| Uniformity and Variability: An Essay in the Philosophy of Matter
Manuel DeLanda (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)
Table of Contents: * * * * * * * * * Through most of history, matter has been a concern of metaphysics more than physics, and materials of neither. Classical physics at its best turned matter into mass, while chemistry discovered the atom and lost interest in properties...[In both metaphysical speculation and scientific research] sensitivity to the wonderful diversity of real materials was lost, at first because philosophical thought despised the senses, later because the . . . the new science could only deal with one thing at a time. It was atomistic, or at least, simplistic, in its very essence. {1}
This author claims that by the time Greek philosophers like Democritus orAristotle developed their philosophies of matter, practically everything about the behaviour of metals and alloys that could be explored with pre-industrial technology, was already known to craftsmen and blacksmiths. For at least a thousand years before philosophers began their speculations, this knowledge was developed on a purely empirical basis, through a direct interaction with the complex behaviour of materials. Indeed, the early philosophies of matter may have been derived from observation and conversation with those whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behaviour of materials during thermal processing or as they were shaped by chipping, cutting or plastic deformation. {2} For instance, Aristotle s famous four elements -- fire, earth, water and air -- may be said to reflect a sensual awareness of what today we know as energy and the three main states of aggregation of matter: the solid, liquid and gas states.
As metaphysical speculation gave special meanings to these four elementary qualities, their original physical meaning was lost, and the variability and complexity of real materials was replaced with the uniform behaviour of a philosophically simplified matter about which one could only speculate symbolically. It is true that sixteenth-century alchemists recovered a certain respect for a direct interaction with matter and energy, and that seventeenth-century Cartesian philosophers intensely speculated about the variable properties of different ways of aggregating material components. But these early attempts at capturing the complexity of physical transmutations and of the effect of physical structure on the complex properties of materials, eventually lost out to the emergent science of chemistry, and its almost total concentration on simple behaviour: that of individual components (such as Lavoisier's oxygen) or of substances that conform to the law of definite proportions (as in Dalton's atomic theory).
* * * James Gordon has called the study of the strength of materials the Cinderella of science, partly because much of the knowledge was developed by craftsmen, metallurgists and engineers (the flow of ideas often ran from the applied to the pure fields), and partly because by its very nature, the study of materials involved an interaction between many scientific disciplines, an interdisciplinary approach which ran counter to the more prestigious tradition of pure specialisation. {6} Today, of course, the interdisciplinary study of complexity, not only in materials but in many other areas of science, from physics and ecology to economics, is finally taking its place at the cutting edge of scientific research. We are beginning to understand that any complex system, whether composed of interacting molecules, organic creatures or economic agents, is capable of spontaneously generating order and of actively organising itself into new structures and forms. It is precisely this ability of matter and energy to self-organise that is of greatest significance to the philosopher. Let me illustrate this with an example from materials science.
Long ago, practical metallurgists understood that a given piece of metal can be made to change its behaviour, from ductile and tough to strong and brittle, by hammering it while cold. The opposite transmutation, from hard to ductile, could also be achieved by heating the piece of metal again and then allowing it to cool down slowly (that is, by annealing it). Yet, although blacksmiths knew empirically how to cause these metamorphoses, it was not until a few decades ago that scientists understood the actual microscopic mechanism involved. As it turns out, explaining the physical basis of ductility involved a radical conceptual change: scientists had to stop viewing metals in static terms, that is, as deriving their strength in a simple way from the chemical bonds between their composing atoms, and begin seeing them as dynamic systems. In particular, the real cause of brittle's in rigid materials, and the reason why ductile ones can resist being broken, has to do with the complex dynamics of spreading cracks.
A crack or fracture needs energy to spread through a piece of material. Thus, any mechanism that takes away energy from the crack will make the material tough. In metals, the mechanism seems to be based on certain defects or imperfections within the component crystals called dislocations. Dislocations not only trap energy locally but moreover are highly mobile and may be brought into existence in large quantities by the very concentrations of stress which tend to break a piece of material. Roughly, if populations of these line defects are free to move in a material, they will endow it with the capacity to yield locally without breaking, that is, they will make the material tough. On the other hand, restricted movement of dislocations will result in a stronger, but more brittle material. {7} Both of these properties may be desirable for different tools, and even within one and the same tool: in a sword or knife, for instance, the body must be tough while the cutting edge must be strong.
