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Tarot Hermeneutics
Exploring How We Create Meaning with Tarot
The Magician’s
Autopoietic Action,
or Eros Contained and Uncontained
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i heard there was a secret
chord From Hallelujah by L. Cohen
There is a major card in all Tarot decks, called “The
Magician”. In the
At the mythical
level, the Magician’s ancestor, Hermes
Trismegistus, was associated
with the Egyptian god Thoth
and the Greek Hermes, a god of communication and wit,
quick action and quick thinking, and the Magician’s idea
is first and foremost communicative and interactive,
aiming towards connecting the One (as the number
corresponding to this card in the deck) with the Many,
discovering unity in diversity and creating diversity
out of unity. As it naturally follows the spontaneous
Fool, a preceding arcanum
signified by zero, that is, unnumbered, the Magician
card, number one, represents a path to the yet unknown.
Being a pure mind, it is – prior to its own action – as
yet disembodied: for Peirce, mind has to be entrenched
in habits so as to “congeal”, as Peirce says, into
matter. The sign of the Magician indicates the first
step towards the objects of Secondness – in a way, the
Peircean Firstness of
Secondness – that is, practical, experiential and
experimental, logic which is not confined to syllogistic
logic proper.
It is almost ironic how instrumental rationality of
modern epoch has separated science and magic into a pair
of binary opposites. While acknowledging what the pure
reason of modernity considered to be a supernatural
action, the former nevertheless attempted to explain the
latter in terms of a regular linear method of a direct
cause-effect connection, promptly arriving at a
conclusion of either anomalous effect (as in magic) or
anomalous cause (as in mantic). Even taking into
consideration a potential “effect of magic [as] a
semiotic therapy’ (in Noth
1995: 191), the view remains that within boundaries of
“normal communicative acts, magic is based on a semiotic
fallacy, [that is] misjudgment of the pragmatic effect
of signs and their semantic object relation” (1995:
188). Specifically, the semiotic anomaly of reading
cards has been considered to rest on mantic signs being
“interpreted as an index of supernatural forces
determining the world” (1995: 190). What is called
magic, however, is a science of hidden relations, the
latter capable of producing real effects when a cause in
question is not at all obvious. Jung gave a name
synchronicity to this seemingly
acausal order in nature. The world of Nature is
full of such magic: in the universe considered to be
self-organizing (see Jantsch
1980), the different and new levels of complexity emerge
as if from nowhere, by means of spontaneous
structuration and the
establishing of an autopoietic
regime. The classical definition of
autopoietic systems is as follows:
“An autopoietic system is
organized (defined as a
unity) as a
network of processes of production (transformation and
destruction) of components that produces the components
that: (1) through their interaction and transformations
continuously regenerate and realize the network of
processes (relations) that produced them; and (2)
constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the
space in which they exist by specifying the topological
domain of its realization as such a network” (Varela
1979: 13, italics mine, IS, so as to stress the
significance of the number One assigned to the Magician
card).
Autopoiesis literally means “self-making” and is
effectuated by means of recursive communicative
feed-forward and feed-back loops created by wave of the
Magician’s wand as shown on the card (Fig. 1). The dual
aspect of continual and self-referential feedbacks, the
processes of folding and unfolding, constitute a network
of mutual interactions as if establishing a
conversation
(Varela 1979), or a dialogic communication between the
system’s heterogeneous levels.
Jantsch (1980) defines consciousness as
the degree of autonomy a system gains in the dynamic
relations with its environment; thereby even the
simplest chemical dissipative structure can be said to
possess “a primitive form of consciousness” (Jantsch
1980: 40). The image of the
Magician, as a sign of
autopoiesis, represents such a trace of
consciousness embedded in the material universe, in
agreement with Peirce’s asserting that mind in not a
sole property of us, conscious and evolved human beings,
but pervades the natural world in various degrees.
Autopoiesis affirms the
living systems as essence-less and the world as
open-ended albeit not predicated solely on the
interference of a subjective human intervention imposed
from without.
Fig. 1
"Illustration is from Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, known also
as the Rider Tarot and the Waite Tarot.
Reproduced by permission of US Games
Systems Inc.,
Autopoiesis describes the feature of a continual renewal
and self-organization pertaining to living, as well as
social (see Luhmann 1995),
systems so as to maintain the integrity of systems’
structures, the latter arising as a result of multiple
interactions – or, using Dewey’s stronger term,
transactions – between many processes. The notion of
transaction considers all human activities including
behavings and
knowings as activities not
of man alone but as processes belonging to the full
situation of an organism-in-the-environment. As such,
all transactions are embedded “in the organization of
space and time prefigured in every course of a
developing life-experience” (Dewey 1934/1980: 24) and
extend beyond the spatio-temporal
boundaries of the sole organism. Indeed, order is not
limited to being imposed from without – which would be
an intervention from the outside of the system thus
making the system’s functioning
allopoietic – “but is made out of the relations
of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one
another. Because it is active (not anything static
because foreign to what goes on) order itself develops.
