Between Beckett and Bec: The Mètic Hexis and Flusserian Flux of Vampyroteuthis Abductionis

‘Mètic Hexis and Flusserian Flux’
(rough draft)
Between Beckett and Bec :
The Mètic Hexis and Flusserian Flux
of Vampyroteuthis Abductionis —

Dan Mellamphy

Marshall McLuhan’s & Vilém Flusser’s
Communication & Aesthetic Theories Revisited
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

◊

◊◊
Appeler ça des questions, des hypothèses.
[…] Comment faire, comment vais‐je faire,
que dois‐je faire, dans la situation où je suis,
comment procéder? Par pure aporie ou bien
par affirmations et négations infirmées au fur
et à mesure, ou tôt ou tard. […] À remarquer,
avant d’aller plus loin, de l’avant, que je dis
aporie sans savoir ce que ça veut dire.

Samuel Beckett
◊◊
◊

Vilém Flusser’s treatise on the Vampyroteuthis Infernalis ends with a
report from “L’Institut Scientifique de Louis Bec”; this one—the present essay—
begins with some support from “L’Innomable de Samuel Beckett”; it begins “by
aporia pure and simple” (par pure aporie).1 “I say aporia without knowing what
it means” (it’s all Greek to me),2 the Greek words póros and aporia being well‐nigh
untranslatable and even at times indistinguishable (mutually ungraspable und
unbegreiflich), as Sarah Kofman acknowledged in the section on ‘Póros, son of
Mètis’ in her as‐yet untranslated Comment s’en Sortir?3 The fluidity (ein Fluss4)
of the Greek póros makes it as intractable and untenable as any aporia, and thus
an equally mètic—crafty, cunning, wily and beguiling—mechanè or machination.
The Greek words mètis, póros and aporia weave together5 in[to] a veritable
enigma, which in Greek could be called an ainigma or griphos, the latter
being “a word which also applies to a certain kind of fishing net”;6 hence,
explains Kofman, “an enigma is woven, like a basket or net; […] [its art or technè
is related to] the arts of weaving and plaiting, to the most ancient techniques
and tricks which use the suppleness of vegetal matter and its capacity for
Dan Mellamphy [[page 1]]
(rough draft)
[fluid] torsion to make knots, ropes, meshes and nets so as to surprise, trap and
ensnare.”7 In Marcel Détienne & Jean‐Pierre Vernant’s 1974 study Les Ruses de
L’Intelligence: La mètis des Grecs, the sourcebook of Kofman’s Comment s’en
Sortir? (and of the latter end of that last‐quoted Kofman‐comment), it is explained
that “the octopus is renowned for its mètis”:8 “fluid, ungraspable, developing into
a thousand agile limbs,” octopi “are enigmatic creatures, […] pure aporias, and
the night that they secrete—a night without exit—is a perfect emblem of their
mètis; in the depths of obscurity, […] the octopus alone is capable of tracing a
path, of opening a póros.”9 Writing about this inky sepia‐secretion, this “perfect
emblem” of mètic maneuvering, Flusser acknowledges that “according to popular
opinion, octopi deploy this floating cloud of ink—which they shape into their own
image10—simply to mislead their enemies, but there is more to the story”:11

Closer observation of the vampyroteuthis’s relatives has revealed
that the act of sculpting the sepia‐cloud has nothing to do with
their enemies and that, beyond self‐portraits, they fabricate
countless other forms that are […] exclusively intended to mislead
their receiver. These nebulous manipulations are meant to deceive.12

By nature as well as by culture,13 according to Flusser, the “vampyroteuthis
seeks to mislead”14 (each gesture of “vampyroteuthian creativity […] is synonymous
with deceit”15 or with what the Greeks of antiquity called dólos: “dólos [signifying]
at once ‘ruse’, ‘trap’ and magical ‘bind’,”16 as Détienne and Vernant state in their
study). All “vampyroteuthian emissions are enigmas”17 (ainigmata, griphoi),18 and
in this sense again the octopus and octopoid “vampire squid” are veritable masters
of mètis:19 the sub‐oceanic equivalents of the super‐oceanic Odysseus polymètis.20
The human octopus and “mètic man” par excellence was the mythological “Odys‐
seus polymètis, whom Eustathius described by the very words ‘he is an octopus!’,”
or—paraphrasing Eustathius in an explicitly Flusserian mode—Odysseus is a veri‐
table vampyroteuthis!21 “But the octopus is not simply characteristic of a particu‐
lar type of human behaviour,” Détienne and Vernant point out; “it is also the
model for a form of intelligence” which was known amongst ancient Greeks
(rough draft)
as the “polyplokon noèma”:22 “a ‘tentacular’ intelligence”23 that, in a recent
essay,24 I posited—via Flusser—as a pre‐posterously “post‐digital” (nevermind
“post‐historical”25) intelligence altogether exemplificative of globally‐reticulated
A.I. “The world that humans comprehend,” wrote Flusser, is one that is grasped,
handled and manipulated in accordance with, and through the literally digital
—ten‐fingered—design of, the human hand (“the limbs of a bygone locomotive
organ” which served to grasp “the branches that we had originally held”).26

The vampyroteuthis, on the contrary, takes hold of the world
with […] tentacles surrounding its mouth, which originally served
to direct streams of food toward the digestive tract. The world
grasped by the vampyroteuthis is a fluid, centripetal whirlpool.
It takes hold of it in order to discern its flowing particularities.
Its tentacles, analogous to our hands, are digestive organs.
Whereas our method of comprehension is active—we perambu‐
late a static and established world—its method is passive and im‐
passioned: it takes in a world that is rushing past it. We compre‐
hend what we happen upon, and it comprehends what happens
upon it. Whereas we have ‘problems’, things in our way, it has
‘impressions’.27

