Chapter 2
A Monad in Cyberspace
«... the virtual is the foundation of the actual.» (Gilles Deleuze)
The Location of the Monadic Self
Monads, as described by Leibniz in the Monadology, are simple and individual substances that enter as a part in the compound. Monads constitute the real atoms of nature, the elements of things that began creation. Monads are all different from one another, just like in nature, there aren’t two beings that are exactly alike. Monads have no extensions, no parts, they have no windows, nothing can come in nor go out. But Monads do change, their internal principles vary and evolve, not the external ones, and the principle of change will always comprehend a certain multiplicity within their unity, within their simplicity and elementary being.
Monads comprehend and represent their multiplicity trough the ‘perception’ that they have of the world.[1] Perception can not be explained with figures and with movements since figures and movements are a composite, such as an accumulation of ‘simples’. Perception can only be found in simple substances and within their changes, within their internal actions. It is because of their internal actions that Monads are self sufficient, and therefore are the creators of their own activity: ‘appetition’ is the passage, the activity from one perception to the other.
A Monad’s present is the natural and evolving result of its past, of a preceding condition, and its future is a natural evolution of the present. Monads recollect and identify their perceptions even if the perceptions of the past are not ‘apperceived’ until they are in the present. ‘Conditio-sine-qua-non’ of a Monad is therefore to have distinct and valuable perceptions. Without perceptions Monads would loose consciousness and meaning. They would be in a constant state of ‘swoon’ as Leibniz defines it. Monads have been gifted by nature with distinct organs or ‘organic bodies’ to collect perceptions (touch, smell, taste,...) and what occurs in the soul represents what occurs in the sense organs. What enables consistency is memory[2], that also allows the soul the succession of perceptions.
Every Monad is gifted with a body and with a soul, both expressing the universe. The soul changes its body little by little so that it will never be deprived of any organ. There can never be a soul without a body, only God is bodiless.
‘Bodies’, gathered in the composite substance, in the accumulation of simple atoms, are affected by their contact with each other and are therefore brought to feel everything that happens to one another. The result is an extended communication that goes beyond distances. Every body has therefore the power to experience anything that happens in the world. The body is the ‘location’ of all my basic perceptions. «I must have a body, it’s a moral necessity, a ‘requirement’. ... I must have a body because an obscure object lives in me.»[3] The body is considered here to be a zone of expression and perception. The Monad expresses the world, it is the mirror of the universe according to ‘its body,’ according to the organs of the body, and according to the activity, the energy, the forces of other bodies on itself. The body realizes the world and the world realizes the body: «... realize is not to say that they are real: they become real with respect to what is actual in the soul. Something completes or realizes it in the body.»[4] What is within our bodies, our organs, our mind, our flesh, is action, it is an action within, it is an implosion of our senses, of our imagination. Monads are the state of one, the unity that envelopes multiplicity. The body/mind, the Res Extensa/Cogitans[5], the actual material reality is endowed with realizations in space, the Monad is realized in the space.
The Monad therefore produces a space of its own and this space is defined by ‘folds’, and their ability to unfold and refold. «Thus when an organism is called to unfold its own parts, its animal or sensitive soul is opened onto an entire theater in which it perceives or feels according to its unity, independently of its organism, yet inseparable from it.»[6] The folding-unfolding movement creates a growth, an envelopment and development. It is in this ability of motion that development is assigned. Development in a Monad is under the action of exterior surrounding and the influence of interior forces that give the right direction. As Gilles Deleuze states in The Fold, knowledge and ideas reside only where there is a ‘fold’, and sometimes everything is so wrapped up in the folds that we can’t ‘unfold’, certain things are just naturally wrapped up in nature and can not be set free. Unfolding is certainly an action toward development, to unfold means to perceive, the Monad unfolds between two folds and therefore within the folds it perceives. But: «Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object. Conscious perception has no object and does not even refer to a physical mechanism of excitation that could explain it from without: it refers only to the exclusively physical mechanism of differential relations among unconscious perceptions that are comprising it within the Monad.»[7]
The ‘monadic self’ folds, unfolds, refolds, it ‘finitely represents infinity’. The world comes alive, it is placed in the subject, in order for it to come alive in the world.
How does the monadic self exist? A Monad’s closure, its lack of windows and its envelopment in itself, is exactly its condition of its being, of being-in-the-world, or being-for-the-world,[8] waiting for the infinite opening of the finite, and giving the world the possibility of beginning over and over again in itself. The Monad’s closure includes an entire world that does not exist outside of its envelopment.