… Order cannot but be admirable in a
world constantly threatened with disorder” (Dewey
1934/1980: 14-15).
Gilles Deleuze’s
neopragmatic philosophy is
mostly concerned with the creation and invention of new
non-preexistent concepts. A novel concept as a product
of active thinking becomes an emergent property. Such a
creative act is a prerogative of the Magician – the
archetype of, in terms of contemporary discourse,
neogenesis or the process
within which “the properties that appear during the
origin of the new set are not the simple sum of the
components that make up the set” (Grobstein
in Juarrero 1999: 12) but
establish different and new relations between
components. An autopoietic
system is organized around “environmental
perturbations/compensations” (Varela 1979: 167f)
effecting transversal communications across the levels.
The very act of communication is capable of establishing
different and new relations between components because
it triggers a compensatory
operation, the
inside of the
system, which itself is part and parcel of the
environmental perturbation, the
outside. In
this way, old boundaries are crossed and traversed, and
new boundary conditions of the system, or its external
structure, is being established meanwhile sustaining the
integrity of its internal structure, or what
Deleuze aptly called the
fold of “the inside of the outside” (Deleuze
1988: 97).
The communicative action of the Magician is expressed in
the coordination, or the Peircean
relation of Thirdness, that
this sign establishes between the
noumenal and phenomenal realms, and may be
considered to be a precursor to neo- or
morpho-, genesis, that is,
emergence of this or that phenomenon of Secondness as
contingent on Thirdness. So,
the sign of the Magician is an indication of how mind,
or Firstness, may become embodied in matter, or
Secondness, through the Thirdness
of an evolutionary process, which serves as a
“mediation, whereby first and second are brought into
relation. … Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution
is Third” (Peirce CP 6. 7). From the perspective of the
logic of explanation, this card may be considered as
representing the functioning of “another kind of
causation” (Peirce CP. 6.59). The Magician becomes the
index of a
self-cause disregarded by a science of modernity the
latter having “succeeded” in reducing the four
Aristotelian causes, including formal and final, to a
single
efficient causation, while at the same time
“retaining his prohibition against that unknown form of
causality” (Juarrero 1999:
48), a self-cause. Jung, commenting on a possibility of
some unexpected correlations, pointed out that it is the
very quality of an archetype to be able to “order”
itself. Peirce asserted that growth, evolution, and
complexity represent basic facts in the universe. He
further noticed that from these facts we may infer “that
there is probably in nature some agency by which the
complexity and diversity of things can be increased”
(Peirce CP 6.58). The mechanical law alone would not
explain the magic of diversification. The Magician,
number One, indeed
unity that
gives rise to diversity, is not a symbol of
identity: for Peirce, the infallible mechanical laws are
insufficient. “How can the regularity of the world
increase, if it has been absolutely perfect all the
time?” asks Peirce (CP 1.174). Difference is needed, and
such a difference in fact is what makes an
autopoiesis functional.
Gilles Deleuze has
ingeniously addressed this concept:
“difference is not diversity.
Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the
given is given. …Difference is not phenomenon but the
noumenon closest to
phenomenon … Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by
which it is conditioned … Everything which happens and
everything which appears is correlated with orders of
differences: differences of level, temperature,
pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity” (Deleuze
1994a: 222).
In other words, the unity, or wholeness, is given not in
“a property which it possesses … [but only]… by a
pervasive and internally integrating quality” (Dewey
1998a: 194-195) as Firstness, exemplified in number One.
The mind itself is part of nature: there is continuity,
that Peirce called synechism,
as opposed to materialism or idealism alike. The
categories of Firstness, Secondness, and
Thirdness are “conceptions
of complexity” (Peirce CP 1. 526). Properties as seconds
arise from the act of communication that involves what
Deleuze dubbed
differentiation,
when the differences in intensity establish a flow of
information. “The pervasive quality is differentiated
while at the same time these differentiations are
connected” (Dewey 1998a:
209), the process of connection – or local
integrations – being described as
differenciation
in terms of it “being like the second part of
difference” (Deleuze 1994a:
209) thereby itself capable of producing a
difference of the second-order. Such a double process of
different/ciation, as the
Magician’s communicative action, appears to border on a
magical art indeed, an act of wonder:
“of all affairs,
communication is the most wonderful…When communication
occurs, all natural events are subject to
reconsideration and revision: they are re-adapted to
meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be
public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed
thinking” (Dewey 1925/1958: 166),
or, we add, the interleveled
communication, the semiosis
in nature, when the Magician
intervenes
between the heterogeneous levels, lifts up his wand and
enables the “events [to] turn into objects, things with
meaning” (Dewey 1925/1958: 166).