As was stated in that previous paper,28 Détienne and Vernant would
disagree with this last claim, the claim that the polyplokon noèma is passive,
and would argue instead that the “passion” here is not in fact “passive” but rather
attentively active.29 Noël Denoyel from the Département de Sciences d’Éducation
at the Université François Rabelais (named after one of the Renaissance masters of
mètis) likens mètic activity to what Charles Sanders Peirce called “abduction”30
and Gilbert Simondon called “transduction”.31 “Just as mètis grasps kairós”
(kairós being the propitious, decisive and opportune “moment” qua “critical
juncture” and/or “turning point” in a given situation or set of conditions),
“abduction [grasps] the pertinent hypothesis” of a given situation qua set of con‐
ditions;32 hence [mètic] abduction—or mètis‐hexis transduction, harkening here
to Debra Hawhee33—always emerges as a new beginning, a novel individuation,
(rough draft)
a hitherto‐unfamiliar perspective, born in and borne by the “mètic kairós”34 (the
pivotal point qua generative moment of mètis understood as a corporeal cunning).
“A central condition for taking new perspectives is activity,” the co‐directors of the
Center for Diagrammatic and Computational Philosophy at Endicott College (Gian‐
luca Caterina and Rocco Gangle) affirm via a quote from Michael Hoffmann,35
and—returning to our central example taken from Flusser, Kofman, Détienne
and Vernant—the activity of abduction or mètic transduction “grasps” given
occasions like an octopus: that is, via the gestures of a great many teeming
“tentacles” or at‐once divergent‐and‐convergent “coils” (the “coils” of its
polyplokon noèma, its many‐tentacled “mètic intelligence”). Many‐coiled/
many‐tentacled mètic/abductive/transductive intelligence is not only “active”
but utterly and inextricably “interactive”: it is the activity of an intensive inter‐
activity, one which articulates interrelations/interactions both material (i.e. eco‐
logical: having to do with the material environment) and sociocultural (i.e. oïko‐
logical: having to do with the habitual environment). “The concept of eco‐form‐
ation (formation by things) transforms itself into oïko‐formation (the Greek oïkos
designating [habit/habituation/]habitat), and finally the notion […] of ec(h)o‐form‐
ation attempts to account for the interactions between these different poles,”
argues Denoyel.36 Ec(h)o‐formation interweaves “the interaction of self and
sociocultural environment” with “the interaction of self and material environ‐
ment,”37 “generating an interactional intelligence”38 qua mètic métissage39
(as Penelopean as it is Ulyssean/Odyssean40); thus “mètis […] strikes us as an
intelligence of interaction, here configured as [an] ec(h)o‐formation.”41 In an
essay written prior to the fortuitous 2012 Christmas‐present/cadeau‐de‐Noël of
Denoyel’s Y2K/1999 paper, the interaction and interrelation of “ecology”
and mètic
(in this case Fremenic, harkening back to Frank Herbert’s Fremen, themselves
masters of mètis and tactical taqiyya42) “ec(h)ology” was also outlined, with
the worm—“variant of wyrm: [i.e.] serpent or dragon”43—as its infernal exem‐
plification rather than the exemplary Flusserian vampyroteuthis infernalis.44
In her essay on ‘Mètis [as] an Intelligence of the Body’, Debra Hawhee
(rough draft)
takes note of the fact that “mètis invokes an idea of intelligence as immanent
movement”: a “movement which blurs boundaries between bodies and arts”
(or, in the analyses of Détienne and Vernant, between the classic régimes of
technè and poièsis);45 “the wiles of art and body converge at the juncture of
groping limbs, […] as with the example of the octopus,” she explains; and be‐
cause of this “it [is] difficult to locate technè,” poièsis, or indeed “thought,
for that matter, […] strictly within the mind or consciousness” (which is the
problem/[dis]solution of any transduction).46 Mind and body “converge”
and are “blurred” in the movement of mètic intelligence or octopoid
cunning. “In other words, in the àgón […] [of] the octopus, […] technè
emerges from the matrix of […] a series of fluid movements”—ein Fluss,
one might say, echoing Flusser—“[fluid] movements between tentacles,
teeth, […] [and various] bodily maneuverings. Mètis is in this sense a
mingling” or métissage “of quick, responsive impulses” (“mètic kairós”);
as opposed to the Greek noós, “which is concerned with timeless principles,”
mètis “emerges only from [an ec(h)ology of] shifting and ambiguous situations […]
eluding logical apprehension”47—its “ec(h)ology” is in many respects alogical:
an alogos (hence literally unspeakable)48 in Greek. Liddell and Scott translate
the alogos as “1, without speech, speechless, infans; […] 2, without reason,
irrational; […] 3, not reckoned upon, unexpected”:49 all aspects (1, 2, 3) of
(4) mètis’s polyplokon noèma. With respect to its infancy—its being infans—
Peirce was in complete accordance (at least when it came to what he called
“abduction”): “[I am] always unceasingly exercising my power of learning new
tricks to keep myself in possession of th[at] childish trait” (the trait of abduction,
hypothesis‐generation, or “the play‐of‐musement”: the movement of mètis‐hexis),
he explained.50 Such infancy is in many respects what Simondon would call “pre‐
individual” and actively “individuating” (i.e. in the process of active/intensive
“individuation”).51
Without speech—in a state of infancy—“a child always tries to express
itself through gestures or actions,”52 wrote the mathematician and historian of
(rough draft)
enigmatic ideas (ainigmata, griphoi) René Schwaller. This permits the child to get
“much closer to the truth [of a situation] than the learnèd man” who relies on
“fixed meanings” and habitual correlations.53 Those who would be “crafty” and
“cunning”—full of Witz: ‘wile’ and ‘wit’, or ‘esprit’ and ‘élan’ en français—would
be advised by Schwaller (as well as by Peirce54) to endeavour to acquire this child‐
ish trait, to employ and deploy “diagrammatical” and “gestural” modes of descrip‐
tion, inscription and transcription: “a form of transcription [always] having several
possible meanings,” and one “that uses ordinary [acts and/or] facts as ‘hooks’
to catch thought.”55 As Flusser suggested in the first of our indented quotations
(above), the “writings” of octopi/polyplokoi are writhings rather than writings,
strictly speaking: they sculpt—via sepia—what he described as enigmatic, eso‐
teric, and ephemeral—hence kairótic56—nebula, “nebulous formations” that play
“childish […] tricks”57 on the senses and (like all tricks, all works of magic, all mètic
machination‐maneuvers) “are meant to deceive.”58 According to Flusser, octop‐
oid writhings deceive, orthograph writings deform: the first by their “bending” or
“breaking” of rules, the second by their rule‐bound “stringency”59 (the deceptive,
diabolical, diagrammatical duplicity of the gesture and its gestural suggestiveness
—its suggestures—is thus “closer to the truth”60 than its orthodox orthographic
alternative61). In his Apologie du Logos and his Modèles Mathématiques de la
Morphogénèse, the mathematician René Thom makes a similar point (most
explicitly in the final chapter of the latter study: its chapter on the play of muse‐
ment—‘Au Frontières du Pouvoir Humain: Le Jeu’62—which deals with the diagram‐
matical “duplicity” qua gestural “game” of mètis). “In mathematics, a science of
exemplary rationality, progression is accompanied more by tricks than by general
methods,” Thom admits.63 “In the face of an enigmatic local situation, ‘universal
reason’—the logos—is not sufficient; it is necessary to have recourse to that form
of intelligence which the classical Greeks called mètis.”64 Mètic “tricks” and their
polymorphous, polyvalent, polyplokon noèma are “comment s’en sortir”65 in the
face of enigmatic situations, states the world‐renown Fields‐Medalist.
(rough draft)
Thom’s erstwhile colleague Gilles Châtelet, whose great contemporary
influences were the writings of Gilles Deleuze and of Gilbert Simondon (and who
organized the famous conference on Simondon at the Collège International de
Philosophie in 199266), devoted a large part of his career to “diagramming gestu‐
res” or to what he kairótically if not kâlîgraphicaly67 characterized as “the capture
68
[of] gestures mid‐flight” (capturing each gesture “before it curls up into a sign”).
His notion of “diagram” was in many ways akin to Flusserian “photographs” qua
technical images,69 which also—like diagrams in Châtelet’s work—“blossom with
dotted lines in order to engulf images that were previously figured in [less detailed,
less intricate, less ‘in‐depth’] thick lines.”70 The key to drawing‐up and drawing‐
forth diagrams for Châtelet is a Peircian “play‐of‐musement” or as Thom would
say, a playing or gaming “to the frontiers of human power.”71 “For Châtelet, our
own interaction with the figures that we draw constitutes a place of invention and
discovery that cannot be explained away by the theorems that appear to lock‐
down a particular […] procedure,” Kenneth Knœspel explains in his excellent
introduction to the English translation of Châtelet’s Enjeu du Mobile (literally
The Issue of the Mobile or The Motile Gambit; translated in the year 2000 as Figuring
Space).72 The cognitive and corporeal gesture is an inextricable part of the diagram‐
matic/diàgónic interactivity qua Denoyellian ec(h)o‐formation of Châtelet’s vision
and version of mètis‐hexis; his diagrams are thus, like the sepia‐scultures—writh‐
ings rather than writings—of Flusser’s vampyroteuthis, trickster‐texts, magic tricks,
mètic machinations, which actively (indeed interactively) “reactivate” a whole
complex that has hitherto “been mutilated by technical dispersement”:73 a
complex that includes “genuine […] magical power, […] sleights of hand, all these
‘recipes’, all these thought‐experiments, all these figures and diagrams, all these
dynasties of problems seemingly capable of the ‘miracle’ of [interactive/ec(h)o‐
logical] reactivation.”74 “It is precisely the reactivation of problems that Châtelet
undertakes” in his work, states Knœspel.75 As in Peirce’s project, the object is the
generation of new perspectives,76 the “spreading and stretching [of] dimensional‐
ity”77 that we also find at the heart and prosthetic perimeters of McLuhan’s parti‐
(rough draft)
cular project78 and that Châtelet—a mathematician, after all—found in Hermann
Grassmann’s Lineale Ausdehnungsle (his Theory of Extension):

