Until Marxism, capitalist political economy has also pretended for a long time to pass as the general grammar of all economy, but linguistics still has not found its Marx and Engels who would reset it on its feet. –Guattari, L’Inconscient Machinique, p.30 fn. 14.

The sign is a position of desire; but the first sings are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh ‘writing,’ then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word. –Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 145.

All methods for the transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with universals…have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 148.

Linguistic Machinics: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Pragmatics

In their Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, Deleuze and Guattari outline a historically materialist theory of language and society which is essentially based upon their theories of assemblages, multiplicity, abstract machines, and deterritorialization along with many other concepts. The difficulty in fully appreciating the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, is mainly due to an ignorance of Guattari’s solo work L’Inconscient machinique which was published a year before ATP and constitutes a sort of companion volume or workbook for the former. It is now time to fully explore this work while keeping A Thousand Plateaus closely in mind in order to fully understand what Guattari’s critiques and use of linguistic theories really amounts to. In other words, the main focus of this essay (beyond an explication of Guattari’s untranslated work) is to specify how language in its stabilization in power formations comes to dominate our everyday lives and what are the means of transformation that pragmatics proposes in order to conceive and actualize new possibilities of subjectification. To perform such a (broad) task, we will focus here mainly on the concepts that Guattari proposes and how they work together to specify the problem in working toward new solutions that the project of a schizoanalytic pragmatics can offer.

Abstract Machines and Contingent Assemblages

The conceptual framework must be stressed here because it seems that in L’Inconscient machinique Guattari particularly wants to safeguard and legitimate his squatter’s rights on philosophical territory. This is not to say that Guattari’s earlier work lacked philosophical content; rather, it is the presence of a certain self-consciousness that betrays Guattari’s eager intent upon truly being recognized as a philosopher in his own rights. His proposal of a machinic unconscious no doubt brings him immediately within the conceptual camp of psychoanalysis, but his insistence on and novel understanding of an abstract machinics forces him in the same movement to qualify his concept of the abstract machine against Platonic ideas and Aristotelian forms (8). Arguing against a time tied down to an abstract, presupposed universality, Guattari proposes to show how abstract machines are produced by their own production through their developments of existential consistencies in conjunction with the various assemblages that allow the actualization of their machinic expressions/propositions. “Abstract machines do not cling to a single, universal time but to a plane of consistency, trans-spatial and trans-temporal, which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their ‘appearance’ in reality no longer claims to be given with only one source: it is negotiated starting from quanta of potentiality.[1]” Thus, the relative existence of abstract machines depends both on propositional discursivity as well as energetic discursivity in order to effectuate a consistency.

The abstract machine thus conceptually brings it into the domain of the actual and the virtual along with an emphasis on contingency and historical singularity[2]. This emphasis will be crucial for the success of a pragmatics that entails the analysis of the stability of power formations and the means of breaking out of a consistency which has become too viscous in its stratifications which legitimate themselves as universal (hence Guattari’s drive to create a materialist (Marx-Engels) critique of linguistics with his emphasis on pragmatics[3]). But, at the same time, it is difficult to merely speak of the actual and the virtual without stressing that abstract machines make no distinction between the plane of consistency and the plane of content. They are both turned toward the strata, effectuating deteritorializations and reterritorializaitons while also being turned toward the plane of consistency which effectuates destratifications which conjugate the deterritorializations, but only on condition of the quanta of potentiality which will catalyze the processes by releasing diagrammatic signs-particles which will guarantee the passage between these existential registers[4].

In other words, because abstract machines are responsible for their own convergence of degrees of consistency which allows them a relative coefficient of existence, they both preexist the stratifications and constitute transformational materials or optional subjects which may allow stratifications to consist or not. “Abstract machines mark, all in all, the fact that deterritorialization, in all its forms, ‘precedes’ the existence of the strata and the territories.[5]” They precede them because the strata and territories demand a separation of content and expression, they require that contents have been formed and expressions have substance, while abstract machines work through unformed matters and formless functions. Non-semiologically formed materials or semiological encodings will be able to pretend to universality, but, consequently, are always under the threat of decomposition because of the transversality of their quanta of potentiality, that is, due to their constantly recreated nature which is more or less sustainable given certain consistencies due to the convergence of heterogeneous realities. Their degree of transversality[6] will indicate the success with which they are able to traverse various realities and destratify them for new possibilities. Since abstract machines are opposed to abstract structures[7] which concern reproducing themselves and their homeostatic conditions, deterritorialization will be understood as the unground for assemblages, that is, their historically singular and contingent conditions which ultimately undermine any preestablished coordinates of existence. Ultimately though, Guattari’s understanding of the disequilibrium of the abstract machine allows it at the same time to be a dynamic machine whose contingency is precisely the aspect of its heterogeneous relations that guarantee its consistency:

Universality will no longer have as an obligated reference the discourse of a subject, incarnating itself in a word, a revealed text, a divine or scientific law…While conferring on the points of singularity a particular power of crossing stratified fields, signs-particles (carriers of quanta of potentiality) will only equip them for so many universal capacities. Indeed, the assemblages that incarnate the singularity- abstract machine conjunctions remain susceptible to being demolished in order to open up other potentialities and contingencies. Universalist thought always receives a reverential fear with respect to an established order—religious or natural. Conversely, that of assemblages and molecular machinisms should continue setting practices of every nature in relation from the perspective of the changes and transformations of the existing orders and the reduction of their power (14-15).

We will see later the more functionalist side of abstract machines when they work directly within concrete assemblages (from which they are inseparable, along with the deterritorializing effects they produce within the assemblages in relation to the territories). While turning there, let us try to understand more directly Guattari’s construction of the different pragmatic fields that animate the contingent assemblages and sign regimes beyond the politico-philosophical abuses of claims to universality.[8]

Distinguishing Pragmatic Fields and the Threat of Capitalist Abstraction

Schizoanalytic pragmatics reexamines the relation between assemblages of enunciation and pragmatic fields under the angle of unconscious phenomena in the social field. The principal behind this is a radical tranversalist meta-modelization embodied by the concept of the rhizome or lattice which opposes the binarist model of the tree. Rhizomes are fundamental to understanding Guattari’s cartographies of the unconscious because they make it impossible for linguistic and semiological components to claim hierarchical positions over other modes of encoding. Not only is every unspecified point able to connect to another, but also rhizomes bring into play both modes of signs and regulations of non-signs while remaining collapsible and suitable for constant modification. Rhizomatic mappings of the unconscious make a distinction between semiology and semiotics, the former giving primacy to the laws of language and the latter proposing to study sign-systems independent of linguistics. This division corresponds with the division between pragmatic fields, that between interpretative components and non-interpretative components.

The interpretative components can be distinguished between the analogical (iconic semiology) and the signifying (linguistic semiologies). Each of these components belong to specific assemblages of enunciation, and so we can better define Guattari’s understanding of the interpretative side of the pragmatic[9] as the differentiation among particular modes of subjectification due to the presence of certain components which allow the development of assemblages that correspond with different regimes of signs rendering them subservient to historically singular power formations[10]. Analogical components or icons, for example, relate to territorialized or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation while individual assemblages of enunciation and capitalistic subjectivity corresponds to signifying transformations (L’Inconscient machinique, 17). On the other hand, there are two sides to the non-interpretative components, one symbolic, the other diagrammatic. The first is concerned with an “intensive” semiotics (at the level of perception, gesture, mimicry, etc. while the second involves an a-signifying semiotics “which proceed[s] by a deterritorialization relating jointly to the formalism of content and expression while setting into play mutant abstract machines (systems of signs-particles and quanta of potentialities working simultaneously in the register of material and semiotic realities)” (18). The distinction between the interpretative and non-interpretative will become clearer later on when we discuss the transformations among these fields and show how they entail different coordinates of efficiency—in other words, Guattari makes a generalization between the two fields due to the different types of redundancies that function in these fields. Redundancies of resonance correspond to semiological components of subjectification and consciousness formation, while machinic redundancies or redundancies of interaction correspond to a-signifying diagrammatic components. (For example, in a crystallization of signifying powers, the fields of resonance are submitted to a semiological subjection while the fields of interaction are cybernetically and semiotically enslaved. In other words, libidinal economies and political economies merge in the field of linguistic overcoding through the conjunction of three elements: imperatives of the dominant grammaticality of expression, “ideological” assemblages at the level of content (subjection of redundancies of resonance) and diagrammatic assemblages of enslavement to decoded capitalistic flows at the level of the referent (36).

However, we will not truly be able to understand redundancies until we have dealt with the level of existential coordinates which specify three different types of consistency. There is the molar consistency of the strata with its significations and dominant realities (complete objects, subjects, individuals), but there is also a molecular consistency that expresses the real mechanical incarnation of an assemblage, although on this level it must be stressed that assemblages can neither be distinguished from the fields in which they consist nor the components which allow them to do so. Finally, and above all crucial for the diagrammatic importance of the distinctions made above, the abstract consistency determines the “theoretical” degree of the possibility of the preceding consistencies.

Molar consistencies develop effects of weak resonance (signifying[11] effect, e.g., pure formal translation) and weak interaction (surplus value of stratified codes) because their redundancies are highly stratified and crystallized (46). “What characterizes the molar politics of stratification is the constitution of a world of stratified, identified or hierarchized objects and subjects, singularities and abstract machines there being grasped from systems of coordinates which authorize only the minimum degree of freedom necessary to the survival of the assemblages.[12]” The molecular field on the other hand is not as stratified and allows for strong effects of resonance and interaction to take place. This consistency is the one that will be critical for a micro-political engagement with the social field. “This type of inter-assemblage, inter-component and inter-field consistency is a fundamental micro-political stake for schizo-analysis, such as the greater or lesser malleability of the assemblages to be bent to the various powers of subjection and enslavement, – concerning, in other words, all that pertains to social power struggles and the molecular metabolisms of the machinic unconscious” (47). In other words, there is more freedom for the assemblages here which can empower them to evade subjection and enslavement or can render them powerless in the face of such overcoding. Finally, there is an abstract consistency that never exhausts itself at the level of actualization and always keeps quanta of possible in reserve. These last two consistencies form the field for transformational schizoanalysis.[13] But, beyond these consistencies and the abstract machines that populate and produce the crossings of their singularities, capitalist[14] abstraction is at work proposing to neutralize the potentialities of assemblages and render the entropy of sign-systems too viscous to effectuate truly transversal means of deterritorialization.

To fully engage in the extended complexity of capitalist abstraction it would be necessary to fully account for all the transformations within consciential components and the different creations of black hole effects that correspond with them (this will be one of the positive directions for this paper to continue to plot). To conclude, however, it would first be necessary to sketch the power relations inherent to this capitalist power takeover. To do so, let me quote extensively from L’Inconscient machinique and then draw out the consequences of Guattari’s pragmatic field transformations:

Abstraction is not a “frozen” abstract machine but an active system of neutralization and recuperation of machinic indices and lines of flight. Thus it has always remained bound to key institutions of power. Religious abstractions have long served the grounds for personological, sexual, ethnic or national identity and modulated the signification of the feeling of a membership to a territoriality of reference. All these functions have been captured in relay by a system much more fragmented, much more diversified and at the same time more molecular and more susceptive to devices of power, utility services and mass-media machines, so that today all instances of semiotic production and all systems of value weave a gigantic net composed of points of signifiance from which it is impossible to escape without a radical setting in question of the ensemble of assemblages of enunciation. Religious overcodings were less malleable, more “passive” than the instruments of this capitalistic network. Each system of redundancy is now constantly altered and re-calculated so that the tolerable thresholds of deterritorialization for the established order are precisely determined. Any coding will have to pass and permanently re-pass by the ordering mega-machine of molecular equipment. Any intensity will be forced to give up connections which would be established apart from the “coherence” of abstractions and dominant coordinates. Thus the perspectives open to lines of flight and machinic assemblages will be perfectly delimited: the former will have to be retained on this side of an abstract horizon, and the latter constantly return to the universal contents for which they will become the apparent foundations. If abstract machines are regularly pinned to the sky of universal abstractions, then assemblages of desire are put to the service of a world order, which is an all too terrestrial fact (52-53).

On the one hand, we have the analogical field (interpretance) which refer to territorial or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation; then there is the signifying field which refers to an individuated assemblage of enunciation; there is the symbolic and a-subjective field which proceeds through desubjectified assemblages of enunciation[15]; finally, there is the “a-subjective diagrammatic transformations whose a-signifying contents deterritorialize not only the assemblages of enunciation but also the machines of expression and semantic formalisms while establishing at the same time a direct connection with intrinsic modes of encoding in the various stratifications of the referent (that which implies a “reference” common to another nature at the most deterritorialized level: that of the machinic plane of consistency)” (58).

