A (Decaying) Prospectus and Two Addendums

Originally written October 22, 2025

In a bout of inspired production, over the course of a day, I wrote up a project prospectus. It was more of a necessity than a choice; the threads in my head felt about ready to explode. Already I can see elements and arguments I wrote fading away. This project is moving at a breakneck speed, yet somehow I feel like there are decades of work ahead. The sheer scope is dizzying, felt most acutely in the waning minutes before sleep.

The rest of this post won't make sense without having read the prospectus; you can read it here.

Laura, my former thesis advisor, and I chatted about the prospectus for a bit, after she had read it, and among her many thoughts, two stood out to me. One was the question of why Wittgenstein played such a prominent role. Is my project framed in an (anti-)Wittgensteinian way? Second, she said that this ontology seemed like it was composed of "micronothings". That coinage immediately stuck with me.

Left to my thoughts after the conversation, I engaged with both of these points. One of them I addressed explicitly in an email to her. The other, so far, has been my own area of play.

The Wittgensteinian Question

I did not consider the Wittgensteinian framing of my prospectus until it was pointed out to me. In response, I said no — Wittgenstein plays such a minor role in my thought. He is by no means central. Later, after our conversation, I fleshed this out some more in an email:

Hi Laura,

I’ve been mulling over what you said re:Wittgenstein, and how my paper seems centered around it, and I think I have a more fleshed out response for you. I would love for you to challenge and critique everything I’m about to say :)

What I called “the problem of denotation” in my prospectus more rightly should be called the “question of meaning” — and what I’m sitting with is this: how can any self-proclaimed universal, systematic ontology stand on its own two feet if it does not explain the genesis of meaning (sense)? If there is one thing in common amongst all Western philosophy to date, it is that they use language, i.e. they presuppose that language is both denotative and significative. In order to be complete, then, they must show that their own system applies just as well to the words used to construct that system itself. If not, how can they stand? If Plato cannot show, for example, that his words have real denotative power, then how can he be confident they point to what he hopes they point to?

I know philosophers have had theories of meaning forever. But if I can be so bold as to say this, they always seem to treat the word as an external object. [The] elusive word, which is always in operation, never gets sufficiently treated. It is in this way that Wittgenstein seemed to me one of the few who really got with things, and whose system was somewhat consistent with his words. I frame a lot of my arguments around Wittgenstein because he is an exemplar of an attempt, albeit failed, to address the elusive word. He is a framing only insofar as he exemplifies this effort -- but really, it is the question of meaning itself that is central to my project, not Wittgenstein. My claim that I’ve been cultivating is this: the Deleuzean system has a true consistency between the system itself and the ontology of meaning presupposed by the very words he uses. In other words, he allows himself the fullest license to speak on the matter of denotation and signification, and in turn, on ontology as a whole.

My other argument is this: a proper consideration of the question of meaning (proper = self-referential) is not only necessary, but sufficient, to then lay the ground for an ontology of intention. And it is here that Deleuze connects with the Dharma, which also properly addresses the question of meaning. This is the connecting point between the two systems -- it is not at all superficial, analogical, or allegorical, as most other comparative works would have it, but rather two complementary expositions of a deeply fleshed out theory of intention -- of karma.

Does this make sense?

-yugan

If Deleuze says that philosophy has its own language, like mathematics, then it follows that it has its own axioms. And philosophy, from the ancients to the present, has only ever had one, and no more than one, axiom: language means. This is the final resting place of the Cogito and the inner limit which the Cogito can never trespass. It is hidden so deeply in the cellars that its primary characteristic can only be described as elusive. It is far more than a linguistic concept; the elusive Brahman, or that thing whose only metaphor is itself (for indeed, any metaphor for the principle must itself rely on the principle, thus distancing itself from any supposed resemblance and making primal the flattened relations of contiguity), is a version of this axiom.

Even this axiom is not the central framework, but only the starting one. Wittgenstein stands for this question higher than any other figure; and so, he makes for a great starting point of argumentation.

Micronothings

What a great phrase! It's snappy, it hits, it cuts — it's sharp. Unfortunately, it can only serve as an upaya (an upaya for an upaya)!

There is a conception of the plane of immanence, of bodies and the surface, as composed of a million little bugs. From the standpoint of the surface, it comes about as a result of conceiving of Events as crisscrossed, interlocking, and infinite things. From the material standpoint, or the Stoic standpoint, it comes about from a conception of bodies as spatially intermingled.

I'll address the second one for now. It is true that the corporeal world is intermingled, and it is in fact true that the corporeal world is "thoroughly” intermingled. The mistake I made throughout the entirety of my senior thesis, however, was conceiving of intermingling simply as a blending which approaches the limit. In other words, if there are two bodies in a relationship of adjacency and opposition, then the operation performed is akin to a food processor. There is a blending so sharp that phenotypical distinctions between involved bodies disappear almost entirely. What's left is chutney. And chutney, surely, is a unified substance. The issue here, however, is that even at the smallest level — even if molecular rearrangements caused every atom of the first body to be bonded to a corresponding atom of the second body — there would not be a true intermingling. There would instead be a blending which is crittery: infinite snakes of infinitesimal width extending this way and that, touching every last one of their friends and families, all in a giant, teeming, orgiastic bubble. In return, then, the differences among these critters — are these not generative micronothings of the truest kind?

But calculus teaches us that a line is not composed of points and that a plane is not composed of lines. A differential is only a micronothing insofar as it puts into immediate relation the two closest points to the limit; it cannot be defined by the relation between these two points, however, because the differential itself is constitutive of the relation! Vanessa de Harven has an incredible paper entitled "The Resistance to Stoic Blending” and it is absolutely worth a read. The Stoic materialist leap is so bold in its ambition because it terrorizes the limit. Adjacencies become layers, and every point on the plane becomes a nonspatial confluence of separate bodies, each of which occupies every single spatial point on the plane.

In my thesis, I fell for the crittery trap. Assemblages and machines became sinuous figures, and the surface of sense became a dull and drab pit of snakes — teeming with life, sure, but nothing more. The true Stoic flattening, the true material flattening, is not some blending which approaches the limit of interwovenness, but the limit of blending itself, laid out across and on top of all bodies. Materiality dives into the depths and becomes pure potentiality. Distinction, difference (as opposition), and adjacency become epiphenomena of the depths, determinable only after certain operations and syntheses of the surface. All snakes and critters owe their lives to this well of potential. If they declare themselves its representatives, they do so of their own accord, and not because there is a concomitant metaphor waiting to be grasped.