What Châtelet found most intriguing about Grassmann
was the way that he “represents a genuine pedagogy of
the forms of the grasping of space” (Châtelet, 2000, 103).
Essential to this pedagogy is the […] capacity for an ‘overview’.
“This ‘overview’ is not the dilettante’s distant contemplation;
it takes part in the action: […] it transports us to that privileged
zone were intuition and discursivity become knotted into a
living unity. It is neither a priori nor a posteriori; it is con‐
temporaneous with what it grasps” (104). In Grassmann’s
own words: “Presentiment [Ahnung] appears foreign to
the domain of pure science, above all to the domain of
mathematics. However, without it, it is impossible to find
a new idea. It is—if conceived in the right way—the look
79
[or the ‘hook’ ] that seizes in one go any development
that leads to the new truth, but comprising instants
that have not yet become exposed. It is for this reason
that the presentiment can at the beginning only be obscure
[dunkles Vorgefühl]” (104). That is why scientific presentation
is essentially a progression of two series of developments […]
80
[and thus essentially and inextricably ec(h)o‐formative].

The nexus of mètis and hexis, the notion of embodied—corporeal—
cunning, of cunning intelligence as immanent movement, suggestive gesture,
and ec(h)ological interactivity (“une intelligence de l’interaction” in the words of
Noël Denoyel), find themselves recapitulated in this comparison/cross‐connection
of Grassmann and Châtelet. “Just as mètis grasps kairós” and in this “grasp” finds
itself at one and complicit with the propitious, decisive and opportune moment,81
so too is the gesture here “knotted” and “hooked” into the instant or moment of
grasping, “neither a priori nor a posteriori […] [but] contemporaneous with what it
grasps.” The “new truth” that emerges from (and/or is “exposed” in) this mètic,
kairótic, “ec(h)o‐formation” abducts and transducts the actant agents of its eco‐,
oïko‐ and ec(h)o‐system qua curved—hence vampyroteuthically voluminous82—
(rough draft)
“polyplokamian plateau” (un plateau qui n’est pas plat: a plateau far from flat,
beyond the bounds of its extant etymology nevermind Gregory‐Batesonian
Ecology83), and plunges them into the outis or oudèis84—the [as‐yet] “no‐thing”—
of pre‐individuated transductive obscurity: a dunkles Vorgefühl, in the words of
Grassmann. And “just as” in the mythological encounter of Odysseus and Poly‐
phemus (wherein Odysseus calls himself oudèis and/or outis, meaning ‘no one’/
‘nobody’/‘nothing’, to trick his titanic adversary and ultimately escape an other‐
wise entirely aporetic situation) Odysseus blinds and binds his foe,85 “so too”
a certain blindness and obscurity seem to be essential in every mètic operation.
Both Denoyel and Kofman before him note that “this form of intelligence which
[Détienne and Vernant describe as having been] cast aside and thrown into the
shadows” (rejetée dans l’ombre) “in fact turns out to need this shadow” (a, en fait,
besoin de l’ombre) “to develop its masked machinations.”86 Détienne and Vernant
“conclude their remarkable study of the Greek mètis by emphasizing the exclusion
from within philosophy of that cunning intelligence which proceeds by tricks and
by turns” (par tours et détours);87 “most notable” amongst those philosophers
dead‐set against such subtle savvy was Plato—whose famous name88 shares the
same etymology as the flat (plat) plateau—Plato, “[who] would have cast into the
shadows and condemned [to oblivion]” ([qui] aurait relégué dans l’ombre et
condamné) all so‐called mètic intelligence.89 But again, like the vampyroteuthis
infernalis, it is within—with and in—the abyssal shadows that such wily ways are
at first formulated, and it is from them that they suddenly, surprisingly, arise (as a
surprising arising out of aporia and/or an aporia from pure póros). Wily ways arise
from the ombre (l’ombre) of their formation—from the shadows of their formula‐
tion—as “sovereign”90 and “treacherous”91 gestures: gestures of “rupture”92 or
“disruption”93 that “turn upon” a given situation and in this “gesture of betrayal”94
are both portrayals (snapshots, aporetic stills) of this situation and portals
(pathways, passages or poroi) out of it.

