Category Archives: intensiology

commonality, intensiology, morphogenesis, social manifold

The Social Logic of Leadership

Triangle-of-Sadness

A reading of Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness through Fascist and Aberrant Leadership

Abstract. This piece puzzles about the social logic of leadership through the lens of the movie Triangle of Sadness (2022), directed by the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund. A distinction is introduced between two modes of leadership, here called, respectively, ‘fascist’ and ‘aberrant’. Phenomena of leadership, it is contended, illustrate the workings of social logic ex vivo, and offer exquisite examples of how intensities intervene in social interaction, giving rise to the tensive states in which the local protagonists of interaction are caught. Östlund’s film has noticeable diagnostic power, so that the piece unfolds as a study of the sociological materials it provides, even apart from the narrative plot and the satirical or critical intentions.

Keywords: social theory, social interaction, social logic, social intensities, leadership

Now out in The Journal for Cultural Research : https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FKVPYAEGKCASAXPCAXRC/full?target=10.1080/14797585.2026.2682597

 

inspiration, intensiology, magic

Inspiration-space

forthcoming in Environment Space Place

Kalliope.001

Abstract. The paper seeks to explore theoretically the relation between space and inspiration. It reviews a series of places, institutions and situations in the light of the notion of inspiration-space, trying to clarify what is at stake in each of them. Inspiration is examined not only from the subjective point of view, but also more amply from a cultural point of view – that is, as a structuring social force. Selectively drawing testimonies from a range of creators, writers, and artists, and engaging in particular Gabriel Tarde’s social theory of imitation and invention and Simondon’s theory of transindividuality, the paper suggests some possible links between inspiration and everyday life, about their complementarity and intermingling.

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camouflage, fake, intensiology, publicness, transformation, visib, visual

Semblance. The uses of fakery

Abstract. News concerning revelations or allegations of counterfeited identities and racial passing unmistakably stir strong feelings in the public. The domain of semblance is a domain of first impressions, certainly, yet these fulfils major cognitive needs and moral evaluations in social life. The article surveys the domain of semblance as a peculiar social interaction space endowed with its own logic, highlighting the entanglements of strategic and emotional, of rational and gratuitous, that contradistinguish it. To theorize adequately the domain of semblance, it is suggested, we need to proceed through at least three moves: first, focus on how semblance work exceeds rational and strategic behaviour; second, consider the intensive regimes associated with becoming-minority through the deployment of desire and emotions; third, besides acts of mimesis (imitation), also consider the existence of processes of méthexis (participation), whereby semblants coalesce not so much through copying a model but through joining environments.

Keywords: passing; faking; appearances; semblants; social epistemology; social interaction

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creation, element, Gabriel Tarde, Gaston Bachelard, Georg Simmel, Gilles Deleuze, intensiology, manifold, measure, memory, morphogenesis, René Thom, rhythms

On Social Intensiology

Conceptualizing social life through topological folding, braid operators and collapse functions

Abstract. Social intensiology is outlined here in its connection to morphogenesis. the latter aims to explain how form come into existence, just as the former seeks to tackle the intensive states of social life. A topological reference model is proposed for conceptualizing how social life operates immanently with saliences and pregnances. The paper starts from the famous Collatz conjecture, and reviews how it has been recently modelled by Danail Valov using braid groups and including thermodynamic irreversibility into the picture. A ‘Valov braid’ can be understood as a manifold, an entity that is, at the same time, individual and collective. Its collective structure can be reconstructed, through its operational logic, as a tensional field. An attempt is made to show how phenomena of memory and measure are intertwined with the braid’s developments, giving rise to a rich present, multi-faceted that lives in non-coincidence. Within such framework, rhythmanalysis is presented as a useful tool for assaying and experimentally improving social life.

Keywords: social theory; social modelling; topology; braid groups; rhythmanalysis

>>> draft available upon request

Creative Commons source : https://live.staticflickr.com/24/92514653_59f55ab0ab_b.jpg
Adolf Portmann, Charles Sanders Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, intensiology, manifold, morphogenesis, René Thom, surface / depth

Something critical occurs at a fractional dimension between two and three…

A proposal for knitting together semiophysics and biosemiotics

 

NOW OUT in Biosemiotics

https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s12304-025-09613-1

 

Abstract. The paper advances a proposal for binding together the insights of biosemiotics and those of semiophysics. The task of achieving an intelligible ontology, in opposition to both mechanical reductionism and metaphysical vitalism, is shared by these two approaches. Yet, there are architectural differences between the two theories. The paper reviews such a differendum, focusing in particular on the difference between Thom’s two-fold construction of saliences and pregnances, and Peircean three-fold categorial construction encompassing firstness, secondness and thirdness. An integrated semiophysical-biosemiotic graph thus encompasses five key categories. This paper suggests to arrange them as a “W” shape to chart their possible dynamical interactions.

