Existing definitions of relevance relations are essentially ambiguous outside the binary case. Hence definitions of probabilistic causality based on relevance relations, as well as probability values based on maximal specificity conditions and homogeneous reference classes are also not uniquely specified. A 'neutral state' account of explanations is provided to avoid the problem, based on an earlier account of aleatory explanations by the author. Further reasons in support of this model are given, focusing on the dynamics of explanation. It is (...) shown that truth in explanation need not entail maximal specificity and that probabilistic explanations should not contain a specification of probability values. (shrink)

The philosophy suggested by Jan Zwicky's expanded understanding of lyric and use of the fragment-as-method inspired this notebook of misunderstanding. Seeking to read Zwicky in the tradition of the aleatory genre and its basic form, the fragment, Roberts finds that her own sense of poetics and ethics accords generally with Zwicky's lyric philosophy and epistemology of imagination. Roberts's resonance with Zwicky's theory is conflicted by Zwicky's choice to isolate her fragment-method from the larger history of the aleatory genre (...) and its complex political evolution. Misunderstandings are compounded by Zwicky's disengagement from her contemporaries in the aleatory genre, the instability of her definitions by way of gestalt, and the impossible scale of her “ontological imperative.” In the end, Roberts is disappointed by this tempting but failed affinity. (shrink)

This paper argues that the reading of Althusser which finds a pronounced continuity in his conception of the relations among science, philosophy, and politics is the correct one, this essay will begin with an examination of Althusser’s “scientism.” The meaning of this term (one that differs slightly from contemporary usages) will be specified before showing how and in what way Althusser’s political philosophy between 1960 and 1980 can be described as “scientistic.” The next section details the important political role Althusser (...) assigned to the sciences and particularly to the science of historical materialism during this period. This accomplished, the arguments of interpreters who emphasize the apparent difference in Althusser’s attitude towards science before and after 1980 will be considered. Here, possible reasons for such a reading will be rehearsed. Next, with the support of recently published and archival documents, this essay will engage in a close and comparative reading of Althusser’s texts from the 1970s and 1980s that have as their subject the relations among philosophy, science, and politics. This survey will show the continuity in Althusser’s position vis-à-vis the sciences: namely, that if we want good (i.e. desired) socio-politico-economic changes to result from our political actions, then it is necessary to engage in social scientific research or, at the very least, to consult such research and to use this knowledge in our political decision making. All this serves to support the conclusion that Althusser’s “new” political philosophy from the 1980s is not really so new. On the contrary, his writings on the materialism of the encounter and aleatory materialism represent prolongations and elaborations of positions and ideas already developed in the 1960s and 1970s and that include a mostly consistent understanding of the relations between scientific knowledge and political action. This is true even if the rhetorical and philosophical style in which these ideas are put forth in the 1980s differs from the ways in which these ideas were introduced during the prior two decades. (shrink)

Review of Gerhard Richter's work on randomness in his recent abstract art paintings, compared with John Cage's work on randomness; the review asks about what randomness in representation qua art amounts to.

Beauvoir's Second Sex seems to be acknowledged as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. However, its relation to structuralism still has to be elaborated. The aim of this chapter is to analyze Beauvoir's reliance on Lévi‐Strauss, his elementary structures of kinship and the exchange of women (and not men). As the very asymmetry of sexual division became a target of Beauvoir's attack, she came close to asking Lévi‐Strauss the same question as Althusser, namely: Why is this (...) possible, and not something else? We conclude that the later Althusser's “repressed” aleatory materialism could account for Beauvoir's reasoning as to why the point of view of psychoanalysis and historical materialism are insufficient, and that Beauvoir's place could be identified with the repressed of the repressed. (shrink)

Analyzes Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

One of the remarkable features of recent interest in the work of Louis Althusser has been the prominence granted to Althusser’s cultural criticism. However, aside from one notable exception, Althusser’s cultural criticism has not figured prominently in discussions of his late work, and the absence of Althusser’s cultural criticism from those discussions has perhaps unwittingly obscured both the genealogy of Althusser’s late aesthetic ontology and the logic of his last texts, of ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ (...) and related writings on aleatory materialism. By tracing the genealogy of the aleatory impulse in Althusser’s cultural criticism, it is possible to show how that work resonates in Althusser’s late texts including the larger unpublished manuscript from which ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ has been drawn. This reading of the philosophy of the encounter also allows us to understand the importance of Nicolas Malebranche for Althusser’s aleatory materialism. (shrink)

Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and of Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza's text through Althusser and vice versa regarding the question of materialism.

