The wind

Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,

not wooing any grace that can be achieved;
song is reality. Simple, for a god.
But when can we be real? When does he pour
the earth, the stars, into us? Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced wide open by your own voice-learn
to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.
From Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke

Turbulence is not universal, and yet the universe itself if

turbulent."
Michel Serres Genesis

The wind makes music of the chimes, and I am forced to listen through my
sleeplessness. The rustle of the traffic merges with each gust, blowing my
imagination backwards and forwards through cities and nature, the human
and the inhuman. Listless and full of night-thought psychic tension, I get up
and sit in the crepuscule of the sitting room. It is there that I begin to
understand what I will call the 'ontology of nature', as if for the very first
time. I will try to explain. The journey ahead is difficult, and will involve
an attempt to think about the real meaning of technology, suggest an
ontology of complexity theory, as well as trying to understand what
'elements' are, amongst other things. Allow me to begin.

This week, I was involved in a discussion about the new physics of

complexity theory, fractals, entropy and neg-entropy etc. and its implications
on aesthetics and in particular architecture. The implication was that the new
modes of description offered by the paradigm of complexity suggest in their
various ways new modes of production. In this way, after a while the
discussion hovered in the direction of a philosophical puzzle that haunts our
times, a conundrum that can be formulated quite simply:

can computers produce objects indistinguishable from reality?

Although seemingly a very contemporary question, rooted within the
technological possibilities of the epoch, concealed within it is a very ancient
philosophical problem. Essentially this question concerns the power of
numbers and the "pythagorian" belief that numbers are the most fundamental
form of reality, or in other words 'nature'. In today's terms, this
"numerological meme" has taken on a different guise: the so-called digital
age. We shall have cause to question whether complexity theory can be
reducible to a numerology later. For the moment, we should focus on the
story that is being told on behalf of the potentiality of computational
production. In our times, the question raised above is at base about the
capacity of digitally-based information and information-processing to
simulate and replicate the objects of sentient experience. In the process,
what would take place (and was being intuited in the discussion about
aesthetics) would be a radical disruption of our notions of the 'natural'.
Included in this simulational capacity would be the whole raft of human
expression: speech acts, cognitive processes, intentional attitudes, forms of
desire and so on. Thus 'scientific' conditions of proofing have arisen, such
as the Turing Test (named after the war code cracking British
mathematician), whereby computers participate in competitions to attempt to
fool a person in a separate space that they are in communication with
another human, not a bunch of circuits and chips. Moreover, in various
commercial enterprises, the simulational capacity of the latest computers has
led to the production of virtual environments (in various guises in
architecture, e-commerce, gaming, artificial life, etc.) And it is the genre of
cyberpunk that this fiction of an infomatic future is twisted back into the
dystopia of the present: the suggestion being that we already live within the
world of the cyborg and that our culture is deeply embedded within
technology. The old narrative of the monster-out-of-control is adorned in
the guise of neural networks, soft, hard and wet-ware.
How do we begin to assess the truth or inevitability of this new version of
Frankenstein and the man-made birth of a monstrous
technologically-induced naturalism? We need first of all to see that the
meaning of technology must be assessed metaphysically. The
digital/computational would then, if such a thing as a 'Turing machine' was
ever wholly achievable and a computer was invented that could think, talk
and respond in human terms, undercut and resituate our most fundamental
epistemic paradigms: rather than 'nature' (human, biological, mental etc.)
implying a system of differentiated frames of reference with their own
irreducible epistemic ground, the digital would become the basis by which
all worldly/cosmic processes occur. In short, everything that can be known
could be boiled down to the low-level language of a string of 1's and 0's
making up some algorithmic computation. All previous frames of reference
(cognitive, aesthetic, economic, meteorological, cosmological ...) would
finally, in this metaphysical triumph of the digital age, collapse into and
ultimately be superseded by the General Theory of computational analysis
and production.1 As with Pythagoras, the natural would be the numerical.
Even life itself, if certain simplistic interpretations of the Genome project are
to be believed, turns out to be just an incredibly complex set of data, to be
bought and sold on the corporate playing field.
In this light, the metaphysics of digitality is seen at the end of a long line of
numerical reductivism and naturalism: prior to what we might call today's
"fetishism of the algorithmic", with the men in white coats as the new
priests, Newton's laws or relativity theory attempted to privilege the
mathesis of physics above all other modes of explanation. Digitisation is
merely the most virulently totalistic appearance of this mathematical
tendency in western history to date. What is unique with the digital
paradigm is its total reduction of time and process. In contrast to the
inherent processuality of complexity theory, in the 'information society',
there finally appears to be no need for time and history: the digital is (at least
theoretically) an instantaneous phenomenon which reduces all previous
phenomena to information sub-routines that can be stored and reproduced
iteratively, effectively deracinated from their spatio-temporal setting.
'Globalism' is less a geographical referent and more a sign of information
flow capacity.2 Moreover, the ideology of the ‘information society’ bestows
the appearance that nothing is hidden - information is just information,
neutral and without any built-in oscillations between revealing and
concealing, downloadable and in the kingdom of statistics the accountant is
king. Everywhere the complexities of existence are violently reduced
through this binaristic filter. We see these tendencies at work all around us:
the flattening of our temporal experience such that ‘access’ to information is
more or less instant - the hyperlinking click of a mouse on the internet,
where once journeys to different libraries and years of schooling would have
been necessary, the reduction of writing styles and word length induced by
electronic mail, the enclosure of politics within the time-frame of the sound-

