Michael Hardts Notes on D&Gs Mille Plateaux

Mille Plateaux: 1, 2, 3

The central problem for MP is the question of aggregation, principally I

think (but this might only be my prejudice) social aggregation. How does

society exist? What is logic of social aggregation? How can we explain

power formations? Such questions were certainly present in AO, but I

think they took a back seat to the primacy of desire, flight, and

deterritorialization. These are Foucault's questions, and whether they

did or not, one can imagine D&G learning them from him. D&G always

proceed by making distinctions or even posing preliminary oppositions,

so here they will pose distinctions between different kinds of manners

of social aggregation, or as they say between different multiplicities.

Already I think in the notion of multiplicity we can detect a shift

between its usage in AO and its usage here. In AO multiplicity was

invoked to contest ordered totalities that brought everything together

in a transcendent unity; multiplicity, in contrast, was seen as moving

out in all directions, to the four winds. Here the point is to make

distinctions among multiplicities and within each multiplicity the

constitutive aspect is highlighted much more clearly. None of these

multiplicities are random or even anarchic. They are each organized but

organized differently. The rhizome vs the tree and the pack vs the mass

are two ways of posing different multiplicities, or different logics of

aggregation. Or really, what is different about each multiplicity is its

constitution. The difference between a rhizome and a tree (or a pack and

a mass) is a different constitution. Even though it isn't used here, I

would argue that the concept constitution could be conceived as central

here. These first two chapters are relatively straightforward in posing

these distinctions and I think present a logic of argument we are quite

familiar with. When I arrive at chapter 3, however, I'm not so sure what

to do. Let me take a minute to explore the differences of the arguments

here. In the first three chapters we have two different kinds of

argument. Chapters 1 and 2 present an ethical alternative: we prefer

rhizomatic to arborescent structures and systems; we prefer packs to

masses. Chapter 3, however, even though its title indicates it is about

morals, does not seem to present such an ethical alternative. It

describes what is not what ought to be. That chapter tells us simply how

life is articulated, structured, formed, etc. This is perhaps the

correlate to the very first point they made in AO, that we should make

distinction between the human, the natural, and the machinic. How are we

supposed to read this chapter? This distinction between two different

kinds of chapters makes we wonder about the relation between what is and

what ought to be in D&G's argument. (I'm stuck in a Kant/Hegel framework

of Sein and Sollen.) How else should we relate biology to politics? Is

there in fact a discourse of authenticity behind this, according to

which the biological or the natural indirectly becomes an ethical or

political mandate--we should strive to relate to each other like the

wasp and the orchid, or create organizations like the organization of

the earth. Is that what they mean by a geology of morals? Become like

the earth? Translate what ought to be to what is? Maybe I'm on the wrong

track here. Maybe I'm too distracted by Professor Challenger and the

biological issues that D&G engage. Maybe it's better to read chapter 3

beginning at the end with the polemics that D&G make explicit there. Let

me try this tack and see if it answers or diverts this first question.

Chapter 3 is aimed at disqualifying several postulates or paradigms of

social thought, none of which bear directly on questions of biology.

First of all, through the second half of the chapter in their discussion

of signs and signification, they attack the imperialism of language,

that is, the interpretative paradigm by which all regimes of signs are

structured like language and thus should be understood through reference

to language. Or as they construct this position: "Every semiology of a

nonlinguistic system must use the medium of language .... Language is

the interpreter of all the other sign systems, linguistic or

nonlinguistic" (62-63). D&G do not cite any particular thinker who

claims this proposition, but such ideas were common among a variety of

structuralist thinkers. In fact, in The Prisonhouse of Language, Fred

Jameson characterizes structuralism in general as the proposition of

language being the universal model for the organization of all

structures. On the contrary, D&G claim, language is not the universal

model, but merely one regime of signs among many, one example of the

relation between content and expression that holds no privilege above

others. This is a discussion they will continue in more depth in Chap 4

on linguistic and Chap 5 on sign systems. In this chapter, however, they

make three correlate attacks, which might be seen as three specific

challenges to structuralism: the correspondence between words and

things; the relation between base and superstructure; and the division

between matter and mind. To elaborate the first of these challenges (on

the relation between words and things) they turn to Foucault and his

analysis of the prison in Discipline and Punish. The thing prison does

not refer primarily to the word "prison" as if the word "prison" were

the expression of the content, that is, the thing. The thing prison is

what D&G call a form of content that exists on a stratum with other

forms of content, such as the school, the barracks, the hospital, etc.

The appropriate form of expression that this form of content might

relate to, according to Foucault's analysis, is not "prison" but

"delinquent." "'Delinquency' is the form of expression in reciprocal

presupposition with the form of content 'prison'" (66). So here a thing

does not correspond to a word, but a form of content relates to a form

of expression. The prison is not a thing but a state of things, an

architecture, a set of carceral practices, a formation of power, etc.

And "delinquency" is not really well designated as a word or a

signifier, but better understood as embedded in a set of statements

arising from the social field, a regime of signs. Mixing Foucault and

D&G, then, we could say that there are two multiplicities that intersect

here, a nondiscursive multiplicity of content (a formation of power) and

a discursive multiplicity of expression (a regime of signs). Now, these

two multiplicities intersect but they do not correspond. They both

equally participate in an abstract machine or diagram. D&G write more

precisely: "they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting ...

as a kind of diagram" (67). The diagram in Discipline and Punish, as you

might remember was the Panopticon, which described not only the prison

but all the institutions of disciplinary society. Foucault asked "Is it

surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks,

hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (DP 228). It's not a surprise

because they all imply or participate in the same diagram or abstract

machine, the panopticon. In short, words don't correspond to things.

Rather forms of expression and forms of content intersect through their

equal participation in an abstract machine. Actually, D&G insist it's

still more complicated that this, because both content and expression

have not only form but also substance. Let's try to put this back in the

Foucauldian example. The nondiscursive multiplicity of the prison and

the discursive multiplicity of the discourse of delinquency each have

both form and substance. I understand easily how the prison, the

nondiscursive content, can have both form and substance: it has walls,

an architecture, a routine, etc. It is less clear to me, however, how

the discursive, the expression, the discourse of delinquency has both

form and substance. What is the substance of expression? Is this

something like the materiality of language? I think it's more than that

because I understand expression here to refer to more than language.

Delinquency, is really more than a discourse; it is also a set of

practices and thus it's equally corporeal and noncorporeal. Perhaps the

bodies of these practices as well as the materiality of this discourse

are the substance of expression. One more element to explain: I said

that content and expression intersect in and imply the shared state of

the abstract machine; or, specifically, the prison and delinquency

intersect in the panopticon. But what makes content and expression

intersect, or what is the logic of this intersection? Is it just random,

accidental? No, this is the role of the machinic assemblages. The

machinic assemblages operate at the intersections of content and

expression in each stratum. As D&G say, they "perform the coadaptations

of content and expression, ensure biunivocal relationships between

segments of content and segments of expression" (71). The machinic

assemblages put content and expression together to lead them toward the

abstract machine to which they belong. The machinic assemblage is the

constitutive go-between that moves from the strata of content and

expression to the abstract machines. What then would be a machinic

assemblage in the Foucauldian example where the prison is the content,

delinquency expression, and the panopticon the abstract machine. It

seems to me that the trial might be a machinic assemblage here in that

it brings together segments of content (segments of prison, prison

architecture, routines, etc) with segments of expression (segments of

delinquency) and lifts them up toward the abstract machine (the

panopticon). This whole apparatus together (content-expression-

assemblage) is the double articulation. I wanted to bring together all

these elements to clarify this definition. "Each stratum is a double

articulation of content and expression, both of which are really

distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and

expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that

place their segments in relation" (72). Translated into Foucault's work:

prison and delinquency are really distinct but they intermingle due to

the functioning of machinic assembles such as the trial that put their

segments in relation. I went through all this Foucauldian example partly

to try to explain some of these concepts but really I was laying out the

first challenge to structuralism at the end of chapter 3, bu which D&G

say that words and things do not correspond, but rather contents and

expressions are assembled through a double articulation toward an

abstract machine. The second challenge to structuralism is directed at

the division of society between base and superstructural elements (which

takes fundamentally the same form as the signified-signifier

relationship). According to D&G the base-superstructure framework would

pose content in the place of the economy with a certain priority over

and final determination of expression or superstructure. Or really they

see three levels: an economic base of content; a first level of the

superstructure occupied by assemblages (which might be thought of as

Althusser's RSAs); and an upper level of the superstructure that poses

expression as what Althusser calls ISAs. This structuralist social

metaphor has it all wrong, D&G claim, because as in other strata here

too content and expression are parallel parts of a double articulation,

which are assembled toward an abstract machine. Economics has elements

of both content and expression as do social institutions characterized

as superstructural such as the Church or the school. The problem with

the base/superstructure framework and with any conception of ideology is

that things simply don't work that way, society doesn't work that way.

The problem is that this is a misrecognition: "one misconstrues the

nature of language ... miscontrues the nature of regimes of signs, which

express organization of power or assemblages and have nothing to do with

ideology as the suppossed expression of a content .... It misconstrues

the nature of organizations of power ... it misconstrues the nature of

content" (68-69). The problem with structuralism is that it

misrecognizes how things are. This is a strictly scientific question

about the nature of reality--not a question of what ought to be but a

question of what is. There is no primacy nor determination between the

economic and the social nor between content and expression. That does

not mean, however, that there is no primacy and determination. In fact,

the primacy seems to reside in the abstract machine. "Form of content

and form of expression involve two parallel formalizations in

presupposition: it is obvious that their segments constantly intertwine,

embed themselves in one another; but this is accomplished by the

abstract machine from which the two forms derive, and by machinic

assemblages that regulate their relations. If this parallelism is

replaced by a pyramidal image, then content (including its form) becomes

an economic base of production displaying all of the characteristics of

the Abstract" (68). The two forms derive from the abstract machine and

the pyramidal image gives the economic base the characteristics of the

Astract (that is, I assume, its determinant role in the last instance).

