Societies of control

The argument for apparent inevitability of the regulative principles of connection, disjunction, conjunction as an ontological structure is already well known and, somewhat disturbingly, it seems to have been accepted almost without question. It is not only the inexorable judgment of the transcendental idealist, whose ideas, expressions, murmurs, sighs and utterances are given voice throughout the preceding pages of this book, but also that of the skeptical but transcendental empiricist, whose beliefs have been till now barely stated but, nevertheless, quietly insinuated. What allows the empiricist to take up a transcendental, and not merely skeptical, stance is the fundamental concept that all simple ideas may be separated by imagination and united by that power again in whatever form pleases us. Such ideas stand in purely external relations with respect to one another; although empirical in origin, they are organized from ‘outside,’ embedded in a higher dimension. Is this not a truly transcendental structure? What are the implications of such external relations? What is gained by the swift and repeated association of impressions and ideas? What is lost as the infinite and infinitely accelerated intensities push forward their forces, ready to capture, to overtake and to determine and define whatever events – affects, percepts, concepts, prospects, functives – contingently rush onto each trajectory, giving themselves up to whatever associations ‘imagination’ has awaiting them. And finally, in the path of such intensities, what of our jagged hesitations, our wild intersecting seperatrices, our intervals of sensibility spilling from illuminated networks into the creation of perspectives, rays of light opening onto the crowds we are?