1
Intuitions that this process is at work are stored in the buzz terms of the day: 'convergence', 'collapse', and
in architecture, the deterritorialising substitution of the 'datascape' in place of 'landscape.'
2
An early prophesy of the reduction of space into information came in Paul Virilio's The Lost Dimension,
which predicted the erasure of architecture through digitalisation. Perhaps the first concrete signs of this
are carried with the term "Data Warehouse" - typological content changing form through virtualisation.
bite. Western kids and their pampered peers in the developing world are
brought up on Encarta and a Mc-framing of geo-history. Managers spend
their time emailing each other byte-sized memos and two line life-stories
and get paid for it. On discussion lists flaming is the sporadic effect of the
structural inarticulacy of email. Everywhere our experience is being altered
by a technologically induced ‘space-time compression’, whether it is of our
words or our experiences.
Does this mean that the monster of technology and the flow of information is
out of control, and that our loss of a sense of time and space is irreperable? I
would say most definitely not. We should not confuse the filtering of our
experience by the shifting technological cybernetic communication
structures of late-capitalism with its fundamental ground of embeddedness in
the world itself: no matter how much compression of space and time is
operative, this process can only be understood in terms of an anteceding
matrix of difference that is the transcendent horizon of the world itself. The
world is resolutely a transcendent medium: it goes beyond any single
attempt at capture (epistemically and ontologically). In the language of
complexity, the world is the open 'system of systems', forever beyond any
particular self-organising matrix. Rather than being our paradigm for
existence, the world is the horizon for the emergence of paradigms: it is the
background 'noise' that brings all entities into being.
The cosmos is not a structure, it is a pure multiplicity of
ordered multiplicities and pure multiplicities. It is the
global basis of all structures, it is the background noise of
all form and information, it is the milky noise of the whole
of our messages gathered together.(Serres, 111)
Thus, although it may appear that space-time is finally compressed (say with
the growth of the informational capacity of the internet), this appearance
only makes sense in terms of a fundamentally differential reality that defines
it as it resists it. Virtual space may be timeless, but its points of
embeddedness within the world are resolutely of time and bound up within
the agonisms of different experience and different modes of embeddedness.
Virtual reality is always superseded ultimately by the 'milky noise' of the
world, and by the complex material and corporeal systems of exchanges that
direct it. In the same way and more generally, the procedures of late
capitalism may be speeding up, however this acceleration of processes is
operating against the background of a resistance by the world itself. Data is
not neutral and time is not wholly the time dictated by mobile telephony and
the world wide web. This is not to react against contemporary economic
dynamics with an account of that which is conserved against everything -
each event of technology spreads across the world in various ways, altering
and disrupting the world-historical horizon of being, if such words are
permitted. What we need to become clear about is how the resistance against
speeding and 'globalising' systems operates, and how it is possible that there
is a sense in which our experience of space and time is not completely
swallowed up by the reductive techno-economic systems of the now. We
need first of all then to be clear about the limits of determinism.
Determinism, as the alleged logic of what are unstoppable and unchangeable
patterns of development in history, is certainly an existing force, but as I
have said, it is not the ground of all social forces. It is important to be clear
that all social systems are intrinsically open, different to themselves, in
movement away from what is constituted at that time (by power, nodes of
authority and their appropriation of technological developments) as the
kernel of significance. The boundaries of social meaning are always blurred,
leaving zones of ambiguity and indeterminacy which can become the sites
for resistance and transformation against the grains of domination. We need
to understand that through the exploitation of such ambiguities, each form or
event of appropriation can become at the same time an expropriation. Thus
the technology of telematics and the new digital technologies exert a
deterministic force upon society that can be at the same time resisted
through the disintegration of all initial unified significance by way of
societies' differences. Not that this contestation is a given, a part of a natural
dialectic that just happens like rain after sun. Rather, resistance and
dismantling of 'the Message' comes through struggle and action, and the
inevitable oscillations between disappointment and energisation. And so the
creeping corporatism of the internet is met with the emergent forms of
global corporate resistance operating on the very same networks,
demonstrating that the web itself is a form of open system that cannot be
dominated by any particular form of self-organisation. What is important to
be clear about therefore is that it is agency that produces the differentiation
of all attempts at unified value and determinism. Again, determinism is a
force (and fairly virulent at that), however it simply cannot be the ground of
all forces. Through people's actions, the artefacts of culture and technology
become contested modes of signification: agency produces alterity in the
context of a society that itself is an open system for the production of
differences. In this sense Popper's notion of the "Open Society" is
absolutely correct, and has renewed application in the face of the insidious
global corporatism behind the current ideology of technophilia.
At this stage, it is quite helpful to use an architectural model of explanation
in order to clarify how this open set of differentiating processes operate on
behalf of society in the face of an ideological appropriation of technological
innovation. What the digital prophets of the corporate west (and their
friends) would have us believe is that there is a 'plan' view available - that
they have the special ability to look down on what is going on from above
and see the way ahead. Although they may not be certain what exactly is
going to happen, they claim that they are sure that whatever it is, it will
fundamentally affect the future of humanity - the nature of work, desire,
community and so on will all be radically altered. This is technological
determinism, engendered by a linear model of time. My argument against it
is that no such plan view is available to anyone: Fukuyama, Toffler, Bill
Gates or the woman on the Clapham Omnibus. We are inescapably
perspectival beings - this means that we cannot help but see things from the
vantage point of our place in the world and in history. This entails that we
see things more or less divergently according to cultural perspective,
embodiment, race, age, sexuality/desire, ethical perspective, place, class,
proximity to the interests backing scientific research, embodied locatedness
in the present, and so on. Far from afforded the planocentric bird's eye view,
we are planted on the surface of being, and all we can see beyond the present
gatherings at the most is the horizon. We cannot see very far beyond our
own position in the time-space unfolding of the world - and this because
each of our perceptions betrays to a smaller or larger extent the horizon of
interests that define us. We can hardly acquire then the 'eternal truths' that
once were the goal of philosophy. As Merleau-Ponty says,
Philosophy has been traditionally regarded as the science of
eternal truths. If we are to be exact, we should, rather,
follow Husserl in the last years of his life and call it the
science of the all-temporal, that which holds throughout all
time, instead of a truth which would absolutely escape from
the temporal order. This is a deepening of temporality.
There is no passing beyond it. (PSM pp49-50)
What is true throughout time is therefore that we are embedded within it,
and therefore we are, as humans, resolutely finite beings. Not only will we
certainly die at some moment, but furthermore our personal life-span will
only ever spread itself a finite width and a given niche across the continuum
of world-history. These facts of spatio-temporal finitude determine what we
see and how we see it, and there is no more deeper or eternal truth available
to us. Our experience takes place in time, and this means that the world
cannot be frozen into pure forms of meaning. In light of the research of
contemporary continental philosophy, we can no longer commit the
philosophical crime of what Jacques Derrida calls a 'metaphysics of
presence'. What he means by this is that any phenomena - be it language, a
piece of music, an experience, a historical moment [..] is reduced to
something like 'pure meaning' - an immediate and self-evident datum of
content that exists prior to any situation or context, outside of temporality.
As we shall see, this limit placed upon our experience, the limit of time
ordered through a series of events rather than a causal pathway, necessitates
a change in style in philosophy, embracing poesis.
In terms of the ideology of digitality described above, the implications of
this metaphysical foray are immediate. There can be no such thing as ‘data’
which escapes this finite interpretation in terms of our experience. As soon
as ‘data’ appears, it is bound up within differing spheres of context (or
different events), and loses its unified meaning. Data would better be
thought of under a biological metaphoric: it is like the dehiscence of
pollenated pods that grow differently in their various rooting sites. In a
different lexicon, all meaning is diasporic, scattered by the world. Ironically,
behind the productive commerce of late capitalism, a more powerful
metaphysical commerce is incessantly at work, undoing all attempts at
meaning-control. Thus the Genome project will produce a mass of complex
data that will differentiate as it reproduces itself within the horizons of
society at large. DNA's final secret will be secreted across town, and its
portent of omniscience at last will be lost among the disagreements,
squabbles, copyright wars and protein hackers.
I began in the sitting room, making claims about an insight into the ontology
of nature achieved through attunement with the wind's music. What has
happened? Has this exploration into the meaning of technology been a
distraction? Have we started to comprehend the being of the natural?
It might seem inapparent, but I would say that if understood aright, we have
already gone a long way towards clarification. I have argued that
technology does not wholly determine our future. Furthermore, any
reproduction of our experience or the objects of experience (wind, streams,
environments, life, etc.) is itself always fed back into the 'hermeneutic
democracy' that is human existence. Both these contentions have been made
on the basis of an ontological claim about the world: that as a complex open
system it is forever beyond any one interpretational outcome. The fantasm
of techno-determinism is therefore always interrupted by the essential
hybridity of human existence: no two people or cultural contexts will see
any 'data' as the same, therefore the data itself loses its directive force in the
face of the ordinary agonistic hermeneutic commerce of society. Therefore,
there can be no valid reduction of the elements (wind, water, light, materials,
information and so on) to mere digits. Each time a numerical simulation
occurs, it again becomes 'data' that is given meaning beyond or against itself
in the human realm.
Data is therefore like any other element: the impossible moment of promise
prior to meaning and significance in the human realm. It is an 'impossible
moment' because it cannot exist or have any real meaning prior to this
existential embedding. Elements are the openings or fluctuations that lead to
differentiations of significance within the world. Elements are not then
essentially 'natural' in the conventional sense; the same for ever, cosmic or
whatever - they are rather the constituents of any process of situated sense,
the switch that lets a different logic of existence emerge. Merleau-Ponty
stumbled on this archaic word when trying to articulate his notion of the
'flesh':
The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To
designate it, we should need the old term "element," in the
sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that
is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the
spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate
principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a
fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an "element" of
Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to
location and to the now. Much more: the inauguration of
the where and the when, the possibility and exigency for the
fact; in a word: facticity, what makes the fact be a fact.
(VI1:139-40)
There is much wisdom in this passage about the relation between nature,
time and culture. Nature, as the sum of elements, is first of all the indefinite
extent of all that emerges into meaning in the located present. Henceforth,
the elemental never remains pure in the face of human involvement - it is not
as if we can define the 'natural' as that which lies in opposition to the human
or to 'culture'. In fact, the natural/unnatural opposition is, through this line
of thought, rendered ontologically untenable (because nature must be
defined as the indefinite complex totality, the universe and nature are
synonyms). Thus, everything within the universe (even 'man-made'
synthesised objects such as 'new materials' or polymers) are within the
compass of the natural and therefore incapable of negation. Therefore, a
conventional conception of nature as in the 'natural' processes of mountains,
flora and landscapes is impossible. The unnatural as a term usually refers to
culturally (or racially or sexually) specific prejudices and cannot refer to an
existent, and ecological arguments must be grounded elsewhere.3 Or, put the
other way, the 'natural' is a term used to cover many different kinds of
violations in different situations, veiling the violence by naturalising it.4
Instead, I back Merleau-Ponty's elemental, taken as the indefinite series of
constituents at work in the emergence of embedded meaning. As is evident
in the cited passage, far from being ahistorical, notions of the elemental are
caught up in the cultural-historical fabric of space-time. Even the notion of
flesh in Merleau-Ponty's work is a calling into being of an element that has
yet to be disclosed in thought: it is therefore a response to a specific spatio-
temporal moment in the history of thought. Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty
points out in the cited passage, a study of the elements of the contemporary
reveals the 'facticity' or value-structure (Nietzsche's 'will to power') that
effects 'factuality'. Thus, in 'our' age, the element we have begun to
emphasise is data or information. At another time or in another place it may
be light, the wind, the body, blood.5 Through the aspect of elementality, we
therefore begin to see that outside of the common-sense world of 'facts', our
conceptions of nature are resolutely historical. Beyond Merleau-Ponty, we
have begun to understand that the 'natural' is a produced meaning, and is in
some way bound up with contemporary accounts of the technological. This
contingency lurking behind the apparent universality of the natural haunting
every age can be witnessed in the closest approximation we can have to a
plan view of humanity: history. For example, we see the change in
conceptions of nature that emerged after Harvey's discovery in the 17th
century that the body circulates blood around the body to maintain health.
Soon after this, we see in all aspects of culture the emergence of a
conception of nature as circulation: urban planning develops a conception of
the city as a circulatory system (with for example ‘arterial roads’), and the
first stages of a cybernetic metaphysics emerges (‘cybernetics’ meaning here
the control of systems).6 Engines and modern meteorology are amongst
many objects that lay ahead within this modern paradigm. Beyond the