This chapter explains the “progressive elaboration” of Louis Althusser’s philosophy in relation to materialism. First, it shows the way in which Althusser’s thinking about materialism, Marxism, Marx’s materialism, and the correct materialism for Marxism had its roots in earlier Marxist reflection on the metaphysics of matter and science. Second, it demonstrates how Althusser’s materialism changed over time. In broad terms, this change can be described as the transition from a Marxist materialism that fully endorsed dialectical logic to one that denied (...) dialectical logic and ontology in the name of a materialism of chance and for the sake of Marxist politics. Another way of stating this is that, gradually, Althusser began to see Historical Materialism as that which is essential to Marxism and Dialectical Materialism as that “horror” which compromised the Marxist movement both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

This article aims at presenting the concept of “phantasmagorical interpellation”. This theoretical effort is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of “phantasmagoria” and Louis Althusser’s concept of “ideological interpellation”. The proposal is to ally their respective philosophical work-in-progress in their “anthropological” and “aleatory” materialisms in order to provide a socio-political analysis of today’s capitalist aesthetics as displayed in postmodern architecture or the design of everyday life. The aim is also to open new perspectives of resistance to the normativity of the (...) consumer imaginary using a critical interpretation of cultural creations which, following the inspiration of both authors, could reveal a new subject history capable of burst onto the scene of history. (shrink)

How were reliable predictions made before Pascal and Fermat's discovery of the mathematics of probability in 1654? What methods in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic helped us to get at the truth in cases where certainty was not attainable? The book examines how judges, witch inquisitors, and juries evaluated evidence; how scientists weighed reasons for and against scientific theories; and how merchants counted shipwrecks to determine insurance rates. Also included are the problem of induction before Hume, design arguments for (...) the existence of God, and theories on how to evaluate scientific and historical hypotheses. It is explained how Pascal and Fermat's work on chance arose out of legal thought on aleatory contracts. The book interprets pre-Pascalian unquantified probability in a generally objective Bayesian or logical probabilist sense. (shrink)

This article addresses two explanatory gaps in Althusser’s late work. One has to do with the relation between nominalism and materialism; the other engages the relation between Althusser’s later materialism and a broadly materialist approach to history. In the first part of the article, I develop a response to the problem of nominalism that makes use of Hobbes’s nominalism and Deleuze’s concept of the plane of immanence. In the second part, I address the problem of history by explaining the concept (...) of an aleatory causal chain, and showing how such chains could be at work in human history. I also make use of Hobbes’s materialist account of causation, applying it to social relations, social collectivities, and historical events. (shrink)

“Aleatory materialism” does not merely constitute that which, in an overly linear perspective, one would call the “fourth Althusser”. Even if, in the last decade of his life, Althusser did indeed attempt to construct a “new philosophy”, seen as an alternative to “dialectical materialism”, one should rather perceive, behind the past arguments, so assertive and sharp, advanced by the previous Althusser, something like a discreet practical layer, self-conscious or not, wherein such arguments would have found their true point of (...) anchorage. What is at stake in this philosophy “starting from nothing” is what has always been the most necessary and the most unthinkable question, that of political subjectivation. (shrink)

I defend three claims regarding Foucault’s historical a priori and the intelligibility of history that counter commonly received accounts of Husserl’s approach to the same. First, Foucault is not a transcendental thinker in the Kantian sense of the term. His use of the HP is contingent, postdictive, regional and hypothetical. Second, the three “axes” of the dyads knowledge/truth, power/government, and subjectivation/ethics along with Foucault’s “history of the present” enclose a space called “experience” Erfahrung as nonreflective and “freed from inner life.” (...) At this point, “experience” and “multiplicity” coalesce to confirm Foucault’s anti-phenomenological bias and nominalist commitment. Finally, the relations of transformation and displacement that define archaeological change support a “fittingness” between the epistemes in question. Neither necessitating nor aleatory, their relation could be called “aesthetic” in a broad sense. I conclude by listing ways Husserl’s approach to historical intelligibility is the inverse of Foucault’s. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic defense of the single-case propensity account of probabilistic explanation from the criticisms advanced by Hanna and by Humphreys and to offer a critical appraisal of the aleatory conception advanced by Humphreys and of the deductive-nomological-probabilistic approach Railton has proposed. The principal conclusion supported by this analysis is that the Requirements of Maximal Specificity and of Strict Maximal Specificity afford the foundation for completely objective explanations of probabilistic explananda, so long (...) as they are employed on the basis of propensity criteria of explanatory relevance. (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and its challenge to (...) structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

