In the eighth footnote for Sanford Kwinter’s essay “Flying the Bullet,” which accompanies the slim volume “Conversations with Students” by Rem Koolhaas, is a brief enumeration of different names for Samadhi-like states in which an interactant “becomes one” with an interactive system. I quote:

“Class four behavior” in Stephen Wolfram; “poised systems” and “edge of chaos” in Chris Langton and Stuart Kaufmann; “separatrices” and “catastrophe sets” in Ralph Abraham and René Thom; “bifurcation regimes” and “far from equilibrium states” of chaologists and thermodynamicists; “singularities” in Deleuze and Guattari; “flow” in Csikszentmihalhyi and optimal experience theorists; “one-over-f” systems in signal theory; the state of “highest or fulfilled tension” in Zen Buddhist disciplines . . . the list is beautiful, and long.

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