Since all assemblages of enunciation are somewhat mixed, we can map the transformations across these fields. For example, moving from the intensive symbolic to the analogical can be understood if we consider that mystic examples, for example, can be reterritorialized on a fascistic assemblage (fascism being understood as the territorial interpretation of redundancies due to a particular membership to a blood or volk—similar to Badiou’s full void or statist operator of the event which claims that only the people directly involved with an event belong). On the other hand, the diagrammatic can be converted into the signifying mode with the recrossing of syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions. This forces an a-subjective machinic assemblage to become (re)subjectivized across a field of signifiance (Guattari gives the example of a bad writer entering L’Acadmie française, thus rendering a certain style as a machine of expression which produces definite contours and traits, etc.—one thinks of Hawthorne or Faulkner for American literature with their unbearably long, drawn out and impossible-to-diagram sentences). This type of transformation corresponds to the ways in which a-signifying fields are transformed into signifying fields. There is, however, an opposite direction to this activity. The signifying field can easily turn into intensive symbolic or the diagrammatic. The first is effectuated through a homophonous and polyphonous proliferation which fragments the denotation of morphemes of the referent; the other proceeds through unsettling the semiologically formed substances in order to extract signs-particles from a-signifying chains of expression.

An extended account of Guattari’s schizoanalysis is called for, but clearly this task can only be undertaken once we have begun to ruminate on the vast conceptual apparatuses which are at work in such theoretical enterprises. The next installment of this paper would direct its studies towards a more thorough engagement with systems of redundancies and the transformations of subjectivity which can be effectuated through their modulations.

The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 101

Deleuze and Guattari admit that the notion of “minority” is very complex, with references and correlations in all dimensions of human and non-human existence. The opposition is not simply quantitative: “Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate [it].” (ATP 105) Thus the majority need not be in numerical majority; for majority supposes only the assumption of a “state of power and domination, not the other way around” — the standard measure, when it is assumed to be the standard, thereby becomes major. Minorities, on the other hand, are not determined by constants — they are not systems but subsystems, outsystems — seeds of potential, creative and created, crystals of becoming.

These considerations are deployed together in one of the most significant points in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of linguistics, which is this: that grammar is a system of power primarily, not a prototype but a protocol, directly connected to an economy and a politics more primarily than to a network of syntagms and semantemes. Thus even though grammar cannot be presented as an invariant linguistic substructure, it nevertheless possesses singular structural features — political ones — namely, functioning as the medium of transmitting commands, “order-words.” Thus language is shaped directly by political and economic forces; it is a prerequisite for the individuals’ submission to social laws. “No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions.” (101)

A language is a war machine bursting with positive lines of flight, inherent lines of free variation. Grammar’s unifying and homogenizing function, far from being the result of purely philosophical or structural considerations, is rather an immediately political phenomena. We are never going to find — and ought to stop looking for — a homogeneous system still unaffected by regulated, immanent, continuous processes of variation: “The unity of language is fundamentally political.” (101) Deleuze and Guattari outline two general treatments of language corresponding to the major/minor distinction. We can (1) attempt to extract constant relations from variables, or we can (2) place the relationships themselves in constant variation. The point here is that certain linguistic categories only make sense when we are doing the first (extracting constants) — for example: speech/language, synchrony/diachrony, distinctive/non-distinctive. Only the second treatment offers a contrast to linearized segmentation and the presence of “constants” — style, prose, the pragmatic function of language — for “their very characteristics give them the power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous variation…” (103-104). Minor languages “proliferate shifting effects,” possess a taste for “overload” — they restrict constants, extend variations, deploy continua which sweep away every component. This so-called “poverty” of minor languages, Deleuze and Guatarri write, “is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from above or below instead of positioning oneself within it.” (104)

They emphasize several times that “major” and “minor” do not indicate two languages but rather two usages or functions of language. Language itself is a battleground without clear boundaries, but rather lines of variation, transitional zones, limitrophes. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that the notion of a dialect itself is entirely relative, since we would need to know with what major language it relates and exercises its function. Minor languages themselves define dialects, precisely through their own possibility for variation. “Should we identify major and minor languages on the basis of regional situations and bilingualism or multilingualism including at least one dominant language and one dominated language, or a world situation giving certain languages an imperial power over others (for example, the role of American English today)?” Let us consider several clear reasons it would be unthinking to do so. A minor language is not immune to the treatment of language which draws homogeneous systems. Furthermore, it is difficult — especially politically — to see how users of minor language can operate without giving it a constancy and homogeneity making it at least locally major. Yet Deleuze and Guattari remind us of the opposite, and perhaps much more compelling argument: that the more a language acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it is affected by the continuous variations which transpose it into a minor language. If American English is dominant, a major language on the global scale, it is also by necessity worked over, intensified, amplified, and transmuted by every minority in the world. Again, the distinction between major and minor is not really between two kinds of language, but two kinds of use of language.

It is impossible to conceive the assemblage of a scientific experiment apart from a field that generates plans and topological, mathematical, axiomatic and computational descriptions. But sign-machines can function equally well directly within material and social machines without the mediation of significant processes of subjectivation, something which has become more obvious each passing day. The fact that the common essence of semiotic machines and material or social machines proceeds from the same type of abstract machine is the decisive step we must take in order to found a political pragmatics on something other than good intentions.

Felix Guattari, L’Inconscient machinique: essais de schizo-analyse. Paris: Editions Recherche, 1979. p. 67.

That we underestimate machines is an understatement. Human language itself is a code which produces codes, hence an always already over-coded decoding — and the decoding processes, for their part, go as far as you like. Let us be cautious, then, and attempt to linger for a moment on the side of the symbolic. Every discourse, every instance of language, every explicit “saying” — is also implicitly a kind of abstract program. A program gives us in turn the language in which that program is expressed — and also in which completely new programs can be expressed. Finally, every text also contains an irreducible element of pure ontology, thereby encoding — between the lines — the very principles for organizing discourse itself. Whichever metaphor obscurely prefigures the communicative passage, tracing these interdependent “resemblances,” or “differential” networks of “abstract” models, (or even “ethico-spiritual” traces of traces) necessarily takes us on an adventure outside of the text — but mysteriously or ironically, always into other kinds of texts! This infinite indeterminacy — or antiproductive rupture — is the basis of a “parasitic” logic, the logic of interruption, inequality, a constitutive non-determination.

Hence, in addition to these four distinct but interwoven layers or aspects co-existing in even the shortest text — indeed in a single word — it seems we must also suppose some pre-logical flux of intensity, a matrix of differences, in which these varying aspects would themselves become locally codified and relatively grounded. A diagram needs a space in which to be built and materials from which to be constructed; ideas needs relational fields in which they realize themselves sensibly and and dramatize their “break” into reality to one another — how, why and where they fall to their death onto the depths of bodies — but even this as though organically or by divine judgment. Bodies break the recursive cycle of language through the intervention of a partial object (programmer-parasite.) The parasite, the cold body sucking the warmth, writes new programs, and in doing so inevitably scrambles the meanings of the old instructions. The parasite is ontological rupture or antiproduction, phenomenological transduction — its work, grounding relation, is itself grounded only by an act of invention, translation, dramatization. Grounded in metaphor, in a productive diagram, in an abstract machine. Or, in other words: the parasite, whose provisional ground or counter-network is the minimal subject of the abstract machine, guarantees the consistency of the abstract programs’ specific productive diagram simultaneously as (1) a single variation, which is also (2) a model for variations; yet this is model is at once a (3) variable language of models, as well as the (4) machinic meta-ontology pragmatically governing the organizational principles of languages themselves.

One way of approaching the difference between knowledge and learning (so profound in our opinion that, despite their entanglement, there can be postulated neither a material nor conceptual ground which could ever serve to unify them) is by considering that even while wholly disparate, they are not in the least opposed for that reason. To learn and to know are two divergent operations, contrapositive dynamisms, which are nevertheless always both active simultaneously, as the “cutting edges” or ungrounding machines of cognition. A thought is grounded not in abstract oppositions, but in concrete forces traversing real problematic fields.

Knowledge is classically represented as a heterogeneous assemblage — our minds are far too imperfect to clearly perceive the pure, homogeneous Truth — which is self-totalizing and self-regulated by an internal learning process, charged with traversing its own experiences (as they are represented and reactivated as memories of varying intensities.) In this sense, abstract oppositions emerge only as variables of these mixed compositions of energetic and entropic flows. This is the illusion of hyper-diagrammatism (implying a kind of super-diagram of “all” thought.) We must try and see that thought isn’t about models and copies, not about identity and ideology — but rather about lines along which interminglings are operative, as though “between” concrete and abstract flows of energy — food for words, money for sex, death for love, virtue for pain, and on and on…

What is produced in this process of establishing communication between incommensurable problematic fields — or learning — should certainly not be characterized as a pure memory, but rather a decentralized and a-subjective cognitive process. “Thought” is not the difference between learning and knowledge, but rather an abstract machine which underlies them while nevertheless separating them, almost as though by an absolute divergence. Learning fights dullness and emptiness with lightning and fire, mortally threatening the stasis and death of “serious knowledge,” which would otherwise totally consume the brave and fiery heart of discovery. So let’s stop asking what “knowledge” and “learning” mean in themselves (and trying to ‘deduce’ the ‘difference’ — and thereby, most likely, only serving to overcode it by an all-too-serious line of death); let’s rather ask: how do these operations work?

“That knowledge can be described”; this is, in a way, the implicit assertion of every “knower,” that a definition can be provided of the known’s own structure. Although the knower asserts his knowledge exists rigorously — that is, in such a way that its structure can be defined –nevertheless, the organizing or individuating drives supporting the knowledge (the hidden forces beneath the idea) must be grasped intuitively before we can “know” the knowledge itself (the pure idea, or form of the problematic field.) Otherwise knowledge and learning would be absolutely impossible, i.e., would have only an internal origin based on identity.

On the contrary, this prior recognition of a “problematic” structure — knowledge’s cautious but deliberate self-ungrounding — is paradoxically the driving urge towards discovery, the wild and infinite energy-overcoming-entropy we experience in learning. Though certainly knowledge misleads us, quite deliberately, as to the nature of this process! (It is easy enough for “knowers” to cover up, even to themselves, the unconscious, a-subjective lightning flash of intuition experienced directly “as” the subjective struggle in the world to learn.)

For knowledge is superficially calm and sure of itself, at least when observed in its close-to-equilibrium state: we must admit of a certain strange feeling of “possession” of an organized (i.e., received) truth, a smooth tabulation of events into neatly ordered columns and rows. Learning, on the other hand, is turbulence itself. Pre-organized knowledge is constitutionally incapable of questioning, or even apprehending as such, the underlying structures upon which its coherence depends.

This paradox could perhaps be formulated as follows. We must know the limits of our knowledge in order to be certain of our certainty. But — and this is, in some sense, Wittgenstein’s most important contribution to Western philosophy — “knowing the limit of our knowledge” entails already knowing both sides of it, that is, to know both the already-known, organized side with which we are familiar, as well as the unknown, unorganized side of which we know little — if anything at all.

“Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics or not. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifiance for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence…

A Thousand Plateaus 148

The world is segmented, stratified, breaking or already broken-up: what happened, what is happening? What crosses over, releasing free, untamed intensities as it travels along the intermediary zones? What is it which is just now passing through — beyond, behind, between — these lines? How do these lines — and always bundles of lines, fibres — work? A question of codes, partitions, signal-sign networks: are these lines of forced motion (interpretation) or rather lines of free variation (experimentation)? “The mixed semiotic of signifiance and subjectification has an exceptional need to be protected from any intrusion from the outside.” (ATP 179) A single expressive substance precludes the development of nomadic machines — truth, God, the Earth, are not “allowed” to have an outside! Do we think we understand this “allowed”? What happened? But already in order to translate we must achieve an expressive unification, yet this by no means guarantees that the language we thus arrive at conveys a message: “You will never know what just happened, or you will always know what is going to happen…” (ATP 193)

All becoming are molecular — not objects or forms easily recognized from science, habit or experiences — and in this sense “unknowable,” at least from the outside. Are human beings the same way? Is there no relation of resemblance between the woman and becoming-woman, the child and becoming-child? “All we are saying is that these in-dissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be understood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a micro-femininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman…” (ATP 275) The question is not about representing a woman, producing an accurate imitation of a particular molecular multiplicity — but of making something that has to do with that multiplicity enter into composition with the speeds of the image. In becoming we discover our own proximity to the molecular: “That is the essential point for us: you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements, you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule.” (275)

Can we “make” the world a becoming? Only if we reduce ourselves to “one or several” abstract lines can we find our own proximities, our own zones of indiscernibility; that is, our own passageway to a becoming-everywhere, a becoming-everybody: “The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and each world as an assemblage effectuating it.” (ATP 280) Eliminate everything exceeding this moment; but don’t forget to include within the moment everything which it includes in its turn. We ourselves slip into the moment, which slips transparently into the impersonal, the indiscernible. “One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things… Saturate, eliminate, put everything in.” (ATP 280)

In truth, the nature of the abstract machine is the most general problem: there is no reason to tie the abstract machine to the universal or the constant, or to efface the singularity of abstract machines insofar as they are built around variables and variations.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (92-93)

Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the Chomsky-Labov debate exemplifies a well-developed but perhaps under-emphasized aspect of their thinking — namely, their theory of semiotics — and in particular the curious relationship they argue holds between language and the abstract machine. The debate between Labov and Chomsky concerns linguistic variation — an issue which, as we shall see, helps illuminate an important aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the abstract machine. Chomsky’s position is more or less what you would expect it to be: linguists isolate from an essentially heterogeneous linguistic reality a standard and homogenous system, thus grounding abstraction not in aggregations but in positions, roots, and linearity. In fact, he claims, it’s only in this way that one can get at real principles, and that science can operate in no other way… — and so on. D+G summarize:

“Chomsky pretends to believe that by asserting his interest in the variable features of language, Labov is situating himself in a de facto pragmatics external to linguistics. Labov, however has other ambitions…” (A Thousand Plateaus 93)

What does Labov do (according to Deleuze and Guattari)? He refuses the very alternative which Chomsky presumes exists between linguistic constants and pragmatic variability. Labov asks us to think about lines of pure or inherent variation. It’s not difficult to see why Deleuze and Guattari like Labov so much; it’s also not difficult to see see why they must move definitively beyond this particular debate, and challenge its very pretext. But let’s slow down, what do these lines mean in the first place — these lines of “inherent variation”? Deleuze and Guattari clarify that, on the one hand, we ought not to think of these simply as “free variants” already in relation to a given style or pronunciation (that is, whose features would still lie completely outside the system, thus leaving its homogeneity intact.) On the other hand, these lines of variations are not a “de facto” mix of both systems — in other words, we shouldn’t think that each system is homogeneous in its own right (“as if the speaker moved from one to the other,” write D+G.)

What, in other words, is the alternative which Labov refuses? It is precisely the one which linguistics wants to set up for itself: the practice of assigning variants to different systems or relegating them to a place outside the structure. Labov’s critical objection to Chomsky — and quite brilliant insight — is that it is the variation itself which is systematic. Deleuze and Guattari explain: “Labov sees variation as a de jure component affecting each system from within, sending it cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it off, to make it homogenous in principle.” (A Thousand Plateaus 93) Isn’t it ultimately the abstract distinction between two systems that proves the most arbitrary? The majority of forms belong to one or another only by chance…
Quite close to this question of variation is that of pragmatics, which Deleuze and Guattari argue quite passionately ought to be thought not only as an “external” science involving “nonlinguistic” factors (88-89). In fact, linguistics “itself” is inseparable from an “internal pragmatics” — variables of “content,” they argue, in perpetual interaction with variables of “expression”:

The only way to define the relation [between expression and content] is to revamp the theory of ideology by saying that expressions and statements intervene directly in productivity, in the form of a production of meaning or sign-value. The category of production doubtless has the advantage of breaking with schemas of representation, information and communication. (89)

But they recognize that this too is ambiguous, even if only in that it appeals to an “ongoing dialectical miracle” by which matter is transformed into meaning — in other words, the social process itself into a signifying system. Here there is a semiconductor, or transducer, which reminds us of Serres’ diagrams of guests who are also hosts themselves — that is, always “cascaded” by a parasitic chain, already interrupted, by the noisy third.
This self-miraculation of the primary transformation announces a key shift in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, towards an understanding of the material interactions of bodies not in terms of the production of goods — but rather in terms of machinic assemblages, rhizomes, multiplicities: “a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another.” (90)
The relation between the rhizome and the body without organs is mapped out “structurally” through the refinement of the notion of an abstract machine. The key shift they make here is analogous to the shift in the very first plateaus (One or Several Wolves?) where they recommence the discussion of abstract machines, marking a shift from the inflection placed upon these ideas in Anti-Oedipus. Let’s return there just for a moment before we continue:

“There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take “collective agents” to mean not peoples or societies but multiplicities.) The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicity pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that the or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is an instant apprehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity…” (25)

In some sense there are two sides to all of this, two non-symmetrical but reverse operations (capitalism and schizophrenia…) One of the important consequences of the “rhizomatic shift” is a complication of reductionistic or essentialist theories of media and technology, always beholden to this static myth of studying tools “themselves,” somehow in isolation from the world they’re used in! The Deleuzo-Guattarian challenge is to go even more abstract than this — to find the real-virtual abstract machines operating in every register and dimension of human and non-human activity.
The point is that tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible. “Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky’s syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhizome.” (15) But even if the links proliferate, we never get beyond fake multiplicities, hierarchical systems with definitive centers of signifiance and subjectification. This poses particularly urgent challenges with respect to information science because

“[i]n the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along pre-established paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ.

Pierre Rosensthiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denoucing ‘the imagery of command trees’ (centered systems or hierarchical structures,) note that “accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent structures privileged status… The arborescent form admits of topological explanation… In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior… The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place…”

The authors point out that even when one thinks one has reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one — of what we call the radicle type — because its ostensible nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution.” (D+G, A Thousand Plateause 15-16)

It is nonetheless the case that intensity also works itself; the hegemony of any signifier is always shaken loose, challenged, mutated. Semiotic systems can regain their freedom and shake off the “traces” of the tracings: a minimal event can upset the entire balance of power, flip the parasitic chain inside-out. This is why, in producing pragmatics, it is not enough to construct a semantics, to take into account signifiers and referents — because these very notions of significance and reference are themselves bound up with “supposedly autonomous and constant structure” (91) — a pre-treatment by a standardizing phonetic, semantic or syntactic machine:

“For a true abstract machine pertains to an assemblage in its entirety: it is defined as the diagram of that assemblage. It is not language based but diagrammatic and superlinear. Content is not a signified nor expression a signifier. Rather, both are variables of the assemblage.” (91)

The problem with Chomsky is that he cannot really conceive of variation or pragmatics. His abstract machine retains both linear ordering and an arborescent model: but what about pragmatic values, or internal variables? Once these are taken into account (especially with respect to indirect discourse,) one is obliged to construct “abstract objects” or bring “hypersentences” into play. D+G argue this implies “superlinearity,” or as they would have it, a plane without linear order, a rhizome:

“From this standpoint, the interpenetration of language and the social field and political problems lies at the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface. The abstract machine as it relates to the diagram of the assemblage is never purely a matter of language, except for lack of sufficient abstraction. It is language that depends on the abstract machine, and not the reverse. At most, we may distinguish in the abstract machine two states of the diagram, one in which variables of content and expression are distributed according to their heterogeneous forms in reciprocal presupposition on a plane of consistency, and another in which it is no longer even possible to distinguish bewteen variables of content and expression because the variability of that same plane has prevailed over the duality of forms, rendering them ‘indiscernible’…”

Notes on Derrida and Cybernetics

Let us conjecture that the invention of the transistor — an auto-controllable circuit — indicates the attainment of a critical level of development in cybernetics, a “tipping point.” Then for writing the corresponding moment is the invention of the video camera, perhaps more precisely the photograph: now seeing is writing, literally marking. Visio-literature is the only kind that can ever exists for us today — even ancient literature is post-modern for 21st-century readers. We cannot simply forget the history of writing, which is also the history of humanity — a spirit which is more like a ghost successively inhabiting our bodies, then our writing-instruments, then our machines, and next…?

Driven by a new kind of virtue, cybernetics questions the character or essence of humanity. It ungrounds our classical assumptions, our metaphysical coordinates. It has an uncanny tendency to dissolve rigorous divisions between human beings and animals, and then in turn the holy division between animals and machines. Ontological collapse. Becoming-machine is always a becoming-animal, but the dissolution goes even further than this.

In its fullest and strangest sense — as both a theory of systems and a theory of control — cybernetics blurs the division between information and noise, between chaos and organization. Cybernetics extrudes not only a difference at the heart of hominid unicity, in the specific identity of the human — the closure of a certain conservative metaphysic — but also the awakening of a new kind of multiplicity — cybernetics, in its own way just like writing, a new kind of writing: a massive, convivial and tool-generating science of social technology.

There are no universal codes. Automation demands a new philosophy of writing, writing beyond codes, surpassing the regime of pure and mixed order-signs. Cybernetics is co-extensive with a spontaneous revival of humanity, waiting in a sense upon the closure of certain ‘closed’ metaphysics, and the gentle re-opening of smooth spaces for thought — the illumination of ‘in-between’ spaces for new experiments, new explorers. In a profound sense, the practice of cybernetics has a vital connection to the future of the human struggle for freedom — a future, whether of absolute violence or unequalled pity, which seems almost precluded by the ravenous shadows of colossal war machines.

Our languages, our religions, our economies, our political groups and rules, even our sciences and philosophies, are violent swarms of machines (waging wars for peace) — and this catastrophe which is erupting, which is already here, is of the order of true “event,” but also enigmatically is of another order entirely — a futural order — indicaticating an entirely new position with regard to the tangled mazes of classical ontology. Cybernetics is already a position beyond thought, even in a sense beyond cybernetics — a movement beyond motion, telecommunication, uncannily points beyond the bloody quagmires characteristic of contemporary political and economic culture — indeed beyond all the tiny slaveries of “civic” society.

Within the networked folds of communicating devices, a new aspect of humanity is awakening, a new kind of struggle for enlightenment and freedom across the globe. A revolution between people, a revival of human society, a dynamic, even exuberant regeneration through interconnection and multiplicity. Cybernetics provokes an apparent and disturbing contradiction: it is a purely immanent, historical intervention, itself a kind of abstract social ‘machine’ which transforms all manner of social practices.

Yet, within this operation, a completely new dimension intrudes, guiding these transformations unconsciously, like a shadow or precursor — a glimmer of pure exteriority. An intimation of closure, not of an ending but of vast, chaotic and potentially dangerous transformations occuring all aspects of society. Decentralization and reintegration on a massive scale. An out of joint time, indeed.

One of Derrida’s most important projects in the Grammatology is to show the essential necessity of writing, of the “trace,” in (‘classical’) philosophical discourse — especially in those discourses which had always believed it possible to do without them! For example, Hegel — the first cybernetician — rehabilitates thought on the basis of a memory which is productive of signs.

The trace is a disjunction before it is a decision — an oversight which completely overturns the metaphysical machinery of classical philosophy. In this sense, Derrida’s overall critique of metaphysics resonates not only with cybernetics as a world-historical system of deterritorialization, but perhaps even more curiously, with certain rupturous developments in abstract algebra and pure mathematics.

In particular, the cautious critique of the signifier, and the advocation of a more primordial logic of the mark, trace, differentiation or distinction, functions in a quite similar way in relation to the philosophy of writing as does Herbert Spencer-Brown’s groundbreaking work in metamathematics — in particular his development of a ‘primary algebra’ or mathematical logic of “distinction”2 — to the philosophy of mathematics.

Spencer-Brown constructs his system presuming only the existence of two asymmetrical states — a marked state (a cross) and an unmarked state (a void) — upon which two asymmetrical operations can be performed. Namely, marks can be repeated — placed alongside another, or ‘called’ — and marks can be reversed — embedded within another, or ‘crossed.’

Here is an example of possible notation, as well as the identities for the two basic operations:

Mark                 ( ).
Un-mark             .

Calling:             ( ) ( ) = ( ).
Crossing:         ( ( ) ) = .

[For those wishing a brief demonstration on the primary arithmetic and algebra, as well as further information on connections to other areas of mathematics and science, you will find some wonderful resources here.]

Astoundingly, using this minimal system, Spencer-Brown was able to derive a majority of the results of mathematical logic, arithmetic, and set theory; and in this way he resolved many formerly irresolvable difficulties. In fact, many results from all of these fundamental branches of mathematics can be derived without difficulty — and sometimes in easier ways! — from Spencer-Brown’s primary algebra.

