Preliminary notes on the Societies of the Vector and the Vidual
David M. Berry
"Each line is broken and subject to changes in direction, bifurcating and forked, and subject to drifting (derivations)." (Deleuze 1992b).
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| The Draughtsman of the Lute by Albrecht Dürer (1525) |
The vector medium produces a form of power I propose to call "gradience". This is a form of power that operates by probabilistic computation, which I have elsewhere called vector computation. In this regime of power the operative function is the incline, the residue left by gradient descent once training has ended, along which thought slopes towards the dense fields of vector space (see Chatonsky and Citton [2026] for a discussion of the "distension" of memory and quaternary retentions as retentions of retentions). I suggest a new form of subjectivity that will emerge through this mediation which I call the "vidual".[1]
Foucault (2020) identified the individual subjectivised through the operation of discourses in and around institutions like the factory, the hospital and the prison, and Deleuze suggested the form of the dividual within the context of the control society operated through digital computers. As Deleuze explained,
The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest-the flock and each of its animals— but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." (Deleuze 1992a: 5).
In contrast, I suggest a new form of subjectification in and through the operation of artificial intelligence, in both its autoregressive and diffusional forms as the vidual. Gradience gathers rather than assembles. Where control produced samples and banks, gradience produces corpora and neighbourhoods, and the vidual falls across a distribution, as weights and as points. There are no longer watchwords or passwords but tokens. What the watchword commands and the password allows, the token predicts.
Viduation
Where Simondon's (2009) notion of individuation captured the process by which a subject emerges from a pre-individual field in relation to a milieu, viduation attempts to describe what we might call the inclination of the subject, as a subject whose thought is always already mediated by vector space. Here cognition moves along a slope defined by the geometry of the mathematical constraints of latent space.[2] This is a subject that is constituted in relation to the very structure of contemporary vector computation within which it is co-constructed.[3] Where discipline moulded the subject and control modulated it, gradience inclines it, which does not fix a subject, nor vary it, but rather transforms the ground on which the vidual operates. We might say that discipline was periodic, as one entered and left the factory, and control was continuous, whereas gradience is anterior. It is settled in advance, pre-trained and encountered long after training has been completed. Only in the moment of the hallucination does vector ideology fall away, when the true and the false, the real and the synthetic are indistinguishable in their production, and the contradictions of the vector regime become apparent.[4]
Notes
[1] The name vidual takes its meaning from the Latin viduus, indicating a subject that is deprived, widowed, bereft of everything that the vector space cannot encode. From the same root as dividuus that gives us Deleuze's notion of dividual, but here the division (di) is lost. Indeed, the vidual is a subject no longer divisible into codes or samples, a subject absorbed into a continuous vector field.
[2] We should note that vector space is the product of human labour congealed and made objective, the general intellect in its vectorised form. Although the latent space (the "manifold") might appear as an alien form to the vidual it is the geometry of dead thought, a social relation re-encoded by mathematical functions. This gives the potential for revealing the fetish character of the vector medium.
[3] Due to the structure of the vector space, I see a potential for resistance through the sparse periphery of the vector space. At the edges of the manifold is that which could not easily be absorbed without a remainder. Critical AI, then, might work at this periphery as it is the location where non-identity is potentially found where concept and object do not coincide. See the vector lab tools for one way of achieving this.
[4] For Stiegler (2013), the same apparatus that can proletarianise cognition can be used to deproletarianise it. We might therefore explore vector spaces as tertiary retentions and so in new arrangements they might be put to work differently. Hence, new institutions suggest ways of developing resistance to gradience.
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