The Post-Historical Return of Interality: In Lieu of a Preface.

Zhang, Peter

The term "interality" [phrase omitted] is not just another mediocre addition to the pool of neologisms competing for attention and adherence in this age of generalized information-weariness. It embodies the will to "take in all the water of the West River at one gulp" ([phrase omitted]), or to expound the entire philosophical canon with one word ([phrase omitted]), as the Zen phrases have it. It is an attempt to encapsulate in a nutshell broad-stroke shifts in the vector of Western civilization and the most fundamental difference between the proverbial East and West. It is literally a gap that fills an enormous but unsuspected gap in the history of philosophy. As such, the term easily matches any myth or conceptual persona (e.g., Zarathustra) that we know of in its density, richness, and significance.

Whitehead (1978), who held a comic, mature attitude toward Plato's work, famously observed, "The safest generalization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato" (p. 39). To see Plato as the default point of departure of Western philosophy, however, is to be oblivious of the rich diversity of ancient Greek thought that preceded and informed Plato's work. In the same vein, to see nothing other than Platonism in Plato is to be blind to the profuse hermeneutic potentials Plato's corpus offers. This is not to suggest that the Platonistic way in which Plato has been read matters not, nor to deny that Plato did set up a hierarchy among model, copy, and simulacra (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 253-266), privileged being over becoming, expunged relations from the list of ideas, and eliminated void as far as possible from his material system, even though Democritus, who lived and philosophized before him, had insisted upon its necessity.

Although Plato offered an intriguing account of khora (the receptacle, the nurse of all becoming, "that in which it comes to be," the Platonic equivalent of interality) in relation to the intelligible model ("that from which, by being made in its likeness, what comes to be is born") and the sensible copy ("that which comes to be") in Timaeus, his cosmology and metaphysics laid far more emphasis on the unchanging model than the imperfect copy, let alone the obscure khora, which is apprehended by a sort of spurious reasoning (Plato, 2008, p. 43). This emphasis is diametrically opposed to that of Laozi (who puts emphasis on interality and the yin principle), and has been the preoccupation of Western philosophy until khora was rediscovered and revived by modern and contemporary Western philosophers like Heidegger, Irigaray, Derrida, Serres, and Kristeva. By contrast, East Asian philosophy has always maintained its interality orientation, although this orientation has remained largely tacit and unselfconscious. The distillation of interality as a philosophical concept is a singular event that marks a coming to fruition of comparative philosophy's internal alchemy.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is not hard for us to see that Plato was a fateful turning point [phrase omitted] in the history of Western philosophy, a turning point that has led up to a cultural hegemony characterized by phallocentrism, logocentrism, the negation of elan vital's natural propensity to creatively differentiate itself in response to the call of motivating niches (i.e., micro-khoras) in the world, the repression of eros, teleological thinking, political conservatism, the repression of culturally negentropic impulses and initiatives as heresy, the regulation of life based on criteria rooted in the petrified narrow seriousness of authoritarianism, the obsession over lineage, and that which Nietzsche terms ressentiment and bad conscience, and so on. These are all manifestations of Platonism one way or another. As such, it was incisive of Deleuze (1990) to point out that the most innocent of all destructions is the destruction of Platonism (p. 266).

A thoroughgoing destruction of Platonism not only entails the elevation of khora or interality within the Platonic hierarchy but also radically unsettles the whole notion of model (i.e., ideal form) as something to imitate. There is nothing to imitate. Form is a contingent, metastable, impermanent consequence of becoming, rather than a pre-given telos. Khora is the site and a motivator of morphogenesis, which is an open-ended and never-ending process with no preordained finality. As change is the only constant, so the world is naturally negentropic. There will never be a shortage of becomings. Conservatives worry about the loss of Form and Order; free spirits celebrate the emergence of new forms and orders. To affirm khora or interality is to affirm all the chance encounters, interplays, mutual motivations, co-evolutions, interdependences, accidents, mutations, becomings, transformations, and transfigurations that take place therein. In such a world, nothing imitates a model. Rather, everything becomes, doing so intuitively, spontaneously, emergently, and innocently in a relational field. The world is naturally inclined toward diversity and relational complexity just as life forms are naturally inclined toward formal simplicity insofar as their umwelts afford such simplicity. There is no incompatibility between complexity and simplicity unless the latter is misapprehended.

