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VIRILIO ADD-ON SHELL

Nanotech specifically risk catastrophic accident imagining these risks away is an example of technofetishism Anderson 7 Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham, Nanoscience Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 2007, Geographies of nano-technoscience
Posed between dream and reality, and suspended between the future and present, nanotechnology has been heralded as a technology that may define the twenty-first century. Based on claims of either the ability to precisely control and manipulate the material world at the nanoscale, or the ability to modulate living processes at the nanoscale, nanotechnology is said to promise a set of transformative applications that will disrupt established categories such as the artificial/natural or the biological/informational. Nanotechnology is defined by the possibilities for technological exploitation of the nanoscale, and the current institutionalization of nanoscience through coordinated research funding and support mechanisms is dependent upon a broad set of expectations of the potentially transformative implications of this exploitation. For example, a recent UNESCO report expresses something of this ambivalent potentiality as it presents nanotechnology as the next step-change in human progress and development albeit a step change with uncertain consequences: Nanotechnology could become the most influential force to take hold of the technology industry since the rise of the Internet. Nanotechnology could increase the speed of memory chips, remove pollution particles in water and air and find cancer cells quicker. Nanotechnology could prove beyond our control, and spell the end of our very existence as human beings. Nanotechnology could alleviate world hunger, clean the environment, cure cancer, guarantee biblical life spans or concoct super-weapons of untold horror. Nanotechnology could be the new asbestos. (UNESCO 2006, 3; emphases added) The repetition of the conditional could exemplifies that what we will hereafter term nanotechnoscience the diverse and interdisciplinary confluence of scientific practices and technological developments organized under the prefix nano can be described as both ontologically and temporally indeterminate. Informed by overlapping expectations of social, economic and political value, nanotechnoscience also therefore entails the strategic attempt to exploit this indeterminacy. (Mody 2006). As might be expected, for a field vaunted as providing the tools for the next industrial revolution, nanotechnology has also been criticized as a superfluous creation of intellectual fashion that fails to designate a novel field of scientific knowledge or experimental practice. In response, attempts to demonstrate the novelty of nanoscale research have asserted the material distinctiveness of the nanoscale, rather than rely on traditional natural distinctions between different classes of object associated with different fields of scientific enquiry (that would designate physics as a distinct field of enquiry from biology, for example). Typically, nanoscale research is defined by an interest in the unique properties of the space between 1 and 100 nm, in which novel properties are said to emerge. As such, the novelty of nanotechnology is defined by the uniqueness of a particular space. Nanotechnology might therefore be thought of as a geographical project, capitalizing on and also enacting such novel properties (Nordmann 2004). Given the ontological and temporal indeterminacy of nanotechnoscience that is, its promissory mode of being how could or should Human Geographers respond?1 Despite its scalar definition, nanotechnology is represented in overtly temporal terms as future oriented.

Only criticizing new technologies and rejecting claims we can control them averts tech-based extinction Virilio 6 Paul, Professor Emeritus, cole Spciale dArchitecture; former director and chairman, cole
Spciale dArchitecture; winner, Grand Prix National de la Critique; The Museum of Accidents International Journal of Baudrillard Studies vol. 3 no. 2; July, 2006; http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_2/viriliopf.htm |Cramer Proof, if proof were needed, that far from promoting quietude, our industrialized societies throughout the twentieth century have essentially developed disquiet and the major risk, and this is so even if we leave out of account the recent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Hence the urgent need to reverse this trend which consists in exposing us to the most catastrophic accidents produced by the techno-scientific spirit, and to establish the opposite approach which would consist in exposing or exhibiting the accident as the major enigma of modern progress. Although some car companies carry out more than 400 crash tests annually in the attempt to improve the safety of their vehicles, this still does not prevent television channels from continually inflicting road-death statistics on us (not to mention the tragedies which see the present repeatedly plunged into mourning. It is certainly high time (alongside the ecological approaches that relate to the various ways in which the biosphere is polluted) for the