(rough draft)

Notes:

1
Samuel Beckett, L’Innomable (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1953), 7;
The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 3.
2
Samuel Beckett, L’Innomable (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1953), 8;
The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 4.
3
Sarah Kofman, Comment s’en Sortir? (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1983), 17.
4
(in Flusserian German)
5
This “weaving together” (which for the poet Homer was an altogether Penelopean,
nevermind entirely Odysseusian/Odyssean, endeavour) will in the following essay
be seen as ultimately “ec(h)ological” (via Noël Denoyel, ‘Alternance Tripolaire
et Raison Expérientielle à la Lumière de la Sémiotique de Peirce’, in
La Revue Française de Pédagogie Volume 128, 1999, 38, as well as
Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, ‘Ec(h)ology of the Désêtre:
Essay on Transduction and Transmutation’, in Reza Negaretani, ed., Collapse:
Journal of Philosophical Research and Development VII: ‘Culinary Materialism’, 2011, 424).
6
7
8
Marcel Détienne & Jean‐Pierre Vernant, Les Ruses de L’Intelligence:
La mètis des Grecs (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1974), 45.
9
10
“These clouds of ink* can […] be shaped into sculptures by the ‘arms’
of the animal (Tintenfisch, ‘ink‐fish’)”; Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis:
Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste
(Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis:
A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 19. || *i.e. this “ink, ‘sepia’—which fo
rms floating clouds
in the water—whose outlines are modelled by cephalopods”; Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis
Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste
(Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Rodrigo Novæs, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis
(Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011), 40.
11
Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique
de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Valentine Pakis,
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche
Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 51‐52.
12
13
Yes, culture: Flusser devotes a whole section of his study to ‘Vampyroteuthic Culture’
(trans. Pakis), ‘The Culture of the Vampyroteuthis’ (trans. Novæs); cf. Vilém Flusser,
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique
de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans.
Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut
Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2012), 45‐68, and Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, trans. Rodrigo Novæs (Dresden: Atropos Press,
2011), 81‐104.
14
de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Rodrigo Novæs,
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011), 91. “As a species, the vampyroteuthis
deludes all other species, and every group of vampyroteuthes deludes every other group; the
individual deceives all others in the group, and every vampyroteuthis deceives all others. The
vampyroteuthic code is a peculiar type of cryptography that is not meant to be decrypted—
(rough draft)

or rather, its decryption yields further deceptive encryptions. The underlying purpose of all
vampyroteuthic communication is to deceive the other in order to devour it. Its is a culture of
deceit, pretense, and falsehood. Broadly speaking, one could even call it a culture of art”; Vilém
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de
Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Valentine Pakis,
15
de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Rodrigo Novæs,
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011), 111.
16
17
Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des
Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen,
1987), trans. Rodrigo Novæs, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011), 91.
18
19
20
See for instance, Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919), 21.274, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0135%3Abook%3D21%3Acard%3D256 (via The Perseus
Digital Library, Tufts University).
21
22
23
24
Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, ‘From the Digital to the Tentacular, or
From iPods to Cephalopods: Apps, Traps, and Entrées‐without‐Exit’, in The Imaginary App,
eds. Paul Miller/DJ‐Spooky & S. Matviyenko (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming).
25
Vilém Flusser, Pós‐história: Vinte Instantâneos e um Modo de Usar,
(São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1983).
26
Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund
des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen,
1987), trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut
Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 39.
In the fourteenth section of his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan
—via reference to the work of Elias Canetti—suggested that (in his day, at least) these limbs
were not yet “bygone organs”: “in Crowds and Power, [Canetti] argues that the trader
is involved in one of the most ancient of all pastimes, namely that of climbing trees
and swinging from limb to limb. The primitive grasping, calculating, and timing of
the greater arboreal apes he sees as a transition into financial terms of one of the
oldest movement patterns. Just as the hand among the branches of the trees
learned a pattern of grasping that was quite removed from the moving of food
to the mouth, so the trader and the financier have developed enthralling activities
that are extensions of the avid climbing and mobility of the greater apes”
(Critical Edition, ed. Terrence Gordon, Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2003, 182).
27
Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund
1987), trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut
Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 39.
28
Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, ‘From the Digital to the Tentacular, or
From iPods to Cephalopods: Apps, Traps, and Entrées‐without‐Exit’, in The Imaginary App,
(rough draft)

eds. Paul Miller/DJ‐Spooky & S. Matviyenko (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming).
29
“This ‘octopus intelligence’ […] from a certain perspective would appear akin to that which
the Lyric poets called the ephèmeros,” they explain. “Indeed, like it, the ephèmeros is characterized
by its mobility,” fluidity and dynamic instability (Détienne & Vernant 1974, 47‐48). But unlike
the intelligence of the Lyric ephèmeros, that of the polytropic polyplokon “is unstable
only in appearance: its about‐faces are a trap, the net in which its adversaries come to be
entangled” (ibid. 48). Between the intelligence of the polytropic polyplokon and that of the
ephèmeros “there is the exact distance that separates the octopus from the chameleon”
(ibid. 47‐48): the former is active, actively trapping, approaching its victim like a hunter
or South‐Park ‘Trapper‐Keeper’,* whereas the latter is passive, changing with (rather than
charging and playing with) the current[s] of its environment, thus devoid of the demonic or
devilish deceit. Flusser does acknowledge this active dimension however, for instance
when he notes that “at some unknown moments”—pouncing upon and capturing the kairós,
very likely—“it becomes a highly mobile predator”: “volatile” (“demonic, even”), with a great
“predatory velocity” (Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund
des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987,
trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut
Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2012, 40‐41). || *Matt Stone and Trey Parker, South Park, Episode 60: “Trapper‐Keeper”
(November 15, 2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapper_Keeper_%28South_Park%29).
30
cf. Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds.
Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1932), 54, re: abductive novelty.
31
cf. Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: Éditions Aubier, 1958);
L’Individuation à la Lumière des Notions de Forme et d’Information (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1964).
32
Noël Denoyel, ‘Alternance Tripolaire et Raison Expérientielle à la Lumière de la
Sémiotique de Peirce’, in La Revue Française de Pédagogie Volume 128, 1999, 36‐37.
33
Debra Hawhee, ‘Mètis: An Intelligence of the Body’, in Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Aesthetics
in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 57‐58.
34
in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 65.
35
Gianluca Caterina & Rocco Gangle, ‘Consequences of a Diagrammatic Representation of
Paul Cohen’s Forcing Technique Based on C.S. Peirce’s Existential Graphs’, in Lorenzo Magnani
et.al., eds., Model‐Based Reasoning in Science & Technology (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2010), 430.
36
Noël Denoyel, ‘Alternance Tripolaire et Raison Expérientielle à la Lumière de
la Sémiotique de Peirce’, in La Revue Française de Pédagogie Volume 128, 1999, 38.
This “Echo”logy folds‐in, enjoins, and ultimately conjoins with Echo’s nemesis:
the narcotized Narcissus of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (§IV).
37
Sémiotique de Peirce’, in La Revue Française de Pédagogie Volume 128, 1999, 38.
38
39
For a machine translation c/o Google Intelligence, cf. http://translate.google.ie/
?hl=&ie=UTF‐8&text=&sl=fr&tl=en#fr/en/m%C3%A9tissage (A.I.).
40
In her follow‐up to Détienne and Vernant’s now‐classic study, Lisa Raphals links
the Greek mètis to the Chinese wu‐wei, the “active passivity” which is just as cunning
as “the you‐wei plots of Ulysses [a.k.a. Odysseus]” and corresponds—for Raphals—
to the twists and Odyssean/Ulyssean U‐turns/“about‐faces” (Détienne & Vernant
1974, 8, 39, 48) of the latter’s equally‐mètic mate: his wily wife Penelope, whose name
is moreover synonymous with the ever‐turning, shape‐shifting polytropos: pènè‐ops
designating one who “weaves, threads or spools”/pènè (Liddell & Scott 1889,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.
0058%3Aentry%3Dph%2Fnh) their “face, countenance or appearance”/ops
(rough draft)

