Update: Introducing Forces of Production
+ the Story of Continuous Variation
“The figure to which we are referring is continuous variation, as an amplitude that continually oversteps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess or default.”
“In continuous variation the relevant distinction is no longer between a form of expression and a form of content but between two inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition.”
“The plane of consistency is a plane of continuous variation; each abstract machine can be considered a “plateau” of variation that places variables of content and expression in continuity.”
“What is called a style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation.”
“Continuous variation has only ascetic lines, a touch of herb and pure water.”
“Continuous variation constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the majoritarian Fact of Nobody.”
“Whatever the breaks and ruptures, only continuous variation brings forth this virtual line, this virtual continuum of life, “the essential element of the real beneath the everyday.””
“The vault is no longer a form but the line of continuous variation of the stones.”
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
An Update
Hello All!
It has been six years since we launched this Substack! What a long time it has been since then. We talked about Keynes, we talked about Confucius, we talked about some books and essays.
Originally, it was meant to be for my ideas about economics and philosophy that were too interdisciplinary for anyone to want to seriously hear about them while I was posting anonymously on twitter in graduate school — a so-called “center for veb account research (cvar). Since then, I have changed, my degree of interdisciplinarity has changed, economics has changed, twitter has changed, graduate school has changed, and even philosophy has changed: pretty crazy!
I am writing today to say that from here on out, this blog is just going to be for my ideas that are too weird in general, rather than too specifically weird.
Now, if you like my economics writing, this is actually good news, because I have gotten into the Economics Substack Newsletter game in a more formal way with my new project: Forces of Production.
We publish monthly, with an exploration of an idea in economics above the fold, and then a rundown of the previous month’s supply side data in a handful of charts below. Or, at least, below where the fold would probably be if you could fold an email. The tone there is a little more serious than at CVAR, but that is probably for the best: the economy is seriously business.
So, with this introduction, we will also be sending along the most recent post from Forces of Production, presenting our manifesto for governing the supply side of the economy – The Productive State – alongside a brief analysis of the data released in June. We will also be pushing the next three issues as they are published through the summer into fall. You can also sign up in advance here:
As for Continuous Variation, Trombley and I will still be posting here. He’s working on a piece to explain something about an invariance in game theory that explains a second thing about basic perspectives in statistics but the stochastics aren’t converging yet; I’ve been sketching an apologia for protestantism on the basis of sussing out media theory as the place where substance metaphysics hides for moderns, but that might end up just being for me. Both of us are in different places now from where we started, which is to say, we are in the same place we were then.
Now, with that out of the way, I thought it might be nice to tell the actual, contingent story of Continuous Variation in a way that, I think, really shows what question we’ve essentially and necessarily been answering across all these long years.
The Story of Continuous Variation
How can we articulate this continuous variation at work within languages…?
On this webpage, this is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables but of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation. The whole question is whether this language - supposedly identical to its world - is defined by invariants or, on the contrary, by the line of continuous variation running through it. To place each statement in continuous variation is to parse it through all the prosodic, semantic, syntactical and phonological variables that can affect it in the shortest moment of time (the smallest interval).
Continuous variation should not be confused with the continuous or discontinuous character of the variable itself! The order-words, a continuous variation for a discontinuous variable, a convex combination … A variable can be continuous over a portion of its trajectory, then leap or skip, without that affecting its continuous variation; what continuous variation does is impose an apparently absent development in an “alternative continuity” that is possible - which is to say both virtual and real without addressing thin actuality. Placing elements of any nature, variable or constant, in continuous variation is an operation that will perhaps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in advance. “Potential” and “virtual” are not at all in opposition to “real”; on the contrary, the reality of the creative, or the placing-in-continuous variation of variables, is in opposition only to the actual determination of their constant relations.
The variables may be treated in such a way as to extract from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as to place them in continuous variation, or both as necessary. Constant is not opposed to variable ontically; constancy is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other kind of treatment, or continuous variation.
Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that renders it heterogeneous to itself and gives it a power of continuous variation: the voice is then no longer accompanied, but truly “machined,” it belongs to a musical machine that prolongs or superposes on a single plane parts that are spoken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental or perhaps electronically generated. The voice becomes the sound plane of a generalized “glissando” implying the constitution of a statistical space in which each variable has, not just an average value, but a probability of frequency that places it in continuous variation with the other variables. By placing all the voice’s components in continuous variation, music itself becomes a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of a tree, and enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences, ruptures and breaks are a part. Certain ethnomusicologists have found extraordinary cases (in Dahomey, for example) of … perhaps characteristic of secret languages, slangs, jargons, professional languages, nursery rhymes, [or] merchants’ cries [which] stand out less for their lexical inventions or rhetorical figures than for the way in which they effect continuous variations of the common elements of language.
Each language, in the meantime, are in immanent continuous variation: neither synchrony nor diachrony, but asynchrony, chromaticism as a variable and continuous state of language. Agrammaticality, for example, is no longer a contingent characteristic of disordered speech opposed to the grammaticality of language; rather, agrammaticality is an ideal characteristic of a line placing grammatical variables in a state of continuous variation. In this sense, AND is less a conjunction than the atypical expression of all of the possible conjunctions it places in continuous variation. Join draws lines of continuous variation, while the concrete assemblage treats variables and organizes their highly diverse relations as a function of those lines.