The Monad in Cyberspace
Can the ‘monadic self’ come alive in a location like Cyberspace? What does the ‘wait for the infinite opening of the finite’ represent in the digital environment? How does the digital world ‘begin over and over again in itself’? The inner selection of the Monad is what makes it realize in Cyberspace. The enjoyment or ‘self-enjoyment’ when interacting with the digital environment, is what makes the body happen, it is what makes the body and the soul perceive. The Monad in Cyberspace is a distinguished zone of expression. The expression of a Monad in Cyberspace functions as an ‘event’, as a duration, that can be of a period of an hour, of a day, or of a second, it is a passage of meaning, a meaning through perception of the body/Monad placed in Cyberspace. Events occur in a variety of different situations that all presuppose a certain ‘multiplicity’, which is the mirror of the multiplicity that is within the unity of the Monad.
According to Leibniz an ‘event’ can be translated as an ‘extension’. Extensions can be elements that are stretched out, the most simple are the single senses, but the users of Cyberspace can also represent an extension, the body/mind, the Monad itself is the extension of ourselves in Cyberspace. The multiplicity of the Monad as an extension is what forms the infinite series of ‘events’, of ‘happening’ in Cyberspace, and it is the Monad itself that represents the creativity, the creation of a new location, the body location, that represents the contact with the virtual world, the extended communication with others Monads and with the world of Cyberspace.
It is not only the ‘perception’ of Cyberspace that realizes in the Monad but a further level of communication: the ‘apperception’. Living and interacting in Cyberspace is not only a matter of acknowledging the reality of a new world, of new shapes and forms, new colors and coordinates, recollecting a certain amount of data that concern emotions and evaluations, it is also and most of all a matter of identifying, recollecting, acquiring and re-living. It is, not only a living-in-the-world, but a living-for-the-world. The data of Cyberspace is ‘folded’ in the Monad becoming a feeling, a manner, a behavior. It is the subjectivity of the individuals in Cyberspace that will make it possible for themselves, for their ‘monadic selves’ to pass from one data to the other comprehending or ‘prehending’, and it is precisely going from one ‘prehension’ to the other that the body finds itself in the position of ‘being-for-Cyberspace.’[9] The result of the ‘being-for-Cyberspace’ consolidates in ‘self-enjoyment’, through the active participation/perception/prehension/expression of the body/Monad in Cyberspace.
Cyberspace represents the best of possible worlds; it is a world where new creations always occur, where new stimuli are produced through the new language and the new semiotic, it is an environment that is highly pregnant with innovation and creativity. It is precisely the activity within the location of Cyberspace that stimulates the activity within the body/Monads when interacting with the environment. Monads have no windows it is true, their external principles cannot vary, but their internal ones do.[10] The Monad in Cyberspace waits for the ‘infinite opening of the finite’, its finite or ‘finiteness’, and thus it gives Cyberspace the possibility of beginning over and over again in itself. This constant or never ending process could be opposed to a certain creativity of the body/Monad, of the user that interacts with Cyberspace, but a Monad’s creativity is inseparable from its process of actualization ‘in the space’ and ‘for the space’: «For Leibniz,... Monads exclude only universes that are incompossible with their world, and all those that exist express the same world without exclusion.»[11] It is the world of Cyberspace that would not exist outside of the body/Monad that express it.
The realization of the body/Monad in Cyberspace can be seen as an exposing of reality/virtual reality, defined by our conceptual expectations and our experience of digital technology. It is the human action /the body experience, perception and apperception, the realization of virtuality itself. If we follow this thought we can also re-explain this concept according to Deleuze’s idea of virtuality, stated in The Fold, where everything is virtual/actual in the soul before it unfolds. Our body/mind sphere may very well be the ‘world’ in which the virtuality of our soul, of our ideas, of our memories and the virtuality of Cyberspace is realized. This un-folding is the momentum, it is the fraction of time before we re-fold, before the feeling goes back in our minds, in the soul, and becomes virtual again. Cyberspace is virtual, but virtuality as potential happens in the body/Monad first, we make it happen, we make it come alive. It isn’t and it will never be a body ‘untainted’ by experience in Cyberspace; we fold, we ‘realize’ ourselves, we experience, we feel, we perceive, and we re-fold again. What is folded, the various inclusions, exist in their virtual form and develop through the activity, the movement of the Monad that envelops it.
If we consider the computer as an organ of a new kind, connected to our flesh, our cyborg identity becomes as natural as in life. People would take on roles and play games and eventually alter their physical and psychic being just as naturally. We could be material, a Monad in the electronic world, a hyper-texted body with a wired system embedded in living flesh. We would be material data to such an extent of implosion of the ‘organ computer’ in our body/Monad as another component of ourselves. The digital world would really come alive, and begin to speak the language of our body, it could be considered a Monad itself interacting with the body/Monad. At this point we become homo generators,[12] not only generating artificial life/reality but also technology and virtuality. The soul is the expression of the world [body/Monad] - actuality - because the world [body/Monad] is what the soul expresses - virtuality.[13] The whole world is virtuality that currently exists in the folds of the soul which convey it. We are moving therefore from the virtual to the real since the digital world is ‘placed’ in us.