3
See for example Michel Serres' "The Natural Contract".
4
As an example, we can think of the way in which slaves during the Atlantic slave trade were treated as
'animals', their treatment on board ship being deemed as therefore 'natural'.
5
I shall defer a possible passage here into a phenomenological anthropology, and mention only as pointers
towards these other historico-cultural 'elements' the function and symbolism of blood in Zapotec rituals, the
significance of semen flow in Papua New Guinea ethnic group ___, and the place of the wind in the
worship of the Yoruba deity Oya.
6
See Richard Sennet's Flesh and Stone the Body and the City in Western Civilisation.
simplistic and reified conceptions of 'nature', we begin to see that the
element used by the present as the fundamental picture of the natural
represents society's attempt to name itself in the deepest terms. Again, there
is no deeper or more universal meaning available than this.7 Far from nature
and technology being antithetical to each other, we start to see the strands of
their interweaving throughout history. Thus, in our times, 'data' or
information as a new mode of technology threatens to become the form of
our experience, our sine qua non. Our language is already being shaped by
new words that re-orient our speech acts, our conventions of interaction and
our models of selfhood, naturalising an apparently 'new paradigm' of society
through their iteration.
The distinction between nature and the technological is therefore superficial.
Beneath their surface opposition, a historical or anthropological purview
reveals differing conceptions of nature that are deeply embedded within
current technological frames of reference. As with Harvey's blood, new
techniques of enquiry lead to new modes of description and production,
which themselves become sedimented, through language, into new modes of
perception. Technology weaves itself into our lives surreptitiously, like a
tune we have heard that we suddenly find ourselves humming. The mistake
that Heidegger made along this line of thought was to assume that the
meaning of technology, as the form of the natural in modernity, stamps itself
across our world in a totalistic and all-enframing manner and that we are
powerless in face of it. For Heidegger, the modern technological
appropriation of nature, such that all natural resources become 'standing
reserves' or commodities to be used, erodes any other conception of the
natural. He didn't realise that society's attempts to disclose itself through
naming conceals other names and other attempts beneath the eye of power.
In other words, Heidegger's thought has an inadequate account of resistance.
The world is the indefinite sum or open system of distributed elements, with
the end-game of commodification, corporate logic, being one trajectory of
interpretation or will to power among others, albeit a vigorous and quasi
hegemonous one. As we have seen, the world always transcends any one
aspect of it, and is therefore irreducibly plural. Resistance is therefore the
possibility unleashed by any totalistic form of naming. We encounter the
world as a rich sedimentation of all previous actions and distributions. The
meaning of the world is therefore essentially differential (constructed across
difference). Moreover, because the differences that scatter any unified