The act of an intervention makes Magician an
autocatalytic element
building the mutualist
feedback of circular causality and representing
“kinetics effective in this moment at each
spacial point” (Jantsch
1980: 34). Performing tricks, creating a momentous “negentropy
as semiotic information” (Spinks 1991: 71) in the
various acts of practical magic based on creative
imagination, Magician in its dual aspect as Trickster
trans-codes the analog continuum of one into the
digital organization of particulars: functioning
as a principle of continuity and harmony, it has to
practically intervene in the world of everyday affairs.
The fact of immanent
intervenience
and not
supervenience
affirms the autopoietic
versus allopoietic structure
in the system’s parts-whole organization. In the
traditional reading, the function of the Magician is to
establish rapport between one’s personal effort and the
natural world via the depth of spiritual life. The
postmodern Magician reconstructs the
premodern (Platonic)
Oneness, that is, a unity between the beautiful, the
good, and the harmonious by taking it out from the
supernatural realm and – while still maintaining this
unity as a system’s integrity – bringing it down to
earth and into the midst of the flesh-and-blood human
experiences. The actual experience, full of
contingencies, thus provides conditions resulting in
structural couplings as “a chain of interlocked …
communicative
interactions” (Varela 1979: 48f) embedded in the
process of shared (dia)logic.
The intensity of difference is a function of yet another
fundamental Deleuzian
concept, desire.
The desire that enables Magician to practically
perform miracles by means of the acts of creation, is
the human
eros, that is, the
passion to create what is good for humans: indeed, the
wise Magician “knows
what is good and spontaneously does it” (Varela
1999: 4) combining therefore a sensitive perception with
an ethical action. The evolution of signs from each
preceding to the consequent arcanum,
from the card numbered zero, the Fool (see
Semetsky 2000) to the
Magician/One, to the High Priestess/Two[1]
and so on, is a matter of contingency: the Fool’s growth
and its continuous reconstruction of experience based on
integration of many connections between an organism and
environment in the phenomenal world depends on the
Fool’s spontaneous act of “veritable becoming-mad” (Deleuze
1990: 1). As for
phronesis,
or the Magician’s intelligent – inspired by “the
striving to make stability of meaning prevail over the
instability of events” (Dewey 1925/1958: 50) – method,
it wouldn’t be possible if not for the element of
madness, namely, the birth of Eros, embedded in it and
in fact having originated this very method.
Let us recall the myth: Eros indeed was conceived in a
foolish, bordering on a pre-conscious, act that has
occurred in the middle and muddle of “a sort of groping
experimentation…that…belong to the order of dreams, of
pathological processes, esoteric experiences,
drunkenness, and excess” (Deleuze
& Guattari 1994: 41). Yet,
as a culmination of desire sparked between two deities,
Eros itself is embedded in the relational triadic
process. It is Thirdness
that governs Secondness because, according to Peirce, it
“brings information, […] determines an idea and gives it
body” (Peirce CP. 1. 537) thereby creating the objects
of cognition as Seconds as if anew. Eros, the magical
son of Poros and
Penia, is itself a symbol of
union that came into existence as an effect of the
activated Jungian archetype of
Coniuncio, that is, the conjunction of
opposites. Eros-the-Magician, wears red (see Fig.1) as
the color of passion, over white as the color of sincere
and serious intentions, and his practical skill –
techne
– is to unite the opposites. Being
form-less in
itself, Eros’s purpose is nevertheless to
in-form, that
is to create negentropy
contained in a surplus of information, or novelty,
arising in the creative act of the Magician that demands
“at every turn, every bend, every alternate possibility
a decision to be made” (Kevelson
1999: 15). While the preceding
arcanum, the Fool, conveys the imagery of an
uncontained Eros literally bordering on the edge of
Chaos, the second card brings an element of organization
into the semiotic process because Chaos itself is
resourceful and is “seen as Creative” (Hoffmeyer
and Emmeche 1991: 162).
Indeed, the Magician’s predicament, or
sign-function, is to ensure an operational closure – a
series of structural couplings – hence correcting and
ordering the course of events.
