Metastasis and Metastability: A Deleuzian Approach to Information

by Kane X. Faucher

This book explores a Deleuzian way of understanding information by retracing Deleuze’s ontology of difference back to Gilbert Simondon’s concepts of transduction, metastability, and perpetual individuation as a source for Deleuze’s concept of the virtual. Although Deleuze did not address information specifically in his oeuvre, this book attempts to construct what a Deleuzian theory of information might look like as a consequence of his philosophical insights.

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Kane X. Faucher is a Canadian author of several novels.

Reviews

[Matei Borangic · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author had a great idea for this project. The introduction and sections on Deleuze and Simondon serve to illustrate how important such a topic really is. Along with the section on information in itself and the conclusion these were the best parts of this book.

Now the ugly parts: the middle chapters really serve no point. They are a very tangled mess with no discernable arguments in sights where the author uses way too many concepts (admittedly very well explained) to say....nothing?

The main arguments of this book can be found in the 5 chapters mentioned above: introduction, information, Deleuze, Simondon and the conclusion. The middle chapters are a way too ambiguous mess that you will get sucked into because for some reason each section has a wonderfully intriguing title. Skip all of them if you read this book.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book moves towards a new sort of Information, and does so with limited success. This would likely be 2 stars except that I've read a lot of the philosophers and theorists this book uses. Clearly Faucher has an arrangement of theory in mind, and is coarsely polishing it out. Knowing this from the way he uses theory, I see his point although it feels drafty and unclear at times.

Specifically, Faucher moves towards a kind of information that is neither idea-to-form nor composite essence of form and matter simultaneously, but is rather the fold itself between form and matter in eternal duration in itself, a separate thing which happens in relation to matter/energy and form, but is neither.

My big critique of this book is that after Chapter 3, things begin to feel slammed together as rough ideas without clear reason for transitions from one thing to the next. I am left wondering whether these concepts genuinely function together for the author or whether the author is begging me to fill in the gaps. It either needed better organization or better transitions and simpler cues for where we had gone and where we are going to go.

I don't wish to diminish the work done here too much however. These are difficult thoughts to make clear, and my inclination is to say this is the correct direction one should meander in if semantic information is to be taken seriously. For that I applaud the author for being one of the first Information scholars to consider Deleuze and his influences seriously in the context of information. This perhaps is the most complete attempt in revising how to interpret "natural" sciences via information, a well discussed topic in those sciences, where Deleuzian difference is a necessary property of the universe. At least it is so far as I've seen.