This is something I think D&G wouldn't have said in AO. The abstract

machine is given a certain priority over content and expression; they in

fact derive from it. I want to highlight this claim because it shows D&G

might be closer to Foucault's framework of last week that they were

before. From Foucault's perspective it is power that is productive and

primary. I think that saying that content and expression derive from the

abstract machine is very close to this Foucauldian claim. And this is

part of what I see as D&G's effort in this book (in contrast to AO) to

think society, to think how it is that society exists, how is there

social order? What remains for me an open question at this point is the

kind of question I posed last week: what is the priority of desiring-

machines and abstract machines, who is producing whom? (I would question

this notion of derivation that I quoted just a minute ago. I don't think

really that content and expression derive from abstract machines, and

the issue becomes even more difficult if we pose desiring machines in

this context. I think this is the kind of question, however, that has to

be answered when confronting a theory of social aggregation as we are

here.) So those were the first two challenges to structuralism presented

at the end of chapter 3: the correspondence between words and things and

the determination of social superstructure by economic base. They offer

a third challenge having to do with the distinction between mind and

matter, but I don't want to go into that. I want rather to look back now

at the first half of the chapter given the framework of these challenges

to structuralism. If these challenges to structuralism were the point

then what was the first half of the chapter doing? How was it supporting

these challenges? From this perspective it seems to me the argument

would go like this. In the first part D&G establish within a framework

of biological discourse that life is organized through a double

articulation on all levels from cell chemistry to geological formations.

If we then accept the claim from AO that there is no difference of

nature between the human and the nonhuman, between the biological and

the social, that all life (mineral, animal, vegetable) functions along

the same lines, then human society too must be organized according to

the double articulation. What authority does it give the argument to

pose the double articulation in biological before claiming it in

sociological terms? That brings me back to my question about Sein and

Sollen, what is and what ought to be. Chapter 3 is about what is not

what ought to be, or rather it brings what ought to be back to what is.

How should we understand the title, "The Geology of Morals" (as a play

on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals). Geology instead of genealogy and

dated 10,000 BC because this is not so much about a process of change, a

genealogy, as it is about a fixed and permanent framework, the double

articulation, which existed everywhere and always. Double articulation

is the logic of life, equally of the earth and society. And then what

does this have to do with morals? Perhaps morals are being brought back

to the earth, perhaps Sollen what ought to be is being brought back to

Sein what is.

Mille Plateaux: 4,5,6

D&G write in the preface to the book that the various chapters or

plateaus are relatively independent and can be read in any order, but I

think that is really misleading. It is true that this book does not

have the relentless linearity of AO where the results of each part were

taken up systematically and developed in the next. In MP, however,

there is nonetheless a progressive construction of the argument in

which concepts (such as rhizome or double articulation) are elaborated

in one plateau are then built on and taken for granted in the next.

Each plateau is not really sufficient and self-contained but rather

refers to more general arguments that are presented by the book as a

whole. There is something, though, that's different about the book,

but rather than saying that each plateau can be read on its own, I'm

tempted to say that none of the plateaus can be understood before

having read the whole book.

This is I think how I got myself into trouble last week with

chapter 3, the Geology of Morals. I was frustrated by the biological

discourse because I saw no point for ethical intervention in it, no

space for politics or pragmatics. I think now I was asked too much of

that chapter on its own. There are points of political intervention in

biology, but perhaps not in that chapter, perhaps not in year 10,000

bc. I have to find the political moment in other plateaus and read

chapter 3 in their light. What is experimentation in biology? How can

we discover variation, passage, and deterritorialization in biology?

This would not be experimentation to discover how things are, but

experiment to make them how we want them to be -- perhaps not discovery

then but invention. The only example I can think of are contemporary

body artists such as Stelarc who change their own bodies either

externally with plastic surgery or internally, changing how the stomach

works. One then ought to ask how that is political, but that is a

matter for another time.

Politics

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are all conducted on an explicitly political

terrain. I want to ask first of all in what way these sections are

political and what is meant by politics. One of the preconditions and

really one of the bases for the arguments about linguistics and

semiology in the first two of these chapters is that language is not

the model for all structures and organizations (as structuralism or

some currents in structuralism would have it) but rather that the

question of language is merely a subset of the larger question of

regimes of signs, the question of semiotics. I don't think it's best

to understand what a regime of signs or what semiotics is by starting

from language and then expanding or extrapolating. It is better rather

to start on a completely different track. I would say as a first

approximation that a regime of signs is a society. Consider, for

example, the ancient history of the Jews around the period of the

destruction of the temple that D&G present. "There is a Jewish

specificity, immediately affirmed in a semiotic system. This semiotic,

however is no less mixed than any other. On the one hand, it is

intimately related to the countersignifying regime of the nomads" (p.

122), the Jews the wandering people, but "on the other hand, it has an

essential relation to the signifying semiotic" (pp. 122-23) by which

the Jews dream or reestablishing an imperial society, and finally,

perhaps most importantly it is characterized by a specific

postsignifying, passional regime. Now this mixed regime of signs, this

mixed semiotic, is nothing other than ancient Jewish society. It is

not that this regime is also social (just as sociolinguists like Labov

will argue that language is also social or that it necessarily relates

to society). No this regime is society itself; society is nothing

other than this regime of signs. (Or I guess we would have to say that

society is also a regime of bodies, a physical system that is distinct

from the sign system, but let's leave that question aside for the

moment.) Once we cast the question of language in the larger and

proper framework of a regime of signs, then, and once we recognize a

regime of signs as a society, it is clear a priori that this is a

political terrain, simply in the sense that all questions are

immediately questions of the polis, of the social field. "For language

is a political affair before it is an affair for linguistics; even the

evaluation of degrees of grammaticality is a political matter" (139-

40).

Being a political matter, however, simply in the sense of referring to

or having social consequences, doesn't yet really grasp what I mean by

political here. Last week I talked rather vaguely about ethics in order

to refer to the possibility of alternatives and action. Perhaps rather

than ethics I should talk about pragmatics. This is the opening in these

chapters toward political action. "Pragmatics is a politics of

language," (82) or perhaps more generally, pragmatics is a politics of

semiotics. What do they means by political here? How does one do

politics in D&G's universe? It is of course a practical matter, but I

would argue that the first thing one needs is criteria for political

action, and that is what D&G provide. You can recognize when D&G are

proposing criteria for political action when they start talking about

usage or particular two different usages for something. The difference

between major and minor is perhaps the clearest criterion we get in

these chapters. "'Major' and 'minor' do not qualify two different

languages but rather two usages or functions of language" (104). The

major usage of language insists on language's unity and uniformity, on

the fixity of its constants. The minor usage operates a reduction of

constants and proliferates variations of the language. "The major and

minor modes are two different treatments of language one of which

consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it in

continuous variation" (106). Maybe we should even distinguish here

between the majority usage of language that is the dominant standard,

the minority usage that also poses a standard but a subordinated one, a

stable ghetto language, and finally a minoritarian usage that poses no

standard but only variation, that deterritorializes the major

language. According to this understanding all great authors invent a

minor language, or more properly, they make minoritarian usage of the

language. In the beautiful expression of Proust that D&G cite, every

great book is written in a kind of foreign language. This minor language

or minor literature is more or less the center of D&G's little book

about Kafka.

We should also cast this difference on a larger plane, not just as two

usages of language, two ways of speaking or writing, but as usages of

society, two ways of living. The major or majority way of living refers

to the standard of the society, to the "adult-white- heterosexual-

European-male" (105) as D&G say. The minor or minority refers then to

nonstandard ways of living. The difference between majority and minority

has nothing to do with numbers, because in fact the minorities are most

often larger in number. It is probably not wrong to say that the

difference is not one of number but of power, that the difference

between the majority and the minority is a power difference, but D&G

rather refer directly to the social standard or constant as the mark of

the majority. The minority way of living, then, would refer to a

subordinate system, or a subsystem -- one, however, that still maintains

a standard. I think it would be accurate to link this to our notion of

subculture (and it would be interesting to situate the question of

subculture developed in British cultural studies in this context -- I'm

thinking specifically of Dick Hebdige's book). Finally, minoritarian is

something different: "we must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a

constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the

minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming" (105-

06). It might be true (I wonder about this) that the minorities as

subsystems or subcultures would have more access to a minoritarian

becoming than those closer to the dominant standard: Kafka as a Czech

Jew writing in German was perhaps in a better position than Goethe to

deterritorialize the German language, to invent it as a foreign

language. This might be an interesting point at which to link this to

Hebdige's notion of subcultures and their creativity.

The minoritarian usage, then, is not simply the usage that is

proper to subordinated populations. It is defined rather by its

creativity. In fact, the minoritarian is the only source of creativity

or production among these three. The majority usage just repeats the

dominant standards, and the minority usage repeats the subordinated

standards. There is no majority or even minority becoming, because

they are both stuck in homogeneous repetitions. Only the minoritarian

usage is a becoming; and it is only a becoming.

Back in the context of D&G's order-words, we should recognize that there

are two usages of order-words. The major usage of them is as

commandments or orders -- "You will do this, you will not do that" each

of which, according to D&G, is a little death sentence. The major usage

of order words is always a verdict. But of course that is not the only

usage possible: "the order-word is also something else,inseparably

connected: it is like a warning cry or a message to flee"(107). The

minoritarian usage of order-words is part of a line of flight.

We have seen these lines of flight posed as the political

alternative before, but what interests me here is that flight or escape

is not enough. "In the order-word life must answer the answer of

death, not by fleeing, but by making flight act and create," by

transforming "the compositions of order into components of passage"

(110). Flight must be creative. It must not only be the refusal of

the major usage, the refusal of the standard, the norm, the law, but a

creation of an alternative. In other words, flight cannot be just

flight -- that would be negative and empty. Flight must be positive and

creative: constituent flight. Now, when I say constituent we can't

just mean the constitution of an new order, new norms, a new majority.