The Magician/Trickster, in a somewhat
Neoplatonic fashion,
reconstructs Eros by taking it away from the domain of
the philosopher-kings and, while still practicing both
poetry and prophecy, bringing Eros into the actual world
of interaction and dialogue that “provides the
laboratory for the experimentation of ‘the good’ in
things and in thought” (Kevelson
1999: 188). The creation itself is a continuous
dialogue, an interaction as an ongoing event represented
by means of the two indices on the Magician’s picture.
While the Magician’s right hand (Fig. 1) holding the
wand points up-wards, to the skies, his left hand is
pointing to the earth enacting thereby the Hermetic
maxim, as above so below. For it is the second
verse of the Hermes’ Emerald Table (Tabula
Smaragdina) that
proclaims the ancient formula of analogy: That which is
above is like to that which is below and that which is
below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the
miracles of (the) one thing. This active principle
indicates a possibility that what happens in human
thought
may be analogous to the Magician’s
action.
Thinking, when being embodied in action, becomes
an active “deliberation [which] is a dramatic rehearsal
(in imagination) of various competing possible lines of
action… Deliberation is an
experiment in finding out what the various lines of
possible action are really like” (Dewey 1922/1988: 132).
Thought thus may extend itself spatially, but not only:
it also “runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby
avoids having to await the instructions of actual
failure and disaster” (Dewey 1922/1988: 133), therefore
extending itself in a temporal sense too, hence
constructing a multidimensional, “both extensive and
enduring” (Dewey 1925/1958: 279) hyperspace, a manifold.
The many potentialities in a manifold follow the
singular direction of the Magician's wand. The magic
wand actualizes this or that of Secondness, and the
Magician embodies the reality of
Peircean would-be-ness. Therefore some, albeit as
yet indeterminate, consequences would inevitably take
place following the
“imaginative rehearsal of
various courses of conduct. We give way
in our mind,
to some impulse; we try,
in our mind,
some plan. Following its career through various steps,
we
find ourselves in imagination in the presence of the
consequences that would follow” (Dewey 1932/Hickman &
Alexander 1998, 2:
335).
The word “magic” has a common root with “imagination”.
The Magician’s active imagination provides the
opportunities to see the possible in the actual and,
respectively and because of code-duality (cf.
Hoffmeyer and
Emmeche 1991), to increase
the number of degrees of freedom in the space of
potentialities. The imagination is active indeed, and
deliberation carries the creative power of the genesis
of new forms; it “terminates in a modification of the
objective order, in the institution of a new object…
. It involves a dissolution of old objects and a
forming of new ones in a medium …beyond the old object
and not yet in a new one” (Dewey 1925/1958: 220), but
within a zone of indiscernibility
between the two. The Magician’s
autopoietic function (First) is complementary to
the spontaneously emerging, and relatively stable,
structure (Second) within the totality of the process (Thirdness)
in the overall triadic sign-system. The relative
stability is a sign of semiosis:
a new regime of signs is part of the overall dynamics
reflected in the evolutionary process represented in
each subsequent card in a deck.
The Magician/Trickster’s imagination completes “the
intercourse of the live creature with his surroundings”
(Dewey 1934/1980: 22). Because of such an interactive
and communicative action, the information represented by
the potential collection of archetypal meanings, which
are as yet dormant in the overcoded
(cf. Varela’s “surplus
signification”, 1999: 56) collective unconscious,
posited by Jung, becomes activated. Those meanings are
realized in a process of carrying over the past into the
present together with the imaginative anticipation of
the future, all three syntheses of time implicit in the
collective unconscious[2].
Meanings thus find their way into a here-and-now of the
present experience. The Magician’s mode of communication
may be described by the Jungian transcendent function
that includes in itself an act of imagination thus
bringing the unconscious material to the level of
conscious awareness. In other words, what we have here
is the construction of logic “from the basic intuitive
act of making a distinction and two fundamental
arithmetical acts: (1) making a mark to signify the
distinction and (2) repeating the mark” (Noddings
and Shore 1984 in Semetsky
2000: 489; cf. Spencer-Brown 1979). The semiotic
language this sign “speaks” in a process of creating a
work of art, is
“not an agency [but] a
release and amplification of energies that enter into
it, conferring upon [human beings] the added quality of
meaning. The quality of meaning thus introduced is
extended and transferred, actually and potentially, from
sounds, gestures and marks, to all other things in
nature. Natural events become messages to be enjoyed and
administered, precisely as are song, fiction, oratory,
the giving of advice and instruction ” (Dewey 1925/1958:
174).
