\documentclass[DIV=12,%
               BCOR=10mm,%
               headinclude=false,%
               footinclude=false,open=any,%
               fontsize=11pt,%
               twoside,%
               paper=210mm:11in]%
               {scrbook}






\usepackage[noautomatic]{imakeidx}



\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{alltt}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage[normalem]{ulem}
\def\hsout{\bgroup \ULdepth=-.55ex \ULset}
% https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/22410/strikethrough-in-section-title
% Unclear if \protect \hsout is needed. Doesn't looks so
\DeclareRobustCommand{\sout}[1]{\texorpdfstring{\hsout{#1}}{#1}}
\usepackage{wrapfig}

% avoid breakage on multiple <br><br> and avoid the next [] to be eaten
\newcommand*{\forcelinebreak}{\strut\\*{}}

\newcommand*{\hairline}{%
  \bigskip%
  \noindent \hrulefill%
  \bigskip%
}

% reverse indentation for biblio and play

\newenvironment*{amusebiblio}{
  \leftskip=\parindent
  \parindent=-\parindent
  \smallskip
  \indent
}{\smallskip}

\newenvironment*{amuseplay}{
  \leftskip=\parindent
  \parindent=-\parindent
  \smallskip
  \indent
}{\smallskip}

\newcommand*{\Slash}{\slash\hspace{0pt}}


% http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/forcing-linebreaks-in-url
\PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url}\usepackage[hyperfootnotes=false,hidelinks,breaklinks=true]{hyperref}
\usepackage{bookmark}

\usepackage[english,shorthands=off]{babel}
\babelfont{rm}[Path=/usr/share/fonts/opentype/linux-libertine/,%
 BoldFont=LinLibertine_RB.otf,%
 BoldItalicFont=LinLibertine_RBI.otf,%
 ItalicFont=LinLibertine_RI.otf]{LinLibertine_R.otf}
\babelfont{tt}[Scale=MatchLowercase,%
 Path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/cmu/,%
 BoldFont=cmuntb.ttf,%
 BoldItalicFont=cmuntx.ttf,%
 ItalicFont=cmunit.ttf]{cmuntt.ttf}
\babelfont{sf}[Scale=MatchLowercase,%
 Path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/cmu/,%
 BoldFont=cmunsx.ttf,%
 BoldItalicFont=cmunso.ttf,%
 ItalicFont=cmunsi.ttf]{cmunss.ttf}



\renewcommand*{\partpagestyle}{empty}


% global style

\pagestyle{plain}




\usepackage{indentfirst}

% remove the numbering
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-2}

% remove labels from the captions
\renewcommand*{\captionformat}{}
\renewcommand*{\figureformat}{}
\renewcommand*{\tableformat}{}
\KOMAoption{captions}{belowfigure,nooneline}
\addtokomafont{caption}{\centering}







\deffootnote[3em]{0em}{3em}{\textsuperscript{\thefootnotemark}~}


\addtokomafont{disposition}{\rmfamily}
\addtokomafont{descriptionlabel}{\rmfamily}


\frenchspacing
% avoid vertical glue
\raggedbottom

% this will generate overfull boxes, so we need to set a tolerance
% \pretolerance=1000
% pretolerance is what is accepted for a paragraph without
% hyphenation, so it makes sense to be strict here and let the user
% accept tweak the tolerance instead.
\tolerance=200
% Additional tolerance for bad paragraphs only
\setlength{\emergencystretch}{30pt}

% (try to) forbid widows/orphans
\clubpenalty=10000
\widowpenalty=10000





% given that we said footinclude=false, this should be safe
\setlength{\footskip}{2\baselineskip}
\setlength{\parindent}{15pt}

\title{A Thousand Plateaus}
\date{1987}
\author{Deleuze \& Guattari}
\subtitle{Capitalism and Schizophrenia}






% https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.text.tex/6fYmcVMbSbQ/discussion
\hypersetup{%
pdfencoding=auto,
pdftitle={Thousand Plateaus},%
pdfauthor={Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari},%
pdfsubject={Capitalism and Schizophrenia},%
pdfkeywords={post-structuralism; post-anarchism; not-anarchist}%
}


\begin{document}









  \begin{titlepage}


  \strut\vskip 2em
  \begin{center}

  {\usekomafont{title}{\huge A Thousand Plateaus\par}}%
  \vskip 1em
  
  {\usekomafont{subtitle}{Capitalism and Schizophrenia\par}}%
  
  \vskip 2em
  
  {\usekomafont{author}{Deleuze \& Guattari\par}}%
  
  \vskip 1.5em



   
   \vfill



  
  {\usekomafont{date}{1987\par}}%
  


  \end{center}


     \end{titlepage}
     
     \cleardoublepage





\tableofcontents
% start a new right-handed page

\cleardoublepage



% ;
\chapter{Contents}
\hyperdef{amuse}{toc}{}%
\label{textamuse:toc}%


\hyperref{}{amuse}{foreword}{Translator’s Foreword}: Pleasures of Philosophy by \emph{Brian
Massumi}


\href{\#translation\_notes}{Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments}


\href{\#authors\_note}{Author’s Note}


1. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-1}{Introduction: Rhizome}



\begin{quote}


Root, radicle, and rhizome—Issues concerning books—The One and the
Multiple—Tree and rhizome—The geographical directions, Orient, Occident,
America—The misdeeds of the tree—What is a plateau?



\end{quote}


2. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-2}{1914: One or Several Wolves?}



\begin{quote}


Neurosis and psychosis—For a theory of multiplicities—Packs—The
unconscious and the molecular



\end{quote}


3. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-3}{10,000 \emph{B.C.}: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the
Earth Think It Is?)}



\begin{quote}


Strata—Double articulation (segmentarity)—What constitutes the unity of
a stratum—Milieus—The diversity within a stratum: forms and substances,
epistrata and parastrata—Content and expression—The diversity among
strata—The molar and the molecular—Abstract machine and assemblage:
their comparative states—Metastrata



\end{quote}


4. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-4}{November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics}



\begin{quote}


The order-word—Indirect discourse—Order-words, acts, and incorporeal
transformations—Dates—Content and expression, and their respective
variables—The aspects of the assemblage—Constants, variables, and
continuous variation—Music—Style—Major and minor—Becoming—Death and
escape, figure and metamorphosis



\end{quote}


5. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-5}{587 \emph{B.C.-A.D.} 70: On Several Regimes of Signs}



\begin{quote}


The signifying despotic regime—The passional subjective regime—The two
kinds of delusion and the problem of psychiatry—The ancient history of
the Jewish people—The line of flight and the prophet—The face, turning
away, and betrayal—The Book—The system of subjectivity: consciousness
and passion, Doubles—Domestic squabble and office
squabble—Redundancy—The figures of deterritorialization—Abstract machine
and diagram—The generative, the transformational, the diagrammatic, and
the machinic



\end{quote}


6. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-6}{November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body
Without Organs?}



\begin{quote}


The body without organs, waves and intensities—The egg—Masochism,
courtly love, and the Tao—The strata and the plane of
consistency—Antonin Artaud—The art of caution—The three-body
problem—Desire, plane, selection, and composition



\end{quote}


7. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-7}{Year Zero: Faciality}



\begin{quote}


White wall, black hole—The abstract machine of faciality—Body, head, and
face—Face and landscape—The courtly novel—Theorems of
deterritorialization—The face and Christ—The two figures of the face:
frontal view and profile, the turning away—Dismantling the face



\end{quote}


8. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-8}{1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?”}



\begin{quote}


The novella and the tale: the secret—The three lines—Break, crack, and
rupture—The couple, the double, and the clandestine



\end{quote}


9. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-9}{1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity}



\begin{quote}


Segmentarity, primitive and civilized—The molar and the
molecular—Fascism and totalitarianism—The segmented line and the quantum
flow—Gabriel Tarde—Masses and classes—The abstract machine: mutation and
overcoding—What is a power center?—The three lines and the dangers of
each—Fear, clarity, power, and death



\end{quote}


10. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-10}{1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,
Becoming-Imperceptible\dots{}}



\begin{quote}


Becoming—Three aspects of sorcery: multiplicity; the Anomalous, or the
Outsider; transformations—Individuation and Haecceity: five o’clock in
the evening—Longitude, latitude, and the plane of consistency—The two
planes, or the two conceptions of the plane—Becoming-woman,
becoming-child, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular: zones of
proximity—Becoming imperceptible—The secret—Majority, minority,
minoritarian—The minoritarian character and dissymmetry of becoming:
double becoming—Point and line, memory and becoming—Becoming and
block—The opposition between punctual systems and multilinear
systems—Music, painting, and becomings—The refrain—Theorems of
deterritorialization continued—Becoming versus imitation



\end{quote}


11. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-11}{1837: Of the Refrain}



\begin{quote}


In the dark, at home, toward the world—Milieus and rhythm—The placard
and the territory—Expression as style: rhythmic faces, melodic
landscapes—Bird song—Territoriality, assemblages, and
interassemblages—The territory and the earth, the Natal—The problem of
consistency—Machinic assemblage and abstract machine—Classicism and
milieus—Romanticism, the territory, the earth, and the people—Modern art
and the cosmos—Form and substance, forces and material—Music and
refrains; the great and the small refrain



\end{quote}


12. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-12}{1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine}



\begin{quote}


The two poles of the State—The irreducibility and exteriority of the war
machine—The man of war—Minor and major: the minor sciences—The body and
esprit de corps—Thought, the State, and nomadology—First aspect: the war
machine and nomad space—Second aspect: the war machine and the
composition of people, the nomad number—Third aspect: the war machine
and nomad affects—Free action and work—The nature of assemblages: tools
and signs, arms and jewelry—Metallurgy, itinerancy, and nomadism—The
machinic phylum and technological lineages—Smooth space, striated space,
holey space—The war machine and war: the complexities of the relation



\end{quote}


13. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-13}{7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture}



\begin{quote}


The paleolithic State—Primitive groups, towns, States, and worldwide
organizations—Anticipate, ward off—The meaning of the word “last”
(marginalism)—Exchange and stock—Capture: landownership (rent), fiscal
organization (taxation), public works (profit)—The problem of
violence—The forms of the State and the three ages of Law—Capitalism and
the State—Subjection and enslavement—Issues in axiomatics



\end{quote}


14. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-14}{1440: The Smooth and the Striated}



\begin{quote}


The technological model (textile)—The musical model—The maritime
model—The mathematical model (multiplicities)—The physical model—The
aesthetic model (nomad art)



\end{quote}


15. \hyperref{}{amuse}{plateau-15}{Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines}


\hyperref{}{amuse}{bibliography}{Bibliography} (compiled by Brian Massumi)

\chapter{Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy}
\hyperdef{amuse}{foreword}{}%
\label{textamuse:foreword}%


This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy
subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how
to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire
chapter to music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn’t a
chapter? That presents itself as a network of “plateaus” that are
precisely dated, but can be read in any order? That deploys a complex
technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the
sciences, mathematics, and the humanities, but whose authors recommend
that you read it as you would listen to a record?\footnote{Gilles Deleuze, in Deleuze and Claire Parnet, \emph{Dialogues} (Paris: Flammarion, 1977; forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press), p. 10.}


“Philosophy, nothing but philosophy.”\footnote{Gilles Deleuze, interview with Catherine Clément, \emph{L’Arc}, no. 49 (revised ed., 1980), p. 99.} Of a bastard line.


The annals of official philosophy are populated by “bureaucrats of pure
reason” who speak in “the shadow of the despot” and are in historical
complicity with the State.\footnote{Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” in \emph{The New Nietzsche}, ed. Donald B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 148. \emph{Semiotext(e)}, \emph{Nietzsche’s Return} 3, 1 (1978), p. 20.} They invent “a properly spiritual \dots{}
absolute State that \dots{} effectively functions in the mind.” Theirs is the
discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by
“good” sense, of rocklike identity, “universal” truth, and (white male)
justice. “Thus the exercise of their thought is in conformity with the
aims of the real State, with the dominant significations, and with the
requirements of the established order.”\footnote{Deleuze and Parnet, \emph{Dialogues}, p. 20. On the relationship between philosophy and the State, see also pp. 351–473 of the present work. Deleuze develops an extended critique of rationalist philosophy in \emph{Difference et répétition} (Paris: PUF, 1968); see especially, “L’Image de la pensée,” pp. 169–217.}


Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles of his
earliest books read like a Who’s Who of philosophical giants. “What got
me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as
a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate
conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and
giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be
monstrous.”\footnote{Deleuze, “I Have Nothing to Admit,” trans. Janis Forman, \emph{Semiotext(e)}, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} 2, 3 (1977), p. 12 (translation modified).} Hegel is absent, being too despicable to merit even a
mutant offspring.\footnote{“What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic” (ibid).} To Kant he dedicated an affectionate study of “an
enemy.” Yet much of positive value came of Deleuze’s flirtation with the
greats. He discovered an orphan line of thinkers who were tied by no
direct descendance but were united in their opposition to the State
philosophy that would nevertheless accord them minor positions in its
canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson there
exists a “secret link constituted by the critique of negativity, the
cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces
and relations, the denunciation of power.”\footnote{Ibid.} Deleuze’s first major
statements written in his own voice, \emph{Différence et répétition} (1968)
and \emph{Logique du sens} (1969), cross-fertilized that line of “nomad”
thought with contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker
revolt of May 1968 and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the
intellectual in society\footnote{See Deleuze’s discussion with Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Foucault, \emph{Language, Counter-Memory, Practice}, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 205–217.} led him to disclaim the “ponderous academic
apparatus”\footnote{Deleuze, “I Have Nothing to Admit,” p. 113.} still in evidence in those works. However, many elements
of the “philosophy of difference” they elaborated were transfused into a
continuing collaboration, of which \emph{A Thousand Plateaus} is the most
recent product.


Félix Guattari is a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political
activist. He has worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental
psychiatric clinic founded by Lacanian analyst Jean Oury. Guattari
himself was among Lacan’s earliest trainees, and although he never
severed his ties with Lacan’s Freudian School the group therapy
practiced at La Borde took him in a very different direction. The aim at
La Borde was to abolish the hierarchy between doctor and patient in
favor of an interactive group dynamic that would bring the experiences
of both to full expression in such a way as to produce a collective
critique of the power relations in society as a whole. “The central
perspective is \dots{} to promote human relations that do not automatically
fall into roles or stereotypes but open onto fundamental relations of a
metaphysical kind that \emph{bring out} the most radical and basic
alienations of madness or neurosis”\footnote{Félix Guattari, “Sur les rapports infirmiers-médecins” (1955), in \emph{Psychanalyse et transversalité} (Paris: Maspero, 1972), p. 11.} and channel them into
revolutionary practice. Guattari collaborated beginning in 1960 on group
projects dedicated to developing this radical “institutional
psychotherapy,”\footnote{Guattari, \emph{Psychanalyse et transversalité}, pp. 40, 173n, 288–289. The journal \emph{Recherches}, of which Guattari was an editor, was the mouthpiece of the institutional analysis movement.} and later entered an uneasy alliance with the
international antipsychiatry movement spearheaded by R.D. Laing in
England and Franco Basaglia in Italy.\footnote{Uneasy because Guattari believed that Laing’s communitarian solution reconstituted an extended Oedipal family (\emph{La Révolution moléculaire}, [Paris: Editions Recherches, 1977], p. 121), and because he was critical of Basaglia’s assimilation of mental illness and social alienation and his rejection of any kind of institutions for the insane (\emph{Psychanalyse et transversalité}, p. 264).} As Lacanian schools of
psychoanalysis gained ground against psychiatry, the contractual Oedipal
relationship between the analyst and the transference-bound analysand
became as much of a target for Guattari as the legal bondage of the
institutionalized patient in the conventional State hospital. He came to
occupy the same position in relation to psychoanalysis as he had all
along in relation to the parties of the left: an ultra-opposition within
the opposition. His antihierarchical leanings made him a precursor to
the events of May 1968 and an early partisan of the social movements
that grew from them, including feminism and the gay rights movement.\footnote{In 1973, Guattari was tried and fined for committing an “outrage to public decency” by publishing an issue of \emph{Recherches} on homosexuality. All copies were ordered destroyed (\emph{La Révolution moléculaire}, p. 110n).}
**Anti-Oedipus* (1972),\footnote{\emph{Anti-Oedipus}, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).} his first book with Deleuze, gave
philosophical weight to his convictions and created one of the
intellectual sensations of postwar France with its spirited polemics
against State-happy or pro-party versions of Marxism and school-building
strains of psychoanalysis, which separately and in various combinations
represented the dominant intellectual currents of the time (in spite of
the fundamentally anarchist nature of the spontaneous popular uprisings
that had shaken the world in 1968). “The most tangible result of
**Anti-Oedipus* was that it short-circuited the connection between
psychoanalysis and the far left parties,” in which he and Deleuze saw
the potential for a powerful new bureaucracy of analytic reason.\footnote{\emph{La Révolution moléculaire}, p. 144. The disintegration of the Left into dogmatic “groupuscules” and the amoeba-like proliferation of Lacanian schools based on personality cults confirmed the charge of bureaucratism but belied the potency of the mix. Guattari himself began his political life in the early 1950s with stormy attempts at membership in two Trotskyist splinter parties (\emph{Psychanalyse et transversalité}, pp. 268–271).}


For many French intellectuals, the hyperactivism of post-May gave way to
a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion (\emph{Tel Quel}) or
political conservatism (the Nouveaux Philosophes) in a foreshadowing of
the Reagan eighties. Deleuze and Guattari never recanted. Nor did they
simply revive the polemics. \emph{A Thousand Plateaus} (1980), written over a
seven-year period, was billed as a sequel to \emph{Anti-Oedipus} and shares
its subtitle, \emph{Capitalism and Schizophrenia}. But it constitutes a very
different project. It is less a critique than a positive exercise in the
affirmative “nomad” thought called for in \emph{Anti-Oedipus}.


“State philosophy” is another word for the representational thinking
that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered
an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the
hands of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory
generally. As described by Deleuze,\footnote{\emph{Difference et répétition}, pp. 49–55, 337–349.} it reposes on a double identity:
of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it
lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The
subject, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the
concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the
self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is
analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these
symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the
policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly
itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end
is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are
limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of
properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others:
**logos*, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of
perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme
standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is
negation: \emph{x} = \emph{x} = not \emph{y}.
Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational
foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers
have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between
philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade
of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of
Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning throughout
Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von
Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the
“spiritual and moral training of the nation,” to be achieved by
“deriving everything from an original principle” (truth), by “relating
everything to an ideal” (justice), and by “unifying this principle and
this ideal in a single Idea” (the State). The end product would be “a
fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society”\footnote{Jean-François Lyotard, \emph{The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge}, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 32–33.}—each mind an
analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the
State. Prussian mind-meld.\footnote{Jürgen Habermas’s notion of “consensus” is the updated, late-modern version.} More insidious than the well-known
practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning
military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the
propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that
“properly spiritual absolute State” endlessly reproduced and
disseminated at every level of the social fabric.
Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce
Irigaray have attacked it under the name “phallogocentrism” (what the
most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In
the introduction to \emph{A Thousand Plateaus}, Deleuze and Guattari describe
it as the “arborescent model” of thought (the proudly erect tree under
whose spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class).


“Nomad thought” does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered
interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not
repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the
artificial division between the three domains of representation,
subject, concept, and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a
conductivity that knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely
reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a
communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the extent
that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. They do not
reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing state of things. A
concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or
it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick?
The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased
in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a
juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The
edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power
relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. “What
interests us are the circumstances.”\footnote{Interview with Gilles Deleuze, \emph{Libération}, October 23, 1980, p. 16.} Because the concept in its
unrestrained usage \emph{is} a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture.
It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a
space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no
subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought
replaces the closed equation of representation, \emph{x}
= \emph{x} = not \emph{y} (I
= I = not you) with an open
equation: \dots{} + \emph{y} + \emph{z} + \emph{a} + \dots{} (\dots{} + arm + brick + window + \dots{}). Rather
than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their
manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a
set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a
multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or
hindering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The
modus operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent
object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force
arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power
builds walls.


The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space.
Air against earth. State space is “striated,” or gridded. Movement in it
is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the
order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable
points. Nomad space is “smooth,” or open-ended. One can rise up at any
point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the \emph{nomos}:
arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the
**logos* of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort).


**A Thousand Plateaus* is an effort to construct a smooth space of
thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad
thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it “ethics.” Nietzsche called
it the “gay science.” Artaud called it “crowned anarchy.” To Maurice
Blanchot, it is the “space of literature.” To Foucault, “outside
thought.”\footnote{See Foucault’s essay on Blanchot, often quoted by Deleuze: “The Thought from Outside,” in \emph{Foucault\Slash{}Blanchot}, trans. Brian Massumi, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault (New York: Zone Books, 1987).} In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms
“pragmatics” and “schizoanalysis,” and in the introduction describe a
rhizome network strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the
points of the book is that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy.
Or that the kind of philosophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and
painters are philosophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the
potentials of their respective mediums and break away from the beaten
paths.\footnote{Deleuze’s books on cinema (\emph{Cinema I: The Movement-Image} [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], and \emph{Cinema II: The Time-Image} [forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press]) and on painting (\emph{Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation} [Paris: Ed. de la Différence, 1981 ]) are not meant as exercises in philosophical expansionism. Their project is not to bring these arts to philosophy, but to bring out the philosophy already in them.} On a strictly formal level, it is mathematics and music that
create the smoothest of the smooth spaces.\footnote{The terms “smooth space” and “striated space” were in fact coined by Pierre Boulez. See p. 361–62 of the present work and note 20.} In fact, Deleuze and
Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with
content than music a rarefied form of philosophy.


Which returns to our opening question. How should \emph{A Thousand Plateaus}
be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you
cold. You skip them. You don’t approach a record as a closed book that
you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over
again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath
as you go about your daily business.


**A Thousand Plateaus* is conceived as an open system.\footnote{Interview with Gilles Deleuze, \emph{Libération}, October 23, 1980, p. 17.} It does not
pretend to have the final word. The authors’ hope, however, is that
elements of it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will
weave into the melody of their everyday lives.


Each “plateau” is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a
variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former
emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector.
The vectors are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that
is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own
trajectory. The word “plateau” comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on
Balinese culture, in which he found a libidinal economy quite different
from the West’s orgasmic orientation.\footnote{See page 158 of the present work and note. <literal style=“html”><!-- TODO --><\Slash{}literal>} In Deleuze and Guattari, a
plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a
pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The
heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of
afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into
other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which
any number of connecting routes could exist. Each section of \emph{A Thousand
Plateaus} tries to combine conceptual bricks in such a way as to
construct this kind of intensive state in thought. The way the
combination is made is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call
consistency—not in the sense of a homogeneity, but as a holding together
of disparate elements (also known as a “style”).\footnote{On style in literature, see Deleuze, \emph{Proust and Signs}, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 142–150.} A style in this
sense, as a dynamic holding together or mode of composition, is not
something limited to writing. Filmmakers, painters, and musicians have
their styles, mathematicians have theirs, rocks have style, and so do
tools, and technologies, and historical periods,
even—especially—punctual events. Each section is dated, because each
tries to reconstitute a dynamism that has existed in other mediums at
other times. The date corresponds to the point at which that particular
dynamism found its purest incarnation in matter, the point at which it
was freest from interference from other modes and rose to its highest
degree of intensity. That never lasts more than a flash, because the
world rarely leaves room for uncommon intensity, being in large measure
an entropic trashbin of outworn modes that refuse to die. Section 12,
for example, the “Treatise on Nomadology,” is dated 1227 \emph{A.D.} because
that is when the nomad war machine existed for a moment in its pure form
on the vacant smooth spaces of the steppes of Inner Asia.


The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises
from the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau
to the next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights.
You can take a concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with
it to its next appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that
repetitious. Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.


Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book
entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting
or politics. The authors steal from other disciplines with glee, but
they are more than happy to return the favor. Deleuze’s own image for a
concept is not a brick, but a “tool box.”\footnote{Deleuze and Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” p. 208.} He calls his kind of
philosophy “pragmatics” because its goal is the invention of concepts
that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of
propositions that you either enter or you don’t, but instead pack a
potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy of
prying.


The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge:
to pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life
and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity that
would leave afterimages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into
still other lives, creating a fabric of heightened states between which
any number, the greatest number, of connecting routes would exist. Some
might call that promiscuous. Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.


The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts
does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it
possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in
the body?


The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be “none.” If that
happens, it’s not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better
off buying a record.



\bigskip


Brian Massumi


\hyperdef{amuse}{translation}{}%
\label{textamuse:translation}%
\_notes

\chapter{Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments}


***AFFECT\Slash{}AFFECTION**. Neither word denotes a personal feeling
(\emph{sentiment} in Deleuze and Guattari). \emph{L’affect} (Spinoza’s \emph{affectus})
is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity
corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to
another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s
capacity to act. \emph{L’affection} (Spinoza’s \emph{affectio}) is each such State
considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second,
affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to
include “mental” or ideal bodies).



\bigskip


***DRAW**. In \emph{A Thousand Plateaus}, to draw is an act of creation. What
is drawn (the Body without Organs, the plane of consistency, a line of
flight) does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word \emph{tracer}
captures this better: It has all the graphic connotations of “to draw”
in English, but can also mean to blaze a trail or open a road. “To
trace” (\emph{décalquer}), on the other hand, is to copy something from a
model.



\bigskip


***FLIGHT\Slash{}ESCAPE**. Both words translate \emph{fuite}, which has a different
range of meanings than either of the English terms. \emph{Fuite} covers not
only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and
disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a
**point de fuite*). It has no relation to flying.



\bigskip


***MILIEU**. In French, \emph{milieu} means “surroundings,” “medium” (as in
chemistry), and “middle.” In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari,
“milieu” should be read as a technical term combining all three
meanings.



\bigskip


***PLANE**. The word \emph{plan} designates both a “plane” in the geometrical
sense and a “plan.” The authors use it primarily in the first sense.
Where both meanings seem to be present (as in discussions of the \emph{plan
d’organisatori}) “plan(e)” has been used in the translation.



\bigskip


***POWER**. Two words for “power” exist in French, \emph{puissance} and
**pouvoir*. In Deleuze and Guattari, they are associated with very
different concepts (although the terminological distinction is not
consistently observed). \emph{Puissance} refers to a range of potential. It
has been defined by Deleuze as a “capacity for existence,” “a capacity
to affect or be affected,” a capacity to multiply connections that may
be realized by a given “body” to varying degrees in different
situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or fullness of
existence (or a degree on such a scale), analogous to the capacity of a
number to be raised to a higher “power.” It is used in the French
translation of Nietzsche’s term “will to power.” Like its English
counterpart, it has an additional mathematical usage, designating the
number of elements in a finite or infinite set. Here, \emph{puissance}
pertains to the virtual (the plane of consistency), \emph{pouvoir} to the
actual (the plane of organization). The authors use \emph{pouvoir} in a sense
very close to Foucault’s, as an instituted and reproducible relation of
force, a selective concretization of potential. Both \emph{puissance} and
**pouvoir* have been translated here as “power,” since the distinction
between the concepts is usually clear from the context. The French terms
have been added in parentheses where confusion might arise, and in
occasional passages where \emph{puissance} is rendered as “potential.”



\bigskip


***PROCESS\Slash{}PROCEEDING**. The authors employ two words normally translated
as “process.” \emph{Processus} in their usage is the more general of the two,
covering both the stratified and destratified dimensions of an
occurrence. \emph{Procés} pertains only to the stratification. In standard
French, \emph{procés} also means “trial” (as in the title of the Kafka
novel). Deleuze and Guattari exploit this polysemy as a way of
emphasizing the role of organizations of social power and regimes of
signs in operations constitutive of the subject, or \emph{procés de
subjectivation}. \emph{Procés} is usually (once again, there is slippage in
their usage) translated as “proceeding,” despite the occasional
awkwardness this produces in English, in an attempt to preserve both
associations: a process, or way of proceeding, and a legal proceeding,
or trial. \emph{Processus} is always “process.”



\bigskip


***SELF**. Both \emph{Moi} and \emph{Soi} have usually been translated as “Self,”
with the French in brackets. \emph{Soi} is the self in its broadest sense,
but as a neuter third-person pronoun implies an impersonality at the
basis of the self. \emph{Moi} is a more restricted concept: the “me” as
subject of enunciation for the “I” (\emph{je}) as subject of the statement.
It is also the French term for the Freudian ego.



\bigskip


***SIGNIFIANCE\Slash{}INTERPRETANCE**. I have followed the increasingly common
practice of importing \emph{signifiance} and \emph{interpretance} into English
without modification. In Deleuze and Guattari these terms refer
respectively to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes of language
as a “signifying regime of signs.” They are borrowed from Benveniste
(“signifying capacity” and “interpretative capacity” are the English
translations used in Benveniste’s work).



\bigskip


***STATEMENT**. \emph{Enoncé} (often “utterance”) has been translated here as
“statement,” in keeping with the choice of the English translators of
Foucault, to whose conception Deleuze and Guattari’s is closest.
“Enunciation” is used for \emph{énonciation}.



\bigskip


***TRAIT**. The word \emph{trait} has a range of meanings not covered by any
single word in English. Literally, it refers to a graphic drawing, and
to the act of drawing a line. Abstractly, it is the purely graphic
element. Figuratively, it is an identifying mark (a feature, or trait in
the English sense), or any act constituting a mark or sign. In
linguistics, “distinctive features” (\emph{traits distinctifs} or \emph{traits
pertinents}) are the elementary units of language that combine to form a
phoneme. \emph{Trait} also refers to a projectile, especially an arrow, and
to the act of throwing a projectile. Here, “trait” has been retained in
all but narrowly linguistic contexts.



\bigskip


***GENDER-BIASED USAGE** has been largely eliminated through
pluralization or the use of male and female pronouns. However, where
Deleuze and Guattari seem deliberately to be using “man” to designate a
socially constructed, patriarchal standard of human behavior applied to
both men and women, the masculine generic has been retained.


\hairline


***ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**. I would like to express my gratitude to the
National Endowment for the Humanities and the French Ministry of Culture
for their generous assistance, without which this translation would not
have been possible, and to the authors for their patience in answering
my questions. Winnie Berman, Ken Dean, Nannie Doyle, Shoshana Felman,
Jim Fleming, Robert Hurley, Fredric Jameson, Sylvère Lotringer, Susan
McClary, Giorgio Passerone, Paul Patton, Dana Polan, Mary Quaintance,
Michael Ryan, Lianne Sullivan, Susan Yazijian, and Caveh Zahedi provided
much-appreciated aid and advice. Glenn Hendler likes to see his name in
print.


I consulted the following translations: “Rhizome” (first version),
trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, \emph{Ideology and Consciousness}, no. 8
(Spring 1981, pp. 49–71); “Rhizome” (final version), trans. John
Johnston in Deleuze and Guattari, \emph{On the Line} (New York: Semiotext[e],
1983); “One or Several Wolves?” (first version), trans. Mark Seem,
**Semiotext(e)\emph{, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 137–147 (1977); “How to Make Yourself
a Body without Organs” (first version, abridged), trans. Suzanne
Guerlac, \emph{Semiotext(e)} vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 265–270.
}


Portions of this translation have appeared previously. “Treatise on
Nomadology” was published as a separate book entitled \emph{Nomad Machine}
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Extracts from “Becoming-Intense\dots{}”
appeared under the title “Becoming-Woman” in \emph{Subjects\Slash{}Objects}, no. 3
(Spring 1985), pp. 24–32, and from “The Smooth and the Striated” under
the title “Nomad Art” in \emph{Art and Text}, no. 19(Oct.-Nov. 1985),
pp. 16–23.


\hyperdef{amuse}{authors}{}%
\label{textamuse:authors}%
\_note

\chapter{Authors’ Note}


This book is the companion volume to \emph{Anti-Oedipus} (paperback ed.,
University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Together they make up \emph{Capitalism
and Schizophrenia}.


It is composed not of chapters but of “plateaus.” We will try to explain
why later on (and also why the texts are dated). To a certain extent,
these plateaus may be read independently of one another, except the
conclusion, which should be read at the end.

\chapter{1. Introduction: Rhizome}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-1}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-1}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-31.png}
\caption[]{\noindent SYLVANO BUSSOTI}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


The two of us wrote \emph{Anti-Oedipus} together. Since each of us was
several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of
everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest
away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why
have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make
ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not
ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s
nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody
knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one
no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance
whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own.
We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.


A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed
matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a
subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of
their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain
geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of
articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of
flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.
Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative
slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and
rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an
**assemblage*. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is
unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don’t know yet what the
multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has
been elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic
assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism,
or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it
also has a side facing a \emph{body without organs}, which is continually
dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure
intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects
that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an
intensity. What is the body without organs of a book? There are several,
depending on the nature of the lines considered, their particular grade
or density, and the possibility of their converging on a “plane of
consistency” assuring their selection. Here, as elsewhere, the units of
measure are what is essential: \emph{quantify writing}. There is no
difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore
a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in
connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies
without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or
signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will
ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does
or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own
are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it
makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on
the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation
(also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love
machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an \emph{abstract machine} that
sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary
authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine
the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order
to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary
bureaucratic machine \dots{} (What if one became animal or plant \emph{through}
literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first
through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage.
It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has
been.


All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities,
lines of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various
types, bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the
plane of consistency, and in each case the units of measure.
**Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of
convergence*: Not only do these constitute a quantification of writing,
but they define writing as always the measure of something else. Writing
has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping,
even realms that are yet to come.


A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of
the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the
classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority
(the strata of the book). The book imitates the world, as art imitates
nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot
or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection, the
One that becomes two. How could the law of the book reside in nature,
when it is what presides over the very division between world and book,
nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we encounter this formula,
even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most “dialectical”
way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well
reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn’t work
that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral,
and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one.
Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a
taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as
a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops
the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four \dots{}
Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a
discipline as “advanced” as linguistics retains the root-tree as its
fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection (for
example, Chomsky and his grammatical trees, which begin at a point S and
proceed by dichotomy). This is as much as to say that this system of
thought has never reached an understanding of multiplicity: in order to
arrive at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong
principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt possible,
following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four, or
five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of
the pivotal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn’t get us
very far. The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by
biunivocal relationships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot
provides no better understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous
root. One operates in the object, the other in the subject. Binary logic
and biunivocal relationships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of
delusion in the Freudian interpretation of Schreber’s case),
linguistics, structuralism, and even information science.


The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the
book, to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the
principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate,
indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes
a flourishing development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the
principal root, but the root’s unity subsists, as past or yet to come,
as possible. We must ask if reflexive, spiritual reality does not
compensate for this state of things by demanding an even more
comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality. Take William
Burroughs’s cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which
constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting),
implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under
consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity
continues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely
fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus.
Most modern methods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow
are perfectly valid in one direction, for example, a linear direction,
whereas a unity of totalization asserts itself even more firmly in
another, circular or cyclic, dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken
up in a structure, its growth is offset by a reduction in its laws of
combination. The abortionists of unity are indeed angel makers,
**doctores angelici*, because they affirm a properly angelic and superior
unity. Joyce’s words, accurately described as having “multiple roots,”
shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a
cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche’s aphorisms
shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity
of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as
much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with
dualism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a
natural reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted
and obstructed in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the
subject. The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even
dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or
overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its
object. The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of
the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos. A strange
mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any
rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth,
it is not enough to say, “Long live the multiple,” difficult as it is to
raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical
cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple \emph{must be made}, not
by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways,
by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has
available—always \emph{n} — 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple:
always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be
constituted; write at \emph{n} — 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be
called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different
from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with
roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the
question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely
rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are
rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply,
movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse
forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion
into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome
includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed.
Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling
that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate
characteristics of the rhizome.


1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a
rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very
different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.
The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and
proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is
necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every
nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological,
political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different
regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status.
**Collective assemblages of enunciation* function directly within
**machinic assemblages*; it is not impossible to make a radical break
between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims
to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions
about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying
particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky’s
grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence,
is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you
will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each
statement into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy\dots{}). Our
criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract
but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do
not reach the \emph{abstract machine} that connects a language to the
semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages
of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A rhizome
ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains,
organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts,
sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber
agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also
perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in
itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of
dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal
speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic
community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, “an essentially
heterogeneous reality.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: U. Weinreich, W. Labov, and M. Herzog, “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language,” in W. Lehmann and Y. Malkeiel, eds., \emph{Directions for Historical Linguistics} (1968), p. 125; cited by Françoise Robert, “Aspects sociaux du changement dans une grammaire générative,” Langages, no. 32 (December 1973), p. 90.]} There is no mother tongue, only a power
takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.
Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a
bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or
train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.\footnote{Bertil Malmberg, \emph{New Trends in Linguistics}, trans. Edward Garners (Stockholm: Lund, 1964), pp. 65–67 (the example of the Castilian dialect).} It is always possible
to break a language down into internal structural elements, an
undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There
is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for
the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze
language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other
registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function
of impotence.


3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is
effectively treated as a substantive, “multiplicity,” that it ceases to
have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual
reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose
arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to
serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is
not even the unity to abort in the object or “return” in the subject. A
multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations,
magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the
multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore
increase in number as the multiplicity grows). Puppet strings, as a
rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist
or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another
puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: “Call the strings or
rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that \emph{its
multiplicity} resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into
the text. Granted; but the actor’s nerve fibers in turn form a weave.
And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the
undifferentiated\dots{}. The interplay approximates the pure activity of
weavers attributed in myth to the Fates or Norns.”\footnote{Ernst Jüinger, \emph{Approches; drogues et ivresse} (Paris: Table Ronde, 1974), p. 304, sec. 218.} An assemblage is
precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that
necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are
no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure,
tree, or root. There are only lines. When Glenn Gould speeds up the
performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is
transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece
proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept measuring
elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has
itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions
considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached
to that domain). We do not have units (\emph{unités}) of measure, only
multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of unity
(\emph{unité}) appears only when there is a power takeover in the
multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification
proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a
set of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or
for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of
differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty
dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding).
The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be
overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above
its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers
attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that
they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of
a \emph{plane of consistency} of multiplicities, even though the dimensions
of this “plane” increase with the number of connections that are made on
it. Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the
line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in
nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency
(grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks:
the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity
effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension,
unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the
possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a
single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number
of dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a
plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet:
lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups,
social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken
chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and
transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His
texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic
book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject. The war
machine-book against the State apparatus-book. \emph{Flat multiplicities of n
dimensions} are asignifying and asubjective. They are designated by
indefinite articles, or rather by partitives (\emph{some} couchgrass, \emph{some}
of a rhizome\dots{}).


4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks
separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome
may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on
one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants
because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again
after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of
segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized,
organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of
deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture
in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight,
but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie
back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a
dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may
make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that
you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything,
formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that
reconstitute a subject—anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to
fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just
waiting to crystallize. Yes, couchgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad
are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must
be renewed.


How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of
reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one
another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of
a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is
nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s
reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by
transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements,
form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp,
reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure,
etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata—a parallelism
between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an
animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else
entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code,
surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a
becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of
these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and
the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and
form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the
deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor
resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line
of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed
to or subjugated by anything signifying. Rémy Chauvin expresses it well:
“the \emph{aparallel evolution} of two beings that have absolutely nothing to
do with each other.”\footnote{Rémy Chauvin in \emph{Entretiens sur la sexualité}, ed. Max Aron, Robert Courrier, and Etienne Wolff (Paris: Plon, 1969), p. 205.} More generally, evolutionary schemas may be
forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent. Under certain
conditions, a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit itself as the
cellular gene of a complex species; moreover, it can take flight, move
into the cells of an entirely different species, but not without
bringing with it “genetic information” from the first host (for example,
Benveniste and Todaro’s current research on a type C virus, with its
double connection to baboon DNA and the DNA of certain kinds of domestic
cats). Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent
descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a
rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one
already differentiated line to another.\footnote{On the work of R. E. Benveniste and G. J. Todaro, see Yves Christen, “Le role des virus dans l’évolution,” \emph{La Recherche}, no. 54 (March 1975): “After integration-extraction in a cell, viruses may, due to an error in excision, carry off fragments of their host’s DNA and transmit them to new cells: this in fact is the basis for what we call ‘genetic engineering.’ As a result, the genetic information of one organism may be transferred to another by means of viruses. We could even imagine an extreme case where this transfer of information would go from a more highly evolved species to one that is less evolved or was the progenitor of the more evolved species. This mechanism, then, would run in the opposite direction to evolution in the classical sense. If it turns out that this kind of transferral of information has played a major role, we would in certain cases have to \emph{substitute reticular schemas (with communications between branches after they have become differentiated) for the bush or tree schemas currently used to represent evolution}” (p. 271).} Once again, there is
**aparallel evolution*, of the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that
they are not models or copies of each other (a becoming-baboon in the
cat does not mean that the cat “plays” baboon). We form a rhizome with
our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other
animals. As François Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by
viruses or through other procedures, fusions of cells originating in
different species, have results analogous to those of “the abominable
couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle Ages.”\footnote{François Jacob, \emph{The Logic of Life}, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 291–292, 311 (quote).} Transversal
communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees.
Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular, particle with which
we are allied. We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and
rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have
their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.


The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted
belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with
the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world;
the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world
effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn
deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can).
Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to
describe phenomena of an entirely different nature. The crocodile does
not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the
colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it
reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is
its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes
imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of
flight, follows its “aparallel evolution” through to the end. The wisdom
of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside
where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal,
human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves
form rhizomes, as do people, etc.). “Drunkenness as a triumphant
irruption of the plant in us.” Always follow the rhizome by rupture;
lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you
have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of \emph{n} dimensions
and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the
plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of
convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside
that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new
points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a
rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the
line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine
covering the entire plane of consistency. “Go first to your old plant
and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain
must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the
runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the
plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the
devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later \dots{} you
can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from
each point along the way.”\footnote{Carlos Castaneda, \emph{The Teachings of Don Juan} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 88.} Music has always sent out lines of
flight, like so many “transformational multiplicities,” even overturning
the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form,
right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed,
a rhizome.\footnote{Pierre Boulez, \emph{Conversations with Célestin Deliège} (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976): “a seed which you plant in compost, and suddenly it begins to proliferate like a weed” (p. 15); and on musical proliferation: “a music that floats, and in which the writing itself makes it impossible for the performer to keep in with a pulsed time” (p. 69 [translation modified]).}


5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not
amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any
idea of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an
objective pivotal unity upon which successive stages are organized; a
deep structure is more like a base sequence that can be broken down into
immediate constituents, while the unity of the product passes into
another, transformational and subjective, dimension. This does not
constitute a departure from the representative model of the tree, or
root—pivotal taproot or fascicles (for example, Chomsky’s “tree” is
associated with a base sequence and represents the process of its own
generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the oldest form of
thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound structure are
above all infinitely reproducible principles of \emph{tracing}. All of tree
logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in
psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself
representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a
genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is
to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective
relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the
start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It consists
of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis,
something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes
tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.


The rhizome is altogether different, a \emph{map and not a tracing}. Make a
map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the
wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the
map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an
experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an
unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It
fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies
without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a
plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is
open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable,
reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn,
reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual,
group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a
work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.
Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that
it always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal
rhizome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of
flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A
map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always
comes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance, whereas
the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.” Unlike
psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic competence (which confines every desire
and statement to a genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes
infinite, monotonous tracings of the stages on that axis or the
constituents of that structure), schizoanalysis rejects any idea of
pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it—divine, anagogic,
historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic. (It is
obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of the cartography of
one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content to make
ready-made tracings—Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad daddy, the bad
mommy and the good mommy—while the child makes a desperate attempt to
carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally
misconstrues.)\footnote{See Melanie Klein, \emph{Narrative of a Child Analysis} (London: Hogarth Press, 1961): the role of war maps in Richard’s activities. [\emph{TRANS}: Deleuze and Guattari, with Claire Parnet and André Scala, analyze Klein’s Richard and Freud’s Little Hans in “The Interpretation of Utterances,” in \emph{Language, Sexuality and Subversion}, trans. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978), pp. 141–157.]} Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a
genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political
options for problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child
lives out politically, in other words, with all the force of his or her
desire.


Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps
to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map
to be traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect
roots and sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of
redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a
multiplicity have strata upon which unifications and totalizations,
massifications, mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and
subjective attributions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to
their eventual divergence, reproduce the very formations their function
it was to dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a
question of method: \emph{the tracing should always be put back on the map}.
This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical. For it
is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead
like a photograph or X ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by
artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures,
what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always creates the model, and
attracts it. The tracing has already translated the map into an image;
it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has
organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the
axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has
generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is
reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That
is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and
propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are
only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of
structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis and linguistics: all the
former has ever made are tracings or photos of the unconscious, and the
latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies (it’s not
surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics).
Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child
psychoanalysis at its purest: they kept on \emph{BREAKING HIS RHIZOME} and
**BLOTCHING HIS MAP*, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way
out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had
rooted shame and guilt in him, \emph{PHOBIA} (they barred him from the
rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they
rooted him in his parents’ bed, they radicled him to his own body, they
fixated him on Professor Freud). Freud explicitly takes Little Hans’s
cartography into account, but always and only in order to project it
back onto the family photo. And look what Melanie Klein did to Little
Richard’s geopolitical maps: she developed photos from them, made
tracings of them. Strike the pose or follow the axis, genetic stage or
structural destiny—one way or the other, your rhizome will be broken.
You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has
been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s
all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves
and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip
it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on
desire by external, productive outgrowths.


That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but
nonsymmetrical, operation. Plug the tracings back into the map, connect
the roots or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans,
studying the unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a
rhizome, with the family house but also with the line of flight of the
building, the street, etc.; how these lines are blocked, how the child
is made to take root in the family, be photographed under the father, be
traced onto the mother’s bed; then how Professor Freud’s intervention
assures a power takeover by the signifier, a subjectification of
affects; how the only escape route left to the child is a
becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the becoming-horse of
Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses must always
be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible lines of
flight. The same applies to the group map: show at what point in the
rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership,
fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only
underground, continuing to make rhizome in the shadows. Deligny’s
method: map the gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine
several maps for the same child, for several different children.\footnote{Fernand Deligny, \emph{Cahiers de l’immuable}, vol. 1, \emph{Voix et voir, Recherches}, no. 8 (April 1975).} If
it is true that it is of the essence of the map or rhizome to have
multiple entryways, then it is plausible that one could even enter them
through tracings or the root-tree, assuming the necessary precautions
are taken (once again, one must avoid any Manichaean dualism). For
example, one will often be forced to take dead ends, to work with
signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a foothold in
formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse, rigidified
territorialities that open the way for other transformational
operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a
foothold, in spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, one will
bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart
strata, cut roots, and make new connections. Thus, there are very
diverse map-tracing, rhizome-root assemblages, with variable
coefficients of deterritorialization. There exist tree or root
structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may
begin to burgeon into a rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by
theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing
multiplicities or aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in
the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or
else it is a microscopic element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets
rhizome production going. Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by
tracings: they can begin to burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome
stems, as in a Kafka novel. An intensive trait starts working for
itself, a hallucinatory perception, synesthesia, perverse mutation, or
play of images shakes loose, challenging the hegemony of the signifier.
In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic
systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the
“tracing,” that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s
language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power.
Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky’s
syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a
rhizome.\footnote{See Dieter Wunderlich, “Pragmatique, situation d’énonciation et Deixis,” in \emph{Langages}, no. 26 (June 1972), pp. 50ff.: MacCawley, Sadock, and Wunderlich’s attempts to integrate “pragmatic properties” into Chomskian trees.} To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that
seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the
trunk, but put them to strange new uses. We’re tired of trees. We should
stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too
much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to
linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from
underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.
Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its
stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation
to a commercial war machine.


Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified
matter. What are wrongly called “dendrites” do not assure the connection
of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the
role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of
synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these
fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of
consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (“the
uncertain nervous system”). Many people have a tree growing in their
heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. “The axon
and the dendrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles,
with synapses at each of the thorns.”\footnote{Steven Rose, \emph{The Conscious Brain} (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 76; on memory, see pp. 185–219.} The same goes for memory.
Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term
memory and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference
between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the
rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and
centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph). Short-term memory
is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object;
it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always
under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity.
Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not that
of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp
the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term Idea:
one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even if
one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts.
Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with
the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective
rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization)
traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it,
from a distance, offbeat, in an “untimely” way, not instantaneously.


The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever
imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher
unity. If we consider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role
of \emph{opposed segment} for one of the subsets running from bottom to top:
this kind of segment is a “link dipole,” in contrast to the “unit
dipoles” formed by spokes radiating from a single center.\footnote{See Julien Pacotte, \emph{Le réseau arborescent, schème primordial de la pensée} (Paris: Hermann, 1936). This book analyzes and develops various schemas of the arborescent form, which is presented not as a mere formalism but as the “real foundation of formal thought.” It follows classical thought through to the end. It presents all of the forms of the “One-Two,” the theory of the dipole. The set, trunk-roots-branches, yields the following schema: \protect\endgraf \begin{figure}[p] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-56.png} \end{figure} \clearpage \protect\endgraf More recently, Michel Serres has analyzed varieties and sequences of trees in the most diverse scientific domains: how a tree is formed on the basis of a “network.” \emph{La traduction} (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 27ff.; \emph{Feux et signaux de brume} (Paris: Grasset, 1975), pp. 35ff.} Even if
the links themselves proliferate, as in the radicle system, one can
never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplicities. Regenerations,
reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any further.
Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance
and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the
corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher
unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished
paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and
computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in
that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre
Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing “the imagery
of command trees” (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note
that “accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving
arborescent structures privileged status\dots{}. The arborescent form admits
of topological explanation\dots{}. In a hierarchical system, an individual has
only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior\dots{}. The
channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system
preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted
place” (signifiance and subjectification). The authors point out that
even when one thinks one has reached a multiplicity, it may be a false
one—of what we call the radicle type—because its ostensibly
nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a
totally hierarchical solution. An example is the famous \emph{friendship
theorem}: “If any two given individuals in a society have precisely one
mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the friend of all
the others.” (Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual friend is. Who
is “the universal friend in this society of couples: the master, the
confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the
initial axioms.” Who is this friend of humankind? Is it the
**philo*-sopher as he appears in classical thought, even if he is an
aborted unity that makes itself felt only through its absence or
subjectivity, saying all the while, I know nothing, I am nothing?) Thus
the authors speak of dictatorship theorems. Such is indeed the principle
of roots-trees, or their outcome: the radicle solution, the structure of
Power.\footnote{Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, “Automate asocial et systèmes acentrés,” \emph{Communications}, no. 22 (1974), pp. 45–62. On the friendship theorem, see Herbert S. Wilf, \emph{The Friendship Theorem in Combinatorial Mathematics} (Welsh Academic Press); and on a similar kind of theorem, called the theorem of group indecision, see Kenneth J. Arrow, \emph{Social Choice and Individual Values} (New York: Wiley, 1963).}


To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems,
finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any
neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all
individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their \emph{state} at a
given moment—such that the local operations are coordinated and the
final, global result synchronized without a central agency. Transduction
of intensive states replaces topology, and “the graph regulating the
circulation of information is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical
graph\dots{}. There is no reason for the graph to be a tree” (we have been
calling this kind of graph a map). The problem of the war machine, or
the firing squad: is a general necessary for \emph{n} individuals to manage
to fire in unison? The solution without a General is to be found in an
acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of states with signals
to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or guerrilla logic
point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a central
order. The authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic
multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any centralizing or
unifying automaton as an “asocial intrusion.”\footnote{Rosenstiehl and Petitot, “Automate asocial.” The principal characteristic of the acentered system is that local initiatives are coordinated independently of a central power, with the calculations made throughout the network (multiplicity). “That is why the only place files on people can be kept is right in each person’s home, since they alone are capable of filling in the description and keeping it up to date: society itself is the only possible data bank on people. A naturally acentered society rejects the centralizing automaton as an asocial intrusion” (p. 62). On the “Firing Squad Theorem,” see pp. 51–57. It even happens that generals, dreaming of appropriating the formal techniques of guerrilla warfare, appeal to \emph{multiplicities} “of synchronous modules \dots{} based on numerous but independent lightweight cells” having in theory only a minimum of central power and “hierarchical relaying”; see Guy Brossollet, \emph{Essai sur la non-bataille} (Paris: Belin, 1975).} Under these
conditions, \emph{n} is in fact always \emph{n} — 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot
emphasize that the opposition, centered-acentered, is valid less as a
designation for things than as a mode of calculation applied to things.
Trees may correspond to the rhizome, or they may burgeon into a rhizome.
It is true that the same thing is generally susceptible to both modes of
calculation or both types of regulation, but not without undergoing a
change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an example again: it subjects
the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs,
recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the
phallus-tree—not only in its theory but also in its practice of
calculation and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in
this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial
conception of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis’s margin of
maneuverability is therefore very limited. In both psychoanalysis and
its object, there is always a general, always a leader (General Freud).
Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the unconscious as an
acentered system, in other words, as a machinic network of finite
automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely different state of
the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics; Rosenstiehl
and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an “acentered
organization of a society of words.” For both statements and desires,
the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to
make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to \emph{produce the
unconscious}, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome
is precisely this production of the unconscious.


It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western
thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology,
theology, ontology, all of philosophy\dots{}: the root-foundation, \emph{Grund,
ratine, fondement}. The West has a special relation to the forest, and
deforestation; the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed
plants produced by cultivation based on species lineages of the
arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects
lineages forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a
different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some
cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field;
cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting
aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed
spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West:
agriculture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of
variable individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of
individuals derived from a wide range of “clones.” Does not the East,
Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed
in every respect to the Western model of the tree? Andre Haudricourt
even sees this as the basis for the opposition between the moralities or
philosophies of transcendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of
the East: the God who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants
and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds).\footnote{On Western agriculture of grain plants and Eastern horticulture of tubers, the opposition between sowing of seeds and replanting of offshoots, and the contrast to animal raising, see André Haudricourt, “Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement d’autrui,” \emph{L’Homme}, vol. 2, no. 1 (January–April 1962), pp. 40–50, and “Nature et culture dans la civilisation de l’igname: l’origine des clones et des clans,” \emph{L’Homme}, vol. 4, no. 1 (January–April 1964), pp. 93–104. Maize and rice are no exception: they are cereals “adopted at a late date by tuber cultivators” and were treated in a similar fashion; it is probable that rice “first appeared as a weed in taro ditches.”}
Transcendence: a specifically European disease. Neither is music the
same, the music of the earth is different, as is sexuality: seed plants,
even those with two sexes in the same plant, subjugate sexuality to the
reproductive model; the rhizome, on the other hand, is a liberation of
sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality. Here in
the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bodies, rigidifying and
stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or the grass.
Henry Miller: “China is the weed in the human cabbage patch\dots{}. The weed
is the Nemesis of human endeavor\dots{}. Of all the imaginary existences we
attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most satisfactory
life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no
Sermons on the Mount\dots{}. Eventually the weed gets the upper hand.
Eventually things fall back into a state of China. This condition is
usually referred to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way
out\dots{}. The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated
areas. \emph{It grows between}, among other things. The lily is beautiful,
the cabbage is provender, the poppy is maddening—but the weed is rank
growth\dots{}: it points a moral.”\footnote{Henry Miller, in Henry Miller and Michael Fraenkel, \emph{Hamlet} (New York: Carrefour, 1939), pp. 105–106.} Which China is Miller talking about?
The old China, the new, an imaginary one, or yet another located on a
shifting map?


America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination by
trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature,
in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or
genealogy (Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless,
everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route
of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs,
successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside.
American books are different from European books, even when the American
sets off in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different.
**Leaves of Grass*. And directions in America are different: the search
for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But
there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its
ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a
whole American “map” in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes.
America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it
were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is
the edge of the East.\footnote{See Leslie Fiedler, \emph{The Return of the Vanishing American} (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). This book contains a fine analysis of geography and its role in American mythology and literature, and of the reversal of directions. In the East, there was the search for a specifically American code and for a receding with Europe (Henry James, Eliot, Pound, etc.); in the South, there was the overcoding of the slave system, with its ruin and the ruin of the plantations during the Civil War (Faulkner, Caldwell); from the North came capitalist decoding (Dos Passes, Dreiser); the West, however, played the role of a line of flight combining travel, hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of frontiers, the rhizome (Ken Kesey and his “fog machine,” the beat generation, etc.). Every great American author creates a cartography, even in his or her style; in contrast to what is done in Europe, each makes a map that is directly connected to the real social movements crossing America. An example is the indexing of geographical directions throughout the work of Fitzgerald.} (India is not the intermediary between the
Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is the pivot
point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti Smith sings
the bible of the American dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the
canal\dots{}


Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still
more)? Western bureaucracy: its agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and
fields; trees and their role as frontiers; the great census of William
the Conqueror; feudalism; the policies of the kings of France; making
property the basis of the State; negotiating land through warfare,
litigation, and marriages. The kings of France chose the lily because it
is a plant with deep roots that clings to slopes. Is bureaucracy the
same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy to depict an Orient of
rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the Orient the State does
not act following a schema of arborescence corresponding to
preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy is one
of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic power
with “weak property,” in which the State engenders channeled and
channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel’s work that have not
been refuted).\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Karl Wittfogel, \emph{Oriental Despotism} (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957).]} The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead,
which is still a point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current
rather than sitting under a tree; Buddha’s tree itself becomes a
rhizome; Mao’s river and Louis’s tree. Has not America acted as an
intermediary here as well? For it proceeds both by internal
exterminations and liquidations (not only the Indians but also the
farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration from the outside.
The flow of capital produces an immense channel, a quantification of
power with immediate “quanta,” where each person profits from the
passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the reality-myth
of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty again):
in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and
rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in
itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it
is neocapitalism by nature. It invents its eastern face and western
face, and reshapes them both—all for the worst.


At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical
distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of
showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism
and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no
ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism
between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of
arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover,
there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific
to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent
system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important
point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed
models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if
it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process
that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its
own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not
a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in
history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a
question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing,
and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and
starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The
problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact
expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is a
necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations:
anexactitude is in no way an approximation; on the contrary, it is the
exact passage of that which is under way. We invoke one dualism only in
order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order
to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental
correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to
construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we all
seek—\emph{PLURALISM = MONISM}—via all the dualisms that
are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever
rearranging.


Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike
trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point,
and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature;
it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign
states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It
is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc.
It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (\emph{n}
+ 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather
directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a
middle (\emph{milieu}) from which it grows and which it overspills. It
constitutes linear multiplicities with \emph{n} dimensions having neither
subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and
from which the One is always subtracted (\emph{n} — 1). When a multiplicity
of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as
well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by
a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points
and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made
only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its
dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the
maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis,
changes in nature. These lines, or lineaments, should not be confused
with lineages of the arborescent type, which are merely localizable
linkages between points and positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is
not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as
image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is
an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome
operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike
the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome
pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is
always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple
entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that
must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even
polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and
preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical,
nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory
or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is
at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but also to the
animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and
artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all
manner of “becomings.”


A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A
rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word “plateau” to
designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of
intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a
culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an
example: mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo
this bizarre intensive stabilization. “Some sort of continuing plateau
of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax,” war, or a culmination
point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate
expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of
evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their
intrinsic value.\footnote{Gregory Bateson, \emph{Steps to an Ecology of Mind} (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 113. It will be noted that the word “plateau” is used in classical studies of bulbs, tubers, and rhizomes; see the entry for “Bulb” in M. H. Baillon, \emph{Dictionnaire de botanique} (Paris: Hachette, 1876–1892).} For example, a book composed of chapters has
culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed
instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across
microfissures, as in a brain? We call a “plateau” any multiplicity
connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in
such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a
rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form,
but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would
ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines
here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines
leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We
made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere
and can be related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one
must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical
cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no
syntactical boldness, can substitute for it. In fact, these are more
often than not merely mimetic procedures used to disseminate or disperse
a unity that is retained in a different dimension for an image-book.
Technonarcissism. Typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations are
necessary only when they no longer belong to the form of expression of a
hidden unity, becoming themselves dimensions of the multiplicity under
consideration; we only know of rare successes in this.\footnote{For example, Joëlle de La Casinière, \emph{Absolument nécessaire. The Emergency Book} (Paris: Minuit, 1973), a truly nomadic book. In the same vein, see the research in progress at the Montfaucon Research Center.} We ourselves
were unable to do it. We just used words that in turn function for us as
plateaus. \emph{RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS
= STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS
= MICROPOLITICS}. These words are concepts, but
concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a
particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains,
lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.). Nowhere do we
claim for our concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar
with scientificity than we are with ideology; all we know are
assemblages. And the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire
and collective assemblages of enunciation. No signifiance, no
subjectification: writing to the \emph{n}th power (all individuated
enunciation remains trapped within the dominant significations, all
signifying desire is associated with dominated subjects). An assemblage,
in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows,
and social flows simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation
that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There is
no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world)
and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity
(the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between
certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book
has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as
its subject. In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in
the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no
subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book
as image of the world. A rhizomebook, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or
fascicular book. Never send down roots, or plant them, however difficult
it may be to avoid reverting to the old procedures. “Those things which
occur to me, occur to me not from the root up but rather only from
somewhere about their middle. Let someone then attempt to seize them,
let someone attempt to seize a blade of grass and hold fast to it when
it begins to grow only from the middle.”\footnote{\emph{The Diaries of Franz Kafka}, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, 1948), p. 12.} Why is this so difficult?
The question is directly one of perceptual semiotics. It’s not easy to
see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or
up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it,
you’ll see that everything changes. It’s not easy to see the grass in
things and in words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to
be “ruminated”; never is a plateau separable from the cows that populate
it, which are also the clouds in the sky).


