Overcoding is a second articulation — Deleuze and Guattari on folding sediment into structure, and a plant whose rows never settle
Before the book talks about faces, it talks about rock. In "10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals", Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe how a stratum forms, and they use the geologist's word for the first step: sedimentation. Layers are laid down one after another, each deposit following a statistical order. Sedimentation alone does not make a rock. A second process has to fold the layers…
Before the book discusses faces, it focuses on rock. In their 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain how a stratum forms through sedimentation, a process in which layers are deposited one after another in a statistical order. However, sedimentation alone does not create a rock. A second process, known as the second articulation, folds these layers into a stable, functional structure. This folding is what they later refer to as overcoding.
The second articulation can be seen as a fold, similar to how a protein fiber folds back on itself to form a compact structure. This fold is a second kind of segmentarity, working at a different scale than the lower order of molecules. The authors emphasize that overcoding only occurs at the level of integrations, implying a difference in magnitude between the summarized elements and the summarizing entity.
For instance, a headline on a dashboard, which is a short, green or red word, represents a summary of multiple observations that may not agree with each other. This fold separates the headline from the individual sensor rows beneath it, centering, unifying, and finalizing the information presented.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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