Godel writes in his proof (on unprovable statements in fundamental arithmetic) about the ‘possibility’ that there may indeed be a proof of completeness — however, it will necessarily be one which is not in the language of set theory or arithmetic. Spencer-Brown’s logic is a candidate for a rehabilitation of just this kind — a ‘primary’ arithmetic which grounds logic itself — illustrating that even the notion of proof itself depends not (only) upon a formal system, but even upon a pre-systematic logic of distinction, a marking in some form or another.

Another way to express the same logic: writing comes before mathematical intuition, even before speech — it provides the ground, the possibility for intellection, the virtual field in which intuition can be set free. Writing supplants formal systems, reinvents them, plays with them, comprehends and surpasses them. The notion of “supplanting” is, for Derrida, an adequate definition of the art of writing itself.

We wish to ask in turn how the mark itself is supplanted by a pure machinic operation, by ‘parasitic’ systems of control — how the logic of writing finally becomes curious and makes an experiment of itself, overturning and tearing itself apart, decentralizing and reintegrating the quantized pieces, in a wild and Dionysian burst of radical self-transformation.

Is a whole new kind of “writing” beginning to seem closer to reality than ever before? — a question which itself may also be a symptom that writing is always already unfolding a new dimension from within itself. But it seems like today a new kind of possibility is becoming visible. While the question of technology is not the substance of Derrida’s analysis, but rather a peripheral inquiry or marginal case, it serves as a useful interruption which causes a coherence at a higher structural level of writing. Such twists and rearrangements are all over Derrida’s work — they are practically a signature — but especially in this case they have more than a rhetorical import.

Derrida is reminding us that cybernetics, in some sense, also points to the closure of a certain metaphysical and historical age — not merely that it is a new science of writing equally as “deep” as philosophy, but on the contrary, that cybernetics has a tendency to precisely supplant philosophy, as writing had already done to images.

The following is a translation of a section containing a table of the evolutions of the names of the transcendental field and the operators of differenciating liaisons from L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Véronique Bergen. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 545-549.
Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/05/07.

The outbreak of new problems reorients the disposition of the transcendental, of its “schematizing” dramatization and of its actual deployments:

Bergsonism:

–problem of the apprehension of the problematic

–invention of the concept of intensive multiplicities, continuous versus discrete, metrical multiplicities set in the work of the method of intuition reshaping the transcendental space of Duration.

Difference and Repetition:

–problems of a “complex repetition,” of a “free difference” subtracted from identity, and from the rise of a “genital thought.”

–reorientation of the transcendental site in accordance with the concept of integration/differenciation–in short, of actualization/virtualization–via the method of dramatization.

Logic of Sense:

–problem of a conquest of surfaces as the rise of events, of sense, of thoughts.

–reorientation of the transcendental source in accordance with the concept of the empty case as univocal Being and with a serial method of structuralist obedience.

Spinoza and the Problem of Expression:

–problem of an anti-Cartesian structure treating the question of the relation between the finite and the infinite, between cause and effect, reorienting the question of true, adequate ideas.

–reorientation of the virtual site in accordance with the concept of expression (in its ontological, epistemological and ethico-political modalities) and the synthetic method by causation.

A Thousand Plateaus:

–problems of a typology of lines, forces and spaces composing the real, of the rise of an “automata” thought, and of a micropolitics of art, science, and philosophy as life.

–invention of concepts of planomenon, smooth and striated spaces, war machine/state apparatus, tree/rhizome, semiotic regimes, ritournelles and crystals of time.

Foucault:

–triple problem of enunciations and visibilities of knowledge, of forces of power and of the aesthetic becoming of the self.

–creation of concepts of a schematizing diagram of forces, of subjectivation as fold of the Outside, the death of man.

Movement-Image and Time-Image:

–problem of the apprehension of time in the cinema, passage of the indirect image from a time subjected to movement to the direct image of time subordinating itself to a becoming aberrant movement.

–creation of a typology of signs and images explicating this reversal of time subjected to movement in an autonomous time.

The Fold:

–problems of the emergence of the new, of the event, of the soul/body relation, of the bond between the expressed and expression.

–creation of concepts of the fold carried to the infinite, of incompossibles and divergent series of the neo-baroque.

What Is Philosophy?

–problem of thought arranging itself to chaos.

–invention of the concept of the triple Chaoide, philosophy, art and science, of their planes, agents and operators.

Anti-Oedipus 1: Desiring-Machines
For every organ-machine, an energy machine (1).
Schizophrenia and the time before the man-nature dichotomy/split (1).
Nature lived as process of production (2).
Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines (3).
The schizophrenic experiences not nature, but nature as a process of production (3).
Production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation (4).
The recording process and consumption directly determine production, but within the production process itself (4).
Production as process:
Production of production—actions and passions
Production of recording processes—of the distribution and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference
Production of consumption—sensual pleasures, anxieties, and pain (4).
Man as the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe (4).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) does not distinguish between producer-product (5).
Desiring-machines are always binary machines (5). [Probably due to the co-existence of paranoic (repulsive) machines and miraculating (attractive) machines—in order to create the identifications of the celibate machine—more on this later.]
Productive or connective syntheses: and…and…and (5).
Flow-producing machines couple with organ-machines that interrupts the flow (5).
Desire couples flows, causes the currents to flow, flows itself, and breaks the flows (5).
The object presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow causes the fragmentation of the object (6).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) also does not distinguish between product/producing (6).
Production is always something ‘grafted onto’ the product—desiring-production is the production of production (6).
Schizophrenic as universal producer (7).
Levi-Strauss’s bricolage and schizophrenia—the schizo shows an indifference to the tools at hand and the goal of the project; there is only the drive as anti-teleological principle of desire (7).
Bricolage works with whatever is at hand—a limited set of rules, and a finite and heterogeneous set of tools (7).
Product/producing unity allows for D+G to talk about “an enormous undifferentiated object” (7).
Nirvana and the view that it would be better if there had never been machines or connections (7).
The body suffers from being organized in a triangulated fashion (8).
The full BwO is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable (8).
Desiring-machines only work when they break down and work continually by breaking down (8).
BwO is nonproductive but is produced as the identity of producing-product in connective synth (8).
BwO is the body without an image (8).

Full BwO is the realm of antiproduction—the connective syntheses couple production w/ antiproduction (8).
2. The Body without Organs (BwO)
In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, the BwO sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid (9).
Repulsions of machines by the BwO (9).
Paranoic machine—BwO repels the machines that attempt to break in and persecute it (9).
BwO invests a counterinside or a counteroutside—paranoic machines occur when the BwO cannot tolerate the desiring-machine’s connections (9).
The socius as a full BwO that forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface (10).
Capital is the BwO of the capitalist being—it produces surplus value as it (seems to miraculously) reproduce itself (10).
Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their functioning seems miraculated by it (11).
Some kind of full body—either the earth, the body of the despot, or the body of capital (11).
BwO (as capital) now falls back on desiring-production (11).
Attraction or miraculating machines vs. repulsion and paranoic machines—these two coexist, but the paranoic machines attempt to de-miraculate the organs (11).
“But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the productive forces and all the organs of production, and that acts as a quasi-cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them” (11-12).
There is a movement from libido (connective synthesis) to an energy of Numen (disjunctive synthesis) that has to do with the divine (miraculating) nature of disjunctive energy (13).
The full BwO is produced as antiproduction to keep itself from having any sort of triangulation imposed on it (15).
The schizo has his own recording code that does not coincide with the social code (15).
Thus he scrambles all the codes, never recording the same event in the same way (15).
3. The Subject and Enjoyment
Production of recording is produced by the production of production (16).
Recording is followed by consumption, but the production of the consumption is produced in and through the production of recording (16).
There is a discerning of this (strange) subject on the recording surface (16).
There is everywhere a reward in the form of becoming or in the production of an avatar (16).
Libido (energy of production)àNumen (energy of recording)àVoluptas (energy of consumption) (16).
Let us term celibate machine that which forms a new alliance between the desiring-machine and the BwO so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism (17).
The subject is produced as a residuum or confuses himself with this third productive machine (conjunctive synthesis) and with the residual reconciliation that it brings about (17).
Critique of conjunctive synthesis (So it’s…!) (18).
Conjunctive synthesis as autoerotic or automatic pleasure (18).
Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation the really primary emotion (18).
Pure intensities come from repulsion and attraction and form the opposition of these forces (19).
All intensities are positive in relationship to the 0 intensity that constitutes the full BwO (19).
These oppositions of the forces of attraction and repulsion produce an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited numbed of stationary, metastable states through which the subject passes (19).
BwO is an egg…the development of the subject along particular trajectories and vectors (19).
Points of disjunction on the BwO form circles that converge on the desiring-machines (20).
The subject is forever decenteredàparanoic vs. miraculating = celibateà the subject (20).
Klossowski, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return (21).
Homo natura = Homo historia in the schizophrenic process (21).
4. A Materialist Psychiatry
Truly materialist psychiatry has a twofold task: introducing desire into mechanism, introducing production into desire (22).
Trinary schema of schizo—dissociation/autism/being-in-the-world—this indicates a false understanding of the schizophrenic process/phenomenon (22-23).
These three concepts reintroduce the ego through the body-image—the final avatar of the soul (23).
The schizo is past worrying about individualization and considers it a false problem (23).
Freud doesn’t like schizos—they are too much like philosophers—triangulation doesn’t stick (23).
Analytical relation between drives and symptoms—the symbol/symbolized (23).
Oedipus makes a classical theatre out of the unconscious as a factory (24).
Unconscious as representation or expression versus units of production and productive unconscious (24).
Product must be related to the process (24).
Nature = Industry, Nature = History (25).
Kant—the reality of the object is a psychic reality because it is produced by desire (25).
Kant (and psychoanalysis) reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, and so is content with exploiting to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as lack (26).
If desire produces, its product is real (26).
Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as unites of production (26).
Desire does not lack an object—it lacks a subject (or fixed subject) unless there is a repression (26).
The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself (26-27).
What is missing is the objectivity of man (27).
Spinoza in the garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary (28).
Lack is created by society—footnote on Sartre’s use of scarcity as initial premise (28).
Social production is desiring-production under determinate conditions (29).
What needs to be explained is that the masses, at some level, wanted fascism (29).
Fantasy is always group fantasy (30).
Great socialist utopias as counterinvestments whereby revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field (31).
Artist causes desiring-machines to undermine technical machines (32).
Technical machine not a cause but an index of a general form of social production (32).
The socius may be the Earth, the body of the Despot, or the body of Money (33).
Capitalism faced with decoding—born of the encounter of two flows—money and free labor (33).
Substituting money for the very notion of a code promotes an axiomatic of abstract quantities (33).
The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, the more the government reterritorializes to absorb surplus value (35).
Eschatology of materialist psychiatry (35).
5. The Machines
The hyle (flows of matter) as ideal continuity—machine of a machine (36).
The law of production of production links all machines back to other machines (36).
Every machine has a code (38).
Orchid’s surplus code allows for the wasp to tap into and works for the benefit of both species (39).
One vocation of the sign is to produce desire (39).
6. The Whole and Its Parts
Multiplicity is beyond the One and the Many (42).
We no longer believe in a primordial totality or a colorless dialectic of evolution (42).
Totality as the whole at the periphery that does not totalize, but is added as a separate part (42).
The Whole that does not totalize but establishes paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels (43).
BwO is a non-totalized totality (43).
Mechanism and vitalism both fail to address the key issue (43).
Partial objects and nonpersonal hyle (flow), and not global persons (ego formation) (44).
Jung + Freud on the psychoanalyst as father-figure or as magician-figure (46).
“It must be granted either that sexuality is sublimated or neutralized in an through social (and metaphysical) relations, in the form of an analytic ‘afterward’; or else that these relations bring into play a nonsexual energy, for which sexuality has merely served as the symbol of an anagogical ‘beyond’” (46).
Child’s recording process and the process of feedback (from the child) (48).
The unconscious is an orphan (49).
Psychoanalysis perpetuates repression (interminable!) (50).