History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the
name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when
the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a
history. There are rare successes in this also, for example, on the
subject of the Children’s Crusades: Marcel Schwob’s book multiplies
narratives like so many plateaus with variable numbers of dimensions.
Then there is Andrzejewski’s book, \emph{Les portes du paradis} (The gates of
paradise), composed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of
children; a flow of walking with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes;
the semiotic flow of the confessions of all the children who go up to
the old monk at the head of the procession to make their declarations; a
flow of desire and sexuality, each child having left out of love and
more or less directly led by the dark posthumous pederastic desire of
the count of Vendome; all this with circles of convergence. What is
important is not whether the flows are “One or multiple”—we’re past that
point: there is a collective assemblage of enunciation, a machinic
assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an
immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more recent
example is Armand Farrachi’s book on the Fourth Crusade, \emph{La
dislocation}, in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse,
or else jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the
typography begin to dance as the crusade grows more delirious.\footnote{Marcel Schwob, \emph{The Children’s Crusade}, trans. Henry Copley (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898); Jersy Andrzejewski, \emph{Les portes du paradis} (Paris: Gallimard, 1959); Armand Farrachi, \emph{La dislocation} (Paris: Stock, 1974). It was in the context of Schwob’s book that Paul Alphandéry remarked that literature, in certain cases, could revitalize history and impose upon it “genuine research directions”; \emph{La chrétienté et l’idée de croisade} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1959), vol. 2, p. 116.} These
are models of nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war machine
and lines of flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarily,
the State apparatus. But why is a model still necessary? Aren’t these
books still “images” of the Crusades? Don’t they still retain a unity,
in Schwob’s case a pivotal unity, in Farrachi’s an aborted unity, and in
the most beautiful example, \emph{Les portes du paradis}, the unity of the
funereal count? Is there a need for a more profound nomadism than that
of the Crusades, a nomadism of true nomads, or of those who no longer
even move or imitate anything? The nomadism of those who only assemble
(\emph{agencent}). How can the book find an adequate outside with which to
assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce? The
cultural book is necessarily a tracing: already a tracing of itself, a
tracing of the previous book by the same author, a tracing of other
books however different they may be, an endless tracing of established
concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and future.
Even the anticultural book may still be burdened by too heavy a cultural
load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting instead of
remembering, for underdevelopment instead of progress toward
development, in nomadism rather than sedentarily, to make a map instead
of a tracing. \emph{RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS}, even if
the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks
of academic culture or pseudoscientificity in it are still too painful
or ponderous. For science would go completely mad if left to its own
devices. Look at mathematics: it’s not a science, it’s a monster slang,
it’s nomadic. Even in the realm of theory, especially in the realm of
theory, any precarious and pragmatic framework is better than tracing
concepts, with their breaks and progress changing nothing. Imperceptible
rupture, not signifying break. The nomads invented a war machine in
opposition to the State apparatus. History has never comprehended
nomadism, the book has never comprehended the outside. The State as the
model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the
philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the
concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries
of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State’s pretension to be
a world order, and to root man. The war machine’s relation to an outside
is not another “model”; it is an assemblage that makes thought itself
nomadic, and the book a working part in every mobile machine, a stem for
a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).


Write to the \emph{n}th power, the \emph{n} — 1 power, write with slogans:
Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t
be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point!
Speed turns the point into a line!\footnote{See Paul Virilio, “Véhiculaire,” in \emph{Nomades et vagabonds}, ed. Jacques Bergue (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975), p. 43, on the appearance of linearity and the disruption of perception by speed.} Be quick, even when standing
still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don’t bring out the
General in you! Don’t have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have
short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther
and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the
baboon. As they say about old man river:



\begin{quote}


He don’t plant ‘tatos\forcelinebreak 
Don’t plant cotton\forcelinebreak 
Them that plants them is soon forgotten\forcelinebreak 
But old man river he just keeps rollin’ along



\end{quote}


A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between
things, interbeing, \emph{intermezzo}. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome
is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but
the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and \dots{} and \dots{} and\dots{}” This
conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.”
Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading
for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting
or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a
foundation—all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a
conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic\dots{}). But
Kleist, Lenz, and Büchner have another way of traveling and moving:
proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather
than starting and finishing.\footnote{See Jean-Cristophe Bailly’s description of movement in German Romanticism, in his introduction to \emph{La légende dispersée. Anthologie du romantisme allemand} (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1976), pp. 18ff.} American literature, and already
English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even
greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic
of the \emph{AND}, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify
endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle
is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up
speed. \emph{Between} things does not designate a localizable relation going
from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular
direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one \emph{and} the other away,
a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up
speed in the middle.

\chapter{2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-2}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-2}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-32.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Field of Tracks, or Wolf Line}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew
that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it
by, then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew
nothing about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud
understood was what a dog is, and a dog’s tail. It wasn’t enough. It
wouldn’t be enough. The Wolf-Man knew that Freud would soon declare him
cured, but that it was not at all the case and his treatment would
continue for all eternity under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire. Finally, he
knew that he was in the process of acquiring a veritable proper name,
the Wolf-Man, a name more properly his than his own, since it attained
the highest degree of singularity in the instantaneous apprehension of a
generic multiplicity: wolves. He knew that this new and true proper name
would be disfigured and misspelled, retranscribed as a patronymic.


Freud, for his part, would go on to write some extraordinary pages.
Entirely practical pages: his article of 1915 on “The Unconscious,”
which deals with the difference between neurosis and psychosis. Freud
says that hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global
comparison between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc.
Doubtless, it is at one and the same time that they apprehend the object
globally and perceive it as lost. Yet it would never occur to a neurotic
to grasp the skin erotically as a multiplicity of pores, little spots,
little scars or black holes, or to grasp the sock erotically as a
multiplicity of stitches. The psychotic can: “we should expect the
multiplicity of these little cavities to prevent him from using them as
substitutes for the female genital.”\footnote{Sigmund Freud, \emph{Papers on Metapsychology}, vol. 14, \emph{Standard Edition}, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 200.} Comparing a sock to a vagina is
OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a
pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas: that’s what Freud
says. This represents an important clinical discovery: a whole
difference in style between neurosis and psychosis. For example,
Salvador Dali, in attempting to reproduce his delusions, may go on at
length about \emph{THE} rhinoceros horn; he has not for all of that left
neurotic discourse behind. But when he starts comparing goosebumps to a
field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere
has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness. Is it still
a question of a comparison at all? It is, rather, a pure multiplicity
that changes elements, or \emph{becomes}. On the micrological level, the
little bumps “become” horns, and the horns, little penises.


No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this
art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work
bringing back molar unities, reverting to his familiar themes of \emph{the}
father, \emph{the} penis, \emph{the} vagina, Castration with a capital \emph{C}\dots{} (On
the verge of discovering a rhizome, Freud always returns to mere roots.)
The reductive procedure of the 1915 article is quite interesting: he
says that the comparisons and identifications of the neurotic are guided
by representations of things, whereas all the psychotic has left are
representations of words (for example, the word “hole”). “What has
dictated the substitution is not the resemblance between the things
denoted but the sameness of the words used to express them” (p. 201).
Thus, when there is no unity in the thing, there is at least unity and
identity in the word. It will be noted that names are taken in their
**extensive* usage, in other words, function as common nouns ensuring the
unification of an aggregate they subsume. The proper name can be nothing
more than an extreme case of the common noun, containing its already
domesticated multiplicity within itself and linking it to a being or
object posited as unique. This jeopardizes, on the side of words and
things both, the relation of the proper name as an \emph{intensity} to the
multiplicity it instantaneously apprehends. For Freud, when the thing
splinters and loses its identity, the word is still there to restore
that identity or invent a new one. Freud counted on the word to
reestablish a unity no longer found in things. Are we not witnessing the
first stirrings of a subsequent adventure, that of \emph{the} Signifier, the
devious despotic agency that substitutes itself for asignifying proper
names and replaces multiplicities with the dismal unity of an object
declared lost?


We’re not far from wolves. For the Wolf-Man, in his second so-called
psychotic episode, kept constant watch over the variations or changing
path of the little holes or scars on the skin of his nose. During the
first episode, which Freud declares neurotic, he recounted a dream he
had about six or seven wolves in a tree, and drew five. Who is ignorant
of the fact that wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows
it. Not Freud. With false scruples he asks, How are we to explain the
fact that there are five, six, or seven wolves in this dream? He has
decided that this is neurosis, so he uses the other reductive procedure:
free association on the level of the representation of things, rather
than verbal subsumption on the level of the representation of words. The
result is the same, since it is always a question of bringing back the
unity or identity of the person or allegedly lost object. The wolves
will have to be purged of their multiplicity. This operation is
accomplished by associating the dream with the tale, “The Wolf and the
Seven Kid-Goats” (only six of which get eaten). We witness Freud’s
reductive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave the wolves to take
the shape of goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the story.
Seven wolves that are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the
Wolf-Man himself) is hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen
his parents make love at five o’clock, and the roman numeral V is
associated with the erotic spreading of a woman’s legs. Three wolves:
the parents may have made love three times. Two wolves: the first
coupling the child may have seen was the two parents \emph{more ferarum}, or
perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf is the father, as we all knew
from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not just a
castrater but also castrated. Who is Freud trying to fool? The wolves
never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already
decided from the very beginning that animals could serve only to
represent coitus between parents, or, conversely, be represented by
coitus between parents. Freud obviously knows nothing about the
fascination exerted by wolves and the meaning of their silent call, the
call to become-wolf. Wolves watch, intently watch, the dreaming child;
it is so much more reassuring to tell oneself that the dream produced a
reversal and that it is really the child who sees dogs or parents in the
act of making love. Freud only knows the Oedipalized wolf or dog, the
castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in the kennel, the analyst’s
bow-wow.


Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like
to be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can’t be one wolf,
you’re always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all
by yourself all at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six
others. In becoming-wolf, the important thing is the position of the
mass, and above all the position of the subject itself in relation to
the pack or wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join
the pack, how far away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the
multiplicity. To soften the harshness of her response, Franny recounts a
dream: “There is a desert. Again, it wouldn’t make any sense to say that
I am \emph{in} the desert. It’s a panoramic vision of the desert, and it’s
not a tragic or uninhabited desert. It’s only a desert because of its
ocher color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in
it, a swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer players, or a group of Tuareg.
**I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I
am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot*. I know that
the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let
myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I
let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even
very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and
their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go
north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains
in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual
motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a
feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.” A very good schizo
dream. To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely
outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge, to take a walk like
Virginia Woolf (never again will I say, “\emph{I am this, I am that}”).\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Virginia Woolf, \emph{Mrs. Dalloway} (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925), p. 11).]}


Problems of peopling in the unconscious: all that passes through the
pores of the schizo, the veins of the drug addict, swarming, teeming,
ferment, intensities, races and tribes. This tale of white skin
prickling with bumps and pustules, and of dwarfish black heads emerging
from pores grimacing and abominable, needing to be shaved off every
morning—is it a tale by Jean Ray, who knew how to bring terror to
phenomena of micromultiplicity? And how about the “Lilliputian
hallucinations” on ether? One schizo, two schizos, three: “There are
babies growing in my every pore”—“With me, it’s not in the pores, it’s
in my veins, little iron rods growing in my veins”—“I don’t want them to
give me any shots, except with camphorated alcohol. Otherwise breasts
grow in my every pore.” Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the
point of view of the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not
see that the unconscious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic
and hard of hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person. Schizos, on
the other hand, have sharp eyes and ears. They don’t mistake the buzz
and shove of the crowd for daddy’s voice. Once Jung had a dream about
bones and skulls. A bone or a skull is never alone. Bones are a
multiplicity. But Freud wants the dream to signify the death of
**someone*. “Jung was surprised and pointed out that there were several
skulls, not just one. Yet Freud still\dots{}”\footnote{E. A. Bennet, \emph{What Jung Really Said} (New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 74.}


A multiplicity of pores, or blackheads, of little scars or stitches.
Breasts, babies, and rods. A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, or
Tuareg. A multiplicity of wolves or jackals \dots{} All of these things are
irreducible but bring us to a certain status of the formations of the
unconscious. Let us try to define the factors involved: first, something
plays the role of the full body—the body without organs. In the
preceding dream it was the desert. In the Wolf-Man’s dream it is the
denuded tree upon which the wolves are perched. It is also the skin as
envelope or ring, and the sock as reversible surface. It can be a house
or part of a house, any number of things, anything. Whenever someone
makes love, really makes love, that person constitutes a body without
organs, alone and with the other person or people. A body without organs
is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon which that
which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is distributed
according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the form of
molecular multiplicities. The desert is populous. Thus the body without
organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of the
organs insofar as it composes an organism. The body without organs is
not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it
has blown apart the organism and its organization. Lice hopping on the
beach. Skin colonies. The full body without organs is a body populated
by multiplicities. The problem of the unconscious has most certainly
nothing to do with generation but rather peopling, population. It is an
affair of worldwide population on the full body of the earth, not
organic familial generation. “I love to invent peoples, tribes, racial
origins \dots{} I return from my tribes. As of today, I am the adoptive son of
fifteen tribes, no more, no less. And they in turn are my adopted
tribes, for I love each of them more than if I had been born into it.”
People say, After all, schizophrenics have a mother and a father, don’t
they? Sorry, no, none as such. They only have a desert with tribes
inhabiting it, a full body clinging with multiplicities.


This brings us to the second factor, the nature of these multiplicities
and their elements. \emph{RHIZOME}. One of the essential characteristics of
the dream of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and
alters its distance in relation to the others. On the Wolf-Man’s nose,
the elements, determined as pores in the skin, little scars in the
pores, little ruts in the scar tissue, ceaselessly dance, grow, and
diminish. These variable distances are not extensive quantities
divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible, or “relatively
indivisible,” in other words, they are not divisible below or above a
certain threshold, they cannot increase or diminish \emph{without their
elements changing in nature}. A swarm of bees: here they come as a
rumble of soccer players in striped jerseys, or a band of Tuareg. Or:
the wolf clan doubles up with a swarm of bees against the gang of
Deulhs, under the direction of Mowgli, who runs on the edge (yes,
Kipling understood the call of the wolves, their libidinal meaning,
better than Freud; and in the Wolf-Man’s case the story about wolves is
followed by one about wasps and butterflies, we go from wolves to
wasps). What is the significance of these indivisible distances that are
ceaselessly transformed, and cannot be divided or transformed without
their elements changing in nature each time? Is it not the intensive
character of this kind of multiplicity’s elements and the relations
between them? Exactly like a speed or a temperature, which is not
composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is enveloped in or
envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature. The metrical
principle of these multiplicities is not to be found in a homogeneous
milieu but resides elsewhere, in forces at work within them, in physical
phenomena inhabiting them, precisely in the libido, which constitutes
them from within, and in constituting them necessarily divides into
distinct qualitative and variable flows. Freud himself recognizes the
multiplicity of libidinal “currents” that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That
makes it all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of
the unconscious the way he does. For him, there will always be a
reduction to the One: the little scars, the little holes, become
subdivisions of the great scar or supreme hole named castration; the
wolves become substitutes for a single Father who turns up everywhere,
or wherever they put him. (As Ruth Mack Brunswick says, Let’s go all the
way, the wolves are “\emph{all} the fathers and doctors” in the world; but
the Wolf-Man thinks, “You trying to tell me my ass isn’t a wolf?”)


What should have been done is the opposite, all of this should be
understood in intensity: the Wolf is the pack, in other words, the
multiplicity instantaneously apprehended as such insofar as it
approaches or moves away from zero, each distance being nondecomposable.
Zero is the body without organs of the Wolf-Man. If the unconscious
knows nothing of negation, it is because there is nothing negative in
the unconscious, only indefinite moves toward and away from zero, which
does not at all express lack but rather the positivity of the full body
as support and prop (“for an afflux is necessary simply to signify the
absence of intensity”). The wolves designate an intensity, a band of
intensity, a threshold of intensity on the Wolf-Man’s body without
organs. A dentist told the Wolf-Man that he “would soon lose all his
teeth because of the violence of his bite”—and that his gums were pocked
with pustules and little holes.\footnote{Ruth Mack Brunswick, “A Supplement to Freud’s History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in \emph{The Wolf-Man}, ed. Muriel Gardiner (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 268.} Jaw as high intensity, teeth as low
intensity, and pustular gums as approach to zero. The wolf, as the
instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a
representative, a substitute, but an \emph{I feel}. I feel myself becoming a
wolf, one wolf among others, on the edge of the pack. A cry of anguish,
the only one Freud hears: Help me not become wolf (or the opposite, Help
me not fail in this becoming). It is not a question of representation:
don’t think for a minute that it has to do with believing oneself a
wolf, representing oneself as a wolf. The wolf, wolves, are intensities,
speeds, temperatures, nondecomposable variable distances. A swarming, a
wolfing. Who could ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation
to the wolf machine, or that the two are only linked by an Oedipal
apparatus, by the all-too-human figure of the Father? For in the end the
anus also expresses an intensity, in this case the approach to zero of a
distance that cannot be decomposed without its elements changing in
nature. \emph{A field of anuses, just like a pack of wolves}. Does not the
child, on the periphery, hold onto the wolves by his anus? The jaw
descends to the anus. Hold onto those wolves by your jaw and your anus.
The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it’s not that simple; jaw and wolf form a
multiplicity that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf, as a
function of other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities,
between thresholds. Lines of flight or of deterritorialization,
becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is
what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to
deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole
is no more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale
told by an overconscious idiot who has no understanding of
multiplicities as formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they
are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles,
productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molecular
multiplicities. It is not even sufficient to say that intense and moving
particles pass through holes; a hole is just as much a particle as what
passes through it. Physicists say that holes are not the absence of
particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Flying
anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.


Let us return to the story of \emph{multiplicity}, for the creation of this
substantive marks a very important moment. It was created precisely in
order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the
one, to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the
pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity
or Totality or as the organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to
come, and instead distinguish between different types of multiplicity.
Thus we find in the work of the mathematician and physicist Riemann a
distinction between discreet multiplicities and continuous
multiplicities (the metrical principle of the second kind of
multiplicity resides solely in forces at work within them). Then in
Meinong and Russell we find a distinction between multiplicities of
magnitude or divisibility, which are extensive, and multiplicities of
distance, which are closer to the intensive. And in Bergson there is a
distinction between numerical or extended multiplicities and qualitative
or durational multiplicities. We are doing approximately the same thing
when we distinguish between arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic
multiplicities. Between macro- and micromultiplicities. On the one hand,
multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable,
totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious—and on the other
hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities
composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and
distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and
that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of
their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or
before a certain threshold. The elements of this second kind of
multiplicity are particles; their relations are distances; their
movements are Brownian; their quantities are intensities, differences in
intensity.


This only provides the logical foundation. Elias Canetti distinguishes
between two types of multiplicity that are sometimes opposed but at
other times interpenetrate: mass (“crowd”) multiplicities and pack
multiplicities. Among the characteristics of a mass, in Canetti’s sense,
we should note large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members,
concentration, sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way
hierarchy, organization of territoriality or territorialization, and
emission of signs. Among the characteristics of a pack are small or
restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances,
qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings,
impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian
variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection
of particles.\footnote{Elias Canetti, \emph{Crowds and Power}, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1963), pp. 29–30, 93ff. Some of the distinctions mentioned here are noted by Canetti.} Doubtless, there is no more equality or any less
hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different kind. The
leader of the pack or the band plays move by move, must wager everything
every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes
on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line
of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it, and
to which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only
integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe
them a negative sign. Canetti notes that in a pack each member is alone
even in the company of others (for example, wolves on the hunt); each
takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band. “In
the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions,
he will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the
center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge
and then back in the center. When the pack forms a ring around the fire,
each man will have neighbors to the right and left, but no one behind
him; his back is naked and exposed to the wilderness.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Ibid., p. 93.]} We recognize
this as the schizo position, being on the periphery, holding on by a
hand or a foot \dots{} As opposed to the paranoid position of the mass
subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the group,
the group with the leader, and the leader with the group; be securely
embedded in the mass, get close to the center, never be at the edge
except in the line of duty. Why assume (as does Konrad Lorenz, for
example) that bands and their type of companionship represent a more
rudimentary evolutionary state than group societies or societies of
conjugality? Not only do there exist bands of humans, but there are
particularly refined examples: “high-society life” differs from
“sociality” in that it is closer to the pack. Social persons have a
certain envious and erroneous image of the high-society person because
they are ignorant of high-society positions and hierarchies, the
relations of force, the very particular ambitions and projects.
High-society relations are never coextensive with social relations, they
do not coincide. Even “mannerisms” (all bands have them) are specific to
micromultiplicities and distinct from social manners or customs.


There is no question, however, of establishing a dualist opposition
between the two types of multiplicities, molecular machines and molar
machines; that would be no better than the dualism between the One and
the multiple. There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a
single \emph{assemblage}, operating in the same \emph{assemblage}: packs in masses
and masses in packs. Trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of
arborescence. How could mad particles be produced with anything but a
gigantic cyclotron? How could lines of deterritorialization be
assignable outside of circuits of territoriality? Where else but in wide
expanses, and in major upheavals in those expanses, could a tiny rivulet
of new intensity suddenly start to flow? What do you not have to do in
order to produce a new sound? Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular,
becoming-inhuman, each involves a molar extension, a human
hyperconcentration, or prepares the way for them. In Kafka, it is
impossible to separate the erection of a great paranoid bureaucratic
machine from the installation of little schizo machines of becoming-dog
or becoming-beetle. In the case of the Wolf-Man, it is impossible to
separate the becoming-wolf of his dream from the military and religious
organization of his obsessions. A military man does a wolf; a military
man does a dog. There are not two multiplicities or two machines; one
and the same machinic assemblage produces and distributes the whole, in
other words, the set of statements corresponding to the “complex.” What
does psychoanalysis have to say about all of this? Oedipus, nothing but
Oedipus, because it hears nothing and listens to nobody. It flattens
everything, masses and packs, molecular and molar machines,
multiplicities of every variety. Take the Wolf-Man’s second dream during
his so-called psychotic episode: in the street, a wall with a closed
door, to the left an empty dresser; in front of the dresser, the
patient, and a big woman with a little scar who seems to want to skirt
around the wall; behind the wall, wolves, rushing for the door. Even
Brunswick can’t go wrong: although she recognizes herself in the big
woman, she does see that this time the wolves are Bolsheviks, the
revolutionary mass that had emptied the dresser and confiscated the
Wolf-Man’s fortune. \emph{The wolves, in a metastable state, have gone over
to a large-scale social machine}. But psychoanalysis has nothing to say
about all of these points—except what Freud already said: it all leads
back to daddy (what do you know, he was one of the leaders of the
liberal party in Russia, but that’s hardly important; all that needs to
be said is that the revolution “assuaged the patient’s feelings of
guilt”). You’d think that the investments and counterinvestments of the
libido had nothing to do with mass disturbances, pack movements,
collective signs, and particles of desire.


Thus it does not suffice to attribute molar multiplicities and mass
machines to the preconscious, reserving another kind of machine or
multiplicity for the unconscious. For it is the assemblage of both of
these that is the province of the unconscious, the way in which the
former condition the latter, and the latter prepare the way for the
former, or elude them or return to them: the libido suffuses everything.
Keep everything in sight at the same time—that a social machine or an
organized mass has a molecular unconscious that marks not only its
tendency to decompose but also the current components of its very
operation and organization; that any individual caught up in a mass has
his\Slash{}her own pack unconscious, which does not necessarily resemble the
packs of the mass to which that individual belongs; that an individual
or mass will live out in its unconscious the masses and packs of another
mass or another individual. What does it mean to love somebody? It is
always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group,
however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through
the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s
own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or
herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to
mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other
person’s. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every
love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to
be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that
someone can be \emph{named}, receives his or her family name or first name,
acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous
apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which
he or she belongs. A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking
through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus’s voice, a
horde of wolves in somebody’s throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the
anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many
bodies in each other. Albertine is slowly extracted from a group of
girls with its own number, organization, code, and hierarchy; and not
only is this group or restricted mass suffused by an unconscious, but
Albertine has her own multiplicities that the narrator, once he has
isolated her, discovers on her body and in her lies—until the end of
their love returns her to the indiscernible.


Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the
masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from
the internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. The
distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior,
which are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between
different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and
change places—machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in
motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of
statements: “I love you” (or whatever). For Kafka, Felice is inseparable
from a certain social machine, and, as a representative of the firm that
manufactures them, from parlograph machines; how could she not belong to
that organization in the eyes of Kafka, a man fascinated by commerce and
bureaucracy? But at the same time, Felice’s teeth, her big carnivorous
teeth, send her racing down other lines, into the molecular
multiplicities of a becoming-dog, a becoming-jackal \dots{} Felice is
inseparable from the sign of the modern social machines belonging to
her, from those belonging to Kafka (not the same ones), and from the
particles, the little molecular machines, the whole strange becoming or
journey Kafka will make and have her make through his perverse writing
apparatus.


There are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic
assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally libidinal and
unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment, we will
note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several
kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines;
molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal
apparatuses (\emph{yes, of course there are Oedipal statements, many of
them}); and counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and
functioning. We will go into it later. We can no longer even speak of
distinct machines, only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that
at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage, the faceless
figure of the libido. Each of us is caught up in an assemblage of this
kind, and we reproduce its statements when we think we are speaking in
our own name; or rather we speak in our own name when we produce its
statement. And what bizarre statements they are; truly, the talk of
lunatics. We mentioned Kafka, but we could just as well have said the
Wolf-Man: a religious-military machine that Freud attributes to
obsessional neurosis; an anal pack machine, an anal becoming-wolf or
-wasp or -butterfly machine, which Freud attributes to the hysteric
character; an Oedipal apparatus, which Freud considers the sole motor,
the immobile motor that must be found everywhere; and a counter-Oedipal
apparatus—incest with the sister, schizo-incest, or love with “people of
inferior station”; and anality, homosexuality?—all that Freud sees only
as Oedipal substitutes, regressions, and derivatives. In truth, Freud
sees nothing and understands nothing. He has no idea what a libidinal
assemblage is, with all the machineries it brings into play, all the
multiple loves.


Of course, there are Oedipal statements. For example, Kafka’s story,
“Jackals and Arabs,” is easy to read in that way: you can always do it,
you can’t lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing. The
Arabs are clearly associated with the father and the jackals with the
mother; between the two, there is a whole story of castration
represented by the rusty scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs are
an extensive, armed, organized mass stretching across the entire desert;
and the jackals are an intense pack forever launching into the desert
following lines of flight or deterritorialization (“they are madmen,
veritable madmen”); between the two, at the edge, the Man of the North,
the jackal-man. And aren’t those big scissors the Arab sign that guides
or releases jackal-particles, both to accelerate their mad race by
detaching them from the mass and to bring them back to the mass, to tame
them and whip them, to bring them around? Dead camel: Oedipal food
apparatus. Counter-Oedipal carrion apparatus: kill animals to eat, or
eat to clean up carrion. The jackals formulate the problem well: it is
not that of castration but of “cleanliness” (\emph{propreté}, also
“ownness”), the test of desert-desire. Which will prevail, mass
territoriality or pack deterritorialization? The libido suffuses the
entire desert, the body without organs on which the drama is played out.


There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is
the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective
agents of enunciation (take “collective agents” to mean not peoples or
societies but multiplicities). The proper name (\emph{nom propre}) does not
designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens
up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the
most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his
or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous
apprehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure
infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity. What Proust
said about the first name: when I said Gilberte’s name, I had the
impression that I was holding her entire body naked in my mouth. The
Wolf-Man, a true proper name, an intimate first name linked to the
becomings, infinitives, and intensities of a multiplied and
depersonalized individual. What does psychoanalysis know about
multiplication? The desert hour when the dromedary becomes a thousand
dromedaries snickering in the sky. The evening hour when a thousand
holes appear on the surface of the earth. Castration! Castration! cries
the psychoanalytic scarecrow, who never saw more than a hole, a father
or a dog where wolves are, a domesticated individual where there are
wild multiplicities. We are not just criticizing psychoanalysis for
having selected Oedipal statements exclusively. For such statements are
to a certain extent part of a machinic assemblage, for which they could
serve as correctional indexes, as in a calculation of errors. We are
criticizing psychoanalysis for having used Oedipal enunciation to make
patients believe they would produce individual, personal statements, and
would finally speak in their own name. The trap was set from the start:
never will the Wolf-Man speak. Talk as he might about wolves, howl as he
might like a wolf, Freud does not even listen; he glances at his dog and
answers, “It’s daddy.” For as long as that lasts, Freud calls it
neurosis; when it cracks, it’s psychosis. The Wolf-Man will receive the
psychoanalytic medal of honor for services rendered to the cause, and
even disabled veterans’ benefits. He could have spoken in his own name
only if the machinic assemblage that was producing particular statements
in him had been brought to light. But there is no question of that in
psychoanalysis: at the very moment the subject is persuaded that he or
she will be uttering the most individual of statements, he or she is
deprived of all basis for enunciation. Silence people, prevent them from
speaking, and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven’t said a
thing: the famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling:
Six wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How’s that? Goats, you say? How
interesting. Take away the goats and all you have left is a wolf, so
it’s your father \dots{} That is why the Wolf-Man feels so fatigued: he’s left
lying there with all his wolves in his throat, all those little holes on
his nose, and all those libidinal values on his body without organs. The
war will come, the wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will
remain suffocated by all he had to say. All we will be told is that he
became well behaved, polite, and resigned again, “honest and
scrupulous.” In short, cured. He gets back by pointing out that
psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological vision: “Nothing can be more
valuable for a young person than the love of nature and a comprehension
of the natural sciences, in particular zoology.”\footnote{Letter cited by Roland Jaccard, \emph{L’homme aux loups} (Paris: Ed. Universitaires, 1973), p. 113.}

\chapter{3. 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-3}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-3}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-33.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Double Articulation}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain
machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing
several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his
simian disposition. He explained that the Earth—the Deterritorialized,
the Glacial, the giant Molecule—is a body without organs. This body
without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in
all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or
transitory particles. That, however, was not the question at hand. For
there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable
phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many
others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving
form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities
into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of
the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar
aggregates. Strata are acts of capture, they are like “black holes” or
occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach.\footnote{Roland Omnès, \emph{L’univers et ses métamorphoses} (Paris: Hermann, 1973), p. 164: “A star that has collapsed so far that its radius has fallen below the critical point becomes what is called a black hole (an occluded star). This expression means that nothing sent in the direction of such an object will ever come back. It is therefore perfectly black since it does not emit or reflect any light.”} They
operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed
simultaneously by code and by territoriality. The strata are judgments
of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment
of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes
that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded,
deterritorialized).


Challenger quoted a sentence he said he came across in a geology
textbook. He said we needed to learn it by heart because we would only
be in a position to understand it later on: “A surface of stratification
is a more compact plane of consistency lying between two layers.” The
layers are the strata. They come at least in pairs, one serving as
**substratum* for the other. The surface of stratification is a machinic
assemblage distinct from the strata. The assemblage is between two
layers, between two strata; on one side it faces the strata (in this
direction, the assemblage is an \emph{inter stratum}), but the other side
faces something else, the body without organs or plane of consistency
(here, it is a \emph{metastratum}). In effect, the body without organs is
itself the plane of consistency, which becomes compact or thickens at
the level of the strata.


God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata
come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double
(it itself has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena
constitutive of \emph{double articulation}. Articulate twice, \emph{B-A, BA}. This
is not at all to say that the strata speak or are language based. Double
articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a
general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation
chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular
or quasi-molecular units (\emph{substances}) upon which it imposes a
statistical order of connections and successions (\emph{forms}). The second
articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures
(\emph{forms}), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures
are simultaneously actualized (\emph{substances}). In a geological stratum,
for example, the first articulation is the process of “sedimentation,”
which deposits units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical
order: flysch, with its succession of sandstone and schist. The second
articulation is the “folding” that sets up a stable functional structure
and effects the passage from sediment to sedimentary rock.


It is clear that the distinction between the two articulations is not
between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed
matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as
formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of
territorialization and deterritorialization. But each articulation has a
code \emph{and} a territorially; therefore each possesses both form and
substance. For now, all we can say is that each articulation has a
corresponding type of segmentarity or multiplicity: one type is supple,
more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is more rigid, molar, and
organized. Although the first articulation is not lacking in systematic
interactions, it is in the second articulation in particular that
phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenomena of
centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and
finalization. Both articulations establish binary relations between
their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation
and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying
far more complex laws. The word “structure” may be used to designate the
sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to
believe that structure is the earth’s last word. Moreover, it cannot be
taken for granted that the distinction between the two articulations is
always that of the molecular and the molar.


He skipped over the immense diversity of the energetic, physicochemical,
and geological strata. He went straight to the organic strata, or the
existence of a great organic stratification. The problem of the
organism—\emph{how to “make” the body an organism}—is once again a problem of
articulation, of the articulatory relation. The Dogons, well known to
the professor, formulate the problem as follows: an organism befalls the
body of the smith, by virtue of a machine or machinic assemblage that
stratifies it. “The shock of the hammer and the anvil broke his arms and
legs at the elbows and knees, which until that moment he had not
possessed. In this way, he received the articulations specific to the
new human form that was to spread across the earth, a form dedicated to
work\dots{}. His arm became folded with a view to work.”\footnote{Marcel Griaule, \emph{Dieu d’eau} (Paris: Fayard, 1975), pp. 38–41.} It is obviously
only a manner of speaking to limit the articulatory relation to the
bones. The entire organism must be considered in relation to a double
articulation, and on different levels. First, on the level of
morphogenesis: on the one hand, realities of the molecular type with
aleatory relations are caught up in crowd phenomena or statistical
aggregates determining an order (the protein fiber and its sequence or
segmentarity); on the other hand, these aggregates themselves are taken
up into stable structures that “elect” stereoscopic compounds, form
organs, functions, and regulations, organize molar mechanisms, and even
distribute centers capable of overflying crowds, overseeing mechanisms,
utilizing and repairing tools, “overcoding” the aggregate (the folding
back on itself of the fiber to form a compact structure; a second kind
of segmentarity).\footnote{For a general treatment of the two aspects of morphogenesis, see Raymod Ruyer, \emph{La genèse de formes vivantes} (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), pp. 54ff., and Pierre Vendryès, \emph{Vie et probabilité} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945). Vendryes analyzes the role of the articulatory relation and articulated systems. On the two structural aspects of protein, see Jacques Monod, \emph{Chance and Necessity}, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 90–95.} Sedimentation and folding, fiber and infolding.


On a different level, the cellular chemistry presiding over the
constitution of proteins also operates by double articulation. This
double articulation is internal to the molecular, it is the articulation
between small and large molecules, a segmentarity by successive
modifications and polymerization. “First, the elements taken from the
medium are combined through a series of transformations\dots{}. All this
activity involves hundreds of chemical reactions. But ultimately, it
produces a limited number of small compounds, a few dozen at most. In
the second stage of cellular chemistry, the small molecules are
assembled to produce larger ones. It is the polymerization of units
linked end-to-end that forms the characteristic chains of
macromolecules\dots{}. The two stages of cellular chemistry, therefore, differ
in their function, products and nature. The first carves out chemical
motifs; the second assembles them. The first forms compounds that exist
only temporarily, for they are intermediaries on the path of
biosynthesis; the second constructs stable products. The first operates
by a series of different reactions; the second by repeating the same
reaction.”\footnote{François Jacob, \emph{The Logic of Life}, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 269–270 [translation modified].} There is, moreover, a third level, upon which cellular
chemistry itself depends. It is the genetic code, which is in turn
inseparable from a double segmentarity or a double articulation, this
time between two types of independent molecules: the sequence of protein
units and the sequence of nucleic units, with binary relations between
units of the same type and biunivocal relationships between units of
different types. Thus there are always two articulations, two
segmentarities, two kinds of multiplicity, each of which brings into
play both forms and substances. But the distribution of these two
articulations is not constant, even within the same stratum.


The audience rather sulkily denounced the numerous misunderstandings,
misinterpretations, and even misappropriations in the professor’s
presentation, despite the authorities he had appealed to, calling them
his “friends.” Even the Dogons \dots{} And things would presently get worse.
The professor cynically congratulated himself on taking his pleasure
from behind, but the offspring always turned out to be runts and wens,
bits and pieces, if not stupid vulgarizations. Besides, the professor
was not a geologist or a biologist, he was not even a linguist,
ethnologist, or psychoanalyst; what his specialty had been was long
since forgotten. In fact, Professor Challenger was double, articulated
twice, and that did not make things any easier, people never knew which
of him was present. He (?) claimed to have invented a discipline he
referred to by various names: rhizomatics, stratoanalysis,
schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of
multiplicities. Yet no one clearly understood what the goals, method, or
principles of this discipline were. Young Professor Alasca, Challenger’s
pet student, tried hypocritically to defend him by explaining that on a
given stratum the passage from one articulation to the other was easily
verified because it was always accompanied by a loss of water, in
genetics as in geology, and even in linguistics, where the importance of
the “lost saliva” phenomenon is measured. Challenger took offense,
preferring to cite his friend, as he called him, the Danish Spinozist
geologist, Hjelmslev, that dark prince descended from Hamlet who also
made language his concern, precisely in order to analyze its
“stratification.” Hjelmslev was able to weave a net out of the notions
of \emph{matter, content} and \emph{expression, form} and \emph{substance}. These were
the strata, said Hjelmslev. Now this net had the advantage of breaking
with the form-content duality, since there was a form of content no less
than a form of expression. Hjelmslev’s enemies saw this merely as a way
of rebaptizing the discredited notions of the signified and signifier,
but something quite different was actually going on. Despite what
Hjelmslev himself may have said, the net is not linguistic in scope or
origin (the same must be said of double articulation: if language has a
specificity of its own, as it most certainly does, that specificity
consists neither in double articulation nor in Hjelmslev’s net, which
are general characteristics of strata).


He used the term \emph{matter} for the plane of consistency or Body without
Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or
destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular
particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free
singularities. He used the term content for formed matters, which would
now have to be considered from two points of view: substance, insofar as
these matters are “chosen,” and form, insofar as they are chosen in a
certain order (\emph{substance and form of content}). He used the term
**expression* for functional structures, which would also have to be
considered from two points of view: the organization of their own
specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds (\emph{form and
content of expression}). A stratum always has a dimension of the
expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative
invariance; for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a
relatively invariant expression by means of which they determine the
compounds, organs, and functions of the organism.\footnote{François Jacob, “Le modèle linguistique en biologie,” \emph{Critique}, no. 322 (March 1974), p. 202: “Genetic material has two roles: it must be reproduced in order to be transmitted to the following generation, and it must be expressed in order for it to determine the organism’s structures and functions.”} To express is
always to sing the glory of God. Every stratum is a judgment of God; not
only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express
themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on
earth. \emph{The first articulation concerns content, the second expression}.
The distinction between the two articulations is not between forms and
substances but between content and expression, expression having just as
much substance as content and content just as much form as expression.
The double articulation sometimes coincides with the molecular and the
molar, and sometimes not; this is because content and expression are
sometimes divided along those lines and sometimes along different lines.
There is never correspondence or conformity between content and
expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition. The
distinction between content and expression is \emph{always real}, in various
ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double
articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them
according to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes
their real distinction. (On the other hand, there is no real distinction
between form and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since
substances are nothing other than formed matters, formless substances
are inconceivable, although it is possible in certain instances to
conceive of substanceless forms.)


Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and
expression are relative terms (“first” and “second” articulation should
also be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is
capable of invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content.
Content and expression are two variables of a function of
stratification. They not only vary from one stratum to another, but
intermingle, and within the same stratum multiply and divide ad
infinitum. Since every articulation is double, there is not an
articulation of content \emph{and} an articulation of expression—the
articulation of content is double in its own right and constitutes a
relative expression within content; the articulation of expression is
also double and constitutes a relative content within expression. For
this reason, there exist \emph{intermediate states} between content and
expression, expression and content: the levels, equilibriums, and
exchanges through which a stratified system passes. In short, we find
forms and substances of content that play the role of expression in
relation to other forms and substances, and conversely for expression.
These new distinctions do not, therefore, coincide with the distinction
between forms and substances within each articulation; instead, they
show that each articulation is already, or still, double. This can be
seen on the organic stratum: proteins of content have two forms, one of
which (the infolded fiber) plays the role of functional expression in
relation to the other. The same goes for the nucleic acids of
expression: double articulations cause certain formal and substantial
elements to play the role of content in relation to others; not only
does the half of the chain that is reproduced become a content, but the
reconstituted chain itself becomes a content in relation to the
“messenger.” There are double pincers everywhere on a stratum;
everywhere and in all directions there are double binds and lobsters, a
multiplicity of double articulations affecting both expression and
content. Through all of this, Hjelmslev’s warning should not be
forgotten: “The terms expression plane and content plane \dots{} are chosen in
conformity with established notions and are quite arbitrary. Their
functional definition provides no justification for calling one, and not
the other, of these entities \emph{expression}, or one, and not the other,
**content*. They are defined only by their mutual solidarity, and neither
of them can be identified otherwise. They are defined only oppositively
and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the same
function.”\footnote{Louis Hjelmslev, \emph{Prolegomena to a Theory of Language}, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 60.} We must combine all the resources of real distinction,
reciprocal presupposition, and general relativism.



\bigskip


The question we must ask is what on a given stratum varies and what does
not. What accounts for the unity and diversity of a stratum? Matter, the
pure matter of the plane of consistency (or inconsistency) lies outside
the strata. The molecular materials borrowed from the substrata may be
the same throughout a stratum, but that does not mean that the molecules
will be the same. The substantial elements may be the same throughout
the stratum without the substances being the same. The formal relations
or bonds may be the same without the forms being the same. In
biochemistry, there is a \emph{unity of composition} of the organic stratum
defined at the level of materials and energy, substantial elements or
radicals, bonds and reactions. But there is a variety of different
molecules, substances, and forms.


Should we not sing the praise of Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire? For in the
nineteenth century he developed a grandiose conception of
stratification. He said that matter, considered from the standpoint of
its greatest divisibility, consists in particles of decreasing size,
flows or elastic fluids that “deploy themselves” by radiating through
space. Combustion is the process of this escape or infinite division on
the plane of consistency. Electrification is the opposite process,
constitutive of strata; it is the process whereby similar particles
group together to form atoms and molecules, similar molecules to form
bigger molecules, and the biggest molecules to form molar aggregates:
“the attraction of like by like,” as in a double pincer or double
articulation. Thus there is no vital matter specific to the organic
stratum, matter is the same on all the strata. But the organic stratum
does have a specific unity of composition, a single abstract Animal, a
single machine embedded in the stratum, and presents everywhere the same
molecular materials, the same elements or anatomical components of
organs, the same formal connections. Organic forms are nevertheless
different from one another, as are organs, compound substances, and
molecules. It is of little or no importance that Geoffroy chose
anatomical elements as the substantial units rather than protein and
nucleic acid radicals. At any rate, he already invoked a whole interplay
of molecules. The important thing is the principle of the simultaneous
unity and variety of the stratum: isomorphism of forms but no
correspondence; identity of elements or components but no identity of
compound substances.


This is where the dialogue, or rather violent debate, with Cuvier came
in. To keep the last of the audience from leaving, Challenger imagined a
particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead, in puppet theater
style. Geoffroy called forth Monsters, Cuvier laid out all the Fossils
in order, Baer flourished flasks filled with embryos, Vialleton put on a
tetrapod’s belt, Perrier mimed the dramatic battle between the Mouth and
the Brain, and so on. \emph{Geoffroy}: The proof that there is isomorphism is
that you can always get from one form on the organic stratum to another,
however different they may be, by means of “folding.” To go from the
Vertebrate to the Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate’s
backbone together, bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to
the nape of its neck \dots{} \emph{Cuvier} (angrily): That’s just not true! You go
from an Elephant to a Medusa; I know, I tried. There are irreducible
axes, types, branches. There are resemblances between organs and
analogies between forms, nothing more. You’re a falsifier, a
metaphysician. \emph{Vialleton} (a disciple of Cuvier and Baer): Even if
folding gave good results, who could endure it? It’s not by chance that
Geoffroy only considers anatomical elements. No muscle or ligament would
survive it. \emph{Geoffroy}: I said that there was isomorphism but not
correspondence. You have to bring “degrees of development or perfection”
into the picture. It is not everywhere on a stratum that materials reach
the degree at which they form a given aggregate. Anatomical elements may
be arrested or inhibited in certain places by molecular clashes, the
influence of the milieu, or pressure from neighbors to such an extent
that they compose different organs. The same formal relations or
connections are then effectuated in entirely different forms and
arrangements. It is still the same abstract Animal that is realized
throughout the stratum, only to varying degrees, in varying modes. Each
time, it is as perfect as its surroundings or milieu allows it to be (it
is obviously not yet a question of evolution: neither folding nor
degrees imply descent or derivation, only autonomous realizations of the
same abstract relations). This is where Geoffroy invoked Monsters: human
monsters are embryos that were retarded at a certain degree of
development, the human in them is only a straitjacket for inhuman forms
and substances. Yes, the Heteradelph is a crustacean. \emph{Baer} (an ally of
Cuvier and contemporary of Darwin, about whom he had reservations, in
addition to being an enemy of Geoffroy): That’s not true, you can’t
confuse degrees of development with types of forms. A single type has
several degrees, a single degree is found in several types, but never
will you make types out of degrees. An embryo of one type cannot display
another type; at most, it can be of the same degree as an embryo of the
second type. \emph{Vialleton} (a disciple of Baer’s who took both Darwin and
Geoffroy one further): And then there are things that only an embryo can
do or endure. It can do or endure these things precisely because of its
type, not because it can go from one type to another according to
degrees of development. Admire the Tortoise. Its neck requires that a
certain number of protovertebrae change position, and its front limbs
must slide 180 degrees in relation to that of a bird. You can never draw
conclusions about phylogenesis on the basis of embryogenesis. Folding
does not make it possible to go from one type to another; quite the
contrary, the types testify to the irreducibility of the forms of
folding \dots{} (Thus Vialleton presented two kinds of interconnected
arguments in the service of the same cause, saying first that there are
things no animal can do by reason of its substance, and then that there
are things that only an embryo can do by reason of its form. Two strong
arguments.)\footnote{See Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, \emph{Principes de philosophie zoologique} (Paris: Picton et Didier, 1830), which quotes extracts from the debate with Cuvier; and \emph{Notions synthétiques, historiques et physiologiques de philosophie naturelle} (Paris: Denain, 1838), in which Geoffroy sets forth his molecular conception of combustion, electrification, and attraction. Karl Ernest von Baer, \emph{Über Entwicklungsgeschichte der Thiere} (Königsberg: Beiden Gehrüdern Bornträger, 1828–88), and “Biographic de Cuvier,” in \emph{Annales des sciences naturelles} (1908). Vialleton, \emph{Membres et ceintures des vertébrés tétrapodes} (Paris: Doin, 1924).}


We’re a little lost now. There is so much going on in these retorts. So
many endlessly proliferating distinctions. So much getting even, for
epistemology is not innocent. The sweet and subtle Geoffroy and the
violent and serious Cuvier do battle around Napoleon. Cuvier, the rigid
specialist, is pitted against Geoffroy, always ready to switch
specialities. Cuvier hates Geoffroy, he can’t stomach Geoffrey’s
lighthearted formulas, his humor (yes, Hens do indeed have teeth, the
Lobster has skin on its bones, etc.). Cuvier is a man of Power and
Terrain, and he won’t let Geoffroy forget it; Geoffroy, on the other
hand, prefigures the nomadic man of speed. Cuvier reflects a Euclidean
space, whereas Geoffroy thinks topologically. Today let us invoke the
folds of the cortex with all their paradoxes. Strata are topological,
and Geoffroy is a great artist of the fold, a formidable artist; as
such, he already has a presentiment of a certain kind of animal rhizome
with aberrant paths of communication—Monsters. Cuvier reacts in terms of
discontinuous photographs, and casts of fossils. But we’re a little
lost, because distinctions have proliferated in all directions.


We have not even taken Darwin, evolutionism, or neoevolutionism into
account yet. This, however, is where a decisive phenomenon occurs: our
puppet theater becomes more and more nebulous, in other words,
collective and differential. Earlier, we invoked two factors, and their
uncertain relations, in order to explain the diversity within a
stratum—degrees of development or perfection and types of forms. They
now undergo a profound transformation. There is a double tendency for
types of forms to be understood increasingly in terms of populations,
packs and colonies, collectivities or multiplicities; and degrees of
development in terms of speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential
relations. A double deepening. This, Darwinism’s fundamental
contribution, implies a new coupling of individuals and milieus on the
stratum.\footnote{Edmond Perrier deserves a place, although not a decisive one, in this long history. He returned to the problem of unity of composition, updating the work of Geoffrey with the aid of Darwin, and especially Lamarck. Perrier’s entire work is organized around two themes: animal colonies or multiplicities, and the speeds necessary to account for heterodox degrees and foldings (“tachygenesis”). For example, the brain of a vertebrate may come to occupy the position of the mouth of an annelid, in the “fight between the mouth and the brain.” See \emph{Les colonies animates et la formation des organismes} (Paris: G. Masson, 1881), and “L’origine des embranchements du règne animal,” \emph{Scienta} (May–June 1918). Perrier wrote a history entitled \emph{Philosophie zoologique avant Darwin} (Paris: Alcan, 1884), which includes excellent chapters on Geoffroy and Cuvier.}


First, if we assume the presence of an elementary or even molecular
population in a given milieu, the forms do not preexist the population,
they are more like statistical results. The more a population assumes
divergent forms, the more its multiplicity divides into multiplicities
of different nature, the more its elements form distinct compounds or
matters—the more efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or
divides up the milieu. Thus the relationship between embryogenesis and
phylogenesis is reversed: the embryo does not testify to an absolute
form preestablished in a closed milieu; rather, the phylogenesis of
populations has at its disposal, in an open milieu, an entire range of
relative forms to choose from, none of which is preestablished. In
embryogenesis, “It is possible to tell from the parents, anticipating
the outcome of the process, whether a pigeon or a wolf is developing\dots{}.
But here the points of reference themselves are in motion: there are
only fixed points for convenience of expression. At the level of
universal evolution, it is impossible to discern that kind of reference
point\dots{}. Life on earth appears as a sum of relatively independent species
of flora and fauna with sometimes shifting or porous boundaries between
them. Geographical areas can only harbor a sort of chaos, or, at best,
extrinsic harmonies of an ecological order, temporary equilibriums
between populations.”\footnote{Georges Canguilhem et al., “Du développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle,” \emph{Thalès} (1960), p. 34.}


Second, simultaneously and under the same conditions, the degrees are
not degrees of preexistent development or perfection but are instead
global and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of
the advantage they give particular elements, then a particular
multiplicity in the milieu, and as a function of a particular variation
in the milieu. Degrees are no longer measured in terms of increasing
perfection or a differentiation and increase in the complexity of the
parts, but in terms of differential relations and coefficients such as
selective pressure, catalytic action, speed of propagation, rate of
growth, evolution, mutation, etc. Relative progress, then, can occur by
formal and quantitative simplification rather than by complication, by a
loss of components and syntheses rather than by acquisition (it is a
question of speed, and speed is a differential). It is through
populations that one is formed, assumes forms, and through loss that one
progresses and picks up speed. Darwinism’s two fundamental contributions
move in the direction of a science of multiplicities: the substitution
of populations for types, and the substitution of rates or differential
relations for degrees.\footnote{George Gaylord Simpson, \emph{The Meaning of Evolution} (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950).} These are nomadic contributions with shifting
boundaries determined by populations or variations of multiplicities,
and with differential coefficients or variations of relations.
Contemporary biochemistry, or “molecular Darwinism” as Monod calls it,
confirms, on the level of a single statistical and global individual, or
a simple sample, the decisive importance of molecular populations and
microbiological rates (for example, the endlessness of the sequence
composing a chain, and the chance variation of a single segment in the
sequence).


Challenger admitted having digressed at length but added that there was
no possible way to distinguish between the digressive and the
nondigressive. The point was to arrive at several conclusions concerning
the unity and diversity of a single stratum, in this case the organic
stratum.


To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which
is what allows it to be called \emph{a} stratum: molecular materials,
substantial elements, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not
the same as the unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are
already stratified, and come from “substrata.” But of course substrata
should not be thought of only as substrata: in particular, their
organization is no less complex than, nor is it inferior to, that of the
strata; we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic
evolutionism. The materials furnished by a substratum are no doubt
simpler than the compounds of a stratum, but their level of organization
in the substratum is no lower than that of the stratum itself. The
difference between materials and substantial elements is one of
organization; there is a change in organization, not an augmentation.
The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an \emph{exterior
milieu} for the elements and compounds of the stratum under
consideration, but they are not exterior \emph{to} the stratum. The elements
and compounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the
materials constitute an exterior \emph{of} the stratum; both belong to the
stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished
to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed
from the materials. Once again, this exterior and interior are relative;
they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of
the stratum responsible for the relation between them. For example, on a
crystalline stratum, the amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the
seed before the crystal has formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing
and incorporating masses of amorphous material. Conversely, the
interiority of the seed of the crystal must move out to the system’s
exterior, where the amorphous medium can crystallize (the aptitude to
switch over to the other form of organization). To the point that the
seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exterior and interior
are interior to the stratum. The same applies to the organic stratum:
the materials furnished by the substrata are an exterior medium
constituting the famous prebiotic soup, and catalysts play the role of
seed in the formation of interior substantial elements or even
compounds. These elements and compounds both appropriate materials and
exteriorize themselves through replication, even in the conditions of
the primordial soup itself. Once again, interior and exterior exchange
places, and both are interior to the organic stratum. The limit between
them is the membrane that regulates the exchanges and transformation in
organization (in other words, the distributions interior to the stratum)
and that defines all of the stratum’s formal relations or traits (even
though the situation and role of the limit vary widely depending on the
stratum, for example, the limit of the crystal as compared to the
cellular membrane). We may therefore use the term central layer, or
central ring, for the following aggregate comprising the unity of
composition of a stratum: exterior molecular materials, interior
substantial elements, and the limit or membrane conveying the formal
relations. There is a single \emph{abstract machine} that is enveloped by the
stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as opposed to
the Planomenon of the plane of consistency.


It would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to isolate this
unitary, central layer of the stratum, or to grasp it in itself, by
regression. In the first place, a stratum necessarily goes from layer to
layer, and from the very beginning. It already has several layers. It
goes from a center to a periphery, at the same time as the periphery
reacts back upon the center to form a new center in relation to a new
periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward, then turn back. There is an
outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate states, and this process is
one of the local conditions of the central ring (different
concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain threshold
of identity). These intermediate states present new figures of milieus
or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. They are
intermediaries between the exterior milieu and the interior element,
substantial elements and their compounds, compounds and substances, and
between the different formed substances (substances of content and
substances of expression). We will use the term \emph{epistrata} for these
intermediaries and superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels.
Returning to our two examples, on the crystalline stratum there are many
intermediaries between the exterior milieu or material and the interior
seed: a multiplicity of perfectly discontinuous states of metastability
constituting so many hierarchical degrees. Neither is the organic
stratum separable from so-called interior milieus that are interior
elements in relation to exterior materials but also exterior elements in
relation to interior substances.\footnote{Gilbert Simondon, \emph{L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique} (Paris: PUF, 1964). On the interior and exterior in the crystal and the organism, and on the role of the limit or membrane, see pp. 107–114 and 259–264.} These internal organic milieus are
known to regulate the degree of complexity or differentiation of the
parts of an organism. A stratum, considered from the standpoint of its
unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial
epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it
down into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a
periphery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center,
and in turn gives forth discontinuous epistrata.


That is not all. In addition to this new or second-degree relativity of
interior and exterior, there is a whole history on the level of the
membrane or limit. To the extent that elements and compounds incorporate
or appropriate materials, the corresponding organisms are forced to turn
to other “more foreign and less convenient” materials that they take
from still intact masses or other organisms. The milieu assumes a third
figure here: it is no longer an interior or exterior milieu, even a
relative one, nor an intermediate milieu, but instead an \emph{annexed or
associated milieu}. Associated milieus imply sources of energy different
from alimentary materials. Before these sources are obtained, the
organism can be said to nourish itself but not to breathe: it is in a
state of suffocation.\footnote{J. H. Rush, \emph{The Dawn of Life} (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1957), p. 165: “Primitive organisms lived, in some sense, in a state of suffocation. Life had been born, but it had not yet begun to breathe.”} Obtaining an energy source permits an increase
in the number of materials that can be transformed into elements and
compounds. The associated milieu is thus defined by the capture of
energy sources (respiration in the most general sense), by the
discernment of materials, the sensing of their presence or absence
(perception), and by the fabrication or nonfabrication of the
corresponding compounds (response, reaction). That there are molecular
perceptions no less than molecular reactions can be seen in the economy
of the cell and the property of regulatory agents to “recognize” only
one or two kinds of chemicals in a very diverse milieu of exteriority.
The development of the associated milieus culminates in the animal
worlds described by von Uexküll, with all their active, perceptive, and
energetic characteristics. The unforgettable associated world of the
Tick, defined by its gravitational energy of falling, its olfactory
characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its active characteristic of
latching on: the tick climbs a branch and drops onto a passing mammal it
has recognized by smell, then latches onto its skin (an associated world
composed of three factors, and no more). Active and perceptive
characteristics are themselves something of a double pincer, a double
articulation.\footnote{Jakob Johann von Uexküll, \emph{Mondes animaux et monde humain} (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).}


Here, the associated milieus are closely related to organic forms. An
organic form is not a simple structure but a structuration, the
constitution of an associated milieu. An animal milieu, such as the
spider web, is no less “morphogenetic” than the form of the organism.
One certainly cannot say that the milieu determines the form; but to
complicate things, this does not make the relation between form and
milieu any less decisive. Since the form depends on an autonomous code,
it can only be constituted in an associated milieu that interlaces
active, perceptive, and energetic characteristics in a complex fashion,
in conformity with the code’s requirements; and the form can develop
only through intermediary milieus that regulate the speeds and rates of
its substances; and it can experience itself only in a milieu of
exteriority that measures the comparative advantages of the associated
milieus and the differential relations of the intermediary milieus.
Milieus always act, through selection, on entire organisms, the forms of
which depend on codes those milieus sanction indirectly. Associated
milieus divide a single milieu of exteriority among themselves as a
function of different forms, just as intermediate milieus divide a
milieu of exteriority among themselves as a function of the rates or
degrees of a single form. But the dividing is done differently in the
two cases. In relation to the central belt of the stratum, the
intermediate strata or milieus constitute “epistrata” piled one atop the
other, and form new centers for the new peripheries. We will apply the
term “parastrata” to the second way in which the central belt fragments
into sides and “besides,” and the irreducible forms and milieus
associated with them. This time, it is at the level of the limit or
membrane of the central belt that the formal relations or traits common
to all of the strata necessarily assume entirely different forms or
types of forms corresponding to the parastrata. A stratum exists only in
its epistrata and parastrata, so that in the final analysis these must
be considered strata in their own right. The ideally continuous belt or
ring of the stratum—the Ecumenon defined by the identity of molecular
materials, substantial elements, and formal relations—exists only as
shattered, fragmented into epistrata and parastrata that imply concrete
machines and their respective indexes, and constitute different
molecules, specific substances, and irreducible forms.\footnote{See Pia Laviosa-Zambotti, \emph{Origini e diffusione della civilità} (Milan: C. Marzorati, 1947): her use of the notions of strata, substratum, and parastratum (although she does not define the last.)}


We may now return to the two fundamental contributions of Darwinism and
answer the question of why forms or types of forms in the parastrata
must be understood in relation to populations, and degrees of
development in the epistrata as rates or differential relations. First,
parastrata envelop the very codes upon which the forms depend, and these
codes necessarily apply to populations. There must already be an entire
molecular population to be coded, and the effects of the code, or a
change in the code, are evaluated in relation to a more or less molar
population, depending on the code’s ability to propagate in the milieu
or create for itself a new associated milieu within which the
modification will be popularizable. Yes, we must always think in terms
of packs and multiplicities: a code does or does not take hold because
the coded individual belongs to a certain population, “the population
inhabiting test tubes, a flask full of water, or a mammal’s intestine.”
What does it mean to say that new forms and associated milieus
potentially result from a change in the code, a modification of the
code, or a variation in the parastratum? The change is obviously not due
to a passage from one preestablished form to another, in other words, a
translation from one code to another. As long as the problem was
formulated in that fashion, it remained insoluble, and one would have to
agree with Cuvier and Baer that established types of forms are
irreducible and therefore do not admit of translation or transformation.
But as soon as it is recognized that a code is inseparable from a
process of decoding that is inherent to it, the problem receives a new
formulation. There is no genetics without “genetic drift.” The modern
theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated that a code, which
necessarily relates to a population, has an essential margin of
decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free
variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy
left free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be
transferred from the cells of one species to those of another, Man and
Mouse, Monkey and Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This
involves not translation between codes (viruses are not translators) but
a singular phenomenon we call surplus value of code, or
side-communication.\footnote{Jacob, \emph{The Logic of Life}, pp. 290–292, 310–312, and what Rémy Chauvin calls “aparallel evolution.”} We will have occasion to discuss this further,
for it is essential to all becomings-animal. Every code is affected by a
margin of decoding due to these supplements and surplus
values—supplements in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in the
order of a rhizome. Forms in the parastrata, the parastrata themselves,
far from lying immobile and frozen upon the strata, are part of a
machinic interlock: they relate to populations, populations imply codes,
and codes fundamentally include phenomena of relative decoding that are
all the more usable, composable, and addable by virtue of being
relative, always “beside.”


Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the
parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities
and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the
epistrata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the
movements that constitute them as the parastrata are from their
processes. Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the
central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new
periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the
new.\footnote{See Laviosa-Zambotti, \emph{Origini}: her conception of waves and flows from center to periphery, and of nomadism and migrations (nomadic flows).} The organization of the epistrata moves in the direction of
increasing deterritorialization. Physical particles and chemical
substances cross thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum
and between strata; these thresholds correspond to more or less stable
intermediate states, to more or less transitory valences and existences,
to engagements with this or that other body, to densities of proximity,
to more or less localizable connections. Not only are physical particles
characterized by speeds of deterritorialization—Joycean tachyons,
particles-holes, and quarks recalling the fundamental idea of the
“soup”—but a single chemical substance (sulfur or carbon, for example)
has a number of more and less deterritorialized states. The more
interior milieus an organism has on its own stratum, assuring its
autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the
exterior, the more deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of
development must be understood relatively, and as a function of
differential speeds, relations, and rates. Deterritorialization must be
thought of as a perfectly positive power that has degrees and thresholds
(epistrata), is always relative, and has reterritorialization as its
flipside or complement. An organism that is deterritorialized in
relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on its interior
milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterritorialized when
it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role by the
new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migration,
stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is
intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between
which it evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity;
displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of
nomadic deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that
simultaneously define complementary, sedentary reterritorializations.
Every stratum operates this way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum
number of intensities or intensive particles over which it spreads its
forms and substances, constituting determinate gradients and thresholds
of resonance (deterritorialization on a stratum always occurs in
relation to a complementary reterritorialization).\footnote{On phenomena of resonance between different orders of magnitude, see Simondon, \emph{L’individu}, pp. 16–20, 124–131, and passim.}


As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined degrees,
all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no way
of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we see
now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into
processes of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up
in movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization.
There is no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on
the one hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the
contrary, a code may be a deterritorialization and a
reterritorialization a decoding. Wide gaps separate code and
territoriality. The two factors nevertheless have the same “subject” in
a stratum: it is populations that are deterritorialized and
reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, these
factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.


On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the
milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus,
their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be
popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not
bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine
their selection. On the other hand, every modification has an associated
milieu that in turn entails a certain deterritorialization in relation
to the milieu of exteriority and a certain reterritorialization on
intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions and actions in an
associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, construct or produce
**territorial signs* (indexes). This is especially true of an animal
world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into
zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs,
and correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of
decoding inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by
the code, or prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are
inseparable from a double movement. Since the associated milieu always
confronts a milieu of exteriority with which the animal is engaged and
in which it takes necessary risks, a \emph{line of flight} must be preserved
to enable the animal to regain its associated milieu when danger appears
(for example, the bull’s line of flight in the arena, which it uses to
regain the turf it has chosen).\footnote{Claude Popelin, \emph{Le taureau et son combat} (Paris: Julliard, 1981): see chapter 4 on the problem of human and bull territories inside the arena.} A second kind of line of flight
arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows from the exterior,
forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an association with new
portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior milieus like
fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its
associated milieu to explore land, forced to “stand on its own legs,”
now carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes
protecting the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a
fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations.
Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying
to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization. In a certain sense, they are secondary. They would
be nothing without these movements that deposit them. In short, the
epistrata and parastrata are continually moving, sliding, shifting, and
changing on the Ecumenon or unity of composition of a stratum; some are
swept away by lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization,
others by processes of decoding or drift, but they all communicate at
the intersection of the milieus. The strata are continually being shaken
by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the
substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical
soup\dots{}), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of
the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous
accelerations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in
deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.


These relative movements should most assuredly not be confused with the
possibility of absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of
flight, absolute drift. The former are stratic or interstratic, whereas
the latter concern the plane of consistency and its destratification
(its “combustion,” as Geoffrey would say). There is no doubt that mad
physical particles crash through the strata as they accelerate, leaving
minimal trace of their passage, escaping spatiotemporal and even
existential coordinates as they tend toward a state of absolute
deterritorialization, the state of unformed matter on the plane of
consistency. In a certain sense, the acceleration of relative
deterritorializations reaches the sound barrier: if the particles bounce
off this wall, or allow themselves to be captured by black holes, they
fall back onto the strata, into the strata’s relations and milieus; but
if they cross the barrier they reach the unformed, destratified element
of the plane of consistency. \emph{We may even say the abstract machines that
emit and combine particles have two very different modes of existence:
the Ecumenon and the Planomenon}. Either the abstract machines remain
prisoner to stratifications, are enveloped in a certain specific stratum
whose program or unity of composition they define (the abstract Animal,
the abstract chemical Body, Energy in itself) and whose movements of
relative deterritorialization they regulate, Or, on the contrary, the
abstract machine cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in
its own right on the plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes,
the same machine at work in astrophysics and in microphysics, in the
natural and in the artificial, piloting flows of absolute
deterritorialization (in no sense, of course, is unformed matter chaos
of any kind). But this presentation is still too simplified.


First, one does not go from the relative to the absolute simply by
acceleration, even though increases in speed tend to have this
comparative and global result. Absolute deterritorialization is not
defined as a giant accelerator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how
fast it goes. It is actually possible to reach the absolute by way of
phenomena of relative slowness or delay. Retarded development is an
example. What qualifies a deterritorialization is not its speed (some
are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes epistrata and
parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the contrary,
jumps from one singularity to another following a nondecomposable,
nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane of consistency.
Second, under no circumstances must it be thought that absolute
deterritorialization comes suddenly of afterward, is in excess or
beyond. That would preclude any understanding of why the strata
themselves are animated by movements of relative deterritorialization
and decoding that are not like accidents occurring on them. In fact,
what is primary is an absolute deterritorialization an absolute line of
flight, however complex or multiple—that of the plane of consistency or
body without organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This
absolute deterritorialization becomes relative only after stratification
occurs on that plane or body: It is the strata that are always residue,
not the opposite. The question is not how something manages to leave the
strata by how things get into them in the first place. There is a
perpetual immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative
deterritorialization; and the machinic assemblages between strata that
regulate the differential relations and relative movements also have
cutting edges of deterritorialization oriented toward the absolute. The
plane of consistency is always immanent to the strata; the two states of
the abstract machine always coexist as two different states of
intensities.



\bigskip


Most of the audience had left (the first to go were the Marinetians with
their double articulation, followed by the Hjelmslevians with their
content and expression, and the biologists with their proteins and
nucleic acids). The only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed
to other follies, along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and
scattered individuals. Challenger, moreover, had changed since the
beginning of his talk. His voice had become hoarser, broken occasionally
by an apish cough. His dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans
as to provide a program for pure computers. Or else he was dreaming of
an axiomatic, for axiomatics deals essentially with stratification.
Challenger was addressing himself to memory only. Now that we had
discussed what was constant and what varied in a stratum from the
standpoint of substances and forms, the question remaining to be
answered was what varied between strata from the standpoint of content
and expression. For if it is true that there is always a real
distinction constitutive of double articulation, a reciprocal
presupposition of content and expression, then what varies from one
stratum to another is the nature of this real distinction, and the
nature and respective positions of the terms distinguished. Let us start
with a certain group of strata that can be characterized summarily as
follows: on these strata, content (form and substance) is molecular, and
expression (form and substance) is molar. The difference between the two
is primarily one of order of magnitude or scale. Resonance, or the
communication occurring between the two independent orders, is what
institutes the stratified system. The molecular content of that system
has its own form corresponding to the distribution of elemental masses
and the action of one molecule upon another; similarly, expression has a
form manifesting the statistical aggregate and state of equilibrium
existing on the macroscopic level. Expression is like an “operation of
amplifying structuration carrying the active properties of the
originally microphysical discontinuity to the macrophysical level.”


We took as our point of departure cases of this kind on the geological
stratum, the crystalline stratum, and physicochemical strata, wherever
the molar can be said to express microscopic molecular interactions
(“the crystal is the macroscopic expression of a microscopic structure”;
the “crystalline form expresses certain atomic or molecular
characteristics of the constituent chemical categories”). Of course,
this still leaves numerous possibilities, depending on the number and
nature of the intermediate states, and also on the impact of exterior
forces on the formation of expression. There may be a greater or lesser
number of intermediate states between the molecular and the molar; there
may be a greater or lesser number of exterior forces or organizing
centers participating in the molar form. Doubtless, these two factors
are in an inverse relation to each other and indicate limit-cases. For
example, the molar form of expression may be of the “mold” type,
mobilizing a maximum of exterior forces; or it may be of the
“modulation” type, bringing into play only a minimum number of them.
Even in the case of the mold, however, there are nearly instantaneous,
interior intermediate states between the molecular content that assumes
its own specific forms and the determinate molar expression of the
outside by the form of the mold. Conversely, even when the
multiplication and temporalization of the intermediate states testify to
the endogenous character of the molar form (as with crystals), a minimum
of exterior forces still intervene in each of the stages.\footnote{See Simondon, \emph{L’individu}, on orders of magnitude and the establishment of resonance between them; actions of the “mold,” “modulation,” and “modeling” types; and exterior forces and intermediate states.} We must
therefore say that the relative independence of content and expression,
the real distinction between molecular content and molar expression with
their respective forms, has a special status enjoying a certain amount
of latitude between the limit-cases.


Since strata are judgments of God, one should not hesitate to apply all
the subtleties of medieval Scholasticism and theology. There is a real
distinction between content and expression because the corresponding
forms are effectively distinct in the “thing” itself, and not only in
the mind of the observer. But this real distinction is quite special; it
is only \emph{formal} since the two forms compose or shape a single thing, a
single stratified subject. Various examples of formal distinction can be
cited: between scales or orders of magnitude (as between a map and its
model; or, in a different fashion, between the micro- and macrophysical
levels, as in the parable of Eddington’s two offices); between the
various states or formal reasons through which a thing passes; between
the thing in one form, and as affected by a possibly exterior causality
giving it a different form; and so forth. (There is a proliferation of
distinct forms because, in addition to content and expression each
having its own forms, intermediate states introduce forms of expression
proper to content and forms of content proper to expression.)


As diverse and real as formal distinctions are, on the organic stratum
the very nature of the distinction changes. As a result, the entire
distribution between content and expression is different. The organic
stratum nevertheless preserves, and even amplifies, the relation between
the molecular and the molar, with all kinds of intermediate states. We
saw this in the case of morphogenesis, where double articulation is
inseparable from a communication between two orders of magnitude. The
same thing applies to cellular chemistry. But the organic stratum has a
unique character that must account for the amplifications. In a
preceding discussion, expression was dependent upon the expressed
molecular content in all directions and in every dimension and had
independence only to the extent that it appealed to a higher order of
magnitude and to exterior forces: The real distinction was between
forms, but forms belonging to the same aggregate, the same thing or
subject. \emph{Now, however, expression becomes independent in its own right,
in other words, autonomous}. Before, the coding of a stratum was
coextensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other
hand, it takes place on an autonomous and independent line that detaches
as much as possible from the second and third dimensions. Expression
ceases to be voluminous or superficial, becoming linear, unidimensional
(even in its segmentarity). The essential thing is \emph{the linearity of the
nucleic sequence}.\footnote{Obviously there is a multiplicity of sequences or lines. But that does not preclude the “order of order” being unilinear (see Jacob, The Logic of Life, p. 286, and “Le modèle linguistique en biologie,” pp. 199–203).} The real distinction between content and
expression, therefore, is not simply formal. It is strictly speaking
real, and passes into the molecular, without regard to order of
magnitude. It is between two classes of molecules, nucleic acids of
expression and proteins of content, nucleic elements or nucleotides and
protein elements or amino acids. Both expression and content are now
molecular \emph{and} molar. The distinction no longer concerns a single
aggregate or subject; linearity takes us further in the direction of
flat multiplicities, rather than unity. Expression involves nucleotides
and nucleic acids as well as molecules that, in their substance and
form, are entirely independent not only of molecules of content but of
any directed action in the exterior milieu. Thus invariance is a
characteristic of certain molecules and is not found exclusively on the
molar scale. Conversely, proteins, in their substance and form of
content, are equally independent of nucleotides: the only thing
univocally determined is that one amino acid rather than another
corresponds to a sequence of three nucleotides.\footnote{On the respective independence of proteins and nucleic acids, and their reciprocal presupposition, see Jacob, \emph{The Logic of Life}, pp. 304–306, and Jacques Monod, \emph{Chance and Necessity}, pp. 96–98, 107–109, 114–115, and 142–144.} What the linear form
of expression determines is therefore a derivative form of expression,
one that is relative to content and that, through a folding back upon
itself of the protein sequence of the amino acids, finally yields the
characteristic three-dimensional structures. In short, what is specific
to the organic stratum is \emph{this alignment of expression, this exhaustion
or detachment of a line of expression}, this reduction of form and
substance of expression to a unidimensional line, guaranteeing their
reciprocal independence from content without having to account for
orders of magnitude.


This has many consequences. The new configuration of expression and
content conditions not only the organism’s power to reproduce but also
its power to deterritorialize or accelerate deterritorialization. The
alignment of the code or linearity of the nucleic sequence in fact marks
a threshold of deterritorialization of the “sign” that gives it a new
ability to be copied and makes the organism more deterritorialized than
a crystal: only something deterritorialized is capable of reproducing
itself. When content and expression are divided along the lines of the
molecular and the molar, substances move from state to state, from the
preceding state to the following state, or from layer to layer, from an
already constituted layer to a layer in the process of forming, while
forms install themselves at the limit between the last layer or last
state and the exterior milieu. Thus the stratum develops into epistrata
and parastrata; this is accomplished through a set of \emph{inductions} from
layer to layer and state to state, or at the limit. A crystal displays
this process in its pure state, since its form expands in all
directions, but always as a function of the surface layer of the
substance, which can be emptied of most of its interior without
interfering with the growth. It is the crystal’s subjugation to
three-dimensionality, in other words its index of territoriality, that
makes the structure incapable of formally reproducing and expressing
itself; only the accessible surface can reproduce itself, since it is
the only deterritorializable part. On the contrary, the detachment of a
pure line of expression on the organic stratum makes it possible for the
organism to attain a much higher threshold of deterritorialization,
gives it a mechanism of reproduction covering all the details of its
complex spatial structure, and enables it to put all of its interior
layers “topologically in contact” with the exterior, or rather with the
polarized limit (hence the special role of the living membrane). The
development of the stratum into epistrata and parastrata occurs not
through simple inductions but through \emph{transductions} that account for
the amplification of the resonance between the molecular and the molar,
independently of order of magnitude; for the functional efficacy of the
interior substances, independently of distance; and for the possibility
of a proliferation and even interlacing of forms, independently of codes
(surplus values of code or phenomena of transcoding or aparallel
evolution).\footnote{On the notion of transduction, see Simondon, \emph{L’individu}, pp. 18–21 (however, he takes the word in its most general sense and uses it to refer to the entire system). On the membrane, see pp. 259ff.}


There is a third major grouping of strata, defined less by a human
essence than, once again, by a new distribution of content and
expression. Form of content becomes “alloplastic” rather than
“homoplastic”; in other words, it brings about modifications in the
external world. Form of expression becomes linguistic rather than
genetic; in other words, it operates with symbols that are
comprehensible, transmittable, and modifiable from outside. What some
call the properties of human beings—technology and language, tool and
symbol, free hand and supple larynx, “gesture and speech”—are in fact
properties of this new distribution. It would be difficult to maintain
that the emergence of human beings marked the absolute origin of this
distribution. Leroi-Gourhan’s analyses give us an understanding of how
contents came to be linked with the hand-tool couple and expressions
with the face-language couple.\footnote{André Leroi-Gourhan, \emph{Le geste et la parole}, vol. 1, of \emph{Technique et langage} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964), p. 161.} In this context, the hand must not be
thought of simply as an organ but instead as a coding (the digital
code), a dynamic structuration, a dynamic formation (the manual form, or
manual formal traits). The hand as a general form of content is extended
in tools, which are themselves active forms implying substances, or
formed matters; finally, products are formed matters, or substances,
which in turn serve as tools. Whereas manual formal traits constitute
the unity of composition of the stratum, the forms and substances of
tools and products are organized into parastrata and epistrata that
themselves function as veritable strata and mark discontinuities,
breakages, communications and diffusions, nomadisms and sedentarities,
multiple thresholds and speeds of relative deterritorialization in human
populations. For with the hand as a formal trait or general form of
content a major threshold of deterritorialization is reached and opens,
an accelerator that in itself permits a shifting interplay of
comparative deterritorializations and reterritorializations—what makes
this acceleration possible is, precisely, phenomena of “retarded
development” in the organic substrata. Not only is the hand a
deterritorialized front paw; the hand thus freed is itself
deterritorialized in relation to the grasping and locomotive hand of the
monkey. The synergistic deterritorializations of other organs (for
example, the foot) must be taken into account. So must correlative
deterritorializations of the milieu: the steppe as an associated milieu
more deterritorialized than the forest, exerting a selective pressure of
deterritorialization upon the body and technology (it was on the steppe,
not in the forest, that the hand was able to appear as a free form, and
fire as a technologically formable matter). Finally, complementary
reterritorializations must be taken into account (the foot as a
compensatory reterritorialization for the hand, also occurring on the
steppe). Maps should be made of these things, organic, ecological, and
technological maps one can lay out on the plane of consistency.


On the other hand, language becomes the new form of expression, or
rather the set of formal traits defining the new expression in operation
throughout the stratum. Just as manual traits exist only in forms and
formed matters that shatter their continuity and determine the
distribution of their effects, formal traits of expression exist only in
a diversity of formal languages and imply one or several formable
substances. The substance involved is fundamentally vocal substance,
which brings into play various organic elements: not only the larynx,
but the mouth and lips, and the overall motricity of the face. Once
again, a whole intensive map must be accounted for: the mouth as a
deterritorialization of the snout (the whole “conflict between the mouth
and the brain,” as Perrier called it); the lips as a
deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips, in other
words, an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human
females have breasts, in other words, deterritorialized mammary glands:
the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is
accompanied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the
breasts, and the breasts on the lips). What a curious
deterritorialization, filling one’s mouth with words instead of food and
noises. The steppe, once more, seems to have exerted strong pressures of
selection: the “supple larynx” is a development corresponding to the
free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it is
no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one’s
cries to be heard above the constant din of the forest. To articulate,
to speak, is to speak softly. Everyone knows that lumberjacks rarely
talk.\footnote{On all of these problems (the free hand, the supple larynx, the lips, and the role of the steppe as factors of deterritorialization), see Emile Devaux’s fine book, \emph{Trois problèmes: l’espèce, l’instinct, l’homme} (Paris: Le François, 1933), part 3 (chapter 7: “The anthropoid, severed from the forest, retarded in its development, infantilized, had to acquire free hands and a supple larynx”; and chapter 9: “The forest made the monkey, the cave and the steppe made the human”).} Physiological, acoustic, and vocal substance are not the only
things that undergo all these deterritorializations. The form of
expression, as language, also crosses a threshold.


**Vocal signs have temporal linearity, and it is this superlinearity*
that constitutes their specific deterritorialization and differentiates
them from genetic linearity. Genetic linearity is above all spatial,
even though its segments are constructed and reproduced in succession;
thus at this level it does not require effective overcoding of any kind,
only phenomena of end-to-end connection, local regulations, and partial
interactions (overcoding takes place only at the level of integrations
implying different orders of magnitude). That is why Jacob is reluctant
to compare the genetic code to a language; in fact, the genetic code has
neither emitter, receiver, comprehension, nor translation, only
redundancies and surplus values.\footnote{Jacob, \emph{The Logic of Life}, pp. 278, 289–290, 298. Jacob and Monod sometimes use the word “translation” for the genetic code, but only for reasons of convenience. As Monod points out, “The code can be translated only by products of translation.”} The temporal linearity of language
expression relates not only to a succession but to a formal synthesis of
succession in which time constitutes a process of linear overcoding and
engenders a phenomenon unknown on the other strata: \emph{translation},
translatability, as opposed to the previous inductions and
transductions. Translation should not be understood simply as the
ability of one language to “represent” in some way the givens of another
language, but beyond that as the ability of language, with its own
givens on its own stratum, to represent all the other strata and thus
achieve a scientific conception of the world. The scientific world
(\emph{Welt}, as opposed to the \emph{Umwelt} of the animal) is the translation of
all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the other
strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other
words, into an overcoding specific to language. This property of
**overcoding* or \emph{superlinearity} explains why, in language, not only is
expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent
of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass
from one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic
code, for example, between RNA and DNA chains. We will see later on how
this situation gives rise to certain imperialist pretentions on behalf
of language, which are naively expressed in such formulas as: “Every
semiology of a nonlinguistic system must use the medium of language\dots{}.
Language is the interpreter of all the other systems, linguistic and
nonlinguistic.” This amounts to defining an abstract character of
language and then saying that the other strata can share in that
character only by being spoken in language. That is stating the obvious.
More positively, it must be noted that the immanence within language of
universal translation means that its epistrata and parastrata, with
respect to superpositions, diffusions, communications, and abutments,
operate in an entirely different manner than those of other strata: all
human movements, even the most violent, imply translations.


We have to hurry, Challenger said, we’re being rushed by the line of
time on this third stratum. So we have a new organization of content and
expression, each with its own forms and substances: technological
content, semiotic or symbolic expression. Content should be understood
not simply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that
preexists them and constitutes states of force or formations of power.
Expression should be understood not simply as the face and language, or
individual languages, but as a semiotic collective machine that
preexists them and constitutes regimes of signs. A formation of power is
much more than a tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language.
Rather, they act as determining and selective agents, as much in the
constitution of languages and tools as in their usages and mutual or
respective diffusions and communications. The third stratum sees the
emergence of Machines that are fully a part of that stratum but at the
same time rear up and stretch their pincers out in all directions at all
the other strata. \emph{Is this not like an intermediate state between the
two states of the abstract Machine}?—the state in which it remains
enveloped in a corresponding stratum (ecumenon), and the state in which
it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of consistency
(planomenon). The abstract machine begins to unfold, to stand to full
height, producing an illusion exceeding all strata, even though the
machine itself still belongs to a determinate stratum. This is,
obviously, the illusion constitutive of man (who does man think he is?).
This illusion derives from the overcoding immanent to language itself.
But what is not illusory are the new distributions between content and
expression: technological content characterized by the hand-tool
relation and, at a deeper level, tied to a social Machine and formations
of power; symbolic expression characterized by face-language relations
and, at a deeper level, tied to a semiotic Machine and regimes of signs.
On both sides, the epistrata and parastrata, the superposed degrees and
abutting forms, attain more than ever before the status of autonomous
strata in their own right. In cases where we can discern two different
regimes of signs or two different formations of power, we shall say that
they are in fact two different strata in human populations.


What precisely is the relation now between content and expression, and
what type of distinction is there between them? It’s all in the head.
Yet never was a distinction more real. What we are trying to say is that
there is indeed one exterior milieu for the entire stratum, permeating
the entire stratum: the cerebral-nervous milieu. It comes from the
organic substratum, but of course that substratum does not merely play
the role of a substratum or passive support. It is no less complex in
organization. Rather, it constitutes the prehuman soup immersing us. Our
hands and faces are immersed in it. The brain is a population, a set of
tribes tending toward two poles. In Leroi-Gourhan’s analyses of the
constitution of these two poles in the soup—one of which depends on the
actions of the face, the other on the hand—their correlation or
relativity does not preclude a real distinction between them; quite the
contrary, it entails one, as the reciprocal presupposition of two
articulations, the manual articulation of content and the facial
articulation of expression. And the distinction is not simply real, as
between molecules, things, or subjects; it has become \emph{essential} (as
they used to say in the Middle Ages), as between attributes, genres of
being, or irreducible categories: things and words. Yet we find that the
most general of movements, the one by which each of the distinct
articulations is already double in its own right, carries over onto this
level; certain formal elements of content play the role of expression in
relation to content proper, and certain formal elements of expression
play the role of content in relation to expression proper. In the first
case, Leroi-Gourhan shows how the hand creates a whole world of symbols,
a whole pluridimensional language, not to be confused with unilinear
verbal language, which constitutes a radiating expression specific to
content (he sees this as the origin of writing).\footnote{Leroi-Gourhan, \emph{Le geste et la parole}, pp. 269–275.} The second case is
clearly displayed in the double articulation specific to language
itself, since phonemes form a radiating content specific to the
expression of monemes as linear significant segments (it is only under
these conditions that double articulation as a general characteristic of
strata has the linguistic meaning Martinet attributes to it). Our
discussion of the relations between content and expression, the real
distinction between them, and the variations of those relations and that
distinction on the major types of strata, is now provisionally complete.


Challenger wanted to go faster and faster. No one was left, but he went
on anyway. The change in his voice, and in his appearance, was growing
more and more pronounced. Something animalistic in him had begun to
speak when he started talking about human beings. You still couldn’t put
your finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the
spot. He still had three problems he wanted to discuss. The first seemed
primarily terminological: Under what circumstances may we speak of
signs? Should we say they are everywhere on all the strata and that
there is a sign whenever there is a form of expression? We may summarily
distinguish three kinds of signs: \emph{indexes} (\emph{territorial signs}),
**symbols* (\emph{deterritorialized signs}), \emph{and icons} (\emph{signs of
reterritorialization}). Should we say that there are signs on all the
strata, under the pretext that every stratum includes territorialities
and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization? This
kind of expansive method is very dangerous, because it lays the
groundwork for or reinforces the imperialism of language, if only by
relying on its function as universal translator or interpreter. It is
obvious that there is no system of signs common to all strata, not even
in the form of a semiotic “chora” theoretically prior to
symbolization.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: A reference to the work of Julia Kristeva. On the \emph{chora}, see Kristeva, \emph{Revolution in Poetic Language}, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 25–30.]} It would appear that we may accurately speak of signs
only when there is a distinction between forms of expression and forms
of content that is not only real but also categorical. Under these
conditions, there is a semiotic system on the corresponding stratum
because the abstract machine has precisely that fully erect posture that
permits it to “write,” in other words, to treat language and extract a
**regime* of signs from it. But before it reaches that point, in
so-called natural codings, the abstract machine remains enveloped in the
strata: It does not write in any way and has no margin of latitude
allowing it to recognize something as a sign (except in the strictly
territorial sense of animal signs). After that point, the abstract
machine develops on the plane of consistency and no longer has any way
of making a categorical distinction between signs and particles; for
example, it writes, but flush with the real, it inscribes directly upon
the plane of consistency. It therefore seems reasonable to reserve the
word “sign” in the strict sense for the last group of strata. This
terminological discussion would be entirely without interest if it did
not bring us to yet another danger: not the imperialism of language
affecting all of the strata, but the imperialism of the signifier
affecting language itself, affecting all regimes of signs and the entire
expanse of the strata upon which they are located. The question here is
not whether there are signs on every stratum but whether all signs are
signifiers, whether all signs are endowed with signifiance, whether the
semiotic of signs is necessarily linked to a semiology of the signifier.
Those who take this route may even be led to forgo the notion of the
sign, for the primacy of the signifier over language guarantees the
primacy of language over all of the strata even more effectively than
the simple expansion of the sign in all directions. What we are saying
is that the illusion specific to \emph{this} posture of the abstract Machine,
the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between one’s
pincers, can be better secured through the erection of the signifier
than through the extension of the sign (thanks to signifiance, language
can claim to be in direct contact with the strata without having to go
through the supposed signs on each one). But we’re still going in the
same circle, we’re still spreading the same canker.


The linguistic relation between the signifier and signified has, of
course, been conceived in many different ways. It has been said that
they are arbitrary; that they are as necessary to each other as the two
sides of the same leaf; that they correspond term by term, or else
globally; and that they are so ambivalent as to be indistinguishable. In
any event, the signified is thought not to exist outside of its
relationship with signifier, and the ultimate signified is the very
existence of the signifier, extrapolated beyond the sign. There is only
one thing that can be said about the signifier: it is Redundancy, it is
the Redundant. Hence its incredible despotism, and its success. Theories
of arbitrariness, necessity, term-by-term or global correspondence, and
ambivalence serve the same cause: the reduction of expression to the
signifier. Yet forms of content and forms of expression are highly
relative, always in a state of reciprocal presupposition. The relations
between their respective segments are biunivocal, exterior, and
“deformed.” There is never conformity between the two, or from one to
the other. There is always real independence and a real distinction;
even to fit the forms together, and to determine the relations between
them, requires a specific, variable assemblage. None of these
characteristics applies to the signifier-signified relation, even though
some seem to coincide with it partially and accidentally. Overall, these
characteristics stand in radical opposition to the scenario of the
signifier. A form of content is not a signified, any more than a form of
expression is a signifier.\footnote{That is why we consider Hjelmslev, despite his own reservations and vacillations, to be the only linguist to have actually broken with the signifier and the signified. Many other linguists seem to make this break deliberately and without reservations, but retain the implicit presuppositions of the signifier.} This is true for all the strata,
including those on which language plays a role.


Signifier enthusiasts take an oversimplified situation as their implicit
model: word and thing. From the word they extract the signifier, and
from the thing a signified in conformity with the word, and therefore
subjugated to the signifier. They operate in a sphere interior to and
homogeneous with language. Let us follow Foucault in his exemplary
analysis, which, though it seems not to be, is eminently concerned with
linguistics. Take a thing like the prison: the prison is a form, the
“prison-form”; it is a form of content on a stratum and is related to
other forms of content (school, barracks, hospital, factory). This thing
or form does not refer back to the word “prison” but to entirely
different words and concepts, such as “delinquent” and “delinquency,”
which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating, and even
committing criminal acts. “Delinquency” is the form of expression in
reciprocal presupposition with the form of content “prison.” Delinquency
is in no way a signifier, even a juridical signifier, the signified of
which would be the prison. That would flatten the entire analysis.
Moreover, the form of expression is reducible not to words but to a set
of statements arising in the social field considered as a stratum (that
is what a regime of signs is). The form of content is reducible not to a
thing but to a complex state of things as a formation of power
(architecture, regimentation, etc.). We could say that there are two
constantly intersecting multiplicities, “discursive multiplicities” of
expression and “nondiscursive multiplicities” of content. It is even
more complex than that because the prison as a form of content has a
relative expression all its own; there are all kinds of statements
specific to it that do not necessarily coincide with the statements of
delinquency. Conversely, delinquency as a form of expression has an
autonomous content all its own, since delinquency expresses not only a
new way of evaluating crimes but a new way of committing them. Form of
content and form of expression, prison and delinquency: each has its own
history, microhistory, segments. At most, along with other contents and
expressions, they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting
not at all as a signifier but as a kind of diagram (a single abstract
machine for the prison and the school and the barracks and the hospital
and the factory\dots{}). Fitting the two types of forms together, segments of
content and segments of expression, requires a whole double-pincered, or
rather double-headed, concrete assemblage taking their real distinction
into account. It requires a whole organization articulating formations
of power and regimes of signs, and operating on the molecular level
(societies characterized by what Foucault calls disciplinary power).\footnote{Michel Foucault, \emph{Discipline and Punish}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975). Already in \emph{The Archaeology of Knowledge}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault outlines his theory of the two kinds of multiplicities, multiplicities of expression or statements and multiplicities of contents or objects. He shows that they are irreducible to the signifier-signified couple. He also explains why the title of one of his earlier books, \emph{Les mots et les choses} [Words and Things, translated as \emph{The Order of Things} (New York: Vintage, 1970)], must be understood negatively (pp. 48–49).}
In short, we should never oppose words to things that supposedly
correspond to them, nor signifiers to signifieds that are supposedly in
conformity with them. What should be opposed are distinct
formalizations, in a state of unstable equilibrium or reciprocal
presupposition. “\emph{It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see
never resides in what we say}.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Foucault, \emph{The Order of Things}, p. 9.]} As in school: there is not just one
writing lesson, that of the great redundant Signifier for any and all
signifieds. There are two distinct formalizations in reciprocal
presupposition and constituting a double-pincer: the formalization of
expression in the reading and writing lesson (with its own relative
contents), and the formalization of content in the lesson of things
(with their own relative expressions). We are never signifier or
signified. We are stratified.


The preferred method would be severely restrictive, as opposed to the
expansive method that places signs on all strata or signifier in all
signs (although at the limit it may forgo signs entirely). First, there
exist forms of expression without signs (for example, the genetic code
has nothing to do with a language). It is only under certain conditions
that strata can be said to include signs; signs cannot be equated with
language in general but are defined by regimes of statements that are so
many real usages or functions of language. Then why retain the word
**sign* for these regimes, which formalize an expression without
designating or signifying the simultaneous contents, which are
formalized in a different way? Signs are not signs of a thing; they are
signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a
certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements, and it is
for this reason that the word should be retained (as we have seen, this
applies even to animal “signs”).


Next, if we consider regimes of signs using this restrictive definition,
we see that they are not, or not necessarily, signifiers. Just as signs
designate only a certain formalization of expression in a determinate
group of strata, signifiance itself designates only one specific regime
among a number of regimes existing in that particular formalization.
Just as there are asemiotic expressions, or expressions without signs,
there are asemiological regimes of signs, asignifying signs, both on the
strata and on the plane of consistency. The most that can be said of
signifiance is that it characterizes \emph{one} regime, which is not even the
most interesting or modern or contemporary one, but is perhaps only more
pernicious, cancerous, and despotic than the others, and more steeped in
illusion than they.


In any case, content and expression are never reducible to
signified-signifier. And (this is the second problem) neither are they
reducible to base-superstructure. One can no more posit a primacy of
content as the determining factor than a primacy of expression as a
signifying system. Expression can never be made into a form reflecting
content, even if one endows it with a “certain” amount of independence
and a certain potential for reacting, if only because so-called economic
content already has a form and even forms of expression that are
specific to it. 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; the assemblages become the
first story of a superstructure that, as such, is necessarily situated
within a State apparatus; the regimes of signs and forms of expression
become the second story of the superstructure, defined by ideology. It
isn’t altogether clear where language should go, since the great Despot
decided that it should be reserved a special place, as the common good
of the nation and the vehicle for information. Thus one misconstrues the
nature of language, which exists only in heterogeneous regimes of signs,
and rather than circulating information distributes contradictory
orders. It misconstrues the nature of regimes of signs, which express
organizations of power or assemblages and have nothing to do with
ideology as the supposed expression of a content (ideology is a most
execrable concept obscuring all of the effectively operating social
machines). It misconstrues the nature of organizations of power, which
are in no way located within a State apparatus but rather are
everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expression, the
segments of which they intertwine. Finally, it misconstrues the nature
of content, which is in no way economic “in the last instance,” since
there are as many directly economic signs or expressions as there are
noneconomic contents. Nor can the status of social formations be
analyzed by throwing some signifier into the base, or vice versa, or a
bit of phallus or castration into political economy, or a bit of
economics or politics into psychoanalysis.


There is a third problem. It is difficult to elucidate the system of the
strata without seeming to introduce a kind of cosmic or even spiritual
evolution from one to the other, as if they were arranged in stages and
ascended degrees of perfection. Nothing of the sort. The different
figures of content and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere
or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by
considering the strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less
organized than another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a
substratum: there is no fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly
as a substratum for another without the intermediaries one would expect
there to be from the standpoint of stages and degrees (for example,
microphysical sectors can serve as an immediate substratum for organic
phenomena). Or the apparent order can be reversed, with cultural or
technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup, for the
development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The
industrial age defined as the age of insects \dots{} It’s even worse nowadays:
you can’t even tell in advance which stratum is going to communicate
with which other, or in what direction. Above all, there is no lesser,
no higher or lower, organization; the substratum is an integral part of
the stratum, is bound up with it as the milieu in which change occurs,
and not an increase in organization.\footnote{Simondon, \emph{L’individu}, pp. 139–141.} Furthermore, if we consider the
plane of consistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs
move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical
interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures
a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and
the orchid cross a letter \dots{} There is no “like” here, we are not saying
“like an electron,” “like an interaction,” etc. The plane of consistency
is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real. These are
electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites, authentic
sign sequences. It’s just that they have been uprooted from their
strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what makes
their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency
possible. A silent dance. \emph{The plane of consistency knows nothing of
differences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows
nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural. It
knows nothing of the distinction between contents and expressions, or
that between forms and formed substances}; these things exist only by
means of and in relation to the strata.


But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the
strata that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute
deterritorialization? Eyes are black holes, but what are black holes and
eyes outside their strata and territorialities? What it comes down to is
that we cannot content ourselves with a dualism or summary opposition
between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency. The strata
themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of
deterritorialization; moreover, absolute deterritorialization is there
from the beginning, and the strata are spinoffs, thickenings on a plane
of consistency that is everywhere, always primary and always immanent.
In addition, the plane of consistency is occupied, drawn by the abstract
Machine; the abstract Machine exists \emph{simultaneously} developed on the
destratified plane it draws, and enveloped in each stratum whose unity
of composition it defines, and even half-erected in certain strata whose
form of prehension it defines. That which races or dances upon the plane
of consistency thus carries with it the aura of its stratum, an
undulation, a memory or tension. The plane of consistency retains just
enough of the strata to extract from them variables that operate in the
plane of consistency as its own functions. The plane of consistency, or
planomenon, is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed
matters, but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every kind. It
is true that on the plane of consistency there are no longer forms or
substances, content or expression, respective and relative
deterritorializations. But beneath the forms and substances of the
strata the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) \emph{constructs
continuums of intensity}: it creates continuity for intensities that it
extracts from distinct forms and substances. Beneath contents and
expressions the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) \emph{emits
and combines particles-signs} that set the most asignifying of signs to
functioning in the most deterritorialized of particles. Beneath relative
movements the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) \emph{performs
conjunctions of flows of deterritorialization} that transform the
respective indexes into absolute values. The only intensities known to
the strata are discontinuous, bound up in forms and substances; the only
particles are divided into particles of content and articles of
expression; the only deterritorialized flows are disjointed and
reterritorialized. Continuum of intensities, combined emission of
particles or signs-particles, conjunction of deterritorialized flows:
these are the three factors proper to the plane of consistency; they are
brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of
destratification. Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic white
night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of
“plan(n)ing,” of diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The
abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and
combinations, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.


A final distinction must now be noted. Not only does the abstract
machine have different simultaneous states accounting for the complexity
of what takes place on the plane of consistency, but the abstract
machine should not be confused with what we call a concrete machinic
assemblage. The \emph{abstract machine} sometimes develops upon the plane of
consistency, whose continuums, emissions, and conjugations it
constructs, and sometimes remains enveloped in a stratum whose unity of
composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines. The
**machinic assemblage* is something entirely different from the abstract
machine, even though it is very closely connected with it. First, on a
stratum, it performs the coadaptations of content and expression,
ensures biunivocal relationships between segments of content and
segments of expression, and guides the division of the stratum into
epistrata and parastrata. Next, between strata, it ensures the relation
to whatever serves as a substratum and brings about the corresponding
changes in organization. Finally, it is in touch with the plane of
consistency because it necessarily effectuates the abstract machine on a
particular stratum, between strata, and in the relation between the
strata and the plane. An assemblage (for example, the smith’s anvil
among the Dogons) is necessary for the articulations of the organic
stratum to come about. An assemblage is necessary for the relation
between two strata to come about. And an assemblage is necessary for
organisms to be caught within and permeated by a social field that
utilizes them: Must not the Amazons amputate a breast to adapt the
organic stratum to a warlike technological stratum, as though at the
behest of a fearsome woman-bow-steppe assemblage? Assemblages are
necessary for states of force and regimes of signs to intertwine their
relations. Assemblages are necessary in order for the unity of
composition enveloped in a stratum, the relations between a given
stratum and the others, and the relation between these strata and the
plane of consistency to be organized rather than random. In every
respect, machinic assemblages \emph{effectuate} the abstract machine insofar
as it is developed on the plane of consistency or enveloped in a
stratum. The most important problem of all: given a certain machinic
assemblage, what is its relation of effectuation with the abstract
machine? How does it effectuate it, with what adequation? Classify
assemblages. What we call the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract
machines and machinic assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or
between strata.


The system of the strata thus has nothing to do with signifier and
signified, base and superstructure, mind and matter. All of these are
ways of reducing the strata to a single stratum, or of closing the
system in on itself by cutting it off from the plane of consistency as
destratification. We had to summarize before we lost our voice.
Challenger was finishing up. His voice had become unbearably shrill. He
was suffocating. His hands were becoming elongated pincers that had
become incapable of grasping anything but could still vaguely point to
things. Some kind of matter seemed to be pouring out from the double
mask, the two heads; it was impossible to tell whether it was getting
thicker or more watery. Some of the audience had returned, but only
shadows and prowlers. “You hear that? It’s an animal’s voice.” So the
summary would have to be quick, the terminology would have to be set
down as well as possible, for no good reason. There was a first group of
notions: the Body without Organs or the destratified Plane of
Consistency; the Matter of the Plane, that which occurs on the body or
plane (singular, nonsegmented multiplicities composed of intensive
continuums, emissions of particles-signs, conjunctions of flows); and
the abstract Machine, or abstract Machines, insofar as they construct
that body or draw that plane or “diagram” what occurs (lines of flight,
or absolute deterritorializations).


Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the
strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined
emissions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents,
units of expression and units of content, for example, signs and
particles. In conjunctions, they separate flows, assigning them relative
movements and diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations
and complementary reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up
everywhere double articulations animated by movements: forms and
substances of content and forms and substances of expression
constituting segmentary multiplicities with relations that are
determinable in every case. Such are the \emph{strata}. 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. What varies from stratum to stratum is
the nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the
nature of the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the
relative movements. We may make a summary distinction between three
major types of real distinction: the real-formal distinction between
orders of magnitude, with the establishment of a resonance of expression
(induction); the real-real distinction between different subjects, with
the establishment of a linearity of expression (transduction); and the
real-essential distinction between different attributes or categories,
with the establishment of a superlinearity of expression (translation).


Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stratum
has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements,
and formal traits (Ecumenon). But it divides into \emph{parastrata} according
to its irreducible forms and associated milieus, and into \emph{epistrata}
according to its layers of formed substances and intermediary milieus.
Epistrata and parastrata must themselves be thought of as strata. A
machinic assemblage is an \emph{interstratum} insofar as it regulates the
relations between strata, as well as the relations between contents and
expressions on each stratum, in conformity with the preceding divisions.
A single assemblage can borrow from different strata, and with a certain
amount of apparent disorder; conversely, a stratum or element of a
stratum can join others in functioning in a different assemblage.
Finally, the machinic assemblage is a \emph{metastratum} because it is also
in touch with the plane of consistency and necessarily effectuates the
abstract machine. The abstract machine exists enveloped in each stratum,
whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it defines, and developed on the
plane of consistency, whose destratification it performs (the
Planomenon). Thus when the assemblages fit together the variables of a
stratum as a function of its unity, they also bring about a specific
effectuation of the abstract machine as it exists outside the strata.
Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of
the contents and expression on each stratum, and at the intersection of
all of the strata with the plane of consistency. They rotate in all
directions, like beacons.


It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning.
The double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and
the tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed
to eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of
olibanum and “hung with strangely figured arras.” Disarticulated,
deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with
him, that he was leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. He
whispered something else: it is by headlong flight that things progress
and signs proliferate. Panic is creation. A young woman cried out, her
face “convulsed with a wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of
stark panic than they had seen on human countenance before.” No one had
heard the summary, and no one tried to keep Challenger from leaving.
Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly hurried toward the \emph{plane of
consistency}, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left
about it. He tried to slip into an assemblage serving as a drum-gate,
the particle Clock with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms
hammering out the absolute: “The figure slumped oddly into a posture
scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward
the coffin-shaped clock\dots{}. The figure had now reached the abnormal clock,
and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw
fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer,
clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and
pulled the door shut after it\dots{}. The abnormal clicking went on, beating
out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical
gate-openings”\footnote{H. P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” in \emph{The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath} (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 168, 217–218.}—the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere.

\chapter{4. November 20, 1923—Postulates of Linguistics}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-4}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-4}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-34.png}
\caption[]{\noindent The Order-word Assemblage}
\end{figure}
\clearpage

\section{I. “Language Is Informational and Communicational”}


When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or
arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing
herself when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as
“insign,” give orders or commands. A teacher’s commands are not external
or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from
primary significations or result from information: an order always and
already concerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The
compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it
imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual
foundations of grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb,
subject of the statement-subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementary
unit of language—the statement—is the order-word.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: \emph{Mot d’ordre}: in standard French, “slogan,” (military) “password.” Deleuze and Guattari are also using the term literally: “word of order,” in the double sense of a word or phrase constituting a command and a word or phrase creative of order.]} Rather than common
sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define
an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and
transmitting order-words. Language is made not to be believed but to be
obeyed, and to compel obedience. “The baroness has not the slightest
intention of convincing me of her sincerity; she is simply indicating
that she prefers to see me pretend to agree.”\footnote{Georges Darien, \emph{L’épaulette} (Paris: 10\Slash{}18, l973), p. 435. Or Zola, \emph{La Bête Humaine}, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 148: “She was saying this not to convince him, but solely to warn him that she had to be innocent in the eyes of the world at large.” This type of phrase seems to us to be much more characteristic of the novel in general than the informational phrase, “the marquess went out at five o’clock.”} We see this in police
or government announcements, which often have little plausibility or
truthfulness, but say very clearly what should be observed and retained.
The indifference to any kind of credibility exhibited by these
announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof that the issue
lies elsewhere. Let people say\dots{}: that is all language demands. Spengler
notes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the statement of a
judgment or the expression of a feeling, but “the command, the
expression of obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or
negation,” very short phrases that command life and are inseparable from
enterprises and large-scale projects: “Ready?” “Yes.” “Go ahead.”\footnote{Oswald Spengler, \emph{Man and Technics}, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1932), p. 54 [translation modified].}
Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks
as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power
marker before it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to
prior significations or to a prior organization of distinctive units.
Quite the opposite. Information is only the strict minimum necessary for
the emission, transmission, and observation of orders as commands. One
must be just informed enough not to confuse “Fire!” with “Fore!” or to
avoid the unfortunate situation of the teacher and the student as
described by Lewis Carroll (the teacher, at the top of the stairs, asks
a question that is passed on by servants, who distort it at each step of
the way, and the student, below in the courtyard, returns an answer that
is also distorted at each stage of the trip back). Language is not life;
it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits.\footnote{Brice Parain, \emph{Sur la dialectique} (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). Parain develops a theory of “supposition” or the presupposed in language in relation to the orders given to life; but he sees this less as a power in the political sense than a duty in the moral sense.}
Every order-word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death
sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it.


The hard part is to specify the status and scope of the order-word. It
is not a question of the origin of language, since the order-word is
only a language-function, a function coextensive with language. If
language always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a
nonlinguistic point of departure, it is because language does not
operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always
goes from saying to saying. We believe that narrative consists not in
communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard,
what someone else said to you. Hearsay. It does not even suffice to
invoke a vision distorted by passion. The “first” language, or rather
the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but
**indirect discourse*. The importance some have accorded metaphor and
metonymy proves disastrous for the study of language. Metaphors and
metonymies are merely effects; they are a part of language only when
they presuppose indirect discourse. There are many passions in a
passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speaking in
tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative
movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse.\footnote{Two authors in particular have brought out the importance of indirect discourse, especially in its so-called free form, from the viewpoint of a theory of enunciation that goes beyond the traditional categories of linguistics: V. N. Vološinov (for Russian, German, and French), \emph{Marxism and the Philosophy of Language} [attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin in the French edition cited by the authors—\emph{TRANS}], trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Part 3, “Toward a History of Forms and Utterance in Language Constructions,” pp. 109–200; Pier Paolo Pasolini (for Italian), \emph{L’expérience hérétique} (Paris: Payot, 1976), part 1. We have also referred to an unpublished study by J.-P. Bamberger, “Les formes du discours indirect dans le cinema, muet et parlant.”}
Benveniste denies that the bee has language, even though it has an
organic coding process and \emph{even uses tropes}. It has no language
because it can communicate what it has seen but not transmit what has
been communicated to it. A bee that has seen a food source can
communicate the message to bees that did not see it, but a bee that has
not seen it cannot transmit the message to others that did not see
it.\footnote{Emile Benveniste, \emph{Problems in General Linguistics}, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 53: “There is no indication, for example, that a bee goes off to another hive with the message it has received in its own hive. This would constitute a kind of transmission or relay.”} Language is not content to go from a first party to a second
party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes
from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in
this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word,
not the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a
tracing. But how can the order-word be a function coextensive with
language when the order, the command, seems tied to a restricted type of
explicit proposition marked by the imperative?


Austin’s famous theses clearly demonstrate that the various extrinsic
relations between action and speech by which a statement can describe an
action in an indicative mode or incite it in an imperative mode, etc.,
are not all there is. There are also intrinsic relations between speech
and certain actions that are accomplished by \emph{saying} them (the
performative: I swear by saying “I swear”), and more generally between
speech and certain actions that are accomplished in speaking (the
illocutionary: I ask a question by saying “Is\dots{}?” I make a promise by
saying “I love you\dots{}”; I give a command by using the imperative, etc.).
These acts internal to speech, these immanent relations between
statements and acts, have been termed \emph{implicit or nondiscursive
presuppositions}, as opposed to the potentially explicit assumptions by
which a statement refers to other statements or an external action
(Ducrot). The theory of the performative sphere, and the broader sphere
of the illocutionary, has had three important and immediate
consequences: (1) It has made it impossible to conceive of language as a
code, since a code is the condition of possibility for all explanation.
It has also made it impossible to conceive of speech as the
communication of information: to order, question, promise, or affirm is
not to inform someone about a command, doubt, engagement, or assertion
but to effectuate these specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit
acts. (2) It has made it impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or
even phonematics as scientific zones of language independent of
**pragmatics*. Pragmatics ceases to be a “trash heap,” pragmatic
determinations cease to be subject to the alternative: fall outside
language, or answer to explicit conditions that syntacticize and
semanticize pragmatic determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes the
presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself
into everything. (3) It makes it impossible to maintain the distinction
between language and speech because speech can no longer be defined
simply as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary signification,
or the variable application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite,
the meaning and syntax of language can no longer be defined
independently of the speech acts they presuppose.\footnote{William Labov has clearly shown the contradiction, or at least paradox, created by the distinction between language and speech: language is defined as the “social part” of language, and speech is consigned to individual variations; but since the social part is self-enclosed, it necessarily follows that a single individual would be enough to illustrate the principles of language, without reference to any outside data, whereas speech could only be studied in a social context. The same paradox recurs from Saussure to Chomsky: “The social aspect of language is studied by observing any one individual, but the individual aspect only by observing language in its social context”; Labov, \emph{Sociolinguistic Patterns} (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), p. 186.}


It is true that it is still difficult to see how speech acts or implicit
presuppositions can be considered a function coextensive with language.
It is all the more difficult if one starts with the performative (that
which one does by saying it) and moves by extension to the illocutionary
(that which one does in speaking). For it is always possible to thwart
that move. The performative can be walled in by explaining it by
specific syntactic and semantic characteristics avoiding any recourse to
a generalized pragmatics. According to Benveniste, for example, the
performative relates not to acts but instead to a property of
**self-referentiality* of terms (the true personal pronouns, \emph{I, YOU}\dots{},
defined as shifters). By this account, a preexistent structure of
subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, in language, rather than
presupposing speech acts, is adequate to account for them.\footnote{Benveniste, \emph{Problems in General Linguistics}, part 4 (“Man and Language”); on the elimination of the illocutionary, see pp. 237–238.}
Benveniste thus defines language as communicational rather than
informational; this properly linguistic intersubjectivity, or
subjectification, explains all the rest, in other words, everything that
is brought into being by saying it. The question is whether subjective
communication is any better a linguistic notion than ideal information.
Oswald Ducrot has set forth the reasons that have led him to reverse
Benveniste’s schema: The phenomenon of self-referentiality cannot
account for the performative. The opposite is the case; it is “the fact
that certain statements are socially devoted to the accomplishment of
certain actions” that explains self-referentiality. The performative
itself is explained by the illocutionary, not the opposite. It is the
illocutionary that constitutes the nondiscursive or implicit
presuppositions. And the illocutionary is in turn explained by
collective assemblages of enunciation, by juridical acts or equivalents
of juridical acts, which, far from depending on subjectification
proceedings or assignations of subjects in language, in fact determine
their distribution. Communication is no better a concept than
information; intersubjectivity gets us no further than signifiance in
accounting for these “statements-acts” assemblages that in each language
delimit the role and range of subjective morphemes.\footnote{Oswald Ducrot, \emph{Dire et nepas dire} (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 70–80, and “De Saussure à la philosophie du langage,” preface to the French translation of S. R. Searle’s \emph{Speech Acts, Actes de langage} (Paris: Hermann, 1972). Ducrot challenges the notions of linguistic information and code, and communication and subjectivity. He develops a theory of “linguistic presupposition” or nondiscursive implicitness, as opposed to concluded and discursive implicitness still referring to a code. He constructs a pragmatics covering all of linguistics and moves toward a study of assemblages of enunciation, considered from a “juridical,” “polemical,” or “political” point of view.} (We will see
that the analysis of indirect discourse confirms this point of view
since it shows that subjectifications are not primary but result from a
complex assemblage.)


We call \emph{order-words}, not a particular category of explicit statements
(for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or
every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech
acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement.
Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked
to statements by a “social obligation.” Every statement displays this
link, directly or indirectly. Questions, promises, are order-words. The
only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words,
implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a
given moment.


The relation between the statement and the act is internal, immanent,
but it is not one of identity. Rather, it is a relation of \emph{redundancy}.
The order-word itself is the redundancy of the act and the statement.
Newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we
“must” think, retain, expect, etc. Language is neither informational nor
communicational. It is not the communication of information but
something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from
one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each
statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the
statement. The most general schema of information science posits in
principle an ideal state of maximum information and makes redundancy
merely a limitative condition serving to decrease this theoretical
maximum in order to prevent it from being drowned out by noise. We are
saying that the redundancy of the order-word is instead primary and that
information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of
order-words (which is why the opposition to be made is not between noise
and information but between all the indisciplines at work in language,
and the order-word as discipline or “grammaticality”). Redundancy has
two forms, \emph{frequency} and \emph{resonance}; the first concerns the
signifiance of information, the second (I = I)
concerns the subjectivity of communication. It becomes apparent that
information and communication, and even signifiance and
subjectification, are subordinate to redundancy. A distinction is
sometimes made between information and communication; some authors
envision an abstract signifiance of information and an abstract
subjectification of communication. None of this, however, yields an
implicit or primary form of language. There is no signifiance
independent of dominant significations, nor is there subjectification
independent of an established order of subjection. Both depend on the
nature and transmission of order-words in a given social field.


There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of
enunciation. Yet relatively few linguists have analyzed the necessarily
social character of enunciation.\footnote{Bakhtin and Labov have stressed the social character of enunciation, in different ways. They are consequently in opposition not only to subjectivism but also to structuralism, to the extent that the latter ties the system of language to the understanding of an ideal individual, and social factors to actual individuals as speakers.} The problem is that it is not
enough to establish that enunciation has this social character, since it
could be extrinsic; therefore too much or too little is said about it.
The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one
succeeds in demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies \emph{collective
assemblages}. It then becomes clear that the statement is individuated,
and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal
collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so. It is for
this reason that indirect discourse, \emph{especially “free” indirect
discourse}, is of exemplary value: there are no clear, distinctive
contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individuated
statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation, but
a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative
subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their
shifting distributions within discourse. Indirect discourse is not
explained by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the
assemblage, as it freely appears in this discourse, that explains all
the voices present within a single voice, the glimmer of girls in a
monologue by Charlus, the languages in a language, the order-words in a
word. The American murderer “Son of Sam” killed on the prompting of an
ancestral voice, itself transmitted through the voice of a dog. The
notion of collective assemblage of enunciation takes on primary
importance since it is what must account for the social character. We
can no doubt define the collective assemblage as the redundant complex
of the act and the statement that necessarily accomplishes it. But this
is still only a nominal definition; it does not even enable us to
justify our previous position that redundancy is irreducible to a simple
identity (or that there is no simple identity between the statement and
the act). If we wish to move to a real definition of the collective
assemblage, we must ask of what consist these acts immanent to language
that are in redundancy with statements or constitute order-words.


These acts seem to be defined as the set of all \emph{incorporeal
transformations} current in a given society and \emph{attributed} to the
bodies of that society. We may take the word “body” in its broadest
sense (there are mental bodies, souls are bodies, etc.). We must,
however, distinguish between the actions and passions affecting those
bodies, and acts, which are only noncorporeal attributes or the
“expressed” of a statement. When Ducrot asks what an act consists of, he
turns precisely to the juridical assemblage, taking the example of the
judge’s sentence that transforms the accused into a convict. In effect,
what takes place beforehand (the crime of which someone is accused), and
what takes place after (the carrying out of the penalty), are
actions-passions affecting bodies (the body of the property, the body of
the victim, the body of the convict, the body of the prison); but the
transformation of the accused into a convict is a pure instantaneous act
or incorporeal attribute that is the expressed of the judge’s
sentence.\footnote{Ducrot, \emph{Dire et nepas dire}, p. 77: “To qualify an action as criminal (theft, fraud, blackmail, etc.) is not, in our sense of the term, to present it as an \emph{act} since the legal situation of guilt, which defines a crime, is supposed to derive from other given consequences of the activity described: the activity is considered punishable because it is harmful to another person, to order, to society, etc. The judge’s statement of a sentence can, on the other hand, be considered a juridical act because there is no intervening effect between the speech of the judge and the transformation of the accused into a convict.”} Peace and war are states or interminglings of very
different kinds of bodies, but the declaration of a general mobilization
expresses an instantaneous and incorporeal transformation of bodies.
Bodies have an age, they mature and grow old; but majority, retirement,
any given age category, are incorporeal transformations that are
immediately attributed to bodies in particular societies. “You are no
longer a child”: this statement concerns an incorporeal transformation,
even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their actions and
passions. The incorporeal transformation is recognizable by its
instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement
expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation
produces; that is why order-words are precisely dated, to the hour,
minute, and second, and take effect the moment they are dated. Love is
an intermingling of bodies that can be represented by a heart with an
arrow through it, by a union of souls, etc., but the declaration “I love
you” expresses a noncorporeal attribute of bodies, the lover’s as well
as that of the loved one. Eating bread and drinking wine are
interminglings of bodies; communing with Christ is also an intermingling
of bodies, properly spiritual bodies that are no less “real” for being
spiritual. But the transformation of the body of the bread and the wine
into the body and blood of Christ is the pure expressed of a statement
attributed to the bodies. In an airplane hijacking, the threat of a
hijacker brandishing a revolver is obviously an action; so is the
execution of the hostages, if it occurs. But the transformation of the
passengers into hostages, and of the plane-body into a prison-body, is
an instantaneous incorporeal transformation, a “mass media act” in the
sense in which the English speak of “speech acts.” The order-words or
assemblages of enunciation in a given society (in short, the
illocutionary) designate this instantaneous relation between statements
and the incorporeal transformations or noncorporeal attributes they
express.


The instantaneousness of the order-word, which can be projected to
infinity, placed at the origin of society, is quite strange; for
Rousseau, for example, the passage from the state of nature to the
social state is like a leap in place, an incorporeal transformation
occurring at zero hour. Real history undoubtedly recounts the actions
and passions of the bodies that develop in a social field; it
communicates them in a certain fashion; but it also transmits
order-words, in other words, pure acts intercalated into that
development. History will never be rid of dates. Perhaps economics or
financial analysis best demonstrates the presence and instantaneousness
of these decisive acts in an overall process (that is why statements
definitely do not belong to ideology, but are already at work in what is
supposedly the domain of the economic base). The galloping inflation in
Germany after 1918 was a crisis affecting the monetary body, and many
other bodies besides; but the sum of the “circumstances” suddenly made
possible a semiotic transformation that, although indexed to the body of
the earth and material assets, was still a pure act or incorporeal
transformation—\emph{November 20, 1923}\dots{}\footnote{John Kenneth Galbraith, \emph{Money} (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), chapter 12, “The Ultimate Inflation”: “On November 20, 1923, the curtain was rolled down. As in Austria a year earlier, the end came suddenly. As with the milder French inflation, \emph{the end came} with astonishing ease. Perhaps it ended simply because it could not go on. On November 20, the old reichsmark \emph{was declared} to be no longer money. A new currency, the rentenmark, was introduced \dots{}. The new rentenmark \emph{was declared} to be backed by a first mortgage on all the land and other physical assets of the Reich. This idea had its ancestry in the assignats; it was, however, appreciably \emph{more fraudulent} [Galbraith means to say ‘deterritorialized’—Au.]. In France in 1789, there was extant, visible land freshly taken from the church for which currency initially could be exchanged; any German seeking to exercise rights of foreclosure on German property with his rentenmarks would have been thought mentally unstable. Nevertheless, it worked. Circumstances helped\dots{}. If, after 1923, the previous claims on the German budget had continued—the reparations claims and the cost of passive resistance—nothing would have saved the mark and [the head of the Reichsbank’s] reputation”; pp. 159, 161.}


The assemblages are in constant variation, are themselves constantly
subject to transformations. First, the circumstances must be taken into
account: Benveniste clearly demonstrates that a performative statement
is nothing outside of the circumstances that make it performative.
Anybody can shout, “I declare a general mobilization,” but in the
absence of an effectuated variable giving that person the right to make
such a statement it is an act of peurility or insanity, not an act of
enunciation. This is also true of “I love you,” which has neither
meaning nor subject nor addressee outside of circumstances that not only
give it credibility but make it a veritable assemblage, a power marker,
even in the case of an unhappy love (it is still by a will to power that
one obeys\dots{}). The general term “circumstances” should not leave the
impression that it is a question only of external circumstances. “I
swear” is not the same when said in the family, at school, in a love
affair, in a secret society, or in court: it is not the same thing, and
neither is it the same statement; it is not the same bodily situation,
and neither is it the same incorporeal transformation. The
transformation applies to bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to
enunciation. There are variables of expression \emph{that establish a
relation between language and the outside, but precisely because they
are immanent to language}. As long as linguistics confines itself to
constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties
the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and
accordingly botches the assemblage; it consigns circumstances to the
exterior, closes language in on itself, and makes pragmatics a residue.
Pragmatics, on the other hand, does not simply appeal to external
circumstances: it brings to light variables of expression or of
enunciation that are so many internal reasons for language not to close
itself off. As Vološinov [Bakhtin] says, as long as linguistics extracts
constants, it is incapable of helping us understand how a single word
can be a complete enunciation; there must be “an extra something” that
“remains outside of the scope of the entire set of linguistic categories
and definitions,” even though it is still entirely within the purview of
the theory of enunciation or language.\footnote{Vološinov [Bakhtin], \emph{Marxism and the Philosophy of Language}, p. 110. And on “symbolic relations of force” as variables internal to enunciation, see Pierre Bourdieu, “L’économie des échanges linguistiques,” in \emph{Linguistique et sociolinguistique, Langue Française}, May 1977, pp. 18–21.} The order-word is precisely
that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation. The
instantaneousness of the order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of
variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is
attributed.