* * * ...during the last years the whole field of materials science and related technologies has experienced a complete renewal. Effectively, by using techniques corresponding to strong non-equilibrium conditions, it is now possible to escape from the constraints of equilibrium thermodynamics and to process totally new material structures, including different types of glasses, nano- and quasi-crystals, superlatices... As materials with increased resistance to fatigue and fracture are sought for actual applications, a fundamental understanding of the collective behaviour of dislocations and point defects is highly desirable. Since the usual thermodynamic and mechanical concepts are not adapted to describe those situations, progress in this direction should be related to the explicit use of genuine non-equilibrium techniques, non-linear dynamics and instability theory. {8}
* * * The term phylum is used in biology to refer to the common body-plan of many different creatures. Human beings, for example, belong to the phylum chordata, as do all other vertebrate animals. The basic idea is that of a common source of form, a body-plan which through different foldings and stretchings during embryological development, is capable of generating a wide variety of specific forms, from snakes to giraffes to humans. Deleuze and Guattari, aware that non-linear population processes are common not only to animals and plants, but to metals and other inorganic materials, have extended this meaning to refer to a common source of spontaneously generated form across all material entities. I began this essay by quoting the opinion of a metallurgist, Cyril Stanley Smith, on the historical importance of sensually acquired knowledge about the complex behaviour of metals and other materials. And indeed, in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of matter, metallurgists play an important role:
...what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognisable... Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in pan-metallism, metal is co-extensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere... The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device. {9}
One aspect of the definition of the machinic phylum is of special interest to our discussion of contemporary materials science. Not only is the phylum defined in dynamic terms (that is, as matter in motion) but also as matter in continuous variation. Indeed, these philosophers define the term machinic precisely as the process through which structures can be created by bringing together heterogeneous materials, that is, by articulating the diverse as such, without homogenisation. In other words, the emphasis here is not only on the spontaneous generation of form, but on the fact that this morphogenetic potential is best expressed not by the simple and uniform behaviour of materials, but by their complex and variable behaviour. In this sense, contemporary industrial metals, such as mild steel, may not be the best illustration of this new philosophical conception of matter. While naturally occurring metals contain all kinds of impurities that change their mechanical behaviour in different ways, steel and other industrial metals have undergone in the last two hundred years an intense process of uniformation and homogenisation in both their chemical composition and their physical structure. The rationale behind this process was partly based on questions of reliability and quality control, but it also had a social component: both human workers and the materials they used needed to be disciplined and their behaviour made predictable. Only then could the full efficiencies and economies of scale of mass production techniques be realised. But this homogenisation also affected the engineers that designed structures using these well-disciplined materials. In the words of James E. Gordon:
The widespread use of steel for so many purposes in the modern world is only partly due to technical causes. Steel, especially mild steel, might euphemistically be described as a material that facilitates the dilution of skills... Manufacturing processes can be broken down into many separate stages, each requiring a minimum of skill or intelligence... At a higher mental level, the design process becomes a good deal easier and more foolproof by the use of a ductile, isotropic, and practically uniform material with which there is already a great deal of accumulated experience. The design of many components, such as gear wheels, can be reduced to a routine that can be looked up in handbooks. {10}
* * * I do not mean to imply that there are no legitimate roles to be played by homogenous materials with simple and predictable behaviour, such as bearing loads in compression. And similarly, for the institutional and economic arrangements that were behind the quest for uniformity, the economies of scale achieved by routinising production and some design tasks, were certainly very significant. As with the already mentioned homogenisations performed by scientists in their conceptions of matter, there were undoubtedly some gains. The question is: what got lost in the process? I can think of several things.
First, the nineteenth-century process of transferring skills from the human worker to the machine and the task of homogenising metallic behaviour went hand in hand. As Cyril Stanley Smith remarks: The craftsman can compensate for differences in the qualities of his material, for he can adjust the precise strength and pattern of application of his tools to the material's local vagaries. Conversely, the constant motion of a machine requires constant materials. {12} If it is true, as I claimed at the beginning of this essay, that much of the knowledge about the complex behaviour of materials was developed outside science by empirically oriented individuals, the de-skilling of craftsmen that accompanied mechanisation may be seen as involving a loss of at least part of that knowledge, since in many cases, empirical know-how is stored in the form of skills.
Second, not only the production process was routinised in this way. To a lesser extent, so was the design process. Many professionals who design load-bearing structures lost their ability to design with materials that are not isotropic, that is, that do not have identical properties in all directions. But it is precisely those abilities to deal with complex, continuously variable behaviour that are now needed to design structures with the new composites. Hence, we may need to nurture again our ability to deal with variation as a creative force, and to think of structures that incorporate heterogeneous elements as a challenge to be met by innovative design.
Third, the quest for uniformity in human and metallic behaviour went beyond the specific disciplinary devices used in assembly-line factories. Many other things were homogenised during the last few centuries. To give only two examples: the genetic materials of our farm animals and crops have become much more uniform, at first due to the spread of the pedigree mystique, and later in this century, by the development and diffusion of miracle crops like hybrid corn. Our linguistic materials also became more uniform as the meshworks of heterogeneous dialects which existed in most countries began to yield to the spread of standard languages, through compulsory education systems and the effects of mass media. As before, the question is not whether we achieved some efficiencies through genetic and linguistic standardisation. We did. The problem is that in the process, we came to view heterogeneity and variation as something to be avoided, as something pathological to be cured or uprooted, since it endangered the unity of the nation state.<
Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, the nineteenth-century quest for uniformity may have had damaging effects for the philosophy of matter, by making the machinic phylum effectively unrecognisable. As the behaviour of metals and other mineral materials became routine, and hence, unremarkable, philosophical attention became redirected to the more interesting behaviour of living creatures, as in early twentieth century forms of vitalism, and later on, to the behaviour of symbols, discourses and texts, in which any consideration of material or energetic factors was completely lost. Today, thanks in part to the new theories of self-organisation that have revealed the potential complexity of behaviour of even the humbler forms of matter-energy, we are beginning to recover a certain philosophical respect for the inherent morphogenetic potential of all materials. And we may now be in a position to think about the origin of form and structure, not as something imposed from the outside on an inert matter, not as a hierarchical command from above as in an assembly line, but as something that may come from within the materials, a form that we tease out of those materials as we allow them to have their say in the structures we create.
References
1 Cyril Stanley Smith. Matter Versus Materials: A Historical View. In: A Search for Structure. (MIT Press, 1992). p. 115 |
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