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beginnings of an eschatological approach to technical progress to emerge an approach to that finitude without which the much-vaunted globalization is in danger of itself becoming a life-size catastrophe. Both a natural and a man-made catastrophe, a general catastrophe and not one specific to any particular technology or region of the world, which would far exceed the disasters currently covered by the insurance companies a catastrophe of which the long-term drama of Chernobyl remains emblematic.\So as to avoid in the near future an integral accident on a planetary scale, an accident capable of incorporating a whole host of incidents and disasters in a chain reaction, we should right now build, inhabit and plan a laboratory of cata clysms the technical progress accident museum so as to avoid the accident of substances, revealed by Aristotle, being succeeded by the knowledge accident that major philosophical catastrophe which genetic engineering, coming on the heels of atomic power, bears within it. Whether we like it or not, globalization is today the fateful mark of a finitude. Paraphrasing Paul Valry, we might assert without fear of contradiction that the time of the finite world is coming to an end and that there is an urgent need to assert that knowledge marks the finitude of man, just as ecology marks that of his geophysical environment. * * * At the very moment when some are requesting, in an open letter to the president of the French Republic, that he create a Museum of the Twentieth Century in Paris,3 it seems appropriate to enquire not only into the historical sequence of the events of that fateful century, but also into the fundamentally catastrophic nature of those events. If, indeed, time is the accident of accidents", 4 the museums of history are already an anticipation of the time of that integral accident which the twentieth century foreshadowed, on the pretext of scientific revolution or ideological liberation. All museology requires a museography, and the question of the presentation of the harm done by progress has not received any kind of answer; it therefore falls to us, as a primordial element of the project, to provide one. At this point we have to acknowledge that it is not so much in history books or in the press that this particular historical laboratory has been prefigured, as in radio, cinema newsreel and, above all, television. Since cinema is time exhibiting itself, as the sequences succeed each other, so with television, it is the pace of its trans-border ubiquity that disrupts the history in the making before our eyes. General history has, as a result, experienced a new type of accident, the accident of its perception at first hand (de visu): a cinematic and soon to be digital perception which modifies its meaning, its customary rhythm the rhythm of almanacs and calendars, or, in other words, that of the long run in favour of the ultra-short timescale of that televisual instantaneity which is revolutionizing our view of the world. With speed man has invented new types of accident The fate of the motorist has become pure chance, wrote Gaston Rageot in 1928.5 What are we to say, today, of the major accident of audiovisual speed and hence of the fate of the innumerable hosts of TV viewers? Other than that, with that speed, it is history which is becoming accidental through the sudden pile-up of facts, through events which were once successive, but are now simultaneous, cannoning into one another, in spite of the distances and time intervals that used to be required for their interpretation. Let us imagine, for example, the probable damage that will be done to the authenticity of the testimony of historical actors by the practice of live digital morphing. Speaking of the preponderant influence of film on the conception of contemporary art, Dominique Pani has stated: For a long time, the cinema came out of the other arts, now it is the plastic arts which come out of it. But in fact it is the whole of history that comes out of cinematic acceleration, out of this movement in cinema and television! Hence the ravages wrought by the circulation of images, this constant concertina-ing, this constant pile-up of dramatic scenes from everyday life on the evening news. And even if the written press has always been more interested in derailed trains than the ones that run on time, it is with the coming of audiovisual media that we have been able to look on, thunderstruck, at the overexposure of accidents, of catastrophes of all kinds not to mention wars. * * * Where the broadcasting of horror is concerned, television has, since the end of the last century, been the (live) site of a constant raising of the stakes and, particularly with the increase in live coverage, it has provided us with an instantaneous transmission of cataclysms and incidents that have broadly anticipated disaster movies. Moreover, after the standardization of opinion, which began in the nineteenth century, we are now seeing the sudden synchronization of emotions. TV channels' competition for viewers has turned the catastrophic accident into a scoop, if not indeed a fantastic spectacle which all pursue with equal vigour. When Guy Debord spoke of the society of the spectacle, he omitted to mention that this scenarization of life was organized around sexuality and violence; a sexuality which the 1960s claimed to liberate, whereas what was actually happening was a progressive abolition of societal inhibitions, regarded by the Situationists as so many unbearable straitjackets. As was so well expressed at the time by one of the officials of the Festival du Film Fantastique d'Avoriaz, At last death will have replaced sex and the serial killer the Latin lover! Television a museum of horrors or a tunnel of death has, then, gradually transformed itself into a kind of altar of human sacrifice, using and abusing the terrorist scene and serial massacres; it now plays more on repulsion than on seduction. From the death twenty wars ago allegedly live on air of a little Colombian girl being swallowed by mud, to the execution this winter of little Mohammed struck down beside his father, when it comes to making horror banal, any pretest will serve. By contrast, as we may recall, the mass media in the old Soviet Union never reported accidents or violent incidents. With the