As D&G say in the passage I just cited, it involves a transformation of

"the compositions of order into components of passage." The passage is

what I'm calling constituent flight. Another way of approaching this

is to say that D&G are proposing not a new order nor a new standard,

but rather a new usage, or maybe a new way of life, a new mode of life.
So this is my answer to the question about what does politics means

here in its most summary form: alternative usage, passage, constituent

flight.

Parenthetically, I want to address in the context of this discussion of

minoritarian politics D&G's easily irritating use of the term "becoming-

woman." (You might recall the term becoming-woman used earlier in AO in

the context of President Schreber, who was becoming a

woman.) The term is used here principally to illustrate the fact that

minoritarian usages are creative and majoritarian are not, or in other

words, that minoritarian usages are becomings. "There is no becoming-

majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is

minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a minority,

definable as a state or subset; but they create only by making possible

a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they

themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of

humankind, men and women both" (106). Men are the majority and women

the minority even if there are more women than men because the standard

is defined in terms of Man. Women/minority is thus a state or a

subset, which is itself not creative nor subversive. What is creative

is not the fact of being a minority but rather a minoritarian usage, a

becoming. Becoming-woman a process, a becoming that has woman as the

endpoint, it is not a process of becoming more feminine so as to reach

the final ideal identity. (And in this sense President Schreber's

becoming-woman insofar as he was simply changing sex is misleading).

Becoming-woman doesn't have an identity as its endpoint nor really any

endpoint whatsoever, but rather it is a deviation or flight from the

standard of Man that creates an alternative, a passage. In this sense,

it is D&G's way of naming a feminist practice, a feminist usage. [I

should note that there have been several interesting debates about this

term "becoming-woman" in D&G. Alice Jardine and Rosi Braidotti have

written against D&G's usage of it and Camilla Griggers has tried to

develop it into a useful feminist concept.]

I want to open one other parenthetical note about minoritarian

politics that arises from the passage I cited about becoming woman.

They said that this becoming-woman affects all of humankind, men and

women alike. D&G said from the beginning that major and minor do not

have to do with number, in the sense that the majority might refer to a

smaller number of people and the minority a larger number. Once we

consider them as two political usages, though, majoritarian and

minoritarian, they do have to do with number in a reversed and absolute

way. "But at this point, everything is reversed. For the majority,

insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is

never anybody, it is always Nobody ... whereas the minority is the

becoming of everybody, one's potential becoming to the extent that one

deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian "fact," but it is the

analytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian of

everybody" (105). "Continuous variation constitutes the becoming-

minoritarian of everybody, as opposed ot the majoritarian Fact of

Nobody. Becoming-majoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness

is called autonomy" (106). I'm interested in the collective dimension

of this explanation, which qualifies what might have sometimes seemed

like very individualistic notions of flight. Minoritarian politics is

not only collective, however, it is universal or at least potentially

universal. It is potentially the politics of everyone.

Abstraction

I'm still trying to work out D&G's usage of abstraction, largely

around their analyses of abstract machines. Frequently in common

situations one might be criticized for being too abstract, particularly

in political discussions. I often get this response. The reasoning is

that the abstract is assumed to pertain to the ideal realm and in

contrast the practical always involves a minimum of abstraction, it is

concrete. D&G, however, maintain the role of the abstract in practical

politics. The first level of explanation for this is that they

consider the abstract not ideal but virtual. The importance of this

shift for us now is that is the position of the two conceptions with

respect to reality. The ideal is opposed to the real but the virtual

is not. The virtual is opposed to the actual, but it is completely

real. (For those of you familiar with Marx, I think his discussion of

the "real abstraction" is very close to this.) But staying within the

D&G framework, the best way to approach understanding this concept of

virtuality is to begin by thinking about what is not actual -- or

better, what is not actuel in the sense of the French word as either

spatially present or temporally present. The virtual is what is

inactual but real. Deleuze's favorite example for this is memory in

Proust: a memory is real but not actual. So, then, an abstract machine
or diagram is virtual and completely real even if it is not actual.

(Remember that the Foucault's understanding of the Panopticon is as a

diagram. The panopticon is virtual, real but not actual.) The

question, then, if we are going to insist that this level of

abstraction is how does this virtual, abstract machine relate to what

is actual, to what is here and now. "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

determining 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. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or

potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always

"prior to" history. Everything escapes, everything creates never along

but through an abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity,

effects conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions

and contents" (142). The response, then, to the person who tells you you

are being too abstract in a political discussion, is that on the

contrary we are never abstract enough. Political action flows from or

through the abstract machine which is entirely inactual. The abstract

machine is prior, or, in other words, as I argued a few weeks ago, it is

productive. I'm still a bit unclear about this "piloting" role or about

the kind of determination exercised by the abstract machine, but I hope

that will become clear in some other week.

The Masochist

I think this question of abstraction and politics is also central

in the project to make for yourself a body without organs. (There is,

of course, a rather close relation between abstract machine, plane of

consistency, and body without organs.) Now, we have to ask two

questions about this "abstract" or "virtual" project to make a body

without organs: how to do it, but first of all why do it? D&G answer

the why question in terms of desire. The body without organs is the

field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency proper to desire

(where desire is defined as a process of production, without reference

to any external instance, such as lack that would crush it or pleasure

that could bring it to an end). (NB that Deleuze's criticisms of

Foucault and his use of pleasure in the letter from a few weeks ago are

taken up again verbatim here and in a footnote.) So the BwO is the

field where desire can produce freely without end. We might say also

that the BwO is the field where intensities can best appear and grow.

The BwO is itself of zero intensity but it is the proper medium for

intensities. I would say, then, translating it into another language,

that we should make a body without organs in order to increase our

power to act and think and to increase our power to be affected. D&G

really only focus on the second half, on the power to be affected, the

heightened intensities.

The masochist construction of a BwO is a good example of the

increase of our power to be affected. The masochist is not really

interested in pain. Pain is merely a means: "the masochist uses

suffering as a way of constitution a body without organs and bringing

forth a plane of consistency of desire" (155). "The masochist

constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the

filed of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or

plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress" (156).

D&G then cite a case in which a masochist plans how he wants his

partner to ride and kick him with her boots in order to have an intense

on him to leave an imprint on his body. "Legs are still organs, but

the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone

on a BwO" (156). The masochist makes a BwO in order to increase his or

her power to be affected, in order to nurture zones of intensity. But

in these terms this can seem a completely unpolitical and individual

practice. I would say that in order to conceive the program to

construct a body without organs as a political practice the other

aspect must be emphasized -- that corresponding to the increase in our

power to be affected is an increase in our power to act and think.

Here the example of the masochist might not be sufficient, and I would

like to come up with something more adequate. We need to think of a

way to link this conception of making a BwO with the universality and

creativity of the notion of a minoritarian becoming that they proposed

in the linguistics chapter.

Mille Plateaux: 7, 8, 9

1. Faciality

Faciality is not an easily concept to grasp. I think a good place to

start is by contrasting it to a dialectical conception of identity and

identity formation. In other words, I would propose as a backdrop to D&G

faciality, Sartre's and Fanon's conceptions of race and racial identity

as dialectical. The Sartre/Fanon dialectic runs like this. First the

dominant subject (the white European) creates the dominated subject as a

coherent identity. As Sartre says, it's the anti-semite who creates the

Jew. Or in Fanon, it is the European colonizer who creates the African

"native" as a fixed identity. And Said's work on Orientalism proceeds

roughly along the same line: the "oriental" is created in European

scholarship, European art, travel logs, etc. None of this is to claim

that the subalterns in question (Jew, Africans, Orientals) did not exist

before their creation by the dominant European imaginary; the claim is

rather that this identity, which overdetermines the existing

subjectivities, was created and imposed by the colonial power. Jews

existed but the anti-semite created "the jew"; Africans existed but the

colonizing power created "the native" as it did "the oriental." The

colonizer and racist created these negative identities, and pushed

alterity to its extreme, inventing the Other, posing a rigid boundary of

exclusion through the middle of the world. As Fanon says, the colonial

city is a world cut in two, between European Self and Native Other. The

dialectical conception doesn't stop, however, with this first act of

creation -- and this is the brilliance, I think, of Sartre and Fanon.

The White European Self does not actually exist before this creative

encounter, this invention of the Other. The European Self is rather the

final result of the process. The White European Self is only arrived at

through its opposition to the Other, its difference from the Jew, the

Native, the Oriental. After the creation of the negative identity, the

Other, the Self arises as a negation of that negation, and hence the

dialectical structure. The White European Self depends on its negative

Other because only through negation of that Other can it invent and

maintain its own identity. Now, I think this dialectical theory of

identity is a good starting point for understanding D&G's notion of

faciality because it is first of all decidedly nondialectical. In other

words, faciality is a theory of racism (among other things), but it is

not a theory of racial Others. "If the face is in fact Christ, in other

words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the

first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the

second or third category. They are also inscribed on the wall,

distributed by the hole. the white man's claim has never operated by

exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other (...). Racism

operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the

White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into

increasingly eccentric and backward waves (...). From the viewpoint of

racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside" (p.