There is a tricky relationship between the Platonic triad (model, copy, khora) and Aristotle's fourfold causality (formal, material, efficient, and final cause). In turning Aristotle's conceptual assemblage toward the study of media, present-day media ecologists, especially those with Platonic inclinations, have betrayed the tendency to commit Platonism by conflating formal cause with Platonic form or model. One can tell this is happening when people speak of formal cause as the definition or essence of something. Treating Platonic model as the formal cause renders Aristotle's framework static, uninteresting, and, more importantly, entropic. The whole process becomes predictable: the model is impressed upon a passive, plastic, and cooperative material by a fallible "midwife" to beget a less than perfect copy. A copy can approximate and resemble the model but can never be "it." There is always a margin of deviation. There is no such thing as a delightful surprise. Nietzsche (1964) holds a critical attitude toward this Platonic view and assumes an ironic tone when presenting it: [T]he idea "leaf"... awakens the notion that in nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called the "leaf," perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accurately measured, coloured, crinkled, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form." (p. 179)

Eric McLuhan points out on multiple occasions that formal cause is environmental cause, which is to say, formal cause is the ground, whereas form is just a figure, a solution, called into being by the ground. In a nutshell, media ecology McLuhan-style coaches a ground orientation; the medium is the ground. Now, the term "medium" as McLuhan means it has a few synonyms, including "milieu," "environment," and, for our purposes, "khora." In this sense, khora is no longer a characterless space where becoming takes place. Rather, it is a formal cause that has a fashioning potency and gives shape to things. A Chinese proverb captures the sentiment well: "Tangerine is tangerine on the south side of the Huai River but becomes orange if it grows on the north side" [phrase omitted]. The environment makes a qualitative difference. McLuhan's thought bears a strong affinity with the Chinese sensibility, especially the philosophy of the I Ching and Laozi.

Speaking of Laozi, the sixth chapter of the Dao De Jing uses an image ([phrase omitted], mysterious female) that immediately calls to mind Plato's khora (uterus, womb). Richard John Lynn's translation captures the sense quite well: "The Valley Spirit never dies, and we call it the 'Mysterious Female'. The gate of the Mysterious Female is referred to as the 'root of Heaven and Earth'. On and on, with only apparent existence, it functions inexhaustibly" (Lynn, 1999, p. 62). The crucial difference between Laozi and Plato is that Laozi holds an affirmative attitude toward the mysterious female, whereas Plato does not give primacy to khora but to the ideal form and sees it as the seminal, originary, impregnating, shape-giving, and governing factor. The Platonic mentality is patriarchal, patrilineal, top-down, judgmental, and life-negating. In the eyes of serious Platonists, life is always in the wrong because it is necessarily a less than perfect copy. In this regard, it is more right-minded to think with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze.

Before we move away from Aristotle's fourfold causality, there are two things worth mentioning. First, Chinese philosophy seems to gravitate toward what Joseph Needham (1956) calls "biogenerative" causality. Peimin Ni (2003) offers a philosophical account of the notion over a decade ago. The relation between this notion and Bergson's notion of elan vital is well worth looking into, partly because there seems to be something Taoist about Bergson's Creative Evolution.

Second, Peter Zhang and Bill Guschwan (2014) bring Aristotle's fourfold causality and the Buddhist notion of tetralemma into dialogue with each other (thus creating a productive interface in between) in a probe, which ends on a note of emergence. The probe is sophistic-minded and enacts Deleuze's notion of "the power of falsity" (Deleuze, 1995, p. 11). One thing significant about it is that it introduces uncertainty and unpredictability into Aristotle's model so it is capable of taking account of the emergence of the new. Better still, it transforms an arguably closed-ended model into a model for negentropy. The "neither... nor..." moment is really about interality in action since it points in the direction of betweenness and beyondness. It is well in line with Deleuze's notion of involution and the Bergsonian-Deleuzean notion of "elan vital as movement of differentiation" (Deleuze, 1991, p. 91). Differentiation is motivated by unoccupied niches and potential symbiotic relations in nature. The full implication of the piece both in its own right and in relation to interality studies is yet to be thought through. The piece is definitely extendable. The introduction of biological examples alone already constitutes a meaningful extension.

There are quite a few things to say about media ecology and interality studies. Media ecological thinking is highly compatible with interological thinking. A so far unarticulated root metaphor of media ecology is "medium as khora" as mentioned above. The modus operandi of media ecology McLuhan-style is probing, which is an interological operation. There is a properly media ecological explanation for the repression and return of interality in the West, and the prevalence of interological thinking in East Asia, regardless of the highly sophisticated writing systems developed there. Looking into the immediate future, it is fairly clear that interality studies bears directly upon the human condition in the post-everything era.