Keywords: semiophysics; biosemiotics; theory of meaning; salience/pregnance; firstness/secondness/thirdness

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element, environment, intensiology, measure, morphogenesis, social manifold, visib

The Elemental Forms of Social Life

translucent-concrete-2Out now in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy

Abstract. The notion of elemental reality is parsed here as instrumental to a renewal of the understanding of social formations, orders, processes, events, and, more generally, social life. An attempt is made to revisit the element notion drawing insights from the classical imagination, so as to develop an ‘elementalism’ that does not imply a simple return to atomism, but rather retrieves some important insights from the Aristotelian tradition. Elementalism, it is suggested, enables us to see the limitations of both individualist and collectivist takes on social life, allowing for a more ‘environmentalist’ idea of what constitutes society. In an attempt to analyze how an elemental reality can be said to be at play, the category of ‘the visible’ is considered, so as to evince some of its constitutive dimensions, properties, and moments.

Keywords: social theory; medium theory; social environment; elemental reality; the visible

Link to OA article : https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1168

Also here

intensiology, morphogenesis

The external form

We notice that, in a relationship between two people, the external form is rarely an adequate expression of its inner intensity. This inadequacy results from the fact that the inner relations develop continuously, while the external relations develop in a spasmodic fashion.

Georg Simmel, 1900

intensiology, publicness

Contribution to an intensiology of the public domain

A Keynote Address at the Urban Creativity Conference, Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, Lund, Sweden.

May 17, 2019, 3pm

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This talk interrogates the nature of the urban public domain by specifically attending the intensities and the phases it generates. A comprehensive view on the phenomenon of publicness, it is suggested, is required to attend its ecological facet – more precisely, as it will be seen, its multi-layered ecology – but also to explain its intrinsic vital qualities. The latter hints to the phenomenon of intensity. After reviewing the main features of publicness (“what is specifically public in public space?”), a broader picture of the public domain can be sketched that includes the processes of mediation. But whereas mediation suggests a ‘continuist’ take, a discontinuities can likewise be detected in the public domain. Coining from physics, the latter could as well be called ‘phase transitions’. How are phase transitions correlated to the intensive moments of publicness? This is the pivotal question for discussion.

+ info | https://urbancreativitylund.tumblr.com

picture courtesy © Mattias Kärrholm
picture courtesy © Mattias Kärrholm
face, Friedrich Nietzsche, instant, intensiology

The Wanderer

“He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth – though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. Such a man will, to be sure, experience bad nights, when he is tired and finds the gate of the town that should offer him rest closed against him; perhaps in addition the desert will, as in the Orient, reach right up to the gate, beasts of prey howl now farther off, now closer to, a strong wind arise, robbers depart with his beasts of burden. Then dreadful night may sink down upon the desert like a second desert, and his heart grow weary of wandering. When the morning sun then rises, burning like a god of wrath, and the gate of the town opens to him, perhaps he will behold in the faces of those who dwell there even more desert, dirt, deception, insecurity than lie outside the gate – and the day will be almost worse than the night. Thus it may be that the wanderer shall fare; but then, as recompense, there will come the joyful mornings of other days and climes, when he shall see, even before the light has broken, the Muses come dancing by him in the mist of the mountains, when afterwards, if he relaxes quietly beneath the trees in the equanimity of his soul at morning, good and bright things will be thrown down to him from their tops and leafy hiding-places, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude and who, like him, are, in their now joyful, now thoughtful way, wanderers and philosophers. Born out of the mysteries of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and the twelfth stroke of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so light-filled, so cheerful and transfigured: – they seek the philosophy of the morning.”

Nietzsche, Human, All too Human (I, §638)

honour, intensiology, territoriology

Onore, sacro, intensità. Per una sociologia del timotico

Pubblicato in La società degli individui, n. 56, anno XIX, 2016/2

A un primo sguardo, onore e dignità sembrano opporsi come l’arcaico e il moderno. In questo senso, la missione che il pensiero moderno, “democratico”, si auto-attribuisce è di sconfiggere e superare una regolazione sociale di tipo aristocratico. L’onore viene così considerato da un’ampia gamma di pensatori moderni come retaggio di forme tribali, particolariste ed elitarie di interazione sociale, a cui viene contrapposta una nuova forma morale universalista e democratica, quella della dignità. Tale, in breve, è il sogno kantiano che Rawls (2000: 328) ha denominato “aristocrazia di tutti”. Ma, come la stessa espressione paradossale lascia intravedere, il rapporto tra onore e dignità è estremamente più complesso di una semplice antitesi.

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