But the opposite implication seems more compelling: the more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose individual speeches into a “minor” language. The major and minor mode are two different treatments of language, one of which consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing speeches in continuous variation. If we consider the other aspect of the order-word, flight rather than death, it appears that variables are in a new state, that of continuous variation. That is the strength of authors termed “minor,” who are in fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one’s own language, in other words, to attain that sobriety in the use of a major language, in order to place it in a state of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). Matter itself was no longer a chaos to subjugate and organize but rather the moving matter of a continuous variation.
One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the “singularities” of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form; when one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous variation of variables, instead of extracting constants from them, etc. The meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself.
When Hitchcock does birds, he does not reproduce bird calls, he produces an electronic sound like a field of intensities or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a terrible threat welling up inside us. A synthesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually making “fundamentally heterogeneous elements which end up turning into each other in some way.” They may then remain relatively constant, or on the contrary grow or diminish, expand or contract, vary in the speed at which they unfold: in both cases, they are no longer pulsed and localized, and even the constants are in the service of variation; the more provisory they are, the more they display the continuous variation they resist, the more rigid they become.
The essential relation is no longer that between matters and forms (or substances and attributes); neither is it the continuous development of form and the continuous variation of matter…The continuous variation of matter and the continuous development of form. The great State mathematicians did their best to improve its status, but precisely on the condition that all the dynamic, nomadic notions — such as becoming, heterogeneity, infinitesimal, passage to the limit, continuous variation — be eliminated and civil, static, and ordinal rules be imposed upon it (Carnot’s ambiguous position in this respect). To the heaviness of the bridge, to the striated space of thick and regular piles, he opposed a thinning and discontinuity of the piles, surbase, and vault, a lightness and continuous variation of the whole. But this cannot be done without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables form the state of continuous variation, in order to extract from them fixed points and constant relations.
At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression. Matter and form have never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous variation. If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy; the musical smith was the first “transformer.” It is only in this context that one may speak of labor value, and of an evaluation bearing on the quantity of social labor, whereas more primitive groups remained under a regime of free action or activity in continuous variation.
An aggregate of intrication of this kind is in no way homogeneous: it is nevertheless smooth, and contrasts point by point with the space of fabric (it is in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center; it does not assign fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variation). Fractals, for example, are aggregates whose number of dimensions is fractional rather than whole, or else whole but with continuous variation in direction. Heterogeneous, in continuous variation, it is a smooth space, insofar as smooth space is amorphous and not homogeneous. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.
This is because the differences are not objective: it is possible to live striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth even in the cities, to be an urban nomad (for example, a stroll taken by Henry Miller in Clichy or Brooklyn is a nomadic transit in smooth space; he makes the city disgorge a patchwork, differentials of speed, delays and accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations … The beatniks owe much to Miller, but they changed direction again, they put the space outside the cities to new use. But the main thing is that it provides a general determination for smooth space that takes into account its differences from and relations to striated space:
(1) we shall call striated or metric any aggregate with a whole number of dimensions, and for which it is possible to assign constant directions;
(2) nonmetric smooth space is constituted by the construction of a line with a fractional number of dimensions greater than one, or of a surface with a fractional number of dimensions greater than two;
(3) a fractional number of dimensions is the index of a properly directional space (with continuous variation in direction, and without tangent);
(4) what defines smooth space, then, is that it does not have a dimension higher than that which moves through it or is inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity, for example, a line that fills a plane without ceasing to be a line;
(5) space and that which occupies space tend to become identified, to have the same power, in the anexact yet rigorous form of the numbering or nonwhole number (occupy without counting);
(6) a smooth, amorphous space of this kind is constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumulation defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to “becoming” (more than a line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface).
In each model, the smooth actually seemed to pertain to a fundamental heterogeneity: felt or patchwork rather than weaving, rhythmic values rather than harmony-melody, Riemannian space rather than Euclidean space — a continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between two points, the formation of a plane that does not proceed by parallel and perpendicular lines. Inscribed on the plane of consistency are haecceities, events, incorporeal transformations that are apprehended in themselves; nomadic essences, vague yet rigorous; continuums of intensities or continuous variations, which go beyond constants and variables; becomings, which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed from within striated space.
Therefore these multiplicities of “distance” are inseparable from a process of continuous variation, whereas multiplicities of “magnitude” distribute constants and variables. Instead, there is the continuous variation of free action, passing from speech to action, from a given action to another, from action to song, from song to speech, from speech to enterprise, all in a strange chromaticism with intense but rare peak moments or moments of effort that the outside observer can only “translate” in terms of work.
What they have instead is a law of the nomos regulating a continuous variation of activity with a rigor and cruelty all its own (get rid of whatever cannot be transported, the old, children …). The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local spaces of pure connection.
On the other hand, a line that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes between points, that is always declining from the horizontal and the vertical and deviating from the diagonal, that is constantly changing direction, a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or background, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation — such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes a smooth space.
Thus both content and expression are necessarily affected by continuous variation, but it still assigns them two dissymmetrical roles as elements of a single becoming, or as quanta of a single flow. That is why it is impossible to define a continuous variation that would not take in both the content and the expression, rendering them indiscernible, while simultaneously proceeding by one or the other, determining the two mobile and relative poles of that which has become indiscernible.