The following are a few problematics that come to mind: the further pollution of interality as distance (Paul Virilio's concern), the symbiosis and coevolution between humanity and technology, the sudden proliferation of unemployment and leisure (a specific sense of interality) as a consequence of qualitative breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research, interfaith relations, the essence of the human brain (which is most likely interality), the likelihood that satori or Zen awakening is a matter of "reformatting" which radically increases the amount of interality (empty space as well as resonant interval) in the brain (perhaps what awakening really does is turn the brain into a truly smooth rhizome), the further permeation or penetration of the life world by the technosphere and infosphere as a false khora (arguably the argument of The Matrix), the sudden relevance of the Platonic hierarchy among model, copy, and simulacra as it bears upon the now fragile unity of the human species (Virilio's anxiety) and the resultant relationality among humans, subhumans, and superhumans, the relationality between humans, posthumans, and nonhumans (including robots, artificial intelligences as well as other creatures co-inhabiting post-nature along with humans), the displacement and replacement of wilderness (an interological spacetime) by virtual reality (VR), the maximization of interanimations and mutual disruptions among formerly disparate knowledge systems and the resultant proliferation and sped-up obsolescence of knowledge, and so on.

All is to suggest that the concept of interality has been called into being by the human condition at this peculiar post-historical juncture, and that interology is a philosophy of the future, meant for us but also for a people to come. The notion of post-history, it needs to be pointed out, comes from Vilem Flusser, the phenomenological-minded Czech-Brazilian media theorist. An unmistakable interological accent can be detected in his media theory. In a way, McLuhan is to the electric age as Flusser is to the digital age. Like McLuhan and Eric Havelock (1963), Flusser would say that the West's not-ahistorical inattention to or repression of interality has everything to do with a fateful event: the rise of alphabetic writing, the psychic and social impact of which took a very long time to penetrate the social fabric. He would also say that Plato's fixation upon and promotion of models or ideal forms and his slighting of khora are the manifestations of a media effect in the realm of philosophy, and the medium in question is, again, alphabetic writing, the psychic and social impact of which was to be intensified later on by the printing press but eventually dissolved by electric, electronic, and digital media. This is a media ecological understanding turned toward the vicissitudes of interality's life in the West.

Flusser attributes the onset of post-history to the advent of the universe of technical images, which inculcate a new way of thinking he calls "dot-interval thinking" [phrase omitted], and give Democritus's atomism a new relevance. Western civilization witnessed another great turning point with the emergence of the digital, which not only remediates all previous contents no matter the medium, turning everything into yins and yangs or zeroes and ones, but also transforms the personality of Western civilization as we knew it once upon a time. For Flusser, the code is the message. There is a difference in kind between the digital and the alphanumeric, which has served as the foundation of Western civilization for millennia. The digital is ideographic in nature, just like a significant portion of Chinese characters. The implication is that in the digital age, Western civilization is approximating the cultural sphere constituted by the Chinese language - not in an ideological sense but in a mediumistic and dispositional sense. The transformation is at once environmental and subliminal.

The digital milieu or khora reshapes the psyche of its inhabitants. Indeed, the medium is the message; the user is the content. There is nothing neutral, transparent, innocent, or harmless about the medium. Rather, each medium has its embedded value and constitutive power. If the logos-problematizing Kenneth Burke lived today, he would raise a question like this: do we simply play with digital devices, or do they not also mold and remold us like Play-Doh? By echoing Flusser's point that the digital is ideographic in nature, by no means do we suggest that the digital and the ideographic are the same. They are not. Otherwise, there won't be any significant transformation of Chinese culture by the digital sandstorm. It needs to be pointed out, though, that the digital has both homogenizing and diversifying impacts simultaneously. As such, the cultural contact zone between the East and the West won't lose its value as a resonant interval, which is where the action is. Instead of disappearing as a result of homogenization, the contact zone will get fractalized and pluralized.

The sandstorm image is no random choice but invokes a Flusserian understanding of the digital. It has nomadic connotations, partly because our enclosed dwellings, which used to differentiate us from tentinhabiting nomads, cannot protect us from the digital sandstorm, which penetrates and perforates our walls, turning them into Swiss cheese. The sandstorm image also implies digital image making, which involves the process of calculation (the reduction of everything into "calculi," literally, pebbles, the equivalent of grains of sand) and computation (the integration or compression of calculi or pixels into recognizable images after the fashion of Pointillist or mosaic art). Digital images, Pointillist paintings, and mosaics share one thing in common: micro-intervals. McLuhan speaks of TV in terms of mosaics ("the TV mosaic mesh") to help foreground the coolness of TV as a medium. In like fashion, we could speak of digital images in terms of Pointillist paintings [phrase omitted], the metaphorical temperature of which is a function of the density of the dots. It is reasonable to claim that Pointillism foreshadowed or prophesied the invention of TV and, later on, digital image making.