178). So, in this nondialectical conception of racism, there are no

Others, no one on the outside. In other words, racial difference or

alterity is not configured in terms of the Other, of polar difference,

but rather in terms of degrees of deviance from the standard of White-

Man face. Really there is no exclusion properly speaking. On the

contrary, European racism functions precisely by including everyone on

the white screen and in the black holes -- including them and arranging

them in a hierarchy defined by degrees of deviance from the dominant

standard. That's the first thing to understand about faciality, then,

that it is based not on a negative dialectic of identities but degrees

of deviance, and that although it does not function through exclusion it

nonetheless establishes a hierarchy of types. (Does faciality have to do

with identity? Is a face an identity?) What, then, is faciality? So far

we have only that it is a nondialectical machine of hierarchy or

domination. "This machine is called the faciality machine because it is

the social production of face, because it performs the facialization of

the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the

landscapification of all worlds and milieus" (p. 181). The machine

imposes a face on a body or a landscape on a world. One might assume at

first that a face or a landscape is an identity that is stamped onto the

body or the world, and that notion of facialization as an identity-

producing machine might end up being pretty accurate, but D&G take a

different tack. The face that is created by this machine is a

combination of a white wall or screen with black holes. The white screen

is the surface on which meanings appear; it is a system of

signification. The black holes, on the other hand, are the points of

passion and subjectification. One should remember at this point that a

few chapters back, On Several Regimes of Signs, D&G described four

regimes that all centered around signification: the primitive pre-

signifying regime, the counter- signifying, the signifying, and the

post-signifying regime, which is also the subjective and passional

regime. A face, then, is a coordinated arrangement of these last two

regimes, signification and subjectification. Specifically, they told

back in that chapter that faciality is the substance of expression. It

is the material locus for signification and subjectification. "Faciality

reigns materially over that whole constellation of signifiances and

interpretations (psychologists have written extensively on the baby's

relations to the mother's face, and sociologists on the role of the face

in mass media and advertising). The despot-god has never hidden his

face, far from it; he makes himself one or even several" (115). The face

is thus a field or a milieu on which signification or subjectification

can take place, but it is not a neutral field or milieu. It is

constructed so as to make certain meanings and subjectivities appear.

The baby's relation to the mother's face is an interesting example, and

maybe gives us a reason for calling this face. But clearly this doesn't

just have to do with what we normally call faces. This face in general

is a constructed field or milieu that determines the possible

signification and subjectification. We might be better off, then,

understand the face as close to what Debord called a spectacle. Like the

spectacle the face determines what can appear, what meanings and what

subjectivities. And like the spectacle, the face corresponds to or

determines a form of rule. "The face is a politics" (181). The despotic

facial machine gives priority to the white wall and signification; while

the authoritarian facial machine gives priority to the black holes and

subjectification. The two, of course, mix and function together. Every

face is a mixture of a despotic regime and an authoritarian regime,

signification and subjectification. The revolutionary politics to

counter or contest this, then, is not to return to any primitive, pre-

facial regime -- nor is it to create any identity (which I assume would

be to create a new face). The course D&G propose instead is to unmake

the face. "If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a
politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine.

Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the

signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity. Here, the

program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: Find your black holes and

white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be

able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight" (188). Here I

think the difference between the face and the spectacle becomes more

clear. Spectacles in Debord are always something external on us,

projected for us, maybe at the limit on us. The faces, on the other

hand, are us. They constitute us, our black holes and white walls.

Dismantling our faces will be to a large extent dismantling ourselves.

We have no choice but to start out from our faces on our lines of

flight.

2. Love

This question of dismantling the face and the lines of flight involved

in it brings up once again the problem that this flight might be

misconceived as purely negative (and the term dismantling certainly

doesn't help that). D&G insist that this dismantling involves real

becoming, and more important it is a positive and creative flight, what

I tried to call last week constituent flight. But that positive aspect

is not always the easiest to recognize. I do see a way in which this

positive aspect, this creative flight is working in this part of the

book, particularly in the Three Novellas plateau, but I have to shift

gears from the politics of the face to love. D&G do presents several

description of love here that I find quite beautiful. Love, it seems to

me, is precisely a constituent flight. Let me try to derive this from

what D&G are saying. Here D&G are talking about dismantling the face and

saying we have to begin with the face we have (its white wall and black

holes) and move from there. "Only in the black hole of subjective
consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated,

captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in

which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without

entering or conquering them, in which the lines are composed together

like broken lines" (p. 188). Living love here is opposed to the dead

love of the couple I imagine, or maybe it's a reference to living labor.

And it arrives only in the process of dismantling the face, breaking

through its white wall and escaping from its black holes. That's the

first step of this love, flight from the face, or really abandon. "I

have become capable of loving (...) by abandoning love and self" (199).

The lines of flight that operate the dismantling the face are here the

abandonment of the self, evacuating the self and the love associated

with it. This evacuation of the self is what I would call exposure. But

this exposure is not somehow revealing the hidden secret, the real me

that no one sees, it is revelation in which there is no identity left,

no secret to reveal. "It's because we no longer have anything to hide

that we can no longer be apprehended. To become imperceptible oneself,

to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have

dismantled one's self ..." (197). Becoming imperceptible, dismantling

the face, evacuating the self, exposure -- these are the conditions of

loving. There is no longer a secret to reveal and no longer a Self to

love. That, however, is only the first step, the pre-condition. The

first step of loving is flight, abandoning the Self, but the second is

composition or constitution -- the lines or spaces are composed

together, or in the quote I read earlier, "each party connects with

unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in

which the lines are composed together like broken lines." So in love the

elements that escaped the organization of the face come into contact.

There is no longer a Self here to love, or Selves, or Self and Other.

Rather this encounter of lines and spaces that have escaped the face and

the Self have the potential to give rise to new compositions, new

relationships. This new relationship, this new composition of the

elements escaped from the face, from the Self, is love. The question in

love is about compatability of these elements, as D&G say of

compossibility -- that is how they can make a new composition, a new

constitution. This new composition is the creativity, the positivity of

the lines of flight. (Here is where D&G have to make good on the claim

that lines of flight, dismantling, abandonment is not merely negative.)

Here, as always, there are dangers or risks, but I think that the

dangers help clarify what the process itself is. "It can happen in love

that one person's creative line is the other's imprisonment. The

composition of the line, of one line with another, is a problem, even of

two lines of the same type. There is no assurance that two lines of

flight will prove compatible, compossible. there is no assurance that

the body without organs will be easy to compose. There is no assurance

that a love, or a political approach, will withstand it" (205). Lines of

flight have to meet and in the encounter have to compose together a new

relationship. This encounter and this composition are not given (there

is no assurance); this is rather the task of love. Discover compatible,

compossible lines. Finally, just as it is with love so it is with

politics. It seems that the positive, creative political approach that

comes with or after the lines of flight operates through love, or rather

through the same logic of encounter and composition defined by love.

That's obviously a leap that has to be worked out further (from love to

politics) but that path is the strategy I see D&G taking in the Three

Novellas plateaux.

3. State

The State is a necessarily abstract concept, first of all because it

refers to the coalescence or coincidence of a series of different bodies

or functions: traditionally, at least the police, the military, the

legislature, the court, and the executive. The concept of the State
imagines the unity of these bodies or functions. Marx & Engels, who

actually wrote very little about the State, characterized it in the

famous passage from the Manifesto as the executive committee that sees

to the interests of the bourgeoisie, or Engels called the State the

ideal collective capitalist. The State is the weapon of the ruling

class, and most important it is a unitary weapon. The State is an ideal

point that abstracts from and brings together a diverse array of ruling

functions. It is the virtual point of political power. Because of this

unity and this relation to serving the ruling class, revolution could be

conceived in the Marxist framework simply as the abolition of the State.

The primary concerns and debates of Marxist State theory in the 20th

century have centered around two questions: first the question of the

relation of the State to the ruling class (in what sense or by what

mechanisms does the bourgeoisie really control the State or do the

actions of the State necessarily correspond to the interests of the

ruling class) and second the question of the unity or centrality of the

State and State power. The second one of these is what I consider the

necessary background for D&G's concept of the State, and I think they

are addressing a line of argument that is moves from Althusser to

Foucault. Like I said, conceiving of the State as a unitary source or

locus of power is obviously an abstraction. There is no one person or

office that commands directly all the actions of the State: the center

of the State is not really in the office of the President or the

Congress or the Police Chief or the General. I see Althusser's

conception of State apparatusses as a step to address this question. In

effect, Althusser doesn't want to talk about the State as such, the

central point, but rather he wants to focus only on the various State

apparatusses. These multiple apparatusses are the adequate objects of

analysis as locuses of power rather than the unitary abstract point that

might lay behind or above them. In other words, look not to the State as

the unitary locus of power but to State apparatusses as multiple

locuses. And these multiple sites, the apparatusses, are both public and
private, repressive and ideological, from the army to the school and the

church. Foucault takes this move one step further claiming that there is

no locus, no center of power, "no headquarters of rationality that

presides over its rationality" (HS 95), not even the multiple centers of

the institutions; the centers of power in Foucault are its every point

of application, spread throughout the social field. Whether or not

Foucault would say that the State exists, he does claim that it is not

the appropriate object for the study of power. In this context, D&G's

notion of the State represents a return back to the Marx/Engels

problematic, in that once again the State is the object of the analysis

of power as a virtual unitary point. In order to understand the

centralized power of the State in D&G we have to start first with their

analysis of power in primitive State-less societies. D&G start by

challenging the anthropological notion by which primitive societies are

composed of several de-centralized segments of authority whereas modern

society has no such segments but in their stead one centralized

authority in the State. They claim instead that there is no opposition

between the segmentary and the centralized; the segmentary and the

centralized both exist and work together in the modern State. The

difference between power in primitive and modern societies is not only

or not primarily the question of centralization but rather the

suppleness or rigidity of these segmentations. So, according to D&G's

conception, the modern State is characterized by rigid segmentation and

centralization. (And this centralization is what I'm posing as a return

to Marx/Engels from the trend of Althusser/Foucault.) Now the State may

be a centralized power but that does not mean that it commands directly

over the various segments of power throughout society, that does not

mean that it is "the headquarters that presides over the rationality of

power" as Foucault said. But I would insist that already in Marx/Engels

the State was already conceived as virtual. They always formulate the

centralized power of the State acting "as if" -- the State acts as if it

were the ideal collective capitalist; or better, power functions in

society as if there were an ideal collective capitalist orchestrating

it. D&G have a way of conceiving the simultaneous reality and virtuality

of the State. The State, they say, is a kind of resonance chamber in

which the various social powers reverberate. "The segmentarity becomes

rigid, to the extent that all centers resonate in, and all the black

holes fall on, a single point of accumulation that is like a point of

intersection somewhere behind the eyes. The face of the father, teacher,

colonel, boss, enter into redundancy, refer back to a center of

signifiance that moves across the various circles and passes back over

all of the segments" (211). The State itself is constituted as this

virtual point of redundancy or resonance. Now really this is not so

different from Foucault. You might remember a line from Discipline and

Punish that I cited a few weeks ago in which Foucault writes, is it any

surprise that the school resembles the barracks which resembles the

factory which all resemble the prison? There is a redundancy or

resonance among all the institutions of disciplinary society and this

virtual centrality is what D&G are calling the State. And D&G claim that

there is no contradiction between the segmentary parts (the church, the

school, the army) and the centralized apparatus. "The State is not a

point taking all the others upon itself, but a resonance chamber for

them all" (224). The next step to explain is the difference between the

State and the war machine, and between the totalitarian State and the

fascist State.