The Imperialism of Oedipus
Structural interpretation and Oedipus as universal, Catholic symbol (52).
Freud wants to get rid of Oedipus for biological realism (54).
Oedipus biunivocalizes (triangulates, forces an exclusive disjunctive synthesis) (54).
Expressive or productive unconscious? (54).
Psychoanalyst as theatre director and not engineer of the unconscious (54).
Three Texts of Freud
Freud reduces the group to individual—Freud affirms only an exclusive disjunction (54).
Resignation to Oedipus and castration (59).
The One of negative theology, exclusive series (60).
Castration of the unconscious—but the unconscious knows nothing of Oedipus or lack (61).
What are the operations that inject the unconscious with beliefs? (61).
Group fantasy—fucking the socius, wanting to be fucked by the socius (62).
Group = symbolic; individual = imaginary.
Learning to experience institutions themselves as mortal (63).
Group fantasy includes the disjunctions—everyone passes into the body of the other on the BwO (63).
Klossowski and the singular state vs. the gregarious state (63).
Formulation of a subject-group vs. a subjugated group (64) [This can be related properly to the concepts of the molar and molecular in D+G, but also with Sartre’s formulations of serialized groups vs. groups-in-fusion (Critique of Dialectical Reason)].
3 factors—castration/quantitative libido/nonlocalizable resistance (65).
The viscous vs. the liquid libido (does it stick or does it slip?) (65).
What must be distinguished are qualitative flows of libido (differences in kind!) (66).
Flows ooze, traverse the (Oedipal) triangle, breaking apart its vertices (67).
Criteria for an Oedipal cure? Contradictory results (67).
Falsification in order to produce the schizophrenic as identity (plagued with autism) (68).
Connective Syntheses
There are no contradictions in the unconscious (or BwO), only degrees of humor [black humor as that which allows contradictions to coexist and intensify rather than cancel out] (68).
In contrast to either/or exclusions, there is the either…or…or of the combinations and permutations where the differences amount to the same without ceasing to be differences (affirmative/inclusive disjunctive synthesis) (69-70).
Opposition between two types of connective syntheses—global and specific (ego formation, global ‘persons’) vs. partial and nonspecific (flows of desire on the BwO) (70).
Global persons (Oedipus) do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them (70).
The personal material of transgression and the person himself do not pre-exist prohibition (71). [Excursus: this is the only place I have located an instance of ‘transgression.’ Here it is perhaps necessary to distinguish between transcendence and transgression. In the former, the emphasis is placed on the teleological role that involves a relation between system formations (the triangulation that posits Oedipus as the alpha and omega)—(less crudely, transcendence goes beyond). However, there is no beyond to transgression—instead, transgression is created retroactively as the effect of the Oedipal ego formation that occurs due to a constituting law or prohibition. According to Paul, it is the sin in me that transgresses—I do that which I hate because the law designates that which constitutes transgression as such. Call me out if this is vague].
Prohibition displaces itself because it displaces desire (71).
Formation of global persons alters the synthesis of production (71).
Two steps of Oedipus: mother as the site of differentiation and sister as exchange: the logic of 3+1 where the sister serves as that which must be prohibited in order for the subject to constitute his own triangle outside the family (with its independent vertices) and the sister as that which must be kept open for exchange with the outside social field (allowing for the sibling to create her independent Oedipal triangle as well). Thus the +1 functions as that which allows for the triangular structure as such to be disseminated and transmitted across the socius (71).
Thus the point is to reproduce the triangular form, creating new triangles (71).
BwO and the dissolution of biunivocalization and triangulation (72).
Imposing an exclusive disjunction on the sexes (Lacanism) (72).
Phallus or law as transcendent, absent signifier (73).
Oedipusà3+1àthe One being the phallus (73).
Despotic signifier—money as detachable chain is converted into capital as detached object, which exists only in the fetishist view of stocks and lacks (73).
Not to deny Oedipus, but to deny that Oedipus is produced by the unconscious (74).
Teleology of psychoanalysisàtranscendence of psychoanalysisàfirst paralogism (74).
Kant and the criteria immanent to understanding a Transcendental Unconscious [transcendental meaning against transcendence and asserting principles of immanent syntheses of the unconscious] (74-75).
Disjunctive Synthesis
Familial triangulation gives the co-ordinates of differentiation to the ego in regard to generation, sex and vital state (75).
Kant’s God as master of disjunctive synthesis (76).
Inclusive disjunction (schizo) vs. exclusive (Oed) (76).
The schizo is dead or alive but not both at once, but each of the two as the terminal point of a distance over which he glides (76).
The schizo is not neo-Hegelian (76).
Schizo as transsexual, trans-alivedead, trans-parentchild (77).
Schizophrenic God has so little to do with the God of religion, even though they are related to the same (disjunctive) syllogism (77).
Affirm the distance and traverse the space between terms in an inclusive disjunction (77).
The schizo liberates a raw genealogical material (78).
God as the energy of recording—paranoic/miraculating (78).
Immanent and transcendent use of disjunctive synthesis (78).
Oedipus creates the differentiation and the undifferentiated (78-79).
Bateson (“Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behaviorial Science vol.1 1956), Russell and the double bind as oedipalizing force—second paralogism, double bind as the whole of Oedipus (80).
Psychoanalysis and policing—Marx and the Jewish question (81).
Oedipus and undecidability (in the mathematical sense) (81).
Schizoanalysis de-oedipalizes the unconscious (81).
Turning the analytical machine into a part of the revolutionary machine (81).
The true difference is between the real machinic element and the structural whole of the Imaginary-Symbolic (83).
Lacan, despotic signifier, problem of disciples following transcendent lack (83).
5. Conjunctive Synthesis
We believe in a biochemistry of schizophrenia (in conjunction with the biochemistry of drugs) that will be progressively more capable of determining the nature of this egg and the distribution of a field-gradient-threshold (84).
Intensive emotion as the common root and the principle of differentiation of delirium and hallucinations (84).
The first thing distributed on the BwO are races, cultures and their gods—the schizo participates in history—hallucinates and raves universal history—All delirium is racial but not necessarily racist (85).
Races and cultures designate zones of intensity, fields of potential—Phenomena of individuation and sexualization are produced within these fields—we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, departing becomes as easy as being born or dying (65).
Artaud—Nietzsche—every name in history is I (66).
Theory of proper names is not concerned with representation but with a class of ‘effects,’ effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain and the operation of a system of signs (66).
D+G:
But simulation must be understood in the same way as we spoke of identification. It expresses those nondecomposable distances always enveloped in the intensities that divide into one another while changing their form. If identification is nomination, a designation, then simulation is the writing corresponding to it, a writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the desiring-machine. The point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice. To seize an intensive real as produced in the coextension of nature and history, to ransack the Roman Empire, the Mexican cities, the Greek gods, and the discovered continents so as to extract from them this always-surplus reality, and to form the treasure of the paranoic tortures and celibate glories—all the pogroms of history, that’s what I am, and all the triumphs too, as if a few simple univocal events could be extricated from this extreme polyvocity: such is the ‘histrionism’ of the schizophrenic, according to Klossowski’s formula, the true program for a theater of cruelty, the mis-en-scene of a machine to produce the real (87).
D+G again:

Moreover, the pretender Richemont’s stroke of genius is not simply that he ‘takes into account’ Louis XVII, or that he takes other pretenders into account by denouncing them as fake. What is so ingenious is that he takes other pretenders into account by assuming them, by authenticating them—that is to say, by making them too into states through which he passes: I am Louis XVII, but I am also Hervagault and Mathurin Bruneau, who claimed to be Louis XVII. Richemont doesn’t identify with Louis XVII, he lays claim to the premium due the person who traverses all the singularities of the series converging around the machine for kidnapping Louis XVII. There is no ego at the center, any more than there are persons distributed on the periphery. Nothing but a series of singularities in the disjunctive network, or intensive states in the conjunctive tissue, and a transpositional subject moving full circle, passing through all the states, triumphing over some as over his enemies, relishing others as his allies, collecting everywhere the fraudulent premium of his avatars. Partial object: a well situated scar—ambiguous besides—is better proof than all the memories of childhood that the pretender lacks. The conjunctive synthesis can therefore be expressed: ‘So I am the king! So the kingdom belongs to me!’ But this me is merely the residual subject that sweeps the circle and concludes a self from its oscillations on the circle (88).
D+G: “The law of the double bind operates relentlessly, ruthlessly, flinging us from one pole to the other, in such a way that what is foreclosed in the Symbolic must reappear in the Real in a hallucinatory form (90).
Stimuli are not organizers, but inductors (91).
Parental figures are indifferent inductors and the true organizer is elsewhere—on the side of what is induced, not on that of the inductor (92).
Foucault and the critique of psychoanalysis—healthy triangulation and perverted triangles (93).
If the psychotic escapes Oedipalization, this only means that he is doubly embedded and that there requires a differential calculus as such to analyze the organization of an extended familialism (93).
Bergson represents an opening up of the closed system and inscribing within that system a temporal dimension of duration that is irreducible and nonclosed (96).
Thus, Oedipus is open to a social field—not 3+1, but 4+n (96).
This leads to a poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle whose vertices are in danger of exploding—father and mother exist only as fragments and are never organized into a structure (96-97).
D+G:
Schizophrenia or desiring-production is the boundary between the molar organization and the molecular multiplicity of desire; this limit of deterritorialization must now pass into the interior of the molar organization, and it must be applied to a factitious and subjugated territoriality. We are now able to surmise what Oedipus signifies: it displaces the limit, it internalizes the limit. Rather a society of neurotics than one successful schizophrenic who has not been made autistic. Oedipus, the incomparable instrument of gregariousness, is the ultimate private and subjugated territoriality of European man. (Moreover the displaced, exorcised limit of border shifts to the interior of Oedipus, between its two poles) (102).
The opposition between the Great Man and the Crowd—Hitler as oedipal subject or German crowd as oedipalized mass (102).
Oedipus is a means of integration into the group (103).
D+G again:
There is therefore a segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses of the unconscious, a use that does not coincide with divisions between classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a dominating class: it is this use that brings about the feeling of ‘indeed being one of us,’ of being part of a superior race threatened by enemies from outside [This notion corresponds to Zizek’s formulations of racism, insofar as, for Zizek and Lacan, what is always despised is the manner in which the Other enjoys differently from me—or it is because we are under the illusion that the Other has a more direct or original connection with the Thing or objet a] (103).
For Lacan, the segregative use of the conjunctive synthesis is a precondition for Oedipus (104).
D+G on ideology:
It is not a question of ideology. Thereis an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the preconscious investments ‘ought to be.’ That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure. Preconscious investments are made, or should be made, according to the interests of the opposing classes. But unconscious investments are made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject, individual or collective, who desires (104).
D+G on the disintegration of Oedipus:
There again is the question of an intense potential for investment and counterinvestment in the unconscious. Oedipus disintegrates because its very conditions have disintegrated. The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is in opposition to the segregative and biunivocal use. Delirium has something like two poles, racist and racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic. And between the two, ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings where the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary potential. Even Schreber finds himself to be the Great Mongol when he breaks through the Aryan segregation. Whence the ambiguity in the texts of great authors, when they develop the theme of races, as rich in ambiguity as destiny itself. Here schizoanalysis must unravel the thread. For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force (105-106).

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). In the second place, singularities posses a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. In the third place, singularities or potentials haunt the surface. Everything happens at the surface in a crystal which develops only on the edges. Undoubtedly, an organism is not developed in the same manner. An organism does not cease to contract in an interior space and to expand in an exterior space–to assimilate and to externalize. But membranes are no less important, for they carry potentials and regenerate polarities. They place internal and external spaces into contact without regard to distance. The internal and external, depth and height, have biological value only through this topological surface of contact. Thus, even biologically, it is necessary to understand that ‘the deepest is the skin.’ The skin has as its disposal a vital and properly superficial potential energy. And just as events do not occupy the surface but rather frequent it, superficial energy is not localized at the surface, but is rather bound to its formation. Gilbert Simondon has expressed this very well: the living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit… The characteristic polarity of life is at the level of the membrane; it is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists… The entire content of internal space is topologically in contact with the content of external space at the limits of the living; there is, in fact, no distance in topology; the entire mass of living matter contained in the internal space is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living… To belong to interiority does not mean only to ‘be inside,’ but to be on the ‘in-side’ of the limit… At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another. [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. p. 103-104.]

Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique (Paris: P.U.F., 1964), pp. 260-264. This entire book, it seems to us, has special importance, since it presents the first thought-out theory of impersonal and pre-individual singularities. It proposes explicitly, beginning with these singularities, to work out the genesis of the living individual and the knowing subject. It is therefore a new conception of the transcendental. The five characteristics through which we have tried to define the transcendental field–the potential energy of the field, the internal resonance of series, the topological surface of membranes, the organization of sense, and the status of the problematic–are all analyzed by Simondon. Thus the material of this, and of the following paragraph, depends directly on the book, with which we part company only in drawing conclusions. [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. fn. 3, p. 344.]