7
Nature is therefore another term for Martin Heidegger's 'techne' - that which reveals itself in an epoch, or
what can be shown in that time. See “The Question concerning Technology” in Basic Writings.
elementality are expressed through the corporeality of thought, the world as
we find it is fundamentally anonymous. We secretly lie if we put a name to
world forces by overly individualising them (for example with ‘Thatcher’ or
‘Hitler’), transferring an egological mind-set onto those forces. Thus the
world, as the sum of elements, transcends our delimited/finite singularity,
appropriating our individual participations according to the principal of
namelessness. Our agency is a form of energy that eventually gets lost in the
dissipative system of the world. The people that influence us have
themselves been influenced by a chain of people that descends backwards
into an energy without name. It is perhaps part of the desire for a name to be
given to 'an age' (and for the concept of the epoch itself to be established)
that this anonymity at work in the production of alterity is denied or
rendered secondary. The forces of power are at the same time the forces of a
linear model of history and causality, as opposed to time modelled as a
garden of forking paths.8
The emergent meaning of nature as digital or reproducible through binary
coding therefore articulates ‘our’ reality at the same time as masking it. The
disclosure of the power of the algorithm (in complexity theory, architecture,
genetics and so on) is at the same time the active suppression of the field of
different elements that are potent within the world. It is through this
dynamic of suppression that forms of resistance begin to emerge. Digitality,
as the final stage of secularism and the death of god by numbers, is
ironically the event that unleashes an activated yearning for an extra-
numerical future. The ontology of nature is therefore always more than the
attempts to name the times by the anonymous patterns of linguistic
emergence at work in the contemporary: there is always a beyond to models
of thought or partly sedimented elements, whether they are data, rhizomes,
the earth, water or indeed wind. Like a radio that slips out of tune, the
background noise that surrounds clear speech interrupts it at the limits. It is
therefore part of an active refusal to reduce the world to a single uniform
element that, as with Merleau-Ponty's flesh, we call these other elements
into being, and release ourselves towards nature's essential alterity through
acts of resistance to the closures of the day. We begin to name nature
paradoxically as the unnameable, as that which is excessive to any model of
thought or any cognition, as the noise behind all noises, as a sublimity.9

