User:DoctorMabuse/Sandbox9
Quotations from Deleuze and Guattari
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Semiotics
[edit]We are abandoning the formal classifications of semiotic compontents, and instead are primarily considering the kind of working organizations they constitute—in view of specific systems of deterritorializing fluxes.[1]
As for the method of textual deconstruction, I know what it is, and I admire it, but it has nothing to do with my own method. I don't really do textual commentary. For me, a text is nothing but a cog in a larger extra-textual practice. It's not about using deconstruction, or any other textual practice, to do textual commentary; it's about seeing what one can do with an extra-textual practice that extends the text.[2]
"His form is our code. His substance is our flow. They belong to the same machine: the semiotic machine."[3]
"Icon: the signified looks like the signifier; Index: the signified is in a de facto relation with the signifier; Symbol: the signified is in a conventional, institutional relation with the signifier (artifice)."[4]
[D]iagrams must be distinguished from indexes, which are territorial signs, but also from icons, which pertain to reterritorialization, and from symbols, which pertain to relative or negative deterritorialization.[5]
[Peirce's] distinctions are based on signifier-signified relations (contiguity for the index, similitude for the icon, conventional rule for the symbol); this leads him to make the "diagram" a special case of the icon (the icon of relation). Peirce is the true inventor of semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First, indexes, icons, and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by territoriality-deterritorialization relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the diagram as a result seems to have a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol.[6]
"Redundancy: this term was created by communication theorists and linguists. Redundancy is the unutilized capacity of a given code. Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, distinguishes between empty repetition and complex repetition, the latter being irreducible to mechanical or material repetition. This term also implies the opposition between signifying redundancy, which is cut off from any contact with reality, and machinic redundancy; which produces effects on the real."[7]
"What is 'underlying' linguistic utterance, perceptive semiotization, etc., is an abstract machine to which the coordinates of existence (space, time, substance of expression) do not apply. This object, at the heart of the object, is not situated in some kind of heaven of representations: it is both 'in the mind' and in things, but outside all coordinates. As a deterritorializing machine it cuts across the coordinates both of language and of existence. It is neither a mental object nor a material one."[8]
There is a single abstract machine that is enveloped by the stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as opposed to the Planomenon of the plane of consistency.[9]
A true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency, which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and reterritorializations. The abstract machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form. Substances and forms are of expression "or" of content. But functions are not yet "semiotically" formed, and matters are not yet "physically" formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function -- a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute.[10]
Defined diagrammatically in this way, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determing in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.[11]
This Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstraction of a supposedly pure machine of expression. It is an Absolute, but one that is neither undifferentiated nor transcendent. Abstract machines thus have proper names (as well as dates), which of course designate not persons or subjects but matters and functions. The name of a musician or scientist is used in the same way as a painter's name designates a color, nuance, tone or intensity: it is always a question of a conjunction of Matter and Function. . . . There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract machine functions directly in a matter.[12]
Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no regimes of signs on the diagrammatic level, or on the plane of consistency, because form of expression is no longer really distinct from form of content. The diagram knows only traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content insofar as they are material and of expression insofar as they are functional, but which draw one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorialization: particles-signs. There is nothing surprising in this, for the real distinction between form of expression and form of content appears only with the strata, and is different on each one.[13]
A-signifying signs
[edit]"These figures do not derive from a signifier nor are they even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are nonsigns, or rather nonsignifying signs, point-signs having several dimensions, flows-breaks or schizzes that form images through their coming together in a whole, but that do not maintain any identity when they pass from one whole to another. Hence the figures, that is, the schizzes or breaks-flows are in no way 'figurative'; they become figurative only in a particular constellation that dissolves in order to be replaced by another one."[14]
"There are great differences between such a linguistics of flows and linguistics of the signifier." [15]
"A-signifier: we have to distinguish between signifying semiologies—that articulate signifying chains and signified contents—and a-signifying semiotics that work from syntagmatic chains without engendering any signification effect, in the linguistic sense, and that are susceptible of entering into direct contact with their referents in the context of diagrammatic interaction. An example of an a-signifying semiotics: musical writing, a mathematical corpus, computer syntax, robotics, etc."[16]
"Whereas before, in a system without writing, the Urstaat was offscreen [hors champ], and the sign polyvocal, playing synchronically on all connective registers at once, now there is bivocality."[17]
Code
[edit]"Coding, over-coding: the idea of the code is used quite widely; it can refer to semiotic systems or social or material flows: the term overcoding corresponds to second-degree coding. For example: primitive agrarian societies functioning according to their own territorialized coding systems, are overcoded by a relatively deterritorialized, imperial structure, that imposes its own military, religious, fiscal, etc., hegemony on them."[18]
Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territorality; therefore each possesses both form and substance.[19]
But in a very precise sense it is true that precapitalist social machines are inherent in desire: they code it, they code the flows of desire. To code desire--and the fear, the anguish of decoded flows--is the business of the socius.[20]
The social machine is literally a machine, irrespective of any metaphor, inasmuch as it exhibits an immobile motor and undertakes a variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations. This is the social machine's supreme task, inasmuch as the apportioning of production corresponds to extractions from the chain, resulting in a residual share for each member, in a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of recording, and the productions of consumption. Flows of women and children, flows of herds and of seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding.[21]
In defining precapitalist regimes by a surplus value of code, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted this surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux, we were presenting things in a summary fashion, we were still acting as though the matter were settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism that had lost all code value. This is not the case, however. On the one hand, codes continue to exist--even as an archaism--but they assume a function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the situation within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker). But on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical machine presupposes flows of a particular type: flows of code that are both interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and even a science. It is these flows of code that find themselves encasted, coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist societies in such a way that they never achieve any independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer). But the decoding of flows in capitalism has freed, deterritorialized, and decoded the flows of code just as it has the others--to such a degree that the automatic machine has always increasingly internalized them in its body or its structrure as a field of forces, while depending on a science and a technology, on a so-called intellectual labour distinct from the manual labour of the worker (the evolution of the technical object). In this sense, it is not machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that creates machines, and that is constantly introducing breaks and clevages through which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production.[22]
Decoding
[edit]For what do private property, wealth, commodities, and classes signify? The breakdown of codes. The appearance, the surging forth of now decoded flows that pour over the socius, crossing it from one end to the other.[23]
Each passage of a flux is a deterritorialization, and each displaced limit, a decoding.[24]
Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territorality; therefore each possesses both form and substance.[25]
The action of decoded flows is not enough, however, to cause the new break to traverse and transform the socius--not enough, that is, to induce the birth of capitalism.[26]
Decoded desires and desires for decoding have always existed; history is full of them. But we have just seen that only through their encounter in a place, and their conjunction in a space that takes time, do decoded flows constitute a desire--a desire that, instead of just dreaming or lacking it, actually produces a desiring-machine that is at the same time social and technical. That is why capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decoded flows, but by the generalized decoding of flows, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows. It is the singular nature of this conjunction that ensured the universality of capitalism.[27]
[C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production. Hence it is correct to retrospectively understand all of history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly. [28]
For great accidents were necessary, and amazing encounters that could have happened elsewhere, or before, or might never have happened, in order for the flows to escape coding and, escaping, to nonetheless fashion a new machine bearing the determinations of the capitalist socius. Thus the encounter between private property and commodity production which presents itself, however, as two quite distinct forms of decoding, by privatization and by abstraction.[29]
[E]ach of these elements brings into play several processes of decoding and deterritorialization having very different origins. For the free worker: the deterritorialization of the soil through privatization; the decoding of the instruments of production through appropriation; the loss of the means of consumption through the dissolution of the family and the corporation; and finally, the decoding of the worker in favour of the work itself or of the machine. And for capital: the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; the decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital; the decoding of States through financial capital and public debts; the decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial capital; and so on.[30]
At the same time as capitalist deterritorialization is developing from the centre to the periphery, the decoding of flows in the periphery develops by means of a "disarticulation" that ensures the ruin of traditional sectors, the development of extraverted economic circuits, a specific hypertrophy of the tertiary sector, and an extreme inequality in the different areas of productivity and incomes.[31]
Decoded flows strike the despotic State with latency; they submerge the tyrant, but they also cause him to return in unexpected forms; they democratize him, oligarchize him, segmentalize him, monarchize him, and always internalize and spiritualize him, while on the horizon there is the latent Urstaat, for the loss of which there is no consolation. It is now up to the State to recode as best it can, by means of regular or exceptional operations, the product of the decoded flows. [32]