The Expression of the Monad in Cyberspace
The Monad is an expression of the world, and if we apply the term ‘expression’ to the Monad in Cyberspace it is the digital environment that the Monad expresses. It is also true that the world that is expressed has no existence outside the Monad that expresses it. The essence of the Monad in Cyberpsace has no existence outside the attributes that express it in that environment and each attribute expresses its essence. What is expressed in Cyberspace has no existence outside its expressions and each expression is the existence of what is expressed in that environment.
The attributes, as expressions of the character of a Monad, are mirrors of its multiplicity. When in Cyberspace each attribute is a mirror that expresses the essence of our substance, of our body. What is expressed of ourselves is at the same time involved in its expression; the essence of the Monad in Cyberspace is reflected in its attributes and is constituted by the attributes that express it. The attributes are therefore more than simple mirrors, they are our dynamic elements.
The Monad in Cyberspace could consider its body as an expressive center, where distinct series of expressions of ourselves express our uniformity and multiplicity. Expression in Cyberspace should be the heart of each individual, it should be in his soul and in his body, in his passions when communicating and his actions when interacting.
The expression of the Monad is endowed with true unity in relation to its expression, and it is also true that expression is the unity in relation to the multiplicity and divisibility of what is expressed. This is how the Monad expresses its passions in the communication in Cyberspace and in its actions when interacting with the space: «Souls and machines... agree perfectly, and although having no immediate influence the one upon the other, they are mutually expressive, the one having concentrated into the perfect unity all that the other has dispersed in multiplicity.»[14] The body in Cyberspace, when relating to digital technologies, has a unity that allows a distinct explanation of the happening communication. Communication is a play of Monads and the convergence and divergence of Monads in Cyberspace emerge in new ways of folding. Living in the digital world as a Monad represents the organization of a new ‘home structure’ and its artificial nature.
In Cyberspace not only we are Monads but we also represent Nomads, always in search for a new location, for a new space to make come alive in us. The new location can very well be within us, such as within the multiplicity of our Monad or within the multiplicity of Cyberspace. Following the oldest meaning of the word Nomad, which refers to the free distribution of animal in a places not bound by any legal decree, nomadic trajectories distribute the Monads in Cyberspace, in an open space, one that is not defined, that is indefinite, unlimited and rich of expression, perceptions, aperception and communication.
In the nomadic life of Cyberspace a Monad’s journey between locations, is a journey trough what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called the Dispars that is a divergent and heterotopic spatiality in contrast with the Compars, homogeneous and metrically determinate places. The dispars, as Cyberspace could be, is described as: «Smooth space is precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogeneity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of the proximities is effected independently of any determined path. It is a space of contact ...wedded to a very particular type of Multiplicity: non-metric, accentered, rhizomatic multiplicities...»[15] It could be therefore though that Monad/Nomads in Cyberspace distribute themselves within the smoothness of the space; the Monad occupies, inhabits and holds the place to itself.
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[1] In Leibniz’s Monadology, ‘perception’ must not be confused with ‘apperception’. To apperceive is to identify, to recollect, it is remembrance, «...Cartesian doctrine... has entirely neglected those perceptions which are not apperceived...». 149.
[2] See Chapter 3 of the Thesis : «A Body of Memory».
[3] Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque. 85.
[4] Ibid. 120.
[5] I.e. Descartes.
[6] Ibid. The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque. 11.
[7] Leibniz. Monadology: «Perception and that which depends upon it cannot be explained mechanically... The explanation of perception must therefore be sought in simple substance, and not in a compound a machine». 17.
[8] Deleuze’s notion of being-for-the-world, takes a different perspective from Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, considering it not dynamic enough.
[9] See Chapter 4 of this thesis: «The Body of Cyberspace».
[10] Martin Heidegger’s remark on the Monad says that it does not need a window because it is «already outside, conforming to its own being» ; in Les problèmes fondamentaux de la phénoménologie. 361.
[11] Ibid. The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque. 81.
[12] Schirmacher, Wolfgang. «Homo Generator : Media and Post Modern Technology» - from Culture on the Brink.
[13] Ibid. The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque.
[14] Longley, A.G. New Essays. 349.
[15] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. «Treatise on Nomadology-the War Machine». In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 371.