For the sake of pure discussion, if the digital age is an age of micro-interalities [phrase omitted] if nomadism has more to do with nomos than logos (meant as a Deleuzean distinction), then perhaps we should entertain the serviceability and rhetorical thrust of the term "interonomy," as distinguished from interology or interalogy. Logos, especially when narrowly conceived, is well in line with the Platonic impulse, which brings to mind the state, the priest, and the moralist, all of whom tend to speak in the negative: "Thou shalt not." By contrast, interonomy, or what we have called interology or interalogy so far, has never been intended as an authoritative discourse. Its modus operandi is nomadic through and through. The term "interonomy" suits our purposes also because we have never been interested in system building. Like Virilio, who discovered anti-form when doing still life, we approach pivotal Western philosophers like Plato not to claim or invent a lineage to justify what we are doing, but to foreground what they push into the background or deem as insignificant or unimportant. In this sense, interonomic or interological inquiry situates itself in a tactical, sophistic position. Like Virilio or Derrida, we have adopted a negative horizon, but the tonality and attitude we assume are totally affirmative, just like those of Zhuangzi or Nietzsche.

The following is a set of probing remarks on interality and mathematics, offered here in the spirit of the power of falsity.

Interality and Mathematics

We need to reach the point where mathematics is indistinguishable from philosophy.

Leibniz's binary number system is more or less a retrieval of the yins and yangs (zeroes and ones) that are the constituent elements of the 64 hexagrams of the immemorial I Ching. Interplay and resonance are the soul of the I Ching. The digital code is now the lingua franca of all digital devices. Leibniz has been rightfully referred to as the father of the digital revolution.

The whole point of "delta" is to help us grasp the smallest interval. It is a matter of negotiating the gap between numbers by introducing miniaturized increments, or a matter of making the discontinuous continuous.

Interality is what makes discrete mathematics discrete.

If we understand interality in the special sense of relationality, then concepts like ratio and proportionality are means to help us grasp interality.

Interality connotes both zero and infinity.

The equation, x=f(y), symbolizes one stripe of interality.

Interality is directly applicable to game theory.

As a line of inquiry, interality studies is interdisciplinary, conceptual, and exploratory in nature. It might open up a fresh way of interpreting mathematics to the layperson.

Once a mathematician intuits the point of the concept, its applicability will become very obvious. The real challenge is to articulate the "so what" part.

Aphorisms and Provocations

"Nothing is more real than nothing" (Samuel Beckett).

"The rejection of everything objective, tangible, physical is a rejection of all ontology" (Flusser, 2011, p. 139).

"Relations, not things, are real; dialogues, not the men themselves, are relevant; the Self is a node in an entire network of connections.... Man is an interpolation, something like a node in a network of interactions and possibilities" (Strohl, 2002, pp. xiii-xiv).

"[T]his human-apparatus connection must be truly dialogical and not one in which the human being is programmed by apparatus, as things stand now" (Flusser, 2011, pp. 113-114).

"The thoughts are moving so fast that between two thoughts you cannot see the interval. But the interval is always there. That interval is you" (Osho, 2004, p. 93).

"Where the interplay of 'is' and 'is not' is fixed, not even the sages can know" (Zenrin Kushu [phrase omitted]).

"Each time it is held up it is a new thing" (Suzuki, 1965, p. 117).

"In the early traditions of Buddhism, depictions of Gautama Buddha were neither iconic nor aniconic but depictions of empty space and absence."

"Appearances are, not only empty. Appearances are, the emptiness itself, appearing" (Michael Erlewine).

"I cannot think, of emptiness, but I have tasted it; my words sputter out, in its silence. Emptiness embraces, more than I know" (Michael Erlewine).

"Unconditional love, has no conditions. It accepts, the exceptions. Total receptivity, takes you in, until you know, nothing. Emptiness, contains everything, and that includes, nothing" (Michael Erlewine).

"[T]he subject creates the object just as much as the object creates the subject" (Watts, 1989, p. 120).

"And this reversible ontology (no subject without an object, as well as no object without a subject) is a basic posthistorical feature" (Flusser, 2002, p. 90).