In defining precapitalist regimes by a surplus value of code, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted this surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux, we were presenting things in a summary fashion, we were still acting as though the matter were settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism that had lost all code value. This is not the case, however. On the one hand, codes continue to exist--even as an archaism--but they assume a function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the situation within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker). But on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical machine presupposes flows of a particular type: flows of code that are both interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and even a science. It is these flows of code that find themselves encasted, coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist societies in such a way that they never achieve any independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer). But the decoding of flows in capitalism has freed, deterritorialized, and decoded the flows of code just as it has the others--to such a degree that the automatic machine has always increasingly internalized them in its body or its structrure as a field of forces, while depending on a science and a technology, on a so-called intellectual labour distinct from the manual labour of the worker (the evolution of the technical object). In this sense, it is not machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that creates machines, and that is constantly introducing breaks and clevages through which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production.[33]
Overcoding
[edit]Although the first articulation is not lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in particular that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenomena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization.[34]
The notion of unity appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a set of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding).[35]
As a general rule, relative deterritorializations (transcoding) reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in certain respects absolute (overcoding).[36]
Recoding
[edit]Decoded flows strike the despotic State with latency; they submerge the tyrant, but they also cause him to return in unexpected forms; they democratize him, oligarchize him, segmentalize him, monarchize him, and always internalize and spiritualize him, while on the horizon there is the latent Urstaat, for the loss of which there is no consolation. It is now up to the State to recode as best it can, by means of regular or exceptional operations, the product of the decoded flows. [37]
Surplus value of code
[edit]In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we call surplus value of code, or side-communication.[38]
Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it "extracts" a surplus value, just as the orchid code "attracts" the figure of a wasp: both phenomena demonstrate the surplus value of a code.[39]
The celebrated problem of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, that is, of surplus value in relation to total capital, can be understood only from the viewpoint of capitalism's entire field of immanence, and by taking into account the conditions under which a surplus value of code is transformed into a surplus value of flux.[40]
In defining precapitalist regimes by a surplus value of code, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted this surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux, we were presenting things in a summary fashion, we were still acting as though the matter were settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism that had lost all code value. This is not the case, however. On the one hand, codes continue to exist--even as an archaism--but they assume a function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the situation within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker). But on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical machine presupposes flows of a particular type: flows of code that are both interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and even a science. It is these flows of code that find themselves encasted, coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist societies in such a way that they never achieve any independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer).[41]
Every semiotic is mixed and only functions as such; each one necessarily captures fragments of one or more other semiotics (surplus value of code).[42]
Content
[edit][ Hjelmslev ] used the term content for formed matters, which would now have to be considered from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are "chosen," and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order (substance and form of content).[43]
"Content is not the sign, and it is not a referent or signified. It is what the sign envelopes, a whole world of forces. Content is formed substance considered as a dominated force-field."[44]
Diagram
[edit]"Semiotic interaction and diagrammatism: diagram: this expression is from Charles Sanders Peirce. He classifies diagrams under the general rubric of icons; and describes them as “icons of relation.” Diagrammatic interactions (or semiotic interactions), in our present terminology, are opposed to semiological redundancies. The former make sign systems work directly with the realities they refer to; they work at the existential production of referents, whereas the latter represent, by giving “equivalents” that have no operational function. Examples: mathematical algorithms, technological charts, computer programming, all directly participate in the process of engendering objects, whereas an advertisement only gives an extrinsic representation of its object (though it is also producing subjectivity)."[45]
Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an expression. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, content and expression are. Hjelmslev's net is applicable to the strata: articulation of content and articulation of expression, with content and expression each possessing its own form and substance. Between them, between content and expression, there is neither a correspondence nor a cause-effect relation nor a signified-signifier relation: there is real distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and only isomorphy.[46]
Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of double articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not to say that the strata speak or are language based.[47]
The first articulation concerns content, the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not between forms and substances but between content and expression, expression having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as expression.[48]
"The terms expression plane and content plane . . . are chosen in conformity with established notions and are quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no justification for calling one, and not the other, of these entities expression, or one, and not the other, content. They are defined only by their mutual solidarity, and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are defined only oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the same function."[49]
Content and expression are two variables of a function of stratification.[50]
There is never correspondence or conformity between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition. The distinction between content and expression is always real, in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them according to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real distinction.[51]
Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and expression are relative terms ("first" and "second" articulation should also be understood in an entirely relative fashion).[52]
Both articulations establish binary relations between their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth's last word.[53]
Thus there are always two articulations, two segmentarities, two kinds of multiplicity, each of which brings into play both forms and substances. But the distribution of these two articulations is not constant, even within the same stratum.[54]
The double articulation sometimes coincides with the molecular and the molar, and sometimes not; this is because content and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and sometimes along different lines.[55]
But content and expression are not distinguished from each other in the same fashion on each stratum: the distribution of content and expression is not the same on the three major strata (there is, for example, a "linearization" of expression on the organic stratum, and a "superlinearity" of the anthropomorphic strata). That is why the molar and molecular have very different combinations depending on the stratum considered.[56]
Since every articulation is double, there is not an articulation of content and an articulation of expression -- the articulation of content is double in its own right and constitutes a relative expression within content; the articulation of expression is also double and constitutes a relative content within expression.[57]
For this reason, there exist intermediate states between content and expression, expression and content: the levels, equilibriums, and exchanges through which a stratified system passes.[58]
Expression
[edit][Hjelmslev] used the term expression for functional structures, which would also have to be considered from two points of view: the organization of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds (form and substance of expression).[59] [the text here reads "form and content of expression" but I figure this must be a misprint?]
A stratum always has a dimension of the expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative invariance; for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a relatively invariant expression by means of which they determine the compounds, organs, and functions of the organism.[60]
Even though it is capable of invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content.[61]
To express is always to sing the glory of God. Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on earth.[62]
Form and substance
[edit]Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus and formed substances. Forms and substances, codes and milieus are not really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.[63]
Substances are nothing other than formed matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territorality; therefore each possesses both form and substance.[64]
[T]here is no real distinction between form and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable, although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless forms.[65]
Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epistrata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements that consitute them as the parastrata are from their processes.[66]
- for the pure, unextended spatium, see Difference and Repetition 229-231
Though experience always shows us intensities already developed in extensions, already covered over by qualities, we must conceive, precisely as a condition of experience, of pure intensities enveloped in a depth, in an intensive spatium that preexists every quality and every extension.[67]
Lived experience is "intensive": I feel... 'I feel' means that something is happening in me, I am experiencing an intensity, and intensity is not the same thing as sensible qualities; in fact, it's totally different. This happens all the time with schizophrenics. [...] When a schizophrenic says: "I feel I'm becoming a woman," "I feel I'm becoming God," it's like the body is crossing a threshold of intensity.[68]
[W]e interpret schizophrenia in terms of intenstive experience.[69]
What I said about lived experences a moment ago, how they mustn't be translated into representations or fantasies, how they mustn't be made to pass through the codes of law, contract, or institution, they mustn't be cashed in—it's quite the opposite: they must be treated as flows which carry us always farther out, ever further toward the exterior; this is precisely intensity, or intensities. The lived experience is not subjective, or not necessarily. It is not of the individual. It is flow and the interruption of flow, since each intensity is necessarily in relation to another intensity, in such a way that something gets through. This is what is underneath the codes, what escapes them, and what the codes want to translate, convert, cash in.[70]
The intensity sends you back neither to signifieds which would be like the representations of things, nor to signifiers which would be like the representations of words.[71]
Isomorphism (is this Homeomorphism?)
