Integration
Listening to the latest interview with Dan Smith on the MUHH podcast has rekindled a lot of the feels that led me to read Deleuze with safety science literature. Here I’ll say a little bit about that relationship by way of an example.
Gilles Deleuze was a philosopher who developed a conception of difference in itself. Putting it too simply: rather than assume identities and give an account of the difference(s) between them (this would be difference as a secondary or derivative, staid concept), his concept takes difference as a primary and dynamic thing from which provisional identities result. In effect he wants to base his metaphysics on differentials, not identities.
Deleuze draws a lot from GW Leibniz, one of the creators of calculus and thus from whom an initial concept of the differential comes. But what does this mean, and what are some of the up-shots? An example that Deleuze cites is the sound of the sea. As Smith explains in his Essays on Deleuze:
Leibniz had observed that we often perceive things of which we are not consciously aware. We recall a familiar scene and become aware of a detail we did not notice at the time; the background noise of a dripping faucet suddenly enters our consciousness at night. Leibniz therefore drew a distinction between conscious perceptions (“apperceptions,” or molar perceptions) and unconscious perceptions (“minute” or molecular perceptions), and argued that our conscious perceptions must be related, not simply to recognizable objects in space and time, but rather to the minute and unconscious perceptions of which they are composed. I apprehend the noise of the sea or the murmur of a group of people, for instance, but not the sound of each wave or the voice of each person that compose them. These unconscious minute perceptions are related to conscious “molar” perceptions, not as parts to a whole, but as what is ordinary to what is noticeable or remarkable: a conscious perception is produced when at least two of these minute and “virtual” perceptions enter into a differential relation that determines a singularity: that is, a conscious perception. Consider the noise of the sea: at least two waves must be minutely perceived as nascent and “virtual” in order to enter into a differential relation capable of determining a third, which excels over the others and becomes conscious.
So basically something that appears to be a simple whole is actually an integration of many distinct but initially indistinguishable things. And if that whole is actually an end result, not a starting point, that means that it may appear to be the same through time yet actually be imperceptibly different.
Let’s now relate this to a core concept from safety science lit: Erik Hollnagel’s Efficieny-Thoroughness Trade-off (ETTO) principle. The gist of this principle is that an operator is a balancing between minimizing the time spent performing some action and maximally preparing to do that action safely. The action that results and which is consciously perceived obscures the tension of that differential relation between those two conflicting ideal goals.
To historicize that principle we should note that a given action doesn’t come ex nihilo but in fact participates in extending a series, which constitutes a pattern in disequilibrium. So when the action occurs and things seem to go well (nothing bad happens) then that gives the operator license to act again with at least that same ratio, if not providing justification for intensifying the disequilibrium.
Thus we see why looking for one or several root cause(s) is bound to fail: an event is an integration of several determinable factors, but the exact determination of each is not given before the event itself. All there is before the event in question is a differential relation. Contrary to Descartes’ proposal that things are clearly and distinctly knowable, that event, to use some phrasing from Deleuze, is clear but indistinct and the determinable factors which pre-exist it are distinct but obscure.