Mille Plateaux: 10, 11

What difference does it make to be human? I'm still struggling with the

Professor Challenger plateau, number 3, and with the difference in my

approach to reading the biology sections and politics sections of the

book. As Rick asked in his email to this list this week, why should I or

we be so much more interested in the question of fascism than that of

biology? Or I would post the question like this: why should we treat

differently on the one hand passages that deal with the assemblages and

striation of cells, rocks, or birds, the alternatives of their

organization and flight, and on the other hand passages that deal with

the assemblages and striation of humans, alternatives of their

organization and flight? At a sufficiently abstract level, these

assemblages and striation, these alternatives of organization are really

the same. This is really D&G's anti-humanism, which I take to be

absolute. And here I understand anti-humanism to mean that the laws of

human nature are the very laws of nature as a whole. Let me quote

Spinoza again about this because I think he states it most clearly.

"Most of those who have written about the Affects, and human's way of

living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common

laws of nature, but of things which are outside nature. Indeed they seem

to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion" -- as if

human nature were separate from nature as a whole. On the contrary, we

must recognize that "the laws and rules of nature, according to which

all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and

everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything,

of whatever kind, must also be the same .... (...) Therefore ... I shall

consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of

lines, planes, and bodies" (Ethics, III, Preface). All of nature

(humans, cells, rocks, birds, trees) acts according to the same laws,

and thus through the same striation, assemblages, alternatives of

organization, and so forth. Therefore, for example, when D&G are

analysing multiplicities in plant development or in bird mating or in

geological formations it is not metaphorically related to the

multiplicities of human society; they are the very same multiplicities.

Since the laws of nature, as Spinoza says, are always and everywhere the

same, we can look anywhere in nature to understand the way that

multiplicities work, how the double articulation works, how assemblages

work, and even what alternatives exists among them. If you want to

understand the laws of the political organization of humans, you can

just as well look to cell biology or plant reproduction. At that level,

the level of analysis of the laws of nature, I understand the anti-

humanism very well. In addition to the analytical level, however, there

is also another level to D&G's text which I think does necessarily

privilege the human. I read the text (at least at times) as not only an

analysis of the laws of nature, as I say, but also an exhortation to

action or practice. Here it does make a difference that we are human

rather than rocks, plants, or birds. We can learn about lobster

articulation and bird refrains, but when we seek to act we translate

them to questions and alternatives of human organization and human

society. Rocks and plants may have desires, may have alternatives of

practice, and in D&G's framework they certainly have lines of flight. As

Jon pointed out well in his email response to Rick I think, part of what

D&G find so useful in Geoffrey as opposed to Cuvier is that he

recognizes the alternatives present in the natural world. That said,

however, the text does not and more generally we cannot speak to them.

There might be alternatives in nonhuman nature, but they are not

alternatives we can act on. D&G necessarily exhort us as humans. In

other words, D&G do not preach to the sparrows, they do not try to argue

with the birds that they should prefer one type of multiplicity over

another; they do not try to tell a tree that it should become like the

leaves of grass. Humans are the only ones who we can engage in these

questions of ethics or practice. That has to do perhaps with limitations

of the world but with our own limitations, but those limitations are

nonetheless real. (Just like Spinoza says there are an infinity of

attributes but we can only recognize thought and extension -- that is

not a statement about the world but about our limitation.) So I'm trying

to propose this as an attempt at explaining why we react differently

about discussions dealing with biology or geology and those dealing with
human society and organization (such as fascism). We should treat them

the same insofar as we are considering them analytically, as part of a

study of the laws of nature; according to this aspect of the text it

makes no difference to be human. But insofar as we are considering these

issues ethically or practically, we should indeed treat them

differently, because only questions of human society or human activity

are open for us a field of practice. In this regard it does make a

difference to be human.

Anti-mimesis

Finally I think in this section I have a better handle on the attack on

metaphor that D&G have conducted since the first page of AO. I

understand it here really more generally as an attack on mimesis more

generally, and in this regard we might see this argument, this anti-

mimesis, as part of the project Deleuze announced a long time earlier to

reverse Platonism (but that will be more clear in the aesthetic theory

in a moment). What I mean by anti-mimesis is D&G's refusal of

resemblance, first of all as the logic of the organization of nature.

The memories of a naturalist work out this argument. One of the

principle questions of natural history, they say, is to understand the

relationships among different animals. One of the principle ways this

has been understood is as a relation of series, where animals and their

functions will relate to each other by analogy: the gills of the fish

are like the lungs of the mammal. (They pose Jungian archetypes as an

example of this kind of series resemblances in social or cultural

terms.) The other principle way the relation among animals has been

understood is in terms of structure, where each of the animals or

function relate (again by analogy) to the transcendent and defining

structure through internal homologies among the instances. (Levi-

Strauss's structuralism series as an example of this second alternative

in social analysis.) "... in both cases Nature is conceived as an

enormous mimesis: either in the form of a chain of beings perpetually

imitating one another, progressively and regressively, and tending

toward the divine higher term they all imitate by graduated resemblance,

as the model for and principel behind the series; or in the form of a

mirror Imitation with nothing left to imitate because it itself is the

model everything else imitates, this time by ordered difference" (234-

35). The general argument here is that the dominant vein of the natural

and social sciences have understood the world as being internally

organized and as propogating on the basis of resemblances, through

mimesis, or if you want through a giant metaphorical mechanism. D&G

argue rather that nature is not organized and does not function through

mimesis but through becoming. "Becoming is never imitating" (305). A

becoming does not involve approaching a certain endpoint or model; it is

rather a kind or style of movement. Becoming- rat, for example, does not

mean resembling a rat; it means functioning the way rats function, as

part of the rat pack. Rats too pursue a becoming-rat. I take becoming,

then, as D&G's answer to the naturalist's question, how are animals and

plants related among themselves and how do they evolve. They are related

and they evolve through becomings. Now, becomings are always

minoritarian in the sense that they are always departures for the

majority or the standard. In other words, the paradigm has been shifted

from serial or structural resemblances and differences to a question of

deviations from the standard. A becoming always deviates from the

majority. This is how it works in all of nature, humans included. When

considering specifically human becomings, then, we can see why D&G say

there is no such thing as a becoming-man, "because man is majoritarian

par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a

becoming-minoritarian" (291). Since man is the primary standard, all

becomings (even when they involve women) take off from the point of man

(as standard) and furthermore becoming-woman has a privileged role as

the primary becoming. That is how I make sense out a statement such as
the following: "A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of

all man" (292). For men and women alike, the standard man is the

starting point and becoming-woman is the primary becoming. A similar

formulation should hold, according to D&G, for all the other

minoritarian becomings, becoming-jewish, becoming-black, and so forth.

All of this becoming-minoritarian, at least when humans are concerned,

is political. "Becoming-minoritarian is a political affair and

necessitates a whole labor of power, an active micropolitics. this is

the opposite of macropolitics, and even of History, in which it is a

question of knowing how to win or obtain a majority. As Faulkner said,

to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but to become-

black" (292). Now, what exactly is meant by politics here? Looking at

this passage it seems to me power is involves two elements, power and

choice, or power and an alternative we can exercise. We have alternative

to become or not to become, to remain with the standard or to deviate

from it. Ok, to go back now to where I started, becoming is situated in

D&G as an alternative to resemblance and mimesis, an alternative

explanation of the organization and mutation of nature, of species, of

human society. Becomings are primary in this analysis because they (and

not series or stuctures of resemblances) are what determine the

organization of nature. The anti-mimesis operates also in also in the

aesthetic realm, which, although of course it is really in some sense

the same as the way it operates in natural history and human society,

feels rather different. This is where we can clearly see D&G's anti-

mimesis as a reversal of Platonism -- precisely insofar as Plato

understood art as a copy of the apparent world, and in turn that

apparent world as a copy of the ideal forms. As in the other domains, in

art too D&G claim that it is not a question of imitating, of mimesis,

but of becoming. "No art is imitative, no art can be imitative or

figurative. Suppose a painter 'represents' a bird; this is in fact a

becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is

in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color"
(304). Art, then, is not at all about reproduction. Thinking of it as

reproduction, that is thinking of nature as a fixed thing that is copies

in art, mistakes the dynamic character of both nature and art. The

painted bird is a becoming-bird insofar as the bird too is becoming line

and color. Art is production just like all of nature is production; or

rather, art is becoming just as all of nature is becoming: "for all

time, painting has had the project of rendering visible, instead of

reproducing the visibe, and must of rendering sonorous, instead of

reproducing the sonorous" (346). This is where I best understand the

mandate against metaphors. The painted bird is not like the bird, it is

not a representation. It is a becoming-bird of the same status as the

becoming bird of the bird, or its becoming color and line. They are both

rendering visible.

Consistency and Composition

For a few weeks now I've been saying that the primary objective of MP is

to address the question of society, how society exists rather than not.