8
See Borges' recit "The Garden of Forking Paths" in Labyrinths for a playful account of the relation
between different modes of temporality: national, generational, personal.
9
In retrospect and quite necessarily, all that is written here is a semi-oblique dialogue with Kant's notion of
the Sublime in his Critique of Judgment.
 *
So, how are we with the wind now? It now appears as a quite arbitrary
selection for thought, the result of a minor nocturnal trouble. This
appearance is however deceptive, for I shall argue that the wind itself has
unique secrets which can unsettle fixities in thought. To begin, what can be
said about its ‘being’ as an element? As is by now apparent, I believe that
all thought involves elementality, whether acknowledged or not. In each
case, what is at stake is not merely a style of writing or a particular
metaphorical usage, but rather the base of a specific form of thought, leading
to different ways of thinking the self, the other and ultimately questions of
ethics and politics. For example, philosophers have too often concentrated
on that element of apparent stasis, the earth.10 The ensuing discourses on
ontologised conceptions of territory, appropriation and ground are all too
predictable in hindsight. As Luce Irigaray points out, this focus involves a
certain forgetting of other elements (for example the air).11 Later in
Heidegger's career, he began to realise that ontology must always involve a
plural elementality. Beyond the commonplace that the history of philosophy
is the history of the different names of Being (substance, monad, will-to-
power etc.), the names of being themselves are finally seen as merely
different nominations of the principal element. In texts such as "The Thing",
beyond Irigaray's own insistence on the primacy of a particular element,
namely the aqueous or mucus, a sort of liquid being, Heidegger starts to
understand that there is no such principal element. He describes what he
calls a 'round dance' of four elements bringing the world into being through
their four-folded interplay: the Gods, the Earth, the Sky and mortals.
Although an advancement on previous unitary forms of ontology, Heidegger
does not convince us that there is not something arbitrary in the quaternitary
model under proposition. With Irigaray, we may ask: what of the air?
Moreover, what of water, of colour, of blood, of data, of stone, of sound? In
contrast to Heidegger's sustained attempt to think the essence of modern
technology alluded to above, his thought at this point arrives as a sort of
fantasy - a retreat into cosmology that makes no reference to modern
technology. As Irigaray's critique shows, each time we think about the
nature of being (and the being of nature), we raise elemental issues to the
fore. This question of elements should not however be seen as the
opportunity for metaphysical escapism; rather, they are the very means by
which we can engage with hegemonies of the now to challenge them.
10
For example Michel Haar in his text "The Song of the Earth"; the emphasis place on 'territorialisation'
and 'de-territorialisation' in aspects of Deleuze & Guattari's work and so on.
11
Luce Irigaray "The Forgetting of the Air"
Different elements are like different models of thought - producing their own
language and frames of reference in their wake. Whether our thinking is
grounded in the earth, floating in the air, sliding within mucous, the tangle of
felt,12 or blowing in the wind, our thought emerges differently, with different
possibilities for agency, interaction, contestation and communion.
With this necessary relationship between ontology and the elements charted
or at least suggested, and with the necessary proviso that a founding element
is decidedly not the goal of this work, we may ask: what if we turn towards
the wind as with other appeals to the cosmic: searching for another form of
poesis and the production of embedded meaning? Here, a mytho-poesis of
the wind opens up a different space of being apart from the 'techniques' and
operative procedures of technophillic corporate appropriation, towards a
transcendent complexity. Outside even of nature's embeddedness within the
technological, perhaps this is what I hear, as the wind gusts through the
streets below and clarification beckons beyond the hazy rim of sleep …
The wind, passion of the air, appeals to us now as a suppressed element,
betrayed as it is by algorithmic privilege, the latest computers and erroneous
weather forecasts. If we return to the wind as a phenomenon, we will start to
uncover what is underneath digitality, waiting ...
First of all, we must open ourselves to the wind as another element. The
wind, as alterity, transcends all meanings we can give to it. The wind is part
of the unnameable; as we refer to it we by necessity demonstrate the
impossibility of reference. The wind is indeed sublime, for when we allow it
to be thought denotation and connotation are scrambled in an
epistemological excess. What we are referring to and what we mean are no
longer clear, the longer we dwell on it, as with the endless repeated
mouthings of a chosen word. Thus, the wind is not reducible to a complex
vector of thermal currents that could potentially be mapped, reproduced or
simulated by algorithmic production; furthermore the wind is more than just
a specific form of data or information to be charted by meteorologists or
simulated in virtual tunnels by the architects of complexity. The wind is not
reducible to a 'metaphysics of presence.' In this case, the pure meaning of the
wind would be simply that it is just data or information - a complex
'diagram' of forces, vectors, currents and so on. As with the myth of the
Genome project, a metaphysics of presence points to the dream of a
fundamental bedrock of meaning or final scientific certainty - “at last the

12
See the discussion of felt as 'anti-fabric' in Deleuze & Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus", p475.
philosopher’s stone!” It is the essentialist and reductivist dream which
haunts science with dreams of funding and finality.
If the wind is not reducible to a computational metaphysics of presence, how
can we say what the wind is in its existence as another element? Whence the
wind as a positivity? It is here again that in order to answer this question, we
must turn to philosophy, and in particular to ontology as the science of
being: how a thing is as it is. The method for this ontology will be that of
phenomenology: the uncovering of the phenomenal appearance as it appears
in its appearing.13 It is here, 'plunged in the phenomenon'14 that we will find
that the wind is first of all an appearance - it cannot be represented like the
blueprint for a building. The wind is what it is in its appearing. This means
that we must include perception within the essence of the wind. This form
of perception at work in the world: as with all elements it does not exist in
any sense prior to its being as a form of the world folding in on itself
through human or non-human perception. The wind therefore has complex
location or 'action at a distance'; it exists ecstatically through the events in
which it is experienced.15 From this, it is clear that the wind does not exist
outside of any of its occurences: the wind is just that which happens in
experience when there is wind. The wind is therefore always bound to a
time and a place of experience and occurs in the flow or duration of time.
Now, if we think about it, the wind as experienced is 'not us' - its meaning is
of a different order to those who perceive it - other human beings or animals
or things. We do not usually interact with the wind as we do the objects of
everyday experience or other people. This is another way of stating that the
wind is beyond any word or 'noema' that we may choose to use for
denotation. We make sense of the wind, but it also makes sense of us,
through storms, breezes and draughts. In other words, the wind cannot be
wholly appropriated by us, either as a semantic mode of reference or as a
physics of force. The wind is part of our world of course, but it cannot be
entirely domesticated. The wind is therefore in a fundamental sense outside
humanity, a force that we cannot fix by means of representation or
categorisation. The wind is thus both metaphysical and physical, and will
slip away from any reductions of the former to the latter. The wind is
therefore beyond the home, a different economy, betraying the evidence of

