On social intensiology. Conceptualizing social life through topological folding, braid operators and collapse functions

Social intensiology is outlined here in its connection to morphogenesis. The latter aims to explain how form comes into existence, just as the former seeks to tackle the intensive states associated with social life. A topological reference model is proposed for conceptualizing how social life operates immanently with saliences and pregnances. The paper starts from the famous Collatz conjecture, and reviews how it has been recently modeled by Danail Valov using braid groups and including thermodynamic irreversibility into the picture. A “Valov braid” can be understood as a manifold, an entity that is, at the same time, individual and collective. Its collective structure can be reconstructed, through its operational logic, as a tensional field. An attempt is made to show how phenomena of memory and measure are intertwined with the braid’s developments, giving rise to a rich, multi-faceted present that lives in non-coincidence. Within such a framework, rhythmanalysis is discussed as a useful tool for both assaying and experimentally improving social life.