Or really, I should pose it on a more general level, how does nature

hold together, how is it not just radically heterogeneous and

fragmented? "This is a question of consistency: the "holding together"

of heterogeneous elements. At first, they constitute no more than a

fuzzy set, a discrete set that later takes on consistency" (323). Now

the word consistency suggests something rather passive to me, and the

plane of consistency also seem to me as a kind of backdrop or

commonality or intersection. Consider, for example, when D&G say, "The

plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms" (251).

But I think instead we should understand consistency as something active

that brings elements together. "Consistency is the same as

consolidation, it is the act that produces consolidated aggregates, of

succession as well as of coexistence ..." (329). Consistency, then, does

not refer just to a common state of elements, a collection of

homogeneous elements, but refers rather to a process of making

heterogeneous elements consistent. "Consistency necessarily occurs

between heterogeneities, not because it is the birth of a

differentiation, but because heterogeneities ... become bound up with

one another through the 'consolidation' of their coexistence and

succession" (330). So, consistency and the plane of consistency has

nothing to do with homogeneity; consistency is rather the process of the

consolidation of heterogeneous elements. This is why I like the shift

from consistency to composition when D&G begin to talk about Spinoza.

Composition rather than consistency poses more clearly for me the

process involved of organizing or composing heterogeneous elements. This

process is the subject of the two memories of a Spinozist sections. I

think it's correct to say that at one end of this process of composition

is the haecceities; they are more or less the raw material, the

heterogeneous elements that enter into the process of composition. Now,

the term haecceity comes from the work of Duns Scotus, the Scottish

scholastic philosopher (14th century?) and specifically from his book on

individuation. I think haecceity can be used interchangeable, at least

in the context of scholastic philosophy, with the term singularity. A

haecceity, D&G explain, is a mode of individuation very different from a

person, a subject, a thing, or a substance. A haecceity might refer

rather to a season, a time of day, a wind. The light at that hour, or

that color was singular. It cannot be captured in its difference from

something else, but is only defined in its thisness. (The recourse to

"thisness" or to the "here and now" are often used to understand Duns

Scotus's use of the term.) D&G of course explain it somewhat

differently. "They are haecceities in the sense that they consist

entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or

particules, capacities to affect and be affected" (261). Or, in their

terms they consist of longitude (relations of movement and rest) and

latitude (powers of affect). (I have no idea why the words longitude and
latitude are used.) This definition of haecceities as longitude and

latitude demonstrates how they are available or disposed to the process

of composition. On one hand, and this according to Spinoza's definition

of the Individual in the Ethics, an Individual is composed of bodies

that have a common relationship of movement and rest (that is the

longitude part). And on the other hand, (and now in terms of latitude),

the affects of each body, including both its power to act and its power

to be affected, determine a different axis of composition. This has to

do with the Spinoza line Deleuze likes so much: we still don't know what

a body can do. What it can do indicates how it can be composed. "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 other bodies, either to destroy that

body or to be destroyed by it..." (257). What interests me in these two

axes, longitude and latitude, is that they begin to identify how the

process of composition can take place. Now, I would like to extend this

same Spinozian logic and think of the refrain as a kind of composition,

or really a process of composition. In particular, I understand the

refrain as a process of composition that deal with time. As D&G say, the

refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time; it makes time. "Time is not

an a priori form; rather, the refrain is the a priori form of time,

which in each case fabricates different times" (349). The refrain is a

kind of constitution, a temporal constitution.

Mille plateaux: 12, 13

These two plateaux are organized in propositions (along with problems

and axioms). I see three groups of propositions. A first group (four

propositions, the first half of nomadology) insists on the difference

between the State and the war machine, or as D&G say, the exteriority of

the war machine to the State. A second group of propositions (four more,
the second half of nomadology) focus on the relation of the war machine

to nomadic movements, or rather its emergence from nomadism. The last

large group of propositions (the whole apparatus of capture plateau)

deal with the means whereby the war machine is appropriated or capture

by the State apparatus.

1. The State and the War Machine

The State and the war machine are defined in contrast to each other, but

let's start first with the State itself. "The State is sovereignty"

(360). And political sovereignty itself has two poles, the despot on one

hand and the legislator on the other, or rather, power (or might) on one

hand and right (or law) on the other. This is the two headed image of

the State we get in the section on noology: "The image has two heads,

corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty: the imperium of true

thinking operating by magical capture, seizure or binding, constituting

the efficacy of a foundation (mythos); a republic of free spirits

proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and juridical

organization, carrying the sanction of a ground (logos)" (374-75).

Normally these two poles of sovereignty, the empire and its power and

the republic and its right (or juridical formation) are conceived as

alternative possibilities of a State, but D&G pose the State-form as

always containing or rather distributing these two poles. The State is a

double articulation of empire and republic, power and right. This double

articulation is what makes the State apparatus into a stratum. The space

of the State apparatus is thus always a striated space, striated

precisely by the distribution of these two poles of sovereignty.

Political sovereignty (authority and rule) is located in the striae.

Now, we should remember the definition of the State that we got earlier
in the micropolitics and segmentarity plateau. There the State was

characterized both by the rigidity (rather that flexibility) of social

segmentation and by the centralization (rather than dispersal) of power.

The rigid segmentation and centralization were conceived together by

posing the State as a kind of resonance chamber in which the various

social powers or segments would reverberate. The State itself was thus a

virtual point of redundancy or resonance that we could recognize through

the repetition of common diagrams (such as the panopticon) through

various social institutions -- the school, the prison, the barracks, the

factory, etc. These two definitions of the State ought to go together.

The stratification that operates through the distribution of the two

heads of sovereignty ought to be the same as or at least consistent with

the centralization and rigid segmentarity of the resonance chamber. This

is finally how D&G define the State, with three elements: "Each State is

a global (not local) integration [centralization], a redundancy of

resonance (not of frequency), an operation of the stratification of the

territory (not the polarization of the milieu)" (433). I guess, then, I

understand these different definitions of the State as coordinated

elements of one more complete definition. The centralization or global

integration of the State is achieved by the redundancy or really by

repetition of a common diagram in the various rigid social segments. And

specifically what is repeated in each of the centers of power (prison,

barracks, school) is a common striation of social space, a common double

articulation between the two poles of sovereignty, between power and

right. The State is thus, backwards now, striation, redundancy,

centralization. Centralization is achieved by the repetition of the

striae, which because repeated or redundant resonate with each other.

You might ask: What are these striae that run through social space and

distribute sovereignty? Well, I'm reading the striae as the institutions

themselves: the school is a striation of society, the prison a

striation, etc. In fact, I'm understanding the institutions as striae in

the sens that they organize and direct social flows. Finally, I'm
understanding sovereignty as an instance of power separate from the

social field, transcendent to society -- as, for example, Hobbes talks

about sovereignty as a power overarching society. Striation is

sovereignty, then, insofar as the striae are raised up above the surface

of society. The walls of the institutions, which might be understood as

these striae, are transcendent above the social field. (The height of

the walls is their transcendence.) Putting all that together, then, the

striae of the institutions are the redundant instances of sovereignty

that resonate in the central (if virtual) chamber of the State. The war

machine, however, is something completely different, and this is

difference is the main point of the first half of the nomadology

plateau. "... the war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it

is in its essence, the constitutive element of smooth space, the

occupation of this space, displacement within this space, and the

corresponding composition of people: this is it sole and veritable

positive object" (417). The war machine is thus defined as the

constitution of smooth space, including both the movements across this

space and the distribution of peoples in it. It is distinct from, and

even opposed to the State, precisely insofar as its smooth space is

opposed to the striated space of the State. It seems then that "war

machine" is really a misleading term because its essence has nothing to

do with war; it should rather I would think be called the smooth machine

or the nomad machine. In any case, when we start from this definition it

is obvious that, as D&G insist several times, the war machine does not

have war as its object. "If war necessarily results, it is because the

war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (or striation)

opposing its positive object .... It is at this point that the war

machine becomes war" (417). The war machine only develops a relation to

war (not an essential but an accidental relation) when it comes into

contact with striated space, that is, with the State. Although the war

machine only arrives at war afterwards, the violence of the State is

always already. State violence, not the violence of the warrior but the
violence of the cop and the jailer, is difficult to pinpoint, D&G say,

because it always presents itself as preaccomplished, as already done,

even if it is redone every day. "State policing or lawful violence ...

consists in capturing [power] while simultaneously constituting a right

to capture [right]. It is an incorporated, structural violence distinct

from every kind of direct violence" (448). The paradigm that D&G point

toward to explain this indirect, structural violence of the State is

what Marx calls primitive accumulation, whereby the two classes are

created. The proletariat has always already been proletarianized, even

if the violence that recreates class divisions is exerted every day. I

would say, and I think this is consist with D&G, that the striation

itself is this always pre-existing violence. The walls themselves of the

prison and the school are a violence that combines power and right, that

from within the prespective of a State society always already exists.

So, paradoxical as it may seem, the State (and its striation) has an

essential relation to violence and the war machine (and its smooth

space) only become violent under certain, accidental conditions, when it

runs into striation. If the State and the war machine are so different,

if they are so exterior to each other as D&G say, how are they related

and how do they come to be integrated? Well, from the point of view of

the war machine they can't become integrated, because when the war

machine comes into contact with the State or with any striated space it

only objective is to destroy it. The war machine has no use for the

State. In contrast, when the State comes into contact with the war

machine, it does not try to destroy it but rather to appropriate it, to

put it to work. This is the process of capture, the State's

appropriation of the war machine. "One of the fundamental tasks of the

State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth

spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It

is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to

control migrations .... If it can help it, the State does not dissociate

itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations,

commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc" (385-86). So the State

does not simply want to destroy smooth space, to striate it, it wants

also to use smooth spaces as a means of communication; it does not want

simply to make nomads sedentary, but to transform nomadic paths into

migrations that serve its power. The State operates by the capture of

flows, which means preserving their movements but channeling them in

defined paths. It seems to me that the State could not exist without

smooth space and nomadism subordinated to it. The striae of the State

are themselves static and isolated; the movement and communication among

the striae only comes from the smooth space that lies between them,

subordinated to them. (Perhaps in the same vein one could say that

sedentary State production depends on labor migrations -- labor

migrations being a kind of captured nomadism.)