13
In my opinion Heidegger's proposal for a phenomenological ontology in Being and Time is absolutely
correct.
14
Michel Serres, Genesis, p77.
15
Here Whitehead's notion of 'complex location' is being linked with Nietzsche's notion of action at a
distance. See Whitehead's "Science and the Modern World".
not being wholly of 'our' world, revealing the potential violence of
exteriority in ruined houses, storms and the majesty of the tsunami.
Although it seems obvious and simple, this fact about the wind - that it is
different to us, is extremely significant ontologically. What it reveals is that
as was stated above, the wind has a certain alterity - it is 'other' - different to
us, and cannot therefore be reduced to any essence. Whatever we may say of
it, the wind will always slip away, leaving room for further imaginative
explorations, future religions, different time-places of experience, different
names and different metaphorical usages. The wind, as an 'elemental'
alterity, is therefore an inexhaustibly rich ontological quantum: its power is
much more than 'physical' - its power is that of an unlimited being that
forever conceals itself behind every mode of its appearance. Each time I
experience the wind - as I did at the moment of origination of the thought
that prompted this writing, I experience a phenomena whose current
appearance is obtained only through a double disappearance - a
disappearance of all the other times and places of the wind that I and others
have and will have experienced firstly, and secondly, a disappearance of
physics into metaphysics. Even as a passing experience that is mine alone, I
cannot ‘comprehend’ or grasp the wind as it passes. Its alterity leads to
epistemological uncertainty: I am not sure if the wind is first of all a tactility
- stroking my surfaces as it flows, or whether it is most of all acoustic -
awakening me with the subtle nuances of its voices - from a balmy breeze to
a hurricane. Nor can I be sure whether my experience of the wind is first of
all visual, in the bowing of the grass, the iridescence of leaves or the gusting
of clouds. Perhaps above all the wind is then a testimony to the fact that all
phenomena exist elsewhere, in different sensory registers, and that the visual
reveals within itself the moments where the non-visual emerges and
challenges it. Thus the wind reminds us that colours are capable of sound,
that sounds are capable of textures, and that the perceptual world is
perpetually transducing itself in our experience, transubstantiating its objects
across and within our modes of embodiment.16 The wind is not visual,
acoustic, a smell; it is the way in which all these receptacles of sensory being
are orchestrated in the moment of its passing. It alludes to the possibility of
a synaesthetic dance, conjuring up a world where one thing continually
passes into the next in a shifting play of perceptual being. As I listen to the
sway of the trees in my favourite spot in the forest, I am no longer sure what
is tree and what wind, what is colour and what sound. In this way the wind