The article focuses on the relation established by Foucault in the two lecture courses Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics between life, nature and political economy. It explores the ways in which liberalism constructs a notion of economic nature as a phenomenon of circulation of aleatory series of events and poses the latter as an internal limit to sovereign power. It argues that the entwinement of vital and economic processes provides the means of internal redefinition of the (...) raison d’État and uses such an explanation to understand the emergence of the network topos as a technology of regulation of the unstable co-causality of milieus of circulation. The article also follows Foucault’s argument that the neoliberal market is significantly different from the liberal market inasmuch as, unlike the latter, it is not defined as an abstract logic of exchange among equals but as an ideal logic of competition between formal inequalities. Finally it asks whether new theories of social production and sympathetic cooperation, in the work of authors such as Yochai Benkler and Maurizio Lazzarato, can offer an alternative to the neoliberal logic of market-based competition as the basis for the production of new forms of life. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with an enigmatic passage at the heart of Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition which locates the origin of ideas in an “aleatory point”. Deleuze develops this claim th...

Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the "late Althusser's" theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with (...) the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy "for Marx" were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency. (shrink)

By digging through the stratigraphy of the history of ideas we can find within and beyond Marxism an 'aleatory current' that values the role of chance in history. Using this perspective, the book builds a case for a historical materialism that is stripped of all teleology. Starting in the ancient Mediterranean with Epicurus, it traces the history of conceiving history as plural up to Marxism and modern science. It shows that concrete historical 'worlds' such as ancient Mesoamerica and Eurasia (...) cannot be reduced to a single template. Affirming the potentiality of a future non-capitalist 'world', it invalidates any 'end of history' thesis. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo pretende introduzir o conceito de “interpelação fantasmagórica”. O esforço teórico se inspira nos conceitos de “fantasmagoria”, de Walter Benjamin, e de “interpelação ideológica”, de Louis Althusser. A proposta é aliar suas respectivas filosofias em processo a seus materialismos “antropológico” e “aleatório”, a fim de fazer uma análise sociopolítica da estética capitalista de hoje, tal como ela aparece na arquitetura pós-moderna e no design da vida cotidiana. Trata-se também de abrir novas perspectivas de resistências a normatividade do imaginário (...) consumista com uma interpretação crítica das criações culturais que, conforme a inspiração dos autores, pode desvelar um novo sujeito capaz de surgir na cena da história. ABSTRACT This article aims at presenting the concept of “phantasmagorical interpellation”. This theoretical effort is inspired from Walter Benjamin’s concept of “phantasmagoria” and Louis Althusser’s concept of “ideological interpellation”. The proposal is to connect their respective philosophical work-in-progress in their “anthropological” and “aleatory” materialisms for a socio-political analysis of today’s capitalist aesthetic as displayed in postmodern architecture and the design of everyday life. It is also to open new perspectives of resistance to the normativity of the consumer imaginary with a critical interpretation of cultural creations that, following the inspiration of both authors, could reveal a new subject of history able to suddenly appear on the scene of history. (shrink)

The score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussotti's Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor is the most important image in A Thousand Plateaus. It serves as a prefatory image not only to the Rhizome plateau, but also to the work as a whole. It functions as the book's musical score, guiding readers in their performance of the text. Embracing John Cage's graphism and aleatory practices, Bussotti created his own ‘aserial’ new music, one that celebrated passion and Bussotti's open homosexuality. (...) The visual elements of Piece Four include a deterritorialisation of the standard piano score, a diagram of the composition's abstract machine, and a drawing that Bussotti had produced ten years before writing Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor. The drawing itself is a rhizomic artwork, with details that echo visual motifs throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The superimposition of the drawing on the deterritorialised framework of the standard piano score conjoins the visible and the audible, faciality and the refrain, in a single artefact. (shrink)