Pragmatics is a politics of language. A study such as Jean-Pierre Faye’s
on the constitution of Nazi statements in the German social field is in
this respect exemplary (and cannot be directly transferred to the
constitution of Fascist statements in Italy). Transformational research
of this kind is concerned with the variation of the order-words and
noncorporeal attributes linked to social bodies and effectuating
immanent acts. We may take as another example, under different
conditions, the formation of a properly Leninist type of statement in
Soviet Russia, basing ourselves on a text by Lenin entitled “On Slogans”
(1917). This text constituted an incorporeal transformation that
extracted from the masses a proletarian class as an assemblage of
enunciation \emph{before} the conditions were present for the proletariat to
exist as a body. A stroke of genius from the First Marxist
International, which “invented” a new type of class: Workers of the
world, unite!\footnote{The very notion of the proletarian class hinges on the question, Does the proletariat already exist at a given moment, and if so as a body? (Or, does it still exist?) It is evident that Marxists use it in an anticipatory sense, as, for example, when they speak of an “embryonic proletariat.”} Taking advantage of the break with the Social
Democrats, Lenin invented or decreed yet another incorporeal
transformation that extracted from the proletarian class a vanguard as
an assemblage of enunciation and was attributed to the “Party,” a new
type of party as a distinct body, at the risk of falling into a properly
bureaucratic system of redundancy. The Leninist wager, an act of
audacity? Lenin declared that the slogan (\emph{mot d’ordre}) “All power to
the Soviets” was valid only from the 27\textsuperscript{th} of February to the 4\textsuperscript{th} of July
for the peacetime development of the Revolution, and no longer held in
the state of war; the passage from peace to war implied this
transformation, not just from the masses to a guiding proletariat, but
from the proletariat to a directing vanguard. \emph{July 4 exactly} the power
of the Soviets came to an end. All of the external circumstances can be
assigned: the war as well as the insurrection that forced Lenin to flee
to Finland. But the fact remains that the incorporeal transformation was
uttered on the 4\textsuperscript{th} of July, prior to the organization of the body to
which it would be attributed, namely, the Party itself. “Every
particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of the specific
features of a definite political situation.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: V. I. Lenin, “On Slogans,” \emph{Selected Works} (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), vol. 3, p. 148.]} If the objection is
leveled that these specific features pertain to politics and not
linguistics, it must be observed how thoroughly politics works language
from within, causing not only the vocabulary but also the structure and
all of the phrasal elements to vary as the order-words change. A type of
statement can be evaluated only as a function of its pragmatic
implications, in other words, in relation to the implicit
presuppositions, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations it
expresses and which introduce new configurations of bodies. True
intuition is not a judgment of grammaticality but an evaluation of
internal variables of enunciation in relation to the aggregate of the
circumstances.


We have gone from explicit commands to order-words as implicit
presuppositions; from order-words to the immanent acts or incorporeal
transformations they express; and from there to the assemblages of
enunciation whose variables they are. To the extent these variables
enter at a given moment into determinable relations, the assemblages
combine in \emph{a regime of signs or a semiotic machine}. It is obvious that
a society is plied by several semiotics, that its regimes are in fact
mixed. Moreover, at a later time there will arise new order-words that
will modify the variables and will not yet be part of a known regime.
Thus the order-word is redundancy in several ways: as a function of the
process of transmission essential to it, and in itself, from the time it
is emitted, in its “immediate” relation with the act or transformation
it effectuates. The order-word is already redundancy even when it is in
rupture with a particular semiotic. That is why every statement of a
collective assemblage of enunciation belongs to indirect discourse.
Indirect discourse is the presence of a reported statement within the
reporting statement, the presence of an order-word within the word.
Language in its entirety is indirect discourse. Indirect discourse in no
way supposes direct discourse; rather, the latter is extracted from the
former, to the extent that the operations of signifiance and proceedings
of subjectification in an assemblage are distributed, attributed, and
assigned, or that the variables of the assemblage enter into constant
relations, however temporarily. Direct discourse is a detached fragment
of a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage;
but the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I
take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not,
from which I draw my voice. I always depend on a molecular assemblage of
enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any more than it
depends solely on my apparent social determinations, which combine many
heterogeneous regimes of signs. Speaking in tongues. To write is perhaps
to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to
select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms
from which I extract something I call my Self (\emph{Moi}). I is an
order-word. A schizophrenic said: “I heard voices say: he is conscious
of life.”\footnote{Quoted by David Cooper, \emph{The Language of Madness} (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p. 34. Cooper comments that “the language of ‘hearing voices’ \dots{} means that one becomes aware of something that exceeds the consciousness of normal [i.e., direct] discourse and which therefore must be experienced as ‘other’” (p. 34).} In this sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito,
but it is a cogito that makes self-consciousness the incorporeal
transformation of an order-word, or a result of indirect discourse. My
direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running through
me, coming from other worlds or other planets. That is why so many
artists and writers have been tempted by the seance table. When we ask
what faculty is specific to the order-word, we must indeed attribute to
it some strange characteristics: a kind of instantaneousness in the
emission, perception, and transmission of order-words; a wide
variability, and a power of forgetting permitting one to feel absolved
of the order-words one has followed and then abandoned in order to
welcome others; a properly ideal or ghostly capacity for the
apprehension of incorporeal transformations; an aptitude for grasping
language as an immense indirect discourse.\footnote{Elias Canetti is one of the rare authors who has dealt with the psychological mode of action of the order-word, or “command”: \emph{Crowds and Power}, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1963), pp. 303–333. He hypothesizes that an order inflicts a kind of sting on the soul, which forms a cyst, a hardening that never goes away. When this happens, the only way to find relief is to pass it on to others as quickly as possible, to “massify,” even though the mass may turn back against the emitter of the order-word. In addition, the fact that the order-word is like a foreign body within the body, an indirect discourse within speech, explains the extraordinary forgetting that occurs: “The person who carries out a command \dots{} does not accuse himself, but the sting: this is the true culprit, whom he carries with him everywhere\dots{}. It is his permanent witness that it was not he himself who perpetrated a given wrong. He sees himself as its victim and thus has no feeling left for the real victim. It is true, therefore, that people who have acted on orders can feel entirely guiltless,” making it all the easier for them to move on to other order-words (p. 332). This provides a profound explanation for the Nazis’ feeling of innocence, or for the capacity of forgetfulness displayed by old Stalinists, whose amnesia worsens the more they invoke their memory and past in order to claim the right to follow new and even more insidious order-words—“sting mania.” In this respect, Canetti’s analysis seems essential. However, it presupposes the existence of a very particular psychic faculty in the absence of which the order-word would not have this mode of action. The whole classical rationalist theory—of “common sense,” of universally shared good sense based on information and communication—is a way to cover up or hide, and to justify in advance, a much more disturbing faculty, that of order-words. This singularly irrational faculty is best safeguarded by gracing it with the name of pure reason, by saying that it is nothing but pure reason\dots{}} The faculty of the cuer
and the cued, of the song that always holds a tune within a tune in a
relation of redundancy; a faculty that is in truth mediumistic,
glossolalic, or xenoglossic.


Let us return to the question of how this defines a language-function, a
function coextensive with language. It is evident that order-words,
collective assemblages, or regimes of signs cannot be equated with
language. But they effectuate its condition of possibility (\emph{the
superlinearity of expression}), they fulfill in each instance this
condition of possibility; without them, language would remain a pure
virtuality (the superlinear character of indirect discourse). Doubtless,
the assemblages vary, undergo transformation. But they do not
necessarily vary by language, they do not correspond to the various
languages. A language seems to be defined by the syntactical, semantic,
phonological constants in its statements; the collective assemblage, on
the contrary, concerns the usage of these constants in relation to
variables internal to enunciation itself (variables of expression,
immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations). Different constants,
different languages, may have the same usage; the same constants in a
given language may have different usages, successively or even
simultaneously. We cannot content ourselves with a duality between
constants as linguistic factors that are explicit or potentially
explicit, and variables as extrinsic, nonlinguistic factors. For the
pragmatic variables of usage are internal to enunciation and constitute
the implicit presuppositions of language. Thus if the collective
assemblage is in each instance coextensive with the linguistic system
considered, and to language as a whole, it is because it expresses the
set of incorporeal transformations that effectuate the condition of
possibility of language and utilize the elements of the linguistic
system. The language-function thus defined is neither informational nor
communicational; it has to do neither with signifying information nor
with intersubjective communication. And it is useless to abstract a
signifiance outside information, or a subjectivity outside
communication. For the subjectification proceedings and movement of
signifiance relate to regimes of signs, or collective assemblages. The
language-function is the transmission of order-words, and order-words
relate to assemblages, just as assemblages relate to the incorporeal
transformations constituting the variables of the function. Linguistics
is nothing without a pragmatics (semiotic or political) to define the
effectuation of the \emph{condition of possibility} of language and the
**usage* of linguistic elements.

\section{II. “There Is an Abstract Machine of Language That Does Not Appeal to Any ‘Extrinsic’ Factor”}


If in a social field we distinguish the set of corporeal modifications
and the set of incorporeal transformations, we are presented, despite
the variety in each of the sets, with two formalizations, one of
**content*, the other of \emph{expression}. For content is not opposed to form
but has its own formalization: the hand-tool pole, or the lesson of
things. It is, however, opposed to expression, inasmuch as expression
also has its own formalization: the face-language pole, the lesson of
signs. Precisely because content, like expression, has a form of its
own, one can never assign the form of expression the function of simply
representing, describing, or averring a corresponding content: there is
neither correspondence nor conformity. The two formalizations are not of
the same nature; they are independent, heterogeneous. The Stoics were
the first to theorize this independence: they distinguished between the
actions and passions of bodies (using the word “body” in the broadest
sense, as applying to any formed content) and incorporeal acts (the
“expressed” of the statements). The form of expression is constituted by
the warp of expresseds, and the form of content by the woof of bodies.
When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads through the body,
when a drop of wine falls into water, there is an \emph{intermingling of
bodies}; but the statements, “The knife is cutting the flesh,” “I am
eating,” “The water is turning red,” express \emph{incorporeal
transformations} of an entirely different nature (events).\footnote{See Emile Brehier’s classic study, \emph{La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme} (Paris: Vrin, 1970). On “the knife cuts the flesh” and “the tree turns green,” see pp. 12 and 20.} The
genius of the Stoics was to have taken this paradox as far as it could
go, up to the point of insanity and cynicism, and to have grounded it in
the most serious of principles: their reward was to be the first to
develop a philosophy of language.


The paradox gets us nowhere unless, like the Stoics, we add that
incorporeal transformations, incorporeal attributes, apply to bodies,
and only to bodies. They are the expressed of statements but are
**attributed* to bodies. The purpose is not to describe or represent
bodies; bodies already have proper qualities, actions and passions,
souls, in short forms, which are themselves bodies. Representations are
bodies too! If noncorporeal attributes apply to bodies, if there are
good grounds for making a distinction between the incorporeal expressed
“to become red” and the corporeal quality “red,” etc., it has nothing to
with representation. We cannot even say that the body or state of things
is the “referent” of the sign. In expressing the noncorporeal attribute,
and by that token attributing it to the body, one is not representing or
referring but \emph{intervening} in a way; it is a speech act. The
independence of the two kinds of forms, forms of expression and forms of
content, is not contradicted but confirmed by the fact that the
expressions or expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents,
not to represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow
them down or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a
different way. The warp of the instantaneous transformations is always
inserted into the woof of the continuous modifications. (Hence the
significance of dates for the Stoics. From what moment can it be said
that someone is bald? In what sense does a statement of the type “There
will be a naval battle tomorrow” constitute a date or order-word?) The
night of August 4, July 4, 1917, November 20, 1923: What incorporeal
transformation is expressed by these dates, incorporeal yet attributed
to bodies, inserted into them? The independence of the form of
expression and the form of content is not the basis for a parallelism
between them or a representation of one by the other, but on the
contrary a parceling of the two, a manner in which expressions are
inserted into contents, in which we ceaselessly jump from one register
to another, in which signs are at work in things themselves just as
things extend into or are deployed through signs. An assemblage of
enunciation does not speak “of” things; it speaks \emph{on the same level} as
states of things and states of content. So that the same \emph{x}, the same
particle, may function either as a body that acts and undergoes actions
or as a sign constituting an act or order-word, depending on which form
it is taken up by (for example, the theoretico-experimental aggregate of
physics). In short, the functional independence of the two forms is only
the form of their reciprocal presupposition, and of the continual
passage from one to the other. We are never presented with an
interlinkage of order-words and a causality of contents each in its own
right; nor do we see one represent the other, with the second serving as
referent. On the contrary, the independence of the two lines is
distributive, such that a segment of one always forms a relay with a
segment of the other, slips into, introduces itself into the other. We
constantly pass from order-words to the “silent order” of things, as
Foucault puts it, and vice versa.


But when we use a word as vague as “intervene,” when we say that
expressions intervene or insert themselves into contents, are we not
still prey to a kind of idealism in which the order-word instantaneously
falls from the sky? What we must determine is not an origin but points
of intervention or insertion in the framework of the reciprocal
presupposition of the two forms. Both forms of content and forms of
expression are inseparable from a movement of deterritorialization that
carries them away. Both expression and content are more or less
deterritorialized, relatively deterritorialized, according to the
particular state of their form. In this respect, one cannot posit a
primacy of expression over content, or content over expression.
Sometimes the semiotic components are more deterritorialized than the
material components, and sometimes the reverse. For example, a
mathematical complex of signs may be more deterritorialized than a set
of particles; conversely, the particles may have experimental effects
that deterritorialize the semiotic system. A criminal action may be
deterritorializing in relation to the existing regime of signs (the
earth cries for revenge and crumbles beneath my feet, my offense is too
great); but the sign that expresses the act of condemnation may in turn
be deterritorializing in relation to all actions and reactions (“a
fugitive and a vagabond shall thou be in the earth” [Gen. 4:12], you
cannot even be killed). In short, there are degrees of
deterritorialization that quantify the respective forms and according to
which contents and expression are conjugated, feed into each other,
accelerate each other, or on the contrary become stabilized and perform
a reterritorialization. What we call circumstances or variables are
these degrees themselves. There are \emph{variables of content}, or
proportions in the interminglings or aggregations of bodies, and there
are \emph{variables of expression}, factors internal to enunciation. Germany,
toward November 20, 1923: on the one hand, the deterritorializing
inflation of the monetary body and, on the other, in response to the
inflation, a semiotic transformation of the reichsmark into the
rentenmark, making possible a reterritorialization. Russia, toward July
4, 1917: on the one hand proportions of a state of “bodies”
Soviets-provisional government, and on the other the elaboration of a
Bolshevik incorporeal semiotic, accelerating things and contributing to
the action of the detonating body of the Party. In short, the way an
expression relates to a content is not by uncovering or representing it.
Rather, forms of expression and forms of content communicate through a
conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization, each
intervening, operating in the other.


We may draw some general conclusions on the nature of Assemblages from
this. On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two
segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is
a \emph{machinic assemblage} of bodies, of actions and passions, an
intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is
a \emph{collective assemblage of enunciation}, of acts and statements, of
incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical
axis, the assemblage has both \emph{territorial sides}, or reterritorialized
sides, which stabilize it, and \emph{cutting edges of deterritorialization},
which carry it away. No one is better than Kafka at differentiating the
two axes of the assemblage and making them function together. On the one
hand, the ship-machine, the hotel-machine, the circus-machine, the
castle-machine, the court-machine, each with its own intermingled
pieces, gears, processes, and bodies contained in one another or
bursting out of containment (see the head bursting through the
roof).\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Kafka, \emph{The Castle}, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976), P. 12.]} On the other hand, the regime of signs or of enunciation:
each regime with its incorporeal transformations, acts, death sentences
and judgments, proceedings, “law.” It is obvious that statements do not
represent machines: the Stoker’s discourse does not describe stoking as
a body; it has its own form, and a development without resemblance.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Kafka, “The Stoker,” chapter 1 of \emph{Amerika}, trans. Edwin Muir (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1940).]}
Yet it is attributed to bodies, to the whole ship as a body. A discourse
of submission to order-words; a discourse of discussion, claims,
accusation, and defense. On the second axis, what is compared or
combined of the two aspects, what always inserts one into the other, are
the sequenced or conjugated degrees of deterritorialization, and the
operations of reterritorialization that stabilize the aggregate at a
given moment. K., the K.-function, designates the line of flight or
deterritorialization that carries away all of the assemblages but also
undergoes all kinds of reterritorializations and
redundancies—redundancies of childhood, village-life, love, bureaucracy,
etc.


The tetravalence of the assemblage. Taking the feudal assemblage as an
example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining
feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the
overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and
their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a
symbiosis of bodies—a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to
consider statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all
of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their
variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the
collective assemblage of enunciation. On the other axis, we would have
to consider the feudal territorialities and reterritorializations, and
at the same time the line of deterritorialization that carries away both
the knight and his mount, statements and acts. We would have to consider
how all this combines in the Crusades.


It would be an error to believe that content determines expression by
causal action, even if expression is accorded the power not only to
“reflect” content but to react upon it in an active way. This kind of
ideological conception of the statement, which subordinates it to a
primary economic content, runs into all kinds of difficulties inherent
to dialectics. First, although it may be possible to conceive of a
causal action moving from content to expression, the same cannot be said
for the respective \emph{forms}, the form of content and the form of
expression. We must recognize that expression is independent and that
this is precisely what enables it to react upon contents. This
independence, however, has been poorly conceived. If contents are said
to be economic, the form of content cannot be said to be economic and is
reduced to a pure abstraction, namely, the production of goods and the
means of that production considered in themselves. Similarly, if
expressions are said to be ideological, the form of expression is not
said to be ideological and is reduced to language as abstraction, as the
availability of a good shared by all. Those who take this approach claim
to characterize contents and expressions by all the struggles and
conflicts pervading them in two different forms, but these forms
themselves are exempt from struggle and conflict, and the relation
between them remains entirely indeterminate.\footnote{\#fn4-21 <class>Stalin<\Slash{}class>, in his famous text on linguistics [\emph{Marxism and Linguistics} (New York: International Publishers, 1951)—Trans.], claims to identify two neutral forms serving all of society, all classes, and all regimes equally: instruments and machines as pure means of production of goods, and language as a pure means of information and communication. Even Bakhtin defines language as the form of ideology, but he specifies that the form of ideology is not itself ideological.} The only way to define
the relation is to revamp the theory of ideology by saying that
expressions and statements intervene directly in productivity, in the
form of a production of meaning or sign-value. The category of
production doubtless has the advantage of breaking with schemas of
representation, information, and communication. But is it any more
adequate than these schemas? Its application to language is very
ambiguous in that it appeals to an ongoing dialectical miracle of the
transformation of matter into meaning, content into expression, the
social process into a signifying system.


We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to
the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling
of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions,
sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations,
and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one
another. What regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted
interminglings of bodies is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual
regime. Even technology makes the mistake of considering tools in
isolation: tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make
possible or that make them possible. The stirrup entails a new man-horse
symbiosis that at the same time entails new weapons and new instruments.
Tools are inseparable from symbioses or amalgamations defining a
Nature-Society machinic assemblage. They presuppose a social machine
that selects them and takes them into its “phylum”: a society is defined
by its amalgamations, not by its tools. Similarly, the semiotic or
collective aspect of an assemblage relates not to a productivity of
language but to regimes of signs, to a machine of expression whose
variables determine the usage of language elements. These elements do
not stand on their own any more than tools do. There is a primacy of the
machinic assemblage of bodies over tools and goods, a primacy of the
collective assemblage of enunciation over language and words. The
articulation of the two aspects of the assemblage is effected by the
movements of deterritorialization that quantify their forms. That is why
a social field is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than
by the lines of flight running through it. An assemblage has neither
base nor superstructure, neither deep structure nor superficial
structure; it flattens all of its dimensions onto a single plane of
consistency upon which reciprocal presuppositions and mutual insertions
play themselves out.


The other mistake (which is combined with the first as needed) is to
believe in the adequacy of the form of expression as a linguistic
system. This system may be conceived as a signifying phonological
structure, or as a deep syntactical structure. In either case, it is
credited with engendering semantics, therefore of fulfilling expression,
whereas contents are relegated to the arbitrariness of a simple
“reference” and pragmatics to the exteriority of nonlinguistic factors.
What all of these undertakings have in common is to erect an \emph{abstract
machine of language}, but as a synchronic set of constants. We will not
object that the machine thus conceived is too abstract. On the contrary,
it is not abstract enough, it remains “linear.” It remains on an
intermediate level of abstraction allowing it to consider linguistic
factors in themselves, independently of nonlinguistic factors, and to
treat those linguistic factors as constants. But if the abstraction is
taken further, one necessarily reaches a level where the pseudoconstants
of language are superseded by variables of expression internal to
enunciation itself; these variables of expression are then no longer
separable from the variables of content with which they are in perpetual
interaction. \emph{If the external pragmatics of nonlinguistic factors must
be taken into consideration, it is because linguistics itself is
inseparable from an internal pragmatics involving its own factors}. It
is not enough to take into account the signified, or even the referent,
because the very notions of signification and reference are bound up
with a supposedly autonomous and constant structure. There is no use
constructing a semantics, or even recognizing a certain validity to
pragmatics, if they are still pretreated by a phonological or
syntactical machine. For a true abstract machine pertains to an
assemblage in its entirety: it is defined as the diagram of that
assemblage. It is not language based but diagrammatic and superlinear.
Content is not a signified nor expression a signifier; rather, both are
variables of the assemblage. We get nowhere until the pragmatic, but
also semantic, syntactical, and phonological determinations are directly
linked to the assemblages of enunciation upon which they depend.
Chomsky’s abstract machine retains an arborescent model and a linear
ordering of linguistic elements in sentences and sentence combinations.
But as soon as pragmatic values or internal variables are taken into
account, in particular with respect to indirect discourse, one is
obliged to bring “hypersentences” into play or to construct “abstract
objects” (incorporeal transformations). This implies superlinearity, in
other words, a plane whose elements no longer have a fixed linear order:
the rhizome model.\footnote{On these problems, see J. M. Sadock, “Hypersentences” (Diss. University of Illinois, 1968); Dieter Wunderlich, “Pragmatique, situation d’énonciation et Deixis,” \emph{Langages}, no. 36 (June 1972), pp. 34–58; and especially S. K. Saumjan, “Aspects algébriques de la grammaire applicative,” \emph{Langages}, no. 33 (March 1974), pp. 95–122. Saumjan proposes a model of abstract objects based on the operation of application called AGM (applicative generative model). He cites Hjelmslev as an influence; Hjelmslev’s strength is to have conceived of the form of expression and the form of content as two entirely relative variables on one and the same plane, as “functives of one and the same function,” Hjelmslev, \emph{Prolegomena to a Theory of Language}, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). This advance toward a diagrammatic conception of the abstract machine is, however, counteracted by the fact that Hjelmslev still conceives the distinction between expression and content in the signifier-signified mode and therefore retains the subordination of the abstract machine to linguistics.} From this standpoint, the interpenetration of
language and the social field and political problems lies at the deepest
level of the abstract machine, not at the surface. The abstract machine
as it relates to the diagram of the assemblage is never purely a matter
of language, except for lack of sufficient abstraction. It is language
that depends on the abstract machine, not the reverse. At most, we may
distinguish in the abstract machine two states of the diagram, one in
which variables of content and expression are distributed according to
their heterogeneous forms in reciprocal presupposition on a plane of
consistency, and another in which it is no longer even possible to
distinguish between variables of content and expression because the
variability of that same plane has prevailed over the duality of forms,
rendering them “indiscernible.” (The first state relates to still
relative movements of deterritorialization; in the second, an absolute
threshold of deterritorialization has been reached.)

\section{III. “There Are Constants or Universals of Language That Enable Us to Define It As a Homogeneous System”}


The question of structural invariants—and the very idea of structure is
inseparable from invariants, whether atomic or relational—is essential
to linguistics. It is what allows linguistics to claim a basis in pure
scientificity, to be nothing but science \dots{} safe from any supposedly
external or pragmatic factor. The question of invariants assumes several
closely connected forms: (1) the constants of a language (phonological,
by commutativity; syntactical, by transformativity; semantic, by
generativity); (2) the universals of language (by decomposition of the
phoneme into distinctive features; of syntax into fundamental
constituents; of signification into minimal semantic elements); (3)
trees linking constants to one another, with binary relations between
trees (see Chomsky’s linear arborescent method); (4) competence, in
principle coextensive with language and defined by judgments of
grammaticality; (5) homogeneity, bearing on elements and relations as
well as intuitive judgments; (6) synchrony, which erects an “in-itself”
and a”for-itself” of language, perpetually moving from the objective
system to the subjective consciousness that apprehends its principle
(that of the linguist himself or herself).


One can juggle all of these factors, subtract some or even add new ones.
They go together, however, because the essentials of all of them are
present on the level of any one. For example, the distinction between
speech and language is recapitulated in the distinction between
competence and performance, but at the level of grammaticality. If it is
objected that the distinction between competence and performance is
entirely relative (a linguistic competence can be economic, religious,
political, or aesthetic, etc.; the teaching competence of a grade school
teacher may be only a performance in relation to the judgment of an
inspector or government regulations), linguists respond that they are
willing to multiply levels of competence, and even to introduce
pragmatic values into the system. Brekle, for example, proposes adding
an “idiosyncratic performatory competence” factor tied to a whole
constellation of linguistic, psychological, or sociological factors. But
what use is this injection of pragmatics if pragmatics is in turn
considered to have constants or universals of its own? And in what way
are expressions like “I,” “promise,” “know” more universal than “greet,”
“name,” or “condemn”?\footnote{See Herbert Brekle, \emph{Sémantique} (Paris: A. Colin, 1974), pp. 94–104, on the idea of a universal pragmatics and of “universals of dialogue.”} Similarly, when efforts are made to make
Chomsky’s trees bud and to shatter linear order, as long as the
pragmatic components marking the ruptures are placed above the tree or
effaced from the derivation nothing has really been accomplished, one
has failed to constitute a rhizome.\footnote{On this budding and various representations of it, see Wunderlich, “Pragmatique, situation d’énonciation et Deixis.”} In truth, the nature of the
abstract machine is the most general problem: there is no reason to tie
the abstract to the universal or the constant, or to efface the
singularity of abstract machines insofar as they are built around
variables and variations.


The debate between Chomsky and Labov will give us a better understanding
of what the issue is. Every language is an essentially heterogeneous
reality; linguists know this and say so. But this is a \emph{factual} remark.
Chomsky asks only that one carve from this aggregate a homogeneous or
standard system as a basis for abstraction or idealization, making
possible a scientific study of \emph{principles}. Limiting oneself to
standard English is thus not the issue, for even a linguist who studies
Black English or the English of the ghettos is obliged to extract a
standard system guaranteeing the constancy and homogeneity of the object
under study (no science can operate any other way, they say). Thus
Chomsky pretends to believe that by asserting his interest in the
variable features of language, Labov is situating himself in a de facto
pragmatics external to linguistics.\footnote{Noam Chomsky, \emph{Language and Responsibility. Based on Conversations with Mitsou Ronat}, trans. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 53–55.} Labov, however, has other
ambitions. When he brings to light lines of \emph{inherent variation}, he
does not see them simply as “free variants” pertaining to pronunciation,
style, or nonpertinent features that lie outside the system and leave
the homogeneity of the system intact; neither does he see them as a de
facto mix between two systems, each homogeneous in its own right, as if
the speaker moved from one to the other. He refuses the alternative
linguistics set up for itself: assigning variants to different systems,
or relegating them to a place outside the structure. It is the variation
itself that is systematic, in the sense in which musicians say that “the
theme is the variation.” Labov sees variation as a de jure component
affecting each system from within, sending it cascading or leaping on
its own power and forbidding one to close it off, to make it homogeneous
in principle. Labov does consider variables of all kinds, phonetic,
phonological, syntactical, semantic, stylistic. Yet it would seem
difficult to accuse him of missing the distinction between the de jure
and the de facto—or between linguistics and stylistics, or synchrony and
diachrony, or pertinent and nonpertinent features, or competence and
performance, or the grammaticality of language and the agrammaticality
of speech. Although this may be hardening his positions, we would say
rather that Labov proposes a different distribution of the de facto and
the de jure, and especially a different conception of the de jure itself
and of abstraction. He takes the example of a young black person who, in
a very short series of phrases, seems to pass from the Black English
system to the standard system eighteen times. Is it not the abstract
distinction between the two systems that proves arbitrary and
insufficient? For the majority of the forms belongs to one or the other
only by virtue of the fortuities of a given sequence. Must it not be
admitted that every system is in variation and is defined not by its
constants and homogeneity but on the contrary by a variability whose
characteristics are immanent, continuous, and regulated in a very
specific mode (\emph{variable or optional} rules)?\footnote{William Labov, \emph{Sociolinguistic Patterns}, especially pp. 187–190. It will be noted that Labov at times limits himself to statements that have approximately the same meaning and at other times disregards this condition in order to follow a sequence of complementary but heterogeneous statements.}


How can we conceptualize this continuous variation at work within a
language, even if it means overstepping the limits Labov sets for
himself as well as the conditions of scientificity invoked by
linguistics? In the course of a single day, an individual repeatedly
passes from language to language. He successively speaks as “father to
son” and as a boss; to his lover, he speaks an infantilized language;
while sleeping he is plunged into an oniric discourse, then abruptly
returns to a professional language when the telephone rings. It will be
objected that these variations are extrinsic, that it is still the same
language. But that is to prejudge the question. First, it is not certain
that the phonology is the same, nor the syntax, nor the semantics.
Second, the whole question is whether this supposedly identical language
is defined by invariants or, on the contrary, by the line of continuous
variation running through it. Some linguists have suggested that
linguistic change occurs less by systemic rupture than by a gradual
modification of frequency, by a coexistence and continuity of different
usages. Take as an example the statement, “I swear!” It is a different
statement depending on whether it is said by a child to his or her
father, by a man in love to his loved one, or by a witness before the
court. These are like three sequences. (Or Messiaen’s four “amen”s
stretched over seven sequences.) Once again, there is no reason to say
that the variables are merely situational, and that the statement
remains constant in principle. Not only are there as many statements as
there are effectuations, but all of the statements are present in the
effectuation of one among them, so that the line of variation is
virtual, in other words, real without being actual, and consequently
continuous regardless of the leaps the statement makes. To place the
statement in continuous variation is to send it through all the
prosodic, semantic, syntactical, and phonological variables that can
affect it in the shortest moment of time (the smallest interval). Build
the \emph{continuum} of “I swear!” with the corresponding transformations.
This is the standpoint of pragmatics, but a pragmatics internal to
language, immanent, including variations of linguistic elements of all
kinds. For example, Kafka’s line of the three proceedings: the father’s
proceedings in the family, the engagement proceedings at the hotel; and
the court proceedings. There is a constant tendency to seek a
“reduction”: everything is explained by the situation of the child in
relation to its father, or of the man in relation to castration, or of
the citizen in relation to the law. But this is to content oneself with
extracting a pseudoconstant of content, which is no better than
extracting a pseudoconstant of expression. Placing-in-variation allows
us to avoid these dangers, because it builds a continuum or medium
without beginning or end. Continuous variation should not be confused
with the continuous or discontinuous character of the variable itself:
the order-word, a continuous variation for a discontinuous variable \dots{} A
variable can be continuous over a portion of its trajectory, then leap
or skip, without that affecting its continuous variation; what this does
is impose an absent development as an “alternative continuity” that is
virtual yet real.


A constant or invariant is defined less by its permanence and duration
than by its function as a center, if only relative. In the tonal or
diatonic system of music, laws of resonance and attraction determine
centers valid for all modes and endowed with stability and attractive
power (\emph{pouvoir}). These centers therefore organize distinct,
distinctive, forms that are clearly established for a certain amount of
time: a linear, codified, centered system of the arborescent type. It is
true that the minor “mode” gives tonal music a decentered, runaway,
fugitive character due to the nature of its intervals and the lesser
stability of its chords. This mode thus has the ambiguity of undergoing
operations that align it to a major model or standard at the same time
as it continues to display a certain modal power (\emph{puissance})
irreducible to tonality, as though music set out on a journey and
garnered all resurgences, phantoms of the Orient, imaginary lands,
traditions from all over. But temperament, tempered chromaticism has an
even greater ambiguity: stretching the action of the center to the most
distant tones, but also preparing the disaggregation of the central
principle, replacing the centered forms of continuous development with a
form that constantly dissolves and transforms itself. When development
subordinates form and spans the whole, as in Beethoven, variation begins
to free itself and becomes identified with creation. But when
chromaticism is unleashed, becomes a generalized chromaticism, turns
back against temperament, affecting not only pitches but all sound
components—durations, intensities, timbre, attacks—it becomes impossible
to speak of a sound form organizing matter; it is no longer even
possible to speak of a continuous development of form. Rather, it is a
question of a highly complex and elaborate material making audible
nonsonorous forces. The couple matter-form is replaced by the coupling
material-forces. The synthesizer has taken the place of the old “a
priori synthetic judgment,” and all functions change accordingly. By
placing all its components in continuous variation, music itself becomes
a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of a tree, and enters the
service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences,
ruptures, and breaks are a part. Thus the important thing is certainly
not to establish a pseudobreak between the tonal system and atonal
music; the latter, on the contrary, in breaking away from the tonal
system, only carried temperament to its ultimate conclusion (although no
Viennese stopped there). The essential thing is almost the opposite
movement: the ferment in the tonal system itself (during much of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries) that dissolved temperament and
widened chromaticism while preserving a relative tonality, which
reinvented new modalities, brought a new amalgamation of major and
minor, and in each instance conquered realms of continuous variation for
this variable or that. This ferment came to the forefront and made
itself heard in its own right; and, through the molecular material thus
wrought, it made audible the nonsonorous forces of the cosmos that have
always agitated music—a bit of Time in the pure state,\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: This is a phrase from Proust’s \emph{Time Regained} in \emph{Remembrance of Things Past}, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), vol. 3, p. 905 (vol. 3, p. 872, in the French “Pléiade” edition). See Deleuze, \emph{Proust and Signs}, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 59–60.]} a grain of
absolute Intensity \dots{} The words “tonal,” “modal,” “atonal” do not mean
much. Music is not alone in being art as cosmos and in drawing the
virtual lines of an infinite variation.


Once again, the objection will be raised that music is not a language,
that the components of sound are not pertinent features of language,
that there is no correspondence between the two. We are not suggesting
any correspondence. We keep asking that the issue be left open, that any
presupposed distinction be rejected. This especially applies to the
language-speech distinction, which is used to relegate all kinds of
variables at work within expression and enunciation to a position
outside language. The Voice-Music relation proposed by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, on the other hand, could have taken not only phonetics and
prosody but all of linguistics in a different direction. The voice in
music has always been a privileged axis of experimentation, playing
simultaneously on language and sound. Music has linked the voice to
instruments in various ways; but as long as the voice is song, its main
role is to “hold” sound, it functions as a constant circumscribed on a
note and \emph{accompanied} by the instrument. Only when the voice is tied to
timbre does it reveal a tessitura that renders it heterogeneous to
itself and gives it a power of continuous variation: it is then no
longer accompanied, but truly “machined,” it belongs to a musical
machine that prolongs or superposes on a single plane parts that are
spoken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental, or perhaps
electronically generated. This is the sound plane of a generalized
“glissando” implying the constitution of a statistical space in which
each variable has, not an average value, but a probability of frequency
that places it in continuous variation with the other variables.\footnote{This is indeed how Labov tends to define his notion of “optional or variable rules,” as opposed to constant rules: not simply an observed frequency, but a specific quantity expressing the probability of the frequency or the application of the rule. See \emph{Language in the Inner City} (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 94ff.}
Luciano Berio’s Visage (Face) and Dieter Schnebel’s \emph{Glossolalie}
(Speaking in tongues) are typical examples of this. And despite what
Berio himself says, it is less a matter of using pseudoconstants to
produce a simulacrum of language or a metaphor for the voice than of
attaining that secret neuter language without constants and entirely in
indirect discourse where the synthesizer and the instrument speak no
less than the voice, and the voice plays no less than the instrument. It
should not be thought that music has forgotten how to sing in a now
mechanical and atomized world; rather, an immense coefficient of
variation is affecting and carrying away all of the phatic, aphatic,
linguistic, poetic, instrumental, or musical parts of a single sound
assemblage—“a simple scream suffusing all degrees” (Thomas Mann). There
are many procedures for placing the voice in variation, not only
**Sprechgesang* (speechsong), which constantly leaves pitch behind by
descent or ascent, but also circular breathing techniques and zones of
resonance in which several voices seem to issue from the same mouth.
Secret languages are very significant in this connection, in learned as
well as popular music. Certain ethnomusicologists have found
extraordinary cases (in Dahomey, for example) where a first, diatonic,
vocal part is superseded by a chromatic descent into a secret language
that slips from one sound to the next in a continuous fashion,
modulating a sound continuum into smaller and smaller intervals until it
becomes a “parlando” all of the intervals of which blur together—and
then the diatonic part is itself transposed according to the chromatic
levels of a terraced architecture, the song sometimes interrupted by a
parlando, by a simple conversation lacking definite pitch.\footnote{See Gilbert Rouget’s article, “Un chromatisme africain,” in \emph{L’Homme}, vol. I, no. 3 (September–December 1961), pp. 32–46 (this issue comes with a recording of ritual chants of Dahomey).} It is
perhaps characteristic of secret languages, slangs, jargons,
professional languages, nursery rhymes, merchants’ cries to stand out
less for their lexical inventions or rhetorical figures than for the way
in which they effect continuous variations of the common elements of
language. They are chromatic languages, close to a musical notation. A
secret language does not merely have a hidden cipher or code still
operating by constants and forming a subsystem; \emph{it places the public
language’s system of variables in a state of variation}.


This is what we are getting at: a generalized chromaticism. Placing
elements of any nature in continuous variation is an operation that will
perhaps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has
none in advance. On the contrary, this operation in principle bears on
the voice, speech, language, and music simultaneously. There is no
reason to make prior, principled distinctions. Linguistics in general is
still in a kind of major mode, still has a sort of diatonic scale and a
strange taste for dominants, constants, and universals. All languages,
in the meantime, are in immanent continuous variation: neither synchrony
nor diachrony, but asynchrony, chromaticism as a variable and continuous
state of language. For a chromatic linguistics according pragmatism its
intensities and values.


What is called a style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is
nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation. Of the
dualisms established by linguistics, there are few with a more shaky
foundation than the separation between linguistics and stylistics:
Because a style is not an individual psychological creation but an
assemblage of enunciation, it unavoidably produces a language within a
language. Take an arbitrary list of authors we are fond of: Kafka once
again, Beckett, Ghérasim Luca, Jean-Luc Godard. It will be noted that
they are all more or less in a bilingual situation: Kafka, the
Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German; Beckett, the Irishman writing in
English and French; Luca, originally from Romania; Godard and his will
to be Swiss. But this is only circumstantial, an opportunity, and the
opportunity can be found elsewhere. It will also be noted that many of
them are not only or not primarily writers (Beckett and theater and
television, Godard and film and television, Luca and his audiovisual
machines). The reason for this is that when one submits linguistic
elements to a treatment producing continuous variation, when one
introduces an internal pragmatics into language, one is necessarily led
to treat nonlinguistic elements such as gestures and instruments in the
same fashion, as if the two aspects of pragmatics joined on the same
line of variation, in the same continuum. Moreover, the idea perhaps
comes first from outside, with language following only later, as with
the necessarily exterior sources of a style. But the essential thing is
that each of these authors has his own procedure of variation, his own
widened chromaticism, his own mad production of speeds and intervals.
The creative stammering of Ghérasim Luca, in the poem “Passionnement”
(Passionately).\footnote{Ghérasim Luca, \emph{Le chant de la carpe} (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), and the recording put out by Givaudan, on which Luca recites the poem “Passionnément.”} Godard’s is another kind of stammering. In theater:
Robert Wilson’s whispering, without definite pitch, and Carmelo Bene’s
ascending and descending variations.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, \emph{Superpositions} (Paris: Minuit, 1979). Forthcoming in English translation from \emph{Semiotext(e)}.]} It’s easy to stammer, but
making language itself stammer is a different affair; it involves
placing all linguistic, and even nonlinguistic, elements in variation,
both variables of expression and variables of content. A new form of
redundancy. \emph{AND \dots{} AND \dots{} AND \dots{}} There has always been a struggle in
language between the verb \emph{être} (to be) and the conjunction \emph{et} (and)
between \emph{est} and \emph{et} (is and and [which in French are identical in
pronunciation—Trans.]) It is only in appearance that these two terms are
in accord and combine, for the first acts in language as a constant and
forms the diatonic scale of language, while the second places everything
in variation, constituting the lines of a generalized chromaticism. From
one to the other, everything shifts. Writers in British or American
English have been more conscious than the French of this struggle and
the stakes involved, and of the valence of the “and.”\footnote{“And” has an especially important role in English literature, as a function not only of the Old Testament but also of the “minorities” at work on the language: one case in point is J. M. Synge (see François Regnault’s remarks on coordination in Anglo-Irish in the French translation of \emph{Playboy of the Western World, Baladin du monde occidental} [Paris: Bibliothèque du Graphe]). It should not be thought adequate to analyze the “and” as a conjunction; rather, “and” is a special form of every possible conjunction and brings into play a logic of language. Jean Wahl’s works contain profound reflections on this sense of “and,” on the way it challenges the primacy of the verb “to be.”} It was Proust
who said that “masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.”
That is the same as stammering, making language stammer rather than
stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in one’s own tongue, not
only when speaking a language other than one’s own. To be bilingual,
multilingual, but in one and the same language, without even a dialect
or patois. To be a bastard, a half-breed, but through a purification of
race. That is when style becomes a language. That is when language
becomes intensive, a pure continuum of values and intensities. That is
when all of language becomes secret, yet has nothing to hide, as opposed
to when one carves out a secret subsystem within language. One attains
this result only by sobriety, creative subtraction. Continuous variation
has only ascetic lines, a touch of herb and pure water.


It is possible to take any linguistic variable and place it in variation
following a necessarily virtual continuous line between two of its
states. We are no longer in the situation of linguists who expect the
constants of language to experience a kind of mutation or undergo the
effects of changes accumulated in speech alone. Lines of change or
creation are fully and directly a part of the abstract machine.
Hjelmslev remarked that a language necessarily includes unexploited
possibilities or potentialities and that the abstract machine must
include these possibilities or potentialities.\footnote{Hjelmslev, \emph{Language: An Introduction}, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), pp. 39ff.} “Potential” and
“virtual” are not at all in opposition to “real”; on the contrary, the
reality of the creative, or the placing-in-continuous variation of
variables, is in opposition only to the actual determination of their
constant relations. Each time we draw a line of variation, the variables
are of a particular nature (phonological, syntactical or grammatical,
semantic, and so on), but the line itself is apertinent, asyntactic or
agrammatical, asemantic. Agrammaticality, for example, is no longer a
contingent characteristic of speech opposed to the grammaticality of
language; rather, it is the ideal characteristic of a line placing
grammatical variables in a state of continuous variation. Let us take
Nicolas Ruwet’s examples of certain singular expressions of Cummings’s:
“he danced his did,” or “they went their came.” It is possible to
reconstitute the variations through which the grammatical variables pass
in virtuality in order to end up as agrammatical expressions of this
kind (“he did his dance,” “he danced his dance,” “he danced what he
did,”\dots{}; “they went as they came,” “they went their way,”\dots{}).\footnote{Nicolas Ruwet, “Parallélisme et déviations en poésie,” in \emph{Langue, discours, société. Pour Emile Benveniste}, ed. Julia Kristeva, Nicolas Ruwet, and Jean-Claude Milner (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Ruwet analyzes Poem 29 in Cummings’s \emph{Fifty Poems} (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940); he gives a restricted and structuralist interpretation of this phenomenon of variation, invoking the notion of parallelism; in other texts, he minimizes the importance of these variations, treating them as marginal exercises irrelevant to true changes in language; still, his comments seem to us to transcend all of these interpretive restrictions.} In
spite of Ruwet’s structural interpretation, we should avoid taking the
view that the atypical expression is produced by the successive correct
forms. It is instead the atypical expression that produces the
placing-in-variation of the correct forms, uprooting them from their
state as constants. The atypical expression constitutes a cutting edge
of deterritorialization of language, it plays the role of \emph{tensor}; in
other words, it causes language to tend toward the limit of its
elements, forms, or notions, toward a near side or a beyond of language.
The tensor effects a kind of transitivization of the phrase, causing the
last term to react upon the preceding term, back through the entire
chain. It assures an intensive and chromatic treatment of language. An
expression as simple as \emph{AND} \dots{} can play the role of tensor for all of
language. In this sense, \emph{AND} is less a conjunction than the atypical
expression of all of the possible conjunctions it places in continuous
variation. The tensor, therefore, is not reducible either to a constant
or a variable, but assures the variation of the variable by subtracting
in each instance the value of the constant (\emph{n} — 1). Tensors coincide
with no linguistic category; nevertheless they are pragmatic values
essential to both assemblages of enunciation and indirect
discourses.\footnote{See Vidal Sephiha, “Introduction à l’étude de l’intensif,” \emph{Langages}, no. 29 (March 1973). This is one of the first studies of the atypical tensions and variations of language, particularly as they appear in so-called minor languages.}


Some believe that these variations do not express the usual labor of
creation in language and remain marginal, confined to poets, children,
and lunatics. That is because they wish to define the abstract machine
by constants that can be modified only secondarily, by a cumulative
effect or syntagmatic mutation. But the abstract machine of language is
not universal, or even general, but singular; it is not actual, but
virtual-real; it has, not invariable or obligatory rules, but optional
rules that ceaselessly vary with the variation itself, as in a game in
which each move changes the rules. That is why abstract machines and
assemblages of enunciation are complementary, and present in each other.
The abstract machine is like the diagram of an assemblage. It draws
lines of continuous variation, while the concrete assemblage treats
variables and organized their highly diverse relations as a function of
those lines. The assemblage negotiates variables at this or that level
of variation, according to this or that degree of deterritorialization,
and determines which variables will enter into constant relations or
obey obligatory rules and which will serve instead as a fluid matter for
variation. We should not conclude from this that the assemblage brings
only a certain resistance or inertia to bear against the abstract
machine; for even “constants” are essential to the determination of the
virtualities through which the variation passes, they are themselves
optionally chosen. There is indeed braking and resistance at a certain
level, but at another level of the assemblage there is nothing but a
come-and-go between different types of variables, and corridors of
passage traveled in both directions: the variables effectuate the
machine in unison, in the sum of their relations. There is therefore no
basis for a distinction between a constant and collective language, and
variable and individual speech acts. The abstract machine is always
singular, designated by the proper mane of a group or individual, while
the assemblage of enunciation is always collective, in the individual as
in the group. The Lenin abstract machine, and the Bolshevik collective
assemblage \dots{} The same goes for literature, for music. There is no
primacy of the individual; there is instead an indissolubility of a
singular Abstract and a collective Concrete. The abstract machine does
not exist independently of the assemblage, any more than the assemblage
functions independently of the machine.

\section{IV. “Language Can Be Scientifically Studied Only under the Conditions of a Standard or Major Language”}


Since everybody knows that language is a heterogeneous, variable
reality, what is the meaning of the linguists’ insistence on carving out
a homogeneous system in order to make a scientific study possible? It is
a question of extracting a set of constants from the variables, or of
determining constant relations between variables (this is already
evident in the phonologists’ concept of commutativity). But the
scientific model taking language as an object of study is one with the
political model by which language is homogenized, centralized,
standardized, becoming a language of power, a major or dominant
language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science, nothing but
pure science—it wouldn’t be the first time that the order of pure
science was used to secure the requirements of another order. What is
grammaticality, and the sign S, the categorical symbol that dominates
statements? It is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker, and
Chomsky’s trees establish constant relations between power variables.
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the
prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be
ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special
institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is
no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at
times advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse
centers simultaneously. We can conceive of several ways for a language
to homogenize, centralize: the republican way is not necessarily the
same as the royal way, and is not the least harsh.\footnote{On the expansion and diffusion of states of language, in the “patch of oil” mode or the “paratrooper” mode, see Bertil Malmberg, \emph{New Trends in Linguistics}, trans. Edward Garners (Stockholm: Lund, 1964), chapter 3 (which uses N. Lindqvist’s important studies on dialect). What are needed now are comparative studies of how homogenizations and centralizations of given major languages take place. In this respect, the linguistic history of French is not at all the same as that of English; neither is their relation to writing as a form of homogenization the same. For French, the centralized language par excellence, one may refer to the analysis of Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, \emph{Une politique de la langue} (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). The analysis covers a very brief period at the end of the eighteenth century, focusing on Abbot Gregory, and notes two distinct periods: one in which the central language opposed the rural dialects, just as the town opposed the countryside, and the capital the provinces; and another in which it opposed “feudal idioms,” as well as the language of the emigres, just as the Nation opposes everything that is foreign to it, an enemy of it (pp. 160ff.: “It is also obvious that the rejection of the dialects resulted from a technical inability to grasp stable laws in regional speech patterns”).} The scientific
enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always
coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and
transmitting order-words.



\begin{quote}



\end{quote}



\begin{verse}
Speak white and loud \\{}
yes what a wonderful language \\{}
for hiring \\{}
giving orders \\{}
appointing the hour of death in the works \\{}
and of the break that refreshes\dots{}
\end{verse}


Must a distinction then be made between two kinds of languages, “high”
and “low,” major and minor? The first would be defined precisely by the
power (\emph{pouvoir}) of constants, the second by the power (\emph{puissance}) of
variation. We do not simply wish to make an opposition between the unity
of a major language and the multiplicity of dialects. Rather, each
dialect has a zone of transition and variation; or better, each minor
language has a properly dialectical zone of variation. According to
Malmberg, it is rare to find clear boundaries on dialect maps; instead,
there are transitional and limitrophe zones, zones of indiscernibility.
It is also said that “the Québecois language is so rich in modulations
and variations of regional accents and in games with tonic accents that
it sometimes seems, with no exaggeration, that it would be better
preserved by musical notation than by any system of spelling.”\footnote{See Michel Lalonde, \emph{Change}, no. 30 (March 1977), pp. 100–122, where the poem, “Speak White,” quoted in text, appears, along with a manifesto on the Québecois language (“La deffense et illustration de la langue québecqoyse”).} The
very notion of dialect is quite questionable. Moreover, it is relative
because one needs to know in relation to what major language it
exercises its function: for example, the Québecois language must be
evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in relation
to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and
syntactical elements, in order to set them in variation. The Bantu
dialects must be evaluated not only in relation to the mother tongue but
also in relation to Afrikaans as a major language, and English as a
counter-major language preferred by blacks.\footnote{On the complex situation of Afrikaans, see Breyten Breytenbach’s fine book, \emph{Feu Froid} (Paris: Bourgois, 1976); G. M. Lory’s study (pp. 101–107) elucidates Breytenbach’s project, the violence of his poetic treatment of the language, and his will to be a “bastard, with a bastard language.”} In short, the notion of
dialect does not elucidate that of minor language, but the other way
around; it is the minor language that defines dialects through its own
possibilities for variation. Should we identify major and minor
languages on the basis of regional situations of bilingualism or
multilingualism including at least one dominant language and one
dominated language, or a world situation giving certain languages an
imperialist power over others (for example, the role of American English
today)?


At least two things prevent us from adopting this point of view. As
Chomsky notes, a dialect, ghetto language, or minor language is not
immune to the kind of treatment that draws a homogeneous system from it
and extracts constants: Black English has its own grammar, which is not
defined by a sum of mistakes or infractions against standard English;
but that grammar can be studied only by applying to it the same rules of
study that are applied to standard English. In this sense, the notions
of major and minor seem to have no linguistic relevance. When French
lost its worldwide major function it lost nothing of its constancy and
homogeneity, its centralization. Conversely, Afrikaans attained
homogeneity when it was a locally minor language struggling against
English. Even politically, especially politically, it is difficult to
see how the upholders of a minor language can operate if not by giving
it (if only by writing in it) a constancy and homogeneity making it a
locally major language capable of forcing official recognition (hence
the political role of writers who assert the rights of a minor
language). But the opposite argument seems more compelling: the more a
language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language, the
more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into a
“minor” language. It is futile to criticize the worldwide imperialism of
a language by denouncing the corruptions it introduces into other
languages (for example, the purists’ criticisms of English influences in
French, the petit-bourgeois or academic denunciation of “Franglais”).
For if a language such as British English or American English is major
on a world scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of
the world, using very diverse procedures of variation. Take the way
Gaelic and Irish English set English in variation. Or the way Black
English and any number of “ghetto languages” set American English in
variation, to the point that New York is virtually a city without a
language. (Furthermore, American English could not have \emph{constituted}
itself without this linguistic labor of the minorities.) Or the
linguistic situation in the old Austrian empire: German was a major
language in relation to the minorities, but as such it could not avoid
being treated by those minorities in a way that made it a minor language
in relation to the German of the Germans. There is no language that does
not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities. So at the
most general level of linguistics, Chomsky’s and Labov’s positions are
constantly passing and converting into each other. Chomsky can say that
even a minor, dialectical, or ghetto language cannot be studied unless
invariants are extracted from it and “extrinsic or mixed” variables are
eliminated; and Labov can respond that even a standard or major language
cannot be studied independently of “inherent” variations, which are
precisely neither mixed nor extrinsic. \emph{You will never find a
homogeneous system that is not still or already affected by a regulated,
continuous, immanent process of variation} (why does Chomsky pretend not
to understand this?).


There are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible
treatments of the same language. Either the variables are treated in
such a way as to extract from them constants and constant relations or
in such a way as to place them in continuous variation. We were wrong to
give the impression at times that constants existed alongside variables,
linguistic constants alongside variables of enunciation: that was only
for convenience of presentation. For it is obvious that the constants
are drawn from the variables themselves; universals in linguistics have
no more existence in themselves than they do in economics and are always
concluded from a universalization or a rendering-uniform involving
variables. \emph{Constant is not opposed to variable}; it is a treatment of
the variable opposed to the other kind of treatment, or continuous
variation. So-called obligatory rules correspond to the first kind of
treatment, whereas optional rules concern the construction of a
continuum of variation. Moreover, there are a certain number of
categories or distinctions that cannot be invoked, that are inapplicable
and useless as a basis for objections because they presuppose the first
treatment and are entirely subordinated to the quest for constants: for
example, language as opposed to speech; synchrony as opposed to
diachrony; competence as opposed to performance; distinctive features as
opposed to nondistinctive (or secondarily distinctive) features. For
nondistinctive features, whether prosodic, stylistic, or pragmatic, are
not only omnipresent variables, in contrast to the presence or absence
of a constant; they are not only superlinear and “suprasegmental”
elements, in contrast to linear segmental elements; their very
characteristics give them the power to place all the elements of
language in a state of continuous variation—for example, the impact of
tone on phonemes, accent on morphemes, or intonation on syntax. These
are not secondary features but another treatment of language that no
longer operates according to the preceding categories.


“Major” and “minor” do not qualify two different languages but rather
two usages or functions of language. Bilingualism, of course, provides a
good example, but once again we use it simply for the sake of
convenience. Doubtless, in the Austrian empire Czech was a minor
language in relation to German; but the German of Prague already
functioned as a potentially minor language in relation to the German of
Vienna or Berlin; and Kafka, a Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German,
submits German to creative treatment as a minor language, constructing a
continuum of variation, negotiating all of the variables both to
constrict the constants and to expand the variables: make language
stammer, or make it “wail,” stretch tensors through all of language,
even written language, and draw from it cries, shouts, pitches,
durations, timbres, accents, intensities. Two conjoined tendencies in
so-called minor languages have often been noted: an impoverishment, a
shedding of syntactical and lexical forms; but simultaneously a strange
proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload and paraphrase.
This applies to the German of Prague, Black English, and Québecois. But
with rare exceptions, the interpretation of the linguists has been
rather malevolent, invoking a consubstantial poverty and preciosity. The
alleged poverty is in fact a restriction of constants and the overload
an extension of variations functioning to deploy a continuum sweeping up
all components. The poverty is not a lack but a void or ellipsis
allowing one to sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or
to approach it from above or below instead of positioning oneself within
it. And the overload is not a rhetorical figure, a metaphor, or symbolic
structure; it is a mobile paraphrase bearing witness to the unlocalized
presence of an indirect discourse at the heart of every statement. From
both sides we see a rejection of reference points, a dissolution of
constant form in favor of differences in dynamic. The closer a language
gets to this state, the closer it comes not only to a system of musical
notation, but also to music itself.\footnote{On the double aspect of minor language, poverty-ellipsis, and overload-variation, one may refer to a certain number of exemplary studies: Klauss Wagenbach’s study of the German of Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century (\emph{Franz Kafka. Eine Biographic seiner Jugend} [Bern: Francke, 1958]); Pasolini’s study demonstrating that Italian was not constructed on the basis of a new standard or mean, but exploded in two simultaneous directions, “upward and downward,” in other words, toward simplified material and expressive exaggeration (\emph{L’expérience hérétique}, pp. 46–47); J. L. Dillard’s study bringing out the double tendency of Black English on the one hand to omit, lose, disencumber, and on the other to overload, to develop “fancy talk” (\emph{Black English} [New York: Random House, 1972]). As Dillard notes, there is no inferiority to the standard language; instead there is a correlation between two movements that necessarily escape from the standard level of language. Still on the topic of Black English, LeRoi Jones shows the extent to which the two conjoined directions approximate language to music (\emph{Blues People} [New York: William Morrow, 1963], pp. 30–31 and all of chapter 3). On a more general level, one will recall Pierre Boulez’s analysis of a double movement in music, dissolution of form, and dynamic overload or proliferation: \emph{Conversations with Célestin Deliège}, (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976), pp. 20–22.}


Subtract and place in variation, remove and place in variation: a single
operation. Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty
in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and
variation that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a
becoming-minor of the major language. The problem is not the distinction
between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It is a
question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but
of deterritorializing the major language. Black Americans do not oppose
Black to English, they transform the American English that is their own
language into Black English. Minor languages do not exist in themselves:
they exist only in relation to a major language and are also investments
of that language for the purpose of making it minor. One must find the
minor language, the dialect or rather idiolect, on the basis of which
one can make one’s own major language minor. That is the strength of
authors termed “minor,” who are in fact the greatest, the only greats:
having to conquer one’s own language, in other words, to attain that
sobriety in the use of a major language, in order to place it in a state
of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). It is in one’s
own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the major
language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use
the minor language to \emph{send the major language racing}. Minor authors
are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they
experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or
intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of
their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it.


The notion of \emph{minority} is very complex, with musical, literary,
linguistic, as well as juridical and political, references. The
opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative.
Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a
standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the
constant or standard is the average
adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language
(Joyce’s or Ezra Pound’s Ulysses). It is obvious that “man” holds the
majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women,
blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice,
once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant
is extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the
other way around. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way
around. Even Marxism “has almost always translated hegemony from the
point of view of the national worker, qualified, male and over
thirty-five.”\footnote{Yann Moulier, preface to Mario Tronti, \emph{Ouvriers et Capital} (Paris: Bourgois, 1977), p. 6.} A determination different from that of the constant
will therefore be considered minoritarian, by nature and regardless of
number, in other words, a subsystem or an outsystem. This is evident in
all the operations, electoral or otherwise, where you are given a
choice, but on the condition that your choice conform to the limits of
the constant (“you mustn’t choose to change society\dots{}”). 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—Ulysses—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. That is why 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. The problem is never to acquire the
majority, even in order to install a new constant. 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. The same goes for minor languages: they
are not simply sublanguages, idiolects or dialects, but potential agents
of the major language’s entering into a becoming-minoritarian of all of
its dimensions and elements. We should distinguish between minor
languages, the major language, and the becoming-minor of the major
language. Minorities, of course, are objectively definable states,
states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto
territorialities, but they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of
becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and
deterritorializations of the mean or majority. That is why Pasolini
demonstrated that the essential thing, precisely in free indirect
discourse, is to be found neither in language A, nor in language B, but
“in language X, which is none other than language A in the actual
process of becoming language B.”\footnote{Pasolini, \emph{L’expérience hérétique}, p. 62} There is a universal figure of
minoritarian consciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that
becoming is creation. One does not attain it by acquiring the majority.
The figure to which we are referring is continuous variation, as an
amplitude that continually oversteps the representative threshold of the
majoritarian standard, by excess or default. In erecting the figure of a
universal minoritarian consciousness, one addresses powers
(\emph{puissances}) of becoming that belong to a different realm from that of
Power (\emph{Pouvoir}) and Domination. Continuous variation constitutes the
becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the majoritarian Fact
of Nobody. Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure of
consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor
language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes
revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by
connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen,
autonomous becoming.\footnote{See the “Strategy Collective” manifesto on the Québecois language in Change, no. 30 (March 1977): it denounces the “myth of subversive language,” which implies that simply being in a minority is enough to make one a revolutionary (“this mechanist equation derives from a populist conception of language\dots{}. Speaking the language of the working class is not what links an individual to the positions of that class\dots{}. The argument that Joual has a subversive, countercultural force is entirely idealistic”; p. 188).}


The major and minor mode are two different treatments of language, one
of which consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing
it in continuous variation. The order-word is the variable of
enunciation that effectuates the condition of possibility of language
and defines the usage of its elements according to one of the two
treatments; we must therefore return to it as the only “metalanguage”
capable of accounting for this double direction, this double treatment
of variables. The problem of the functions of language is in general
poorly formulated because this order-word variable, which subsumes all
possible functions, is overlooked. Following Canetti’s suggestions, we
may begin from the following pragmatic situation: the order-word is a
death sentence; it always implies a death sentence, even if it has been
considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory, temporary, etc.
Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or
potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves
inflict, take elsewhere. A father’s orders to his son, “You will do
this,” “You will not do that,” cannot be separated from the little death
sentence the son experiences on a point of his person. Death, death; it
is the only judgment, and it is what makes judgment a system. The
verdict. \emph{But the order-word is also something else}, inseparably
connected: it is like a warning cry or a message to flee. It would be
oversimplifying to say that flight is a reaction against the order-word;
rather, it is included in it, as its other face in a complex assemblage,
its other component. Canetti is right to invoke the lion’s roar, which
enunciates flight and death simultaneously.\footnote{Elias Canetti, \emph{Crowds and Power} (see the two essential chapters corresponding to the two aspects of the order-word, “The Command” and “Transformation”; especially pp. 313–314, describing the pilgrimage to Mecca and its two coded aspects, mortifying petrification and panicked flight).} The order-word has two
tones. The prophet receives order-words just as much in taking flight as
in longing for death: Jewish prophetism fused the wish to be dead and
the flight impulse with the divine order-word.