2. Capture and Labor

D&G present three apparatuses of capture: one that derives rent from

land, another that derives profit from labor, and a third that derives

interest or tax from money. All of these apparatusses of capture have to

do with the creation of a stock. The landlord gains rent through a stock

of land; or more clearly, the entrepreneur gains profit through a stock

of labor or suplus labor. Now I think it's important to recognize this

stock not really as something static. In other words, it's not that the

flow has been halted, but rather it has been channeled, the way for

example a nomadic movement might be channeled into a migration. The

State depends on this dynamism, even if it is a channeled dynamism. I

want to focus just on one of these apparatusses of capture, the one

having to do with labor. But first I want to go back to a discussion of

labor in the fourth section of AO, which I think is more or less taken

up again and repeated here with different terms. In that part of AO, D&G

linked labor directly to desire: "the identity of desire and labor is

not a myth, it is rather the active utopia par excellence that designate

the capitalist limit to be overcome through desiring-production" (AO

302). Desire and labor are thus if not the same thing at least

isomorphic; they are both defined by flows. And moreover, they are

captured in the same way by abstraction and representation in capitalist

society: "subjective abstract Labor as represented in private property

has, as its correlate, subjective abstract Desire as represented in the

priviatized family. Psychoanalysis undertakes the analysis of the second

term, as political economy analyzes the first" (303-04). Labor is thus

the same kind of productive, creative force as desire, but just as

desire is reigned in by Oedipus labor is reigned in by capitalism.

Clearly the labor being refered to in AO is not wage labor -- that would

be its reigned in form. This labor (which D&G say corresponds to desire)

is what Marx calls living labor. "Labour is the living, form-giving

fire, it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their

formation by living time" (Grundrisse, 361). Living labor is transformed

into the dead labor of capital, or really, undead labor, zombie labor.

In MP, however, D&G shift their terms to describe this same capture of

labor in capitalism. Now "free activity" takes the place of living labor

and "labor" takes that of waged labor. And now the process that was

described in terms of representation in AO is characterized in terms of

stockpiling: "by virtue of the stock ... activities of the 'free action'

type come to be compared, linked, and subordinated to a common and

homogeneous quantity called labor. (...) labor itself is stockpiled

activity" (442). What stockpiling seems to mean here is imposing a

repetition on activity and thus transforming the free activity that is

essentially heterogeneous into labor that is homogeneous. Labor is thus

the apparatus of capture of activity. Through its process of repetition

and homogenization, it transforms living labor into dead labor, or it

makes free activity into the activity of the living-dead. That is why

D&G claim that the myth of the zombie is the myth of labor, the movement

of the living dead (425). You might also say here that free activity has
been striated in the sense that its unrestricted flow has been channeled

by the striae of wage labor. The capture of the worker by the State is

accomplished not only through the homogenization of activity in work,

but also through a channeling or restriction of the workers' movement.

The proletariat is fundamentally nomadic, or even a "force of

nomadization" and capital has to block or direct its flows. "Even Marx

defines the proletariat not only as alienated (labor) but as

deterritorialized. [You might understand this as the Marx writing about

primitive accumulation, about the formation of the English proletariat

through the clearing of the peasants from the land, the creation of a

vagabond class that would later be available to work in the new

factories.] The proletariat, in this second perspective, appears as the

heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did many anarchists

invoke nomadic themese orignating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above

all were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a

city haunted by nomads" (558 n. 61). So, in the first place free

activity is heterogeneous and has to be homogenized in labor and second

the proletariat is deterritorialized, a force of nomadization that has

to be made sedentary or migrant through labor. Gravity has to be imposed

on its speed. These are the two aspects of labor as an apparatus of

capture: homogenization of activity and control or channeling of

movement. Both of these aspects of capitalist labor as capture involve

the striation of smooth space.

3. Axiomatics of the Global

War Machine What we generally have in these plateaux is the

appropriation of the war machine by the State and thus the striation of

smooth space (or rather the use of smooth space between striae). This

relationship seems to change, however, when D&G consider the present

situation when the world is not organizated by sovereign nation-States,

but rather States are in some ways subordinated to a global order. They

reject right away the possibility that there is emerging some sort of

global State that stands above the various nation-States. "It is an

absurdity to postulate a world supergovernment that makes the final

decisions" (461). The various States are thus superceded by what I would

call a smooth global Empire. "The war machine reforms a smooth space

that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war

itself is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The

war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States

are now no more than objects or means of that war machine. (...) [The

enemy is] no longer another State, or even another regime, but the

'whichever enemy' [l'ennemi quelconque]" (421-22). Whichever enemy --

Quaddafi, Noriega, Saddam, whichever. I think this is a very interesting

description of the contemporary global order, but how in the logic of

the text do D&G move from the State continually getting the upper hand

over the war machine to this situation where the war machine has

subordinated States to its order? And how is it that now the war machine

and its free space that used to be associated with creation and free

activity now has taken only global order for its object? Or the question

is posed most clearly for me in terms of soveriegnty. If I understand

sovereignty as an instance of power transcendent to the social field and

specifically as residing in the striae of the State space, then how can

we say that this global war machine (which is by definition on smooth

space) is sovereign? How can a war machine rule? I think the answer has

to lie back in the question of the axiomatic, which we first saw in AO

and which reappears here in these plateaux. As you remember, the

axiomatic was introduced as a way to understand the immanence of

capitalism and its controlled schizophrenia. In the present situation,

D&G say, the relationship between axiomatics and politics becomes more

and more close. "[A]n axiomatic is not at all a transcendent,

autonomous, and decision-making power opposed to experimentation and

intuition" (461). Axiomatics involve combinations of indeterminate

variables that sometimes come up against undecidable propositions. The

system of "whichever enemy", for example, refers to an axiomatic. (And

this is an axiomatic that better describes the post Cold War world ever

better than it did the workd of D&G's time.) Whichever enemy is a

variable that can be filled in the equation by a variety of different

terms, yeilding different solutions. The global war machine doesn't need

fixed relations and striated spaced ruled by a transcendent power. It

can deal with a variety of configurations through its immanent laws. If

the global war machine is not capital, then at least we can say that it

is constituted by an axiomatic just as capital is.

A new sovereignty. Capitalist sovereignty.

Mille Plateaux: 14, 15

Immanence, une vie It seems to me that the question of immanence runs

throughout the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and that one

might even pose the first mandate of the project to discover the plane

of immanence. One could begin by understanding this problematic as an

affirmation of the immanent over the transcendent, a reversal of

Platonism, a Spinozian pantheism insisting on the immanence of being, a

belief in this world (as Deleuze says in the second cinema book). Or in

social and political terms this maps easily to an affirmation of the

immanence of desire over the transcendence of the Subject and the Ego,

and perhaps most clearly the immanence of social assemblages over the

transcendence of the State. That is indeed a good beginning, but the

question quickly becomes much more complex. The concept of immanence is

not so simple and neither can our evaluation of it, our affirmation of

it remain unqualified -- a philosophical complication and then a

political qualification. In the last article published during his life,

a very brief and dense piece, Deleuze returned again to the problematic

of immanence ("Immanence: une vie," Philosophie, no. 47, 1995). Let me

summarize the argument for you. The article begins not directly with

immanence but by asking the question, What is a transcendental field?

And right away he has to distinguish the transcendental from the

transcendent. (This is an argument from AO that you probably remember.)