(Liddell & Scott 1889, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%
3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Dw%29%2Fy). “We can account for both the you‐wei plots
of Ulysses and the wu‐wei designs of Penelope as oblique means toward similar ends”
—that is to say similar actions—wrote Raphals. “Both [play upon] appearances; both are
oblique; both rely on skillful means more than on discursive wisdom. By contrast, the Greek
philosopher [i.e. lover of wisdom] and the Confucian junzi [i.e. sage ruler or wise man] […]
follow lines rather than twists”; Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning
in the Classical Traditions of China & Greece (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), 230.
41
42
cf. Frank Herbert, Dune (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1965).
43
cf. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=worm
44
“The logic or logos of the ecologist is not that of the egological operative: its vernacular
is instead vermicular, an unspoken and unspeakable wormtongue, the logos alogos
of earthworms, which drags us back to the serpentine dragon (even, ironically, by its etymon;
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=worm). It is the language of egos drawn back to
the dust, mixed into the mud, sunk into the sand from whence they distinguished themselves
as environmentally indigestible existents”; Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy,
‘Ec(h)ology of the Désêtre: Essay on Transduction and Transmutation’, in Reza Negaretani, ed.,
Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development VII: ‘Culinary Materialism’,
Spring‐Summer 2011, 424.
45
46
in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 48. In an article on the topic of
‘What Cephalopods Teach Us about Language’ (Discover: The Magazine of Science, Technology,
and the Future, April 2006, http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/cephalopod‐morphing),
Jaron Lanier provided an excellent example of the mètic/polyplokamian convergence of body,
mind, technè and poièsis: Describing a video shot by Roger Hanlon (Researcher at the Marine
Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole) in 1997, Lanier recounts how the videographer Hanlon
“swims up to examine an unremarkable rock covered in swaying algæ. Suddenly, astonishingly,
one‐third of the rock and a tangled mass of algæ morphs and reveals itself for what it really is:
the waving arms of a bright white octopus. Its cover blown, the creature squirts ink at Roger and
shoots off into the distance—leaving Roger, and the video viewer, slack‐jawed. The star of this
video, Octopus vulgaris, is one of several cephalopod species capable of morphing, including
the mimic‐octopus and the giant Australian cuttlefish. […] Morphing in cephalopods works
somewhat similarly to how it works in computer graphics,” explains Lanier in fine Flusserian
fashion. “Two components are involved: a change in the image or texture visible on a shape’s
surface and a change in the underlying shape itself. The ‘pixels’ in the skin of a cephalopod
are organs called chromatophores. These can expand and contract quickly, and each is filled
with a pigment of a particular color. When a nerve‐signal causes a red chromatophore to expand,
the ‘pixel’ turns red. A pattern of nerve‐firings causes a shifting image—an animation—to appear
on the cephalopod’s skin. As for shapes, an octopus can quickly arrange its arms to form a wide
variety of them, like a fish or a piece of coral, and can even raise welts on its skin to add texture.
But—why morph?” he asks. “One reason is camouflage. (The octopus in the video is presumably
trying to hide from Roger.) Another is dinner. One of Roger’s video‐clips shows a giant cuttlefish
pursuing a crab. The cuttlefish is mostly soft‐bodied, the crab all armor. As the cuttlefish appro‐
aches, the medieval‐looking crab snaps into a macho posture, waving its sharp claws at its foe’s
vulnerable body. The cuttlefish responds with a bizarre and ingenious psychedelic performance.
Weird images, luxurious colors, and successive waves of undulating lightning bolts and filigree
swim across its skin. The sight is so unbelievable that even the crab seems disoriented; its
menacing gesture is replaced for an instant by another that seems to express ‘Huh?’ In that
moment the cuttlefish strikes between cracks in the armor. It uses art to hunt!” Here we see
the corporeal cunning of mètis‐hexis in action, and its turn or twist upon the critical kairós qua
(rough draft)