[edit]Geoffroy: I said that there was isomorphism but not correspondence. You have to bring "degrees of development or perfection" into the picture. It is not everywhere on a stratum that materials reach the degree at which they form a given aggregate. Anatomical elements may be arrested or inhibited in certain places by molecular clashes, the influence of the milieu, or pressure from neighbours to such an extent that they compose different organs. The same formal relations or connections are then effectuated in entirely different forms and arrangements. It is still the same abstract Animal that is realized throughout the stratum, only to varying degrees, in varying modes. Each time, it is as perfect as its surroundings or milieu allows it to be[72]
- The line of flight is discussed extensively in the Three Novellas chapter
Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities.[73]
There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome.[74]
What really matters to us are the escape routes in the systems, the conditions under which these paths form or incite revolutioary actions, or remain anecdotal. Revolutionary probabilities do not consist in the contradictions of the capitalist system, but rather in efforts at escape—always unexpected, always renewed—that undermine it.[75]
Lines of flight, for their part, never consist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic, about a line of flight.[76]
Milieu
[edit]Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus and formed substances. Forms and substances, codes and milieus are not really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.[77]
The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration[78]
[But the materials] are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and compounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials.[79]
Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for the relation between them.[80]
Associated milieus imply sources of energy different from alimentary materials. . . . Obtaining an energy source permits an increase in the number of materials that can be transformed into elements and compounds.[81]
The associated milieu is thus defined by the capture of energy sources (respiration in the most general sense), by the discernment of materials, the sensing of their presence or absence (perception), and by the fabrication or nonfabrication of the corresponding compounds (response, reaction).[82]
The unforgettable associated world of the Tick, defined by its gravitational energy of falling, its olfactory characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its active characteristic of latching on: the tick climbs a branch and drops onto a passing mammal it has recognized by smell, then latches onto its skin (an associated world composed of three factors, and no more).[83]
Active and perceptive characterstics are themselves something of a double pincer, a double articulation.[84]
Milieus always act, through selection, on entire organisms, the forms of which depend on codes those milieus sanction indirectly.[85]
"Innocence is the truth of multiplicity."[86]
Everything Bergson has to say about it comes down to this: duration is what differs from itself. Matter, on the other hand, is what does not differ from itself; it is what repeats itself."[87]
"duration, the indivisible is not exactly that which does not allow itself to be divided; it is what changes its nature when it divides, and what changes its nature defines the virtual or the subjective."[88]
"Virtuality exists in such a way that it actualizes itself as it dissociates itself; it must dissociate itself to actualize itself. Differentiation is the movement of a virtuality actualizing itself."[89]
"In Bergson, thanks to the notion of the virtual, the thing differs from itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs from itself because it differs first from everything it is not, and thus difference goes as far as contradiction."[90]
"Everything comes back to Bergson's critique of the negative: his whole effort is aimed at a conception of difference without negation, a conception of difference that does not contain the negative. In his critique of disorder, as well as his critique of nothingness or contradiction, Bergson tries to show that the negation of one real term by the other is only the positive actualization of a virtuality that contains both terms at once. 'Struggle, in this instance, is only the superficial aspect of progress.' It is our ignorance of the virtual that makes us believe in contradiction and negation. The opposition of two terms is only the actualization of a virtuality that contained them both: this is tantamount to saying that difference is more profound than negation or contradition."[91]
"Duration is the virtual."[92]
"It is no longer a question of knowing whether the Idea is one or multiple, or even both at once; "multiplicity," when used as a substantive, designates a domain where the Idea, of itself, is much closer to the accident than to the abstract essence, and can be determined only with the questions who? how? how much? where and when? in which case?—forms that sketch the genuine spatio-temporal coordinates of the Idea."[93]
Order-word aka Foucault's "statement"
[edit]Remember to address translation issues, re: utterance, enunciation, etc.
"We must therefore distinguish between the individuated Oedipalist utterance, directed towards biunivocity, the complete object, representative application, and the quite different individuated schizo utterance whose force, whose deterritorializing charges, go out to the furthest corners of the universe."[94]
worldly statements = subjected groups: "Worldly statements are the fact that nothing, in a discursive chain, should go "too far." For example: in good company, you can't broach just any subject, you have to avoid, or circumvent desire, death, etc."[95]
When someone explains to me that what I say means something other than what I say, a split in the ego as subject is produced. This split is well known: what I say refers to me as the subject of an utterance or statement, what I mean refers to me as an expressing subject. This split is conjured by psychoanalysis as the basis for castration and prevents all production of statements.[96]
Indeed, what produces statements in each one of us is not ego as subject, it's something entirely different: multiplicities, masses and mobs, peoples and tribes, collective arrangements; they cross through us, they are within us, and they seem unfamiliar because they are part of our unconscious. The challenge for a real psychoanalysis, an anti-psychoanalytical analysis, is to discover these collective arrangements of expression, these collective networks, these peoples who are in us and who make us speak, and who are the source of our statements. This is the sense in which we set a whole field of experimentation, of personal or group experimentation, against the interpretive activities of psychoanalysis.[97]
Psychoanalysis uses a small number of collective statements, which are those of capitalism itself regarding castration, loss, and family, and it tries to get this small number of collective statements specific to capitalism to enter into the individual statements of the patients themselves. We claim that one should do just the opposite, that is, start with the real individual statements, give people conditions, including the material conditions, for the production of their individual statements, in order to discover the real collective arrangements that produce them.[98]
The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real. [TP: 69] Consistency is neither totalizing nor structuring; rather, it is deterritorializing (a biological stratum, for example, evolves not according to stastistical phenomena but rather according to cutting edges of deterritorialization). [TP: 144]
[T]he plane of consistency is occupied, drawn by the abstract Machine [TP: 70]
The plane of consistency, or planomenon, is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed matters, but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every kind. [TP: 70]
These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites, authentic sign sequences. It's just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency possible. A silent dance. [TP: 69]
That which races or dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the aura of its stratum, an undulation, a memory or tension. The plane of consistency retains just enough of the strata to extract from them variables that operate in the plane of consistency as its own functions. [TP: 70]
Continuum of intensities, combined emission of particles or signs-particles, conjunction of deterritorialized flows: these are the three factors proper to the plance of consistency; they are brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of destratification. [TP: 70] Now there is no hint in all this of a chaotic white night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of "plan(n)ing," or diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combinations, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion. [TP: 70-1]
The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the strata. [TP: 69-70]
[W]e cannot content ourselves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of deterritorializaiton; moreover, absolute deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spin-offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always primary and always immanent. [TP: 70]
The field of immanence is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in which they have fused. [TP: 156]
The plane of consistency would be the totality of all BwO's, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chinnese, another American, another medieval, another petty peverse, but all in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he can, according to tastes she or he will have succeeded in abstracting from a Self [Moi], according to a politics or strategy successfully abstracted from a given formation, according to a given procedure abstracted from its origin. [TP: 157]
Whenever a multiplicity unfolds, the plane of consistency is brought into operation.[99]
This infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement. The identity of the image and movement leads us to conclude immediately that the movement-image and matter are identical. 'You may say that my body is matter or that it is an image.' [Bergson] The movement-image and flowing-matter are strictly the same thing.[100]
The plane of immanence is the movement (the facet of movement) which is established between the parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them all up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them from being absolutely closed. It is therefore a section; but, despite some terminological ambiguities in Bergson, it is not an immobile and instantaneous section, it is a mobile section, a temporal section or perspective.[101]
The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machinic assemblage of movement-images. Here Bergson is startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema.[102]
Regime of Signs
- Presignifying Semiotic
- the "overcoding" marking the privileged status of language operates diffusely
- enunciation is collective, statements themselves are polyvocal, and substances of expression are multiple
- relative deterritorialization is determined by the confrontation between the territorialities and segmentary lineages that ward off the State apparatus
- segmentarizing functions
- analogical transformations
- Signifying Semiotic
- overcoding is fully effectuated by the signifier, and by the State apparatus that emits it
- there is uniformity of enunciation, unification of the substance of expression, and control over statements in a regime of circularity
- relative deterritorialization is taken as far as it can go by a redundant and perpetual referral from sign to sign
- signifiance and interpreting functions
- symbolic transformations
- Countersignifying Semiotic
- overcoding is assured by the Number as form of expression or enunciation, and by the War Machine upon which it depends
- deterritorialization follows a line of active destruction or abolition
- numerating functions
- polemical or strategic transformations
- Postsignifying Semiotic
- overcoding is assured by the redundancy of consciousness
- a subjectification of enunciation occours on a passional line that makes the organization of power (pouvoir) immanent
- deterritorialization is raised to the absolute, although in a way that is still negative
- subjectifying functions
