It’s relatively easy to see how differences of degree can lead to differences in kind. Thought enjoys moving between differing kinds, and reducing them to mere differences of degree, as this gives a diversity its common measure. Here, secret affinities are made to reveal themselves, identities beneath multiplicities, individuals being species being genera, and so on. But what of the reverse? Differences of kind leading to differences of degree?
This could be mistaken for an old essentialism – only certain types, owing to their constitution, can tolerate the higher and lower degrees, for example. A logic of comparison and localization. But this is still degree defining type – now as a cartography of territories of degree, wavelengths and speeds and scales and distances. What is lacking is the constitution of degree itself from a difference of type. What is a degree? A metric. What is a metric? A way of flattening difference of kind out into a uniform unit, which admits of degrees, constitutive of differences of kind. Seen this way, how could differences of kind produce these degrees that effectively nullify them? It seems the playful hypothesis we posited, of differences of kind leading to differences of degree, is forlorn and dead on arrival. And yet…
For differences of kind to be at the source of differences of degree, we would need to think of our metrics as emerging from encounters between true incommensurables. A nice paradox: surely incommensurables pass like ships in the night – that is the condition of their incommensurability. Whence the encounter? A mute event, rendered null by the nocturnal context and the absence of the neutral container provided by daylight itself. But to pass as ships in day, in a commensurable way, is to already be ensnared in a common metric that escapes beneath the waves and above the sky and is always and everywhere merely assumed as a key piece of stagecraft: effective only insofar as it goes unnoticed, or as long as we all contently perform our ‘un-noticing’ of it. Light makes things visible (ships, for example) only insofar as it remains invisible, and so on.
Our question is thus: how to think of a productive meeting of incommensurables? At what table do they sit, in what tongue do they converse, with what goods do they exchange? The answer in each case lies perhaps in the metrics that each of their unique and many encounters inaugurate. To bring differences in kind to the same table, the creation of a unit, a lexical or quantitative unit, a unit of exchange or transmission, is required. This is not an assumed piece of stagecraft; the creation of such a unit is the heavy fruit that arises as the dramatic culmination of the dangerous labor of such an impossible encounter. A singular treasure found at the end of a tangled narrative. This is what makes encounters so interesting. Long before they are added into a series, axis, or robust metric, the unit is a singularity and a perfect individual – as un-aggregable and non-fungible as a work of art. And, just as a real work of art, like a real mineral, establishes its own industries, its own field of capture, these immaculate units, product of the encounter between incommensurables (we can think of them as signs as yet without systems), fold out their metrics, their degrees, their systems of quantification, just at the same time as they enfold that incommensurable difference of kind, that impossible encounter. When we measure, we measure with a unit that was always first a singular name: the name of the ambivalent event that is two nocturnal ships passing.