16
The fertile promise of transduction (as opposed to induction or deduction), was first raised by
Henri Lefebvre.
is like an angel, stirring the in-between like Merleau-Ponty's flesh. The
angels transcend us only partly touching unseen.17 It follows from this that
the wind is not wholly exterior: its in-betweenness means that it exists in us
as much as outside: does the wind not find its mirror in our breathe? Is there
not an echo of our breathe we can find back in the wind - a wind of
inspiration or of expiration? Inspiration would then not be merely a
cognitive event - it would mark a creative rupture in one's relation to the
world. The wind whispers and rustles, and thereby takes the form of the
emergence of human agency, encouraging passion and energy. As Judith
Gleason writes,
For millennia wind, fire, and water have been chanted as
primary constituents of an inhabited cosmos. Everywhere
on earth they have been symbolically oriented about the
magical circle drawn to encompass that space within which
we seek to find ourselves. Therefore, by inheritance we
cling to them still. As middle terms between energy
systems of obscure purpose and our human desire to shape
experience, the elements present themselves as matter
already expressively organized, matter whose modes are
reflected in and by our own moods - basal axes of our
poetries.18
The wind is always there to remind us of the essential significance of
horizontality: across the surface of Heidegger's earth a play of shifting
thermal forces is always at work, unpredicting the weather. The wind as a
model of thought demonstrates that there is never a flat plane of being where
all things are equal; there are just the equivalent of thermal differences at
work in every moment, demanding attention and vigilence.
Finally, thinking about the wind allows us to return to the science of
complexity at one remove from the apparent safety of numbers or the
productive capacity of computational iterations of algorithms and closer to a
metaphysics that opens up a different model of thought and of the self. The
wind is essentially a complex phenomena, and key to an altered
understanding of complexity theory. In teaching complexity theory, we are
often introduced early on to a thermal example: when the butterfly flaps its
wings a feedback loop is created which produces a cyclone elsewhere. It is
when we study thermal patterns - turbulence, cyclones and so on, that we
17
Who can forget Wim Wenders' "The Wings of Desire" - the way in which the stone fell half sensed into
the hand of the angel?
18
"Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess", Harper SanFrancisco, 1992, p21.
can begin to see patterns of complexity in operation in a way that instantly
undermines the object-based ontologies of data and metaphysical presence.
Any moment of thermal activity is the sum of relations between different
temperature gradients as they interact with each other and unfold over time.
Winds are not then object-entities but processual events that express their
own field of operations through each dynamic exchange. When we think of
winds we are therefore thinking of wholly temporal phenomena - events that
simply cannot be abstracted from the time in which they occur. What is
important to understand is that this shift from the atemporality of object-
entities to durational phenomena is at the same time the limit of a quantitive
general theory and the opening towards a theory of scientific qualia. Winds
are the effect of qualitative shifts in the thermal environment, and not merely
quantitive exchanges that can be numerically reduced or adduced. To take
the example above, when the butterfly flaps its wings, a qualitative
difference can occur in the forms of thermal activity at work on the planet.
The complexity theory 'take' on winds is therefore that they demonstrate that
nature is always 'becoming'. As one of the key thinkers of complexity, Ilya
Prigogine, writes,
Not because we are concerned today with new,
unimaginable objects, closer to magic than to logic, but
because as scientists we are now beginning to find our way
toward the complex processes forming the world with which
we are most familiar, the natural world in which living
creatures and their societies develop. Indeed, today we are
beginning to go beyond what Koyre called "the world of
quantity" into the world of "qualities" and thus of
"becoming" (OC, 36)
Numbers are therefore not the origin or source of complex phenomena:
strange attractors, bifurcations and so on. Rather, they have proved, with the
advancement of computational technology, to be a sophisticated way of
explaining and mapping complexity. Numbers are therefore a form of
representation of complexity, rather than complexity itself. The mistake has
been entirely in this reduction, which allows the 'complex' to be merely a
contemporary substitute for 'Being'. Numerical reductivism has
paradoxically permitted complexity theory to be subsumed within Unity, the
Univocal or the One. It is as if complexity theory is the final theory at the
end of theory, when in fact it is a term whose reference is always excessive
to itself:
 The world is empty here and full there, sometimes being and
sometimes nothingness, here order, there chaotic, here
occupied, there lacunary, sporadic, and intermittent, as a
whole, here strongly forseeable, there underdetermined, here
temporal and there meteorological - here, I mean,
predictable or reversible and there an estimate and aleatory,
here universe, there diverse, here unitary and there
multiplicity, all in all when all's said and done a multiplicity.
(Serres, 111)
Complex phenomena themselves exist on all levels: the perceptual, the
libidinal, the psychic, the economic, the material and so on, as unstable
qualities far-from-equilibrium. Within each field of being, qualitative shifts
of post-mechanistic magnitude are the potential outcome of a wholly
relational dynamic of events. Despite this, it is nonetheless inevitable that
the turn towards algorithmic production in the new technologies of
representation has occurred, and with it a concomitant numerical
reductivism. The demands for speedy information and categorical certitude
produces quick terms that make objects of non-objects. However, we are
now in a position to see that the complex phenomena that have been
numerically reduced, as qualities, have a reality outside of their numerical
representation. Computers can produce object indistinguishable from reality
only in the sense that whatever is produced is scattered across the
differential field of interpretations. A generator may produce wind whose
naturalistic subtleties are guaranteed by algorithmic logic, however that
wind as such is still yet to be experienced. The wind thus produced becomes
another potential element, or the site of another potential fluctuation beyond
itself. In general, complex phenomena impinge upon the perceptual world
of sentient beings, leading to qualitative shifts and loops that cannot be so
readily mapped by computers. There is no essential danger to simulation, no
monstrous virtuality that may finally engulf our sensorium with the non-real.
The simulation itself is just another layer of sound within the continuum of
universal noise, that may or may not be listened to. For example, between
sensation and thought, the complexity of the wind can become a new model
for thinking about embodied being-in-the-world. It is true, we can transform
ourselves by refusing to imagine 'the self' as a delimited object, a Rubik's
Cube of operations, and model our energetic adherence to the world as a
series of turbulences. As one writer has perceptively noted, this 'new model'
of complexity in fact joins up with the thinking of Merleau-Ponty in his
work spanning the middle twenty years of the previous century.
 Without its traditional foundation within itself as self-
subsistent consciousness, there is no more subject as
discrete being, but rather, as Merleau-Ponty stated… a
"relation between circularities," one that is part of the
"return" in "this stabilizing explosion" that is "my body-the
sensible". In other words - the words of chaos theory - my
body in the world is a way of interacting in an open and
chaotic system to achieve self-organizing
continuance.(M235)
Just as the river or the hurricane is at each time caught up within flows of
forces that maintain or disrupt its equilibrium, so too is the self. In this way,
through thinking about the inexhaustible ontological nature of the wind, we
can begin to think more clearly about the ontology or 'being' of nature itself
and its intertwining with our own experiential being. The passion of the air
can amplify the passions of the soul or blow them into existence. We begin
to think of ourselves as turbulent beings, capable of disruption, violence,
storm, squalls and breezes.
In general, the 'natural' - elements such as wind or water, data, landscapes,
cityscapes, felt, the earth, blood, or in the most abstract terms any form of
in-between - are all things that we can only experience in terms of finite
spatio-temporal moments of a complex/chaotic open system. Each now of
the experience of any elemental phenomena therefore simply cannot through
itself be an experience of the totality of nature; rather, nature as the
indefinite sum of elements is folded within each moment as the potentiality
of an event happening. There is no ‘universal’ element: light, wind, water,
sound, surface only exist in passing, in the concrete experience of their
temporal/processual being. Moreover, these events of nature are thoroughly
intertwined with sentient experience: far from being object-entities mapped
or simulated algorithmically, as complexly located forms of ecstasy or action
at a distance, they are potentially transformative of our experience, leading
to new forms of poesis. Furthermore, each element, once called into being
as primordial (through a poem, an event, a building, a dance, a speech or a
dream), each of these impossible moments of reference, not only
paradoxically names the unnameable, but also closes off other elements and
possibilities. Against conventional accounts of causation, the insight of
Heidegger's four-folded round dance was to have opened up the possibility
that different elements might be involved in a reciprocal genesis: mortals,
gods, earth and sky calling each other into being through their interplay.
However, even this escapist gesture against the totalistic nature of his
thinking elsewhere of the meaning of technology implied its own violence
through other forms of elemental silence - the silence of water, of the wind.
Finally then, each naming of an element will eventually be transcended by
the world, as the most fundamentally unnameable entity, or in the words of
complexity, the open system of all systems or that which allows for
elementality. Each element will be undone as it is done, leaving history to
the eternal enigmas of interpretation. Can this wind that I have heard show
me at last the seduction of history by beckoning towards the anonymity that
flows beneath each name? Can we hear the wind (and perhaps listen to what
complexity theory has to offer) and comprehend that the desire for a history
or an epoch in which to reside is an extrapolation of Ego - a history of the
Same in which everything is reduced to the element which can be named and
apparently referred to?