- consciousness-related or mimetic transformation
We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of signs, at least when the expression is linguistic. A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic system. [TP: 111]
[A regime of signs is a] form of expression [that] is reducible not to words but to a set of statements arising in the social field considered as a stratum . . . . The form of content is reducible not to a thing but to a complex state of things as a formation of power . . . . [TP: 66]
Every semiotic is mixed and only functions as such; each one necessarily captures fragments of one or more other semiotics (surplus value of code). [TP: 136]
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. 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. [TP: 148]
Since the signifying sign refers only to other signs, and the set of all signs to the signifier itself, the corresponding semiotic enjoys a high level of deterritorialization; but it is a deterritorialization that is still relative, expressed as frequency. In this system, the line of flight remains negative, it is assigned a negative sign.[103]
Whatever the differences between signifiance and subjectification, whichever prevails over the other in this case or that, whatever the varying figures assumed by their de facto mixtures--they have it in common to crush all polyvocality, set up language as a form of exclusive expression, and operate by signifying biunivocalization and subjective binarization. The superlinearity proper to language is no longer co-ordinated with multidimensional figures: it now flattens out all volumes and subordinates all lines.[104]
The signifier functioned on an autonomous stratum of its own, ceaselessly referring back to itself, while reality was to be found a long way away from the semiotic fluxes. An individuated subjectivity emerged from the workings of that signifying machine; in Lacan's phrase, 'a signifier represents the subject for antoher signifier.'[105]
For now, all we can say is that each articulation has a corresponding type of segmentarity or multiplicity: one type is supple, more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is more rigid, molar, and organized. [TP: 41]
Although the first articulation is not lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in particular that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenomena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization. [TP: 41]
Both articulations establish binary relations between their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth's last word. [TP: 41]
We are never signifier or signified. We are stratified. [TP: 67]
The system of the strata thus has nothing to do with signifier or signified, base and superstructure, mind and matter. All of these are ways of reducing the strata to a single stratum, or of closing the system in on itself by cutting it off from the plane of consistency as destratification. [TP: 71-2]
Hjelmslev was able to weave a net out of the notions of matter, content and expression, form and substance. These were the strata, said Hjelmslev. Now this net had the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality, since there was a form of content no less than a form of expression. Hjelmslev's enemies saw this merely as a way of rebaptizing the discredited notions of the signified and signifier, but something quite different was actually going on. Despite what Hjelmslev himself may have said, the net is not linguistic in scope or origin (the same must be said of double articulation: if language has a specificity of its own, as it most certainly does, that specificity consists neither in double articulation nor in Hjelmslev's net, which are general characteristics of the strata). [TP: 43]
The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized). [TP: 40]
[Strata] consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture, they are like "black holes" or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach. They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. [TP: 40] Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an expression. [TP: 502]
Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus and formed substances. Forms and substances, codes and milieus are not really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation. [TP: 502]
It is on the strata that the double articulation appears that formalizes traits of expression and traits of content, each in its own right, turning matters into physically or semiotically formed substances and functions into forms of expression or content. Expression then constitutes indexes, icons, or symbols that enter regimes or semiotic systems. Content then constitutes bodies, things or objects that enter physical systems, organisms, and organizations. [TP: 143]
In short, the strata substantialize diagrammatic matters and separate a formed plane of content from a formed plane of expression. They hold expressions and contents, separately substantialized and formalized, in the pincers of a double articulation assuring their independence and real distinction and enthroning a dualism that endlessly reproduces and redivides. They shatter the continuums of intensity, introducing breaks between different strata and within each stratum. They prevent conjunctions of flight from forming and crush the cutting edges of deterritorialization, either by effecting reterritorializations that make these movements merely relative, or by assigning certain of the lines an entirely negative value, or again by segmenting them, blocking them, plugging them, or plunging them into a kind of black hole. [TP: 143]
The program of the stratum, against the diagram of the plane of consistency. [TP: 143]
Strata are topological [TP: 47]
physiochemical stratum (matter) / organic stratum (life) / anthropomorphic stratum (humanity) "A surface of stratification is a more compact plane of consistency lying between two layers." The layers are the strata. They come in at least pairs, one serving as substratum for the other. The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the strata. The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one side it faces the strata (in this direction, the assemblage is an interstratum), but the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of consistency (here, it is a metastratum). [TP: 40]
The important thing is the principle of the simultaneous unity and variety of the stratum: isomorphism of forms but no correspondence; identity of elements or components but no identity of compound substances. [TP: 46]
[A] stratum necessarily goes from layer to layer, and from the very beginning. It already has several layers. It goes from a center to a periphery, at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outwards. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate states, and this process is one of the local conditions of the central ring (different concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain threshold of identity). These intermediate states present new figures of milieus or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. [TP: 50]
A stratum, considered from the standpoint of its unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it down into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a periphery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center, and in turn gives forth discontinuous epistrata. [TP: 50-1]
The epistrata and parastrata subdividing a stratum can be considered strata themselves (so that the list is never exhaustive). [TP: 502]
Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epistrata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements that consitute them as the parastrata are from their processes. [TP: 53]
These intermediate states present new figures of milieus or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. They are intermediaries between the exterior milieu and the interior element, substantial elements and their compounds, compounds and substances, and between the different formed substances (substances of content and substances of expression). We will use the term epistrata for these intermediaries and superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels. [TP: 50]
A stratum, considered from the standpoint of its unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it down into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a periphery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center, and in turn gives forth discontinuous epistrata. [TP: 50-1]
The epistrata and parastrata subdividing a stratum can be considered strata themselves (so that the list is never exhaustive). [TP: 502]
Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epistrata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements that consitute them as the parastrata are from their processes. [TP: 53]
Unity of stratum
[edit][A] stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations or traits. [TP: 49]
We may therefore use the term central layer, or central ring, for the following aggregate comprising the unity of composition of a stratum: exterior molecular materials, interior substantial elements, and the limit or membrane conveying the formal relations. [TP: 50]
The limit between them is the membrane that regulates the exchanges and transformation in organization (in other words, the distributions interior to the stratum) and that defines all of the stratum's formal relations or traits [TP: 50]
There is a single abstract machine that is enveloped by the stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as opposed to the Planomenon of the plane of consistency. [TP: 50]
A stratum, considered from the standpoint of its unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it down into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a periphery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center, and in turn gives forth discontinuous epistrata. [TP: 50-1]
[T]he organic stratum does have a specific unity of composition, a single abstract Animal, a single machine embedded in the stratum, and presents everywhere the same molecular materials, the same elements or anatomical components of organs, the same formal connections. Organic forms are nevertheless different from one another, as are organs, compound substances, and molecules. [TP: 45-6]
A given stratum retains a unity of composition in spite of the diversity in its organization and development. The unity of composition relates to formal traits common to all of the forms or codes of a stratum, and to substantial elements, materials common to all of the stratum's substances or milieus. [TP: 502]
"Molecular/molar: the same elements existing in flows, strata and assemblages can be organized in a molar or a molecular mode. The molar order corresponds to signification that delimits objects, subjects, representations and their reference systems. Whereas the molecular order is that of flows, becomings, phase transitions and intensities. This molecular traversal of strata and levels, operated by different kinds of assemblages, is called “transversality”."[106]
"Rhizome, rhizomatic: arborescent diagrams proceed by successive hierarchies, from a central point, each local element going back to this central point. Whereas rhizomatic or trellis systems can drift infinitely, establish transversal connections, without being circumscribed or closed off. The term “rhizome” has been borrowed from botany where it describes a system of subterranean stems among perennials that emit buds and adventive roots in their lower parts. (For example: iris rhizomes.)"[107]
It seems, then, that each thing has two "halves"—uneven, dissimilar, and unsymmetrical—each of which is itself divided into two: an ideal half, which reaches into the virtual and is constituted both by differential relations and by concomitant singularities; and an actual half, constituted both by the qualities that incarnate those realtions and by the parts that incarnate those singularities.[108]
Perhaps the word virtuality would precisely designate the mode of the structure or the object of theory, on the condition that we eliminate any vagueness about the word. For the virtual has a reality which is proper to it, but which does not merge with any actual reality, any present or past actuality. The virtual has an ideality that is proper to it, but which does not merge with any possible image, any abstract idea.[109]
To discern the structure of a domain is to determine an entire virtuality of coexistence which pre-exists the beings, objects and works of this domain. Every structure is a multiplicity of virtual coexistence.[110]
