Tired of the clich� "that's wrong on so many levels," I hoped to explore the meaning of level. Or the level of meaning. Or indeed the meaning of meaning, or of of or of the. These questions, and possibly others, were answered by a Brian Massumi - or possibly the Brian Massumi, for how could there be more than one translator of Deleuze called Brian anything, let alone Brian Massumi? Thanks to reader Ole Sandberg for drawing attention to the New Criterion article in which the following passage is quoted, not, I should add, with approval:

Just as higher functions are fed back - all the way to the subatomic (that is position and momentum) - quantum indeterminacy is fed forward.

It rises through the fractal bifurcations leading to and between each of the superposed levels of reality. On each level, it appears in a unique mode adequate to that level. On the level of physical macrosystems analysed by Simondon, its mode is potential energy and the margin of "play" it introduces into deterministic systems (epitomised by the "three body system" so dear to chaos theory). On the biological level, it is the margin of undecidability accompanying every perception, which is one with a perception's transmissibility from one sense to another. On the human level, it is that same undecidability fed forward into thought, as evidenced in the deconstructability of every structure of ideas (as expressed, for example in G�del's incompleteness theorem and in Derrida's diff�rance). Each individual and collective human level has its own peculiar "quantum" mode; various forms of undecidability in logical and signifying systems are joined by emotion on the psychological level, resistance on the political level, the spectre of crisis haunting capitalist economies. . . . The use of the concept of the quantum outside quantum mechanics, even as applied to human psychology, is not a metaphor.

Oh yes it is.

On a more mundane level, with so many undecidabilities, how do you tell the diff�rance? Answers on descartes postales, s'il vous pla�t.