decisive moment. With regard to cephalopoid chromatophoria, cf. Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis
Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste
(Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis:
A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 21‐22, 47, 50‐51, 64, 67, and Vampyroteuthis Infernalis,
trans. Rodrigo Novæs (Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011), 42, 89, 109‐110.
47
48
Henry George Liddell & Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek‐English Lexicon
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Da%29%2Flogos).
49
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Da%29%2Flogos).
50
Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce, quoted in Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce:
A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998:331‐332.
51
cf. Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: Éditions Aubier, 1958);
L’Individuation à la Lumière des Notions de Forme et d’Information (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1964).
52
René Schwaller, Propos sur Ésotérisme et Symbole (Paris: Éditions La Colombe, 1960),
trans. André & Goldian VandenBrœck, Esotercism and Symbol (New York: Inner Traditions
International, 1985), 68.
53
54
A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 331‐332.
55
René Schwaller, Le Temple de l’Homme: Apet du Sud à Louqsor (Paris: Éditions Caractères, 1957),
trans. André & Goldian VandenBrœck, The Egyptian Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom
of the Temple (New York: Inner Traditions International, 1985), 8.
56
One could add here, after the kairótic, the erotic: for, as Flusser says, the conceptions and com‐
munications (indeed the entire “culture” nevermind “nature”) of the vampyroteuthis infernalis
can be likened to a libidinal and altogether erotic ecology. “The world arouses the vampyroteuthis
sexually: It conceives the world with its penis or clitoris, and its conceptions—unlike our sexually
neutral and existentially bland conceptions—induce it toward orgasm” (Vilém Flusser, Vampyro-
teuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Para‐
naturaliste, Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987, trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis
Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 41). “Our sexual organs are only indirectly
connected to our handsand eyes. First the brain must coordinate the different pieces of
information that it receives from these organs. This process can result in contradictions
in the brain between the different types of sensory information it receives, and the brain must
attempt to resolve these contradictions into ‘empirical experiences’. Our brain doubts, and there‐
fore our world is dubious—for us, to think is to doubt. In the case of the vampyroteuthis, the sexu‐
al organs are partially located on its tentacles and, like its eyes, they are directly connected to its
brain. The latter thus receives optical, tactile and sexual impressions as already coordinated and
unified bits of information. In this there can be no contradictions: All incoming bits of information
have, simultaneously, a tentacular, optical and sexual dimension. Its world is not doubtful but
surprising; vampyroteuthic thinking is an unbroken stream of Aristotelian shock” (ibid. 40).
“Since its tentacles are equipped with sexual organs, the concepts that it abstracts [from the world]
[…] are sexually laden’ (ibid. 47). “Its concepts are generated by orgasms, and its philosophy is
synonymous with copulation. Human coïtus has no clear place or function in reflection, and this is
because it remains undetermined whether our coïtus is a public or private act. Vampyroteuthic
coïtus, on the contrary, is the ultimate political event. It corresponds to something like the
(rough draft)

academy or to the agora of Greek cities. It is the ultimate political event not only because it is
responsible for the regeneration of society but also because everything it conceives in the world
is impregnated—given life—by means of copulation. Its every ontology is an analysis of sex, an
effort to differentiate between male and female being. The rules of its reflection are sexual rules.
The logic of sex governs the syntax of its language (the colorations and illuminations of its skin).
If, while philosophizing, the vampyroteuthis is able to abstract these sexual rules from phenomena
—if it manages to practice pure science—then it will behold the structure of pure sex.
This theoretical insight causes it to climax” (ibid. 48).
57
A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 331‐332.
58
59
Paranaturaliste (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 62.
60
61
One might call this the alèthéia of the abyssedary as opposed to the abecedary
(an abyssal truth beyond our A‐B‐Cs).
62
‘To the Frontiers of Human Power: On Games’.
63
René Thom, Modèles Mathématiques de la Morphogénèse: Recueil de Textes sur la
Théorie des Catastrophes et ses Applications (Paris: Union Général d’Éditions, 1974), 305.
64
René Thom, Modèles Mathématiques de la Morphogénèse: Recueil de Textes sur la
Théorie des Catastrophes et ses Applications (Paris: Union Général d’Éditions, 1974), 305.
65
Sarah Kofman, Comment s’en Sortir? (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1983).
66
cf. Gilles Châtelet, ed., Gilbert Simondon: Une Pensée de l’Individuation et de la Technique
(Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1994), with contributions by Gilles Châtelet, Gilbert Simondon,
Gilbert Hottois, Jean‐Yves Château, Jean‐François Marquet, John Hart (a former colleague
here at Western), Jacques Garelli, Yves Deforge, Hubert Curien, René Thom, Bruno Paradis,
Bernard Stiegler, François Laruelle and Anne Fagot‐Largeault.
67
Referring here (rather obliquely, hence altogether mètically) to the aforementioned Greek kairós
or ‘decisive moment’, and to the Sansrit kâlî/kâla, which means both ‘temporality’ (present time)
and the darkest ‘obscurity’ (pitch black), throwing the attentive reader into the pitch‐black present‐
moment (the kháos of kairós).
68
Gilles Châtelet, Les Enjeux du Mobile (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993),
trans. Robert Shore & Muriel Zagha, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 10. Châtelet’s interest in “ephemeral manuscript
diagrams” and “napkin doodling[s]” (2000, xvii) brings us back to vampyroteuthic diagrams and
“the ephemerality of [their] sepia cloud”; cf. Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine
Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen:
Immatrix Publikationen, 1987), trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise,
with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 52.
69
cf. Vilém Flusser, Toward a Phiosophy of Photography: Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie
(Göttingen: Verlag European Photography, 1984). One is reminded here also of Marshall
McLuhan’s argument in the twentieth chapter of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
with regard to the photograph’s “statement without syntax” (Critical Edition, ed. Terence Gordon,
Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2003, 271). “Statement without syntax or verbalization [is] really statement
by gesture,” he explained. “This new dimension opened for human inspection by poets like Baude‐
laire and Rimbaud le paysage intérieur, or the countries of the mind. Poets and painters invaded
(rough draft)

this inner landscape long before Freud and Jung brought their cameras and notebooks to capture
states‐of‐mind. Perhaps most spectacular of all was Claude Bernard, whose Introduction to the
Study of Experimental Medicine ushered science into le milieu intérieur of the body exactly at the
time when the poets did the same for the life of perception and feeling. It is important to note that
this ultimate stage of pictorialization”—“the world of body and mind observed by Baudelaire and
Bernard”—“was not [yet] photographical […] but a nonvisual set of relations such as the physicist,
for example, had encountered by means of the new mathematics and statistics. […] Just as the
painter Samuel Morse had unintentionally projected himself into the nonvisual world of the
telegraph, so the photograph really transcends the pictorial by capturing the inner gestures and
postures of both body and mind, yielding new worlds” such as “the subvisual world of bacteria”
as well as those “of endocrinology and psychopathology. To understand the medium of the
photograph is quite impossible, then, without grasping its relations to other media, both
old and new” (ibid. 271‐272).
70
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 10.
71
‘Au Frontières du Pouvoir Humain: Le Jeu’: the final chapter of René Thom’s Modèles
Mathématiques de la Morphogénèse: Recueil de Textes sur la Théorie des Catastrophes
et ses Applications (Paris: Union Général d’Éditions, 1974).
72
Kenneth Knœspel, ‘Diagrammatic Writing and the Configuration of Space’, in Gilles Châtelet,
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), xi.
73
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 3.
74
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 3. One might detect here echoes of
Gilbert Simondon’s notion of a “primitive magical unity” at the root of technicity
and of religiosity (cf. ‘The Essence of Technicity’: Section Three of his treatise
Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques, Paris: Éditions Aubier, 1958, trans.
Ninian Mellamphy, Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, in Deleuze Studies 5.3,
11‐11‐11, 406‐424). The mathematician and historian of enigmatic ideas René Schwaller
links “magical unity” with the geste or enjeu du mobile in his study [of] Le Temple de l’Homme:
Apet du Sud à Louqsor (Paris: Éditions Caractères, 1957), trans. André & Goldian VandenBrœck,
The Egyptian Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple (New York: Inner Traditions
International, 1985), 21‐22: “To know how to make the proper gesture in the proper milieu
at the right moment”—“the proper gesture in the consonant ambiance and at the corres‐
ponding [kairótic] moment”:—“this is [mètic] magic” and “the ‘miracle’ of reactivation […]
that Châtelet undertakes in [his] book” (cf. Kenneth Knœspel, ‘Diagrammatic Writing and
the Configuration of Space’, in Gilles Châtelet, trans. Robert Shore & Muriel Zagha,
Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, xi).
75
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), xi.
76
Gianluca Caterina & Rocco Gangle, ‘Consequences of a Diagrammatic Representation of
Paul Cohen’s Forcing Technique Based on C.S. Peirce’s Existential Graphs’, in Lorenzo Magnani
et.al., eds., Model‐Based Reasoning in Science & Technology (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2010), 430.
77
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), xv. This, of course, recalls Flusser’s descriptions
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche
Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: Immatrix Publikationen, 1987) of vampyroteuthic
(rough draft)