Capitalism and power
[edit]The criticism that consumption society deserves is that there are not enough things: we need more gadgets, and things and stuff, that we can box into other things, all this crap, a whole sexuality of gadgets. The Puritans still have too much control over consumer society![111]
It entails promoting an other logic: a logic of real desire which establishes the primacy of history over structure.[112]
The only revolutionary is a joyful revolutionary [...].[113]
We're not saying that ideology is smoke and mirrors (or any other concept that serves to designate an illusion). We're saying: there is no ideology, the concept itself is an illusion. [...] There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power, once you accept that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure.[114]
In point of fact, it is by getting caught up in the net of interpretative semiologies that the masses fail to realize the true springs of their power—that is their real control over industrial, technological, scientific, economic and social semiotics—and become bogged down in the phantasies of the dominant reality, and in the modes of subjectivation and repression of desire imposed upon them by the bourgeoisie.[115]
[T]he relative limit is no more nor less than the capitalist social formation, because the latter engineers (machine) and mobilizes flows that are effectively decoded, but does so by substituting for codes a quantifying axiomatic that is even more oppressive.[116]
[C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production.[117]
A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labour flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the "tendency" has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate. The tendency's only limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit--that is, by reconstituting it, be rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus, the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence, as revealed under the withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat, is continually expanding, and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being "the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production."[118]
By no means does the diachronic capitalist machine allow itself to be revolutionized by one or more of its synchronous technical machines, and by no means does it confer on its scientists and its technicians an independence that was unknown in the previous regimes. Doubtless it can let a certain number of scientists--mathematicians, for example--"schizophrenize" in their corner, and it can allow the passage of socially decoded flows of code that these scientists organize into axiomatics of research that is said to be basic. But the true axiomatic is elsewhere. (Leave the scientists alone to a certain point, let them create their own axiomatic, but when the time comes for serious things... For example, nondeterminist physics, with its corpuscular flows, will have to be brought into line with "determinism.") The true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which takes the place of the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends. ... An innovation is adopted only from the perspective of the rate of profit its investment will offer by the lowering of production costs; without this prospect, the capitalist will keep the existing equipment, and stand ready to make a parallel investment in equipment in another area.[119]
Degrees are no longer measured in terms of increasing perfection or a differentiation and increase in the complexity of the parts, but in terms of differential relations and coeffecients such as selective pressure, catalytic action, speed of propagation, rate of growth, evolution, mutation, etc.[120]
[T]he degrees are not degrees of preexistent development or perfection but are instead global and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of the advantage they give particular elements, then a particular multiplicity in the milieu, and as a function of a particular variation in the milieu.[121]
Relative progress, then, can occour by formal and quantitative simplification rather than by complication, by a loss of components and syntheses rather than by acquisition (it is a question of speed, and speed is a differential).[122]
A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labour flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the "tendency" has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate.[123]
[T]he Earth -- the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule -- is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles.[124]
For there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification.[125]
The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production. For the earth is not merely the multiple and divided object of labour, it is also the unique, indivisible entity, the full body that falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them for its own as the natural or divine precondition. While the ground can be the productive element and the result of appropriation, the Earth is the great unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the common appropriation and utilization of the ground. It is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and means of labour are recorded, and the agents and the products distributed. It appears here as the quasi cause of production and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound to its own repression).[126]
The primitive territorial machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is already a social machine, a megamachine, that codes the flows of production, the flows of means of production, of producers and consumers: the full body of the goddess Earth gathers to itself the cultivable species, the agricultural implements, and the human organs.[127]
"Encoding, over-coding, decoding, flows: these categories establish the theory of society, whereas the idea of the "Urstaat," warded off or triumphant, establishes the theory of history." Pierre Clastres. In "Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back" p.227.
"For us, the essential thing is the relation of desiring-machines and social machines, their different regimes, and their immanence with respect to one another. In other words, how is unconscious desire invested in a social, economic and political field? How does sexuality, or what Leclaire might call choice of sexual objects, merely express these investments, whereas in reality these investments are investments of flow? How do our love affairs derive from universal history and not mommy and daddy? A whole social field is invested through a man or a woman that we love, and this investment happens in a variety of ways. So, we try to show how the flows invest different social fields, what they are flowing on, and by what means they are invested: encoding, over-coding, decoding. [...] What we're trying to do is put libido in relation with an "outside." The flows of women among the primitives is in relation with flows of herd animals, flows of arrows. [...] What are the flows of a society? Which flows are capable of subverting that society? And where is desire's place in all this?" (Deleuze 1972, 229).
"Perhaps the most fundamental idea is that the unconscious "produces." What this means is that we must stop treating the unconscious, as everyone has done up to now, like some kind of theatre where a privileged drama is represented, the drama of Oedipus. We believe the unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory." (Deleuze 1972b, 232)
"Even with a child, desire is not Oedipal, it functions like a mechanism, produces little machines, establishing connections among things." (Deleuze 1972b, 233)
"Today's capitalist or technocrat does not desire in the same way a slave trader or a bureaucrat from the old Chinese empire would have. When people in a society desire repression, for others and for themselves; when there are people who like to harass others, and who have the opportunity to do so, the "right" to do so, this exhibits the problem of a deep connection between libidinal desire and the social field." (Deleuze "On Capitalism and Desire" p.263)
"Ideology has no importance here: what matters is not ideology and not even the "economic / ideological" distinction or opposition; what matters is the organization of power. Because the organization of power, i.e. the way in which desire is already in the economic, the way libido invests the economic, haunts the economic and fosters the political forms of repression." (263)
"What is liberated desire? A desire that escapes the impasse of individual private fantasy: it's not about adapting desire, socializing and disciplining it, but hooking it up in such a way that its process is uninterrupted in the social body, so its expression can be collective. The most important thing is not authoritarian unification, but a kind of infinite swarming: desires in the neighbourhood, the schools, factories, prisons, nursery schools, etc." (Guattari 267)
"Capitalism has always been, and still is a remarkable desiring-machine. Flows of money, flows of the means of production, flows of man power, flows of new markets: it's all desire in flux." (Deleuze, 267)
"The first capitalist are waiting there like birds of prey, waiting to swoop on the worker who has fallen through the cracks of the previous system. This is what is meant by primitive accumulation." (Deleuze, 268)
"Each system, moreover, has its own particular illness: the hysteria of so-called primitive societies, the paranoid-depressives of great Empires... The capitalist economy functions through decoding and deterritorialization: it has its extreme illnesses, that is, its schizophrenics who come uncoded and become deterritorialized to the extreme, but it also has its extreme consequences, its revolutionaries." (Guattari, 273)
"Desire or delirium (which are in a deep sense the same thing), desire-delirium is by its nature a libidinal investment of an entire historical milieu, or an entire social environment. What makes one delirious are classes, peoples, races, masses, mobs." (Deleuze, 275)
Schreber's delirium and Wolf-man's treatment as examples of crushing of social and historical to familial (application). (ref: Deleuze 275)
"tribes, empires, and war machines"[128]
"Asiatic" production, with the State that expresses or constitutes its objective movement, is not a distinct formation; it is the basic formation, on the horizon throughout history.[129]
A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labour flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the "tendency" has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate. The tendency's only limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit--that is, by reconstituting it, be rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus, the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence, as revealed under the withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat, is continually expanding, and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being "the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production."[130]
[I]t is not due to confusion that a schizophrenic jumps from one register to the next. It is the reality he finds himself confronted with that drives him to it. The schizophrenic, without any epistemological guarantee, so to speak, sticks closely to reality and this reality causes him to move from one level to the next, from a questioning of semantics and syntax to the revision of the themes of history, etc. Well, from this perspective, people in the human sciences and in politics should, in a sense, go a little schizo [...] to have the same ability to embrace all the disciplines together.[131]
Conjunctive synthesis
[edit]T]he capitalist machine, the civilized machine, will first establish itself on the conjunction. When this occurs, the conjunction no longer merely designates remnants that have escaped coding, or consummations-consumptions as in the primitive feasts, or even the "maximum consumption" in the extravagance of the despot and his agents. When the conjunction moves to the fore in the social machine, it seems on the contrary that it ceases to be tied to enjoyment or to the excess consumption of a class, that it makes luxury itself into a means of investment, and reduces all the decoded flows to production, in a "production for production's sake" that rediscovers the primitive connections of labour, on condition--on the sole condition--that they be / linked to capital and to the new deterritorialized full body, the true consumer from whence they seem to emanate[132]