As a fourth determination, we will say therefore that the surface is the locus of sense: signs remain deprived of sense as long as they do not enter into the surface organization which assures the resonance of two series (two images-signs, two photographs, two tracks, etc.). But this world of sense does not yet imply unity of direction or community of organs. The latter requires a receptive apparatus capable of bringing about a successive superimposition of surface planes in accordance with another dimension. Furthermore, this world of sense, with its events-singularities, offers a neutrality which is essential to it. And this is the case, not only because it hovers over the dimensions according to which it will be arranged in order to acquire signification, manifestation, and denotation, but also because it hovers over the actualizations of its energy as potential energy, that is, the realization of its events, which may be internal as well as external, collective as well as individual, according to the contact surface or the neutral surface-limit which transcends distances and assures the continuity on both its sides. And this is why (determination number five) this world of sense has a problematic status: singularities are distributed in a properly problematic field and crop up in this field as topological events to which no direction is attached. As with chemical elements, with respect to which we know where they are before we now what they are, likewise here we know of the existence and distribution of singular points before we know their nature (bottlenecks, knots, foyers, centers…). This allows us, as we have seen, to give an entirely objective definition to the term ‘problematic’ and to the indetermination which it carries along, since the nature of directed singularities and their existence and directionless distribution depend on objectively distinct instances. [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. p. 104.]

See Albert Lautman, Le Probleme du temps (Paris: Hermann, 1946), pp. 41-42: “The geoemtrical interpretations of the theory of differential equations clearly places in evidence two absolutely distinct realities: there is the field of directions and the topological accidents which may suddenly crop up in it, for example: the existence of the plane of singular points to which no direction has been attached: and there are the integral curves with the form they take on in the vicinity of the singularities of the field of directions… The existence and distribution of singularities are notions relative to the field of vectors defined by the differential equation. The form of the integral curves is relative to the solution of this equation. The two problems are assuredly complementary, since the nature of the singularities of the field is defined by the form of the curves in their vicinity. But it is no less true that the field of vectors on one hand and the integral curves on the other are two essentially distinct mathematical realities.” [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. fn. 4, p. 344.]

Certain distinctions proposed by Simondon can be compared to those of Husserl. For Simondon exposes the technological insufficiency of the matter-form model, in that it assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed homogeneous. It is the idea of the law that assures the model’s coherence, since laws are what submit matter to this or that form, and conversely, realize in matter a given property deduced from the form. But Simondon demonstrates that the hylomorphic model leaves many things, active and affective, by the wayside. On the one hand, to the formed or formable matter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying singularities or haecceities that are already like implicit forms that are topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of deformation: for example, the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. On the other hand, to the essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must add variable intensive affects, now resulting from the operation, now on the contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous, more or less elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos. One addresses less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter than material traits of expression constituting affects. Of course, it is always possible to “translate” into a model that which escapes the model; thus, one may link the materiality’s power of variation to laws adapting a fixed form and a constant matter to one another. But this cannot be done without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables from the state of continuous variation, in order to extract from the fixed points and constant relations. Thus one throws the variables off, even changing the nature of the equations, which cease to be immanent to matter-movement (inequations, adequations). The question is not whether such a translation is conceptually legitimate–it is–but what intuition gets lost in it. In short, what Simondon criticizes the hylemorphic model for is taking form and matter to be two terms defined separately, like the ends of two half-chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of molding behind which there is a perpetually variable, continuous modulation that is no longer possible to grasp. The critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on ‘the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension,’ of energetic, molecular dimension–a space unto itself that deploys its materiality through matter, a number unto itself that propels its traits through form.

W e always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed. Doubtless, the operation that consists in following can be carried out in one place: an artisan who planes follows the wood, the fibers of the wood, without changing location. But this way of following is only one particular sequence in a more general process. For artisans are obliged to follow in another way as well, in other words, to go find the wood where it lies, and to find the wood with the right kind of fibers. Otherwise, they must have it brought to them: it is only because merchants take care of one segment of the journey in reverse that the artisans can avoid making the trip themselves. But artisans are complete only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to make ‘workers’ of them. We will follow a flow of matter, a machinic phylum. The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action. Of course, there are second-order itinerancies where it is no longer a flow of matter that one prospects and follows, but, for example, a market. Nevertheless, it is always a flow that is followed, even if the flow is not always that of matter. And, above all, there are secondary itinerancies, which derive from another ‘condition,’ even if they are necessarily entailed by it. For example, a transhumant, whether a farmer or an animal raiser, changes land after it is worn out, or else seasonally; but transhumants only secondarily follow a land flow, because they undertake a rotation meant from the start to return them to the point from which they left, after the forest has regenerated, the land has rested, the weather has changed. Transhumants do not follow a flow, they draw a circuit; they only follow the part of the flow that enters into the circuit, even an ever-widening one. Transhumants are therefore itinerant only consequentially, or become itinerant only when their circuit of land or pasture has been exhausted, or when the rotation has become so wide that the flows escape the circuit. Even the merchant is a transhumant, to the extent that mercantile flows are subordinated to the rotation between a point of departure and a point of arrival (go get-bring back, import-export, buy-sell). Whatever the reciprocal implications, there are considerable differences between a flow and a circuit. The migrant, we have seen, is something else again. And the nomad is not primarily defined as an itinerant or as a transhumant, nor as a migrant, even though nomads become these consequentially. The primary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold a smooth space: it is this aspect that determines them as nomad (essence). On their own account, they will be transhumants, or itinerants, only by virtue of the imperatives imposed by the smooth spaces. In short, whatever the de facto mixes between nomadism, itinerancy, and transhumance, the primary concept is different in the three cases (smooth space, matter-flow, rotation). It is only the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judgment on the mix–on when it is produced, on the form in which it is produced.

But in the course of the preceding discussion, we have wandered from the question: Why is the machinic phylum, the flow of matter, essentially metallic or metallurgical? Here again, it is only the distinct concept that can give us an answer, in that it shows that there is a special, primary relation between itinerance and metallurgy (deterritorialization). However, the examples we took from Husserl and Simondon concerned wood and clay as well as metals. Besides, are there not flows of grass, water, herds, which form so many pyhla or matters in movement? It is easier for us to answer these questions now. For it is as if metal and metallurgy imposed upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried in the other matters and operations. The difference is that elsewhere the operations occur between two thresholds, one of which constitutes the matter prepared for the operation, and the other the form to be incarnated (for example, the clay and the mold). The hylomorphic model derives its general value from this, since the incarnated form that marks the end of an operation can serve as the matter for a new operation, but in a fixed order marking a succession of thresholds. In metallurgy, on the other hand, the operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deformation of transformation overspills the form. For example, quenching follows forging and takes place after the form has been fixed. Or, to take another example, in molding, the matallurgist in a sense works inside the mold. Or again, steel that is melted and molded later undergoes a series of successive decarbonations. Finally, metallurgy has the option of melting down and reusing a matter to which it gives an ingot-form: the history of metal is inseparable from this very particular form, which is not to be confused with either a stock or a commodity: monetary value derives from it. More generally, the metallurgical idea of the ‘reducer’ expresses this double liberation of a materiality in relation to a prepared matter, and of a transformation in relation to the form to be incarnated. Matter and form have never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous variation. If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to bring int its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy: the musical smith was the first ‘transformer.’ In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness of thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter. The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metalic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device. And thought is born more from metal than from stone: metallurgy is minor science in person, ‘vague’ science or the phenomenology of matter. The prodigious idea of Nonorganic Life–the very same idea Worringer considered the barbarian idea par excellence–was the invention, the intuition of metallurgy. Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs. The ‘Northern, or Gothic, line’ is above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body. The relation between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondance with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. pp. 408-411]

Gilbert Simondon has contibuted much to the analysis and critique of the hylomorphic schema and of its social presuppositions (‘form corresponds to what the man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he gives his orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible”). To the form-matter schema, Simondon opposes a dynamic schema, that of matter endowed with singularities-forces, or the energetic conditions at the basis of a system. The result is an entirely different conception of the relations between science and technology. See L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique (Paris: PUF, 1964). [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. fn. 33, p. 555.]

On the mold-modulation relation, and the way in which molding hides or contracts an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, Du mode d;existence des objets techniques, pp. 28-50 (‘modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable manner’; p. 42). Simondon clearly shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to the technological operation but to the social mode of work subsuming that operation (pp. 47-49). [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. fn. 92, p. 562.

The following is subsections 2 and 3 of section 1 of chapter 1 of Gilbert Simondon's L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. pp. 39-50. Original translation by Taylor Adkins 10/19/07.

2. Validity of the hylemorphic model; the obscure zone of the hylemorphic model; generalization of the notion of the capture of form; modeling, molding, modulation

The technical operation of the capture of form can thus be used as a paradigm provided that one asks this operation to indicate the true relations which it institutes. However, these relations are not established between the raw material and the pure form, but between the prepared matter and materialized forms: the operation of the capture of form does not suppose only raw material and form, but also energy; the materialized form is a form that can act as a limit, as a topological border of a system. The prepared matter is that which can transport the potential energy which charges it in the technical manipulation. The pure form, playing a role in the technical operation, must become a system of points of application corresponding to the reactive forces, while the raw material becomes a homogeneous vehicle of potential energy. The capture of form is a common operation of the form and matter in a system: the condition of energy is essential, and it is not furnished by the form alone; it is the whole system that is the focus of potential energy, precisely because the capture of form is an in-depth operation throughout the entire mass, in consequence of an energy state of reciprocity of the matter in relation to itself<!--[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–>. It is the distribution of the energy which is determining in the capture of form, and the mutual suitability of the matter and the form is related to the possibility of existence and the characters of this energy system. The matter is what transports this energy and the form what modulates the distribution of this same energy. The unity matter-form, at the time of the capture of form, is in the field of energy.

The hylemorphic model retains only the ends from these two half-chains that the technical operation elaborates; the schematics of the operation itself is veiled, been ignored. There is a hole in the hylemorphic representation, making the true mediation disappear, the operation itself which attaches one to the other both half-chains by instituting an energy system, a state that has evolved and must indeed exist so that an object appears with its haecceity. The hylemorphic model corresponds to the knowledge of a man who remains outside the workshop and considers only what enters there and what is done there; to know the true hylemorphic relation, it is not enough even to penetrate inside the workshop and to work with the craftsman: one would need to penetrate inside the mold itself to follow the operation of the capture of form to the various levels of the dimensions of physical reality.

Seizure in itself, the operation of the capture of form can effectuate itself in many ways, according to various methods apparently very different from each other. The true technicality of the operation of the capture of form largely exceeds the conventional limits which separate trades and the fields of work. Thus, it becomes possible, by the study of the energy field of the capture of form, to bring closer the molding of a brick to the operation of an electronic relay. In an electron tube of the triode type, the “matter” (vehicle of potential energy which actualizes itself) is the cloud of electrons leaving the cathode in the circuit cathode-anode-effector-generator. The “form” is what limits this actualization of potential energy in reserve in the generator, i.e. the electric field created by the potential difference between the grid of order and the cathode, which is opposed to the cathode-anode field, created by the generator itself; this counter-field is a limit to the actualization of the potential energy, as the walls of the mold are a limit to the actualization of the potential energy of the system clay-mold, transported by the clay in its displacement. The difference between the two cases lies in the fact that, for clay, the operation of the capture of form is finished in time: it tends, rather slowly (in a few seconds) towards a state of equilibrium, until the brick is taken from the mold; one uses the state of equilibrium while un-molding when it is reached. In the electron tube, one employs a support of energy (the cloud of electrons in a field) of a very weak inertia, so that the state of equilibrium (adequacy between the distribution of the electrons and the gradient of the electric field) is obtained in an extremely rapid time compared to the preceding (some billionths of a second in a tube of greater dimensions, some tenth of a billionth of a second in the smaller tubes).

Under these conditions, the potential of the grid of order is used as a variable mold; the distribution of the support of energy according to this mold is so fast that it is carried out within the smallest minimum time for the majority of the applications: the variable mold is then used to vary in time the actualization of the potential energy of a source; one has stopped not when equilibrium is reached, one continues by modifying the mold, i.e. the grid voltage; actualization is almost instantaneous, there is no end to its release from the mold, because the circulation of the support of energy is equivalent to a permanent release from the mold; a modulator is a continuous temporal mold. The “matter” is there almost only as the support of potential energy; it however always preserves a defined inertia, which prevents the modulator from being infinitely fast. In the case of the clay mold, that which, on the contrary, is technically used as the state of balance that one can preserve while un-molding: one then accepts a rather large viscosity of clay so that the form is conserved during the release from the mold, although this viscosity slows down the capture of form. In a modulator of energy, because one does not seek to preserve the state of balance after the conditions of equilibrium have been met: it is easier to modulate energy carried by compressed air. The mold and the modulator are extreme cases, but the essential operation of the capture of form is achieved there in the same way; it consists of the establishment of energy, durable or not. To mold is to modulate in a final way; to modulate is to mold in a continuous and perpetually variable way.