Now if we consider the first aspect of the order-word, in other words,
death as the expressed of the statement, it clearly meets the preceding
requirements: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is
attributed to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, lends it the
authentic character of an incorporeal transformation. What precedes and
follows it may be an extensive system of actions and passions, a slow
labor of bodies; in itself, it is neither action nor passion, but a pure
act, a pure transformation that enunciation fuses with the statement,
the sentence. That man is dead \dots{} You are already dead when you receive
the order-word \dots{} In effect, death is everywhere, as that ideal,
uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms, and states, and as
the condition, even initiatory, even symbolic, through which a subject
must pass in order to change its form or state. This is the sense in
which Canetti speaks of “enantiomorphosis”:\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Translated as “prohibitions of transformation” in the English version of \emph{Crowds and Power}. \emph{Enantio}- is from the Greek, “to oppose.”]} a regime that involves
a hieratic and immutable Master who at every moment legislates by
constants, prohibiting or strictly limiting metamorphoses, giving
figures clear and stable contours, setting forms in opposition two by
two and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form to the
other. It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body
separates and distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as
it is the extremity of a body, is the noncorporeal attribute that limits
and completes that body: death is the Figure. It is through death that a
body reaches completion not only in time but in space, and it is through
death that its lines form or outline a shape. There are dead spaces just
as there are dead times. “If [enantiomorphosis is] practiced often the
whole world shrivels\dots{}. Social prohibitions against metamorphosis are
perhaps the most important of all\dots{}. Death itself, the strictest of all
boundaries, is what is interposed between classes.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Canetti, \emph{Crowds and Power}, pp. 378, 380.]} In a regime of
this kind, any new body requires the erection of an opposable form, as
well as the formation of distinct subjects; death is the general
incorporeal transformation attributed to all bodies from the standpoint
of their forms and substances (for example, the body of the Party cannot
come into its own without an operation of enantiomorphosis, and without
the formation of new activists, which assumes the elimination of the
first generation).


It is true that we are bringing in considerations of content as well as
expression. For even at the moment when the two planes are most
distinct, as the regime of bodies and the regime of signs in an
assemblage, they are still in reciprocal presupposition. The incorporeal
transformation is the expressed of order-words, but also the attribute
of bodies. Not only do linguistic variables of expression enter into
relations of formal opposition or distinction favorable to the
extraction of constants; nonlinguistic variables of content do also. As
Hjelmslev notes, an expression is divided, for example, into phonic
units in the same way a content is divided into social, zoological, or
physical units (“calf” divides into young-bovine-male).\footnote{As we have seen, Hjelmslev imposes a restrictive condition, that of assimilating the plane of content to a kind of “signified.” Certain authors are therefore correct in objecting that the analysis of content he proposes has less to do with linguistics than other disciplines, such as zoology (for example, André Martinet, with the collaboration of Jeanne Martinet and Henriette Walter, \emph{La linguistique}. \emph{Guide alphabétique} [Paris: Danoël, 1969],p. 353).It seems to us, however, that this objection applies only to Hjelmslev’s restrictive condition.} The network
of binarities, or arborescences, is applicable to both sides. There is,
however, no analytic resemblance, correspondence, or conformity between
the two planes. But their independence does not preclude isomorphism, in
other words, the existence of the same kind of constant relations on
both sides. It is by virtue of this type of relations that linguistic
and nonlinguistic elements are inseparable from the start, despite their
absence of correspondence. The elements of content give the
interminglings of bodies clear contours at the same time as the elements
of expression give the noncorporeal expresseds a power of sentencing or
judgment. These elements are all abstract or deterritorialized to
different degrees, but in each instance they effect a
reterritorialization of the overall assemblage on certain order-words
and contours. Indeed, the significance of the doctrine of synthetic
judgment is to have demonstrated that there is an a priori link
(isomorphism) between Sentence and Figure, form of expression and form
of content.


If we consider the other aspect of the order-word, flight rather than
death, it appears that variables are in a new state, that of continuous
variation. An incorporeal transformation is still attributed to bodies,
but it is now a passage to the limit: that is the only way, not to
eliminate death, but to reduce it or make it a variation itself. This
movement pushes language to its own limits, while bodies are
simultaneously caught up in a movement of metamorphosis of their
contents or a process of exhaustion causing them to reach or overstep
the limit of their figures. This is an appropriate place to bring up the
opposition between minor sciences and major sciences: for example, the
tendency of the broken line to become a curve, a whole operative
geometry of the trait and movement, a pragmatic science of
placings-in-variation that operates in a different manner than the royal
or major science of Euclid’s invariants and travels a long history of
suspicion and even repression (we will return to this question
later).\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See 12, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology,” pp. 351–423.]} The smallest interval is always diabolical: the master of
metamorphoses is opposed to the invariant hieratic king. It is as though
an intense matter or a continuum of variation were freed, here in the
internal tensors of language, there in the internal tensions of content.
The idea of the smallest interval does not apply to figures of the same
nature; it implies at least a curve and a straight line, a circle and a
tangent. We witness a transformation of substances and a dissolution of
forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid
forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does
not end at a precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that
intense matter, the material power of that language. A matter more
immediate, more fluid, and more ardent than bodies or words. In
continuous variation the relevant distinction is no longer between a
form of expression and a form of content but between two inseparable
planes in reciprocal presupposition. The relativity of the distinction
between them is now fully realized on the plane of consistency, where
the assemblage is swept up by a now absolute deterritorialization.
Absolute, however, does not mean undifferentiated: differences, now
“infinitely small,” are constituted in a single matter serving both for
expression as incorporeal power and for content as limitless
corporeality. The relation of presupposition between variables of
content and expression no longer requires two forms: the
placing-in-variation of the variables instead draws the two forms
together and effects the conjunction of cutting edges of
deterritorialization on both sides; this occurs on the plane of a single
liberated matter that contains no figures, is deliberately unformed, and
retains in expression and in content only those cutting edges, tensors,
and tensions. Gestures and things, voices and sounds, are caught up in
the same “opera,” swept away by the same shifting effects of stammering,
vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling. A synthesizer places all of the
parameters in continuous variation, gradually making “fundamentally
heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in some way.” The
moment this conjunction occurs there is a common matter. It is only at
this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or the diagram of the
assemblage. The synthesizer has replaced judgment, and matter has
replaced the figure or formed substance. It is no longer even
appropriate to group biological, physicochemical, and energetic
intensities on the one hand, and mathematical, aesthetic, linguistic,
informational, semiotic intensities, etc., on the other. The
multiplicity of systems of intensities conjugates or forms a rhizome
throughout the entire assemblage the moment the assemblage is swept up
by these vectors or tensions of flight. For the question was not how to
elude the order-word but how to elude the death sentence it envelops,
how to develop its power of escape, how to prevent escape from veering
into the imaginary or falling into a black hole, how to maintain or draw
out the revolutionary potentiality of the order-word. Hofmannsthal
adopts the order-word, “Germany, Germany!”, or the need to
reterritorialize, even in a “melancholy mirror.” But beneath this
order-word he hears another, as if the old German “figures” were mere
constants that were then effaced to uncover a relation with nature and
life all the more profound for being variable. When should this relation
to life be a hardening, when submission? At what moment is rebellion
called for and at what moment surrender or impassibility? When is dry
speech necessary and when exuberance or amusement?\footnote{See the details of the text of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, \emph{Lettres du voyageur à son retour}, trans. Jean-Claude Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901.} Whatever the
breaks and ruptures, only continuous variation brings forth this virtual
line, this virtual continuum of life, “the essential element of the real
beneath the everyday.” There is a splendid statement in one of Herzog’s
films. The main character asks himself a question and then says, Who
will answer this answer? Actually, there is no question, answers are all
one ever answers. To the answer already contained in a question
(cross-examination, competition, plebiscite, etc.) one should respond
with questions from another answer. One should bring forth the
order-word of the order-word. In the order-word, life must answer the
answer of death, not by fleeing, but by making flight act and create.
There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that
are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or
organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly
has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the
other—to transform the compositions of order into components of passage.

\chapter{5. 587 B.C.–A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-5}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-5}%


**The Order of the Ark of the Israelites*


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-35.png}
\caption[]{\noindent A New Regime}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of signs, at
least when the expression is linguistic. A regime of signs constitutes a
semiotic system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in
themselves: there is always a form of content that is simultaneously
inseparable from and independent of the form of expression, and the two
forms pertain to assemblages that are not principally linguistic.
However, one can proceed as though the formalization of expression were
autonomous and self-sufficient. Even if that is done, there is such
diversity in the forms of expression, such a mixture of these forms,
that it is impossible to attach any particular privilege to the form or
regime of the “signifier.” If we call the signifying semiotic system
semiology, then semiology is only one regime of signs among others, and
not the most important one. Hence the necessity of a return to
pragmatics, in which language never has universality in itself,
self-sufficient formalization, a general semiology, or a metalanguage.
Thus it is the study of the signifying regime that first testifies to
the inadequacy of linguistic presuppositions, and in the very name of
regimes of signs.


There is a simple general formula for the signifying regime of the sign
(the signifying sign): every sign refers to another sign, and only to
another sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the
notion of the sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign’s
relation to a state of things it designates, or to an entity it
signifies, but only the formal relation of sign to sign insofar as it
defines a so-called signifying chain. The limitlessness of signifiance
replaces the sign. When denotation (here, designation and signification
taken together) is assumed to be part of connotation, one is wholly
within this signifying regime of the sign. Not much attention is paid to
**indexes*, in other words, the territorial states of things constituting
the designatable. Not much attention is paid to \emph{icons}, that is,
operations of reterritorialization constituting the signifiable. Thus
the sign has already attained a high degree of relative
deterritorialization; it is thought of as a \emph{symbol} in a constant
movement of referral from sign to sign. The signifier is the sign in
redundancy with the sign. All signs are signs of signs. The question is
not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other signs it refers,
or which signs add themselves to it to form a network without beginning
or end that projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmospheric continuum.
It is this amorphous continuum that for the moment plays the role of the
“signified,” but it continually glides beneath the signifier, for which
it serves only as a medium or wall: the specific forms of all contents
dissolve in it. The atmospherization or mundanization of contents.
Contents are abstracted. This is the situation Lévi-Strauss describes:
the world begins to signify before anyone knows \emph{what} it signifies; the
signified is given without being known.\footnote{Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, \emph{Sociologie et anthropologie} (Paris: PUF, 1973), pp. 48–49 (later in this text Lévi-Strauss brings out another aspect of the signified). On this first aspect of the atmospheric continuum, see the Binswanger’s and Arieti’s psychiatric descriptions.} Your wife looked at you
with a funny expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a
letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile
of dog shit. You saw two sticks on the sidewalk positioned like the
hands of a watch. They were whispering behind your back when you arrived
at the office. It doesn’t matter what it means, it’s still signifying.
The sign that refers to other signs is struck with a strange impotence
and uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier that constitutes the chain.
The paranoiac shares this impotence of the deterritorialized sign
assailing him from every direction in the gliding atmosphere, but that
only gives him better access to the superpower of the signifier, through
the royal feeling of wrath, as master of the network spreading through
the atmosphere. The paranoid despotic regime: they are attacking me and
making me suffer, but I can guess what they’re up to, I’m one step ahead
of them, I’ve always known, I have power even in my impotence. “I’ll get
them.”


Nothing is ever over and done with in a regime of this kind. It’s made
for that, it’s the tragic regime of infinite debt, to which one is
simultaneously debtor and creditor. A sign refers to another sign, into
which it passes and which carries it into still other signs. “To the
point that it returns in a circular fashion\dots{}” Not only do signs form an
infinite network, but the network of signs is infinitely circular. The
statement survives its object, the name survives its owner. Whether it
passes into other signs or is kept in reserve for a time, the sign
survives both its state of things and its signified; it leaps like an
animal or a dead person to regain its place in the chain and invest a
new state, a new signified, from which it will in turn extricate
itself.\footnote{See Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Savage Mind} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 209ff. (an analysis of the two cases).} A hint of the eternal return. There is a whole regime of
roving, floating statements, suspended names, signs lying in wait to
return and be propelled by the chain. The signifier as the
self-redundancy of the deterritorialized sign, a funereal world of
terror.


But what counts is less this circularity of signs than the multiplicity
of the circles or chains. The sign refers not only to other signs in the
same circle, but to signs in other circles or spirals as well. Robert
Lowie describes how Crow and Hopi men react differently when their wives
cheat on them (the Crow are nomadic hunters and the Hopi sedentaries
with an imperial tradition): “A Crow Indian whose wife has cheated on
him slashes her face, whereas the Hopi who has fallen victim to the same
misfortune, without losing his calm, withdraws and prays for drought and
famine to descend on the village.” It is easy to see where the paranoia
resides, the despotic element or signifying regime, or again, as
Lévi-Strauss says, “the bigotry”: “In effect, for a Hopi everything is
connected: a social disturbance or a domestic incident calls into
question the system of the universe, the levels of which are united by
multiple correspondences; a disruption on one plane is only
intelligible, and morally tolerable, as a projection of other
disruptions involving other levels.”\footnote{Lévi-Strauss, preface to Don C. Talayesva, \emph{Soleil Hopi} (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. vi [translation of \emph{Sun Chief}, ed. Leo W. Simmons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942)].} The Hopi jump from one circle
to another, or from one sign to another on a different spiral. One
leaves the village or the city, only to return. The jumps may be
regulated not only by presignifying rituals but also by a whole imperial
bureaucracy passing judgment on their legitimacy. The jumps are not made
at random, they are not without rules. Not only are they regulated, but
some are prohibited: Do not overstep the outermost circle, do not
approach the innermost circle \dots{} There is a distinction between circles
because, although all signs refer to each other only to the extent that
they are deterritorialized, oriented toward the same center of
signifiance, distributed throughout an amorphous continuum, they have
different speeds of deterritorialization attesting to a place of origin
(temple, palace, house, street, village, bush, etc.), and they have
differential relations maintaining the distinction between circles or
constituting thresholds in the atmosphere of the continuum (private and
public, family incident and social disorder). Moreover, the distribution
of these thresholds and circles changes according to the case. Deception
is fundamental to the system. Jumping from circle to circle, always
moving the scene, playing it out somewhere else: such is the hysteric
operation of the deceiver as subject, answering to the paranoid
operation of the despot installed in his center of signifiance.


There is one other aspect: the signifying regime is not simply faced
with the task of organizing into circles signs emitted from every
direction; it must constantly assure the expansion of the circles or
spiral, it must provide the center with more signifier to overcome the
entropy inherent in the system and to make new circles blossom or
replenish the old. Thus a secondary mechanism in the service of
signifiance is necessary: interpretance or interpretation. This time the
signifier assumes a new figure: it is no longer the amorphous continuum
that is given without being known and across which the network of signs
is strung. A portion of signified is made to correspond to a sign or
group of signs for which that signified has been deemed suitable, thus
making it knowable. To the syntagmatic axis of the sign referring to
other signs is added a paradigmatic axis on which the sign, thus
formalized, fashions for itself a suitable signified (once again there
is abstraction of the content, but in a new way). The interpretive
priest, the seer, is one of the despot-god’s bureaucrats. A new aspect
of deception arises, the deception of the priest: interpretation is
carried to infinity and never encounters anything to interpret that is
not already itself an interpretation. The signified constantly reimparts
signifier, recharges it or produces more of it. The form always comes
from the signifier. The ultimate signified is therefore the signifier
itself, in its redundancy or “excess.” It is perfectly futile to claim
to transcend interpretation or even communication through the production
of signifier, because communication and interpretation are what always
serve to reproduce and produce signifier. That is certainly not the way
to revive the notion of production. The discovery of the
psychoanalyst-priests (a discovery every kind of priest or seer made in
their time) was that interpretation had to be subordinated to
signifiance, to the point that the signifier would impart no signified
without the signified reimparting signifier in its turn. Actually, there
is no longer even any need to interpret, but that is because the best
interpretation, the weightiest and most radical one, is an eminently
significant silence. It is well known that although psychoanalysts have
ceased to speak, they interpret even more, or better yet, fuel
interpretation on the part of the subject, who jumps from one circle of
hell to the next. In truth, signifiance and interpretosis are the two
diseases of the earth or the skin, in other words, humankind’s
fundamental neurosis.


There is not much to say about the center of signifiance, or the
Signifier in person, because it is a pure abstraction no less than a
pure principle; in other words, it is nothing. Lack or excess, it hardly
matters. It comes to the same thing to say that the sign refers to other
signs ad infinitum and that the infinite set of all signs refers to a
supreme signifier. At any rate, this pure formal redundancy of the
signifier could not even be conceptualized if it did not have its own
substance of expression, for which we must find a name: \emph{faciality}. Not
only is language always accompanied by faciality traits, but the face
crystallizes all redundancies, it emits and receives, releases and
recaptures signifying signs. It is a whole body unto itself: it is like
the body of the center of signifiance to which all of the
deterritorialized signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of
their deterritorialization. The voice emanates from the face; that is
why, however fundamentally important the writing machine is in the
imperial bureaucracy, what is written retains an oral or nonbook
character. The face is the Icon proper to the signifying regime, the
reterritorialization internal to the system. The signifier
reterritorializes on the face. The face is what gives the signifier
substance; it is what fuels interpretation, and it is what changes,
changes traits, when interpretation reimparts signifier to its
substance. Look, his expression changed. The signifier is always
facialized. 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. The mask does not hide the face, it \emph{is} the face. The priest
administers the face of the god. With the despot, everything is public,
and everything that is public is so by virtue of the face. Lies and
deception may be a fundamental part of the signifying regime, but
secrecy is not.\footnote{For example, in Bantu myth the first founder of the State shows his face and eats and drinks in public, whereas the hunter, subsequently the warrior, invents the art of secrecy. See Luc de Heusch, \emph{Le roi ivre ou l’origine de l’État} (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 20–25. Heusch sees the second moment as proof of a more “refined” civilization; to us, on the other hand, it is a different semiotic system, that of war rather than public works.} Conversely, when the face is effaced, when the
faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have entered another
regime, other zones infinitely muter
and more imperceptible
where subterranean becomings-animal occur, becomings-molecular,
nocturnal deterritorializations overspilling the limits of the
signifying system. The despot or god brandishes the solar face that is
his entire body, as the body of the signifier. He looked at me queerly,
he knitted his brow, what did I do to make him change expression? I have
her picture in front of me, it’s as if she were watching me \dots{}
Surveillance by the face, as Strindberg said. Overcoding by the
signifier, irradiation in all directions, unlocalized omnipresence.


Finally, the face or body of the despot or god has something like a
counterbody: the body of the tortured, or better, of the excluded. There
is no question that these two bodies communicate, for the body of the
despot is sometimes subjected to trials of humiliation or even torture,
or of exile and exclusion. “At the opposite pole one might imagine
placing the body of the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he
gives rise to his own ceremonial \dots{} not in order to ground the surplus
power possessed by the person of the sovereign, but in order to code the
lack of power with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In
the darkest region of the political field the condemned man outlines the
symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.”\footnote{Michel Foucault, \emph{Discipline and Punish}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 29 [translation modified].} The one who is tortured
is fundamentally one who loses his or her face, entering into a
becoming-animal, a becoming-molecular the ashes of which are thrown to
the wind. But it appears that the one who is tortured is not at all the
final term, but rather the first step before exclusion. Oedipus, at
least, understood that. He tortured himself, gouged out his own eyes,
then went away. The rite, the becoming-animal of the scapegoat clearly
illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second
is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying
regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the
system of signs: it is charged with everything that was “bad” in a given
period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything
that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different
circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the
signifier at its center and carries off everything that spills beyond
the outermost circle. Finally, and especially, it incarnates that line
of flight the signifying regime cannot tolerate, in other words, an
absolute deterritorialization; the regime must block a line of this kind
or define it in an entirely negative fashion precisely because it
exceeds the degree of deterritorialization of the signifying sign,
however high it may be. The line of flight is like a tangent to the
circles of signifiance and the center of the signifier. It is under a
curse. The goat’s anus stands opposite the face of the despot or god.
Anything that threatens to put the system to flight will be killed or
put to flight itself. Anything that exceeds the excess of the signifier
or passes beneath it will be marked with a negative value. Your only
choice will be between a goat’s ass and the face of the god, between
sorcerers and priests. The complete system, then, consists of the
paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the
temple; the interpreting priests who continually recharge the signified
in the temple, transforming it into signifier; the hysterical crowd of
people outside, clumped in tight circles, who jump from one circle to
another; the faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center,
chosen, treated, and adorned by the priests, cutting across the circles
in its headlong flight into the desert. This excessively hasty overview
is applicable not only to the imperial despotic regime but to all
subjected, arborescent, hierarchical, centered groups: political
parties, literary movements, psychoanalytic associations, families,
conjugal units, etc. The photo, faciality, redundancy, signifiance, and
interpretation are at work everywhere. The dreary world of the
signifier; its archaism with an always contemporary function; its
essential deception, connoting all of its aspects; its profound antics.
The signifier reigns over every domestic squabble, and in every State
apparatus.


The signifying regime of the sign is defined by eight aspects or
principles: (1) the sign refers to another sign, ad infinitum (the
limitlessness of signifiance, which deterritorializes the sign); (2) the
sign is brought back by other signs and never ceases to return (the
circularity of the deterritorialized sign); (3) the sign jumps from
circle to circle and constantly displaces the center at the same time as
it ties into it (the metaphor or hysteria of signs); (4) the expansion
of the circles is assured by interpretations that impart signified and
reimpart signifier (the interpretosis of the priest); (5) the infinite
set of signs refers to a supreme signifier presenting itself as both
lack and excess (the despotic signifier, the limit of the system’s
deterritorialization); (6) the form of the signifier has a substance, or
the signifier has a body, namely, the Face (the principle of faciality
traits, which constitute a reterritorialization); (7) the system’s line
of flight is assigned a negative value, condemned as that which exceeds
the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialization (the principle of
the scapegoat); (8) the regime is one of universal deception, in its
jumps, in the regulated circles, in the seer’s regulation of
interpretations, in the publicness of the facialized center, and in the
treatment of the line of flight.


Not only is this semiotic system not the first, but we see no reason to
accord it any particular privilege from the standpoint of an abstract
evolutionism. We would like to indicate very briefly certain
characteristics of the other two semiotic systems. First, the so-called
primitive, \emph{presignifying semiotic}, which is much closer to “natural”
codings operating without signs. There is no reduction to faciality as
the sole substance of expression: there is no elimination of forms of
content through abstraction of the signified. To the extent that there
is still abstraction of content from a strictly semiotic point of view,
it fosters a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of expression that
prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preserves expressive
forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality, gesturality,
rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal
form.\footnote{See A. J. Greimas, “Pratiques et langagesgestuels,” in \emph{Conditions d’une sémiotique du monde naturel}, Langages, no. 10 (June 1968), pp. 3–35. Greimas, however, relates this semiotic to categories such as “the subject of the statement” and the “subject of enunciation,” which seem to us to belong to other regimes of signs.} A variety of forms and substances of expression intersect and
form relays. It is a segmentary but plurilinear, multidimensional
semiotic that wards off any kind of signifying circularity. Segmentarity
is the law of the lineages. Here, the sign owes its degree of relative
deterritorialization not to a perpetual referral to other signs but
rather to a confrontation between the territorialities and compared
segments from which each sign is extracted (the camp, the bush, the
moving of the camp). Not only is the polyvocality of statements
preserved, but it is possible to finish with a statement: A name that
has been used up is abolished, a situation quite unlike the placing in
reserve or transformation occurring in the signifying semiotic. The
meaning of cannibalism in a presignifying regime is precisely this:
eating the name, a semiography that is fully a part of a semiotic in
spite of its relation to content (the relation is an expressive
one).\footnote{On cannibalism as a way of protecting against the souls or names of the dead, and on its semiotic function as “calendar,” see Pierre Clastres, \emph{Chronique des Indiens Guayaki} (Paris: Plon, 1972), pp. 332–340.} It should not be thought that a semiotic of this kind
functions by ignorance, repression, or foreclosure of the signifier. On
the contrary, it is animated by a keen presentiment of what is to come.
It does not need to understand it to fight against it. It is wholly
destined by its very segmentarity and polyvocality to avert the
already-present threat: universalizing abstraction, erection of the
signifier, circularity of statements, and their correlates, the State
apparatus, the instatement of the despot, the priestly caste, the
scapegoat, etc. Every time they eat a dead man, they can say: one more
the State won’t get.


There is another semiotic, the \emph{countersignifying} semiotic (whose most
notable representatives are the fearsome, warlike, and animal-raising
nomads, as opposed to hunter nomads, who belong to the previous
semiotic). This time, the semiotic proceeds less by segmentarity than by
arithmetic and numeration. Of course, the number already played a role
of great importance in the division and union of segmentary lineages; it
also had a function of decisive importance in the signifying imperial
bureaucracy. But that was a kind of number that represented or
signified, a number “incited, produced, caused by something other than
itself.” On the contrary, a numerical sign that is not produced by
something outside the system of marking it institutes, which marks a
mobile and plural distribution, which itself determines functions and
relations, which arrives at arrangements rather than totals,
distributions rather than collections, which operates more by breaks,
transitions, migration, and accumulation than by combining units—a sign
of this kind would appear to belong to the semiotic of a nomad war
machine directed against the State apparatus. The numbering number.\footnote{The foregoing expressions concerning the number are borrowed from Julia Kristeva. Kristeva, however, uses them in an analysis of literary texts based on the hypothesis of the “signifier”: \emph{Semiotikè. Recherches pour une sémanalyse} (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 294ff., 317.}
Its numerical organization into tens, fifties, hundreds, thousands,
etc., and the associated spatial organization were obviously adopted by
State armies, but basically bear witness to a military system specific
to the great nomads of the steppes, from the Hyksos to the Mongols. They
were superposed upon the principle of lineage. Secrecy and spying are
important elements of the war machine’s semiotic of Numbers. The role of
Numbers in the Bible is not unrelated to the nomads, since Moses got the
idea from his father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite: he used it as an
organizational principle for the march and migration, and applied it
himself to the military domain. In this countersignifying regime, the
imperial despotic line of flight is replaced by a line of abolition that
turns back against the great empires, cuts across them and destroys
them, or else conquers them and integrates with them to form a mixed
semiotic.


We would like to go into greater detail on a fourth regime of signs, the
**postsignifying* regime, which has different characteristics opposing it
to signifiance and is defined by a unique procedure, that of
“subjectification.”


There are many regimes of signs. Our own list is arbitrarily limited.
There is no reason to identify a regime or a semiotic system with a
people or historical moment. There is such mixture within the same
period or the same people that we can say no more than that a given
people, language, or period assures the relative dominance of a certain
regime. Perhaps all semiotics are mixed and not only combine with
various forms of content but also combine different regimes of signs.
Presignifying elements are always active in the signifying regime;
countersignifying elements are always present and at work within it; and
postsignifying elements are already there. Even that is to mark too much
temporality. The semiotics and their mixtures may appear in a history of
confrontation and intermingling of peoples, but also in languages in
which there are several competing functions, or in a psychiatric
hospital in which different forms of insanity coexist among the patients
or even combine in a single patient; or in an ordinary conversation in
which people are speaking the same tongue but different languages (all
of a sudden a fragment of an unexpected semiotic surfaces). We are not
suggesting an evolutionism, we are not even doing history. Semiotic
systems depend on assemblages, and it is the assemblages that determine
that a given people, period, or language, and even a given style,
fashion, pathology, or minuscule event in a limited situation, can
assure the predominance of one semiotic or another. We are trying to
make maps of regimes of signs: we can turn them around or retain
selected coordinates or dimensions, and depending on the case we will be
dealing with a social formation, a pathological delusion (\emph{délire}), a
historical event, etc. We will see this on another occasion when we deal
with a dated social system, “courtly love,” and then switch to a private
enterprise called “masochism.” We can also combine maps or separate
them. To make the distinction between two types of semiotics (for
example, the postsignifying regime and the signifying regime), we must
consider very diverse domains simultaneously.


In the first years of the twentieth century, psychiatry, at the height
of its clinical skills, confronted the problem of nonhallucinatory
delusions in which mental integrity is retained without “intellectual
diminishment.” There was a first major grouping, paranoid or
interpretive delusions, which already subsumed various aspects. But the
question of the possible independence of another group was prefigured in
Esquirol’s monomania and Kraepelin’s querulous delusion, and later
defined by Sérieux and Capgras as grievance delusion, and by Clérambault
as passional delusion (“querulousness or seeking redress, jealousy,
erotomania”). Basing ourselves on very fine studies of Sérieux and
Capgras on the one hand, and Clérambault on the other (the latter took
the distinction furthest), we will contrast a paranoid-interpretive
ideal regime of signifiance with a passional, postsignifying subjective
regime. The first regime is defined by an insidious onset and a hidden
center bearing witness to endogenous forces organized around an idea; by
the development of a network stretching across an amorphous continuum, a
gliding atmosphere into which the slightest incident may be carried; by
an organization of radiating circles expanding by circular irradiation
in all directions, and in which the individual jumps from one point to
another, one circle to another, approaches the center then moves away,
operates prospectively and retrospectively; and by a transformation of
the atmosphere, as a function of variable traits or secondary centers
clustered around a principal nucleus. The second regime, on the
contrary, is defined by a decisive external occurrence, by a relation
with the outside that is expressed more as an emotion than an idea, and
more as effort or action than imagination (“active delusion rather than
ideational delusion”); by a limited constellation operating in a single
sector, by a “postulate” or “concise formula” serving as the point of
departure for a linear series or proceeding that runs its course, at
which point a new proceeding begins. In short, it operates \emph{by the
linear and temporal succession of finite proceedings, rather than by the
simultaneity of circles in unlimited expansion}.\footnote{See Paul Sérieux and Joseph Capgras, \emph{Les folies raisonnantes} (Paris: Alcan, 1909), and Gatian Clérambault, \emph{Oeuvre psychiatrique}, rpt. (Paris: PUF, 1942). Capgras believes in an essentially mixed or polymorphous semiotic; Clerambault abstractly analyzes two pure semiotics, although he does recognize that they form de facto mixes. The principal texts on the origin of the distinction between two groups of delusions are Jean Esquirol, \emph{Des maladies mentales} (Brussels: J. B. Tircher, 1838) (to what extent is “monomania” distinguishable from mania?); and Emil Kraepelin, \emph{Psychiatric. Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Ärtze}, 8\textsuperscript{th} ed. (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1920) [English translation, \emph{Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry}, rpt., ed. Thomas Johnstone (New York: Hafner, 1968)] (to what extent is “querulous delusion” distinguishable from paranoia?). The question of the second group of delusions, or the passional delusions, was broached and analyzed historically by Jacques Lacan, \emph{De la psychose parandïaque} (Paris: Seuil, 1975), and by Daniel Lagache, \emph{La jalousie amoureuse} (Paris: PUF, 1947).}


This story of two kinds of delusions without intellectual diminishment
is of great importance. For it is not a disruption of a preexisting
discipline of psychiatry; it lies at the heart of the constitution of
the psychiatrist in the nineteenth century and explains why he or she
was from the start what he or she has been ever since: the psychiatrist
was born cornered, caught between legal, police, humanitarian demands,
accused of not being a true doctor, suspected of mistaking the sane for
mad and the mad for sane, prey to quandaries of conscience, the last
Hegelian \emph{belle âme}. If we consider the two types of intact delusions,
we can say that people in the first group seem to be completely mad, but
aren’t: President Schreber developed his radiating paranoia and
relations with God in every direction, but he was not mad in that he
remained capable of managing his wealth wisely and distinguishing
between circles. At the other pole are those who do not seem mad in any
way, but are, as borne out by their sudden actions, such as quarrels,
arsons, murders (Esquirol’s four great monomanias, erotic, intellectual,
arson, and homocidal, already belong in this category). In short,
psychiatry was not at all constituted in relation to the concept of
madness, or even as a modification of that concept, but rather by \emph{its
split in these two opposite directions}. And is it not our own double
image, all of ours, that psychiatry thus reveals: seeming mad without
being it, then being it without seeming it? (This twofold assertion is
also psychoanalysis’s point of departure, its way of linking into
psychiatry: we seem to be mad but aren’t, observe the dream; we are mad
but don’t seem to be, observe everyday life.) Thus psychiatrists were
alternately in the position of on the one hand pleading for tolerance
and understanding, underscoring the uselessness of confinement,
appealing for open-door asylums; and on the other arguing for stepped-up
surveillance and special high-security asylums, stricter measures
necessitated by the fact that the mad seemed not to be.\footnote{See Sérieux and Capgras, \emph{Les folies raisonnantes}, pp. 340ff., and Clérambault, \emph{Oeuvre psychiatrigue}, pp. 369ff.: people with passional delusion are overlooked, even in the asylum, because they are calm and cunning, “suffering from a limited enough delusion that they know how we judge them.” This makes it all the more necessary to keep them confined; “such patients must not be questioned, but rather maneuvered, and the only way to maneuver them is to move them emotionally.”} Is it by
chance that the distinction between the two major kinds of delusions,
ideational and active, in many ways recapitulates the distinction
between the classes (paranoiacs do not particularly need to be
committed, they are usually bourgeois, whereas monomaniacs, passional
redress-seekers, are most often from the working and rural classes, or
are marginal, as in the case of political assassins).\footnote{Esquirol suggests that monomania is a “disease of civilization” and has a social evolution: it begins religious but tends to become more and more political, tracked by the police (\emph{Des maladies mentales}, vol. 1, p. 400). See also the remarks of Emmanuel Regis, \emph{Les régicides dans l’histoire et dans le présent} (Lyons: A. Storck, 1890).} A class with
radiant, irradiating ideas (but of course!) against a class reduced to
linear, sporadic, partial, local actions \dots{} All paranoiacs are not
bourgeois, all passionals or monomaniacs are not proletarian. But God
and his psychiatrists are charged with recognizing, among these de facto
mixes, those who preserve, even in delusion, the class-based social
order, and those who sow disorder, even strictly localized, such as
haystack fires, parental murders, déclassé love and aggression.


We are trying, then, to make a distinction between a paranoid,
signifying, despotic regime of signs and a passional or subjective,
postsignifying, authoritarian regime. Authoritarian is assuredly not the
same as despotic, passional is not the same as paranoid, and subjective
is not the same as signifying. What happens in the second regime, by
comparison with the signifying regime as we have already defined it? In
the first place, \emph{a sign or packet of signs detaches from the
irradiating circular network} and sets to work on its own account,
starts running a straight line, as though swept into a narrow, open
passage. Already the signifying system drew a line of flight or
deterritorialization exceeding the specific index of its
deterritorialized signs, but the system gave that line a negative value
and sent the scapegoat fleeing down it. Here, it seems that the line
receives a positive sign, as though it were effectively occupied and
followed by a people who find in it their reason for being or destiny.
Once again, we are not, of course, doing history: we are not saying that
a people invents this regime of signs, only that at a given moment a
people effectuates the assemblage that assures the relative dominance of
that regime under certain historical conditions (and that regime, that
dominance, that assemblage may be assured under other conditions, for
example, pathological, literary, romantic, or entirely mundane). We are
not saying that a people is possessed by a given type of delusion but
that the map of a delusion, its coordinates considered, may coincide
with the map of a people, its coordinates considered. The paranoid
Pharaoh and the passional Hebrew? In the case of the Jewish people, a
group of signs detaches from the Egyptian imperial network of which it
was a part and sets off down a line of flight into the desert, pitting
the most authoritarian of subjectivities against despotic signifiance,
the most passional and least interpretive of delusions against
interpretational paranoid delusion, in short, a linear “proceeding and
grievance” against the irradiating circular network. \emph{Your grievance,
your proceeding}: that is Moses’ word to his people, and the proceedings
come one after the other along a line of Passion.\footnote{Deuteronomy 1:12. In the “Pléiade” edition of the Bible (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol. 1, p. 510, editor Edouard Dhorme specifies: “Your grievance, literally your proceeding.”} From this Kafka
derives his own conception of querulousness or the proceeding, and the
succession of linear segments: the father-proceeding, hotel-proceeding,
ship-proceeding, court-proceeding\dots{}


We cannot overlook the most fundamental or extensive event in the
history of the Jewish people: the destruction of the Temple, in two
stages (587 \emph{B.C.} and \emph{A.D.} 70). The whole history of the Temple—the
mobility and fragility of the ark, then the construction of a House by
Solomon, its reconstruction under Darius, etc.—has meaning only in
relation to renewed proceedings of destruction, the two supreme moments
of which came with Nebuchadnezzar and Titus. A temple, mobile, fragile,
or destroyed: the ark is no more than a little portable packet of signs.
An entirely negative line of flight occupied by the animal or scapegoat
laden with all the dangers threatening the signifier has become an
impossibility. Let misfortune befall us: this formula punctuates Jewish
history. It is we who must follow the most deterritorialized line, the
line of the scapegoat, but we will change its sign, we will turn it into
the positive line of our subjectivity, our Passion, our proceeding or
grievance. We will be our own scapegoat. We will be the lamb: “The God
who, like a lion, was given blood sacrifice must be shoved into the
background, and the sacrificed god must occupy the foreground\dots{}. God
became the animal that was slain, instead of the animal that does the
slaying.”\footnote{D. H. Lawrence, \emph{Apocalypse} (New York: Viking, 1932), pp. 93–94.} We will follow, we will wed the tangent separating the
land from the waters, we will separate the circular network from the
gliding continuum, we will make the line of separation our own, in order
to forge our path along it and dissociate the elements of the signifier
(the dove of the ark). A narrow line of march, an in-between that is not
a mean but a slender line. 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 (the Hebrews had a nomadic past,
a continuing relationship with the nomadic numerical organization that
inspired them, and their own particular becoming-nomad; their line of
deterritorialization owed much to the military line of nomadic
destruction).\footnote{See Edouard Dhorme, \emph{La religion des Hébreux nomades} (Brussels: Nouvelle Société d’Editions, 1937), and Zecharia Mayani, \emph{Les Hyksos et le monde de la Bible} (Paris: Payot, 1956). The author emphasizes the connections between the Hebrews and the Habiru (nomadic warriors) and Kenites (nomadic metal workers); what is specific to Moses is not the principle of numerical organization, which was borrowed from the nomads, but the idea of an always revocable convention-proceeding, contract-proceeding. This idea, according to Mayani, derives neither from the rooted farmers nor from the nomadic warriors, nor even from the migrants, but from a tribe on the march that thinks of itself in terms of subjective destiny.} On the other hand, it has an essential relation to
the signifying semiotic itself, for which the Hebrews and their God
would always be nostalgic: reestablish an imperial society and integrate
with it, enthrone a king like everybody else (Samuel), rebuild a temple
that would finally be solid (David and Solomon, Zachariah), erect the
spiral of the Tower of Babel and find the face of God again; not just
bring the wandering to a halt, but overcome the diaspora, which itself
exists only as a function of an ideal regathering. We only have space to
indicate what, in this mixed semiotic, bears witness to the new
postsignifying subjective or passional regime.


Faciality undergoes a profound transformation. The god averts his face,
which must be seen by no one; and the subject, gripped by a veritable
fear of the god, averts his or her face in turn. The averted faces, in
profile, replace the frontal view of the radiant face. It is this double
turning away that draws the positive line of flight. The prophet is the
main figure in this assemblage; he needs a sign to guarantee the word of
God, he is himself marked by a sign indicating the special regime to
which he belongs. It is Spinoza who has elaborated the profoundest
theory of prophetism, taking into account the semiotic proper to it.
Cain, who turns away from the God who turns away from him, already
follows the line of deterritorialization, protected by a sign allowing
him to escape death. The mark of Cain. A punishment worse than imperial
death? The Jewish God invented the reprieve, existence in reprieve,
**indefinite postponement*.\footnote{See Franz Kafka, \emph{The Trial}, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1968). The painter Titorelli originates the theory of indefinite postponement. Aside from definite acquittal, which does not exist, Titorelli differentiates the two juridical regimes of “ostensible acquittal” and “indefinite postponement”; the first is circular and linked to a semiotic of the signifier, whereas the second is linear and segmentary, linked to the passional semiotic (pp. 152–162).} But He also invented the positivity of
alliance, or the covenant, as the new relation with the deity, since the
subject remains alive. Abel, whose name is vanity, is nothing; Cain is
the true man. This is very different from the system of rigging or
deception animating the face of the signifier, the interpretation of the
seer and the displacements of the subject. It is the regime of betrayal,
universal betrayal, in which the true man never ceases to betray God
just as God betrays man, with the wrath of God defining the new
positivity. Before his death, Moses receives the words of the great song
of betrayal. Even the prophet, unlike the seer-priest, is fundamentally
a traitor and thus fulfills God’s order better than anyone who remained
faithful could. God calls upon Jonah to go to Nineveh to entreat the
inhabitants, who had repeatedly betrayed God, to mend their ways. But
Jonah’s first act is to take off in the opposite direction; he also
betrays God, fleeing “far from the face of Adonai.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: The King James Bible reads “to flee \dots{} from the presence of the Lord.” Jonah 1:3.]} He takes a ship
for Tarshish and sleeps, like a righteous man. The tempest sent by God
causes him to be thrown into the sea, where he is swallowed by the great
fish and vomited out at the boundary between land and water, the limit
of separation or line of flight earlier occupied by the dove of the Ark
(Jonah, precisely, is the word for dove). But Jonah, in fleeing from the
face of God, did exactly what God had wanted: he took the evil of
Nineveh upon himself; he did it even more effectively than God had
wanted, he anticipated God. That is why he slept like a righteous man.
God let him live, temporarily protected by the tree of Cain, but then
made the tree die because Jonah had renewed the covenant by occupying
the line of flight.\footnote{Jérôme Lindon was the first to analyze the relation between Jewish prophetism and betrayal, in the exemplary case of Jonah. \emph{Jonas} (Paris: Minuit, 1955).} Jesus universalizes the system of betrayal: he
betrays the God of the Jews, he betrays the Jews, he is betrayed by God
(“Why hast thou forsaken me?” [Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34—Trans.]), he is
betrayed by Judas, the true man. He took evil upon himself, but the Jews
who kill him also take it upon themselves. Jesus is asked for a sign of
his divine descendance: he invokes the sign of Jonah [Luke
11:29—Trans.]. Cain, Jonah, and Jesus constitute three great linear
proceedings along which signs rush and form relays. There are many
others. Everywhere a double turning away on a line of flight.


When a prophet declines the burden God entrusts to him (Moses, Jeremiah,
Isaiah, etc.), it is not because the burden would have been too heavy,
as with an imperial oracle or seer who refuses a dangerous mission. It
is instead a case like Jonah’s, who by hiding and fleeing and betraying
anticipates the will of God more effectively than if he had obeyed. The
prophet is always being forced by God, literally violated by him, much
more than inspired by him. The prophet is not a priest. The prophet does
not know how to talk, God puts the words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a
new form of semiophagy. Unlike the seer, the prophet interprets nothing:
**his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative*, his
relation to God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and
signifying; he anticipates and detects the powers (\emph{puissances}) of the
future rather than applying past and present powers (\emph{pouvoirs}).
Faciality traits no longer function to prevent the formation of a line
of flight, or to form a body of signifiance controlling that line and
sending only a faceless goat down it. Rather, it is faciality itself
that organizes the line of flight, in the face-off between two
countenances that become gaunt and turn away in profile. Betrayal has
become an idée fixe, the main obsession, replacing the deceit of the
paranoiac and the hysteric. The “persecutor-persecuted” relation has no
relevance whatsoever: its meaning is altogether different in the
authoritarian passional regime than in the despotic paranoid regime.


Something is still bothering us: the story of Oedipus. Oedipus is almost
unique in the Greek world. The whole first part is imperial, despotic,
paranoid, interpretive, divinatory. But the whole second part is
Oedipus’s wandering, his line of flight, the double turning away of his
own face and that of God. Rather than very precise limits to be crossed
in order, or which one does not have the right to cross (\emph{hybris}),
there is a concealed limit toward which Oedipus is swept. Rather than
interpretive signifying irradiation, there is a subjective linear
proceeding permitting Oedipus to keep a secret, but only as a residue
capable of starting a new linear proceeding. Oedipus, his name is
**atheos*: he invents something worse than death or exile, he wanders and
survives on a strangely positive line of separation or
deterritorialization. Hölderlin and Heidegger see this as the birth of
the \emph{double turning away}, the change of face, and also the birth of
modern tragedy, for which they bizarrely credit the Greeks: the outcome
is no longer murder or sudden death but survival under reprieve,
unlimited postponement.\footnote{Friedrich Hölderlin, \emph{Remarques sur Oedipe} (Paris: Union Generate d’Edition, 1965). Hölderlin already puts limits on the character of this “slow and difficult” death; see Jean Beaufret’s fine discussion of the nature of this death and its relation to betrayal: “Man must match the categorical turning away of the god, now no more than Time, by himself turning away as a traitor.”} Nietzsche suggests that Oedipus, as opposed
to Prometheus, was the Semitic myth of the Greeks, the glorification of
Passion or passivity.\footnote{Friedrich Nietzsche, \emph{The Birth of Tragedy}, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), sec. 9.} Oedipus: Greek Cain. Let us return to
psychoanalysis. It was not by chance that Freud pounced upon Oedipus.
Psychoanalysis is a definite case of a mixed semiotic: a despotic regime
of signifiance and interpretation, with irradiation of the face, but
also an authoritarian regime of subjectification and prophetism, with a
turning away of the face (the positioning of the psychoanalyst behind
the patient suddenly assumes its full significance). Recent efforts to
explain that a “signifier represents the subject for another signifier”
are typically syncretic: a linear proceeding of subjectivity along with
a circular development of the signifier and interpretation. Two
absolutely different regimes of signs in a mix. But the worst, most
underhanded of powers are founded on it.


One more remark on the story of authoritarian passional betrayal, as
opposed to despotic paranoid deception. Everything is infamy, but Borges
botched his history of universal infamy.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See 10, “1730: Becoming-Intense\dots{},” note 10.]} He should have
distinguished between the great realm of deceptions and the great realm
of betrayals. And also between the various figures of betrayal. There
is, in effect, a second figure of betrayal that springs up at certain
places at certain times, but always as a function of a variable
assemblage with new components. Christianity is a particularly important
case of a mixed semiotic, with its signifying imperial combination
together with its postsignifying Jewish subjectivity. It transforms both
the ideal signifying system and the postsignifying passional system. It
invents a new assemblage. Heresies are still a part of deception, just
as orthodoxy is a part of signifiance. But there are heresies that are
more than heresies and profess pure treason, for example, the Buggers;
it is not by chance that the Bulgars played a special role.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: “Buggers,” from the Middle French for “Bulgarians,” originally referred to a sect of heretics from Bulgaria suspected of ‘unnatural’ practices, and later became a general term for heretics before taking on its modern meaning.]} Beware
the Bulgars, as Monsieur Plume would say. The problem is one of
territorialities in relation to deep movements of deterritorialization.
England, another territoriality or another deterritorialization:
Cromwell, everywhere a traitor, a straight line of passional
subjectification opposed to the royal center of signifiance and the
intermediary circles: the dictator against the despot. Richard III, the
deformed, the twisted, whose ideal is to betray everything: he confronts
Lady Anne in a face-off in which the two countenances turn away, but
each knows she or he is the other’s, destined for the other. This is
unlike Shakespeare’s other historical dramas, in which kings and
assassins deceive in order to take power but then become good kings.
That kind are men of the State. Richard III comes from elsewhere: his
ventures, including those with women, derive more from a war machine
than from a State apparatus. He is the traitor, springing from the great
nomads and their secrecy. He says so from the beginning, when he
mentions a secret project infinitely surpassing the conquest of power.
He wants to return the war machine both to the fragile State and
pacified couples. The only one to guess is Lady Anne, fascinated,
terrified, consenting. Elizabethan theater is full of these traitorous
characters who aspire to be absolute traitors, in opposition to the
deceptions of the man of the court or even of the State.


How many betrayals accompanied the great discoveries of Christendom, the
discovery of new lands and continents! Lines of deterritorialization on
which small groups betray everything, their companions, the king, the
indigenous peoples, the neighboring explorer, in the mad hope of
founding, with a woman of their family, a race that would finally be
pure and represent a new beginning. Herzog’s film, \emph{Aguirre}, is very
Shakespearean. Aguirre asks, How can one be a traitor everywhere and in
everything? I’m the only traitor here. No more deception, it’s time for
betrayal. What a grandiose dream! I will be the last traitor, the total
traitor, and therefore the last man.


Then there was the Reformation: the extraordinary figure of Luther, as
traitor to all things and all people; his personal relation with the
Devil resulting in betrayal, through good deeds as well as bad.


These new figures of betrayal always return to the Old Testament: I am
the wrath of God. But betrayal has become humanist, it does not fall
between God and his own men; it relies on God, but falls between the men
of God and the others, denounced as deceivers. In the end, there is only
one man of God or of the wrath of God, a single betrayer against all
deceivers. But every deceiver is mixed, and which does not take him- or
herself to be the one? And what betrayer does not say to him- or herself
at some point that he or she was nothing but a deceiver after all? (See
the strange case of Maurice Sachs.)


It is clear that the book, or what takes its place, has a different
meaning in the signifying paranoid regime than in the postsignifying
passional regime. In the first case, there is an emission of the
despotic signifier, and its interpretation by scribes and priests, which
fixes the signified and reimparts signifier; but there is also, from
sign to sign, a movement from one territory to another, a circulation
assuring a certain speed of deterritorialization (for example, the
circulation of an epic, or the rivalry between several cities for the
birth of a hero, or, once again, the role of scribe-priests in exchanges
of territorialities and genealogies).\footnote{On the nature of the epic “library” (its imperial character, the role of priests, the circulation between sanctuaries and cities), see Charles Autran, \emph{Homère et les origines sacerdotales de l’épopée grecque}, 3 vols. (Paris: Denoel, 1938–1944).} What takes the place of the
book always has an external model, a referent, face, family, or
territory that preserves the book’s oral character. On the contrary, in
the passional regime the book seems to be internalized, and to
internalize everything: it becomes the sacred written Book. It takes the
place of the face and God, who hides his face and gives Moses the
inscribed stone tablets. God manifests himself through trumpets and the
Voice, but what is heard in sound is the nonface, just as what is seen
in the book are words. \emph{The book has become the body of passion}, just
as the face was the body of the signifier. It is now the book, the most
deterritorialized of things, that fixes territories and genealogies. The
latter are what the book says, and the former the place at which the
book is said. The function of interpretation has totally changed. Or it
disappears entirely in favor of a pure and literal recitation forbidding
the slightest change, addition, or commentary (the famous “stultify
yourself” of the Christians belongs to this passional line; the Koran
goes the furthest in this direction). Or else interpretation survives
but becomes internal to the book itself, which loses its circulatory
function for outside elements: for example, the different types of coded
interpretation are fixed according to axes internal to the book;
interpretation is organized according to correspondences between two
books, such as the Old and New Testaments, and may even induce a third
book suffused by the same element of interiority.\footnote{See the techniques for the interpretation of books in the Middle Ages, and the extreme attempt by Joachim de Flore, who, on the basis of similarities between the two Testaments, induces from within a third state or proceeding. \emph{L’Evangile éternel} (Paris: Rieder, 1928).} Finally,
interpretation may reject all intermediaries or specialists and become
direct, since the book is written both in itself and in the heart, once
as a point of subjectification and again in the subject (the Reformation
conception of the book). In any case, this is the point of departure for
the delusional passion of the book as origin and finality of the world.
The unique book, the total work, all possible combinations \emph{inside} the
book, the tree-book, the cosmos-book: all of these platitudes so dear to
the avant-gardes, which cut the book off from its relations with the
outside, are even worse than the chant of the signifier. Of course, they
are entirely bound up with a mixed semiotic. But in truth they have a
particularly pious origin. Wagner, Mallarmé, and Joyce, Marx and Freud:
still Bibles. If passional delusion is profoundly monomaniacal,
monomania for its part found a fundamental element of its assemblage in
monotheism and the Book. The strangest cult.


This is how things are in the passional regime, or the regime of
subjectification. There is no longer a center of signifiance connected
to expanding circles or an expanding spiral, but a point of
subjectification constituting the point of departure of the line. There
is no longer a signifier-signified relation, but a subject of
enunciation issuing from the point of subjectification and a subject of
the statement in a determinable relation to the first subject. There is
no longer sign-to-sign circularity, but a linear proceeding into which
the sign is swept via subjects. We may consider these three diverse
realms.


1. \emph{The Jews as opposed to the empires}. God withdraws his face,
becoming a point of subjectification for the drawing of a line of flight
or deterritorialization; Moses is the subject of enunciation,
constituted on the basis of the tablets of God that replace the face;
the Jewish people constitute the subject of the statement, for betrayal
as well as for a new land, and enter an ever-renewed covenant or linear
“proceeding” rather than a circular expansion.


2. \emph{So-called modern, or Christian, philosophy}: Descartes as opposed to
ancient philosophy. There is a primacy of the idea of the infinite as an
absolutely necessary point of subjectification. The Cogito,
consciousness, the “I think” is the subject of enunciation that reflects
its own use and conceives of itself following a line of
deterritorialization represented by methodical doubt. The subject of the
statement is the union of the soul and the body, or feeling, guaranteed
in a complex way by the cogito, and performs the necessary
reterritorializations. The cogito is a proceeding that must always be
recommenced, haunted by the possibility of betrayal, a deceitful God,
and an evil Genius. When Descartes says, I can infer “I think therefore
I am” but not “I walk therefore I am,” he is initiating the distinction
between the two subjects (what still-Cartesian contemporary linguists
call a shifter, even though they find traces of the second subject in
the first).


3. \emph{Nineteenth-century psychiatry}: monomania distinguished from mania;
subjective delusion separated from ideational delusions; “possession”
replacing sorcery; a slow elaboration of passional delusion, as distinct
from paranoia \dots{} The schema of passional delusion according to
Clérambault is as follows: the Postulate as the point of
subjectification (\emph{He} loves me); pride as the tonality of the subject
of enunciation (delusional pursuit of the loved one); Spite, Rancor (a
result of a reversion to the subject of the statement). Passional
delusion is a veritable cogito. In the foregoing example of erotomania,
as well as in jealousy and querulous delusion, Clérambault stresses that
a sign must follow a segment or linear proceeding through to the end
before it can begin another, whereas the signs in paranoid delusion form
an endless, self-adjusting network developing in all directions. The
cogito also follows a linear temporal proceeding needing to be
recommenced. The history of the Jews is punctuated by catastrophes after
each of which there were just enough survivors to start a new
proceeding. In the course of a proceeding, while there is linear
movement the plural is often used, whereas there is a return to the
Singular as soon as there is a pause or stoppage marking the end of one
movement before another begins.\footnote{For example, Exodus 19:2: “For \emph{they} were departed from Rephidim, and were come to the desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness, and there \emph{Israel} camped before the mount.”} Fundamental segmentarity: one
proceeding must end (and its termination must be marked) before another
begins, to enable another to begin.


The point of subjectification is the origin of the passional line of the
postsignifying regime. The point of subjectification can be anything. It
must only display the following characteristic traits of the subjective
semiotic: the double turning away, betrayal, and existence under
reprieve. For anorexics, food plays this role (anorexics do not confront
death but save themselves by betraying food, which is equally a traitor
since it is suspected of containing larvae, worms, and microbes). A
dress, an article of underwear, a shoe are points of subjectification
for a fetishist. So is a faciality trait for someone in love, but the
meaning of faciality has changed; it is no longer the body of the
signifier but has become the point of departure for a
deterritorialization that puts everything else to flight. A thing, an
animal, will do the trick. There are cogitos on everything. “A pair of
eyes set far apart, a head hewn of quartz, a haunch that seemed to live
its own life\dots{}. Whenever the beauty of the female becomes irresistible,
it is traceable to a single quality”:\footnote{Henry Miller, \emph{Sexus} (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 250.} a point of subjectification
in the departure of a passional line. Moreover, several points coexist
in a given individual or group, which are always engaged in several
distinct and not always compatible linear proceedings. The various forms
of education or “normalization” imposed upon an individual consist in
making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving
toward a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed
ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of
enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point.
Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement,
in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a
dominant reality (of which the mental reality just mentioned is a part,
even when it seems to oppose it). What is important, what makes the
postsignifying passional line a line of subjectification or subjection,
is the constitution, the doubling of the two subjects, and the recoiling
of one into the other, of the subject of enunciation into the subject of
the statement (the linguists acknowledge this when they speak of the
“imprint of the process of enunciation in the statement”). Signifiance
brought about uniformity in the substance of enunciation; now
subjectivity effects an individuation, collective or particular.
Substance has become subject, as they say. \emph{The subject of enunciation
recoils into the subject of the statement, to the point that the subject
of the statement resupplies subject of enunciation for another
proceeding}. The subject of the statement has become the “respondent” or
guarantor of the subject of enunciation, through a kind of reductive
echolalia, in a biunivocal relation. This relation, this recoiling, is
also that of mental reality into the dominant reality. There is always
an appeal to a dominant reality that functions from within (already in
the Old Testament, and during the Reformation, with trade and
capitalism). There is no longer even a need for a transcendent center of
power; power is instead immanent and melds with the “real,” operating
through normalization. A strange invention: as if in one form the
doubled subject were the \emph{cause} of the statements of which, in its
other form, it itself is a part. This is the paradox of the
legislator-subject replacing the signifying despot: the more you obey
the statements of the dominant reality, the more in command you are as
subject of enunciation in mental reality, for in the end you are only
obeying yourself! You are the one in command, in your capacity as a
rational being. A new form of slavery is invented, namely, being slave
to oneself, or to pure “reason,” the Cogito. Is there anything more
passional than pure reason? Is there a colder, more extreme, more
self-interested passion than the Cogito?


Althusser clearly brings out this constitution of social individuals as
subjects: he calls it interpellation (“Hey you, over there!”) and calls
the point of subjectification the Absolute Subject; he analyzes the
“specular doubling” of subjects and for purposes of demonstration uses
the example of God, Moses, and the Jewish people.\footnote{Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’Etat,” \emph{La pensée}, no. 151 (May–June 1970), pp. 29–35.} Linguists like
Benveniste adopt a curious linguistic personology that is very close to
the Cogito: the \emph{You}, which can doubtless designate the person one is
addressing, but more importantly, a point of subjectification on the
basis of which each of us is constituted as a subject. The \emph{I} as
subject of enunciation, designating the person that utters and reflects
its own use in the statement (“the empty nonreferential sign”); this is
the I appearing in propositions of the type “I believe, I assume, I
think\dots{}” Finally, the I as subject of the statement, indicating a state
for which a \emph{She} or \emph{He} could always be substituted (“I suffer, I
walk, I breathe, I feel\dots{}”).\footnote{In \emph{Problems of General Linguistics}, trans Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1971), pp. 217–222, Emile Benveniste speaks of a proceeding, or process (\emph{procès}).} This is not, however, a question of a
linguistic operation, for a subject is never the condition of
possibility of language or the cause of the statement: there is no
subject, only collective assemblages of enunciation. Subjectification is
simply one such assemblage and designates a formalization of expression
or a regime of signs rather than a condition internal to language.
Neither is it a question of a movement characteristic of ideology, as
Althusser says: subjectification as a regime of signs or a form of
expression is tied to an assemblage, in other words, an organization of
power that is already fully functioning in the economy, rather than
superposing itself upon contents or relations between contents
determined as real in the last instance. Capital is a point of
subjectification par excellence.


The psychoanalytic cogito: the psychoanalyst presents him- or herself as
an ideal point of subjectification that brings the patient to abandon
old, so-called neurotic, points. The patient is partially a subject of
enunciation in all he or she says to the psychoanalyst, and under the
artificial mental conditions of the session: the patient is therefore
called the “analysand.” But in everything else the patient says or does,
he or she is a subject of the statement, eternally psychoanalyzed, going
from one linear proceeding to another, perhaps even changing analysts,
growing increasingly submissive to the normalization of a dominant
reality. In this sense, psychoanalysis, with its mixed semiotic, fully
participates in a line of subjectification. The psychoanalyst does not
even have to speak anymore, the analysand assumes the burden of
interpretation; as for the psychoanalyzed patient, the more he or she
thinks about “his” or “her” next session, or the preceding one, in
segments, the better a subject he or she is.


