is misleading’ I don’t know which lang you are referring to…I have never come across a lang of ‘self-reproduction’….self-production yes – for autopoietic systems. As you note rocks do not produce their own elements…but are sustained by ‘forces’.
I’m not even sure that rocks would be allopoietic machines…they don’t produce something other than themselves -but certainly they are produced by processes indep of the rock….so that may count as allopoietic….
But I shouldn’t dwell on definitions that could be sorted v easily.
The more important distinction would be the diff btwnt identity of a rock and the identity of a psyche. That is btwn ipseity and cadacualtez and that’s a story that is not widely read.
happy new year
January 27, 2012 at 3:32 am
[…] The present of the rock is only affected by the immediately preceding temporal moment. By contrast, as I’ve argued in some of my meditations on memory and the importance of memory, those substances or objects that have the capacity of memory have a very different sort of […]
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October 18, 2012 at 3:45 am
[…] ways that both disrupts the effects of E3 and that leaps over events E2 and E3. In short, we get Bergson’s cone of memory. Here the immediately preceding historical events do not fully determine the present event […]