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exception of natural catastrophes, which it would have been difficult to pass over, the media systematically censored any deviations from the norm, allowing only visions of a radiant future to filter through ...until Chernobyl. However, when it comes to censorship, liberalism and totalitarianism each had their particular method for stifling the true facts. For the former, the aim was, even then, to overexpose the viewer to the incessant repetition of tragedies; the latter, by contrast, opted for underexposure and the radical occultation of any singularity. Two panic reactions, but an identical outcome: censorship by illumination a fateful blinding by the light for the democratic West, and censorship by the prohibition of any divergent representation the darkness and fog of wilful blindness for the dogmatic East. * * * So, just as there is a Richter scale of seismic catastrophes, so there is, surreptitiously, a scale of media catastrophes, the clearest effect of which is to cause, on the one hand, resentment against the perpetrators and, on the other, an effect of exemplarity, which leads, where terrorism is concerned, to the reproduction of the disaster, thanks to its dramaturgical amplification. So much is this the case that to Nietzsche's study of the birth of tragedy we need to add the analysis of this media tragedy, in which the perfect synchronization of the collective emotion of TV viewers might be said to play the role of the ancient chorus though no longer on the scale of the theatre at Epidauros, but on the life-size scale of entire continents. It is clearly here that the museum of the accident has its place The media scale of catastrophes and cataclysms that dress the world in mourning is, in fact, so vast that it must necessarily make the amplitude of the perceptual field the first stage of a new understanding no longer solely that of the ecology of risks in the face of environmental pollution, but that of an ethology of threats in terms of the mystification of opinion, of a pollution of public emotion. A pollution that always paves the way for intolerance followed by vengeance. In other words for a barbarism and chaos which quickly overwhelm human societies, as has recently been demonstrated by the massacres and genocides, those fruits of the baneful propaganda of the media of hatred. After a period of waiting for the integral accident to occur, we are seeing the forceps birth of a catastrophism that bears no relation whatever (we really must make no mistake about this) to that of the millenarian obscurantism of yesteryear, but which requires just as much in the way of precautions, in the way of that Pascalian subtlety which our organs of mass information so cruelly lack! \Since one catastrophe may conceal another, if the major accident is indeed the consequence of the speed of acceleration of the phenomena engendered by progress, it is certainly time, in these early years of the twenty-first century, to take what is happening, what is emerging unexpectedly before our eyes and analyze it wisely. Hence the imperative need now to exhibit the accident.

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CONTROL SOCIETY ADDON

Nanotechnology is the extension of complete control over every particle its a fascist dream. We must RESIST nanotechnology through LINES OF FLIGHT Kearnes 6
Kearnes, M. B. (2006) Chaos and control : nanotechnology and the politics of emergence., Paragraph., 29 (2). pp. 57-80. Department of Socilogy graduate student Lancaster Univeristy Perhaps this is a statement about Science, rather than about science a statement that is too all encompassing. We will leave such thoughts for somebody else, for here we are interested in science. We are interested in the specific interventions that particular scientists make, and are making, into the material world within the broadly defined field of nanotechnology. Indeed, it is at this level of specificity that the notion of endurance comes into its own. For nanotechnology, which is both scientific and technical (if we must bring up that old distinction), is fundamentally about making things. That is, nanotechnology is about the construction, generation and growth of objects, devices and architecture all of which have a certain endurance. In working at the nanoscale (10-9m), in the world of Brownian motion and atomic uncertainty, this kind of endurance is produced by certain forms of control specifically the control of sub-molecular particles, of biological systems, chemical syntheses, reactions and crystal growth. If it is possible to construct a nanostructure from a few atoms or molecules, or to grow one using a protein or some process of crystallisation, the endurance of this structure is dependent on being able to control atomic-level forces that would tear it apart. Such endurance is premised on perpetual control. Of course Deleuze was also famously interested in control, particularly in his Postscript for Control Societies. For Deleuze control defines the political constitution of the contemporary moment. Critical of Foucaults analysis of modern discipline, he suggests that institutions and technologies of incarceration and discipline are being replaced by the mechanisms of control. He states: Were in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinementprisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family Control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies. For Deleuze this regime of control is not about any specific mechanism, technology or institution of control. Indeed he states: Its not a question of amazing pharmaceutical products, nuclear technology, and genetic engineering, even though these play a part in the process. Its not a question of asking whether the old of new system is hasher or more bearable, because theres a conflict in each between the ways they free and enslave us. With the breakdown of the hospital as a site of confinement, for instance, community psychiatry, day hospitals, and home care initially presented new freedoms, while at the same time contributing to mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement. ii This then is one side of control the side of power and determinism. This is the power of total control and it is the dream of many nanotechnologists. This is the kind of control through which some suggest that it will be possible to build anything we want simply by arranging atoms the way we would like themiii. However, for Deleuze, control is never absolute in this sense. Control is a product of a repetition of force. Therefore in the application of force and control we also see the radical possibility for creativity, lines of flight and the nomad

root cause of war, genocide and extinction Mitchell Dean, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, 2001 Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics,
and sovereignty. Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 55-58 Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in the first volume of the History of Sexuality that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled

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"Right of Death and Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of government is thus between one that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life. Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken down. The right of death can also be understood as "the right to take life or let live"; the power over life as the power "to foster life or disallow it." Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign power by Its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped down mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and sovereignty is not one of a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include what had earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his enemies but to disqualify the lifethe mere existenceof those who are a threat to the life of the population, to disallow those deemed "unworthy of life," those whose bare life is not worth living. This allows us, first, to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 13637). In Foucault's account, biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of war: it provides it with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations. Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. Thesame state that takes on the duty to enhance the life of the population also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons of this process of the power to put whole populations todeath. We might also consider here the aptly named biological and chemical weapons that seek an extermination ofpopulations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in which they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable. Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killingwhether by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the Utopia to be achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is only occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence wars will be waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (1979a: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more notice: "massacres become vital." There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity between the power over life and the power to take life characteristic of biopower. The emergence of a biopolitical racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which this homogeneity always threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be approached as a fundamental mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995: 8485). For Foucault, the primary function of this form of racism is to establish a division between those who must live and those who must die, and to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion and techniques of population had given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new linkage among population, the internal organization of states, and the competition between states. Darwinism, as an imperial social and political program, would plot the ranking of individuals, populations, and nations along the common gradient of fitness and thus measure eflicienqp6 However, the series "population, evolution, and race" is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the "white races" or of justifying colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates and the abnormals in one's own population and prevent the further degeneration of the race. The second and most important function for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that "it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life" (Stoler 1995: 84). The life of the population, its vigor, its health, its capacities to survive, becomes necessarily linked to the elimination of internal and external threats. This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the injunctions of the eugenic project: identify those who are degenerate, abnormal, feeble*minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to forced sterilization: encourage those who are superior, fit, and intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but mere existence and disqualify their propagation: encourage those who can partake

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of a sovereign existence and of moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a positive justification for the right to kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism, however, we need to take into account another kind of denouement between the biopolitical management of population and the exercise of sovereignty. This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and democratized form founded on the liberty of the juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further element of sovereignty, its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault 1979a: 148). For Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in bloodas a reality and as a symboljust as one might say that sexuality becomes the key field on which biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised through repression and deduction, through a law over which hangs the sword, when it is exercised on the scaffold by the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through alliance, "blood was a reality with a symbolic function." By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigor, fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality" (Foucault 1979a: 147). For Foucault (1979a: 14950), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated "the oneiric exaltation of blood," of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an immensely cynical and naive fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the detailed administration of the life of the population and the regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and education.'Nazism generalized biopower without the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of right, but it could not do away with sovereignty. Instead, it established a set of permanent interventions into the conduct of the individual within the population and articulated this with the "mythical concern for blood and the triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into the eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the themes of the purity of blood and the myth of the fatherland.In such an articulation of these elements of sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the administration of life and the right to kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It has become a necessary relation. The administration of life comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and therefore war, will be exercised at the level of an entire population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life of other races becomes necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of other races is only one face of the purification of one's own race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other part is to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of death and total destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an "absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state and an absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are superimposed and converge on the Final Solution. With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through the Jews, all the other races, for whom the Jews were the symbol and the manifestation. This includes, in one of Hitler's last acts, the order to destroy the bases of bare life for the German people itself "Final Solution for other races, the absolute suicide of the German race" is inscribed, accordingto Foucault.in the functioning of the modern state (232).