Counteracted tendency
[edit]Secondly, however, the relative limit is no more nor less than the capitalist social formation, because the latter engineers (machine) and mobilizes flows that are effectively decoded, but does so by substituting for codes a quantifying axiomatic that is even more oppressive. With the result that capitalism--in conformity with the movement by which it counteracts its own tendency--is continually drawing near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall farther away. Schizophrenia is the absolute limit, but capitalism is the relative limit. [AO: 176]
[C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of / its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production. Hence it is correct to retrospectively understand all of history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly. [AO: 139-40]
The celebrated problem of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, that is, of surplus value in relation to total capital, can be understood only from the viewpoint of capitalism's entire field of immanence, and by taking into account the conditions under which a surplus value of code is transformed into a surplus value of flux. [AO: 228]
[I]n keeping with Balibar's remarks--this tendency to a falling rate of profit has no end, but reproduces itself while reproducing the factors that counteract it. [AO: 228]
Let us return to the dualism of money, to the two boards, the two inscriptions, the one going into the account of the wage earner, the other into the balance sheet of the enterprise. Measuring the two orders of magnitude in terms of the same analytical unit is a pure fiction, a cosmic swindle, as if one were to measure intergalatic or intra-atomic distances in metres and centimetres. There is no common measure between the value of the enterprises and that of the labour capacity of wage earners. That is why the falling tendency has no conclusion. [AO: 230]
A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labour flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the "tendency" has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate. The tendency's only limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit--that is, by reconstituting it, be rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus, the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence, as revealed under the withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat, is continually expanding, and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being "the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production." [AO: 230]
And if it is true that the tendency to a falling rate of profit or to its equalization asserts itself at least partially at the centre, carrying the economy toward the most progressive and the most automated sectors, a veritable "development of underdevelopment" on the periphery ensures a rise in the rate of surplus value, in the form of an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the centre. [AO: 231]
Territoriality, deterritorialization, reterritorialization: the idea of territory is understood very widely, as it surpasses its usage by ethologists and ethnologists. Territory describes a lived space, or a perceived system in which a subject “feels at home.” Territory is synonymous with appropriation, subjectification closed in on itself. A territory can also be deterritorialized, i.e. open up, to be engaged in lines of flight, and even become deleterious and self-destructive. Reterritorialization consists of an attempt to recompose a territory engaged in a process of deterritorialization. Capitalism is a good example of a permanent system of reterritorialization: the capitalist class tends continuously to “catch up” with deterritorialization processes in the order of production and social relations. It tries to master all processual drives (or machinic phylums) at work in society.[133]
One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each of the two terms reterritorializes on the other.[134]
the least deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized.[135]
When a social formation exhausts itself and begins to leak on every side, all sorts of things come uncoded, all sorts of unpoliced flows begin circulating: for example, the migrations of peasants in feudal Europe are phenomena of "deterritorialization. The bourgeoisie imposes a new code, both economic and political, so you might think it was revolutionary. Not in the least.[136]
For example, the merchant bourgeoisie of the cities conjugated or capitalized a domain of knowledge, a technology, assemblages and circuits into whose dependency the nobility, Church, artisans, and even peasants would enter. It is precisely because the bourgeoisie was a cutting edge of deterritorialization, a veritable particle accelerator, that it also performed an overall reterritorialization."[137]
"We may summarily distinguish three kinds of signs: indexes (territorial signs), symbols (deterritorialized signs), and icons (signs of reterritorialization).[138]
[D]iagrams must be distinguished from indexes, which are territorial signs, but also from icons, which pertain to reterritorialization, and from symbols, which pertain to relative or negative deterritorialization.[139]
reterritorialization is not an added territory, but takes place in a different space than that of territories, namely overcoded geometrical space[140]
Reterritorialization must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territorality: it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as well.[141]
As a general rule, relative deterritorializations (transcoding) reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in certain respects absolute (overcoding).[142]
Each passage of a flux is a deterritorialization, and each displaced limit, a decoding. [AO: 232] Or, from the viewpoint of private property itself, the encounter between flows of convertible wealth owned by capitalists and a flow of workers possessing nothing more than their labor capacity (here again, two distinct forms of deterritorialization).[143]
At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production.[144]
The plane of consistency would be the totality of all BwO's, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chinnese, another American, another medieval, another petty peverse, but all in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he can, according to tastes she or he will have succeeded in abstracting from a Self [Moi], according to a politics or strategy successfully abstracted from a given formation, according to a given procedure abstracted from its origin.[145]
[E]ach of these elements brings into play several processes of decoding and deterritorialization having very different origins. For the free worker: the deterritorialization of the soil through privatization; the decoding of the instruments of production through appropriation; the loss of the means of consumption through the dissolution of the family and the corporation; and finally, the decoding of the worker in favour of the work itself or of the machine. And for capital: the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; the decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital; the decoding of States through financial capital and public debts; the decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrual capital; and so on.[146]
Substances as formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territorality; therefore each possesses both form and substance. [TP: 41]
[T]here is no real distinction between form and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable, although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless forms. [TP: 44]
[S]ubstances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epistrata. [TP: 53]
Groups
[edit]- See Deleuze's essay "Three Group Problems" (rpt. in Desert Islands)
"Subject group/production of subjectivity: subjectivity is not considered here as a thing in itself, an immutable essence. Such or another subjectivity exists only insofar as an enunciation assemblage produces it. (For example: modern capitalism, through the media and collective facilities, produces a new type of subjectivity on a large scale.) Behind the appearance of individuated subjectivity, we have to map out real subjectification processes. Subject groups are different from subjected groups. This opposition implies a micropolitics: the subject group has, for its vocation, to manage its own relations to external determination and to its internal law as much as possible. While a subjected group tends to be manipulated by all sorts of external determinations and to be dominated by its own internal law (the Superego)."[147]
"The complete system, then, consists of the paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the temple; the interpreting priests who continually recharge the signified in the temple, transforming it into signifier; the hysterical crowd of people outside, clumped in tight circles, who jump from one circle to another; the faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treated, and adorned by the priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight into the desert. This excessively hasty overview is applicable not only to the imperial despotic regime but to all subjected, arborescent, hierarchial, centered groups: political parties, literary movements, psychoanalytic associations, families, conjugal units, etc. The photo, faciality, redundancy, signifiance, and interpretation are at work everywhere."[148]
The most important thing is not authoritarian unification, but a kind of infinite swarming: desires in the neighborhood, the schools, factories, prisons, nursery schools, etc. It's not about a make-over, or totalization, but hooking up on the same plane at its tipping point. As long as we stick to the alternative between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the hierarchial and bureaucratic encoding of a party-organization, there can be no liberation of desire.[149]
This is precisely the problem facing marginal groups: to make all the lines of escape connect up on a revolutionary plane. In capitalism, then, these lines of escape take on a new character, and a new kind of revolutionary potential. So, you see, there is hope.[150]
Limit
[edit][C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production. Hence it is correct to retrospectively understand all of history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly. [AO: 139-40]
In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes. Then again, if we say that capitalism determines the conditions and the possibility of a universal history, this is true only insofar as capitalism has to deal essentially with its own limit, its own destruction--as Marx says, insofar as it is capable of self-criticism (at least to a certain point: the point where the limit appears, in the very movement that counteracts the tendency). In a word, universal history is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical. [AO: 140]
[Limit as eschatological determination] can be understood in many different ways. In the first place, desiring-production is situated at the / limits of social production; the decoded flows, at the limits of the codes and the territoritories; the body without organs, at the limits of the socius. We shall speak of an absolute limit every time the schizo-flows pass through the wall, scramble all the codes, and deterritorialize the socius: the body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse. Secondly, however, the relative limit is no more nor less than the capitalist social formation, because the latter engineers (machine) and mobilizes flows that are effectively decoded, but does so by substituting for codes a quantifying axiomatic that is even more oppressive. With the result that capitalism--in conformity with the movement by which it counteracts its own tendency--is continually drawing near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall farther away. Schizophrenia is the absolute limit, but capitalism is the relative limit. Thirdly, there is no social formation that does not foresee, or experience a foreboding of, the real form in which the limit threatens to arrive, and which it wards off with all the strength it can command. Whence the obstinancy with which the formations preceding capitalism encaste the merchant and the technician, preventing the flows of money and the flows of production from assuming an autonomy that would destroy their codes. Such is the real limit. [AO: 175-76]