"Your life is made of two dates and a dash. Make the most of the dash" (popular saying).

"Our world flipped around the year 1900. At that time Max Planck explained with quantum mechanics that matter isn't continuous, that the material world has no connections, that it is made up of, and held together by, resonant interfaces. This marked the end of Newton for whom everything was linked" (McLuhan, 1999, p. 53).

"The western world organizes itself visually by connective, uniform, and continuous space. The oriental world, antithetically, organizes everything by spaces, by distances between sounds and objects, not by connection.... The oriental works by interval, not by connection, and that is why we think he is inscrutable.... And, in the electric world in which we now live, everything occurs by instantaneous little intervals rather than by connections. We are orientalizing ourselves at a furious clip." (McLuhan, 1966, p. 91).

"Nothing has its meaning alone. Nothing is intelligible in isolation. Perception as such is a proportion among proportions apprehended in our sensory life. There is meaning in the sense ratios themselves" (McLuhan & Nevitt, 1972, p. 137).

"Many people of professional demeanour 'shun the punman', having been warned that verbal play is the lowest form of wit.... James Joyce knew that any word was a storehouse of innumerable human perceptions that could be released by abrasive interplay with other words. Given any two words, he could invent a verbal universe" (McLuhan & Nevitt, 1972).

"Linus Pauling shook the foundations of classical physics by reminding his fellow scientists that nothing in the material universe connects. The same thing can be said of the mind; all its elements interface" (McLuhan & Powers, 1989, p. 49).

"A thought about betweenness. That area is always frontier, or double frontier. Very isometric. Each of the situations can act as counter-environment for the other. The borderline is the pregnant interval" (Eric McLuhan).

"The orthodox image of two discrete entities exchanging messages was subsumed by the reality of an organic bond in which each participant was fused into a single rhythmic arrangement" (Rifkin, 1987, p. 44).

"[T]he musical term mesure pour rien [refers to] a silent measure at the beginning of a performance, a soundless interval conveying nothing but setting the tempo and so an essential part of the musical whole" (Ackerley & Gontarski, 2004, p. 562).

"After three glasses of wine one throughs into the Great Way. After an entire jug one becomes one with nature" [phrase omitted] (from a poem by Li Bai).

"Send off your cares beyond heaven and earth; get life-force between mountains and waters" [phrase omitted], [phrase omitted] (translated by Richard John Lynn).

"The mind must stay empty. For if empty truth shall come there to abide" [phrase omitted], [phrase omitted] (translated by Richard John Lynn).

In basketball, pick and roll is a matter of taking advantage of interality to turn two on two into two on one.

In this age of interconnectivity, Deleuze's notion of "rhizome" has become a lived sensation. Its technical actualization, however, also blinds us to nontechnical rhizomes, such as butterfly-potato, and the brain.

The French word "entre-deux" (interspace, gap, say, between two things) gives one the impulse to take stock of similar words in all languages and contemplate their philosophical and ethical implications.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is a follow-up to the special section of China Media Research, 11(2), 2015 on interology, and the special issue of Canadian Journal of Communication, 41(3), 2016 bearing the title, "Studies in Interality." The author thanks Randy Lumpp, Robert L. Ivie, and Blake Seidenshaw for offering insightful feedback when this piece was being composed, Stephen C. Rowe for reading the final version and sharing his impressions, and Richard John Lynn for translating some mini-texts from Chinese into English upon request. His thanks also go to the coterie of peer reviewers who dedicated their precious time and talent to this collective endeavor. On behalf of all the contributors and interested scholars, the author thanks Guo-Ming Chen for generously making available the space of an entire issue, which has served as a motivating chora to call this collection into being. Following the successful launch of the 1st International Symposium on Interality Studies at Eberhard Center, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan from June 29-30, 2017, we are expecting another series of articles to be completed in the weeks to come, and looking forward to working with interested hosts and sponsors in preparation for the 2nd International Symposium on Interality Studies. Lastly, the author wants to mention that Geling Shang has a yet-to-finalize article on Plato, Derrida, and Laozi, which is of a piece with this collection and has inflected the crafting of this preface.

Peter Zhang

Grand Valley State University, USA

Correspondence to:

Peter Zhang [phrase omitted], Ph.D.

School of Communications Grand Valley State University 290 LSH 1 Campus Dr. Allendale, MI 49401 Email: zhangp@gvsu.edu

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[Peter Zhang. The Post-Historical Return of Interality: In Lieu of a Preface. China Media Research 2017; 13(4): 1-6]. 1

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