The Magician’s language of expression is “always a form
of action” (Dewey 1925/1958: 184). It creates its own
and new, non-representative, language exemplified in
what Deleuze called a
performative or modulating –
that is, always in the making – aspect of language
existing as poetic undertaking. For the Magician/Eros
such an organic form of action is both forward-looking
and cooperative, oriented toward the
good, so that
“Response to another’s act involves contemporaneous
response to a thing as entering into the other’s
behavior, and this upon both sides. …It constitutes the
intelligibility of acts and things.
Possession of the capacity to engage in such activity is
intelligence” (Dewey 1925/1958: 179- 180).
In other words, what becomes a prerequisite of an
intelligent activity is a structural coupling which is
always common and “mutual: both organism and environment
undergo transformations” (Maturana
and Varela 1992: 102) as a necessary condition of
autopoietic systems’
information exchange and creation of meanings.
The syntax of a language in such a conjoint
autopoietic undertaking goes
through a process of its own becoming-other and
undergoes a series of transformations giving birth to a
new, as if foreign, language. Such a language within
language functions on the margins like any other
becoming, that is, in a form of “the
outside of language, not outside of it” (Deleuze
1994b: 23), or as a limit case of language modulations.
The language becomes effective as long as the form of
content supplements the form of expression: both exist
in assemblage. The relationship between the two is
derived from the Peircean
triadic semiotics or “a different logic of social
practice, an intensive and affective logic of the
included middle” (Bosteels
1998: 151) which defines them “by their mutual
solidarity, and neither of them can be identified
otherwise” (Deleuze &
Guattari 1987: 45). In its
most effective mode the distinction between content and
expression becomes blurred, leading to the emergence of
a new property: a highly expressive, passionate
language, in which an utterance affected by a play of
forces becomes the Magician’s enunciation.
At the ontological level this indicates, for
Deleuze, the
univocity of
Being – exemplified, we add,
in the number one corresponding to The Magician –
that is, the highest possible affirmation of its
dynamical structure. As though referring to a magical
craft, Deleuze and
Guattari use somewhat
alchemical terms to describe the evolution inscribed in
dynamics as
“a transformation of
substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the
limits or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces,
flows, air, light and matter, such that a body or a word
does not end at a precise point. We witness the
incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material
power of that language. A matter
more immediate, more fluid, and more ardent than bodies
of words. In continuous variations the relevant
distinction is no longer between a form of expression
and a form of content but between two inseparable planes
in reciprocal presupposition. … Gestures and things,
voices and sounds, are caught up in the same ‘opera’,
swept away by the same shifting effects of stammering,
vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling
“(Deleuze &
Guattari 1987: 109).
As a marker of in-between-ness
Deleuze uses his brilliant metaphor of
stuttering which seems to exemplify what Varela
would have called an “apparent paradox of
nonlocalization” (Varela
1999: 60).
The Magician’s philosophy of life is different from a
rational consensus: “It is not a question of
intellectual understanding …but of intensity, resonance,
musical harmony” (Deleuze
1995: 86).
Its rationale is pragmatic, and the thinking it produces
is experimental and experiential, creating a paradox of
bringing the element of non-thought into a thought, the
former making the Magician to think the unthinkable, to
address the paradoxical possibility of the impossible
and to see borders, therefore “to show the
imperceptible” (Deleuze
1995: 45). It is when expressed by stuttering that the
secondness of the new form
of content becomes manifest: the intensity of stuttering,
“a milieu functioning as the conductor of
discourse brings together the quaver, the whisper, the
stutter, the tremolo, or the vibrato and imparts upon
words the resonance of the affect under consideration” (Deleuze
1994b: 24). The metaphoric stuttering, which itself in
an autoreferential manner
“ushers in the words that it affects” (Deleuze
1994b: 23), is part and parcel of a semiotic process.
Stuttering, as a poetic modulation, is always creative
because the subtle variations of the refrain tend to
destabilize language, thus creating “a condition of
tensional distribution of energies” (Dewey 1925/1958:
253).
In terms of Peircean logic,
stuttering would symbolize a momentous discontinuity as
part and parcel of the continuum, that is, density
permeated by infinitesimals[3].
Consequently, by having produced a state “of uneasy or
unstable equilibrium” (Dewey 1925/1958: 253) – a rupture
that allowed the difference to intervene and be repeated
– “the transfer from the form of expression to the form
of content has been completed” (Deleuze
1994b: 26): indeed, it is the “recurrence [that] makes
novelty possible” (Dewey 1925/1958:
253). Pertaining to language in its diagrammatic
Thirdness, “content is not a
signified nor expression a signifier, rather both are
variables in assemblage” (Deleuze
& Guattari 1987: 91) the
latter described by a distributed – non-representational
and a-signifying – semiotic process. The Magician’s
language of expression is taken broadly, that is, as
everything, which “says
something, to those who understand it” (Dewey
1938/Hickman & Alexander 1998, 2: 80). The language may
be subtle, sometimes even “like silence, or like
stammering … something letting language slip through and
making itself heard” (Deleuze
1995: 41),
or appearing in the extra-linguistic mode as the
language of signs.