The late scholastic era was, among others, contemporary to the “emergence of probability”, the German academic philosophy from Leibniz to Kant, and the introduction of Newtonian physics. Within this era, two branches of the late-scholastic analysis of induction can be identified, one which can be thought of as a continual development of earlier scholastic approaches, while the other one absorbed influences of early modern philosophy, mathematics, and physics. Both branches of scholastic philosophy share the terminology of modalities, probability, and forms (...) of arguments. Furthermore, induction was commonly considered valid as a result of being a covert syllogism. Last but not least, there appears to be a difference in emphasis between the two traditions’ analyses of induction: while Tolomei discussed the theological presuppositions of induction, Amort’s “leges contingentium” exemplify the principles of induction by aleatory phenomena and Boscovich’s rules for inductive arguments are predominately concerned with the generalisation of macro-level observations to the micro-level. (shrink)

A nation is not a creation of the brain but a collective experience. It does not equal the sum of the individuals that compose it but transcends that sum like a global personality that is not only juridical (although there once was a “League of Nations”) but also moral in the highest sense of the word.We may ask ourselves if liberty is indetermination, nonalienation and autonomy in its accomplishment; if it is congenial in the genetic code of the nation for (...) its entire existence or, on the contrary, if there is not a sort of dialectic, that is, historic, aleatory and problematic relationship between these two realities. In fact, there is danger in the desire to find a similarity, even by analogy, between the life of nations and a biological process. The nation is a historical phenomenon appearing through a chain of circumstances in 19th-century Europe, theorized by Europe and often born elsewhere as a reaction to European imperialism. The Nation is largely a bourgeois idea and reality. (shrink)

Nearly 20 years after the Shonubi case and an extended discussion in the Anglophone world on the admissibility and probative force of statistical evidence, the labour courts of Germany seem not to have learned a simple lesson: aleatory probabilities are not informative for the individual in question. In this paper I argue that innumeracy (that is the lack of ability to understand and apply simple numerical concepts) is underestimated – if not ignored – both within the German jurisprudence and (...) legal theory. In this paper the pseudo-scientific methods of analyzing the evidence in the recent GEMA case by the labor courts of Berlin-Brandenburg and the Federal Labor Court are examined and it is shown that the persistence on applying reference class evidence to an individual-case ends up being not only theoretically unacceptable but also socially harmful. (shrink)

Introducción: la existencia de pacientes con prótesis totales que presentan problemas para desarrollar sus funciones puede tener diferentes causas, entre ellas el incumplimiento de las indicaciones médicas, y factores capaces de repercutir de forma directa sobre los pacientes, que pueden modificar su calidad de vida en relación con la rehabilitación protésica. Objetivo: Evaluar la influencia del incumplimiento de las indicaciones post rehabilitación protésica en la calidad de vida de los pacientes desdentados totales tratados en las Clínicas Estomatológicas Provincial Docente Ismael (...) Clark Mascaró y La Vigía durante el período de septiembre del 2009 a septiembre del 2013. Material y método: Se realizó un estudio descriptivo en un universo de 254 pacientes desdentados totales rehabilitados. A través de un muestreo probabilístico aleatorio se obtuvo una muestra de 43 pacientes. Resultados: El nivel de incumplimiento bajo se presentó principalmente en el grupo de 50-69 años, con un 50 % y el alto en el grupo de 70 años y más. Los elementos no cumplidos por los pacientes resultaron ser: método incorrecto de sostener las prótesis para realizar su higiene (46,5 %), uso permanente de las prótesis (30,2 %) e incorrecta frecuencia del cepillado de las prótesis (25,6 %). Conclusiones: Los mayores niveles de incumplimiento de las indicaciones de uso, cuidado e higiene de las prótesis totales se presentaron en el grupo de 70 años y más. La calidad de vida de los pacientes con rehabilitación protésica total está influenciada por el nivel de incumplimiento de las indicaciones de uso, cuidado e higiene de las prótesis. Introduction: the existence of patients with total dental prosthesis who present problems to develop their functions may have different causes, among them the unfulfillment of the medical instructions, as well as factors capable of influencing directly on the patients, that can modify their life quality with regards to the prostatic rehabilitation. Objective: to evaluate the influence of the unfulfillment of the prosthetic post-rehabilitation in the life quality of totally umpteenth patients treated at the Teaching Provincial Estomatological Clinics Ismael Clark Mascaró and La Vigía since September 2009 to September 2013. Material and method: it was carried out a descriptive study in a universe of 254 unteeth patients totaly rehabilitated. By means of probabilistic aleatory sampling it was obtained a sample of 43 patients. Results: the lowest level of unfulfillment was in patients between 50 and 69 years old, with a 50 % and the highest one was in patients older than 70 years old. The unfulfilled elements by these patients were : incorrect method of taking out the prothesis for hygiene (46,5 %), permanent use of the dental prothesis (30,2 %) and incorrect frequency for brushing the dental prothesis (25,6 %). Conclusions: the highest levels of unfulfillment of the medical instructions for using, taking care and hygiene of the dental prosthesis were presented in patients older than 70 years old. The life quality of patients with total prosthesic rehabilitation is influenced by the level of unfulfillment of the medical instructions for its use, taking care and hygiene of the prosthesis. (shrink)