The moment of experience, when the wind or the water or the forest or the
city are being witnessed, is a moment of immanence - in-dwelling,
involvement within the experience, participation in the moment, etc. Each
perception involves a flesh, an inhabited intertwining between perceiver and
perceived in an ontogenetic communion that can be affirmed or denied. It is
in this way that nature and technology were explained above as intertwined.
The natural therefore is seen as the sedimented paradigm of experience
opened up by new modes of technological production. In pursuit of the
sublimity of all elements and nature itself, I have been arguing that this
intertwining of technology and nature can itself be avoided, by an appeal to
the alterity at work in all elements. This appeal to the elements violates the
language of 'flesh' itelf; as Gleason shows, by being reminded of the
elements in ritual and practice, an energy as bright as fire can be released.
Beyond the social construction or production of the 'natural' lies nature itself,
as a perpetual stranger in our midst, inciting us to act if we can but listen.
It is time to show that the finitude of all interpretations of the object is
mirrored by a finitude on the part of the subject. The alterity within each
thinking of the elements is rejoined with an alterior limit to our experience
itself. It is through the finitude of all experiences of nature that each
intertwined expression involves an oppositional non-participation, a moment
of transcendence, when nature's essence slips away once again. The union
of perceptual intertwining only occurs on the basis of an ecart or gap of non-
coincidence between ourselves and the world. My expression of the world
through perception differentiates the world from itself, releasing an
invisibility in the heart of the visible, and I am not clear about what has
taken place. Without certainty, we are left with the fragility of a perceptual
faith, or as Merleau-Ponty says, "the insistent reminder of a mystery as
familiar as it is unexplained, of a light which, illuminating the rest, remains
at its source obscurity". (MP, 130)
Nature as a series of non-coincident events of experience, whereby the
elements of being are gathered according to a singular space-time (gathered
by the sentient body) overthrows the age-old notion of 'efficient causality.'
The linear model of time as a series of events with directive prior causal
pathways is rejected in favour of an "eventmental" conception of time. In a
sense, the classical temporal values of pre-complexity science give way to
the 'autopoesis' of non-linearity, where elements are gathered according to
the disruptive imperatives of the present. Our resolutely spatio-historical
experience of nature-as-event is perhaps best expressed according to the
metaphysical problematic of the 'haecceity': the conception of time as event
first developed by the scholastic Duns Scotus and put succinctly in the
following way by Deleuze and Guattari: "A haecceity" has neither beginning
nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of
points, only of lines."(p263). Something happens in the midst of time, a
contraction or expression or a mode of reality that exists only in and through
that moment. How can this temporality be accounted for as truthfully as
possible? What method of thought or style of ennunciation can approximate
to its insubstantive dynamics? How can the pulsion of interaction and
perceptual engagement be understood in terms of the somatically produced
difference of the world? As Deleuze suggests, one such style for the
haecceity is the haiku:
In a barbershop
The stench of soap and hair,-
a hot summer day!

A black woman sings:

Filling the sunlight with steam,
Bubbling molasses.

Beyond a sea wall,

An occasional wave flings
 Foam at the autumn sky19

The haiku's content is that of an anonymous and intense concrescence of

being. Within the strictures of a haiku-metaphysics of nature understood as
the ground of autopoesis, whatever we experience, we only experience
partially. Our experience of nature as a series of event-based haecceities is
grounded within the finitude of place-time.20 The nature of our subjectivity
mirrors that of the objects of our experience, and inside and outside cross
into each other an ontological looking glass. We find ourselves to be finite
beings, and the moments of our experience reflects this fundamental spatio-
temporal weakness or fragility. Our experience of nature and the world is a
finite experience, a condensed event-series within the insuperably complex
and unfolding whole. We can therefore only ever have a finite experience of
the wind; a series of memories, imaginations, emotions […] and finally only
ever experience ourselves in the same manner, a series of events open to
transformation through further unfoldings and shifts in our experience. The
haiku suggests that there is no more substantive mode of reality available
than this. As Deleuze and Guattari emphasise,
It should not be thought that a haecceity consists of a décor
or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that
hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire
assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity;
it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a
latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and
subjects, which belongs to another plane.(TP, 262)
The wind, in the shadows, in this room, synthesising with the late night
traffic. Once again, finitude dictates that everything we experience we
experience on an event-horizon, not on a plan: a coalescence of forces,
movements, speeds. The invisible is proclaimed within every visible
revelation wrought through expression. The duree of the world - its
inestimable processuality, cannot be transcended, visually nor epistemically.
Fortunately for we who desire resistance, the techno-corporate forces of
space-time compression are undone by the complex unfolding of the world
in our experience. The struggle for resistance is aided by the alterity at work

19
Taken from Richard Wright, "Haiku: this other world" Arade Publishing, New York, 1998.
20
See Edward Casey's discussion of haiku in his rich phenomenology of place "Getting back into Place",
p285.
in the open system of the world, eventually undoing all manifestations of
hegemony. The answer starts blowin' in the wind.
In the shadows, I listen to the wind, howling half-liquid half-animal outside.
I realise that in spite of everything, I have yet to call it into being. I cannot
refer to it without it slipping away, leaving only textual remnants. All I have
done is ask you to think of it, beyond number, promising releasement if not a
burning fire to break the chains of an alleged contemporary, as another
element of being in its transcendent complexity.
Beneath the hum of the computer, the wind in contrast carries on regardless,
a sublime element that nourishes or destroys us.