The Magician’s mode of communication as the
heterogeneous regime of signs is indirect and operates
in order “to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to
the light of the day, to select the whispering voices,
to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I
extract something I call my Self (Moi)
(Deleuze &
Guattari 1987:
84). Such a self, when extracted from
experiential happenings and occurrences as “a serial
course of affairs” (Dewey 1925/1958: 232), becomes
itself a sign-event – that is, not a substantive but a
relational entity – going by the name
moi.
Indeed, “among and within these occurrences, not outside
of them nor underlying them, are those events which are
denominated selves” (:232). The emergent and multiple
selves defy the habitual “feeling of ‘I’ as a true
center” (Varela 1999: 61) because at each and every
moment those as yet “selfless” (Varela 1999: 61) selves
enact (Varela’s expression) and re-enact the totality of
an experiential and interactive situation. And because
“experiential structures ‘motivate’ conceptual
understanding and rational thought” (Varela 1999: 16),
the cognitive selves indeed emerge in the midst of
situational transactions.
The expressionism of an artist in the Magician’s
trade complements the
constructionism of a craftsman: the functioning
of this sign conforms to the triadic “logic of artistic
construction” (Dewey 1998a: 199). A transformation into
a new form takes place at the limit, and the limit in
the extreme case is a line of horizon, or vanishing
line, which is – never mind its being a purely symbolic
concept derived from projective geometry and
Poincare’s mathematics –
nevertheless visible and accessible to the Magician’s
expanded perception (cf. Merrell 1998: 115-117). The
imaginary line is a line on which all parallel
horizontal lines, as in a
perspectival composition, would converge provided
they are extended indefinitely – as they do, in the
Magician’s paradoxical archetypal world, situated on a
complex plane (see Semetsky
2003), which is ruled by Riemann’s
metric tensors and where imaginary numbers are combined
with real thus forming complex numbers describing this
world. The complex plane that includes an imaginary axis
as one of its coordinates is non-representational: for
the objects of cognition to emerge, the information must
become active and imaginatively enacted through the “embodied
action” (Varela 1999: 17) so as to “trace a sort of
line of flight” (Deleuze
1995: 41).
The Deleuzian lines of
flight then acquire meaning of an escape, or indeed
flight, from some old and fixed frame of reference (a
horizontal plane), within which the flight (a vertical
plane) is yet a sort of incorporeal vanishing beyond its
event horizon. But because the Magician’s wand “reaches
down into nature … it has breadth …to an indefinitely
elastic extent. It stretches” (Dewey
1925/1958: 1). This stretch, as
Thirdness, expands the
event-horizon and contributes to overcoming the
limitations of empirical reality available to senses by
fine-tuning the perception
per se:
indeed, “[t]hat stretch constitutes inference” (Dewey
1925/1958: 1)[4].
In a process of stretching beyond limits and inventing
new concepts, the Magician produces “cutting and
cross-cutting...[so the
concept] has no reference: it is self-referential, it
posits itself and its object at the same time it is
created” (Deleuze 1988: 87).
Among conflicting experiences situated among many
critical junctures the Magician
arcanum represents a potential “tendency to form
a new [habit]” (Dewey 1925/1958: 281); as such it indeed
“cuts across some old habit” (:281). Self-reference,
though, is inscribed not in a dyadic but triadic
relation: function and structure are related through
stuttering – the latter functioning as a symbol of
fluctuation leading to a higher level of organization.
The Trickster’s work is a pure chance, but his
alter-ego, the Magician, is already a necessity, and
both indeed exist in assemblage as a complementary pair
of that what has been traditionally, and within
boundaries of formal logic, considered binary opposites.
That is, a minute stuttering, a fluctuation or
instability, leads to order (see Dewey above) not
because of the action of the law of large numbers as
statistical averages but because of the active inner
dynamics symbolized by the “divine intervention” of the
Magician. The Magician’s magic wand establishes
directedness, that is, “a vector [that] already
indicates in which direction the new structure may be
expected” (Jantsch 1980:
46): that’s why, and as Peirce said,
Thirdness is indeed
governing Secondness[5].