Just as the paranoid regime had two axes—one sign referring to another
(making the sign a signifier), and the signifier referring to the
signified—so too the passional regime, the line of subjectification, has
two axes, one syntagmatic and the other paradigmatic: as we have just
seen, the first axis is consciousness. Consciousness as passion is
precisely that doubling of subjects, of the subject of enunciation and
the subject of the statement, and the recoiling of one into the other.
But the second form of subjectification is love as passion,
love-passion, another type of double, of doubling and recoiling. Here
again, a variable point of subjectification serves to distribute two
subjects that as much conceal their faces as reveal them to each other,
that wed a line of flight, a line of deterritorialization forever
drawing them together and driving them apart. But everything changes:
there is a celibate side to this doubled consciousness, and there is a
passional love couple that no longer has any use for consciousness or
reason. Yet it is the same regime, even in betrayal and even if the
betraying is done by a third party. Adam and Eve, and Cain’s wife (about
whom the Bible should have said more). Richard III, the traitor, is in
the end given consciousness in a dream, but only the strange face-off
with Lady Anne, a meeting of two countenances that conceal themselves
knowing that they have promised themselves to each other following the
same line that will nonetheless separate them. The most loyal and
tender, or intense, love assigns subject of enunciation and a subject of
the statement that constantly switch places, wrapped in the sweetness of
being a naked statement in the other’s mouth, and of the other’s being a
naked enunciation in my own mouth. But there is always a traitor in the
making. What love is not betrayed? What cogito lacks its evil genius,
the traitor it will never be rid of? “Tristan \dots{} Isolde \dots{} Isolde \dots{}
Tristan”: the cry of the two subjects climbs the scale of intensities
until it reaches the summit of a suffocating consciousness, whereas the
ship follows the line of the waters, the line of death and the
unconscious, betrayal, a continuous melody line. Passional love is a
cogito built for two, just as the cogito is a passion for the self
alone. There is a potential couple in the cogito, just as there is a
doubling of a single virtual subject in love-passion. Klossowski has
created the strangest figures on the basis of this complementarity
between an over intense thought and an over feverish couple. The line of
subjectification is thus entirely occupied by the Double, but it has two
figures since there are two kinds of doubles: the syntagmatic figure of
consciousness, or the consciousness-related double, relating to form
(Self = Self [\emph{Moi} = \emph{Moi}]);
and the paradigmatic figure of the couple, or the passional double,
relating to substance (Man = Woman; here, the
double is immediately the difference between the sexes).


We can follow the becoming of these doubles in mixed semiotics, which
are interminglings as well as degradations. On the one hand, the
passional love double, the couple in love-passion, falls into a conjugal
relation or even a “domestic squabble” situation: Which is the subject
of enunciation? Which is the subject of the statement? The battle of the
sexes: \emph{You’re stealing my thoughts}. The domestic squabble has always
been a cogito for two, a war cogito. Strindberg took this fall of
love-passion into despotic conjugality and hysterico-paranoid squabbling
to its extreme (“she” says she found it all by herself when in fact she
owes it all to me, echo, thought theft, O Strindberg!).\footnote{One aspect of Strindberg’s genius was to elevate the couple, and the domestic squabble, to an intense semiotic level, and to make it a creative factor in the regime of signs. This was not the case with Jouhandeau. Klossowski, on the other hand, was able to invent new sources and conflicts for the passional cogito for two, from the standpoint of a general theory of signs; \emph{Les lots de l’hospitalité} (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).} On the
other hand, the consciousness-related double of pure thought, the couple
of the legislating subject, falls into a bureaucratic relation and a new
form of persecution in which one double takes over the role of subject
of enunciation while the other is reduced to a subject of the statement;
the cogito itself becomes an “office squabble,” a bureaucratic love
delusion. A new form of bureaucracy replaces or conjugates with the old
imperial bureaucracy, the bureaucrat says \emph{I think} (Kafka goes the
furthest in this direction, as in the example of Sortini and Sordini in
**The Castle*, or the many subjectifications of Klamm).\footnote{See also Dostoyevsky’s \emph{The Double}.} Conjugality
is the development of the couple, and bureaucracy the development of the
cogito. But one is contained in the other: amorous bureaucracy,
bureaucratic couple. Too much has been written on the double,
haphazardly, metaphysically, finding it everywhere, in any old mirror,
without noticing the specific regime it possesses both in a mixed
semiotic where it introduces new phases, and in the pure semiotic of
subjectification where it inscribes itself on a line of flight and
introduces very particular figures. Once again: the two figures of
thought-consciousness and love-passion in the postsignifying regime; the
two moments of bureaucratic consciousness and conjugal relation in the
mixed fall or combination. But even in a mixed state, the original line
is easily discovered by semiotic analysis.


There is a redundancy of consciousness and love that is not the same as
the signifying redundancy of the other regime. In the signifying regime,
redundancy is a phenomenon of objective \emph{frequency} involving signs or
elements of signs (the phonemes, letters, and groups of letters in a
language): there is both a maximum frequency of the signifier in
relation to each sign, and a comparative frequency of one sign in
relation to another. In any case, it could be said that this regime
develops a kind of “wall” on which signs are inscribed, in relation to
one another and in relation to the signifier. In the postsignifying
regime, on the other hand, the redundancy is one of \emph{subjective
resonance} involving above all shifters, personal pronouns and proper
names. Here again, we may distinguish between the maximum resonance of
self-consciousness (Self = Self [\emph{Moi}
= \emph{Moi}]) and a comparative resonance of names
(Tristan \dots{} Isolde\dots{}). This time, however, there is no longer a wall upon
which the frequency is tallied but instead a black hole attracting
consciousness and passion and in which they resonate. Tristan calls
Isolde, Isolde calls Tristan, both drawn toward the black hole of a
self-consciousness, carried by the tide toward death. When the linguists
distinguish between two forms of redundancy, frequency and resonance,
they often ascribe the latter a merely derivative status.\footnote{On these two forms of redundancy, see the entry on “Redondance” in André Martinet, \emph{La linguistique. Guide alphabétique} (Paris: Danoél, 1969), pp. 331–333.} In fact,
it is a question of two semiotics that mix but retain their own distinct
principles (similarly, one could define other forms of redundancy, such
as rhythmic, gestural, or numerical, relating to the other regimes of
signs). The most essential distinction between the signifying regime and
the subjective regime and their respective redundancies is the \emph{movement
of deterritorialization} they effectuate. Since the signifying sign
refers only to other signs, and the set of all signs to the signifier
itself, the corresponding semiotic enjoys a high level of
deterritorialization; but it is a deterritorialization that is still
**relative*, expressed as frequency. In this system, the line of flight
remains negative, it is assigned a negative sign. As we have seen, the
subjective regime proceeds entirely differently: precisely because the
sign breaks its relation of signifiance with other signs and sets off
racing down a positive line of flight, it attains an \emph{absolute}
deterritorialization expressed in the black hole of consciousness and
passion. The absolute deterritorialization of the cogito. That is why
subjective redundancy seems both to graft itself onto signifying
redundancy and to derive from it, as second-degree redundancy.


Things are even more complicated than we have let on. Subjectification
assigns the line of flight a positive sign, it carries
deterritorialization to the absolute, intensity to the highest degree,
redundancy to a reflexive form, etc. But it has its own way of
repudiating the positivity it frees, or of relativizing the absoluteness
it attains, without, however, falling back to the preceding regime. In
this redundancy of resonance, the absolute of consciousness is the
absolute of impotence and the intensity of passion, the heat of the
void. This is because subjectification essentially constitutes finite
linear proceedings, one of which ends before the next begins: thus the
cogito is always recommenced, a passion or grievance is always
recapitulated. Every consciousness pursues its own death, every
love-passion its own end, attracted by a black hole, and all the black
holes resonate together. Thus subjectification imposes on the line of
flight a segmentarity that is forever repudiating that line, and upon
absolute deterritorialization a point of abolition that is forever
blocking that deterritorialization or diverting it. The reason for this
is simple: forms of expression and regimes of signs are still \emph{strata}
(even considered in themselves, after abstracting forms of content);
subjectification is no less a stratum than signifiance.


The principal strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance
and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection. These strata
together are what separates us from the plane of consistency and the
abstract machine, where there is no longer any regime of signs, where
the line of flight effectuates its own potential positivity and
deterritorialization its absolute power. The problem, from this
standpoint, is to tip the most favorable assemblage from its side facing
the strata to its side facing the plane of consistency or the body
without organs. Subjectification carries desire to such a point of
excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself in a black
hole or change planes. Destratify, open up to a new function, a
**diagrammatic* function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double,
and passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an
experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities,
an emission of particles-signs. Make the body without organs of
consciousness and love. Use love and consciousness to abolish
subjectification: “To become the great lover, the magnetizer and
catalyzer \dots{} one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an
utter fool.”\footnote{Henry Miller, \emph{Sexus}, p. 229. The theme of the idiot is itself quite diverse. It is an explicit part of the cogito according to Descartes, and feeling according to Rousseau. Russian literature, however, takes it down other paths, beyond consciousness or passion.} Use the \emph{I think} for a becoming-animal, and love for
a becoming-woman of man. Desubjectify consciousness and passion. Are
there not diagrammatic redundancies distinct from both signifying
redundancies and subjective redundancies? Redundancies that would no
longer be knots of arborescence but resumptions and upsurges in a
rhizome? Stammer language, be a foreigner in one’s own tongue:



\begin{quote}



\end{quote}



\begin{verse}
do domi not passi do not dominate \\{}
do not dominate your passive passions not \\{}
\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{}\dots{} \\{}
do devouring not not dominate \\{}
your rats your rations your rats rations not not\dots{}\footnote{Ghérasim Luca, \emph{Le chant de la carpe} (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), pp. 87–94.}
\end{verse}


It seems necessary to distinguish between three types of
deterritorialization: the first type is relative, proper to the strata,
and culminates in signifiance; the second is absolute, but still
negative and stratic, and appears in subjectification (\emph{Ratio et
Passio}); finally, there is the possibility of a positive absolute
deterritorialization on the plane of consistency or the body without
organs.


We have not, of course, managed to eliminate forms of content (for
example, the role of the Temple, or the position of a dominant Reality,
etc.). What we have done is to isolate, under artificial conditions, a
certain number of semiotics displaying very diverse characteristics. The
**presignifying semiotic*, in which the “overcoding” marking the
privileged status of language operates diffusely: enunciation is
collective, statements themselves are polyvocal, and substances of
expression are multiple; relative deterritorialization is determined by
the confrontation between the territorialities and segmentary lineages
that ward off the State apparatus. The \emph{signifying semiotic}: overcoding
is fully effectuated by the signifier, and by the State apparatus that
emits it; there is uniformity of enunciation, unification of the
substance of expression, and control over statements in a regime of
circularity; relative deterritorialization is taken as far as it can go
by a redundant and perpetual referral from sign to sign. The
**countersignifying semiotic*: here, overcoding is assured by the Number
as form of expression or enunciation, and by the War Machine upon which
it depends; deterritorialization follows a line of active destruction or
abolition. The \emph{postsignifying semiotic}, in which overcoding is assured
by the redundancy of consciousness; a subjectification of enunciation
occurs on a passional line that makes the organization of power
(\emph{pouvoir}) immanent and raises deterritorialization to the absolute,
although in a way that is still negative.


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-36.png}
\caption[]{\noindent (1) The Center or the Signifier; the
faciality of the god or despot. (2) The Temple or Palace, with priests
and bureaucrats. (3) The organization in circles and the sign referring
to other signs on the same circle or on different circles. (4) The
interpretive development of signifier into signified, which then
reimparts signifier. (5) The expiatory animal; the blocking of the line
of flight. (6) The scapegoat, or the negative sign of the line of
night.}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


Yet we must consider two aspects: on the one hand, these semiotics are
still concrete even after forms of content have been abstracted, but
only to the extent that they are mixed, that they constitute mixed
combinations. Every semiotic is mixed and only functions as such; each
one necessarily captures fragments of one or more other semiotics
(surplus value of code). Even from this perspective, the signifying
semiotic has no privileged status to apply toward the formation of a
general semiology: in particular, the way in which it combines with the
passional semiotic of subjectification (“the signifier for the subject”)
implies nothing that would privilege it over other combinations, for
example, the combination of the passional semiotic and the
countersignifying semiotic, or of the countersignifying semiotic and the
signifying semiotic itself (when the Nomads turn imperial), etc. There
is no general semiology.


For example, without privileging one regime over another, it is possible
to construct schemas of the signifying and postsignifying semiotics that
clearly illustrate the possibilities for concrete mixture.


The second aspect, complementary but very different, consists in the
possibility of transforming one abstract or pure semiotic into another,
by virtue of the translatability ensuing from overcoding as the special
characteristic of language. This time, it is no longer a question of
concrete mixed semiotics but of transformations of one abstract semiotic
into another (even though that transformation is not itself abstract, in
other words, effectively takes place without being performed by a
“translator” in the role of pure knower). All transformations taking a
given semiotic into the presignifying regime may be called \emph{analogical
transformations}; those that take it into the signifying regime are
**symbolic*; into the countersignifying regime, \emph{polemical or strategic};
into the postsignifying regime, \emph{consciousness-related or mimetic};
finally, transformations that blow apart semiotics systems or regimes of
signs on the plane of consistency of a positive absolute
deterritorialization are called \emph{diagrammatic}. A transformation is not
the same thing as a statement in a pure semiotic; nor even an ambiguous
statement requiring a whole pragmatic analysis to determine the semiotic
it belongs to; nor a statement belonging to a mixed semiotic (although
the transformation may have that effect). A transformational statement
marks the way in which a semiotic translates for its own purposes a
statement originating elsewhere, and in so doing diverts it, leaving
untransformable residues and actively resisting the inverse
transformation. Furthermore, transformations are not limited to the ones
we just listed. It is always through transformation that a new semiotic
is created in its own right. Translations can be creative. New pure
regimes of signs are formed through transformation and translation.
Again, there is no general semiology but rather a transsemiotic.


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-37.png}
\caption[]{\noindent (1) The point of subjectification, replacing
the center of signfiance. (2) The two faces turned away from each other.
(3) The subject of enunciation resulting from the point of
subjectification and the turning away. (4) The subject of the statement,
into which the subject of enunciation recoils. (5) The succession of
finite linear proceedings accompanied by a new form of priest and a new
bureaucracy. (6) The line of flight, which is freed but still segmented,
remaining negative and blocked.}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


In analogical transformations, we often see sleep, drugs, and amorous
rapture form expressions that translate into presignifying regimes the
subjective or signifying regimes one wishes to impose upon the
expressions, but which they resist by themselves imposing upon these
regimes an unexpected segmentarity and polyvocality. Christianity
underwent strange creative translations in its transmission to
“barbarian” or even “savage” peoples. The introduction of monetary signs
into certain commercial circuits in Africa caused those signs to undergo
an analogical transformation that was very difficult to control (except
when the circuits underwent a destructive transformation instead).\footnote{For example, when the whites introduced money to the Siane of New Guinea, the latter started off by translating the bills and coins into two categories of nonconvertible goods. See Maurice Godelier, “Economic politique et anthropologie économique,” \emph{L’Homme}, vol. 14, no. 3 (September–December 1964), p. 123.}
The songs of black Americans, including, especially, the words, would be
a better example, since they show how the slaves “translated” the
English signifier and made presignifying or even countersignifying use
of the language, blending it with their own African languages just as
they blended old African work songs with their new forced labor; these
songs also show how, with Christianization and the abolition of slavery,
the slaves underwent a proceeding of “subjectification” or even
“individuation” that transformed their music, while the music
simultaneously transformed the proceeding by analogy; and also how
unique problems of “faciality” were posed when whites in “blackface”
appropriated the words and songs and blacks responded by darkening their
faces another hue, taking back their dances and songs, even transforming
or translating those of the whites.\footnote{On these translations-transformations, see LeRoi Jones, \emph{Blues People} (New York: Morrow, 1963), chapters 3–7.} Of course, the crudest and most
visible transformations were in the other direction: the symbolic
translations occurring when the signifier takes power. The preceding
examples concerning monetary signs and rhythmic regimes can be repeated
in the opposite direction. The passage from an African dance to a white
dance often exhibits a consciousness-related or mimetic translation,
accompanied by a power takeover by signifiance and subjectification.
(“In Africa the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the
phallus becomes erect and is handled like a banana it is not a ‘personal
hard-on’ we see but a tribal erection\dots{}. The hoochie-koochie dancer of
the big city dances alone—a fact of staggering significance. The law
forbids response, forbids participation. Nothing is left of the
primitive rite but the ‘suggestive’ movements of the body. What they
suggest varies with \emph{the individual observer}.”)\footnote{Miller, \emph{Sexus}, pp. 479–480.}


It is not simply linguistic, lexical, or even syntactic transformations
that determine the importance of a true semiotic translation but the
opposite. Crazy talk is not enough. In each case we must judge whether
what we see is an adaptation of an old semiotic, a new variety of a
particular mixed semiotic, or the process of creation of an as yet
unknown regime. For example, it is relatively easy to stop saying “I,”
but that does not mean that you have gotten away from the regime of
subjectification; conversely, you can keep on saying “I,” just for
kicks, and already be in another regime in which personal pronouns
function only as fictions. Signifiance and interpretation are so
thick-skinned, they form such a sticky mixture with subjectification,
that it is easy to believe that you are outside them when you are in
fact still secreting them. People sometimes denounce interpretation yet
show so signifying a face that they simultaneously impose interpretation
upon the subject, which continues to nourish itself on it in order to
survive. Who can really believe that psychoanalysis is capable of
changing a semiotic amassing every deception? The only change there has
been is a role switch. Instead of a patient who signifies and a
psychoanalyst who interprets, we now have a signifying analyst and it is
the patient who does all the interpreting. In the antipsychiatric
experiment of Kingsley Hall, Mary Barnes, a former nurse turned
“schizophrenic,” embraces the new semiotic of the Voyage, only to
arrogate to herself a veritable power in the community and reintroduce
as a collective delusion the worst kind of psychoanalytic regime of
interpretation (“She \emph{interpreted} everything that was done for her, or
for anyone else for that matter\dots{}”).\footnote{Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, \emph{Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness} (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 233. The failure of the antipsychiatry experiment of Kingsley Hall apparently was due as much to these internal factors as to external circumstances.} A highly stratified semiotic is
difficult to get away from. Even a presignifying, or countersignifying,
semiotic, even an asignifying diagram, harbors knots of coincidence just
waiting to form virtual centers of signifiance and points of
subjectification. Of course, an operation of translation is not easy
when it is a question of destroying a dominant atmospheric semiotic. One
of the things of profound interest in Castaneda’s books, under the
influence of drugs, or other things, and of a change of atmosphere, is
precisely that they show how the Indian manages to combat the mechanisms
of interpretation and instill in the disciple a presignifying semiotic,
or even an asignifying diagram: Stop! You’re making me tired!
Experiment, don’t signify and interpret! Find your own places,
territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight!
Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood
and Western semiology. “Don Juan stated that in order to arrive at
‘seeing’ one first had to ‘stop the world.’ ‘Stopping the world’ was
indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which
the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of
interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped
by a set of circumstances alien to the flow.”\footnote{Carlos Castaneda, \emph{Journey to Ixtlan} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 14.} In short, a true
semiotic transformation appeals to all kinds of variables, not only
external ones, but also variables implicit to language, internal to
statements.


Pragmatics, then, already displays two components. The first could be
called \emph{generative} since it shows how the various abstract regimes form
concrete mixed semiotics, with what variants, how they combine, and
which one is predominant. The second is the \emph{transformational}
component, which shows how these regimes of signs are translated into
each other, especially when there is a creation of a new regime.
Generative pragmatics makes tracings of mixed semiotics;
transformational pragmatics makes maps of transformations. Although a
mixed semiotic does not necessarily imply effective creativity, and may
content itself with combinatory possibilities without veritable
transformation, it is still the transformational component that accounts
for the originality of a regime as well as for the novelty of the mixes
it enters at a given moment in a given domain. This second component is
therefore the more profound, and it is the only means of measuring the
elements of the first component.\footnote{“Generative” and “transformational” are Chomsky’s terms. For him, the transformational is precisely the best and most profound way of realizing the generative; we, however, are using the terms in a different sense.} For example, we may ask when
statements of the Bolshevik type first appeared, and how Leninism, at
the time of the break with the social democrats, effected a veritable
transformation that created an original semiotic, even if its fall into
the mixed semiotic of Stalinist organization was inevitable. In an
exemplary study, Jean-Pierre Faye did a detailed analysis of the
transformations that produced Nazism, viewed as a system of new
statements in a given social field. At what moment is a regime of signs
established, and in what domain? Throughout an entire people? In a
fraction of that people? In a more or less localizable margin inside a
psychiatric hospital? (For as we have seen we can find a semiotic of
subjectification in the ancient history of the Jews, but also in
psychiatric diagnosis in the nineteenth century, with, of course,
profound variations and even veritable transformations in the
corresponding semiotic.) All of these questions fall within the purview
of pragmatics. There is no question that the most profound
transformations and translations of our time are not occurring in
Europe. Pragmatics should reject the idea of an invariant immune from
transformation, even if it is the invariant of a dominant
“grammaticality.” For language is a political affair before it is an
affair for linguistics; even the evaluation of degrees of grammaticality
is a political matter.


What is a semiotic, in other words, a regime of signs or a formalization
of expression? They are simultaneously more and less than language.
Language as a whole is defined by “superlinearity,” its condition of
possibility; individual languages are defined by constants, elements,
and relations of a phonological, syntactical, and semantic nature.
Doubtless, every regime of signs effectuates the condition of
possibility of language and utilizes language elements, but that is all.
No regime can be identical to that condition of possibility, and no
regime has the property of constants. As Foucault clearly shows, regimes
of signs are only \emph{functions of existence} of language that sometimes
span a number of languages and are sometimes distributed within a single
language; they coincide neither with a structure nor with units of a
given order, but rather intersect them and cause them to appear in space
and time. This is the sense in which regimes of signs are assemblages of
enunciation, which cannot be adequately accounted for by any linguistic
category: \emph{what makes a proposition or even a single word a “statement”}
pertains to implicit presuppositions that cannot be made explicit, that
mobilize pragmatic variables proper to enunciation (incorporeal
transformations). This precludes explaining an assemblage in terms of
the signifier or the subject, because both pertain to variables of
enunciation within the assemblage. It is signifiance and
subjectification that presuppose the assemblage, not the reverse. The
names we gave to the regimes of signs (“presignifying,” “signifying,”
“countersignifying,” “postsignifying”) would remain evolutionist if
heterogeneous functions or varieties of assemblages did not effectively
correspond to them (segmentarization, signifiance and interpretation,
numeration, subjectification). Regimes of signs are thus defined by
variables that are internal to enunciation but remain external to the
constants of language and irreducible to linguistic categories.


But at this point, everything turns around, and the reasons why a regime
of signs is less than language also become the reasons why it is more
than language. Only one side of the assemblage has to do with
enunciation or formalizes expression; on its other side, inseparable
from the first, it formalizes contents, it is a machinic assemblage or
an assemblage of bodies. Now contents are not “signifieds” dependent
upon a signifier in any way, nor are they “objects” in any kind of
relation of causality with the subject. They have their own
formalization and have no relation of symbolic correspondence or linear
causality with the form of expression: the two forms are in reciprocal
presupposition, and they can be abstracted from each other only in a
very relative way because they are two sides of a single assemblage. We
must therefore arrive at something in the assemblage itself that is
still more profound than these sides and can account for both of the
forms in presupposition, forms of expression or regimes of signs
(semiotic systems) and forms of content or regimes of bodies (physical
systems). This is what we call the \emph{abstract machine}, which constitutes
and conjugates all of the assemblage’s cutting edges of
deterritorialization.\footnote{Michel Foucault has developed, in successive levels, a theory of statements addressing all of these problems. (1) In \emph{The Archaeology of Knowledge}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault distinguishes two kinds of “multiplicities,” of content and of expression, which are not reducible to relations of correspondence or causality, but are in reciprocal presupposition. (2) In \emph{Discipline and Punish}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), he looks for an agency capable of accounting for the two imbricated, heterogeneous forms, and finds it in assemblages of power, or micropowers. (3) But these collective assemblages (school, army, factory, hospital, prison, etc.) are only degrees or singularities in an abstract “diagram,” which for its part has only matter and function (the unspecified multiplicity of human beings to be controlled). (4) \emph{The History of Sexuality. Vol. I, An Introduction}, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), takes yet another direction since assemblages are no longer related to and contrasted with a diagram, but rather to a “biopolitics of population” as an abstract machine. Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.} We must say that the abstract machine is
necessarily “much more” than language. When linguists (following
Chomsky) rise to the idea of a purely language-based abstract machine,
our immediate objection is that their machine, far from being too
abstract, is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of
expression and to alleged universals that presuppose language.
Abstracting content is an operation that appears all the more relative
and inadequate when seen from the viewpoint of abstraction itself. A
true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself
between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a
single plane of consistency, which in turn formalizes contents and
expressions according to strata and reterritorializations. The abstract
machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of
its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction within itself
between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides
over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains, and
territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal,
any more than it is semiotic; it is \emph{diagrammatic} (it knows nothing of
the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It
operates by \emph{matter}, not by substance; by \emph{function}, not by form.
Substances and forms are of expression “or” of content. But functions
are not yet “semiotically” formed, and matters are not yet “physically”
formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function—a diagram
independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it
will distribute.


We define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which nothing
but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor
form, neither content nor expression.\footnote{Louis Hjelmslev proposed a very important conception of “matter” or “purport” (sens) as unformed, amorphous, or formless: \emph{Prolegomena to a Theory of Language}, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), sec. 13, pp. 47–60, and \emph{Essais linguistiques} (Paris: Minuit, 1971), pp. 58ff. (see also the preface by François Rastier, p. 9).} Substance is a formed matter,
and matter is a substance that is unformed either physically or
semiotically. Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are
really distinct from each other, function has only “traits,” of content
and of expression, between which it establishes a connection: it is no
longer even possible to tell whether it is a particle or a sign. A
matter-content having only degrees of intensity, resistance,
conductivity, heating, stretching, speed, or tardiness; and a
function-expression having only “tensors,” as in a system of
mathematical, or musical, writing. Writing now functions on the same
level as the real, and the real materially writes. The diagram retains
the most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized
expression, in order to conjugate them. Maximum deterritorialization
sometimes starts from a trait of content and sometimes from a trait of
expression; that trait is said to be “deterritorializing” in relation to
the other precisely because it diagrams it, carries it off, raises it to
its own power. The most deterritorialized element causes the other
element to cross a threshold enabling a conjunction of their respective
deterritorializations, a shared acceleration. This is the abstract
machine’s absolute, positive deterritorialization. That is why
**diagrams* must be distinguished from \emph{indexes}, which are territorial
signs, but also from \emph{icons}, which pertain to reterritorialization, and
from \emph{symbols}, which pertain to relative or negative
deterritorialization.\footnote{The distinction between indexes, icons, and symbols comes from C. S. Peirce, \emph{Collected Papers}, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958). But his distinctions are based on signifier-signified relations (contiguity for the index, similitude for the icon, conventional rule for the symbol); this leads him to make the “diagram” a special case of the icon (the icon of relation). Peirce is the true inventor of semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First, indexes, icons, and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by territoriality-deterritorialization relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the diagram as a result seems to have a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol. On Peirce’s fundamental distinctions and the complex status of the diagram, one may refer to Jakobson’s analysis, “A la recherche de l’essence du langage,” in \emph{Problèmes du langage}, ed. Emile Benveniste (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).} 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 alone, but through an
abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity, effects
conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and
contents. This Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious
abstraction of a supposedly pure machine of expression. It is an
Absolute, but one that is neither undifferentiated nor transcendent.
Abstract machines thus have proper names (as well as dates), which of
course designate not persons or subjects but matters and functions. The
name of a musician or scientist is used in the same way as a painter’s
name designates a color, nuance, tone, or intensity: it is always a
question of a conjunction of Matter and Function. The double
deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is marked by a
Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In physics and
mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine, and in algebra
of a Galois abstract machine (defined precisely by an arbitrary line,
called the adjunctive line, which conjugates with a body taken as a
starting point), etc. There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract
machine functions directly in a matter.


Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no regimes of signs on the
diagrammatic level, or on the plane of consistency, because form of
expression is no longer really distinct from form of content. The
diagram knows only traits and cutting edges that are still elements of
content insofar as they are material and of expression insofar as they
are functional, but which draw one another along, form relays, and meld
in a shared deterritorialization: particles-signs. There is nothing
surprising in this, for the real distinction between form of expression
and form of content appears only with the strata, and is different on
each one. It is on the strata that the double articulation appears that
formalizes traits of expression and traits of content, each in its own
right, turning matters into physically or semiotically formed substances
and functions into forms of expression or content. Expression then
constitutes indexes, icons, or symbols that enter regimes or semiotic
systems. Content then constitutes bodies, things, or objects that enter
physical systems, organisms, and organizations. The deeper movement for
conjugating matter and function—absolute deterritorialization, identical
to the earth itself—appears only in the form of respective
territorialities, negative or relative deterritorializations, and
complementary reterritorializations. All of this culminates in a
language stratum that installs an abstract machine on the level of
expression and takes the abstraction of content even further, tending to
strip it of any form of its own (the imperialism of language, the
pretensions to a general semiology). In short, the strata substantialize
diagrammatic matters and separate a formed plane of content from a
formed plane of expression. They hold expressions and contents,
separately substantialized and formalized, in the pincers of a double
articulation assuring their independence and real distinction and
enthroning a dualism that endlessly reproduces and redivides. They
shatter the continuums of intensity, introducing breaks between
different strata and within each stratum. They prevent conjunctions of
flight from forming and crush the cutting edges of deterritorialization,
either by effecting reterritorializations that make these movements
merely relative, or by assigning certain of the lines an entirely
negative value, or again by segmenting them, blocking them, plugging
them, or plunging them into a kind of black hole.


Above all, diagrammaticism should not be confused with an operation of
the axiomatic type. Far from drawing creative lines of flight and
conjugating traits of positive deterritorialization, axiomatics blocks
all lines, subordinates them to a punctual system, and halts the
geometric and algebraic writing systems that had begun to run off in all
directions. This happened in relation to the question of indeterminism
in physics: a “reordering” was undertaken to reconcile it with physical
determinism. Mathematical writing systems were axiomatized, in other
words, restratified, resemiotized, and material flows were
rephysicalized. It is as much a political as a scientific affair:
science must not go crazy. Hilbert and de Broglie were as much
politicians as scientists: they reestablished order. An axiomatization,
a semiotization, a physicalization, is not a diagram but in fact the
opposite of a diagram. The program of a stratum, against the diagram of
the plane of consistency. This does not, however, preclude the diagram’s
heading back down the road to escape and scattering new, singular
abstract machines (the mathematical creation of improbable functions was
carried out in opposition to axiomatization, and the material invention
of unfindable particles in opposition to physicalization). Science as
such is like everything else; madness is as intrinsic to it as
reorderings. The same scientists may participate in both aspects, having
their own madness, police, signifiances, or subjectifications, as well
as their own abstract machines, all in their capacity as scientists. The
phrase “the politics of science” is a good designation for these
currents, which are internal to science and not simply circumstances and
State factors that act upon it from the outside, leading it to make
an atomic bomb
here and embark upon a space program there. These political influences
or determinations would not exist if science itself did not have its own
poles, oscillations, strata, and destratifications, its own lines of
flight and reorderings, in short, the more or less potential events of
its own politics, its own particular “polemics,” its own internal war
machine (of which thwarted, persecuted, or hindered scientists are
historically a part). It is not enough to say that axiomatics does not
take invention and creation into account: it possesses a deliberate will
to halt or stabilize the diagram, to take its place by lodging itself on
a level of coagulated abstraction too large for the concrete but too
small for the real. We will see in what sense this is the “capitalist”
level.


We cannot, however, content ourselves with a dualism between the plane
of consistency and its diagrams and abstract machines on the one hand,
and the strata and their programs and concrete assemblages on the other.
Abstract machines do not exist only on the plane of consistency, upon
which they develop diagrams; they are already present enveloped or
“encasted” in the strata in general, or even erected on particular
strata upon which they simultaneously organize a form of expression and
a form of content. What is illusory in the second case is the idea of an
exclusively expressive or language-based abstract machine, not the idea
of an abstract machine internal to the stratum and accounting for the
relativity of those two distinct forms. Thus there are two complementary
movements, one by which abstract machines work the strata and are
constantly setting things loose, another by which they are effectively
stratified, effectively captured by the strata. \emph{On the one hand},
strata could never organize themselves if they did not harness
diagrammatic matters or functions and formalize them from the standpoint
of both expression and content; every regime of signs, and even
signifiance and subjectification, is still a diagrammatic effect
(although relativized and negativized). \emph{On the other hand}, abstract
machines would never be present, even on the strata, if they did not
have the power or potentiality to extract and accelerate destratified
particles-signs (the passage to the absolute). Consistency is neither
totalizing nor structuring; rather, it is deterritorializing (a
biological stratum, for example, evolves not according to statistical
phenomena but rather according to cutting edges of
deterritorialization). The security, tranquillity, and homeostatic
equilibrium of the strata are thus never completely guaranteed: to
regain a plane of consistency that inserts itself into the most diverse
systems of stratification and jumps from one to the other, it suffices
to prolong the lines of flight working the strata, to connect the dots,
to conjugate the processes of deterritorialization. We have seen that
signifiance and interpretation, consciousness and passion, can prolong
themselves following these lines, and at the same time open out onto a
properly diagrammatic experience. All of these states or modes of the
abstract machine coexist in what we call the \emph{machinic assemblage}. The
assemblage has two poles or vectors: one vector is oriented toward the
strata, upon which it distributes territorialities, relative
deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the other is oriented
toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon which it
conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the
absolute of the earth. It is along its stratic vector that the
assemblage differentiates a form of expression (from the standpoint of
which it appears as a collective assemblage of enunciation) from a form
of content (from the standpoint of which it appears as a machinic
assemblage of bodies); it fits one form to the other, one manifestation
to the other, placing them in reciprocal presupposition. But along its
diagrammatic or destratified vector, it no longer has two sides; all it
retains are traits of expression and content from which it extracts
degrees of deterritorialization that add together and cutting edges that
conjugate.


A regime of signs has more than just two components. It has, in fact,
four of them, which form the object of Pragmatics. The first was the
**generative* component, which shows how a form of expression located on
the language stratum always appeals to several combined regimes, in
other words, how every regime of signs or semiotic is concretely mixed.
On the level of this component, one \emph{can} abstract forms of content,
most successfully if emphasis is placed on the mixture of regimes in the
form of expression: one should not, however, conclude from this the
predominance of a regime constituting a general semiology and unifying
forms. The second, \emph{transformational}, component, shows how one abstract
regime can be translated, transformed into another, and especially how
it can be created from other regimes. This second component is obviously
more profound, because all mixed regimes presuppose these
transformations from one regime to another, past, present, or potential
(as a function of the creation of new regimes). Once again, one
abstracts, or can abstract, content, since the analysis is limited to
metamorphoses internal to the form of expression, even though the form
of expression is not adequate to account for them. The third component
is \emph{diagrammatic}: it consists in taking regimes of signs or forms of
expression and extracting from them particles-signs that are no longer
formalized but instead constitute unformed traits capable of combining
with one another. This is the height of abstraction, but also the moment
at which abstraction becomes real; everything operates through
abstract-real machines (which have names and dates). One can abstract
forms of content, but one must simultaneously abstract forms of
expression; for what is retained of each are only unformed traits. That
is why an abstract machine that would operate purely on the level of
language is an absurdity. It is clear that this diagrammatic component
is in turn more profound than the transformational component: the
creations-transformations of a regime of signs operate by the emergence
of ever-new abstract machines. Finally, the last, properly \emph{machinic},
component is meant to show how abstract machines are effectuated in
concrete assemblages; it is these assemblages that give distinct form to
traits of expression, but not without doing the same for traits of
content—the two forms being in reciprocal presupposition, or having a
necessary, unformed relation that once again prevents the form of
expression from behaving as though it were self-sufficient (although it
is independent or distinct in a strictly formal way).


Thus pragmatics (or schizoanalysis) can be represented by four circular
components that bud and form rhizomes.


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-38.png}
\caption[]{\noindent (1) The generative component: the study of
concrete mixed semiotics; their mixtures and variations. (2) The
transformational component: the study of pure semiotics; their
transformations-translations and the creation of new semiotics. (3) The
diagrammatic component: the study of abstract machines, from the
standpoint of semiotically unformed matters in relation to physically
unformed matters. (4) The machinic component: the study of the
assemblages that effectuate abstract machines, simultaneously
semiotizing matters of expression and physicalizing matters of
content.}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


Pragmatics as a whole would consist in this: making a \emph{tracing} of the
mixed semiotics, under the generative component; making the
transformational \emph{map} of the regimes, with their possibilities for
translation and creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings;
making the \emph{diagram} of the abstract machines that are in play in each
case, either as potentialities or as effective emergences; outlining the
**program* of the assemblages that distribute everything and bring a
circulation of movement with alternatives, jumps, and mutations.


For example, in considering a given “proposition,” in other words, a
verbal aggregate defined syntactically, semantically, and logically as
the expression of an individual or group (“I love you” or “I am
jealous”), one would begin by asking to which “statement” this
proposition corresponds in the group or individual (for the same
proposition can be tied to completely different statements). This
question means: What regime of signs is the proposition taken up by and
without which its syntactical, semantic, and logical elements would
remain totally empty universal conditions? What nonlinguistic element,
or variable of enunciation, gives it consistency? There is a
presignifying “I love you” of the collective type in which, as Miller
says, a dance weds all the women of the tribe; there is a
countersignifying “I love you” of the distributive and polemical type
that has to do with war and relations of force (the “I love you” of
Penthesilea and Achilles); there is an “I love you” that is addressed to
a center of signifiance and uses interpretation to make a whole series
of signifieds correspond to the signifying chain; and there is a
postsignifying or passional “I love you” that constitutes a proceeding
beginning from a point of subjectification, then another, and yet
another. Similarly, the proposition “I am jealous” is clearly not the
same statement in the passional regime of subjectification as in the
paranoid regime of signifiance: these are two distinct delusions.
Second, once it has been determined which statement the proposition
corresponds to in a given group or individual at a given time, one would
look into the possibilities not only of mixture but also of translation
and transformation into another regime, or into statements belonging to
other regimes; one would look at what passes and does not pass in such a
transformation, what remains irreducible and what flows. Third, one
could try to create new, as yet unknown statements for that proposition,
even if the result were a patois of sensual delight, physical and
semiotic systems in shreds, asubjective affects, signs without
signifiance where syntax, semantics, and logic are in collapse. This
research should go from the worst to the best since it would cover
precious, metaphorical, or stultifying regimes as well as
cries-whispers, feverish improvisations, becomings-animal,
becomings-molecular, real transsexualities, continuums of intensity,
constitutions of bodies without organs \dots{} These two poles are
inseparable; they entertain perpetual relations of transformation,
conversion, jumping, falling, and rising. This final research
simultaneously brings into play, on the one hand, abstract machines,
diagrams and diagrammatic functions, and, on the other hand, machinic
assemblages, the formal distinctions they make between expression and
content, and their investments of words and organs according to a
relation of reciprocal presupposition. For example, the “I love you” of
courtly love: What is its diagram, what abstract machine emerges, and
what is the new assemblage? These questions apply as much to
destratification as to the organization of strata. In short, there are
no syntactically, semantically, or logically definable propositions that
transcend or loom above statements. All methods for the
transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language
with universals, from Russell’s logic to Chomsky’s grammar, have fallen
into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a
level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of
signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute
an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is
the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes
of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic
assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or
logic. There is no universal prepositional logic, nor is there
grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself.
“Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines,
assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the
stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of
language and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to
logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental
element upon which all the rest depend.

\chapter{6. November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-6}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-6}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-39.png}
\caption[]{\noindent The Dogon Egg and the Distribution of
Intensities}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it
preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is
preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can’t desire without making
one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation,
already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long
as you don’t. This is not reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it
can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well
as desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set
of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach
it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is
this BwO?—But you’re already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping
like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler and
nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight—fight
and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous
defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On
November 28, 1947, Artaud declares war on the organs: \emph{To be done with
the judgment of God}, “for you can tie me up if you wish, but there is
nothing more useless than an organ.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done With the Judgement of God,” \emph{Selected Writings}, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 571.]} Experimentation: not only
radiophonic but also biological and political, incurring censorship and
repression. Corpus and Socius, politics and experimentation. They will
not let you experiment in peace.


The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of
organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them. A long procession.
The \emph{hypochondriac body}: the organs are destroyed, the damage has
already been done, nothing happens anymore. “Miss X claims that she no
longer has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has
left is the skin and bones of a disorganized body. These are her own
words.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Jules Cotard, \emph{Etard sur les maladies cérébrates et mentales} (Paris: Braillière, 1891).]} The \emph{paranoid body}: the organs are continually under
attack by outside forces, but are also restored by outside energies.
(“He lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost
without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with
shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx with
his food, etc. But divine miracles (‘rays’) always restored what had
been destroyed.”)\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Dr. Schreber’s \emph{Memoirs}, quoted by Sigmund Freud, \emph{Notes on a Case of Paranoia}, vol. 12, \emph{Standard Edition}, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 17.]} The \emph{schizo body}, waging its own active internal
struggle against the organs, at the price of catatonia. Then the
**drugged body*, the experimental schizo: “The human body is scandalously
inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not
have one all-purpose hole to eat \emph{and} eliminate? We could seal up nose
and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs
where it should have been in the first place.”\footnote{William Burroughs, \emph{Naked Lunch} (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 131.} The \emph{masochist
body}: it is poorly understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a
question of the BwO. It has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes,
anus, urethra, breasts, and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up
to stop the organs from working; flayed, as if the organs clung to the
skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight.


Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified,
sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance?
So why these examples, why must we start there? Emptied bodies instead
of full ones. What happened? Were you cautious enough? Not wisdom,
caution. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of
caution. Many have been defeated in this battle. Is it really so sad and
dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your
lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking
with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk
on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe
with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the
stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love,
Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says, “Stop, find your self
again,” we should say instead, “Let’s go further still, we haven’t found
our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self.” Substitute
forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your
body without organs. Find out how to make it. It’s a question of life
and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is
played out.


“Mistress, 1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight, for
ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2) One
hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin
sewing, you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the skin around the
glans to the glans itself, preventing the top from tearing; you sew the
scrotum to the skin of the thighs. You sew the breasts, securely
attaching a button with four holes to each nipple. You may connect them
with an elastic band with buttonholes—\emph{Now you go on to the second
phase}: 4) You can choose either to turn me over on the table so I am
tied lying on my stomach, but with my legs together, or to bind me to
the post with my wrists together, and my legs also, my whole body
tightly bound; 5) You whip my back buttocks thighs, a hundred lashes at
least; 6) You sew my buttocks together, all the way up and down the
crack of my ass. Tightly, with a doubled thread, each stitch knotted. If
I am on the table, now tie me to the post; 7) You give me fifty thrashes
on the buttocks; 8) If you wish to intensify the torture and carry out
your threat from last time, stick the pins all the way into my buttocks
as far as they go; 9) Then you may tie me to the chair; you give me
thirty thrashes on the breasts and stick in the smaller pins; if you
wish, you may heat them red-hot beforehand, all or some. I should be
tightly bound to the chair, hands behind my back so my chest sticks out.
I haven’t mentioned burns, only because I have a medical exam coming up
in awhile, and they take a long time to heal.” This is not a phantasy,
it is a program: There is an essential difference between the
psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy and the antipsychiatric
experimentation of the program. Between the phantasy, an interpretation
that must itself be interpreted, and the motor program of
experimentation.\footnote{The opposition program-phantasy appears clearly in the work of Michel de M’uzan, in relation to a case of masochism. See M’uzan in \emph{La sexualité perverse}, ed. Isle and Robert Barande et al. (Paris: Payot, 1972), p. 36. Although he does not specifically discuss this opposition, M’uzan uses the notion of the program to question the themes of Oedipus, anxiety, and castration.} The BwO is what remains when you take everything
away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and
subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it
translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into
phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because
it botches the BwO.


Something will happen. Something is already happening. But what comes to
pass on the BwO is not exactly the same as how you make yourself one.
However, one is included in the other. Hence the two phases set forth in
the preceding letter. \emph{Why two clearly distinguished phases}, when the
same thing is done in both cases—sewing and flogging? One phase is for
the fabrication of the BwO, the other to make something circulate on it
or pass across it; the same procedures are nevertheless used in both
phases, but they must be done over, done twice. What is certain is that
the masochist has made himself a BwO under such conditions that the BwO
can no longer be populated by anything but intensities of pain, \emph{pain
waves}. It is false to say that the masochist is looking for pain but
just as false to say that he is looking for pleasure in a particularly
suspensive or roundabout way. The masochist is looking for a type of BwO
that only pain can fill, or travel over, due to the very conditions
under which that BwO was constituted. Pains are populations, packs,
modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he engenders and augments.
The same goes for the drugged body and intensities of cold,
**refrigerator waves*. For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What type
is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means
(predetermining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what
comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is
unexpected and what expected? In short, there is a very special relation
of synthesis and analysis between a given type of BwO and what happens
on it: an \emph{a priori} synthesis by which something will necessarily be
produced in a given mode (but what it will be is not known) and an
infinite analysis by which what is produced on the BwO is already part
of that body’s production, is already included in the body, is already
on it (but at the price of an infinity of passages, divisions, and
secondary productions). It is a very delicate experimentation since
there must not be any stagnation of the modes or slippage in type: the
masochist and the drug user court these ever-present dangers that empty
their BwO’s instead of filling them.


You can fail twice, but it is the same failure, the same danger. Once at
the level of the constitution of the BwO and again at the level of what
passes or does not pass across it. You think you have made yourself a
good BwO, that you chose the right Place, Power (\emph{Puissance}), and
Collectivity (there is always a collectivity, even when you are alone),
and then nothing passes, nothing circulates, or something prevents
things from moving. A paranoid point, a point of blockage, an outburst
of delirium: it comes across clearly in \emph{Speed}, by William Burroughs,
Jr. Is it possible to locate this danger point, should the block be
expelled, or should one instead “love, honor, and serve degeneracy
wherever it surfaces”? To block, to be blocked, is that not still an
intensity? In each case, we must define what comes to pass and what does
not pass, what causes passage and prevents it. As in the meat circuit
according to Lewin, something flows through channels whose sections are
delimited by doors with gatekeepers, passers-on.\footnote{See Kurt Lewin’s description of the flow of meat in the American family, “Psychological Ecology,” \emph{Field Theory in Social Science}, ed. Dorwin Cartwright (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951), pp. 170–187.} Door openers and
trap closers, Malabars and Fierabras. The body is now nothing more than
a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels,
each with a proper name: a peopling of the BwO, a Metropolis that has to
be managed with a whip. What peoples it, what passes across it, what
does the blocking?


A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by
intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not
a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass.
It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The
BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a
**spatium* that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space,
nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given
degree—to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is
nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity,
intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about
that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals
energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at
zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension
of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation
of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients
and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation
and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all
independent of \emph{accessory forms} because the organs appear and function
here only as pure intensities.\footnote{Albert Dalcq, \emph{L’oeuf et son dynamisme organisateur} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941), p. 95: “Forms are contingent upon kinematic dynamism. It is secondary whether or not an orifice forms in the germ. All that counts is the process of immigration itself; what yields an orifice fissure or primitive line is not invagination, but pure chronological and quantitative variations.”} The organ changes when it crosses a
threshold, when it changes gradient. “No organ is constant as regards
either function or position,\dots{} sex organs sprout anywhere,\dots{} rectums open,
defecate and close,\dots{} the entire organism changes color and consistency
in split-second adjustments.”\footnote{Burroughs, \emph{Naked Lunch}, p. 8.} The tantric egg.


After all, is not Spinoza’s \emph{Ethics} the great book of the BwO? The
attributes are types or genuses of BwO’s, substances, powers, zero
intensities as matrices of production. The modes are everything that
comes to pass: waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and
gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting
from a given matrix. The masochist body as an attribute or genus of
substance, with its production of intensities and pain modes based on
its degree 0 of being sewn up. The drugged body as a different
attribute, with its production of specific intensities based on absolute
Cold = 0. (“Junkies always beef about \emph{The Cold} as
they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their
withered necks \dots{} pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm, he
wants to be cool-cooler-\emph{COLD}. But he wants The Cold like he wants His
Junk—\emph{NOT OUTSIDE} where it does him no good but \emph{INSIDE} so he can sit
around with a spine like a frozen hydraulic jack \dots{} his metabolism
approaching Absolute Zero.”)\footnote{Ibid., pp. xlv-xlvi.} Etc. The problem of whether there is a
substance of all substances, a single substance for all attributes,
becomes: \emph{Is there a totality of all BwO’s}? If the BwO is already a
limit, what must we say of the totality of all BwO’s? It is a problem
not of the One and the Multiple but of a fusional multiplicity that
effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one and the multiple.
A formal multiplicity of substantial attributes that, as such,
constitutes the ontological unity of substance. There is a continuum of
all of the attributes or genuses of intensity under a single substance,
and a continuum of the intensities of a certain genus under a single
type or attribute. A continuum of all substances in intensity and of all
intensities in substance. The uninterrupted continuum of the BwO. BwO,
immanence, immanent limit. Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics,
lovers—all BwO’s pay homage to Spinoza. The BwO is the \emph{field of
immanence} of desire, the \emph{plane of consistency} specific to desire
(with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any
exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure
that fills it).


Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of
immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on
desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent
ideal. Facing north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not
lack what it desires?). The priest carried out the first sacrifice,
named castration, and all the men and women of the north lined up behind
him, crying in cadence, “Lack, lack, it’s the common law.” Then, facing
south, the priest linked desire to pleasure. For there are hedonistic,
even orgiastic, priests. Desire will be assuaged by pleasure; and not
only will the pleasure obtained silence desire for a moment but the
process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting it, of
instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as
discharge: the priest carries out the second sacrifice, named
masturbation. Then, facing east, he exclaimed: \emph{Jouissance} is
impossible, but impossible \emph{jouissance} is inscribed in desire. For
that, in its very impossibility, is the Ideal, the “\emph{manque-à-jouir}
that is life.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: \emph{Jouissance}: “pleasure, enjoyment, orgasm.” In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the object of desire is irrevocably lost and the subject eternally split. \emph{Jouissance} is doubly impossible: life is a \emph{manque-à-jouir}, read as “lack of enjoyment,” because the true object of desire is unattainable; and it is a \emph{manque-à-jouir}, read as “a lack to be enjoyed,” because \emph{jouissance} as the orgasmic plenitude of union with a substitute object means the annulment of the constitutionally split subject. One of the necessary terms, the subject or the object, is always missing.]} The priest carried out the third sacrifice, phantasy
or the thousand and one nights, the one hundred twenty days, while the
men of the East chanted: Yes, we will be your phantasy, your ideal and
impossibility, yours and also our own. The priest did not turn to the
west. He knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he
thought that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules, that it led
nowhere and was uninhabited by people. But that is where desire was
lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other
directions, rediscovered or deterritorialized.


The most recent figure of the priest is the psychoanalyst, with his or
her three principles: Pleasure, Death, and Reality. Doubtless,
psychoanalysis demonstrated that desire is not subordinated to
procreation, or even to genitality. That was its modernism. But it
retained the essentials; it even found new ways of inscribing in desire
the negative law of lack, the external rule of pleasure, and the
transcendent ideal of phantasy. Take the interpretation of masochism:
when the ridiculous death instinct is not invoked, it is claimed that
the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can only get
it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to allay
or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochist’s suffering
is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the
pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure
is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through
suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible
because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire. There
is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were
filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or
impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what
distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being
suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. In short, the masochist uses
suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing
forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways, other
procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the
point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them.


Take a masochist who did not undergo psychoanalysis: “\emph{PROGRAM}\dots{} At
night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the
bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the
bath. Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and
thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should
be in a metal sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and
in the evening as the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days,
hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The
master will never approach her horse without the crop, and without using
it. If the animal should display impatience or rebelliousness, the reins
will be drawn tighter, the master will grab them and give the beast a
good thrashing.”\footnote{Roger Dupouy, “Du masochisme,” \emph{Annales médico-psychologiques}, series 12, vol. 2 (1929), p. 405.} What is this masochist doing? He seems to be
imitating a horse, \emph{Equus eroticus}, but that’s not it. Nor are the
horse and the master-trainer or mistress images of the mother or father.
Something entirely different is going on: a becoming-animal essential to
masochism. It is a question of forces. The masochist presents it this
way: \emph{Training axiom—destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace
them with transmitted forces}. In fact, it is less a destruction than an
exchange and circulation (“what happens to a horse can also happen to
me”). Horses are trained: humans impose upon the horse’s instinctive
forces transmitted forces that regulate the former, select, dominate,
overcode them. The masochist effects an inversion of signs: the horse
transmits its transmitted forces to him, so that the masochist’s innate
forces will in turn be tamed. There are two series, the horse’s (innate
force, force transmitted by the human being), and the masochist’s (force
transmitted by the horse, innate force of the human being). One series
explodes into the other, forms a circuit with it: an increase in power
or a circuit of intensities. The “master,” or rather the mistress-rider,
the equestrian, ensures the conversion of force and the inversion of
signs. The masochist constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously
draws and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body
without organs or plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the
mistress. “Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual
expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all
opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours\dots{}. Thus at the
mere thought of your boots, without even acknowledging it, I must feel
fear. In this way, \emph{it will no longer be women’s legs that have an
effect on me}, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your
caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will
give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never
would have had it otherwise.”\footnote{Ibid.} Legs are still organs, but the boots
now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO.


Similarly, or actually in a different way, it would be an error to
interpret courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of
transcendence. The renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its
infinite regress, testifies on the contrary to an achieved state in
which desire no longer lacks anything but fills itself and constructs
its own field of immanence. Pleasure is an affection of a person or a
subject; it is the only way for persons to “find themselves” in the
process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most
artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely
whether it is necessary to find oneself. Courtly love does not love the
self, any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or
religious way. It is a question of making a body without organs upon
which intensities pass, self and other—not in the name of a higher level
of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities
that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no
longer be said to be extensive. The field of immanence is not internal
to the self, but neither does it come from an external self or a
nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows no Selves
because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in
which they have fused. “Joy” in courtly love, the exchange of hearts,
the test or “assay”: everything is allowed, as long as it is not
external to desire or transcendent to its plane, or else internal to
persons. The slightest caress may be as strong as an orgasm; orgasm is a
mere fact, a rather deplorable one, in relation to desire in pursuit of
its principle. Everything is allowed: all that counts is for pleasure to
be the flow of desire itself, Immanence, instead of a measure that
interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms, namely, internal
lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority.\footnote{On courtly love, and its radical immanence rejecting both religious transcendence and hedonist exteriority, see René Nelli, \emph{L’érotique des troubadours} (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1974), in particular, vol. 1, pp. 267, 316, 358, and 370, and vol. 2, pp. 47, 53, and 75. (Also vol. 1, p. 128: one of the major differences between chivalric love and courtly love is that for “knights the valor by which one merits love is always \emph{external} to love,” whereas in the system of courtly love, the test is essentially internal to love; war valor is replaced by “sentimental heroism.” This is a mutation in the war machine.)} If pleasure
is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is
impossible to fill but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity, in
other words, the plane of consistency it draws in the course of its
process.


A great Japanese compilation of Chinese Taoist treatises was made in
**A.D.* 982–984. We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities
between female and male energy, with the woman playing the role of the
innate or instinctive force (Yin) stolen by or transmitted to the man in
such a way that the transmitted force of the man (Yang) in turn becomes
innate, all the more innate: an augmentation of powers.\footnote{Robert Van Gulik, \emph{Sexual Life in Ancient China} (Leiden: Brill, 1961); and Jean-François Lyotard’s discussion of it, \emph{Economie libidinale} (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 241–251.} The
condition for this circulation and multiplication is that the man not
ejaculate. It is not a question of experiencing desire as an internal
lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to produce a kind of
externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting an intensive
body without organs, Tao, a field of immanence in which desire lacks
nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or transcendent
criterion. It is true that the whole circuit can be channeled toward
procreative ends (ejaculation when the energies are right); that is how
Confucianism understood it. But this is true only for one side of the
assemblage of desire, the side facing the strata, organisms, State,
family \dots{} It is not true for the other side, the Tao side of
destratification that draws a plane of consistency proper to desire. Is
the Tao masochistic? Is courtly love Taoist? These questions are largely
meaningless. The field of immanence or plane of consistency must be
constructed. This can take place in very different social formations
through very different assemblages (perverse, artistic, scientific,
mystical, political) with different types of bodies without organs. It
is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and
techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is
whether the pieces can fit together, and at what price. Inevitably,
there will be monstrous crossbreeds. The plane of consistency would be
the totality of all BwO’s, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece
of which may be Chinese, another American, another medieval, another
petty perverse, but all in a movement of generalized
deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he
can, according to tastes she or he will have succeeded in abstracting
from a Self [\emph{Moi}], according to a politics or strategy successfully
abstracted from a given formation, according to a given procedure
abstracted from its origin.


We distinguish between: (1) BwO’s, which are different types, genuses,
or substantial attributes. For example, the Cold of the drugged BwO, the
Pain of the masochist BwO. Each has its degree 0 as its principle of
production (\emph{remissio}). (2) What happens on each type of BwO, in other
words, the modes, the intensities that are produced, the waves that pass
(\emph{latitudo}). (3) The potential totality of all BwO’s, the plane of
consistency (\emph{Omnitudo}, sometimes called the BwO). There are a number
of questions. Not only how to make oneself a BwO, and how to produce the
corresponding intensities without which it would remain empty (not
exactly the same question). But also how to reach the plane of
consistency. How to sew up, cool down, and tie together all the BwO’s.
If this is possible to do, it is only by conjugating the intensities
produced on each BwO, by producing a continuum of all intensive
continuities. Are not assemblages necessary to fabricate each BwO, is
not a great abstract Machine necessary to construct the plane of
consistency? Gregory Bateson uses the term \emph{plateau} for continuous
regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow
themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than
they allow themselves to build toward a climax; examples are certain
sexual, or aggressive, processes in Balinese culture.\footnote{Gregory Bateson, \emph{Steps to an Ecology of Mind} (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 113.} A plateau is
a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is
itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of
consistency. The BwO is a component of passage.


A rereading of \emph{Héliogabale} and \emph{Les Tarahumaras}. For Heliogabalus is
Spinoza, and Spinoza is Heliogabalus revived. And the Tarahumaras are
experimentation, peyote. Spinoza, Heliogabalus, and experimentation have
the same formula: anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the
unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the
multiple.\footnote{Artaud, \emph{Héliogabale}, in \emph{Oeuvres Complètes} (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 50–51. It is true that Artaud still presents the identity of the One and the Multiple as a dialectical unity, one that reduces the multiple by gathering it into the One. He makes Heliogabalus a kind of Hegelian. But that is a manner of speaking, for from the beginning multiplicity surpasses all opposition and does away with dialectical movement.} These two books by Artaud express the multiplicity of
fusion, fusionability as infinite zero, the plane of consistency, Matter
where no gods go; principles as forces, essences, substances, elements,
remissions, productions; manners of being or modalities as produced
intensities, vibrations, breaths, Numbers. Finally, the difficulty of
reaching this world of crowned Anarchy if you go no farther than the
organs (“the liver that turns the skin yellow, the brain wracked by
syphilis, the intestines that expel filth”) and if you stay locked into
the organism, or into a stratum that blocks the flows and anchors us in
this, our world.


We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the
opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the
organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization
of the organs called the organism. It is true that Artaud wages a
struggle against the organs, but at the same time what he is going
after, what he has it in for, is the organism: \emph{The body is the body.
Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is.
Organisms are the enemies of the body}.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Artaud, “The Body Is the Body,” trans. Roger McKeon, \emph{Semiotext(e)}, \emph{Anti-Oedipus}, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), p. 59.]} The BwO is not opposed to
the organs; rather, the BwO and its “true organs,” which must be
composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the organic
organization of the organs. The \emph{judgment of God}, the system of the
judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of
He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism,
because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart
so He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is
already that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit
and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body,
the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a
phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in
order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms,
functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized
transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers. “Tie me up if you wish.”
We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for
the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on a
stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where
the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings
that compose an organism—and also a signification and a subject—occur.
For the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO; it
is the BwO that undergoes it. It is in the BwO that the organs enter
into the relations of composition called the organism. The BwO howls:
“They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve
stolen my body!” The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and
makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is
stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratification
into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and the
plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation.
If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because
behind each stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum.
For many a stratum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the
judgment of God. A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of
consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of
the strata, and the surfaces of stratification that block it or make it
recoil.


Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words,
the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and
subjectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance
and interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You
will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your
body—otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and
signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you’re just a deviant.
You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation
recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp.
To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or \emph{n}
articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency,
experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never
interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place,
never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). What does it
mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we convey how
easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how
necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger.
You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You
invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive.
Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather
opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage,
circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and
distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations
measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actually, dismantling the
organism is no more difficult than dismantling the other two strata,
signifiance and subjectification. Signifiance clings to the soul just as
the organism clings to the body, and it is not easy to get rid of
either. And how can we unhook ourselves from the points of
subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality?
Tearing the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a means
of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from signifiance and
interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is
assuredly no more or less difficult than tearing the body away from the
organism. Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the
organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away from
signifiance and subjection one courts falsehood, illusion and
hallucination and psychic death. Artaud weighs and measures every word:
the conscious “knows what is good for it and what is of no value to it:
it knows which thoughts and feelings it can receive without danger and
with profit, and which are harmful to the exercise of its freedom. Above
all, it knows just how far its own being goes, and just how far it has
not yet gone or does not have the right to go without sinking into the
unreal, the illusory, the unmade, the unprepared \dots{} a \emph{Plane} which
normal consciousness does not reach but which \emph{Ciguri} allows us to
reach, and which is the very mystery of all poetry. But there is in
human existence another plane, obscure and formless, where consciousness
has not entered, and which surrounds it like an unilluminated extension
or a menace, as the case may be. And which itself gives off adventurous
sensations, perceptions. These are those shameless fantasies which
affect an unhealthy conscious\dots{}. I too have had false sensations and
perceptions and I have believed in them.”\footnote{Artaud, \emph{The Peyote Dance} (translation of \emph{Les Tarahumaras}), trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 38–39 [translation modified].}


You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and
you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if
only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances
demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you
have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to
enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You
don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly
destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied
and dreary bodies at the very beginning: \emph{they had emptied themselves of
their organs} instead of looking for the point at which they could
patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we
call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO:
either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but
nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This
is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify
it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an
action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then
instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black
hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified—organized,
signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that
can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal
collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is
how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the
opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find
potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight,
experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out
continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new
land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata
that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows
to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.
Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole “diagram,” as opposed to still
signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first
see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are;
then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we
are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of
the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself
for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum
of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when
needed to be plugged into other collective machines. Castaneda describes
a long process of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it
is with peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the
Indian forces him first to find a “place,” already a difficult
operation, then to find “allies,” and then gradually to give up
interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines
of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the
BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane,
necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants,
animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is
not “my” body without organs, instead the “me” (\emph{moi}) is on it, or what
remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds).