What is transcendent in experience are subjects and objects. A

transcendental field is distinguished from experience or from empirical

representation in that it does not refer to any object nor pertain to

any subject. It is rather a pure asubjective flow. (I think Guattari

would add at this point that the transcendental field is therefore

machinic. That is precisely what from the beginning I've understood

machinic to mean -- neither refering to any object nor pertaining to any

subject. Thus "the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane

of immanence, because it flees from every transcendence of the subject

and the object." The transcendental is defined in terms of immanence

because both are posed against the transcendent, specifically against

the transcendence of Subject and Object. This is the point at which

Deleuze can question immanence itself. Immanence does not refer to being

immanent in something or being immanent to something; it does not depend

on an object or pertain to a subject. Deleuze is not talking about what

is immanent to the world or what is immanent to language or even what is

immanent to life. "Immanence is absolute in itself." How can be

understand this pure immanence that is absolute in itself? Deleuze

explains it as a life. "It will be said of pure immanence that it is A

LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but immanence that

is not in anything; it is already a life in itself. A life is the

immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is power and beatitude,

complete." But what is a life (the indefinite article being important

here) that is this pure immanence? Should we associate this with the

generic life we saw in the beginning of AO, or even with a notion of la

vie quelconque? Deleuze gives an example of a life from Dickens's novel,

Our Common Friend, in which a scoundrel, reviled by everyone is on the

point of death. At that moment those caring for him find a sympathy for

him and do everything they can to save him, but when he recovers they

recognize again why they despised him. At that moment of death, Deleuze

claims, the character was revealed as only a life. "The life of the

individual ceded its place to an impersonal, and yet singular, life,

that releases a pure event liberated from the accidents of interior and

exterior life, in other words, from the subjectivity and objectivity of

what happens. "Homo tantum," sympathized with by everyone, to the point

of reaching a kind of beatitude. It is an hecceity, that is no longer of

individuation but of singularization: life of pure immanence, neutral,

beyond good and evil because only the subject that incarnated it among

things made it good or bad. The life of this individuality disappears

and yields to the singular immanent life of a man that no longer has a

name, because he cannot be confused with any other. Singular essence, a

life ...." Now, the example of Dickens's dying scoundrel may not be a

good one here because this singular immanence, a life, is not at all

limited to the moment of confronting death. A life is everywhere, in all

the moments experienced by this or that living subject and this or that

lived object. Here is where it is perhaps understandable that Deleuze

would begin this meditation on the plane of immanence with a description

of the transcendental field. The plane of immanence is not simply the

sum of the actually existing things and subjects. On the contrary, pure

immanence in itself, a life, is completely virtual: "it is made of

virtualities, events, singularities." Here we can recognize the

conceptual unity between the plane of immanence and the transcendental

field, in that both are distinct from the experience of subjects and

objects; a life, a pure virtuality is distinct from the lives in which

it is actualized. A life in its virtuality is what subtends and thus

runs throughout actual lives. Finally, Deleuze comes to the original

point contrasting the plane of immanence and the transcendental field

from the transcendent subjects and objects, but now that contrast is

defined in terms of priority, productivity. "One can always invoke a

transcendent that falls outside the plane of immanence, or rather that

it attributed to it, but every transcendence continues nonetheless to be

constituted only in the flux of immanent consciousness proper to this

plane. Transcendence is always a product of immanence." The plane of

immanence not only subtends but it is prior to, that is productive of

any transcendence, specifically here any Subject or Object. I thus see

the elaboration of the concept of immanence in three stages. First,

immanence is a this-worldliness opposed to the transcendence of either

the Platonic forms or the conventional Judeo- Christian God. In a second

moment, though, we have to distinguish the actualities of this world

(the individual subjects and objects that inhabit it, themselves

transcendent instances) from its virtualities. Pure immanence is

precisely the virtuality of this world, this world as singularity, as

event. Finally, and this is the third moment of the elaboration, this

pure immanence is posed as the creative core, the productive motor of

all that exists. Why should we value immanence over transcendence?

Because immanence is the source of all creativity; it is prior in terms

of productivity.

Immanence of Society

In the history of European philosophy, the immanence/transcendence

problematic pertains equally to the metaphysical (or theological) domain

and to the political. And the three elements or stages of Deleuze's

elaboration of the concept of immanence map precisely to the political

domain. In modern philosophy, at least since Hobbes, the State has been

understood in terms of its transcendence over the social plane -- and

the structural homology between the transcendence of the State over the

social plane and the transcendence of God over the plane of nature is
certainly no accident. The transcendent sovereign occupies the same

space as the transcendent God. It is quite commonplace to understand the

State in terms of this spatial metaphor of superiority. Engels, for

example, in one of the classic definitions, characterizes the State as

"a power apparently standing above society" (The Origin of the Family,

etc). Hobbes's Leviathan, Machiavelli's Prince, and even the modern

capitalist State are all sovereign insofar as they are transcendent,

that is, insofar as they stand above society. The first stage of a

political elaboration of immanence, then, is an affirmation of society

against the State, an affirmation of immanence over transcendence. There

are still, however, within modern society itself elements of

transcendence, or if you like elements of the State. The second moment

of this elaboration is to distinguish within the this-worldliness of

society between the immanent and the transcendent. This is where I see

the political importance of the D&G discussion of the smooth and the

striated. The striae are elements of transcendence that pertain to the

social field itself, that structure the social field. The smooth plane

of immanence is a pure asubjective flow; whereas the striae form canals

that channel flows. The straie, which I would like to link to the

various social institutions such as the prison, the school, the family,

are the mechanisms of subjection and subjectification. Subjects exist

within these striae and within the straie one cannot exist except as

subject. Finally, and this is the third element of the elaboration, the

plane of immanence, or here the smooth space is the locus of production

and creativity. Just as in the metaphysical context Deleuze said all

transcendence is a product of immanence, so too in this political

contest D&G claim that smooth space is the productive motor that fuels

all striated space. Once again the priority, precisely in terms of

production, is on the side of immanence. Smooth space, free activity,

and the various correlated elements are valued over transcendence and

striation because, once again, they are the source of creativity, prior

in terms of production. The State and the striae are merely products.
Axiomatics

However complex the nuances of this elaboration of immanence,

immanence's distinction from and priority over transcendence remains up

to this point relatively straightforward and unproblematic -- precisely

because immanence at each point can be evaluated as preferable to

transcendence, prior in terms of creativity and production. Immanence at

each moment is associated with creativity or productivity and freedom,

whereas transcendence is merely a product that brings with it

subordination and control. At this point we could easily correlate the

evaluation of immanence over transcendence with Deleuze's analysis of

active and reactive forces in Nietzsche as a criterion of evaluation.

Immanence is always active, creative, productive; transcendence (the

State, striae, Subject, Object) is always reactive, repressive, inert.

So, as I said, defining immanence may be a complex affair, but

evaluating it is at this point quite clear. In fact, I would be tempted

to point to this as the operative criterion for all of D&G's politics:

in every instance value immanence over transcendence (in line with the

evaluation of active over reactive forces). In Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, however, this clear evaluation is thrown into question by

one primary stumbling block, capitalism -- and perhaps also fascism. (I

want to leave fascism aside here. The question in any case is, Is

fascism an immanent form of rule, and if so how is it distinct from

democracy? If not, it is not really a stumbling block for this criterion

of evaluation.) Capitalism is a stumbling block precisely because it

operates on the plane of immanence, capital operates as Marx says

through immanent laws, and as D&G say through a general

deterritorialization and decoding of flows. And yet capitalism deploys

the most severe forms of subordination and control. If such a machine of

immanence is so oppressive how can we maintain our notion of immanence

as the central political criterion? In order to understand this paradox

of capitalism as a repressive machine that develops on the plane of

immanence, or really that itself remains a plane of immanence, D&G pose

the axiomatic as the core of capitalism; capitalism is a general

axiomatic of decoded and deterritorialized flows. I understand axiomatic

here from its mathematical definition as an open set of equations that

pose fixed relationships among variables. (One axiom of capitalism, for

example, is the tendential fall of the rate of profit.) The axiomatic is

open in the sense that new axioms can continually be added. (So to

counter the axiom of the tendential fall of the rate of profit, another

axiom might be added to transfer certain sectors of the core economy,

say heavy industry, to the periphery.) The openness and plural character

of the axiomatic means that it can at times come up with multiple

solutions to a problem or face and manage other problems that are

insoluable. Neither of these situations are catastrophic for the

axiomatic. It is accustomed to functioning through partial, tentative,

and even overdetermined solutions to its equations. (This is perhaps the

best way to understand what D&G mean when they say the capitalism

functions by breaking down.) My main point, though, is about immanence.

The axiomatic is immanent precisely in that it is not a series of fixed

statement, but a set of equations of variables. The variables are the

whichever elements, le quelconque. For example, the labor that is

plugged into the equation of capitalist valorization Marx calls abstract

labor but we might also call it whichever labor, travail quelconque.

That is what really means by abstract here: whichever, labor, the labor

of the tailor, the weaver, the carpenter, whichever. The variables are

what make the axiomatic smooth and immanent. Really there are no

Subjects or Objects in the axiomatic itself; there are rather variables

for which Subjects and Objects can be substituted in each deployment of

capitalism. The axiomatic variables are whichever subjectivities,

whichever objectivities. In this way, the axiomatic remains a plane of

immanence because it is separate from every transcendence of the subject

and the object.

Capitalism against the State

It seems to me that this notion of the capitalist axiomatic as a plane

of immanence poses capitalism in conflict with the State and with all

the correlated forces of striation. Now I think this is true but it does

not mean that capitalism does not at times converge with State

striation. I see emerging in D&G's analysis two phases of the

relationship: a first in which capitalism uses the State-form and its

striation and a second in which capitalism discovers a smooth form of

rule beyond the State. (These phases are perhaps more my invention than

theirs.) You can see the relationship of the first phase in D&G's

description of Work as striation. "The physicosocial model of Work

pertains to the State apparatus, it is one of its inventions, and for

two reason. (...) Second, labor performs a generalized operation of

striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of

smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is the essential enterprise

of the State, namely, its conquest of the war machine" (490- 91). It's

easy to recognize the regimentation of capitalist wage labor as a

striation of space-time: space for example in the construction of the

factory and the coding of its spaces (with the tasks along the assembly

line for instance) and time in the divisions of the day into work and

leisure and then the elaborate coding of the times of the work day. This

phase is also characterized by the nation-State as the ruling structure

for the operation of capitalism. (That should be explained but I'm

moving fast now.) These striation, however, are not proper to

capitalism, and striated capital is not the only form of capital. There

is also smooth capital. Actually, I would like to pose these as phases

of capitalism and we are moving today from the striated phase to the

smooth. "The present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital

are making the distinction between constant and variable capital, and

even fixed and circulating capital, increasingly relative; the essential

thing is instead the distinction between striated capital and smooth

capital, and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter ..."

(492). The former gives way to the latter, the striated gives way to the

smooth, I would argue, precisely because capitalism is at heart an

axiomatic, and hence a plane of immanence, a smooth space. The passage

to the smooth phase of capital is actually capitalism's realization, the

realization of its smooth essence. Now the form of rule of this realized

smooth capital is not the State-form nor any kind of transcendence.

Integrated world capitalism must correspond not to a State but to a

global war machine. The global war machine rules over a smooth space

with a peace more terrifying than any war -- and most important for my

argument here it operates precisely through an axiomatic. D&G only give

a hint of the axiomatic of the global war machine by telling us that it

functions through the whichever enemy, l'ennemi quelconque. My point in

this section is simply that this global war machine and not any State is

the form of rule really adequate to capitalism precisely because like

capitalism it operates on a plane of immanence through an axiomatic.

Now the question all this discussion of the axiomatics of both

capitalism and the global war machine raises is, does the axiomatic's

combination of immanence and repression really derail any utility of the

category of immanence as central political criterion (as I was claimed

it functions)? Or are the immanence they want to affirm and the

immanence of these axiomatics distinct and distinguishable in some way?

Is the axiomatic really a false kind of immanence, an immanence held

back, diverted?