A great number of technical operations use a capture of form that has intermediate characters between the modulation and the molding; thus, a spinneret, a rolling mill, are molds in a continuous mode, creating by successive stages (master keys) a final profile; the release from the mold is continuous there, as in a modulator. One could design a rolling mill which would really modulate the matter, and would manufacture, for example, a crenulated or dented bar; rolling mills that produce corrugated sheet iron modulate the matter, while a rolling mill smoothes only a model. Molding and modulation are the two borderline cases whose modeling is the average case.

We would like to show that the technological paradigm is not deprived of value, and that it is possible up to a certain point to think the genesis of individuated beings, but under the express condition that one retains as an essential model the relation of the matter in the form through the energy system of the capture of form. Matter and form must be seized during the capture of form, at the moment when the unity of the becoming of an energy system constitutes this relation on the level of the homogeneity of forces between the matter and the form. What is essential and central, is the operation of energy, supposing energy potentiality and a limit of actualization. The initiative of the genesis of substance returns neither to the raw material as passive nor to the form as pure: it is the complete system that generates, and it generates because it is a system of actualization of potential energy, joining together in an active mediation two realities, of different orders of magnitude, in an intermediate order.

Individuation, in the classical sense of the term, cannot have its principle in the matter or the form; neither form nor matter is enough with the capture of form. The true principle of individuation is the genesis itself taking place, i.e. the system in becoming, as its energy self-actualizes. The true principle of individuation can neither be sought in what exists before the individuation occurs, nor in what remains after the individuation is accomplished; it is the system of energy that is individuating insofar as it realizes in the individual this internal resonance of the matter taking form and a mediation between orders of magnitude. The principle of individuation is the single way in which the internal resonance of this matter is established taking this form. The principle of individuation is an operation. With the result that a being is itself, different from all the others; it is neither its matter nor its form, but it is the operation by which its matter took form in a certain system of internal resonance. The principle of individuation of brick is not the clay, nor the mold: this heap of clay and this mold will leave other bricks than this one, each one having its own haecceity, but it is the operation by which the clay, at a given time, in an energy system which included the finest details of the mold as the smallest components of this wet dirt took form, under such pressure, thus left again, thus diffused, thus self-actualized: a moment ago when the energy was thoroughly transmitted in all directions from each molecule to all the others, of the clay to the walls and the walls to the clay: the principle of individuation is the operation that carries out an energy exchange between the matter and the form, until the unity leads to a state of equilibrium. One could say that the principle of individuation is the common allagmatic<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> operation of the matter and form through the actualization of potential energy. This energy is energy of a system; it can produce effects in all the points of the system in an equal way, it is available and is communicated. This operation rests on the singularity or the singularities of the concrete here and now; it envelops them and amplifies them<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3]<!–[endif]–>.

3. Limits of the hylemorphic model

However, one cannot extend in a purely analogical way the technological paradigm to the genesis of all beings. The technical operation is complete in a limited time; after actualization, it leaves a partially individuated, more or less stable being which draws its haecceity from this operation of individuation having constituted its genesis in a very short time; the brick, at the end of a few years or several thousand years, again becomes dust. The individuation is complete in one stroke; the individuated being is never individuated more perfectly than when it leaves the hands of the craftsman. There thus exists a certain externality of the operation of individuation compared to its result. Quite to the contrary, in the living being, the individuation is not produced by only one operation, limited by time; the living being is in itself partially its own principle of individuation; it continues its individuation, and the result of a first operation of individuation, instead of being only one result which gradually degrades, becomes the principle of a later individuation. The individuating operation and the individuated being are not in the same relation except in the product of the technical effort.

To become a living being, instead of being a becoming following individuation, is always to become between two individuations; individuating and individuated are in the living being in a prolonged allagmatic relation. In the technical object, this allagmatic relation exists only for a moment, when both half-chains are connected one to the other, i.e. when the matter takes form: in this moment, individuated and individuating are coincident; when this operation is finished, they separate; the brick does not carry its mold<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4]<!–[endif]–>, and it is detached from the workman or the machine that pressed it. The living being, after being begun, continues individuating itself; as time individuates the system and partial results of individuation. A new mode of internal resonance is instituted in the living being whose technology does not provide the paradigm: a resonance through time, created by the recurrence of the results going up towards the principle and becoming the principle in its turn. As in the technical individuation, a permanent internal resonance constitutes the unity of the organism. But, moreover, with this simultaneous resonance a successive resonance is superimposed, a temporal allagmatic. The principle of individuation of the living is always an operation, like the capture of technical Form, but this operation is of two dimensions, that of simultaneity, and that of succession, through an ontogenesis supported by memory and instinct.

One can then wonder whether the true principle of individuation is not indicated better by the living than by the technical operation, and if the technical operation could be known as individuating without the implicit paradigm of the life exists in us, that knows the technical operation and practices it with our body diagram, our practices, and our memory. This question is of a wide philosophical range, because it results in wondering whether a true individuation can exist apart from life. For knowledge, it is not the technical, anthropomorphic and consequently zoomorphic operation that is necessary to study, but the natural processes of formation of the basic unities that nature presents apart from the domain defined as the living.

Thus, the hylemorphic model, departing from technology, is insufficient under its usual species, because it is even unaware of the center of the technical operation of the capture of form, and led in this direction to be unaware of the role played by the conditions of energy in the capture of form. Moreover, even restored and completed in the form of the triad matter-form-energy, the hylemorphic model is likely to wrongly objectify a contribution of the living in the technical operation; it is this fabricated intention which constitutes the system thanks to which the energy exchange is established between matter and energy in the capture of form; this system does not form part of the individuated object; however, the individuated object is thought by mankind as having an individuality as a manufactured object, by reference to the manufacture. The haecceity of this brick as brick is not an absolute haecceity, it is not the haecceity of this preexistent object due to the fact that it is a brick. It is the haecceity of the object as a brick: it comprises a reference for use and, through it, to the fabricated intention, therefore with the human gesture which constituted the two half-chains joined together in a system for the operation of the capture of form<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[5]<!–[endif]–>.

In this semse, the hylemorphic model is perhaps only apparently technological: it is the reflection of the vital processes in an abstractly known operation and draws its consistency of what it is made by a living being for living beings. This would explain the very great paradigmatic capacity of the hylemorphic model: coming from the living, it goes back there and applies to it, but with a deficiency owing to the fact that the awakening which has clarified it seizes it through the wrongly simplified particular case of the technical capture of form; it seizes types more than individuals, specimens of a model more than of realities. The dualism matter-form, seizing only the extreme terms of that which is larger and smaller than the individual, obscures the reality that is of the same order of magnitude that produced the individual, and without which the extreme terms would remain separate: an allagmatic operation spreading itself starting from a singularity.

However, it is not enough to criticize the hylemorphic model and to restore a more exact relation in the course of the technical capture of form to discover the true principle of individuation. It is also not enough to suppose in the knowledge that one takes from the technical operation a paradigm initially biological: even if the relation matter-form in the technical capture of form is easily known (adequately or inadequately) thanks to the fact that we are living beings, it is not more important than the reference to the technical field that makes it necessary for us to clarify, explicate, and objectify this implicit concept that the subject carries with it. If testing the vital is the condition of the represented technique, the represented technique becomes in its turn the condition of the knowledge of the vital. One is thus returned from one order to another, so that the hylemorphic model seems to owe its universality mainly to the fact that it institutes reciprocity between the vital domain and the technical field. Besides, the model is not the only example of a similar correlation: the automatism to penetrate the functions of the living by means of representations resulting from technology, from Descartes to current cybernetics. However, an important difficulty emerges in the hylemorphic use of the model: it does not indicate what is the principle of individuation of the living, precisely because it grants to the two terms an existence prior to the relation which links them, or at least because it cannot make it possible to think this relation clearly; it can represent only the mixture, or attachment part by part; the way in which the form informs the matter is not enough for the hylemorphic model. To use the hylemorphic model is to suppose that the principle of individuation is in the form or in the matter, but not in the relation of both. The dualism of substances–soul and body–is in the seed of the hylemorphic model, and one can wonder whether this dualism will leave the technique in good condition.

In order to look further into this examination, it is necessary to consider all the conditions that surround a notional capture of consciousness. If there were only the living individual being and the technical operation, the hylemorphic model perhaps could not be constituted. In fact, it seems well that the middle term between the living field and the technical field was, at the hylemorphic origin of the model, social life. What the hylemorphic model reflects initially is a socialized representation of work and a representation also socialized of the individual living being; the coincidence between these two representations is the foundation common to the extension of the diagram from one field to the other, and the guarantor of its validity in a given culture. The technical operation which imposes a form on a passive and unspecified matter is not only an operation considered abstractly by the spectator who sees between the workshop and what is produced without knowing the development properly stated. It is primarily the operation commanded by the free man and executed by the slave; the free man chooses matter, unspecified because it is generically enough to the designer under the name of substance, without seeing it, without handling it, without preparing it: the object will be made of wood, or iron, or out of the earth. Truthfully, the passivity of matter is its availability abstracted behind the given order that others will carry out. Passivity is that of the human mediation which will retrieve the matter. The form corresponds to that which the man who commands has thought by himself and which he must express in a positive way to whom he gives his orders: the form is thus of the order of the expressible; it is eminently active because it is what one imposes on those who will handle the matter; it is the same contents of the order, that through which it governs. The active character of the form and the passive character of the matter answer the conditions of the transmission of the order which supposes social hierarchy: it is in the contents of the order that the indication of matter is undetermined and at the same time form is determination, expressible and logical. It is through social conditioning that the soul is opposed to the body; it is not through the body that the individual is citizen, participating in collective judgments, common beliefs, surviving in the memory of his fellow citizens: the soul is distinguished from the body as the citizen from the human living being. The distinction between form and matter, the soul and the body, reflects a city that contains citizens in opposition to the slaves. One must notice however that the two designs, technological and civic, if the citizens agree to distinguish the two terms, do not assign to them the same role in the two couples: the soul is not pure activity, full determination, whereas the body would be passivity and indetermination. The citizen is individuated as a body, but he or she is also individuated as a soul.

The vicissitudes of the hylemorphic model owes to the fact that it is neither directly technological nor directly vital: it is a technological operation and a vital reality mediated by the social, i.e. by the conditions already given—in inter-individual communication—from an effective reception of information, in the species the order of fabrication. This communication between two social realities, this operation of reception which is the condition of the technical operation, masks what, within the technical operation, allows two extreme terms—form and matter—to enter into interactive communication: information, the singularity of the “here and now” of the operation, pure event in the dimension of the appearing individual.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–> This reciprocity causes a permanent energetic disposal: in a very limited space a considerable amount of work can effectuate itself if a singularity attracts a transformation there.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> Greek word allagma can mean change or vicissitude, but it can also mean that which can be given or taken in exchange, which more genuinely captures the idea of energy exchange here [Tr. Note].

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3]<!–[endif]–> These real singularities, occasion of a common operation, can be called information. The form is an apparatus for producing them.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4]<!–[endif]–> It only manifests the singularities of the here and now constituting the conditions of information of its particular mold: state of usury of the mold (engravings, irregularities).

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[5]<!–[endif]–> The individuality of the brick, that by what this brick expresses such operation that have existed here and now, envelops the singularities of this here and now, prolongs them, amplifies them; however, the technical production seeks to reduce the margin of variability, of unpredictability. The real information that modulates an individual seems like a parasite; it is that by which the technical object remains in some measurement inevitably natural.

Go back to previous section of The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis

Cellular automata

The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. D’arcy Thompson

All organisms are modular: life always consists of sub-organisms which are involved together in a biological network. The interrelations between organ and organism form a series of feedback loops, forming a cascading and complex surface. Each organ parasites off the next, but this segmentation is not spontaneous. Rather, it is development itself, the decoupling of non-communicating spaces for the organization of divergent series. Creative evolution, self-organization and modularity are the same idea.

The theory of the development of metabolic modularity is called morphogenesis. ‘Morphogenesis’ in its literal sense means the creation of shapes or forms. But in the (relatively) narrow sense we intend it here, morphogenesis is a self-symmetry of the biological structure (onto itself) which allows it to develop in such a way as to divide while remaining unseparated, that is: to ‘individuate,’ or split apart into fused symmetrical segments.