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MORE CONTROL CARDS

Nanotechnology is premised on a rhetoric of COMPLETE DOMINATION over life in all its aspects
Both the materialist turn in biology and the biological turn in mathematics and physics are concerned with a set of logical possibilities. Schrdingers conception of the physics of life and von Neumanns mathematical theory of automata have the effect of converting life itself into discrete physical entities which operate as a form of information or code. This double move has the paradoxical effect of rendering the physicality of biological and chemical systems as merely an instrumental concern in the hylomorphic application of computational models onto material substrates. Combined with Feynmans vision of atomic scale machinery nanotechnology operates as a set of theoretical promises and possibilities for gaining progressive control over the structure of matter in the design and manufacture of nanotechnologies. Life itself is cast as absolutely divisible. The mechanisms of reproduction and self-organisation are themselves recreatable, given the precise control over the parameters of chemical synthesis of biological systems. This rhetorical move from the big to the small, from the complex to the simple and from the chaotic to the organised parallels the overall imagination of nanotechnology as the ability to precisely control the ultimate building blocks of life. This logic is also comparable to the reductionism at the heart of some versions of complexity theory. Broadly speaking whereas chaos theory works in the reverse direction small events producing large results complexity theory suggests that simple structures emerge and self-organise in the context of complex and dynamic systems.xxiv Though inherent to theoretical accounts of complexity theory is the spontaneous emergence of organised structures, its technological operationalisation often reveals a reductionist drive toward simplification and predictive control.xxv It is in the construction of complexity theory as a unifying project, through which total systems understanding, simplification and predictive control may be achieved, that complexity theory is at its most reductionist. For example, Capra defines complexity theory as: A new mathematical language and a new set of concepts for describing and modelling complex nonlinear systems. Complexity theory now offers the exciting possibility of developing a unified view of life by integrating lifes biological cognitive and social dimension (emphasis added). xxvi By unifying biological, chemical and physical knowledge, complexity theory, is thought to enable an enhanced capacity to model non-linear systems. By extension complexity theory is seen to enable the precise control and recreation of such systems.xxvii The rhetorical move from the complex, the large, and the extensive to the simple, the small and the intensive is ambiguously reductionist. Given this ambiguity complexity theory masks a reductionist returnxxviii in contemporary technoscience inherent that is revealed in the currency of notions such as predictive control, modelling, law and total systems knowledge. This reductionism mirrors the rhetorical efforts of miniaturisation and simplification made by Feynman, Schrdinger and von Neumann. The combined effect of Feynman, Schrdinger and von Neumann is to cast biological, chemical and material life as absolutely physically divisible and created through mechanisms that are ultimately controllable. Indeed, nanotechnology operates as a similar unifying project as complexity theory combining traditional scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology with technically oriented disciplines of engineering and computing. Rhetorically nanotechnology also relies upon a similar rhetorical move from the big to the small as the ultimate technical expression of the miniaturisation imperative. Thus for Drexler, following Feynman, Schrdinger and von Neumann, the sheer logical possibility of nanoscale engineering and manufacture is established absolute divisibility of all forms of life and materiality to the atom and the technical possibilities for building things atom by atom.

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The reductionism of advanced nanotechnology is also deeply political. The vision of nanotechnology as heralding the ability to remake the world atom by atom, and as leading to the next industrial revolution, is also a State sanctioned vision of the power of science to revolutionise material practice. xxix The reductionism of nanotechnology, that demands total control of the atomic scale, is deeply entwined with this politics. This is what Deleuze calls the politics of the State, or the apparatus of capture, in which the unifying project of reductionist science works toward the total control demanded by the State. Deleuzes ontology is of an entirely different order. Deleuze neither moves from the complex to the simple, nor from the simple to the chaotic. Rather Deleuze starts with the singular or more properly the singularity. Whilst in nanotechnology the unity represents the absolute divisibility of life Deleuze starts with the notion of the singularity as the basis for molecular variation and flux. Deleuzes philosophy of difference fundamentally concerned with revalorising the singular, over and above the particular. He deploys an explicitly monistic ontologya material pantheism whereby the singularity of matter is alive with the creative potential of endless evolutions and innovations. Delueze states: There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There are not two paths, as Parmenides poem suggests, but a single voice of Being which includes all its modes, including the most diverse, the most varied, the most differentiated. Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.xxx What Deleuze does here is to free the singular from the particular, giving it an individuating capacity. Deleuzes notion of singularity is at once an absolute rebuttal of both the Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics of matter and a valorisation of the creative vitalism of the material. He refuses the categorical difference, established by the metaphysicians, between matter and form or between the subject and the object. Rather, all things are formed through repetitious individuation of the same substancethe monadic singularityintensities, riffs, sublimations in a singular key. Rethinking monadology in explictly materialistic terms enables Deleuze to insist upon a materialism that is roughly equivalent to an ongoing Big Bang, permanent 12 Creationxxxi, precisely because whilst this evolution is both permanent and multiple, the substance upon which these operations is performed is singular. Thus it is not simply that matter is singular as a universal substance. Rather matters are singularitiesmomentary agglomerations in the creative evolution of the singular, monistic substance.