A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labour flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the "tendency" has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate. The tendency's only limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit--that is, by reconstituting it, be rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus, the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence, as revealed under the withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat, is continually expanding, and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being "the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production." [AO: 230]
If capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies, this is because capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but / only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it. [AO: 231]
We see no reason in fact for accepting the postulate that underlies exchangist notions of society; society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark or to be marked. There is circulation only if inscription requires or permits it. [AO: 142]
Desire makes connections, it assembles, it machines.[151]
"I is an other, a multiplicity of others, embodied at the intersection of partial components of enunciation, breaching on all sides individuated identity and the organised body."[152]
"We must be able to localize individuation, to determine it with respect to being, in a movement that will cause a passage from the pre-individual to the individual."[153]
"Individuation is intensive, and it is presupposed by all qualities and species, by all extensions and parts that happen to fill up or develop the system."[154]
"Instead of 'adding more to' oedipal reductionism, we could imagine desire, in its essence, as desire for artifice. So not desire for a mythic Other, artificialized in an analytic relation, but desire for a singular conjunction—even if it's perverse—location for its own sake, in short an even more marked investment in the sign's mad constructivism."[155]
"Desire flows proceed by affects and becomings, independently of the fact that they can fold over onto [se rabattre sur] persons, images and identifications or not. So an individual, anthropologically labeled masculine, can be traversed by multiple, and apparently contradictory, becomings: becoming feminine can coexist with becoming a child, becoming an animal, becoming invisible, etc. A dominant language (a language operating in a national space) can be caught locally in a becoming minoritarian. So it will be termed a minor language. For example: the German dialect in Prague used by Kafka".[156]
- See the discussion on spatio-temporal dynamisms in Deleuze (2002, 96) - "the whole world is an egg".
"Notion of the body without an image: bodies escape discursive representation. They escape Manichaean imagery. They enter into the order of transduction, which is not locatable except on the body without organs of desire. The power sign is the deterritorialized body without organs." (Guattari 2006, 44)
"Desire has an image, it has lost its symbolic corporeity, that of the body without organs, which is not individual, but the corporeity of group fantasy." (Guattari 2006, 44)
"What is the body without organs that escapes the image? That does everything possible to escape? It's Hjelmslev's sign (or the sign we attribute to him!), a sign that is indifferent to substance, a sign that doesn't give a shit about discursive chains and traverses, trans-verses, structures to constitute a plane of subjective consistency for itself." (Guattari 2006, 45)
"Body without organs: Gilles Deleuze borrowed this idea from Antonin Artaud to describe the degree zero of intensity. The idea of the body without organs, unlike that of the death drive, does not implicate thermodynamic reference." Guattari (2006, 416).
"Plane of consistency: flows, territories, machines, universes of desire, whatever their differences, refer to a single plane of consistency (or plane of immanence), which cannot be confused with a plane of reference. Indeed, these different existence modalities of the systems of intensity are not transcendental idealities, but real engenderment and transformation processes."[157]
[Hjelmslev] used the term matter for the plane of consistency or Body without Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities. [TP: 43]
It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. [TP: 149-150]
You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. [TP: 150]
The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the BwO. [TP: 151]
At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production. [AO: 140]
For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predetermining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and what expected? [TP: 152]
[T]he BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. [TP: 153]
The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree--to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. [TP: 153]
It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. [TP: 153]
[W]e treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. [TP 153] The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined was a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it). [TP 154]
[T]he masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways, other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them. [TP: 155]
The plane of consistency would be the totality of all BwO's, a pure multiplicity of immanence [TP: 157]
Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the latitude of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or rather within the limits of that degree. Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation. [TP: 256-7]
We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. [TP: 257]
Anti-production will be, among other things, what has been described under the term 'production relations.'[158]
The lines are inscribed on a Body without Organs, upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of the BwO.[159]
"In our view, there exists a desiring production prior to any actualization in the familial division of the sexes and individuals or in the social division of labour, and this production invests the diverse forms of the production of pleasure as well as the structures intended to repress them. Though it obeys different regimes, the desiring energy found in the revolutionary aspect of history--with the working class, the sciences and the arts--is the same as that found in the aspect of exploitation and how it relates to State power. Both aspects presuppose the unconscious participation of the oppressed."[160]
- Guattari, Félix. 1972. "Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back." In Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. ISBN 1584350180. 216-229.
"The capitalist is interested only in the different machines of production that he can connect to his machine of exploitation: your arms, if you are a janitor; your brains if you are an engineer; your looks, if you are a cover-girl. [...] An individual does not communicate with his fellow humans: a transhuman chain of organs is formed and enters into conjunction with semiotic chains and an intersection of material flows." (Guattari 1995, 231; 237)
"Crossroads signs where code surplus value effects are hatched, as are twisted marriages between orchids and wasps. It's with sign-points that you have:
- the polyvocality of desire
- genetic transcursivity
- the transductivity (effectuation) of evolution and of history." (Guattari 2006, 45)
"Desiring production: (desiring economy). Unlike in Freud, desire here is not associated with representation. It is able directly to produce its objects and the modes of subjectification corresponding to them, independently of subjective or intersubjective relations."[161]
"Process: continuous series of facts or operations that can lead to other series of facts and operations. A process implies the idea of a permanent rupture in established equilibria. This term is not used in the sense of schizophrenic processes in classical psychiatry, which always implies an arrival to a terminal state. Rather, it echoes what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers call “dissipative processes.”"[162]
But the repressed is not first of all the Oedipal representation. What is repressed is desiring-production. It is the part of this production that does not enter into social production or reproduction. It is what would introduce disorder and revolution into the socius, the noncoded flows of desire. The part that passes, on the contrary, from desiring-production to social production forms a direct sexual investment of this social production, without any repression of a sexual nature of the symbolism and the corresponding affects, and above all, without any reference to an Oedipal representation that could be held to be originally repressed or structurally foreclosed. [AO: 173]
We have already seen how the prohibition of incest referred, not to Oedipus, but to the noncoded flows that constitute desire, and to their representative, the intense prepersonal flow. As for Oedipus, it is another way of coding the uncodable, of codifying what eludes the codes, or of displacing desire and its object, a way of entrapping them. [AO: 173]
Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfer with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious ... is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analysed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative assemblages, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms. Unconscious subjectivity engendered by these assemblages is not 'ready made.' It locates its processes of singularization, its subjective ensemble, within orders which differ greatly from each other (signs, incorporeal universes, energy, the 'mechanosphere,' etc.), according to open configurations . . . . [Guattari, "Beyond the Psychological Unconscious": 199]
Pleasure is an [[affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to "find themselves" in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializaitons. But the question is whether it is necessary to find oneself. [TP: 156]
Flow
[edit]"Flow: material and semiotic flows “precede” subjects and objects; desire, as the economy of flow, is therefore not first of all subjective and representative."[163]
The celebrated problem of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, that is, of surplus value in relation to total capital, can be understood only from the viewpoint of capitalism's entire field of immanence, and by taking into account the conditions under which a surplus value of code is transformed into a surplus value of flux. [AO: 228]
In defining precapitalist regimes by a surplus value of code, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted this surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux, we were presenting things in a summary fashion, we were still acting as though the matter were settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism that had lost all code value. This is not the case, however. On the one hand, codes continue to exist--even as an archaism--but they assume a function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the situation within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker). But on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical machine presupposes flows of a particular type: flows of code that are both interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and even a science. It is these flows of code that find themselves encasted, coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist societies / in such a way that they never achieve any independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer). But the decoding of flows in capitalism has freed, deterritorialized, and decoded the flows of code just as it has the others--to such a degree that the automatic machine has always increasingly internalized them in its body or its structrure as a field of forces, while depending on a science and a technology, on a so-called intellectual labour distinct from the manual labour of the worker (the evolution of the technical object). In this sense, it is not machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that creates machines, and that is constantly introducing breaks and clevages through which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production. [AO: 232-233]
Machine
[edit]See Chaosmosis chapter two ("Machinic Heterogenesis").