“multidimensionality”: “We have been exiled to the surfaces of the continents. There we have
managed to walk upright—to erect ourselves—and now we loom into the third dimension, into
space (heavenward, if you will). The vampyroteuthis has been exiled to the depths. There it has
managed to erect itself, and now it touches the seabed like an open palm. In so doing, its palm is
analogous to ours, but it is not concerned simply with feeling the third dimension—as we are—
but rather with feeling multidimensionality” (trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis:
A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 25). “The construction of our respective brains reflects
the differences between our […] worlds,” he continues. “Ours is flat and, for us, bodies are
simply bulging surfaces (mountains). It lives in a water container, of which the seabed
constitutes only one of the walls. For it, then, two‐dimensionality is an abstraction of
the three‐dimensionality of everything that is objective, everything that it licks with its
toothy tongue. When it soars, it does not do so from a surface into space, as we do, but rather
it shoots into volume. Its soaring is not a breakthrough from a plane into the third dimension,
as ours is. It bores through watery volumes like a screw. For it, space is not a lethargic and
passive expanse supported by a Cartesian endoskeleton. It is rather a realm of coiled tension,
laden with energy, that has been banished from its snail shell. Its geometry therefore corres‐
ponds to what we call dynamics. According to its thinking, for instance, the shortest distance
between two points is not a straight line but a coil spring that, when fully compressed, brings
two points together. Where the world is constituted in such a way—as a dynamic conglomerate—
there can be no immutable and eternal forms, no circles and triangles. Theory, in the sense of
the Platonic contemplation of eternal forms, is unimaginable to it. Assailing it from all around,
the world astonishes the vampyroteuthis again and again by the mutability and plasticity of its
impressions. In short, vampyroteuthic theory is not contemplative but orgasmic, not philo‐
sophical tranquility but philosophical frenzy” (2012, 42; also, a link here to a paper and
performance which Joseph Nechvatal put together for our New York City NWW.IV
conference: his aesthetic and philosophical ‘States of Frenzy’,
http://twitter.com/twinkletwink/status/309766879319322625).
78
Beyond the correlation here with what McLuhan described as “the extensions of man”
(Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man), McLuhan and Châtelet shared a similar
interest in, and keen observation of, the formative influence of technology on thought,
or of technè on epistemè. When Knœspel, in his introduction, describes the third part of
Figuring Space and its concern with “the status of the diagram […] [as] a consequence of the
technologies of representation, whether in scrolls, codices, printed books, mimeographed and
xeroxed sheets, or hand‐held calculators and desktop monitors”—not to mention its concern with
the “relation between Nicholas of Cusa and problems with manuscript representation on the eve of
Gutenberg”—it is hard not to think of The Gutenberg Galaxy. McLuhan looms (to use a nice Penel‐
opean term) in the background here hear. Cf. Kenneth Knœspel, ‘Diagrammatic Writing and the
Configuration of Space’, in Gilles Châtelet, trans. Robert Shore & Muriel Zagha, Figuring Space:
Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), xvi.
79
Here inserting the previously‐quoted passage from René Schwaller, Le Temple de l’Homme:
Apet du Sud à Louqsor (Paris: Éditions Caractères, 1957), trans. André & Goldian VandenBrœck,
The Egyptian Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple (New York: Inner Traditions
80
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), xv.
81
Sémiotique de Peirce’, in La Revue Française de Pédagogie Volume 128, 1999, 36‐37.
82
Vampyroteuthic/octopoid/polyplokamian intelligence is, as previously noted, “multi‐
dimensional” (Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund
1987, trans. Valentine Pakis, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the
(rough draft)

Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2012, 25, 42). “Whereas we think linearly (‘rightly’), it thinks circularly (‘eccentrically’). In turn,
our respective worlds reflect the differences between our […] thinking. Ours is flat and, for us,
bodies are simply bulging surfaces (mountains). It lives in a water container, of which the seabed
constitutes only one of the walls. For it, then, two‐dimensionality is an abstraction of the three‐
dimensionality of everything that is objective, everything that it licks with its toothy tongue.
When it soars, it does not do so from a surface into space, as we do, but rather it shoots into
volume. Its soaring is not a breakthrough from a plane into the third dimension, as ours is.
It bores through watery volumes like a screw” (2012, 42). “The overwhelming importance of
volume as a form of perception—what makes it concrete form par excellence—is the fact that
it is the only form that contacts all of the senses,” René Schwaller explained in a conversation with
the artist and translator André VandenBrœck (Schwaller, quoted in André VandenBrœck, Al Kemi:
Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Hudson: Lindisfarne
Press, 1987, 107). “We are able to conceive the spherical spiral, but we can comprehend it
only in its plane surface aspect and, in general, we can understand volume only as section,
the projection into a plane,” he states in his study [of] Le Temple de l’Homme: Apet du Sud
à Louqsor (Paris: Éditions Caractères, 1957), trans. André & Goldian VandenBrœck, The Egyptian
Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple (New York: Inner Traditions International,
1985), 44. Likewise, affects or “feelings can be conceived but are grasped only by their concrete
effects” (ibid.). “The image that represents the cube is an intuitive script for our intellect’s under‐
standing of the cubic tendency. The Image is two‐dimensional. The cube, however, is volume,
and forms in space can be represented only by conventional devices; as far as the image is
concerned, our conception of cubic volume is transcribed into comprehension, into the
reasoning and coordinating intelligence of the cerebral cortex” (ibid. 46‐47). “Volume alone
is space” and it “poses a non‐polarized energy as origin: an abstraction that may be called indivis‐
ible Unity […]. This same energetic state rediscovers its analogues at all levels where volumes
come into being” (ibid. 133). “Thus the form of a volume results from a combat between
movement [and the] disintegrating rebellion of matter […]. The appearance of this double effect”
—a manifest ec(h)ology—“is ‘life’, which we translate through the specific numbers of the volume‐
forms [i.e. through the gesture of geometry, through geometric diagrams,] because it is this ‘life’
that is manifested by volumes. The five regular solids, like the four elements and their dodeca‐
hedral quintessence, are basic symbols [and/or diagrams] for understanding’ (ibid. 136).
83
cf. Gregory Bateson, ‘Culture Contact and Schizmogenesis’, ‘Experiments in Thinking about
Observed Ethnological Material’, and ‘The Value System of a Steady State’ in Steps to an Ecology
of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). “It is possible,” writes Bateson in the latter chapter
(‘Experiments in Thinking’), “that some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for
climax” in Balinese culture. […] In general, a lack of climax”—and “the substitution of a plateau
for a climax”—“is characteristic of Balinese music, drama, and other art forms” (ibid. 113).
Arguably, and/or “forcing” things a bit (with a nod to Paul Cohen et.al), this plateau can be
understood as both vertical and horizontal (ibid. 117),* not to mention three‐dimensionally‐
hence‐voluminously extended by dint of its ultimate embodiment in and by the members of that
culture (viz. its being “extend[ed] to […] attitudes based upon bodily balance” or l’enjeu du mobile ,
for instance; ibid. 125). The plateau in this sense is not flat (in accordance with its standard and
strict etymology; http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=plateau), but instead fleshed‐out
and given depth‐of‐dimension or extensive volume, which speaks volumes, schizmogenically,
for Bateson’s ecological enterprise (his steps to an ecology of mind‐and‐body: “mind and body”
being—as he puts it in the follow‐up to his Steps to an Ecology of Mind—a “necessary unity”
after all). || *“The Balinese are markedly dependent upon spatial orientation”—i.e. upon
figuring space—in both the material (or what Denoyel would call the ecological) and the
sociocultural (or what Denoyel would call the echological) domains. Bateson’s “schizmogenic”
analyses are in this respect attempts to correlate and coordinate this material ecology and socio‐
cultural echology via an ec(h)ology avant‐la‐lettre.
84
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=
(rough draft)

Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0073%3Aentry%3Dou%29%2Ftis). “This quality is illustrated
beautifully in the Cyclops episode of The Odyssey,” writes Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, i.e.
“[the episode] in which Odysseus defeats and overcomes Polyphemus by calling himself
Oudèis or Outis—ou being ‘no’ or ‘none’, tis and dèis being thing or body.* In this passage,
Homer poetically links word and act, cunningly intermixing Odysseus’s epithet mètis and his
pseudonym outis/oudèis. What’s more (more than mere association), here he actually equates
the word mètis with the word outis, having Polyphemus and his neighbours use mètis as a word
for ‘no one’ or ‘nobody’, which of course is the very meaning of outis. As both polytropos and
polymètis, Odysseus is, in The Odyssey, both ‘much‐traveled’, ‘versatile’ and ‘ deceptive’ as well as
‘mutable’, ‘multiplicitous’, ‘multiple’ and in consequence ‘no one’ (‘no one’ person). […] Odysseus’s
outis is thus the ruse/mètis of ‘no one’/nobody and the ruse/mètis as ‘no one’/nobody: the hero
here becomes his very epithet. When translated into English, the Greek words mètis and outis
in this passage are both given as ‘nobody’, ‘none’ and/or ‘no one’. Let us exemplify with two or
three well‐known translations (one by Fagles, one by Lattimore and one by Knox). In response
to his blinded cries, Polyphemus’s neighbours exclaim ‘è mè tis seu mèla brotón aèkontos elaúnei /
è mè tis s’auton kteinei dóloi ee bièphin’, to which Polyphemus replies, ‘o philoi, Outis mè kteinei
dóloi oudè bièphin’. Fagles’s translation reads: ‘Surely no one is rustling your flocks against your
will—Surely no one is trying to kill you now by fraud or force!’; ‘Nobody, friends’, Polyphemus
bellowed back from his cave, ‘Nobody’s killing me now by fraud and not by force!’ (1996, 224).
Lattimore’s translation, less accurate with respect to the consistency of the mètis translation
(not to mention the translation of oudè, which should be rendered as ‘and not’ and not—pardon
the redoubling here [oudè]—as ‘or’), reads as follows: ‘Surely no mortal against your will can be
driving your sheep off? Surely none can be killing you by force or treachery?’ Then from inside
the cave strong Polyphemus answered: ‘Good friends, Nobody is killing me by force or treachery’
(1967, 147). And Knox’s translation, which suffers from the same neglect of the oudè (replacing
this ‘and not’ by mere punctuation) and adding a silent ‘h’ to the nominal no(h)body, reads as
follows: ‘Sure no man’s driving off your flock? No man has tricked you, ruined you?’ Out of the
cave, the mammoth Polyphemus roared in answer: ‘Nohbody, Nohbody has tricked me, Nohbody
has ruined me!’ (1993, 138–139). In his commentary on this passage, Derrida writes: ‘Ruse rather
than force (dóloi oudè bièphin). And by someone who calls himself ‘Nobody’. The Mètis of Outis,
the trickery that blinds, is the ruse of nobody (outis, mè tis, mètis). Homer plays more than once
on these words when Polyphemus echoes the chorus: è mè tis … è mè tis … ‘Ruse, my friends! Ruse
rather than force! … and who kills me? Nobody!’ And in turn, Odysseus makes use of these same
words in signing his ruse by his name as nobody and by his mètis’ (Jacques Derrida, 1990, 88–89,
translated by Dan Mellamphy (in Mellamphy, 1996)”; Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, The Three
Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 105‐106, 140‐141. || *cf. Henry George Liddell & Robert Scott,
An Intermediate Greek‐English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889, http://www.perseus.
tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0073%3Aentry%3D*ou%29%3Dtis).
85
Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919), 9.360‐406, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D360
(via The Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University).
86
87
88
Actually/mètically a nickname: that of Aristocles tes Aiginas, according to Diogenes Laërtius.
89
90
91
92
93
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Between Beckett and Bec: The Mètic Hexis and Flusserian Flux of Vampyroteuthis Abductionis

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