A review of recent French and Latin-American work on Althusser suggests that the received interpretations of the latter’s work may profitably be re-examined. The notion that there exists an early, middle and late Althusser, each distinct from the others in important ways, is called radically into question by this body of scholarship. Various authors show the presence of an aleatory dimension, usually associated with the late Althusser, in even his most ‘structuralist’ concepts. These works help us read Althusser in (...) a new way. (shrink)

The paper attempts to reconcile two very different approaches to the concept of causation. In the original form, it is the opposition found in Laplace between his doctrine of constant and variable causes on the one hand and his mechanistic determinism on the other. This tension was described clearly only by Maxwell who stressed the contrast between the statistical and the dynamical method (calling the latter also the historical or strictly kinetic method). A similar dichotomy surfaces in the work of (...) Wesley Salmon who distinguished statistical from aleatory causation. Acknowledging that we seem to have conflicting intuitions about causality and explanation, I argue that assigning probabilistic laws a fundamental role in scientific explanation does not conflict with the assumption of Laplacian determinism. This is due to the fact that in most systems of interest, we confront a complex interaction of multiple causal factors and an extreme sensitivity to small variations of initial conditions. (shrink)

Deleuze's cinema project identifies a crisis of movement, action and thought, established initially in the war-devastated spaces of neo-realist cinema. Indirectly these spaces subordinate architecture as the locus of crisis, which only new, temporal artistic practices can avert. However, an architectural model of the smooth and striated, revealing a sophisticated interplay of the two concepts, can reinstall design practice and the intentional built environment as part of a productive and affirmative image of thought. The designs of James Stirling, whose career (...) unfolds alongside significant developments in post-war spatial thought, reveal sensual expressions of new modes of subjectivity and individuation to accompany the increasingly aleatory and lacunary nature of movement. (shrink)

In the past few years there has been a renewed interest in the work of Louis Althusser, although, in some cases, this interest has been one-sided, focusing mainly on his later writings on aleatory materialism. The three books reviewed in this article, however, offer balanced and insightful overviews of the totality of Althusser's work, placing it in the wider context of Marxist political and theoretical debates and stressing both its originality and strengths, but also its contradictions.

The essay takes its point of departure from Monod's reading of dialectical materialism in Chance and Necessity. A passage of Engels's Dialectics of Nature, which identifies Spinoza's concept of causa sui with the Hegelian concept of interaction [Wechselwirkung], provides the opportunity to examine the consequences of Monod's claims more closely. Using Spinoza's philosophy as a litmus test, the essay attempts to demonstrate the debt of Engels's materialism to Hegel's Science of Logic by tracing the development of the concept of Wechselwirkung (...) in classical German philosophy. A profound difference between the Spinozan and Hegelian concepts becomes apparent: while the concept of Wechselwirkung implies a totality present to itself as simultaneity, permitting the flow of a linear, homogenous and empty time upon which stages of development can be inscribed, the concept of causa sui implies a totality without closure, a totality whose eternity is identified with the necessary and infinite network of modal durations. The essay concludes by suggesting that Spinoza's concept of causa sui allows us to rethink the relation between freedom and necessity in the Marxist tradition in conjunctural and aleatory terms. (shrink)