"A desiring-machine is a non-organic system of the body" (Deleuze 1972, 219)
- Deleuze, Gilles. 1972. "Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back." In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. ISBN 1584350180. 216-229.
"Every machine is the negation, the destroyer by incorporation (almost to the point of excretion), of the machine it replaces. And it is potentially in a similar relationship to the machine that will take its place." (Guattari 1984, 112) [might want to biblio individual essay, published in 1971).
"Machine (and machinic): we have here to distinguish between machines and Mechanics. Mechanics is relatively closed; it entertains only perfectly coded relations to external flows. Machines, though, considered in their historical evolution, constitute a phylum comparable to that of living species. They engender themselves, choose themselves, eliminate themselves, and make new lines of possibilities open up. Machines, in the widest sense, i.e. not just technical machines but theoretical, social, aesthetic, etc., machines, never function in isolation, but by aggregates or assemblages. A technical machine, for example, in a factory, interacts with a social machine, a training machine, a research machine, a commercial machine, etc."[164]
"From now on the machine will be conceived in opposition to structure, the latter being associated with a feeling of eternity and the former with an awareness of finitude, precariousness, destruction and death."[165]
Fort-da refrain as a desiring-machine.[166]
Social and technical machines
[edit]In its simplest, so-called manual forms, the technical machine already implies an acting, a transmitting, or even a driving element that is nonhuman, and that extends man's strength and allows for a certain disengagement from it. The social machine, in contrast, has men for its parts, even if we view them with their machines, and integrate them, internalize them in an institutional model at every stage of action, transmission, and motricity. Hence the social machine fashions a memory without which there would be no synergy of man and his (technical) machines. [AO: 141]
[Technical machines] do not in fact contain the conditions for the reproduction of their process; they point to the social machines that condition and organize them, but also limit and inhibit their development. [AO: 141]
It will be necessary to await capitalism to find a semiautonomous organization of technical production that tends to appropriate memory and reproduction, and thereby modifies the forms of the exploitation of man; but as a matter of fact, this organization presupposes a dismantling of the great social machines that preceded it. [AO: 141]
The same machine can be both technical and social, but only when viewed from different perspectives: for example, the clock as a technical machine for measuring uniform time, and as a social machine for reproducing canonic hours and for assuring order in the city. [AO: 141]
The social machine is literally a machine, irrespective of any metaphor, inasmuch as it exhibits an immobile motor and undertakes a variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations. This is the / social machine's supreme task, inasmuch as the apportioning of production corresponds to extractions from the chain, resulting in a residual share for each member, in a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of recording, and the productions of consumption. Flows of women and children, flows of herds and of seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding. [AO: 141-42]
By no means does the diachronic capitalist machine allow itself to be revolutionized by one or more of its synchronous technical machines, and by no means does it confer on its scientists and its technicians an independence that was unknown in the previous regimes. Doubtless it can let a certain number of scientists--mathematicians, for example--"schizophrenize" in their corner, and it can allow the passage of socially decoded flows of code that these scientists organize into axiomatics of research that is said to be basic. But the true axiomatic is elsewhere. (Leave the scientists alone to a certain point, let them create their own axiomatic, but when the time comes for serious things... For example, nondeterminist physics, with its corpuscular flows, will have to be brought into line with "determinism.") The true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which takes the place of the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends. . . . An innovation is adopted only from the perspective of the rate of profit its investment will offer by the lowering of production costs; without this prospect, the capitalist will keep the existing equipment, and stand ready to make a parallel investment in equipment in another area. [AO: 233]
See also Object relations theory | Objet petit a | Part-whole theory.
"When Jacques Lacan opens up the series of partial objects to the voice and the gaze, beyond the breast and the buttocks, he signals his refusal to close them off and reduce them to the body. The voice and the gaze escape the body, for example, as they and audiovisual machines become increasingly contiguous." (Guattari, 222)
"As object "a," the partial object is de-totalized and deterritorialized; it has permanently distanced itself from any individual corporeity; and it is now in a position to tip in the direction of real singularities and open up to the molecular machinisms of every kind that shape history." (Guattari, 222)
"Objet petit “a”: this term was put forward by Lacan in the context of a general theory of partial objects in psychoanalysis. The objet petit “a” is a function implicating oral objects, anal objects, the penis, the gaze, the voice, etc. I suggested to Lacan to join this petit “a” with petit “b” objects, corresponding to Winnicott’s transitional objects, and petit “c” objects, corresponding to institutional objects."[167]
"It is by no means clear that desire has anything to do with objects. We're talking about machines, flows, levies, detachments, residues. We're doing a critique of the partial object." (Deleuze 223)
"In order to understand the affective charge of these microgestures [of mime], they can be seen as partial objects [...]: they can be taken out of the whole sequence, they belong to other gestural sequences, they have no meaning in themselves, but are always articulated with other microgestures through the formation of different sequences." (José Gil 1985, 110)
"You can make any list of part-objects you want: hand, breast, mouth, eyes . . . It's still Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without organs, animated by various intensive movements that determine the nature and emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an organism, or even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part." (1980, 190)
We have been criticized for using the word schizo-analysis, for confusing the schizophrenic and the revolutionary. And yet we were extremely careful to distinguish them.[168]
"This is a very summary survey of the main directions an analysis must take: the uncharted continent of power formations, in other words the unconscious of the socius itself rather than the unconscious buried in the folds of the individual's brain, or expressed in stereotyped complexes. The analyst cannot be neutral towards those power formations." (Guattari 1984, 166)
"The object of desire is the power sign that manages to undo itself of its structural glue. The power sign is inscribed onto transcursive writing." (Guattari 2006, 44)
"the unconscious works with Peirce's sign; it iconizes, indexes and symbolizes, all at the same time..." (Guattari 2006, 412)
"Assemblage: this notion is larger than structure, system, form, process, etc. An assemblage contains heterogeneous elements, on a biological, social, machinic, gnoseological, or imaginary order. In schizoanalytic theory of the unconscious, assemblage is employed in reponse to the Freudian "complex."" (Guattari 2006, 415)
"Personological: adjective to describe molar relations in the subjective order. The emphasis placed on the roles played by persons, identities and identifications, is characteristic of theoretical concepts in psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytical Oedipus brings into play persons, character types; it reduces intensities, projects the molecular level of investment onto a “personological theater,” i.e. onto a system of representation cut off from real desiring production (an equivalent expression: oedipal triangulation."[169]
"Schizo-analysis: whereas psychoanalysis is based on a model of the psyche founded on the study of neuroses, focused on the person and identification, and working with transfer and interpretation, schizoanalysis turns to research on psychosis; it refuses to fold desire over onto personological systems; and challenges the efficiency of transfer and interpretation."[170]
"While psychoanalysis conceptualises psychosis through its vision of neurosis, schizoanalysis approaches all modalities of subjectivation in light of the mode of being in the world of psychosis."[171]
"Just as the schizo has broken moorings with subjective individuation, the analysis of the Unconscious should be recentred on the non-human processes of subjectivation that I call machinic, but which are more than human--superhuman in a Nietzschean sense."[172]
"The study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions."[173]
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