In the course of Castaneda’s books, the reader may begin to doubt the
existence of the Indian Don Juan, and many other things besides. But
that has no importance. So much the better if the books are a syncretism
rather than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment
rather than an account of an initiation. The fourth book, \emph{Tales of
Power}, is about the living distinction between the “Tonal” and the
“Nagual.” The \emph{tonal} seems to cover many disparate things: It is the
organism, and also all that is organized and organizing; but it is also
signifiance, and all that is signifying or signified, all that is
susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is memorizable in
the form of something recalling something else; finally, it is the Self
(\emph{Moi}), the subject, the historical, social, or individual person, and
the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including
God, the judgment of God, since it “makes up the rules by which it
apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the
world.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Carlos Castaneda, \emph{Tales of Power} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 125.]} Yet the tonal is only an island. For the \emph{nagual} is also
everything. And it is the same everything, but under such conditions
that the body without organs has replaced the organism and
experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer
has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their
continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation,
microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings,
becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual
or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems: it
includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the
strata, the organization of the organism, the interpretations and
explanations of the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The
nagual, on the contrary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an
organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are
there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood
memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colors and
sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don’t ask if
the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is “your
goddam mother” or something else entirely). There is no longer a Self
[\emph{Moi}] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is “a glowing fog, a dark
yellow mist” that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Ibid., p. 183.]}
The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all
of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only
at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off
the assault of the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the
tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns
immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only
outcome is death: “The tonal must be protected at any cost.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Ibid., p. 161.]}


We still have not answered the question of why there are so many
dangers, and so many necessary precautions. It is not enough to set up
an abstract opposition between the strata and the BwO. For the BwO
already exists in the strata as well as on the destratified plane of
consistency, but in a totally different manner. Take the organism as a
stratum: there is indeed a BwO that opposes the organization of the
organs we call the organism, but there is also a BwO of the organism
that belongs to that stratum. \emph{Cancerous tissue}: each instant, each
second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, proliferates and loses its
configuration, takes over everything; the organism must resubmit it to
its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also to
make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the
“other” BwO on the plane of consistency. Take the stratum of
signifiance: once again, there is a cancerous tissue, this time of
signifiance, a burgeoning body of the despot that blocks any circulation
of signs, as well as preventing the birth of the asignifying sign on the
“other” BwO. Or take a stifling body of subjectification, which makes a
freeing all the more unlikely by forbidding any remaining distinction
between subjects. Even if we consider given social formations, or a
given stratic apparatus within a formation, we must say that every one
of them has a BwO ready to gnaw, proliferate, cover, and invade the
entire social field, entering into relations of violence and rivalry as
well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money (inflation), but also a
BwO of the State, army, factory, city, Party, etc. If the strata are an
affair of coagulation and sedimentation, all a stratum needs is a high
sedimentation rate for it to lose its configuration and articulations,
and to form its own specific kind of tumor, within itself or in a given
formation or apparatus. The strata spawn their own BwO’s, totalitarian
and fascist BwO’s, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency.
It is not enough to make a distinction between full BwO’s on the plane
of consistency and empty BwO’s on the debris of strata destroyed by a
too-violent destratification. We must also take into account cancerous
BwO’s in a stratum that has begun to proliferate. \emph{The three-body
problem}. Artaud said that outside the “plane” is another plane
surrounding us with “an unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case
may be.” It is a struggle and as such is never sufficiently clear. How
can we fabricate a BwO for ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO
of a fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or
hypochondriac? How can we tell the three Bodies apart? Artaud was
constantly grappling with this problem. The extraordinary composition of
**To Be Done with the Judgment of God*: he begins by cursing the
cancerous body of America, the body of war and money; he denounces the
strata, which he calls “caca”; to the strata he opposes the true Plane,
even if it is only peyote, the little trickle of the Tarahumaras; but he
also knows about the dangers of a too-sudden, careless destratification.
Artaud was constantly grappling with all of that, and flowed with it.
**Letter to Hitler*. “Dear Sir, In 1932 in the Ider Cafe in Berlin, on
one of the evenings when I made your acquaintance and shortly before you
took power, I showed you roadblocks on \emph{a map that was not just a map of
geography}, roadblocks against me, an act of force aimed in a certain
number of directions you indicated to me. Today Hitler I lift the
roadblocks I set down! The Parisians need gas. Yours, A.A.—P.S. Be it
understood, dear sir, that this is hardly an invitation, it is above all
a warning.”\footnote{See \emph{Cause commune}, no. 3 (October 1972).} That map that is not only a map of geography is
something like a BwO intensity map, where the roadblocks designate
thresholds and the gas, waves or flows. Even if Artaud did not succeed
for himself, it is certain that through him something has succeeded for
us all.


The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it
is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own
milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is the milieu
of pure intensity, spatium not extension, Zero intensity as principle of
production. There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth,
embryology and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic
egg: the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not
undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished
solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO.
The BwO is not “before” the organism; it is adjacent to it and is
continually in the process of constructing itself. If it is tied to
childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult regresses to the child
and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the child, like the
Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears from the
organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter that on
the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his
or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood
block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the
child “before” the adult, or the mother “before” the child: it is the
strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child,
their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the
variations on that map. The BwO is precisely this intense germen where
there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic
representation). This is what Freud failed to understand about
Weissmann: the child as the germinal contemporary of its parents. Thus
the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always \emph{a} body. It is no more
projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always a
contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute themselves on
the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the
organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more
than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradients.
“A” stomach, “an” eye, “a” mouth: the indefinite article does not lack
anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the
pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. The indefinite
article is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a
fragmented, splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO
is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments
in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the
undifferentiated in relation to a differentiable totality. There is a
distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive
indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside an
assemblage, and according to machinic connections operating on a BwO.
**Logos spermaticos*. The error of psychoanalysis was to understand BwO
phenomena as regressions, projections, phantasies, in terms of an
**image* of the body. As a result, it only grasps the flipside of the BwO
and immediately substitutes family photos, childhood memories, and
part-objects for a worldwide intensity map. It understands nothing about
the egg nor about indefinite articles nor about the contemporaneousness
of a continually self-constructing milieu.


The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one
desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the
field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of
too-sudden destratification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous
stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s
own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army,
police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There
is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation
or another. It is a problem not of ideology but of pure matter, a
phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cosmic matter.
That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing
whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to
distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous
bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing
false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which
pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification,
and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consistency
(keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for
the suicidal and the demented). The plane of consistency is not simply
that which is constituted by the sum of all BwO’s. There are things it
rejects; the BwO chooses, as a function of the abstract machine that
draws it. Even within a BwO (the masochist body, the drugged body,
etc.), we must distinguish what can be composed on the plane and what
cannot. There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there
also a possible use that would be in conformity with the plane of
consistency? Even paranoia: Is there a possibility of using it that way
in part? When we asked the question of the totality of all BwO’s,
considered as substantial attributes of a single substance, it should
have been understood, strictly speaking, to apply only to the plane. The
plane is the totality of the full BwO’s that have been selected (there
is no positive totality including the cancerous or empty bodies). What
is the nature of this totality? Is it solely logical? Or must we say
that each BwO, from a basis in its own genus, produces effects identical
or analogous to the effects other BwO’s produce from a basis in their
genera? Could what the drug user or masochist obtains also be obtained
in a different fashion in the conditions of the plane, so it would even
be possible to use drugs without using drugs, to get soused on pure
water, as in Henry Miller’s experimentations? Or is it a question of a
real passage of substances, an intensive continuum of all the BwO’s?
Doubtless, anything is possible. All we are saying is that the identity
of effects, the continuity of genera, the totality of all BwO’s, can be
obtained on the plane of consistency only by means of an abstract
machine capable of covering and even creating it, by assemblages capable
of plugging into desire, of effectively taking charge of desires, of
assuring their continuous connections and transversal tie-ins.
Otherwise, the BwO’s of the plane will remain separated by genus,
marginalized, reduced to means of bordering, while on the “other plane”
the emptied or cancerous doubles will triumph.

\chapter{7. Year Zero: Faciality}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-7}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-7}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-40.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


Earlier, we encountered two axes, signifiance and subjectification. We
saw that they were two very different semiotic systems, or even two
strata. Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it
inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without
a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and
redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in
twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is
situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the \emph{white
wall\Slash{}black hole} system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face
with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white
mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior
to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The form of the signifier in
language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential
listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choices
(“Hey, he seems angry\dots{}”; “He couldn’t say it\dots{}”; “You see my face when
I’m talking to you\dots{}”; “look at me carefully\dots{}”). A child, woman, mother,
man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not speak a general
language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to specific
faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones
of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance
any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate
significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether
consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not
form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make
it conform in advance to a dominant reality. The face itself is
redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of
signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The
face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off
of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The
face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break
through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness
or passion, the camera, the third eye.


Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that
constitutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The
face, at least the concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape \emph{on} the
white wall. It vaguely begins to appear \emph{in} the black hole. In film,
the close-up of the face can be said to have two poles: make the face
reflect light or, on the contrary, emphasize its shadows to the point of
engulfing it “in pitiless darkness.”\footnote{Josef von Sternberg, \emph{Fun in a Chinese Laundry} (New York: MacMillan, 1965), p. 324. [\emph{TRANS}: The English version of this phrase reads “merciful darkness.”]} A psychologist once said that
the face is a visual percept that crystallizes out of “different
varieties of vague luminosity without form or dimension.” A suggestive
whiteness, a hole that captures, a face. According to this account, the
dimensionless black hole and formless white wall are already there to
begin with. And there are already a number of possible combinations in
the system: either black holes distribute themselves on the white wall,
or the white wall unravels and moves toward a black hole combining all
black holes, hurtling them together or making them “crest.” Sometimes
faces appear on the wall, with their holes; sometimes they appear in the
hole, with their linearized, rolled-up wall. A horror story, the face is
a horror story. It is certain that the signifier does not construct the
wall that it needs all by itself; it is certain that subjectivity does
not dig its hole all alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come
ready-made. They are engendered by an \emph{abstract machine of faciality}
(\emph{visagéité}), which produces them at the same time as it gives the
signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black
hole\Slash{}white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but the abstract
machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of
its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it
produces, or will produce.


The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance
juncture when you are just falling asleep, or into a twilight state or
hallucinating, or doing an amusing physics experiment \dots{} Kafka’s novella,
“Blumfeld”:\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: “Blumfeld. An Elderly Gentleman.” \emph{The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka}, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), pp. 183–205.]} the bachelor returns home in the evening to find two
little ping-pong balls jumping around by themselves on the “wall”
constituted by the floor. They bounce everywhere and even try to hit him
in the face. They apparently contain other, still smaller, electric
balls. Blumfeld finally manages to lock them up in the black hole of a
wardrobe. The scene continues the next day when Blumfeld tries to give
the balls to a small, feebleminded boy and two grimacing little girls,
and then at the office, where he encounters his two grimacing and
feebleminded assistants, who want to make off with a broom. In a
wonderful ballet by Debussy and Nijinsky, a little tennis ball comes
bouncing onto the stage at dusk, and at the end another ball appears in
a similar fashion. This time, between the two balls, two girls and a boy
who watches them develop passional dance and facial traits in vague
luminosities (curiosity, spite, irony, ecstasy\dots{}).\footnote{On this ballet, see Jean Barraqué’s \emph{Debussy} (Paris: Seuil, 1977), which cites the text of the argument, pp. 166–171.} There is nothing
to explain, nothing to interpret. It is the pure abstract machine of a
twilight state. White wall\Slash{}black hole? But depending on the
combinations, the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white.
The balls can bounce off of a wall or spin into a black hole. Even upon
impact they can have the relative role of a hole in relation to the
wall, just as when they are rolling straight ahead they can have the
relative role of a wall in relation to the hole they are heading for.
They circulate in the white wall\Slash{}black hole system. Nothing in all of
this resembles a face, yet throughout the system faces are distributed
and faciality traits organized. Nevertheless, the abstract machine can
be effectuated in other things besides faces, but not in any order, and
not without the necessary foundation (\emph{raisons}).


The face has been a major concern of American psychology, in particular
the relation between the mother and the child through eye-to-eye
contact. Four-eye machine? Let us recall certain stages in the research:
(1) Isakower’s studies on falling asleep, in which so-called
proprioceptive sensations of a manual, buccal, cutaneous, or even
vaguely visual nature recall the infantile mouth-breast relation. (2)
Lewin’s discovery of a \emph{white screen} of the dream, which is ordinarily
covered by visual contents but remains white when the only dream
contents are proprioceptive sensations (this screen or white wall, once
again, is the breast as it approaches, getting larger and then pressing
flat). (3) Spitz’s interpretation according to which the white screen,
rather than being a representation of the breast itself as an object of
tactile sensation or contact, is a visual percept implying a minimum of
distance and upon which the mother’s face appears for the child to use
as a guide in finding the breast. Thus there is a combination of two
very different kinds of elements: manual, buccal, or cutaneous
proprioceptive sensations; and the visual perception of the face seen
from the front against the white screen, with the shape of the eyes
drawn in for black holes. This visual perception very quickly assumes
decisive importance for the act of eating, in relation to the breast as
a volume and the mouth as a cavity, both experienced through touch.\footnote{See Otto Isakower, “Contribution à la psychopathologie des phénomènes associés à l’endormissement,” \emph{Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse}, no. 5 (Spring 1972), pp. 197–210; Bertram D. Lewin, “Le sommeil, la bouche et l’écran du rêve,” ibid., pp. 211–224; and René Spitz, with the collaboration of W. Godfrey Cobliner, \emph{The First Year of Life} (New York: International Publishers, 1965), pp. 75–82.}


We can now propose the following distinction: the face is part of a
surface-holes, holey surface, system. This system should under no
circumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the
(proprioceptive) body. The head is included in the body, but the face is
not. The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face,
square face, triangular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied
to and wraps a volume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that
are now no more than holes. The head, even the human head, is not
necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be
a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it
ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code—when the
body, head included, has been decoded and has to be \emph{overcoded} by
something we shall call the Face. This amounts to saying that the head,
all the volume-cavity elements of the head, have to be facialized. What
accomplishes this is the screen with holes, the white wall\Slash{}black hole,
the abstract machine producing faciality. But the operation does not end
there: if the head and its elements are facialized, the entire body also
can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevitable
process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey
surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An
operation worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand,
breast, stomach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be
facialized. Fetishism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these
processes of facialization. It is not at all a question of taking a part
of the body and making it \emph{resemble} a face, or making a dream-face
dance in a cloud. No anthropomorphism here. Facialization operates not
by resemblance but by an order of reasons. It is a much more unconscious
and machinic operation that draws the entire body across the holey
surface, and in which the role of the face is not as a model or image,
but as an overcoding of all of the decoded parts. Everything remains
sexual; there is no sublimation, but there are new coordinates. \emph{It is
precisely because the face depends on an abstract machine that it is not
content to cover the head}, but touches all other parts of the body, and
even, if necessary, other objects without resemblance. \emph{The question
then becomes what circumstances trigger the machine} that produces the
face and facialization. Although the head, even the human head, is not
necessarily a face, the face is produced in humanity. But it is produced
by a necessity that does not apply to human beings “in general.” The
face is not animal, but neither is it human in general; there is even
something absolutely inhuman about the face. It would be an error to
proceed as though the face became inhuman only beyond a certain
threshold: close-up, extreme magnification, recondite expression, etc.
The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It
is by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining
black holes, its emptiness and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that
if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to
dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to
become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning
to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by
strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black
holes, that make \emph{faciality traits} themselves finally elude the
organization of the face—freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair
carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in
or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying
subjectivities. “I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in
my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that
behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world
of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever\dots{}. I have broken the
wall\dots{}. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the
known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with
an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never
dwindling\dots{}. \emph{Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth}.”\footnote{Henry Miller, \emph{Tropic of Capricorn} (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 121–123.} BwO.
Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed,
dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective. But so far
we have explained nothing of what we sense.


The move from the body-head system to the face system has nothing to do
with an evolution or genetic stages. Nor with phenomenological
positions. Nor with integrations of part-objects, or structural or
structuring systems. Nor can there be any appeal to a preexisting
subject, or one brought into existence, except by this machine specific
to faciality. In the literature of the face, Sartre’s text on the look
and Lacan’s on the mirror make the error of appealing to a form of
subjectivity or humanity reflected in a phenomenological field or split
in a structural field. \emph{The gaze is but secondary in relation to the
gazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror is but
secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality}. Neither will we
speak of a genetic axis, or the integration of part-objects. Any
approach based on stages in ontogenesis is arbitrary: it is thought that
what is fastest is primary, or even serves as a foundation or
springboard for what comes next. An approach based on part-objects is
even worse; it is the approach of a demented experimenter who flays,
slices, and anatomizes everything in sight, and then proceeds to sew
things randomly back together again. You can make any list of
part-objects you want: hand, breast, mouth, eyes \dots{} It’s still
Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally organs
without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without organs,
animated by various intensive movements that determine the nature and
emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an organism, or
even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part. It becomes
apparent that the slowest of movements, or the last to occur or arrive,
is not the least intense. And the fastest may already have converged
with it, connected with it, in the disequilibrium of a nonsynchronic
development of strata that have different speeds and lack a sequence of
stages but are nevertheless simultaneous. The question of the body is
not one of part-objects but of differential speeds.


These movements are movements of deterritorialization. They are what
“make” the body an animal or human organism. For example, the prehensile
hand implies a \emph{relative} deterritorialization not only of the front paw
but also of the locomotor hand. It has a correlate, the use-object or
tool: the club is a deterritorialized branch. The breast of the woman,
with her upright posture, indicates a deterritorialization of the
animal’s mammary gland; the mouth of the child, adorned with lips by an
outfolding of the mucous membranes, marks a deterritorialization of the
snout and mouth of the animal. Lips-breast: each serves as a correlate
of the other.\footnote{Klaatsch, “L’évolution du genre humain,” in Kreomer, \emph{L’Univers et l’humanité}, vol. 2: “In vain, we tried to find a trace of red edging around the lips of live, young chimpanzees, which resemble man so closely in all other respects\dots{}. How would the face of the most gracious young woman look if her mouth was a stripe between two white borders? \dots{} In addition, the pectoral region of the anthropoid possesses the two nipples of the mammary glands, but folds of fat comparable to the breasts never form.” And Emile Devaux’s formula in \emph{Trois problèmes: l’espèce, l’instinct, l’homme} (Paris: Le François, 1933), p. 264: “The child made the woman’s breast, and the mother the child’s lips.”} The human head implies a deterritorialization in
relation to the animal and has as its correlate the organization of a
world, in other words, a milieu that has itself been deterritorialized
(the steppe is the first “world,” in contrast to the forest milieu). But
the face represents a far more intense, if slower, deterritorialization.
We could say that it is an \emph{absolute} deterritorialization: it is no
longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the
organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as
signifiance and subjectification. Now the face has a correlate of great
importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a
deterritorialized world. There are a number of face-landscape
correlations, on this “higher” level. Christian education exerts
spiritual control over both faciality and landscapity (\emph{paysagéité}):
Compose them both, color them in, complete them, arrange them according
to a complementarity linking landscapes to faces.\footnote{Face exercises play an essential role in the pedagogical principles of J.-B. de la Salle. Even Ignacio de Loyola integrated his teaching landscape exercises or “compositions of place” relative to the life of Christ, hell, the world, etc. As Barthes points out, this involves skeletal images subordinated to a language, but also active schemas to be completed, colored in, like those found in catechisms and devotional handbooks [\emph{Sade, Fourier, Loyola}, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)—Trans.]} Face and
landscape manuals formed a pedagogy, a strict discipline, and were an
inspiration to the arts as much as the arts were an inspiration to them.
Architecture positions its ensembles—houses, towns or cities, monuments
or factories—to function like faces in the landscape they transform.
Painting takes up the same movement but also reverses it, positioning a
landscape as a face, treating one like the other: “treatise on the face
and the landscape.” The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a
landscape; that is the definition of film, black hole and white wall,
screen and camera. But the same goes for the earlier arts, architecture,
painting, even the novel: close-ups animate and invent all of their
correlations. So, is your mother a landscape or a face? A face or a
factory? (Godard.) All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape;
all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a
face to come or already past. What face has not called upon the
landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what landscape has not evoked
the face that would have completed it, providing an unexpected
complement for its lines and traits? Even when painting becomes
abstract, all it does is rediscover the black hole and white wall, the
great composition of the white canvas and black slash. Tearing, but also
stretching of the canvas along an axis of escape (\emph{fuite}), at a
vanishing point (\emph{point de fuite}), along a diagonal, by a knife slice,
slash, or hole: the machine is already in place that always functions to
produce faces and landscapes, however abstract. Titian began his
paintings in black and white, not to make outlines to fill in, but as
the matrix for each of the colors to come.


The novel—\emph{A flock of geese flew which the snow had dazzled. [Perceval]
saw them and heard them, for they were going away noisily because of a
falcon which came drawing after them at a great rate until he found
abandoned one separated from the flock, and he struck it so and bruised
it that he knocked it down to earth\dots{}. When Perceval saw the trampled
snow on which the goose had lain, and the blood which appeared around,
he leaned upon his lance and looked at that image, for the blood and the
snow together seemed to him like the fresh color which was on the face
of his friend, and he thinks until he forgets himself; for the vermilion
seated on white was on her face just the same as these three drops of
blood on the white snow\dots{}. We have seen a knight who is dozing on his
charger}. Everything is there: the redundancy specific to the face and
landscape, the snowy white wall of the landscape-face, the black hole of
the falcon and the three drops distributed on the wall; and,
simultaneously, the silvery line of the landscape-face spinning toward
the black hole of the knight deep in catatonia. Cannot the knight, at
certain times and under certain conditions, push the movement further
still, crossing the black hole, breaking through the white wall,
dismantling the face—even if the attempt may backfire?\footnote{Chrétien de Troyes, \emph{The Story of the Grail}, trans. Robert White Linker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), pp. 88–89. A similar scene, dominated by the “machinery” of the boat, is found in Malcolm Lowry’s novel \emph{Ultramarine} (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), pp. 159–172: a pigeon drowns in waters infested by sharks, “as if a red leaf should fall on a white torrent” (p. 170), and this inevitably evokes the image of a bloody face. Lowry’s scene is imbedded in such different elements and is so particularly organized that there can be no question of influence by Chrétien de Troyes’s scene, only confluence with it. This makes it an even better confirmation of the existence of a veritable black hole or red mark-white wall abstract machine (snow or water).} All of this
is in no way characteristic of the genre of the novel only at the end of
its history; it is there from the beginning, it is an essential part of
the genre. It is false to see Don Quixote as the end of the chivalric
novel, invoking the hero’s hallucinations, harebrained ideas, and
hypnotic or cataleptic states. It is false to see novels such as
Beckett’s as the end of the novel in general, invoking the black holes,
the characters’ line of deterritorialization, the schizophrenic
promenades of Molloy or the Unnameable, their loss of their names,
memory, or purpose. The novel does have an evolution, but that is surely
not it. The novel has always been defined by the adventure of lost
characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking for, or
what they are doing, amnesiacs, ataxies, catatonics. They differentiate
the genre of the novel from the genres of epic or drama (when the
dramatic or epic hero is stricken with folly or forgetting, etc., it is
in an entirely different way). \emph{La princesse de Clèves} is a novel
precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the people of the
time: the states of absence or “rest,” the sleep that overtakes the
characters. There is always a Christian education in the novel. Molloy
is the beginning of the genre of the novel. When the novel began, with
Chrétien de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would
accompany it over the entire course of its history was already there:
The knight of the novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his
name, what he is doing, what people say to him, he doesn’t know where he
is going or to whom he is speaking, he is continually drawing a line of
absolute deterritorialization, but also losing his way, stopping, and
falling into black holes. “He awaits chivalry and adventure.” Open
Chrétien de Troyes to any page and you will find a catatonic knight
seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting, seeing the face of
his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to make him respond.
Lancelot, in the presence of the queen’s white face, doesn’t notice his
horse plunge into the river; or he gets into a passing cart and it turns
out to be the cart of disgrace. There is a face-landscape aggregate
proper to the novel, in which black holes sometimes distribute
themselves on a white wall, and the white line of the horizon sometimes
spins toward a black hole, or both simultaneously.

\section[{Theorems of Deterritorialization, or Machinic Propositions}]{Theorems of Deterritorialization, or Machinic Propositions\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Continued in 10, “1730: Becoming-Intense\dots{},” pp. 232–309]}}
\hyperdef{amuse}{theorems-of-deterritorialization-or-machinic-propositionsatp-plateau-7-9}{}%
\label{textamuse:theorems-of-deterritorialization-or-machinic-propositionsatp-plateau-7-9}%


**First theorem*: One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at
least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each
of the two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization
must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older
territoriality: it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one
element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for
another, which has lost its territoriality as well. Thus there is an
entire system of horizontal and complementary reterritorializations,
between hand and tool, mouth and breast, face and landscape. \emph{Second
theorem}: The fastest of two elements or movements of
deterritorialization is not necessarily the most intense or most
deterritorialized. Intensity of deterritorialization must not be
confused with speed of movement or development. The fastest can even
connect its intensity to the slowest, which, as an intensity, does not
come after the fastest but is simultaneously at work on a different
stratum or plane (for example, the way the breast-mouth relation is
guided from the start by a plane of faciality). \emph{Third theorem}: It can
even be concluded from this that the \emph{least} deterritorialized
reterritorializes on the \emph{most} deterritorialized. This is where the
second system of reterritorializations comes in, the vertical system
running from bottom to top. This is the sense in which not only the
mouth but also the breast, hand, the entire body, even the tool, are
“facialized.” As a general rule, relative deterritorializations
(transcoding) reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in
certain respects absolute (overcoding). We have seen that the
deterritorialization of the head into a face is absolute but remains
negative in that it passes from one stratum to another, from the stratum
of the organism to those of signifiance and subjectification. The hand
and breast reterritorialize on the face and in the landscape: they are
facialized at the same time as they are landscapified. Even a use-object
may come to be facialized: you might say that a house, utensil, or
object, an article of clothing, etc., is \emph{watching me}, not because it
resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall\Slash{}black
hole process, because it connects to the abstract machine of
facialization. The close-up in film pertains as much to a knife, cup,
clock, or kettle as to a face or facial element, for example, Griffith’s
“the kettle is watching me.” Is it not fair to say, then, that there are
close-ups in novels, as when Dickens writes the opening line of \emph{The
Cricket on the Hearth}: “The kettle began it\dots{}”,\footnote{Sergei Eisenstein, \emph{Film Form and Film Sense}, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 195–199: “‘The kettle began it\dots{}’ Thus Dickens opens his \emph{Cricket on the Hearth}\dots{}. What could be further from films! \dots{} But, strange as it may seem, movies also were boiling in that kettle\dots{}. As soon as we recognize this kettle as a typical close-up, we exclaim: ‘\dots{} of course this is the purest Griffith.’ \dots{} Certainly, this kettle is a typical Griffithesque close-up. A close-up saturated, we now become aware, with typically Dickens-esque ‘atmosphere,’ with which Griffith, with equal mastery, can envelop the severe face of life in \emph{Way Down East}, and the icy cold moral face of his characters, who push the guilty Anna onto the shifting surface of a swirling ice-break” (the white wall again).} and in painting,
when a utensil becomes a face-landscape from within, or when a cup on a
tablecloth or a teapot is facialized, in Bonnard, Vuillard? \emph{Fourth
theorem}: The abstract machine is therefore effectuated not only in the
faces that produce it but also to varying degrees in body parts,
clothes, and objects that it facializes following an order of reasons
(rather than an organization of resemblances).


Yet the question remains: When does the abstract machine of faciality
enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some simple examples: the
maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional
power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the
political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers,
icons, and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of film
operating through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of
television. It is not the individuality of the face that counts but the
efficacy of the ciphering it makes possible, and in what cases it makes
it possible. This is an affair not of ideology but of economy and the
organization of power (\emph{pouvoir}). We are certainly not saying that the
face, the power of the face (\emph{la puissance du visage}), engenders and
explains social power (\emph{pouvoir}). \emph{Certain assemblages of power}
(\emph{pouvoir}) \emph{require the production of a face}, others do not. If we
consider primitive societies, we see that there is very little that
operates through the face: their semiotic is nonsignifying,
nonsubjective, essentially collective, polyvocal, and corporeal, playing
on very diverse forms and substances. This polyvocality operates through
bodies, their volumes, their internal cavities, their variable exterior
connections and coordinates (territorialities). A fragment from a manual
semiotic, a manual sequence, may be coordinated, without subordination
or unification, with an oral sequence, or a cutaneous one, or a rhythmic
one, etc. Lizot, for example, shows how “the dissociation of duty,
ritual and daily life is almost total \dots{} it is strange, inconceivable to
us”: during mourning behavior, certain people make obscene jokes while
others cry; or an Indian abruptly stops crying and begins to repair his
flute; or everybody goes to sleep.\footnote{Jacques Lizot, \emph{Le cercle des feux} (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 34ff.} The same goes for incest. There
is no incest prohibition; instead, there are sequences of incest that
connect with sequences of prohibition following specific coordinates.
Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the multidimensionality
of bodies. Even masks ensure the head’s belonging to the body, rather
than making it a face. Doubtless, there are profound movements of
deterritorialization that shake up the coordinates of the body and
outline particular assemblages of power; however, they connect the body
not to faciality but to becomings-animal, in particular with the help of
drugs. Of course, there is no less spirituality for that, for these
becomings-animal involve an animal Spirit—a jaguar-spirit, bird-spirit,
ocelot-spirit, toucan-spirit—that takes possession of the body’s
interior, enters its cavities, and fills its volumes instead of making a
face for it. Possession expresses a direct relation between Voices and
the body rather than a relation to the face. Shaman, warrior, and hunter
organizations of power, fragile and precarious, are all the more
spiritual by virtue of the fact that they operate through corporeality,
animality, and vegetality. When we said earlier that the human head
still belongs to the stratum of the organism, we obviously were not
denying the existence of culture and society among these peoples; we
were merely saying that these cultures’ and societies’ codes pertain to
bodies, to the belonging of heads to bodies, to the ability of the
body-head system to \emph{become} and receive souls, and to receive them as
friends while repulsing enemy souls. “Primitives” may have the most
human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but they have no
face and need none.


The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that
of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks
and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the
typical European, what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in
short, the ordinary everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth-century
psychiatrists were right to say that erotomania, unlike nymphomania,
often remains pure and chaste; this is because it operates through the
face and facialization). Not a universal, but \emph{facies totius universi}.
Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body
and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus
the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not preclude
its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function
of biunivocalization, or binarization. It has two aspects: the abstract
machine of faciality, insofar as it is composed by a black hole\Slash{}white
wall system, functions in two ways, one of which concerns the units or
elements, the other the choices. Under the first aspect, the black hole
acts as a central computer, Christ, the third eye that moves across the
wall or the white screen serving as general surface of reference.
Regardless of the content one gives it, the machine constitutes a facial
unit, an elementary face in biunivocal relation with another: it is a
man \emph{or} a woman, a rich person or a poor one, an adult or a child, a
leader or a subject, “an x \emph{or} a y.” The movement of the black hole
across the screen, the trajectory of the third eye over the surface of
reference, constitutes so many dichotomies or arborescences, like
four-eye machines made of elementary faces linked together two by two.
The face of a teacher and a student, father and son, worker and boss,
cop and citizen, accused and judge (“the judge had a stern expression,
his eyes were horizonless\dots{}”): concrete individualized faces are produced
and transformed on the basis of these units, these combinations of
units—like the face of a rich child in which a military calling is
already discernible, that West Point chin. You don’t so much have a face
as slide into one.


Under the second aspect, the abstract machine of faciality assumes a
role of selective response, or choice: given a concrete face, the
machine judges whether it passes or not, whether it goes or not, on the
basis of the elementary facial units. This time, the binary relation is
of the “yes-no” type. The empty eye or black hole absorbs or rejects,
like a half-doddering despot who can still give a signal of acquiescence
or refusal. The face of a given teacher is contorted by tics and bathed
in an anxiety that makes it “no go.” A defendant, a subject, displays an
overaffected submission that turns into insolence. Or someone is too
polite to be honest. A given face is neither a man’s nor a woman’s. Or
it is neither a poor person’s nor a rich person’s. Is it someone who
lost his fortune? At every moment, the machine rejects faces that do not
conform, or seem suspicious. But only at a given level of choice. For it
is necessary to produce successive divergence-types of deviance for
everything that eludes biunivocal relationships, and to establish binary
relations between what is accepted on first choice and what is only
tolerated on second, third choice, etc. The white wall is always
expanding, and the black hole functions repeatedly. The teacher has gone
mad, but madness is a face conforming to the \emph{n}th choice (not
the last, however, since there are mad faces that do not conform to what
one assumes madness should be). A ha! It’s not a man and it’s not a
woman, so it must be a transvestite: The binary relation is between the
“no” of the first category and the “yes” of the following category,
which under certain conditions may just as easily mark a tolerance as
indicate an enemy to be mowed down at all costs. At any rate, you’ve
been recognized, the abstract machine has you inscribed in its overall
grid. It is clear that in its new role as deviance detector, the
faciality machine does not restrict itself to individual cases but
operates in just as general a fashion as it did in its first role, the
computation of normalities. 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. They must be Christianized, in other words,
facialized. European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated
by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is instead
in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.”\footnote{On the stranger grasped as Other, see André Haudricourt, “Nature et culture dans la civilisation de l’igname: l’origine des clones et des clans,” \emph{L’Homme} vol. 4, no. 1 (January–April 1964), pp. 98–102. And Robert Jaulin, \emph{Gens de soi, gens de l’autre} (Paris: Union Generate d’Editions, 1973), preface, p. 20.}
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, sometimes tolerating
them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto,
sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s
a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic\dots{}). From the viewpoint
of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside.
There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to
be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is
internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective
choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates
waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped
out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given
degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence
and naïveté.


On the brighter side, painting has exploited all the resources of the
Christ-face. Painting has taken the abstract white wall\Slash{}black hole
machine of faciality in all directions, using the face of Christ to
produce every kind of facial unit and every degree of deviance. In this
respect, there is an exultation in the painting of the Middle Ages to
the Renaissance, like an unbridled freedom. Not only did Christ preside
over the facialization of the entire body (his own) and the
landscapification of all milieus (his own), but he composed all of the
elementary faces and had every divergence at his disposal:
Christ-athlete at the fair, Christ-Mannerist queer, Christ-Negro, or at
least a Black Virgin at the edge of the wall. The most prodigious
strokes of madness appear on canvas under the auspices of the Catholic
code. A single example chosen from many [Giotto, \emph{The Life of
St. Francis}, scene XII, \emph{The Transfiguration}—Trans.]: against the
white background of the landscape and the black-blue hole of the sky,
the crucified Christ-turned-kite-machine sends stigmata to Saint Francis
by rays; the stigmata effect the facialization of the body of the saint,
in the image of the body of Christ; but the rays carrying the stigmata
to the saint are also the strings Francis uses to pull the divine kite.
It was under the sign of the cross that people learned to steer the face
and processes of facialization in all directions.


Information theory takes as its point of departure a homogeneous set of
ready-made \emph{signifying} messages that are already functioning as
elements in biunivocal relationships, or the elements of which are
biunivocally organized between messages. Second, the picking of a
combination depends on a certain number of \emph{subjective} binary choices
that increase proportionally to the number of elements. But the problem
is that all of this biunivocalization and binarization (which is not
just the result of an increase in calculating skills, as some say)
assumes the deployment of a wall or screen, the installation of a
central computing hole without which no message would be discernible and
no choice could be implemented. The black hole\Slash{}white wall system must
already have gridded all of space and outlined its arborescences or
dichotomies for those of signifier and subjectification even to be
conceivable. The mixed semiotic of signifiance and subjectification has
an exceptional need to be protected from any intrusion from the outside.
In fact, there must not be any exterior: no nomad machine, no primitive
polyvocality must spring up, with their combinations of heterogeneous
substances of expression. Translatability of any kind requires a single
substance of expression. One can constitute signifying chains operating
with deterritorialized, digitalized, discrete elements only if there is
a semiological screen available, a wall to protect them. One can make
subjective choices between two chains or at each point in a chain only
if no outside tempest sweeps away the chains and subjects. One can form
a web of subjectivities only if one possesses a central eye, a black
hole capturing everything that would exceed or transform either the
assigned affects or the dominant significations. Moreover, it is absurd
to believe that language as such can convey a message. A language is
always embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast
them in relation to the signifiers in progress and subjects concerned.
Choices are guided by faces, elements are organized around faces: a
common grammar is never separable from a facial education. The face is a
veritable megaphone. Thus not only must the abstract machine of
faciality provide a protective screen and a computing black hole; in
addition, the faces it produces draw all kinds of arborescences and
dichotomies without which the signifying and the subjective would not be
able to make the arborescences and dichotomies function that fall within
their purview in language. Doubtless, the binarities and biunivocalities
of the face are not the same as those of language, of its elements and
subjects. There is no resemblance between them. But the former subtend
the latter. When the faciality machine translates formed contents of
whatever kind into a single substance of expression, it already
subjugates them to the exclusive form of signifying and subjective
expression. It carries out the prior gridding that makes it possible for
the signifying elements to become discernible, and for the subjective
choices to be implemented. The faciality machine is not an annex to the
signifier and the subject; rather, it is subjacent (\emph{connexe}) to them
and is their condition of possibility. Facial biunivocalities and
binarities double the others; facial redundancies are in redundancy with
signifying and subjective redundancies. It is precisely because the face
depends on an abstract machine that it does not assume a preexistent
subject or signifier; but it is subjacent to them and provides the
substance necessary to them. What chooses the faces is not a subject, as
in the Szondi test; it is faces that choose their subjects. What
interprets the black blotch\Slash{}white hole figure, or the white page\Slash{}black
hole, is not a signifier, as in the Rorschach test; it is that figure
which programs the signifiers.


We have made some progress toward answering the question of what
triggers the abstract machine of faciality, for it is not in operation
all the time or in just any social formation. \emph{Certain} social
formations need face, and also landscape.\footnote{Maurice Ronai demonstrates that the landscape, the reality as well as the notion, is tied to a very particular semiotic system and very particular apparatuses of power: this is one of the sources of geography, as well as a principle behind its political subordination (the landscape as “the face of the fatherland or nation”). See “Paysages,” in \emph{Hérodote}, no. 1 (January–March 1976), pp. 125–159.} There is a whole history
behind it. At very different dates, there occurred a generalized
collapse of all of the heterogeneous, polyvocal, primitive semiotics in
favor of a semiotic of signifiance and subjectification. Whatever the
differences between signifiance and subjectification, whichever prevails
over the other in this case or that, whatever the varying figures
assumed by their de facto mixtures—they have it in common to crush all
polyvocality, set up language as a form of exclusive expression, and
operate by signifying biunivocalization and subjective binarization. The
superlinearity proper to language is no longer coordinated with
multidimensional figures: it now flattens out all volumes and
subordinates all lines. Is it by chance that linguistics always, and
very quickly, encounters the problem of homonymy, or ambiguous
statements that it then subjects to a set of binary reductions? More
generally, linguistics can tolerate no polyvocality or rhizome traits: a
child who runs around, plays, dances, and draws cannot concentrate
attention on language and writing, and will never be a good subject. In
short, the new semiotic needs systematically to destroy the whole range
of primitive semiotic systems, even if it retains some of their debris
in well-defined enclosures.


However, there is more to the picture than semiotic systems waging war
on one another armed only with their own weapons. \emph{Very specific
assemblages of power impose signifiance and subjectification} as their
determinate form of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new
contents: there is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no
subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture
between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers
and act upon souls and subjects. It is these assemblages, these despotic
or authoritarian formations, that give the new semiotic system the means
of its imperialism, in other words, the means both to crush the other
semiotics and protect itself against any threat from outside. A
concerted effort is made to do away with the body and corporeal
coordinates through which the multidimensional or polyvocal semiotics
operated. Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dismantled,
becomings-animal hounded out, deterritorialization pushed to a new
threshold—a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of
signifiance and subjectification. A single substance of expression is
produced. The white wall\Slash{}black hole system is constructed, or rather the
abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the
almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject.
You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This
machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social
production efface, because it performs the facialization of the entire
body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of
all worlds and milieus. The deterritorialization of the body implies a
reterritorialization on the face; the decoding of the body implies an
overcoding by the face; the collapse of corporeal coordinates or milieus
implies the constitution of a landscape. The semiotic of the signifier
and the subjective never operates through bodies. It is absurd to claim
to relate the signifier to the body. At any rate it can be related only
to a body that has already been entirely facialized. The difference
between our uniforms and clothes and primitive paintings and garb is
that the former effect a facialization of the body, with buttons for
black holes against the white wall of the material. Even the mask
assumes a new function here, the exact opposite of its old one. For
there is no unitary function of the mask, except a negative one (in no
case does the mask serve to dissimulate, to hide, even while showing or
revealing). Either the mask assures the head’s belonging to the body,
its becoming-animal, as was the case in primitive societies. Or, as is
the case now, the mask assures the erection, the construction of the
face, the facialization of the head and the body: the mask is now the
face itself, the abstraction or operation of the face. The inhumanity of
the face. Never does the face assume a prior signifier or subject. The
order is totally different: despotic and authoritarian concrete
assemblage of power ➝ triggering of the abstract machine of faciality,
white wall\Slash{}black hole ➝ installation of the new semiotic of signifiance
and subjectification on that holey surface. That is why we have been
addressing just two problems exclusively: the relation of the face to
the abstract machine that produces it, and the relation of the face to
the assemblages of power that require that social production. The face
is a politics.


Of course, we have already seen that signifiance and subjectification
are semiotic systems that are entirely distinct in their principles and
have different regimes (circular irradiation versus segmentary
linearity) and different apparatuses of power (despotic generalized
slavery versus authoritarian contract-proceeding). Neither begins with
Christ, or the White Man as Christian universal: there are Indian,
African, and Asiatic despotic formations of signifiance; the
authoritarian process of subjectification appears most purely in the
destiny of the Jewish people. But however different these semiotics are,
they still form a de facto \emph{mix}, and it is at the level of this mixture
that they assert their imperialism, in other words, their common
endeavor to crush all other semiotics. There is no signifiance that does
not harbor the seeds of subjectivity; there is no subjectification that
does not drag with it remnants of signifier. If the signifier bounces
above all off a wall, if subjectivity spins above all toward a hole,
then we must say that the wall of the signifier already includes holes
and the black hole of subjectivity already carries scraps of wall. The
mix, therefore, has a solid foundation in the indissociable white
wall\Slash{}black hole machine, and the two semiotics intermingle through
intersection, splicing, and the plugging of one into the other, as with
the “Hebrew and the Pharaoh.” But there is more because the nature of
the mixtures may vary greatly. If it is possible to assign the faciality
machine a date—the year zero of Christ and the historical development of
the White Man—it is because that is when the mixture ceased to be a
splicing or an intertwining, becoming a total interpenetration in which
each element suffuses the other like drops of red-black wine in white
water. Our semiotic of modern White Men, the semiotic of capitalism, has
attained this state of mixture in which signifiance and subjectification
effectively interpenetrate. Thus it is in this semiotic that faciality,
or the white wall\Slash{}black hole system, assumes its full scope. We must,
however, assess the states of mixture and the varying proportions of the
elements. Whether in the Christian or pre-Christian state, one element
may dominate another, one may be more or less powerful than the other.
We are thus led to define \emph{limit-faces}, which are different from both
the facial units and the degrees of facial divergence previously
defined.


1. The black hole is on the white wall. It is not a unit, since the
black hole is in constant movement on the wall and operates by
binarization. Two black holes, four black holes, \emph{n} black holes
distribute themselves like eyes. Faciality is always a multiplicity. The
landscape will be populated with eyes or black holes, as in an Ernst
painting, or a drawing by Aloïse or Wölfli. Circles are drawn around a
hole on the white wall; an eye can be placed in each of the circles. We
can even propose the following law: the more circles there are around a
hole, the more the bordering effect acts to increase the surface over
which the hole slides and to give that surface a force of capture.
Perhaps the purest case is to be found in popular Ethiopian scrolls
representing demons: on the white surface of the parchment, two black
holes are drawn, or an outline of round or rectangular faces; but the
black holes spread and reproduce, they enter into redundancy, and each
time a secondary circle is drawn, a new black hole is constituted, an
eye is put in it.\footnote{See Jacques Mercier, \emph{Ethiopian Magic Scrolls}, trans. Richard Pevear (New York: Braziller, 1979). And “Les peintures des rouleaux protecteurs éthiopiens,” \emph{Journal of Ethiopian Studies}, vol. 14, fasc. 2 (Summer 1974), pp. 89–106 (“The eye stands for the face which stands for the body\dots{}. The pupils are drawn in the inner spaces\dots{}. That is why we must speak of directions of magic meaning based on eyes and faces, with the use of traditional decorative motifs such as cross-hatching, check patterns, four-pointed stars, etc.”). The power of Negus, with his ancestry going back to Solomon and his court of magicians, was based on his ember-eyes, operating like a black hole, angelic or demonic. Mercier’s analyses in their entirety constitute an essential contribution to the analysis of facial functions.} An effect of capturing a surface that becomes
more enclosed the more it expands. This is the signifying despotic face
and the multiplication proper to it, its proliferation, its redundancy
of frequency. A multiplication of eyes. The despot or his
representatives are everywhere. This is the face as seen from the front,
by a subject who does not so much see as get snapped up by black holes.
This is a figure of destiny, \emph{terrestrial} destiny, objective signifying
destiny. The close-up in film knows this figure well: the Griffith
close-up of a face, an element of a face or a facialized object, which
then assumes an anticipatory temporal value (the hands of the clock
foreshadow something).


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-41.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Terrestrial Signifying Despotic Face}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


2. Now, on the contrary, the white wall has unraveled, becoming a silver
thread moving toward the black hole. One black hole “crests” all the
other black holes, all of the eyes and faces, while the landscape
becomes a thread whose far end coils around the hole. It is still a
multiplicity but constitutes a different figure of destiny: reflexive,
passional, subjective destiny. It is the \emph{maritime} face or landscape:
it follows the line separating the sky from the waters, or the land from
the waters. This authoritarian face is in profile and spins toward the
black hole. Or else there are two faces facing each other, but in
profile to the observer, and their union is already marked by a
limitless separation. Or else the faces turn away from each other, swept
away by betrayal. Tristan, Isolde, Isolde, Tristan, in the boat carrying
them to the black hole of betrayal and death. A faciality of
consciousness and passion, a redundancy of resonance and coupling. This
time, the effect of the close-up is no longer to expand a surface while
simultaneously closing it off; its only function is to have an
anticipatory temporal value. It marks the origin of a scale of
intensity, or is part of that scale; the closer the faces get to the
black hole as termination point, the more the close-up heats the line
they follow. Eisenstein’s close-ups versus Griffith’s (the intensive
heightening of shame, or anger, in the close-ups in \emph{Potemkin}).\footnote{For Eisenstein’s own distinction between his conception of the close-up and Griffith’s, see \emph{Film Form and Film Sense}.}
Here again, it is clear that any combination is possible between the two
limit-figures of the face. In Pabst’s \emph{Lulu}, the despotic face of the
fallen Lulu is associated with the image of a bread knife, which has the
anticipatory value of foreshadowing the murder; but the authoritarian
face of Jack the Ripper also ascends a whole scale of intensities
leading to the knife and Lulu’s murder.


More generally, we may note characteristics common to the two
limit-figures. First, although the white wall, the broad cheeks, is the
substantial element of the signifier, and the black hole the reflexive
element of subjectivity, they always go together. But in one of two
modes: either the black holes distribute themselves and multiply on the
white wall, or the wall, reduced to its crest or horizon thread, hurtles
toward a black hole that crests them all. There is no wall without black
holes, and no black hole without a wall. Second, in both cases the black
hole is necessarily surrounded by a border, or even bordered more than
once: the effect of this border is either to expand the surface of the
wall or to intensify the line. The black hole is never in the eyes
(pupil); it is always inside the border, and the eyes are always inside
the hole: dead eyes, which see all the better for being in a black
hole.\footnote{This is a recurring theme in horror novels and science fiction: the eyes are in the black hole, not the opposite (“I see a luminous disk emerging from the black hole, resembling eyes”). Comic books, \emph{Circus} No. 2, for example, depict black holes populated by faces and eyes, and the traversing of that black hole. On the relation of eyes to holes and walls, see the texts and drawing of Jean-Luc Parant, in particular, \emph{Les yeux MMDVI} (Paris: Bourgois, 1976).} These common characteristics do not preclude the existence of
a limit-difference between the two figures of the face, and proportions
according to which first one then the other dominates in the mixed
semiotic. The terrestrial signifying despotic face, the maritime
subjective passional authoritarian face (the desert can also be a sea of
land). Two figures of destiny, two states of the faciality machine. Jean
Paris has clearly shown how these poles operate in painting, the pole of
the despotic Christ and that of the passional Christ: on the one hand,
the face of Christ seen from the front, as in a Byzantine mosaic, with
the black hole of the eyes against a gold background, all depth
projected forward; and on the other hand, faces that cross glances and
turned away from each other, seen half-turned or in profile, as in a
quattrocento painting, their sidelong glances drawing multiple lines,
integrating depth into the painting itself (arbitrary examples of
transition and mixture can be cited, such a Duccio’s \emph{Calling of Saint
Peter and Saint Andrew}, against the background of an aquatic landscape;
the second formula has already overtaken Christ and the first fisherman,
while the second fisherman remains within the Byzantine code).\footnote{See Jean Paris’s analyses, \emph{L’espace et le regard} (Paris: Seuil, 1965), vol. 1, chapter 1 (also, the evolution of the Virgin and the variation in the relations between her face and that of the infant Jesus: vol. 2, chapter 2).}


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-42.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Maritime Subjective Authoritarian Face (after
Tristan and Isolde)}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


**Swann’s Love*: Proust was able to make the face, landscape, painting,
music, etc., resonate together. Three moments in the story of Swann and
Odette. First, a whole signifying mechanism is set up. The face of
Odette with her broad white or yellow cheeks, and her eyes as black
hoes. But this face continually refers back to other things, also
arrayed on the wall. That is Swann’s aetheticism, his amateurism: a
thing must always recall something else, in a network of interpretations
under the sign of the signifier. A face refers back to a landscape. A
face must “recall” a painting, or a fragment of a painting. A piece of
music must let fall a little phrase that connects with Odette’s face, to
the point that the little phrase becomes only a signal. The white wall
becomes populous, the black holes are arrayed. This entire mechanism of
signifiance, with its referral of interpretations, prepares the way for
the second, passional subjective, moment, during which Swann’s jealousy,
querulous delusion, and erotomania develop. Now Odette’s face races down
a line hurtling toward a single black hole, that of Swann’s Passion. The
other lines, of landscapity, picturality, and musicality, also rush
toward this catatonic hole and coil around it, bordering it several
times.


But in the third moment, at the end of his long passion, Swann attends a
reception where he sees the faces of the servants and guests
**disaggregate* into autonomous aesthetic traits, as if the line of
picturality regained its independence, both beyond the wall and outside
the black hole. Then Vinteuil’s little phrase regains its transcendence
and renews its connection with a still more intense, asignifying, and
asubjective line of pure musicality. And Swann knows that he no longer
loves Odette and, above all, that Odette will never again love him.


Was this salvation through art necessary? For neither Swann nor Proust
was saved. Was it necessary to break through the wall and out of the
hole in \emph{this} way, by renouncing love? Was not that love rotten from
the start, made of signifiance and jealousy? Was it possible to do
anything else, considering Odette’s mediocrity and Swann’s aestheticism?
In a way, the madeleine is the same story. The narrator munches his
madeleine: redundancy, the black hole of involuntary memory. How can he
get out of that? And it is, above all, something one has to get out of,
escape from. Proust knows that quite well, even if his commentators do
not. But the way he gets out is through art, uniquely through art.


How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall?
How do you dismantle the face? Whatever genius there may be in the
French novel, that is not its affair. It is too concerned with measuring
the wall, or even with building it, with plumbing the depths of black
holes and composing faces. The French novel is profoundly pessimistic
and idealistic, “critical of life rather than creative of life.” It
stuffs its characters down the hole and bounces them off the wall. It
can only conceive of organized voyages, and of salvation only through
art, a still Catholic salvation, in other words, salvation through
eternity. It spends its time plotting points instead of drawing lines,
active lines of flight or of positive deterritorialization. The
Anglo-American novel is totally different. “To get away. To get away,
out!\dots{} To cross a horizon\dots{}”\footnote{D. H. Lawrence, “Melville’s ‘Typee’ and ‘Omoo,’” \emph{Studies in Classic American Literature} (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 197. Lawrence’s essay begins with a lovely distinction between terrestrial and maritime eyes.} From Hardy to Lawrence, from Melville to
Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get out, breakthrough, make a
beeline, don’t get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, follow
it or create it, to the point of treachery. That is why their
relationship to other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and
also to drugs and voyages in place, is entirely different from that of
the French. They know how difficult it is to get out of the black hole
of subjectivity, of consciousness and memory, of the couple and
conjugality. How tempting it is to let yourself get caught, to lull
yourself into it, to latch back onto a \emph{face}. “[Being] locked away in
the black hole \dots{} gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out
of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a
perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to
reintegrate and repose for a few moments\dots{}. At first I mistook it for
passion, for ecstasy\dots{}. I thought I had found a living volcano, a female
Vesuvius. I never thought I had found a human ship going down in an
ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black
star gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which
hung above our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute,
and I know it was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead
black sun without aspect.”\footnote{Miller, \emph{Tropic of Capricorn}, p. 239.} A copperish glow like the face at the
bottom of a black hole. The point is to get out of it, not in art, in
other words, in spirit, but in life, in real life. \emph{Don’t take away my
power to love}. These English and American authors also know how hard it
is to break through the wall of the signifier. Many people have tried
since Christ, beginning with Christ. But Christ himself botched the
crossing, the jump, he \emph{bounced} off the wall. “As if by a great recoil,
this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole
negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert
mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and
indivisible”—the Face.\footnote{Ibid., p. 63.} Cross the wall, the Chinese perhaps, but at
what price? At the price of a \emph{becoming-animal}, a \emph{becoming-flower or
rock}, and beyond that a strange \emph{becoming-imperceptible}, a
**becoming-hard now one with loving*.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 63–64.} It is a question of speed,
even if the movement is in place. Is this also to dismantle the face, or
as Miller says, no longer to look at or into the eyes but to swim
through them, to close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light
moving at ever-increasing speed? Of course, this requires all the
resources of art, and art of the highest kind. It requires a whole line
of writing, picturality, musicality \dots{} For it is through writing that you
become animal, it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is
through music that you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal
and imperceptible: in love. But art is never an end in itself; it is
only a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real
becomings that are not produced only \emph{in} art, and all of those active
escapes that do not consist in fleeing \emph{into} art, taking refuge in art,
and all of those positive deterritorializations that never
reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the
realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless.


Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is
it by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and
others’, their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its
dominant significations all at the same time? The organization of the
face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds within its
rectangle or circle a whole set of traits, \emph{faciality traits}, which it
subsumes and places at the service of signifiance and subjectification.
What is a tic? It is precisely the continually refought battle between a
faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organization of the
face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes
hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its
organization upon it. (There is a medical distinction between the clonic
or convulsive tic and the tonic or spasmodic tic; perhaps we can say
that in the first case the faciality trait that is trying to escape has
the upper hand, whereas in the second case the facial organization that
is trying to clamp back down or immobilize itself has the upper hand.)
But if dismantling the face is a major affair, it is because it is not
simply a question of tics, or an amateur’s or aesthete’s adventure. 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.\footnote{Wilhelm Reich’s \emph{Character-Analysis}, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), considers the face and faciality traits to be among the first pieces of character “armor” and the first ego resistances (the “occular ring,” followed by the “oral ring”). The organization of these rings occurs on planes perpendicular to the “orgonotic streaming” and oppose the free movement of this streaming throughout the body. Hence the importance of eliminating the armor and “dissolving the rings.” See pp. 370ff.}


It is time once again to multiply practical warnings. First, it is never
a question of a return to \dots{} It is not a question of “returning” to the
presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples. We will
always be failures at playing African or Indian, even Chinese, and no
voyage to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to cross the
wall, get out of the hole, or lose our face. We will never succeed in
making ourselves a new primitive head and body, human, spiritual, and
faceless. It would only be taking more photos and bouncing off the wall
again. We will always find ourselves reterritorialized again. O my
little desert island, on you I am in the Closerie des Lilas again, O my
deep ocean, you reflect the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, O little
phrase of Vinteuil, you recall a sweet moment. These are Eastern
physical and spiritual exercises, but for a couple, like a conjugal bed
tucked with a Chinese sheet: you did do your exercises today, didn’t
you? Lawrence has only one grudge against Melville: he knew better than
anyone how to get across the face, the eyes and horizon, the wall and
hole, but he mistook that crossing, that creative line, for an
“impossible return,” a return to the savages in \emph{Typee}, for a way of
staying an artist and hating life, of maintaining a nostalgia for the
Home Country. (“He ever pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had
run away from as far as ships would carry him\dots{}. Melville came home to
face out the rest of his life\dots{}. He refused life. But he stuck to his
ideal of perfect relationship, possible perfect love\dots{}. A truly perfect
relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in
the other party\dots{}. Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist\dots{}.
And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine. I say, let the old guns
rot. \emph{Get new ones, and shoot straight}.”)\footnote{Lawrence, \emph{Studies in Classic American Literature}, p. 200.}


We can’t turn back. Only neurotics, or, as Lawrence says, “renegades,”
deceivers, attempt a regression. The white wall of the signifier, the
black hole of subjectivity, and the facial machine are impasses, the
measure of our submissions and subjections; but we are born into them,
and it is there we must stand battle. Not in the sense of a necessary
stage, but in the sense of a tool for which a new use must be invented.
Only across the wall of the signifier can you run lines of asignifiance
that void all memory, all return, all possible signification and
interpretation. 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 composed are broken lines. Only on your face
and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white wall will you
be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to return
to a primitive head, but to invent the combinations by which those
traits connect with landscapity traits that have themselves been freed
from the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that
have also been freed from their respective codes. With what joy the
painters used the face of Christ himself, taking it in every sense and
direction; and it was not simply the joy of a desire to paint, but the
joy of all desires. Is it possible to tell, when the knight of the
courtly novel is in his catatonic state, whether he is deep in his black
hole or already astride the particles that will carry him out of it to
begin a new journey? Lawrence, who has been compared to Lancelot,
writes: “To be alone, mindless and memoryless beside the sea \dots{} As alone
and as absent and as present as an aboriginal dark on the sand in the
sun \dots{} Far off, far off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man
might after death \dots{} The landscape?—he cared not a thing about the
landscape\dots{}. Humanity?—there was none. Thought?—fallen like a stone into
the sea. The great, the glamorous past?—worn thin, frail, like a frail
translucent film of shell thrown up on the shore.”\footnote{D. H. Lawrence, \emph{Kangaroo} (London: William Heinemann, 1964), p. 339.} The uncertain
moment at which the white wall\Slash{}black hole, black point\Slash{}white shore
system, as on a Japanese print, itself becomes one with the act of
leaving it, breaking away from and crossing through it.


We have seen that the abstract machine has two very different states:
sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about
deterritorializations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations
that are absolute but remain negative; sometimes it is developed on a
plane of consistency giving it a “diagrammatic” function, a positive
value of deterritorialization, the ability to form new abstract
machines. Sometimes the abstract machine, as the faciality machine,
forces flows into signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of
aborescence and holes of abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it
performs a veritable “defacialization,” it frees something like
**probe-heads* (\emph{têtes chercheuses}, guidance devices) that dismantle the
strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour out
of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favor of veritable rhizomes,
and steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or
creative flight. There are no more concentrically organized strata, no
more black holes around which lines coil to form borders, no more walls
to which dichotomies, binarities, and bipolar values cling. There is no
more face to be in redundancy with a landscape, painting, or little
phrase of music, each perpetually bringing the other to mind, on the
unified surface of the wall or the central swirl of the black hole. Each
freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of landscapity,
picturality, or musicality. This is not a collection of part-objects but
a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits of a face
enter a real multiplicity or diagram with a trait of an unknown
landscape, a trait of painting or music that is thereby effectively
produced, created, according to quanta of absolute, positive
deterritorialization—not evoked or recalled according to systems of
reterritorialization. A wasp trait and an orchid trait. Quanta marking
so many mutations of abstract machines, each of which operates as a
function of the other. Thus opens a rhizomatic realm of possibility
effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to
arborescent possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence.