The transformations which occur during development, all the mad foldings and unfoldings, bifurcations and convergences, are somehow encoded linearly into our DNA. Each genomic triplet codes for a specific amino acid, which when chained together form proteins which form cellular subcomponents which form organs… Morphogenesis concerns the historical development of complex biological networks: the forces of evolutionary drift, of mutation and historical selection. Every segment, every scale can be mapped to a series of instructions: coupling or decoupling, how many times and in what order, how quickly or slowly. (Codes are libidinal, the secret is always erotic: why else would the meaning be hidden, transfigured?)

After combination and selection, the resultant components may be simpler or more complex. It is impossible to say before divergent series are brought into communication whether they will find a balance or not. There are always risks: I think of Aristotle and the golden mean. There always two ways for an aspect of human development to fail catastrophically, always two directions for a tiny shift in behavior to throw the system into chaos. Chaos, fluctuating fields of differential intesities, matter and energy: these are the raw forces of morphogenesis. Morphogenesis is not just biological. It means that energy organizes itself, forms complex asymmetrical networks, even evolve entirely new formations. Molecular evolution occurs cosmically and microscopically as well as biologically. Matter does not need a miracle to ‘trans-individuate’.

One of the ideas that I’m really interested in is that highly organized behavior patterns can result from repeatedly applying simple rules. Adaptation is also finding a suitable new repetition, not just a different one. The genetic code is based on a fractal self-representation of the human body. But non-human processes of becoming also exhibit morphogenetic characteristics: we think of weather, galaxy formation, turbulence, crystals. These are expressive forces of nature, that is, an expression of the generative powers of matter to create new structures, to produces new self-organizing forms. Matter actively defines and creates the universe through self-organizing processes; and furthermore the formal structure of these processes has an order which can be abstractly understood.

This idea of morphogenetic evolution is actually very old, and probably much older than the Greeks. The story doesn’t begin with human beings, it doesn’t even begin with biology. It begins with matter, reality, singular events which have the possibility of breaking free from their environment, which are free to create new relationships between themselves and their environments. Richard Lewontin criticizes sociobiologists for reducing human behavior to genetics or to evolution. The point about evolution, and not just human behavior, is that it is radically free and radically constrained. It only takes place on the scale of individuals, in the asymmetrical interrelations between individuals. Even amoebas face one another; galaxies express an identity through light and sound no less than territorial songbirds through song and color.

Every moment an individuation occurs there is the self-unfolding of a new sequence, the beginning of a universe, from chaos, from void. The world is not inhabited by spirits, but by energy. After Deleuze, there are molecular processes of self-organization, and molar processes of deceleration and acceleration, convergence and divergence. Serres considers atomism to be a thought of morphogenesis, the origin of the turbulence, of new and complex forms from the tiniest difference in the speed of flowing energy. Chaos and difference are the origin; within the flurry and turbulence of activity, a spontaneous order results, as from many complex machines working tirelessly to organize matter and energy into symmetrical forms. Cosmic, molecular, geological, biological and social networks.

The point of chaos theory is to accustom us towards thinking inter-dimensionally, non-linearly, between orders. In other words, the essential thing is to think the process of morphogenesis itself apart from the individual; or rather, to see the individual as a moment of a complex evolving line of infinitesimal differences, as an expressive force whose implications are much larger and much smaller than the individual alone. To see the individual as a single link in a complex self-referential network, in-between dimensions, capable of only the tiniest mutations, the most tedious of differences. Catastrophe theory shows us that complex and chaotic variations emerge spontaneously from ‘tiny’ or differential modulations of intensity or speed. The action happens between dimensions, becoming is fractal: the origin of structure is also the origin of substructure. Modularity is scale-free, morphogenesis is both cosmic and molecular.

All forms are also information, but not everything unfolds endlessly into substructures; only singularities, only events can mulitply and form couplings and new resonances. In other words we also need situations; there must also be a preindividual field of intensities for the process of morphogenesis to act upon. It is not a force outside the system creating new forms: it is an internal capability of the system itself. Not ‘information processing’ but the production of new forms, the conveyance of information. Impregnate digital space with new codes, new formations: and here finally we have the production of a plane of virtual events. Digital morphogenesis refers to a plane of machinic consistency whose absolute convergence of all potential forms we would have to compare to Thompson’s descriptions of mathematical beauty.

Machinic forms of self-organization are already up to their usual work; the question is how to accelerate positive processes of becoming, how to initiate dialogue between two non-communicating series, how to create new interfaces. Biocomputation take place in a curious interspace between scientific biology and theoretical mathematics. There is no formalism to pose the question of machinic morphogenesis; we must create new kinds of self-organizing spaces: new environments, new machines, new processes of machinic becomings. We realize we already have the only kind of space it would be possible to develop machinic agents capable of modularity and morphogenesis, namely, digital space. The discretization of reality is the first step towards a machinic re-integration of the segmented components. Digital space is modular, internally-subdivided space; it has a perfectly discrete memory at any point in time. But its operation, the performative properties of the space, are not captured in the formal arrangement, but only in the execution process, only in the actual production of a user interface. The digital is always in a state of becoming-human, establishing new relations to (and representations for) the human.

The digital is swiftly emerging as the media for a revolution we are just beginning, a journey both outwards (between modes of existence, of (dis)assembling machines) as well as inwards (through specific events, forces and individuals.) Cultural space is already beginning to reflect the disintegration of the virtual in favor of the digital. Signals become miracles, we forget how to recognize morphogenesis. Organisms do not find a niche to inhabit; they dynamically create a relationships with the environment. And in fact there is no strict distinction between internal and external: all forces express potentials, there is a univocity of energy. What matters now is our power not only to experience machinic becomings, animal becomings, but to enact them, to create spaces where the impossible no longer seems out of reach. The political meaning of morphogenesis is that it represents the possibility of possibility, in other words, that the world doesn’t have to be this way. We are capable of change, we can create new spaces and modes for interacting with one another and the world and ourselves. There is chaos and difference at the origin, but harmony is possible. I am fascinated by the idea that life evolves by creating interfaces between different spaces: fusing or decoupling, individuating or self-organizing, smoothing together or splitting apart. So, my final question is about the criteria we ought to use to evaluate spaces. For example, are we judging by the permeability of spaces to pleasurable activity, how soft and light a space is? Or are we rather judging by purely formal or aesthetic criteria, the poetry or proportions of the space? Or, finally — are we judging by the actual capacity for new and differentiating developments to take place in the space?

Process

In Mechanism and Biological Explanation [Maturana 1970], Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela argue that machines and biological forms are very closely related — so closely, in fact, that biologists can reasonably claim living systems are machines. This is not meant merely as a pedagogical metaphor, but rather as a rigorous analogy, which emphasizes important symmetries, and even better, expresses concisely specific experimental and theoretical aims. In what sense, then, are living systems machines?

A machine is defined by a group of abstract operations, satisfying certain specific conditions. An abstract machine is this system of inter-relations which is itself independent of the actual components which ‘realize’ the machine. A fishing boat can be made from many kinds of wood, sailed on many bodies of water, used to store many species of fish; a game of tag can be played with an arbitrary number of arbitrary people in any suitable space. What matters is not the specificity of a given component but the specificity of its relationships. We can define living systems as specific groups of components and their inter-relations, according to both abstract structure and specific functionalities. But insofar as we are only considering their structure, living beings are isomorphic to collections of finite groups of abstract machines: biology considers micro- and macro-structure, whereas systems theory studies inter- and intra-relations.

In short even the two styles of theorizing are quite closely related. Maturana and Varela are arguing that, just like abstract machines and actual living systems, our theories of living systems and our theories of machines are isomorphic. The two explanatory modes are, in some way, the same thought expressed twice, spoken in different languages and at different rhythms, for different people altogether. Yet the generic series of interrelations which they both describe have essential structural symmetries. A change in location just varies our perceptive horizon of possible actualizations, but not their underlying rule. It is precisely this ‘synthetic’ level of biological analysis which must invoke the immaterial plane of inter-relations. Whereas to analyze in terms of a machine is to identify rules of inter-dependence, modes of producing inter-activity which already imply a potential materiality. Either theoretical analysis produces a structural definition, independent from any particular material reality.

Machine

This abstract-machinic level of analysis seems quite distinct from what we consider the engaged and active analysis in biology, observing and experimenting with living systems. But this indicates that we do not yet have a general theory of living machines of sufficient explanatory power. It is clear, at any rate, that we need both layers of analysis in order to understand living processes. Despite their apparent unity, we must examine the machine and the organism in both their concrete difference and abstract structure, both the concept model and the material instance. Indeed, these are the simultaneous and irreducible aspects of scientific explanation: “The structures of living systems and their actual (material) components are complementary yet distinct aspects of any biological explanation: they complement each other reciprocally but cannot be reduced to one another.”2 Whether biology or cybernetics, we find an inherent double-articulation of inter-relations and intra-relations, of ontological rules and actual instances. The question in either case is not how the information is embodied or a specific component realized. Rather, the cybernetic or biological question is how these abstract bodies of information are correlated, not the specific operation content (form) but the specification of operation (in-formation.) The two sciences are the same, their problem spaces are isometric.

Order

Our question is how to use theory to build new machines. Let’s sketch out a potential theoretical apparatus capable of properly posing our question. We have considered that the concept of machinic autopoesis in Maturana and Varela has a function in both biology and cybernetics. The important idea here was that it really had the same function in both disciplines, just on different scales. After all, autopoesis is the raw material of individuation itself. Autopoesis conditions possible modes of inter-relation and orderings of sub-developments. It regulates its own development, it is self-different and yet identical; it constitutes a turbulent yet stable flux which maintains a complex and well-adapted cycle of behavior, carefully “managing” the roles and inter-relations of components.

Cybernetics is about developing systems of control; the idealized abstract machine is more or less a perfectly decentralized machinic awareness, an image of the human mind itself, it would be a perfectly nebulous rhizomatic network, and would be aware as a swarm of submachines, even perhaps “alive” through this emergent consciousness within the algebraic balance of computational sub-components. As Raymond Ruyer wryly notes, we might fall into the dualistic fallacy less if there weren’t any mirrors around! Sure, nature and our brains and society are a rhizomatic network; and there’s really no reason to think we can’t eventualy develop computers exceeding human intelligence. Remember: the computer is really just a further evolution of mnemotechnics, memory technology. Computers are ideal symbolic manipulators, precisely because they are unaware of what they are manipulating. They promise to “forget” what the message is about, to transmit the signal innocently. We value this about computers now; but it may not be true in the future!

For now, at least, computers are without the human bias of caring about the information they are processing. Humans, of course, imagine they have an opinion about the world; and we imagine computers do not form such opinions, or anyway, that we haven’t found any evidence yet that they do. They do not remember something unless told to; they have no autonomy, no desire. But how is human desire, human automony produced, at bottom? What are the machines of the unconscious which produce the strongest or most subtle desires, passions, impulses? The delicate chemistry of our instincts is the most sensitive and credible sense we possess. The question underneath all of this is the production of subjectivity; how do we regulate and preserve life and awareness? How do we measure the principle of difference, how do we calculate the origin of exteriority? How do we transform a theoretical inversion into an intervention into real situations, to actual new formations? A few notes, for now: (1) Life is structural, but it depends upons an a-structural ‘reserve’ of energy, or chtonic milieu. 2) Life is structured becoming, pulls itself out from an inner space. (3) Life produces scale, ordering, introduces zones and grids and metric planes into the universe, into itself, by mapping its local environment onto itself.

Our first conclusion here is that all measuring has to be brought down to a vital scale; more precisely, all scales are biological, they are produced and constrained by biology. They are formed and deformed by sensation and imagination. (We cannot measure what we cannot imagine, what we are not clever enough to think up a way to measure.) The other point to notice is that our abstract model here is topological at root. The concrete model must be considered as a purely materialist, immanent conception. Life is time, light, energy, space — life is em-bodied. Cybernetics seeks to describe and produce systems of “control”; it is ‘information-architecture’ without ontology. What exists is energy embodied in a specific system; what doesn’t exist per se is the machinic form which is ‘clearly embodied. The immaterial is our theory of machines, the becoming-invisble. Both technological and biological systems ‘embody’ a specific immaterial form, and condition the production of new (sociotechnical, theoretical) formations. But each formation is always at risk of arising (or collapsing) due to a spontaneous, asymmetrical pulse.

[1] – Francisco Varela; Humberto Maturana. Mechanism and Biological Explanation. Philosophy of Science, Vol. 39, No. 3. (Sep., 1972), pp. 378-382.