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. This chapter is a comprehensive survey of sound practices in avant-garde film, video art, and installation art since the 1960s. It addresses a series of artistic approaches to sound: silence, tone and drone, antic and aleatory, multilayering and cacophony, work with voices, legacies of cinematic exhibition, and resonant spaces in galleries and museums. It is broadly chronological, beginning with major (...) figures of the 1960s and ending with artists currently working. The chapter does not deny medium specificity, but moves easily among celluloid film, video formats, and gallery installation. Theoretical perspectives derive from the debate between Deleuze and Badiou on the nature and frequency of “the event,” a restaging of the discussion on the value of experiment and innovation. The chapter is wide-ranging enough to be synoptic, but also provides detailed discussion of works by Larry Gottheim, Abigail Child, Andy Warhol, Christian Marclay, Janet Cardiff, and Bruce High Quality Foundation. (shrink)

In A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser Panagiotis Sotiris attempts a reading of the work of the French philosopher centered upon his deeply political conception of philosophy. Althusser's endeavour is presented as a quest for a new practice of philosophy that would enable a new practice of politics for communism, in opposition to idealism and teleology. The central point is that in his trajectory from the crucial interventions of the 1960s to the texts on aleatory materialism, Althusser remained a (...) communist in philosophy. This is based upon a reading of the tensions and dynamics running through Althusser's work and his dialogue with other thinkers. Particular attention is paid to crucial texts by Althusser that remained unpublished until relatively recently. (shrink)

This article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fulfil all the requirements for a materialist ‘philosophical anthropology’. In fact, we demonstrate that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and notably his concept of the transindividual, can be, as it were, included in a genealogy of aleatory materialism. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is indeed a philosophy of the transindividual insofar as it involves the constant revision of the different historical forms taken by social relations in the coevolution (...) of human beings and their techno-social and natural milieu. Simondon’s way of conceiving anthropogenesis as an open and ‘metastable’ field in which individuals and processes relate to each other maintaining their own knowledge in motion, marks, in our view, a materialist style of thinking. Against this background we analyse Simondon’s overcoming of the dichotomy between the individual and society through a ‘double rejection’, we sketch his theory of a ‘double source’ for social relations, and we explain in what sense, from his perspective, the transindividual ‘can be said in many ways’. (shrink)

It is somewhat of a mystery why one of Foucault's most important concepts—that of ‘dispositif’—is still quite vague in social and political theory; and while a small number of analyses have moved understanding forward, it remains stubbornly opaque. This paper argues that a strengthening of Foucault's concept can be achieved by integrating elements of Althusser’s formulation of a dispositif events), and a detailed examination of the shared conceptual history between dispositifs and discursive formations. Regarding, the paper contends that dispositifs restrict (...) three types of aleatory event: first, a ‘continuous present’ exerted upon objects and subjects; second, overdetermining repetitious occurrences; and third, negating the effects of unexpected aleatory events. The paper also argues that dispositifs are capable of producing certain forms of aleatory change. Regarding, four developmental thresholds of dispositifs are identified: strategic emergence, political elaboration, overdetermined a priori, and aleatory dominance. These two developments are argued to move Foucault's concept from being descriptive and largely passive to becoming a more theoretically active resource—what Deleuze terms changing the analytical to the diagnostic. (shrink)

By proposing the notion of aleatory materialism, or Marxism of encounter, Althusser had three goals in mind: to give Marxism, finally in crisis, its philosophy; to identify this philosophy with an underground current starting with Epicure and Democritus; to provide the means to introduce points of heresy from which the crisis would gain intelligibility. This article purports to show that this form of materialism consists less in a new philosophy than in an ontology and a logic of the “not-much”, (...) of the impoverishment of meaning and reason. The encounter is not a thesis on the materiality of the world, but on the conditions of thought of its very being: without origin, without purpose, without meaning, without necessity. By subscribing to such a thesis, one reintegrates within a reflection inhabited by emptiness, gap and difference, its outside, constituted by the singular practices of those who suffer and struggle in the emptiness and delinkage of the world. (shrink)

Probability theory is the arithmetic of the real line constrained by special aleatory axioms. Fuzzy logic is also a kind of probability theory, but of considerably more mathematical and axiomatic complexity than the standard account. Fuzzy logic purp orts to model the human capacity for reasoning with inexact concepts. It does this by exploring the assumption that when we argue in inexact terms and draw inferences in imprecise vocabularies, we actually make computations about the embedded imprecision s. I argue (...) that this is in fact the last thing that we do, and indeed that we do the opposite. (shrink)

This chapter covers the epistemic or information-based interpretations of probability: logical, subjective, objective Bayesian, and group level. It explains how these differ from aleatory or world-based interpretations of probability, presents each in detail, and then discusses its strengths and weaknesses.