The Magician is a Juggler, indeed. He juggles time and
space creating new patterns in the fabric of matter. The
function of cutting and cross-cutting by means of the
Magician’s wand establishes multiple
becomings in a mode of “a
new threshold, a new direction of zigzagging line, a new
course for the border” (Deleuze
1995: 45),
together with the “emergence of unexpected and
unpredictable combinations” (Dewey 1925/1958: 281)
functioning as ideas along many transversal lines. Yet,
the Magician itself is an
Idea, a
virtual tendency, just musing and subsisting
in
potentia in the Jungian
collective unconscious; still – as an archetype of
creative artist, poet and prophet – it is capable of
generating ever new ideas in accord with Peirce’s
semiotics (cf. Peirce CP. 1.216), every new actualized
idea being a manifestation of a newly created possible.
The Magician possesses this peculiar “feeling of the
direction and end of various lines of behavior [as]… the
feeling of habits working below direct consciousness”
(Dewey 1922/1988:
26) because by itself it
is one such
organic habit
immanent in the collective unconscious; it in-habits
the latter.
Varela has acknowledged Dewey’s emphasis on the power of
habits in terms of practical reasoning: “We may be said
to know how
by means of our habits” (Dewey 1922 in Varela 1999: 19).
The functioning of habits, when described in terms of
Deleuze’s poststructuralist
conceptualizations, takes place through a
diagram, that is an abstract
and informal, yet powerful and intensive, machine, a
multiplicity which is positioned between discursive and
non-discursive formations, and – like the functioning of
the sign of Magician – “makes others see and speak” (Deleuze
1988: 34). So Being is
univocal
indeed, but “because the diagrammatic multiplicity can
be realized only and the differential of forces
integrated only by taking diverging paths” (Deleuze
1988: 38) it necessarily becomes
plurivocal
when, due to the immanent difference, digitized,
articulated and enacted in its actual manifestations.
Deleuze has stressed the
a-personal and collective nature of the
univocity by introducing his
novel concept of the forth person singular as the
specific language expressing the singularity of the
event. The “language [is] considered
as an experienced event” (Dewey 1925/1958: 173).
The Magician, as a sign-event, speaks in the forth
person singular, the paradoxical subject of which is the
plural “they” of the collective unconscious, that is,
subject-less (i.e., collective) by definition. The
multiplicity of
“they” functions “in the form of
undetermined infinitive. …It is poetry itself.
As it expresses in language all
events in one, the infinitive expresses the event of
language – language being a unique event which merges
now with that which renders it possible” (Deleuze
1990: 185).
The heightened perception of a poet allows Magician to
prophetically envisage the
difference
between “what may be and is not” (Dewey 1998b: 225). For
the Magician, “the action and its consequence
…[are] joined in perception”
(Dewey 1934/1980: 44). Because “to
perceive is
to acknowledge unattained
possibilities, …to refer the present to
consequences” (Dewey 1925/1958: 182), the Magician is
able to creatively – that is, “in an unprecedented
response to conditions” (Dewey 1998b: 225) – re-organize
the “change in a given direction” (:225). Creativity is
what characterizes the process of actualization. The
Deleuzian
outside as an
ontological category is an
overcoded virtual space that “possesses a full
reality by itself … it is on the basis of its reality
that existence is produced” (Deleuze
1994: 211). However,
“in order for the virtual to
become actual it must
create its
own terms of actualization. The
difference
between the virtual and the actual is what requires that
the process of actualization be a creation. …The
actualization of the virtual…presents a dynamic
multiplicity […] a multiplicity of organization.
…Without the blueprint of order, the
creative process of organization is always an art” (Hardt
1993: 18).
In a pragmatic
sense, what is defined as potentiality represents a
departure from the classic Aristotelian
telos
that, unless thwarted by the interference of
unforeseeable accidents, asserts the success in
actualization and assigns to
matter a
status of a passive receptacle for essences. Indeed,
“potentialities must be thought of in terms of
consequences of interactions with other things. Hence
potentialities cannot be
known till
after the
interactions have occurred” (Dewey 1998b: 222). But, and
this is critical, for Magician-the-alchemist, matter
is never inert: it is an active and intensive
multiplicity capable of self-organization precisely
because of the Magician being immanent in its capacity
of the “virtual governor” (Juarrero
1999: 125). Being virtual, the function of such a
“governor” is inherently non-local, that is it may be
considered as distributed in the transactional field of
action that includes itself in the environment, and is
both inscribed
in the dynamics of self-organization and can be
described,
topologically, as an attractor – a mathematical notation
for the archetype of chaotic Eros – functioning as “a
rudimentary precursor of final cause” (Juarrero
1999: 127), fractal by its very definition and therefore
necessarily vague.
