Individual spots, categories or phenomena, praxes or wrought objects, placed together under the name of Hermes - these were the spaces of transformation encountered at first.
Interference is an aural and visual phenomenon, a phenomenon of physics; it is a metaphor and an art of invention. The exchanger is a builder where the moving parts are sorted as to meaning and move along according to that sorting, a sort of winnowing machine with several hoppers where the transformation is only cinematic. At the crossroads, the morals turn around the decision, sometimes murders are committed; bifurcation, that of space and of logic, suddenly rises to a fantastic level and takes charge of old tales where language is as close as possible to its birthplace; one's reason for living - one's reason, quite simply - is changed. The discourse speaks of the path taken and follows its meanderings. The well, the bridge, the labyrinth: these are vignettes or figurings, games, strategies, chances or random occurrences, circumstances, built or constructed monuments, phenomena as well since death soon comes around, but still fantasies and still exact theorems for changes of phase. A rich series of varied spaces, separated, for multiple transformations, maybe the richest and most baroque. On the contrary, the open, chaotic space of the Norman heaths, at Lessay, loses a bit, loses a lot of its features, too well defined by a god who is too determined, though mobile, to become simple, both formally and concretely. how can we cross the heath? How can we cross the sea? What does it mean to cross the sea? Images. the space of transformation as such emerges from this hodge-podge of abundance whose merit lies in having taken diagonally, askew, crosswise, many of the usual and stupid distinctions of philosophy. Translation is both a praxis and a theory; turbulence is a stable and unstable phenomenon where liquid moves and stays in a randomly fixed form; the organism - my body - is now an exchanger of time. at this point in time, several chronies intertwine. Perhaps I have encountered only spaces of transformation, singular spots or slack varieties. the simplest of these, absolutely, is the void, the void in which the atoms fall, in which, suddenly, bursts the clinamen: be it an order brought to its elementary state, elements of distribution for an element of order, a void purged of all determination; be it a transformer brought to its elementary states, almost to the zero state, both in the theoretical and in the concrete. From that, however, a global system is formed, a world in the universe of worlds. the distance of performance is as large as the origin is near nothing and the final phase is near totality. given, the following sequence: a distribution, a signal, a system. The hum of the universe - chaos, the blink of an eye, the world. Thus the space of transformation came back to physics and to phenomena typical of sight and hearing.
States change phase, and systems change state, by transition of phases or of states. But the system itself is never stable. its equilibrium is ideal, abstract, and never reached. The state, in the first meaning of the word, is outside time. the state is the contrary of history, for history tries to block and to fix the state. The state is the mortal enemy of history. And it can kill history. We are not far from this now. It moves ahead like the beam on the unstable wall when the winds blow and the earth shakes. It falls, it does not fall; it rights itself, it falls. It wears away; it is abraded; it is split by the flow. An aggregation, it loses parts like a vase covered with cracks. A miracle reunites its fragments and makes its synthesis blaze; time slowly disaggregates it. that is what existence is: facing death, being in perpetual difference from equilibrium. These flows never stop running over lacunar lands. To devour them, parasite them, nourish them, and make them live. the fall kills us and creates us. We move unfailingly toward noise, but we come from noise. Oxygen feeds the heat of our lives, but aging is an oxidation. It works because it doesn't work. The system is very badly named. maybe there is not or never was a system. As soon as the world came into being, its transformation began. the system in itself is a space of transformation. There are only metabolas. what we take as an equilibrium is only a slowing down of metabolic processes. My body is an exchanger of time. It is filled with signals, noises, messages, and parasites. and it is not at all exceptional in this vast world. It is true of animals and plants, of air crystals, of cells and atoms, of groups and constructed objects. transformation, deformation of information.
I thought that the exchangers were intermediaries, that interference was on the fringe, that the translator was between instances, that the bridge connected two banks, that the path went from the origin to the goal. But there are no instances. Or more correctly, instances, systems, banks, and so forth are analyzable in turn as exchangers, paths, translations, and so forth. the only instances or systems are black boxes. when we do not understand, when we defer our knowledge to a later date, when the thing is too complex for the means at hand, when we put everything in a temporary black box, we prejudge the existence of a system. when we can finally open the box, we see that it works like a space of transformation. The only systems, instances, and substances come from our lack of knowledge. the system is nonknowledge. the other side of nonknowledge. One side of nonknowledge is chaos; the other, system. Knowledge forms a bridge between the two banks. Knowledge as such is a space of transformation.
The whole question is fractal.
Leibniz described fractal reality, formed of pools and fish, filled in turn, with fish and pools, ad infinitum. Mandelbrot repeats this of the world, inventing the world, and undoubtedly, the thing. I am saying the same thing of the process of knowledge.