In this sense, the Magician, albeit not being able to
know potentialities until its act is performed,
nonetheless knows
how to perform the action and thus
quasi-causes
a qualitative transformation of what Dewey dubbed a
problematic – indeed making us
baffled (see
epigraph) – situation, thereby becoming a second-order
constraint, or a self-cause, within the newly organized
context. The interleveled
causal relations flow in the mode of
heterarchy (see
Juarrero 1999: 130), that
is, as a “two-way movement between levels: ‘upward’ with
the emergence of properties from the constituting
elements, and ‘downward’ with the constraints imposed by
global coherence on local interactions” (Varela 1999:
61). The presence of the Magician, “like a
virtual
interface” (Varela 1999: 61), enables, in accord
with Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, the production of real
effects on the actual plane of manifestation. The four
semiotic tools on the Magician's table (see Fig.1) are
the signs not of instrumental rationality, but of
phronesis,
that is, practical wisdom. They correspond to four suits
in a deck or, respectively, four Jungian functions
comprising the Magician’s intelligence: thinking,
feeling, sensing, intuition.
Or, alternatively, these are four elements available to
Magician in his alchemical laboratory: fire, earth,
water and air, all the elements of nature brought
together to serve the aim of freeing a human spirit from
the constraints and limitations of the material world,
that is, to effectuate a conjunction of opposites by
creating a semiotic bridge between the worlds of mind
and matter. Those connections are enacted in “a
continual rhythm of loss of integration with environment
and recovery of union” (Dewey 1934/1980: 15), the sign
of rhythm – as a cycle of eternal respiration of life –
being expressed by a mathematical symbol of infinity,
which appears on the Magician icon (Fig. 1) and is also
repeated in the shape of the hat that Le
Bateleur, in the Marseilles
deck, wears.
The Magician’s creative “will is thus not something
opposed to consequences or severed from them.
It is a
cause of
consequences” (Dewey 1922/1988:
33). The newly created process-structure
is in fact a decision made, or a direction taken by
means of the autocatalytic
web built by Magician’s double-pointed wand (see Fig.1),
that is, a change described by a novel probability
distribution of parts acting within an overall dynamics
of a complex adaptive system. Systems-theoretical
thinking considers a
part as
always “already a part-of-a-whole…conditioned by the
contingent, although itself a [necessary] condition of
the full determination of the latter” (Dewey 1925/1958:
65, brackets mine). The Magician “bring[s] to
awareness meanings hitherto unperceived, thereby
constituting their ideas. … [T]o get a new meaning
is perforce
to be in a new attitude” (Dewey 1925/1958:
316). New boundary conditions serve as a
container, albeit expanded, for the Magician’s erotic,
“free, moving and operative, …
living spirit” (1925/1958: 294). Such
firstness in
thirdness, the
Magician/Eros, was envisaged by Dewey as a vital – and
not mechanical – organization recognizing “the empirical
impact … of the mixture of universality and singularity”
(Dewey 1925/1958: 48) in the relation of a whole to its
parts.
In a reading, the Magician arcanum
sometimes appears as an indication of the presence of
the wise teacher, a guidance counselor, or a healer –
always a practitioner of the ethics of care (see
Noddings 1984) who gains its
knowledge in practice as an art of continuing learning.
The Magician in us strikes this resonating
chord (see
epigraph) which, when played, brings forth “the tenor of
existence, the intensification of life” (Deleuze
& Guattari 1994: 74) and the
previously unknown creative potential expressed by “the
manner in which the existing being is filled with
immanence” (Deleuze 1997:
137). The Magician’s method,
phronesis,
cannot but create the conditions of freedom specified as
“efficiency in action, …
capacity to change the course of action, to experience
novelties. And again it signifies the power of desire
and choice to be factors in events” (Dewey 1922/1988:
209). The autonomy of the self is never “given”:
it requires work to be done and is contingent on the
shared and transversal communication capable of crossing
levels and thresholds in the process of what Jung dubbed
individuation. The precursor to “autonomy is that a
living system finds its way into the next moment by
acting appropriately out of its own resources” (Varela
1999: 11), such a richness and availability of resources
in the otherwise uncertain world being signified by the
card of the Magician. When this card comes up in a
reading, it brings reassurance and the feeling of
security, the awareness of order, which is just about to
emerge from chaos: the help is here, within oneself, the
“magical” work has been done! Indeed – and as we noted
earlier citing Dewey – order cannot but be admirable in
a world constantly threatened with disorder. Thus the
mode of being as
filled with immanence means becoming necessarily
fulfilled due
to one’s acquired capacity to act freely and
independently precisely because of having learned to
experience the connectedness and the reality of mutual
interdependence as the ethical lesson of the Magician.
References | |