**The face, what a horror*. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its
pores, planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no
need for a close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-up, and
naturally inhuman, a monstrous hood. Necessarily so because it is
produced by a machine and in order to meet the requirements of the
special apparatus of power that triggers the machine and takes
deterritorialization to the absolute while keeping it negative. Earlier,
when we contrasted the primitive, spiritual, human head with the inhuman
face, we were falling victim to a nostalgia for a return or regression.
In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of
inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and
speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhumanity, has all the
polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of the body, a
body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged into
becomings-spiritual\Slash{}animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether different
inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of “probe-heads”;
here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines
of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new
becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome
everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. \emph{Face, my
love}, you have finally become a probe-head \dots{} Year zen, year omega, year
ω\dots{} Must we leave it at that, three states, and no more: primitive heads,
Christ-face, and probe-heads?

\chapter{8. 1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?”}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-8}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-8}%


It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the “novella” as a
literary genre: Everything is organized around the question, “What
happened? Whatever could have happened?” The tale is the opposite of the
novella, because it is an altogether different question that the reader
asks with bated breath: What is going to happen? Something is always
going to happen, come to pass. Something always happens in the novel
also, but the novel integrates elements of the novella and the tale into
the variation of its perpetual living present (\emph{duration}). The
detective novel is a particularly hybrid genre in this respect, since
most often the something = \emph{X} that has happened is
on the order of a murder or theft, but exactly what it is that has
happened remains to be discovered, and in the present determined by the
model detective. Yet it would be an error to reduce these different
aspects to the three dimensions of time. Something happened, something
is going to happen, can designate a past so immediate, a future so near,
that they are one (as Husserl would say) with retentions and protentions
of the present itself. Nevertheless, the distinction is legitimate, in
view of the different movements that animate the present, are
contemporaneous with it: One moves with it, another already casts it
into the past \emph{from the moment} it is present (novella), while another
**simultaneously* draws it into the future (tale). We are lucky to have
treatments of the same subject by a tale writer and a novella writer:
two lovers, one of whom dies suddenly in the other’s room. In
Maupassant’s tale, “Une ruse” (An artifice), everything revolves around
these questions: What is going to happen? How will the survivor
extricate himself from the situation? What will the third party-savior,
in this case a doctor, think of? In Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novella, “Le
rideau cramoisi” (The crimson curtain), everything revolves around:
Something happened, but what? That is the question, not only because it
is really not known what the cold young woman just died from, but also
because it will never be known why she gave herself to the petty
officer, or how the third party-savior, here the colonel of the
regiment, was able to arrange things.\footnote{See Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, \emph{The Diaboliques}, trans. Ernest Boyd (New York: Knopf, 1925). Of course, the work of Maupassant is not limited to tales; he also wrote novellas, or novels containing elements of the novellas. For example, the episode of Lison in chapter 4 of \emph{Une vie}: “It was at the time of Aunt Lison’s sudden impulse It was never spoken of again, and remained as though enveloped in fog. One evening, Lise, then twenty, threw herself into the water without anyone having an inkling why. Nothing in her life or manners, could have allowed one to predict this act of madness.”} It should not be thought that
it is easier to leave things open-ended: for there to be something that
has happened that we will never know about, or even several things in a
row, requires no less minute attention and precision than the contrary
case, when the author must invent the details of what will need to be
known. You will never know what just happened, or you will always know
what is going to happen: these are the reasons for the reader’s two
bated breaths, in the novella and the tale, respectively, and they are
two ways in which the living present is divided at every instant. In the
novella, we do not wait for something to happen, we expect something to
have just happened. The novella is a last novella, whereas the tale is a
first tale. The “presence” of the tale writer is completely different
from that of the novella writer (and both are different from that of the
novelist). Let us not dwell too much on the dimensions of time: the
novella has little to do with a memory of the past or an act of
reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fundamental
forgetting. It evolves in the element of “what happened” because it
places us in a relation with something unknowable and imperceptible (and
not the other way around: it is not because it speaks of a past about
which it can no longer provide us knowledge). It may even be that
nothing has happened, but it is precisely that nothing that makes us
say, Whatever could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys,
or whether I mailed that letter, etc.? What little blood vessel in my
brain could have ruptured? What is this nothing that makes something
happen? The novella has a fundamental relation to \emph{secrecy} (not with a
secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the
secret, which remains impenetrable), whereas the tale has a relation to
**discovery* (the form of discovery, independent of what can be
discovered). The novella also enacts postures of the body and mind that
are like folds or envelopments, whereas the tale puts into play
**attitudes or positions* that are like unfoldings and developments,
however unexpected. Barbey has an evident fondness for body posture, in
other words, states of the body when it is surprised by something that
just happened. In the preface to the \emph{Diaboliques}, Barbey even suggests
that there is a diabolism of body postures, a sexuality, pornography,
and scatology of postures quite different from those that also, and
simultaneously, mark body attitudes or positions. Posture is like
inverse suspense. Thus it is not a question of saying that the novella
relates to the past and the tale to the future; what we should say
instead is that the novella relates, in the present itself, to the
formal dimension of something that has happened, even if that something
is nothing or remains unknowable. Similarly, one should not try to make
the distinction between the novella and the tale coincide with
categories such as the fantastic, the fabulous, etc.; that is another
problem, there is no reason why it should overlap. The links of the
novella are: What happened? (the modality or expression), Secrecy (the
form), Body Posture (the content).


Take Fitzgerald. He is a tale and novella writer of genius. He is a
novella writer when he asks himself, \emph{Whatever could have happened for
things to have come to this?} He is the only one who has been able to
carry this question to such a point of intensity. It is not a question
of memory, reflection, old age, or fatigue, whereas the tale would deal
with childhood, action, or impulse. Yet it is true that Fitzgerald only
asks himself the question of the novella writer when he is personally
worn-out, fatigued, sick, or even worse off. But once again, there is
not necessarily a connection: it can also be a question of vigor, or
love. It still is, even in desperate conditions. It is better to think
of it as an affair of perception: you enter a room and perceive
something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has
not yet been done. Or you know that what is in the process of happening
is happening for the last time, it’s already over with. You hear an “I
love you” you know is the last one. Perceptual semiotics. God, whatever
could have happened, even though everything is and remains
imperceptible, and in order for everything to be and remain
imperceptible forever?


Not only is there a specificity of the novella, but there is also a
specific way in which the novella treats a universal matter. For we are
made of lines. We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of
writing conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of luck or
misfortune, lines productive of the variation of the line of writing
itself, lines that are \emph{between the lines} of writing. Perhaps the
novella has its own way of giving rise to and combining these lines,
which nonetheless belong to everyone and every genre. Vladimir Propp has
said, with great solemnity, that the folktale must be defined in terms
of external and internal \emph{movements} that it qualifies, formalizes, and
combines in its own specific way.\footnote{Vladimir Propp, \emph{Morphology of the Folktale}, 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).} We would like to demonstrate that
the novella is defined by living \emph{lines}, flesh lines, about which it
brings a special revelation. Marcel Arland is correct to say that the
novella “is nothing but pure lines right down to the nuances, \emph{and}
nothing but the pure and conscious power of the word.”\footnote{Marcel Arland, \emph{Le Promeneur} (Paris: Pavois, 1944).}

\section{First Novella: “In the Cage,” Henry James}


The heroine, a young telegrapher, leads a very clear-cut, calculated
life proceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams she takes one after
the other, day after day; the people to whom she sends the telegrams;
their social class and the different ways they use telegraphy; the words
to be counted. Moreover, her telegraphist’s cage is like a contiguous
segment to the grocery store next door, where her fiancé works.
Contiguity of territories. And the fiancé is constantly plotting out
their future, work, vacations, house. Here, as for all of us, there is a
line of rigid segmentarity on which everything seems calculable and
foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the passage from one
segment to another. Our lives are made like that: Not only are the great
molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but so are
people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations between
people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or disperse,
but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency,
including personal identity. The fiancé can say to the young woman, Even
though there are differences between our segments, we have the same
tastes and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a
telegraphist, I am a grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our
segments fit together, conjugate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of
well-determined, well-planned territories. They have a future but no
becoming. This is the first life line, the \emph{molar or rigid line of
segmentarity}; in no sense is it dead, for it occupies and pervades our
life, and always seems to prevail in the end. It even includes much
tenderness and love. It would be too easy to say, “This is a bad line,”
for you find it everywhere, and in all the other lines.


A rich couple comes into the post office and reveals to the young woman,
or at least confirms, the existence of another life: coded, multiple
telegrams, signed with pseudonyms. It is hard to tell who is who
anymore, or what anything means. Instead of a rigid line composed of
well-determined segments, telegraphy now forms a supple flow marked by
**quanta* that are like so many little segmentations-in-progress grasped
at the moment of their birth, as on a moonbeam, or on an intensive
scale. Thanks to her “prodigious talent for interpretation,” the young
woman grasps that the man has a secret that has placed him in danger,
deeper and deeper in danger, in a dangerous posture. It does not just
have to do with his love relations with the woman. James has reached the
stage in his work when it is no longer the matter of the secret that
interests him, even if he has succeeded in rendering it entirely banal
and unimportant. Now what counts is the form of the secret; the matter
no longer even has to be discovered (we never find out, there are
several possibilities, there is an objective indetermination, a kind of
molecularization of the secret). In relation to this man, directly with
him, the young telegraphist develops a strange passional complicity, a
whole intense molecular life that does not even enter into rivalry with
the life she leads with her fiancé. What has happened, whatever could
have happened? This life, however, is not in her head, it is not
imaginary. Rather, we should say that there are two \emph{politics} involved,
as the young woman suggests in a remarkable conversation with her
fiancé: a macropolitics and a micropolitics that do not envision
classes, sexes, people, or feelings in at all the same way. Or again,
there are two very different types of relations: intrinsic relations of
**couples* involving well-determined aggregates or elements (social
classes, men and women, this or that particular person), and less
localizable relations that are always external to themselves and instead
concern flows and particles eluding those classes, sexes, and persons.
Why are the latter relations of \emph{doubles} rather than of couples? “She
was literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside.
He might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him
she was afraid.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: “In the Cage,” \emph{The Novels and Tales of Henry James} (Fairfield, N. J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1979), vol. 11, p. 469.]} In any case, this line is very different from the
previous one; it is a \emph{line of molecular or supple segmentation} the
segments of which are like quanta of deterritorialization. It is on this
line that a present is defined whose very form is the form of something
that has already happened, however close you might be to it, since the
ungraspable matter of that something is entirely molecularized,
traveling at speeds beyond the ordinary thresholds of perception. Yet we
will not say that it is necessarily better.


There is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering,
reacting upon each other, introducing into each other either a current
of suppleness or a point of rigidity. Nathalie Sarraute, in her essay on
the novel, praises English novelists, not only for discovering (as did
Proust and Dostoyevsky) the great movements, territories, and points of
the unconscious that allow us to regain time or revive the past, but
also for inopportunely following these molecular lines, simultaneously
present and imperceptible. She shows that dialogue or conversation does
indeed comply with the breaks of a fixed segmentarity, with vast
movements of regulated distribution corresponding to the attitudes and
positions of each of us; but also that they are run through and swept up
by \emph{micromovements}, fine segmentations distributed in an entirely
different way, unfindable particles of an anonymous matter, tiny cracks
and postures operating by different agencies even in the unconscious,
secret lines of disorientation or deterritorialization: as she puts it,
a whole subconversation within conversation, in other words, a
micropolitics of conversation.\footnote{Nathalie Sarraute, in “Conversation and Sub-conversation,” \emph{The Age of Suspicion}, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), shows how Proust analyzes the smallest movements, glances, or intonations. However, he apprehends them through memory, he assigns them a “position,” he thinks of them as a sequence of causes and effects; “he rarely \dots{} tried to relive them and make them relive for the reader in the present, while they were forming and developing, like so many tiny dramas, each one of which has its adventures, its mystery and its unforeseeable ending” (p.92).}


Then James’s heroine reaches a sort of maximum quantum in her supple
segmentarity or line of flow beyond which she cannot go (even if she
wanted to, there is no going further). There is a danger that these
vibrations traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance. What
happened? The molecular relation between the telegraphist and the
telegraph sender dissolved in the form of the secret—because nothing
happened. Each of them is propelled toward a rigid segmentarity: he will
marry the now-widowed lady, she will marry her fiancé. And yet
everything has changed. She has reached something like a new line, a
third type, a kind of \emph{line of flight} that is just as real as the
others even if it occurs in place: this line no longer tolerates
segments; rather, it is like an exploding of the two segmentary series.
She has broken through the wall, she has gotten out of the black holes.
She has attained a kind of absolute deterritorialization. “She ended up
knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. \emph{There were
no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare}.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: The French translation consulted by the authors reversed the meaning of this passage. The original reads: “She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctions—it all bounded out.” \emph{In the Cage, The Novels and Tales of Henry James}, vol. 11, p. 472.]} You
cannot go further in life than this sentence by James. The nature of the
secret has changed once again. Undoubtedly, the secret always has to do
with love, and sexuality. But previously it was either only a hidden
matter given in the past (the better hidden the more ordinary it was),
and we did not exactly know what form to give it: See, I am bending
under the burden of my secret, see what mystery resides within me. It
was a way of seeming interesting, what D. H. Lawrence called “the dirty
little secret,” \emph{my} Oedipus, in a way. Or else the secret became the
form of something whose matter was molecularized, imperceptible,
unassignable: not a given of the past but the ungivable “What happened?”
But on this third line there is no longer even any form—nothing but a
pure abstract line. It is 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 in order finally to be alone and meet the true
double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a
motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely,
is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be
anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. As Kierkegaard says, nothing
distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bourgeois German going home
or to the post office: he sends off no special telegraphic sign; he
constantly produces or reproduces finite segments, yet he is already
moving on a line no one even suspects.\footnote{Søren Kierkegaard, \emph{Fear and Trembling}, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 46ff.} In any case, the telegraphic
line is not a symbol, and it is not simple. There are at least three of
them: a line of rigid and clear-cut segmentarity; a line of molecular
segmentarity; and an abstract line, a line of flight no less deadly and
no less alive than the others. On the first line, there are many words
and conversations, questions and answers, interminable explanations,
precisions; the second is made of silences, allusions, and hasty
innuendos inviting interpretation. But if the third line flashes, if the
line of flight is like a train in motion, it is because one jumps
linearly on it, one can finally speak “literally” of anything at all, a
blade of grass, a catastrophe or sensation, calmly accepting that which
occurs when it is no longer possible for anything to stand for anything
else. The three lines, however, continually intermingle.

\section{Second Novella: “The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald}


What happened? This is the question Fitzgerald keeps coming back to
toward the end, having remarked that “of course all life is a process of
breaking down.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up,” in \emph{The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected Pieces}, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), p. 69.]} How should we understand this “of course”? We can
say, first of all, that life is always drawn into an increasingly rigid
and desiccated segmentarity. For the writer Fitzgerald, voyages, with
their clear-cut segments, had lost their usefulness. There was also,
from segment to segment, the depression, loss of wealth, fatigue and
growing old, alcoholism, the failure of conjugality, the rise of the
cinema, the advent of fascism and Stalinism, and the loss of success and
talent—at the very moment Fitzgerald would find his genius. “\emph{The big
sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside}” (p. 69), and
proceed by oversignificant breaks, moving us from one term to the other
according to successive binary “choices”: rich\Slash{}poor \dots{} Even when change
runs in the other direction, there is nothing to compensate for the
rigidification, the aging that overcodes everything that occurs. This is
a line of rigid segmentarity bringing masses into play, even if it was
supple to begin with.


But Fitzgerald says that there is another type of cracking, with an
entirely different segmentarity. Instead of great breaks, these are
microcracks, as in a dish; they are much more subtle and supple, and
**occur when things are going well on the other side*. If there is aging
on this line, it is not of the same kind: when you age on this line you
don’t feel it on the other line, you don’t notice it on the other line
until after “it” has already happened on this line. At such a moment,
which does not correspond to any of the ages of the other line, you
reach a degree, a quantum, an intensity beyond which you cannot go.
(It’s a very delicate business, these intensities: the finest intensity
becomes harmful if it overtaxes your strength at a given moment; you
have to be able to take it, you have to be in shape.) But what exactly
happened? In truth, nothing assignable or perceptible: molecular
changes, redistributions of desire such that when something occurs, the
self that awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has
not yet arrived. This time, there are outbursts and crackings in the
immanence of a rhizome, rather than great movements and breaks
determined by the transcendence of a tree. The crack-up “happens almost
without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed” (p. 69). This
molecular line, more supple but no less disquieting, in fact, much more
disquieting, is not simply internal or personal: it also brings
everything into play, but on a different scale and in different forms,
with segmentations of a different nature, rhizomatic instead of
arborescent. A micropolitics.


There is, in addition, a third line, which is like a line of rupture or
a “clean break” and marks the exploding of the other two, their shake-up
\dots{} in favor of something else? “This led me to the idea that the ones who
had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and
is no parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail
or will be forced back to the old one” (p. 81). Here, Fitzgerald
contrasts rupture with structural pseudobreaks in so-called signifying
chains. But he also distinguishes it from more supple, more subterranean
links or stems of the “voyage” type, or even from molecular conveyances.
“The famous ‘Escape’ or ‘run away from it all’ is an excursion in a trap
even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who
want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot
come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to
exist” (p. 81). Can it be that voyages are always a return to rigid
segmentarity? Is it always your daddy and mommy that you meet when you
travel, even as far away as the South Seas, like Melville? Hardened
muscles? Must we say that supple segmentarity itself reconstructs the
great figures it claimed to escape, but under the microscope, in
miniature? Beckett’s unforgettable line is an indictment of all voyages:
“\emph{We don’t travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we’re foolish,
but not that foolish}.”


In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volitized; the form of
what happened, of an imperceptible something that happened in a volatile
matter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and
clandestine in motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have
happened, any longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any
longer. My territories are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary,
but the opposite: because I am in the process of drawing them. Wars, big
and little, are behind me. Voyages, always in tow to something else, are
behind me. I no longer have any secrets, having lost my face, form, and
matter. I am now no more than a line. I have become capable of loving,
not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and
that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. One has
been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and self. Now one is no
more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the void. Absolute
deterritorialization. One has become like everybody\Slash{}the whole world
(\emph{tout le monde}), but in a way that can become like everybody\Slash{}the whole
world. One has painted the world on oneself, not oneself on the world.
It should not be said that the genius is an extraordinary person, \emph{nor}
that everybody has genius. The genius is someone who knows how to make
everybody\Slash{}the whole world a becoming (Ulysses, perhaps: Joyce’s failed
ambition, Pound’s near-success). One has entered becomings-animal,
becomings-molecular, and finally becomings-imperceptible. “I was off the
dispensing end of the relief roll forever. The heady villainous feeling
continued\dots{}. I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw
me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Ibid., pp. 82, 84.]} Why
such a despairing tone? Does not the line of rupture or true flight have
its own danger, one worse than the others? Time to die. In any case,
Fitzgerald proposes a distinction between the three lines traversing us
and composing “a life” (after Maupassant). \emph{Break line, crack line,
rupture line}. The line of rigid segmentarity with molar breaks; the
line of supple segmentation with molecular cracks; the line of flight or
rupture, abstract, deadly and alive, nonsegmentary.

\section[{Third Novella: “The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass,” Pierrette Fleutiaux}]{Third Novella: “The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass,” Pierrette Fleutiaux\footnote{Pierrette Fleutiaux, \emph{Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette et autres nouvelles} (Paris: Julliard, 1976), pp. 9–50.}}
\hyperdef{amuse}{third-novella-the-story-of-the-abyss-and-the-spyglass-pierrette-fleutiauxatp-plateau-8-10}{}%
\label{textamuse:third-novella-the-story-of-the-abyss-and-the-spyglass-pierrette-fleutiauxatp-plateau-8-10}%


Some segments are more or less near, and others more or less distant.
The segments seem to encircle an abyss, a kind of huge black hole. On
each segment there are two kinds of lookouts, near-seers and far-seers.
What they watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions,
disturbances, and rebellions occurring in the abyss. But there is a
major difference between the two types of lookouts. The near-seers have
a simple spyglass. In the abyss, they see the outline of gigantic cells,
great binary divisions, dichotomies, well-defined segments of the type
“classroom, barracks, low-income housing project, or even countryside
seen from an airplane.” They see branches, chains, rows, columns,
dominoes, striae. Once in a while along the edges they discover a
misshapen figure or a shaky contour. Then they bring out the terrible
Ray Telescope. It is used not to see with but to cut with, to cut out
shapes. This geometrical instrument, which emits a laser beam, assures
the dominion of the great signifying break everywhere and restores the
momentarily threatened molar order. The cutting telescope \emph{overcodes}
everything; it acts on flesh and blood, but itself is nothing but pure
geometry, as a State affair, and the near-seers’ physics in the service
of that machine. What is geometry, what is the State, and what are the
nearseers? These are meaningless questions (“I am speaking literally”)
because it is not so much a question of defining something as
effectively drawing a line; not a line of writing but a line of rigid
segmentarity along which everyone will be judged and rectified according
to his or her contours, individual or collective.


Very different is the situation of those with long-distance vision, the
farseers, with all their ambiguities. There are very few of them, at
most one per segment. Their telescopes are complex and refined. But they
are in no way leaders. And what they see is entirely different from what
the others see. They see a whole microsegmentarity, details of details,
“a roller coaster of possibilities,” tiny movements that have not
reached the edge, lines or vibrations that start to form long before
there are outlined shapes, “segments that move by jerks.” A whole
rhizome, a molecular segmentarity that does not permit itself to be
overcoded by a signifier like the cutting machine, or even to be
attributed to a given figure, a given aggregate or element. This second
line is inseparable from the anonymous segmentation that produces it and
challenges everything all the time, without goal or reason: “What
happened?” The far-seers can divine the future, but always in the form
of a becoming of something that has already happened in a molecular
matter; unfindable particles. The situation is the same in biology: the
great cellular divisions and dichotomies, with their contours, are
accompanied by migrations, invaginations, displacements, and
morphogenetic impulses whose segments are marked not by localizable
points but by thresholds of intensity passing underneath, mitoses that
scramble everything, and molecular lines that intersect each other
within the large-scale cells and between their breaks. The situation is
the same in a society: rigid segments and overcutting segments are
crosscut underneath by segmentations of another nature. But this is
neither one nor the other, neither biology nor a society; nor is it a
resemblance between the two: “I am speaking literally,” I am drawing
lines, lines of writing, and life passes between the lines. A line of
supple segmentarity formed and became entangled with the other, but it
was a very different kind of line, shakily drawn by the micropolitics of
the far-seers. It is a political affair, as worldwide in scope as the
other, but on a scale and in a form that is incommensurable,
nonsuperposable. It is also a perceptual affair, for perception always
goes hand in hand with semiotics, practice, politics, theory. One sees,
speaks and thinks on a given scale, and according to a given line that
may or may not conjugate with the other’s line, even if the other is
still oneself. If it does not, then you should not insist, you should
not argue; you should flee, flee, even saying as you go, “Okay, okay,
you win.” It’s no use talking; you first have to change telescopes,
mouths, and teeth, all of the segments. Not only does one speak
literally, one also lives literally, in other words, following lines,
whether connectable or not, even heterogeneous ones. Sometimes it
doesn’t work when they are homogeneous.\footnote{In another novella in the same collection, “Le dernier angle de transparence” (The last angle of transparency). Fleutiaux distinguishes three lines of perception, but without applying a preestablished schema. The hero has \emph{molar perception}, which takes in overall aggregates and clear-cut elements, well-distributed areas of fullness and emptiness (this perception is coded, inherited, and overcoded by the walls: Don’t miss you chair, etc.). But he is also caught up in a \emph{molecular perception} composed of fine and shifting segmentations and autonomous traits, where holes appear in what is full and microforms in emptiness, between two things, where everything “teems and stirs” with a thousand cracks. The hero’s problem is that he cannot make up his mind between the two lines and constantly jumps from one to the other. Will he be saved by a third line of perception, the \emph{perception of escape}, a “hypothetical direction barely hinted at” by the angle of the two others, the “angle of transparency” opening a new space?}


The ambiguity of the far-seers’ situation is that they are able to
detect the slightest microinfraction in the abyss, things the others do
not see; they also observe, beneath its apparent geometrical justice,
the dreadful damage caused by the Cutting Telescope. They feel as though
they foresee things and are ahead of the others because they see the
smallest thing as already having happened; but they know that their
warnings are to no avail because the cutting telescope will set
everything straight without being warned, without the need for or
possibility of prediction. At times they feel that they do indeed see
something the others do not, but at other times that what they see
differs only in degree and serves no purpose. Although they are
collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest project of control, how
could they not feel a vague sympathy for the subterranean activity
revealed to them? An ambiguity in the molecular line, \emph{as if it
vacillated between two sides}. One day (what will have happened?), a
far-seer will abandon his or her segment and start walking across a
narrow overpass above the dark abyss, will break his or her telescope
and depart on a line of flight to meet a blind Double approaching from
the other side.



\bigskip


Individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesies,
tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature.
We said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather,
of bundles of lines, for each kind is multiple. We may be more
interested in a certain line than in the others, and perhaps there is
indeed one that is, not determining, but of greater importance \dots{} if it
is there. For some of these lines are imposed on us from outside, at
least in part. Others sprout up somewhat by chance, from a trifle, why
we will never know. Others can be invented, drawn, without a model and
without chance: we must invent our lines of flight, if we are able, and
the only way we can invent them is by effectively drawing them, in our
lives. Aren’t lines of flight the most difficult of all? Certain groups
or people have none and never will. Certain groups or people lack a
given kind of line, or have lost it. The painter Florence Julien has a
special interest in lines of flight: she invented a procedure by which
she extracts from photographs lines that are nearly abstract and
formless. But once again, there is a bundle of very diverse lines: the
line of flight of children leaving school at a run is different from
that of demonstrators chased by the police, or of a prisoner breaking
out. There are different animal lines of flight: each species, each
individual, has its own. Fernand Deligny transcribes the lines and paths
of autistic children by means of \emph{maps}: he carefully distinguishes
“lines of drift” and “customary lines.” This does not only apply to
walking; he also makes maps of perceptions and maps of gestures (cooking
or collecting wood) showing customary gestures and gestures of drift.
The same goes for language, if it is present. Deligny opened his lines
of writing to life lines. The lines are constantly crossing,
intersecting for a moment, following one another. A line of drift
intersects a customary line, and at that point the child does something
not quite belonging to either one: he or she finds something he or she
lost—what happened?—or jumps and claps his or her hands, a slight and
rapid movement—and that gesture in turn emits several lines.\footnote{Fernand Deligny, \emph{Cahiers de l’immuable}, vol. 1, \emph{Voix et voir, Recherches}, no. 8 (April 1975).} In
short, \emph{there is a line of flight, which is already complex since it has
singularities; and there is
a customary or molar
line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a molecular line
with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other}.


As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean
nothing. It is an affair of cartography. They compose us, as they
compose our map. They transform themselves and may even cross over into
one another. Rhizome. It is certain that they have nothing to do with
language; it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is
writing that must take sustenance from them, \emph{between} its own lines. It
is certain that they have nothing to do with a signifier, the
determination of a subject by the signifier; instead, the signifier
arises at the most rigidified level of one of the lines, and the subject
is spawned at the lowest level. It is certain that they have nothing to
do with a structure, which is never occupied by anything more than
points and positions, by arborescences, and which always forms a closed
system, precisely in order to prevent escape. Deligny invokes a common
Body upon which these lines are inscribed as so many segments,
thresholds, or quanta, territorialities, deterritorializations, or
reterritorializations. The lines are inscribed on a Body without Organs,
upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract
line with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of
the BwO. \emph{This body is the only practical object of schizoanalysis}:
What is your body without organs? What are your lines? What map are you
in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you
draw, and at what price, for yourself and for others? What is your line
of flight? What is your BwO, merged with that line? Are you cracking up?
Are you going to crack up? Are you deterritorializing? Which lines are
you severing, and which are you extending or resuming? Schizoanalysis
does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations,
or structures. It pertains only to \emph{lineaments} running through groups
as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is
immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an
individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. Practice
does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations,
but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the
same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does.
Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new. Or rather, there is no
problem of application: the lines it brings out could equally be the
lines of a life, a work of literature or art, or a society, depending on
which system of coordinates is chosen.


Line of molar or rigid segmentarity, line of molecular or supple
segmentation, line of flight—many problems arise. The first concerns the
**particular character of each line*. It might be thought that rigid
segments are socially determined, predetermined, overcoded by the State;
there may be a tendency to construe supple segmentarity as an interior
activity, something imaginary or phantasmic. As for the line of flight,
would it not be entirely personal, the way in which an individual
escapes on his or her own account, escapes “responsibilities,” escapes
the world, takes refuge in the desert, or else in art\dots{}? False
impression. Supple segmentarity has nothing to do with the imaginary,
and micropolitics is no less extensive or real than macropolitics.
Politics on the grand scale can never administer its molar segments
without also dealing with the microinjections or infiltrations that work
in its favor or present an obstacle to it; indeed, the larger the molar
aggregates, the greater the molecularization of the agencies they put
into play. Lines of flight, for their part, never consist in running
away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a
hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all
directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to
seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic,
about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of
flight, among animals or humans.\footnote{Henri Laborit wrote a book “in praise of flight,” \emph{Eloge de la fuite} (Paris: Laffont, 1976). In it, he demonstrates the biological importance of lines of flight among animals, but his approach is too formalistic; among human beings, he thinks flight is associated with values of the imaginary functioning to increase one’s “information” about the world.} Even History is forced to take
that route rather than proceeding by “signifying breaks.” What is
escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that
new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the
State. “I may be running, but I’m looking for a gun as I go” (George
Jackson). It was along lines of flight that the nomads swept away
everything in their path and found new weapons, leaving the Pharaoh
thunderstruck. It is possible for a single group, or a single individual
even, to exhibit all the lines we have been discussing simultaneously.
But it is most frequently the case that a single group or individual
functions as a line of flight; that group or individual creates the line
rather than following it, is itself the living weapon it forges rather
than stealing one. Lines of flight are realities; they are very
dangerous for societies, although they can get by without them, and
sometimes manage to keep them to a minimum.


The second problem concerns \emph{the respective importance of the lines}.
You can begin with the rigid segmentarity, it’s the easiest, it’s
pregiven; and then you can look at how and to what extent it is crosscut
by a supple segmentarity, a kind of rhizome surrounding its roots. Then
you can look at how the line of flight enters in. And alliances and
battles. But it is also possible to begin with the line of flight:
perhaps this is the primary line, with its absolute
deterritorialization. It is clear that the line of flight \emph{does not come
afterward}; it is there from the beginning, even if it awaits its hour,
and waits for the others to explode. Supple segmentarity, then, is only
a kind of compromise operating by relative deterritorializations and
permitting reterritorializations that cause blockages and reversions to
the rigid line. It is odd how supple segmentarity is caught between the
two other lines, ready to tip to one side or the other; such is its
ambiguity. It is also necessary to look at the various combinations: it
is quite possible that one group or individual’s line of flight may not
work to benefit that of another group or individual; it may on the
contrary block it, plug it, throw it even deeper into rigid
segmentarity. It can happen in love that one person’s creative line is
the other’s imprisonment. The composition of the lines, 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.


Third problem: there is a \emph{mutual immanence} of the lines. And it is not
easy to sort them out. No one of them is transcendent, each is at work
within the others. Immanence everywhere. Lines of flight are immanent to
the social field. Supple segmentarity continually dismantles the
concretions of rigid segmentarity, but everything that it dismantles it
reassembles on its own level: micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power,
microfascisms. The line of flight blasts the two segmentary series
apart; but it is capable of the worst, of bouncing off the wall, falling
into a black hole, taking the path of greatest regression, and in its
vagaries reconstructing the most rigid of segments. Have you sown your
wild oats? That is worse than not escaping at all: See Lawrence’s
reproach to Melville.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See pp. 188–89.]} Between the matter of a dirty little secret
in rigid segmentarity, the empty form of “What happened?” in supple
segmentarity, and clandestinity of what can no longer happen on the line
of flight, how can we fail to see the upheavals caused by a monster
force, the Secret, threatening to bring everything tumbling down?
Between the Couple of the first kind of segmentarity, the Double of the
second, and the Clandestine of the line of flight, there are so many
possible mixtures and passages.


There is one last problem, the most anguishing one, concerning \emph{the
dangers specific to each line}. There is not much to say about the
danger confronting the first, for the chances are slim that its
rigidification will fail. There is not much to say about the ambiguity
of the second. But why is the line of flight, even aside from the danger
it runs of reverting to one of the other two lines, imbued with such
singular despair in spite of its message of joy, as if at the very
moment things are coming to a resolution its undertaking were threatened
by something reaching down to its core, by a death, a demolition?
Shestov said of Chekhov, a great creator of novellas: “There can be
practically no doubt that Chekhov exerted himself, and something broke
inside him. And the overstrain came not from hard and heavy labor; no
mighty overpowering exploit broke him: he stumbled and fell, he
slipped\dots{}. The old Chekhov of gaiety and mirth is no more\dots{}. Instead, a
morose and overshadowed man, a ‘criminal.’”\footnote{Leon Shestov, \emph{Chekhov and Other Essays} (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 8–9 [translation modified to agree with the French edition cited by the authors—Trans].} \emph{What happened}? Once
again, this is the question facing all of Chekhov’s characters. Is it
not possible to exert oneself, and even break something, without falling
into a black hole of bitterness and sand? But did Chekhov really fall?
Is that not to judge him entirely from the outside? Was Chekhov not
correct in saying that however grim his characters are, he still carries
“a hundred pounds of love”? Of course, nothing is easy on the lines that
compose us, and that constitute the essence of the Novella (\emph{la
Nouvelle}), and sometimes of Good News (\emph{la Bonne Nouvelle}).


What are your couples, your doubles, your clandestines, and what are
their mixes? When one person says to another, love the taste of whiskey
on my lips like I love the gleam of madness in your eyes, what lines are
they in the process of composing, or, on the contrary, making
incompossible? Fitzgerald: “Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and
relations will tell you in good faith that it was my drinking that drove
Zelda mad, and the other half would assure you that it was her madness
that drove me to drink. Neither of these judgments means much of
anything. These two groups of friends and relations would be unanimous
in saying that each of us would have been much better off without the
other. The irony is that we have never been more in love with each other
in all of our lives. She loves the alcohol on my lips. I cherish her
most extravagant hallucinations.” “In the end, nothing really had much
importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in all honesty, I never thought
we destroyed each other.” Beautiful texts. All of the lines are there:
the lines of family and friends, of all those who speak, explain, and
psychoanalyze, assigning rights and wrongs, of the whole binary machine
of the Couple, united or divided, in rigid segmentarity (50 percent).
Then there is the line of supple segmentation, from which the alcoholic
and the madwoman extract, as from a kiss on the lips and eyes, the
multiplication of a double at the limit of what they can endure in their
state and with the tacit understandings serving them as internal
messages. Finally, there is a line of flight, all the more shared now
that they are separated, or vice versa, each of them the clandestine of
the other, a double all the more successful now that nothing has
importance any longer, now that everything can begin anew, since they
have been destroyed but not by each other. Nothing will enter memory,
everything was on the lines, between the lines, in the \emph{AND} that made
one \emph{and} the other imperceptible, without disjunction or conjunction
but only a line of flight forever in the process of being drawn, toward
a new acceptance, the opposite of renunciation or resignation—a new
happiness?

\chapter{9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-9}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-9}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-43.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Segmentarities (Overview of the Types)}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being
is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata
composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is
spatially and socially segmented. The house is segmented according to
its rooms’ assigned purposes; streets, according to the order of the
city; the factory, according to the nature of the work and operations
performed in it. We are segmented in a \emph{binary} fashion, following the
great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men-women,
adults-children, and so on. We are segmented in a \emph{circular} fashion, in
ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce’s “letter”:
my affairs, my neighborhood’s affairs, my city’s, my country’s, the
world’s \dots{} We are segmented in a \emph{linear} fashion, along a straight line
or a number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an
episode or “proceeding”: as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin
another, forever proceduring or procedured, in the family, in school, in
the army, on the job. School tells us, “You’re not at home anymore”; the
army tells us, “You’re not in school anymore” \dots{} Sometimes the various
segments belong to different individuals or groups, and sometimes the
same individual or group passes from one segment to another. But these
figures of segmentarity, the binary, circular, and linear, are bound up
with one another, even cross over into each other, changing according to
the point of view. This is already evident among “savage” peoples: Lizot
shows how the communal House is organized in circular fashion, going
from interior to exterior in a series of coronas within which certain
types of localizable activities take place (worship and ceremonies,
followed by exchange of goods, followed by family life, followed by
trash and excrement); at the same time “each of these coronas is itself
transversally divided, each segment devolves upon a particular lineage
and is subdivided among different kinship groups.”\footnote{Jacques Lizot, \emph{Le cercle des Feux} (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 118} In a more
general context, Lévi-Strauss shows that the dualist organization of
primitive peoples has a circular form, and also takes a linear form
encompassing “any number of groups” (at least three).\footnote{Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{Structural Anthropology}, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963): “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” pp. 132–163.}


Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The
fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists
to account for so-called primitive societies, which have no fixed,
central State apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized
political institutions. In these societies, the social segments have a
certain leeway, between the two extreme poles effusion and scission,
depending on the task and the situation; there is also considerable
communicability between heterogeneous elements, so that one segment can
fit with another in a number of different ways; and they have a local
construction excluding the prior determination of a base domain
(economic, political, juridical, artistic); they have extrinsic and
situational properties, or relations irreducible to the intrinsic
properties of a structure; activity is continuous, so segmentarity is
not grasped as something separate from a segmentation-in-progress
operating by outgrowths, detachments, and mergings. Primitive
segmentarity is characterized by a polyvocal \emph{code} based on lineages
and their varying situations and relations, and an itinerant
**territoriality* based on local, overlapping divisions. Codes and
territories, clan lineages and tribal territorialities, form a fabric of
relatively supple segmentarity.\footnote{See two exemplary studies in \emph{African Political Systems}, ed. Meyer Frotes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): Fortes, “The Political System of the Tellensi of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast,” pp. 239–271, and Evans-Pritchard, “The Nuer of the Southern Sudan,” pp. 272–296.}


However, it seems to us difficult to maintain that State societies, even
our modern States, are any less segmentary. The classical opposition
between segmentarity and centralization hardly seems relevant.\footnote{Georges Balandier analyzes the ways in which ethnologists and sociologists define this opposition: \emph{Political Anthropology}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp. 137–143.} Not
only does the State exercise power over the segments it sustains or
permits to survive, but it possesses, and imposes, its own segmentarity.
Perhaps the opposition sociologists establish between the segmentary and
the central is biological deep down: the ringed worm, and the central
nervous system. But the central brain itself is a worm, even more
segmented than the others, in spite of and including all of its
vicarious actions. There is no opposition between the central and the
segmentary. The modern political system is a global whole, unified and
unifying, but is so because it implies a constellation of juxtaposed,
imbricated, ordered subsystems; the analysis of decision making brings
to light all kinds of compartmentalizations and partial processes that
interconnect, but not without gaps and displacements. Technocracy
operates by the segmentary division of labor (this applies to the
international division of labor as well). Bureaucracy exists only in
compartmentalized offices and functions only by “goal displacements” and
the corresponding “dysfunctions.” Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the
boss’s office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower.
In short, we would say that modern life has not done away with
segmentarity but has on the contrary made it exceptionally rigid.


Instead of setting up an opposition between the segmentary and the
centralized, we should make a distinction between two types of
segmentarity, one “primitive” and supple, the other “modern” and rigid.
This distinction reframes each of the figures previously discussed.


1. Binary oppositions (men\Slash{}women, those on top\Slash{}those on the bottom,
etc.) are very strong in primitive societies, but seem to be the result
of machines and assemblages that are not in themselves binary. The
social binarity between men and women in a group applies rules according
to which both sexes must take their respective spouses from different
groups (which is why there are at least three groups). Thus Lévi-Strauss
can demonstrate that dualist organization never stands on its own in
this kind of society. On the contrary, it is a particularity of modern
societies, or rather State societies, to bring into their own duality
machines that function as such, and proceed simultaneously by biunivocal
relationships and successively by binarized choices. Classes and sexes
come in twos, and phenomena of tripartition result from a transposition
of the dual, not the reverse. We have already encountered this, notably
in the case of the Face machine, which differs in this respect from
primitive head machines. It seems that modern societies elevated dual
segmentarity to the level of a self-sufficient organization. The
question, therefore, is not whether the status of women, or those on the
bottom, is better or worse, but the type of organization from which that
status results.


2. Similarly, we may note that in primitive societies circular
segmentarity does not necessarily imply that the circles are concentric,
or have the same center. In a supple regime, centers already act as so
many \emph{knots}, \emph{eyes}, or \emph{black holes}; but they do not all resonate
together, they do not fall on the same point, they do not converge in
the same black hole. There is a multiplicity of animist eyes, each of
which is assigned, for example, a particular animal spirit
(snake-spirit, woodpecker-spirit, cayman-spirit\dots{}). Each black hole is
occupied by a different animal eye. Doubtless, we see operations of
rigidification and centralization take shape here and there: all of the
centers must collect on a single circle, which itself has a single
center. The shaman draws lines between all the points or spirits,
outlines a constellation, a radiating set of roots tied to a central
tree. This is the birth of a centralized power with an arborescent
system to discipline the outgrowths of the primitive rhizome.\footnote{On the initiation of a shaman and the role of the tree among the Yanomami Indians, see Jacques Lizot, \emph{Le cercle des feux}, pp. 127–135: “Between his legs a hole is hastily dug in which they place the base of the pole they erect there. Turaewë draws imaginary lines on the ground radiating in all directions. He says, ‘These are the roots.’”} Here,
the tree simultaneously plays the role of a principle of dichotomy or
binarity, and an axis of rotation. But the power of the shaman is still
entirely localized, strictly dependent upon a particular segment,
contingent upon drugs, and each point continues to emit independent
sequences. The same cannot be said of modern societies, or even of
States. Of course, the centralized is not opposed to the segmentary, and
the circles remain distinct. But they become concentric, definitively
arborified. The segmentarity becomes rigid, to the extent that all
centers resonate in, and all 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. The supple
microheads with animal facializations are replaced by a macroface whose
center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. There are no longer \emph{n}
eyes in the sky, or in becomings-animal and -vegetable, but a central
computing eye scanning all of the radii. The central State is
constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity but by a
concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance
among centers. \emph{There are already just as many power centers in
primitive societies; or, if one prefers, there are still just as many in
State societies}. The latter, however, behave as apparatuses of
resonance; they organize resonance, whereas the former inhibit it.\footnote{The State, therefore, is not defined solely by the type of public powers it has, but also as a resonance chamber for private as well as public powers. It is for this reason that Althusser says: “The distinction between public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the subordinate domains where bourgeois law exercises its powers. The domain of the State eludes it because it is beyond Law\dots{}. It is on the contrary the foundation for any distinction between the public and the private.” “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’Etat,” \emph{La Pensée}, no. 151 (June 1970), pp. 29–35.}


3. Finally, in the case of linear segmentarity, we would say that each
segment is underscored, rectified, and homogenized in its own right, but
also in relation to the others. Not only does each have its own unit of
measure, but there is an equivalence and translatability between units.
The central eye has as its correlate a space through which it moves, but
it itself remains invariant in relation to its movements. With the Greek
city-state and Cleisthenes’ reform, a homogeneous and isotopic space
appears that overcodes the lineal segments, at the same time as distinct
focal points begin to resonate in a center acting as their common
denominator.\footnote{Jean-Pierre Vernant, \emph{Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs} (Paris: Maspero, 1971–1974), vol. 1, part 3 (“When it becomes communal, when it is erected in the public and open space of the agora and no longer inside private residences \dots{} the hearth [\emph{foyer}: also, focus, focal point—Trans.] expresses the center as common denominator of all of the houses constituting the \emph{polis}”; p. 210).} Paul Virilio shows that after the Greek city-state,
the Roman Empire imposes a geometrical or \emph{linear reason of State}
including a general outline of camps and fortifications, a universal art
of “marking boundaries by lines,” a laying-out of territories, a
substitution of space for places and territorialities, and a
transformation of the world into the city; in short, an increasingly
rigid segmentarity.\footnote{Paul Virilio, \emph{L’insécurité du territoire} (Paris: Stock, 1975), pp. 120, 174–175. On “castrametation”: “Geometry is the necessary foundation for a calculated expansion of State power in space and time; conversely, this supplies the State with an ideal, sufficient figure, provided that the figure is ideally geometrical\dots{}. But Fénélon, voicing his opposition to the State policies of Louis XIV, exclaimed: ‘Beware the bewitchments and diabolical attributes of geometry!’”} The segments, once underscored or overcoded,
seem to lose their ability to bud, they seem to lose their dynamic
relation to segmentations-in-progress, or in the act of coming together
or coming apart. If there exists a primitive “geometry” (a
protogeometry), it is an operative geometry in which figures are never
separable from the affectations befalling them, the lines of their
becoming, the segments of their segmentation: there is “roundness,” but
no circle, “alignments,” but no straight line, etc. On the contrary,
State geometry, or rather the bond between the State and geometry,
manifests itself in the primacy of the theorem-element, which
substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple morphological formations,
properties for affects, predetermined segments for
segmentations-in-progress. Geometry and arithmetic take on the power of
the scalpel. Private property implies a space that has been overcoded
and gridded by surveying. Not only does each line have its segments, but
the segments of one line correspond to those of another; for example,
the wage regime establishes a correspondence between monetary segments,
production segments, and consumable-goods segments.


We may summarize the principal differences between rigid segmentarity
and supple segmentarity. In the rigid mode, binary segmentarity stands
on its own and is governed by great machines of direct binarization,
whereas in the other mode, binarities result from “multiplicities of \emph{n}
dimensions.” Second, circular segmentarity tends to become concentric,
in other words, causes all of its focal points to coincide in a single
center that is in constant movement but remains invariant through its
movements, and is part of a machine of resonance. Finally, linear
segmentarity feeds into a machine of overcoding that constitutes \emph{more
geometrico} homogeneous space and extracts segments that are determinate
as to their substance, form, and relations. It will be noted that this
rigid segmentarity is always expressed by the Tree. The Tree is the knot
of arborescence or principle of dichotomy; it is the axis of rotation
guaranteeing concentricity; it is the structure or network gridding the
possible. This opposition between arborified and rhizomatic segmentarity
is not just meant to indicate two states of a single process, but also
to isolate two different processes. For primitive societies operate
essentially by codes and territorialities. It is in fact the distinction
between these two elements, the tribal system of territories and the
clan system of lineages, that prevents resonance.\footnote{Meyer Fortes analyzes the difference among the Tellensi between “guardians of the earth” and chiefs. This distinction between powers is fairly widespread among primitive societies; but the important thing is that it is organized in such a way as to prevent the powers from resonating. For example, according to Louis Berthe’s analysis of the Baduj of Java, the power of the guardian of the earth, on the one hand, is considered to be passive and feminine but, on the other hand, is assigned to the eldest son: this is not an “intrusion of kinship into the political order” but on the contrary “a requirement of a political order translated in kinship terms” in order to prevent the establishment of a resonance leading to private property. See Berthe, “Aînés et cadets, l’alliance et la hiérarchic chez les Baduj,” \emph{L’Homme}, vol. 5, nos. 3\Slash{}4 (July–December 65), pp. 189–223.} Modern, or State,
societies, on the other hand, have replaced the declining codes with a
univocal overcoding, and the lost territories with a specific
reterritorialization (which takes place in an overcoded geometrical
space). Segmentarity is always the result of an abstract machine, but
different abstract machines operate in the rigid and the supple.



\bigskip


It is not enough, therefore, to oppose the centralized to the
segmentary. Nor is it enough to oppose two kinds of segmentarity, one
supple and primitive, the other modern and rigidified. There is indeed a
distinction between the two, but they are inseparable, they overlap,
they are entangled. Primitive societies have nuclei of rigidity or
arborification that as much anticipate the State as ward it off.
Conversely, our societies are still suffused by a supple fabric without
which their rigid segments would not hold. Supple segmentarity cannot be
restricted to primitive peoples. It is not the vestige of the savage
within us but a perfectly contemporary function, inseparable from the
other. Every society, and every individual, are thus plied by both
segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other \emph{molecular}. If they
are distinct, it is because they do not have the same terms or the same
relations or the same nature or even the same type of multiplicity. If
they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into
each other. The configurations differ, for example, between the
primitives and us, but the two segmentarities are always in
presupposition. In short, everything is political, but every politics is
simultaneously a \emph{macropolitics} and a \emph{micropolitics}. Take aggregates
of the perception or feeling type: their molar organization, their rigid
segmentarity, does not preclude the existence of an entire world of
unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine segmentations that
grasp or experience different things, are distributed and operate
differently. There is a micropolitics of perception, affection,
conversation, and so forth. If we consider the great binary aggregates,
such as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over
into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a
double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a
multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the
man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to
the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes. And social classes
themselves imply “masses” that do not have the same kind of movement,
distribution, or objectives and do not wage the same kind of struggle.
Attempts to distinguish mass from class effectively tend toward this
limit: \emph{the notion of mass is a molecular notion} operating according to
a type of segmentation irreducible to the molar segmentarity of class.
Yet classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they crystallize them. And
masses are constantly flowing or leaking from classes. Their reciprocal
presupposition, however, does not preclude a difference in viewpoint,
nature, scale, and function (understood in this way, the notion of mass
has entirely different connotations than Canetti’s “crowd”).


It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with
compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each
segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or
on top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic
segmentation, a suppleness of and communication between offices, a
bureaucratic perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity
practiced even against administrative regulations. If Kafka is the
greatest theorist of bureaucracy, it is because he shows how, at a
certain level (but which one? it is not localizable), the barriers
between offices cease to be “a definite dividing line” and are immersed
in a molecular medium (\emph{milieu}) that dissolves them and simultaneously
makes the office manager proliferate into microfigures impossible to
recognize or identify, discernible only when they are centralizable:
another regime, coexistent with the separation \emph{and} totalization of the
rigid segments.\footnote{Franz Kafka, \emph{The Castle}, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976), especially chapter 15 (Barnabas’s statements [the phrase quoted is on p. 228—Trans]). The parable of the two offices—molar and molecular—does not just have a physical interpretation, as in Eddington, but a properly bureaucratic one as well.} We would even say that fascism implies a molecular
regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their
centralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the
totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a
concept of its own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the
Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not fascist. The
concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical
level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and
centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of
molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point,
**before* beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State.
Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war
veteran’s fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism
of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a
micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the
others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black
hole.\footnote{The strength of Jean-Pierre Faye’s book, \emph{Langages totalitaires} (Paris: Hermann, 1972), is that it illustrates the multiplicity of these focuses, both practical and semiotic, on the basis of which Nazism was constituted. That is why Faye is the first both to do a rigorous analysis of the concept of the totalitarian State (in its Italian and German origins) and to refuse to define Italian fascism and German Nazism by that concept (which operates on a different plane than the “subjacent process”). Faye goes into all of these points in \emph{La critique du langage et son économic} (Paris: Galilee, 1973).} There is fascism when a \emph{war machine} is installed in each
hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been
established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to
act upon the “masses.” Daniel Guérin is correct to say that if Hitler
took power, rather then taking over the German State administration, it
was because from the beginning he had at his disposal microorganizations
giving him “an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell
of society,” in other words, a molecular and supple segmentarity, flows
capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if capitalism came
to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to
ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of view
was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segmentarity
and centralization of the latter was more classical and less fluid. What
makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it
is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian
organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal points;
band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no
one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why
does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own
repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor
do they “want” to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor
are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from
complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from
microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions,
expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated
instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed,
engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that
processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist
determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete
microfascisms. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and
not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain
and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.


Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be
avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a
little suppleness is enough to make things “better.” But microfascisms
are what make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as
harmful as the most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as
if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only
to the individual and interindividual. But there is just as much
social-Real on one line as on the other. Third, the two forms are not
simply distinguished by size, as a small form and a large form; although
it is true that the molecular works in detail and operates in small
groups, this does not mean that it is any less coextensive with the
entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the qualitative
difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or
cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between
the two, directly or inversely proportional.


In the first case, the stronger the molar organization is, the more it
induces a molecularization of its own elements, relations, and
elementary apparatuses. When the machine becomes planetary or cosmic,
there is an increasing tendency for assemblages to miniaturize, to
become microassemblages. Following André Gorz’s formula, the only
remaining element of work left under world capitalism is the molecular,
or molecularized, individual, in other words, the “mass” individual. The
administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate
a whole micromanagement of petty fears, a permanent molecular
insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might
be: a macropolitics of society by and for a micropolitics of
insecurity.\footnote{On the complementarity between the “macropolitics of security” and the “micropolitics,” see Virilio, \emph{L’insecurité du territoire}, pp. 96, 130, 228–235. The microorganization of permanent stress in large modern cities has frequently been noted.} However, the second case is even more important:
molecular movements do not complement but rather thwart and break
through the great worldwide organization. That is what French President
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was saying in his military and political
geography lesson: the more balanced things are between East and West, in
an overcoding and overarmed dualist machine, the more “destabilized”
they become along the other, North-South, line. There is always a
Palestinian or Basque or Corsican to bring about a “regional
destabilization of security.”\footnote{Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, speech of June 1, 1976, before the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale (complete text in \emph{Le Monde}, June 4, 1976).} The two great molar aggregates of the
East and West are perpetually being undermined by a molecular
segmentation causing a zigzag crack, making it difficult for them to
keep their own segments in line. It is as if a line of flight, perhaps
only a tiny trickle to begin with, leaked between the segments, escaping
their centralization, eluding their totalization. The profound movements
stirring in a society present themselves in this fashion, even if they
are necessarily “represented” as a confrontation between molar segments.
It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined
by its contradictions. That is true only on the larger scale of things.
From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines
of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or
flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus,
and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a “change in
values,” the youth, women, the mad, etc. May 1968 in France was
molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the
viewpoint of macropolitics. It happens that people who are very limited
in outlook or are very old grasp the event better than the most advanced
politicians, or politicians who consider themselves advanced from the
viewpoint of organization. As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs to know
is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped
greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in
this case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May
’68: those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms understood
nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping. The
politicians, the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed;
they kept repeating over and over again that “conditions” were not ripe.
It was as though they had been temporarily deprived of the entire
dualism machine that made them valid spokespeople. Bizarrely, de Gaulle,
and even Pompidou, understood much more than the others. A molecular
flow was escaping, minuscule at first, then swelling, without, however,
ceasing to be unassignable. The reverse, however, is also true:
molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return
to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary
distributions of sexes, classes, and parties.


The issue is that the molar and the molecular are distinguished not by
size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system of reference
envisioned. Perhaps, then, the words “line” and “segment” should be
reserved for molar organization, and other, more suitable, words should
be sought for molecular composition. And in fact, whenever we can
identify a well-defined \emph{segmented line}, we notice that it continues in
another form, as a \emph{quantum flow}. And in every instance, we can locate
a “power center” at the border between the two, defined not by an
absolute exercise of power within its domain but by the relative
adaptations and conversions it effects between the line and the flow.
Take a monetary flow with segments. These segments can be defined from
several points of view, for example, from the viewpoint of a corporate
budget (real wages, net profit, management salaries, interest on assets,
reserves, investments, etc.). Now this line of payment-money is linked
to another aspect, namely, the flow of financing-money, which has, not
segments, but rather poles, singularities, and quanta (the poles of the
flow are the creation of money and its destruction; the singularities
are nominal liquid assets; the quanta are inflation, deflation,
stagflation, etc.). This has led some to speak of a “mutant, convulsive,
creative and circulatory flow” tied to desire and always subjacent to
the solid line and its segments determining interest rates and supply
and demand.\footnote{On the “flow with mutant power” and the distinction between the two kinds of money, see Bernard Schmitt, \emph{Monnaie, salaires et profits} (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 236, 275–277.} In a balance of payment, we again encounter a binary
segmentarity that distinguishes, for example, so-called autonomous
operations from so-called compensatory operations. But movements of
capital do not allow themselves to be segmented in this way; because
they are “\emph{the most thoroughly broken down}, according to their nature,
duration, and the personality of the creditor or debtor,” one “no longer
has any idea where to draw the line when dealing with these flows.”\footnote{Michel Lelart, \emph{Le dollar. Monnaie Internationale} (Paris: Albatros, 1975), p. 57.}
Yet there is always a correlation between the two aspects since
linearization and segmentation are where flows run dry, but are also
their point of departure for a new creation. When we talk about banking
power, concentrated most notably in the central banks, it is indeed a
question of the relative power to regulate “as much as” possible the
communication, conversion, and coadaptation of the two parts of the
circuit. That is why power centers are defined much more by what escapes
them or by their impotence than by their zone of power. In short, the
molecular, or microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by the
smallness of its elements but by the nature of its “mass”—the quantum
flow as opposed to the molar segmented line.\footnote{Take Foucault’s analysis, in \emph{Discipline and Punish}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), of what he calls the “microphysics of power.” First, it is indeed a question of miniaturized mechanisms, or molecular focuses operating in detail or in the infinitely small and forming any number of “disciplines” in the school, army, factory, prison, etc. (see pp. 138ff.). But second, these segments themselves, and the focuses operating within them at the molecular level, present themselves as the singularities of an “abstract” diagram coextensive with the entire social field, or as quanta deducted from a flow of a nonspecific nature—the nonspecific flow being defined by “a multiplicity of individuals” to be controlled (see pp. 205ff. [translation modified]).} The task of making the
segments correspond to the quanta, of adjusting the segments to the
quanta, implies hit-and-miss changes in rhythm and mode rather than any
omnipotence; and something always escapes.


We could take other examples, such as the power of the Church. Church
power has always been associated with a certain administration of sin
possessing a strong segmentarity (the seven deadly sins), units of
measure (how many times?), and rules of equivalence and atonement
(confession, penance\dots{}). But there is also what might be called the
molecular flow of sinfulness, something quite different yet
complementary: it hugs close to the linear zone, as though negotiated
through it, but itself has only poles (original sin-redemption or grace)
and quanta (“that sin which is the default of consciousness of sin”; the
sin of having a consciousness of sin; the sin of the consequence of
having a consciousness of sin).\footnote{On “quantitative sinfulness,” quanta, and the qualitative leap, one may refer to the microtheology constructed by Søren Kierkegaard in \emph{The Concept of Dread}, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).} The same could be said of a flow of
criminality, in contrast to the molar line of a legal code and its
divisions. Or to take another example, discussions of military power, or
the power of the army, consider a segmentable line broken down into
types of war corresponding exactly to the States waging war and the
political goals those States assign themselves (from “limited” war to
“total” war). But following Clausewitz’s intuition, the war machine is
very different; it is a flow of \emph{absolute} war stretching between an
offensive and a defensive pole, and is marked only by quanta (psychic
and material forces that are like the nominal liquid assets of war). We
may say of the pure flow that it is abstract yet real; ideal yet
effective; absolute yet “differentiated.” It is true that the flow and
its quanta can be grasped only by virtue of indexes on the segmented
line, but conversely, that line and those indexes exist only by virtue
of the flow suffusing them. In every case, it is evident that the
segmented line (macropolitics) is immersed in and prolonged by quantum
flows (micropolitics) that continually reshuffle and stir up its
segments.


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-44.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


In homage to Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904): his long-forgotton work has
assumed new relevance with the influence of American sociology, in
particular microsociology. It had been quashed by Durkheim and his
school (in polemics similar to and as harsh as Cuvier’s against Geoffrey
Saint-Hilaire). Durkheim’s preferred objects of study were the great
collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and
overcoded. Tarde countered that collective representations presuppose
exactly what needs explaining, namely, “the similarity of millions of
people.” That is why Tarde was interested instead in the world of
detail, or of the infinitesimal: the little \emph{imitations}, \emph{oppositions},
and \emph{inventions} constituting an entire realm of subrepresentative
matter. Tarde’s best work was his analyses of a minuscule bureaucratic
innovation, or a linguistic innovation, etc. The Durkheimians answered
that what Tarde did was psychology or interpsychology, not sociology.
But that is true only in appearance, as a first approximation: a
microimitation does seem to occur between two individuals. But at the
same time, and at a deeper level, it has to do not with an individual
but with a flow or a wave. \emph{Imitation is the propagation of a flow;
opposition is binarization, the making binary of flows; invention is a
conjugation or connection of different flows}. What, according to Tarde,
is a flow? It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage);
a flow is always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the
basis of every society, because they are flows and as such are
“quantifiable”; they are veritable social Quantities, whereas sensations
are qualitative and representations are simple resultants.\footnote{According to Tarde, psychology is quantitative, but only insofar as it studies the desire and belief components of sensation. And logic is quantitative when it does not restrict itself to forms of representation, but extends to degrees of belief and desire, and their combinations; see \emph{La logique sociale} (Paris: Alcan, 1893).}
Infinitesimal imitation, opposition, and invention are therefore like
flow quanta marking a propagation, binarization, or conjugation of
beliefs and desires. Hence the importance of statistics, providing it
concerns itself with the cutting edges and not only with the
“stationary” zone of representations. For in the end, the difference is
not at all between the social and the individual (or interindividual),
but between the molar realm of representations, individual or
collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which the
distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning
since flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by
collective signifiers. Representations already define large-scale
aggregates, or determine segments on a line; beliefs and desires, on the
other hand, are flows marked by quanta, flows that are created,
exhausted, or transformed, added to one another, subtracted or combined.
Tarde invented microsociology and took it to its full breadth and scope,
denouncing in advance the misinterpretations to which it would later
fall victim.


This is how you tell the difference between the segmented line and the
quantum flow. A mutant flow always implies something tending to elude or
escape the codes; quanta are precisely signs or degrees of
deterritorialization in the decoded flow. The rigid line, on the other
hand, implies an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering
codes; its segments are like reterritorializations on the overcoding or
overcoded line. Let us return to the case of original sin: it is the
very act of a flow marking a decoding in relation to creation (with just
one last island preserved for the Virgin), and a deterritorialization in
relation to the land of Adam; but it simultaneously performs an
overcoding by binary organizations and resonance (Powers, Church,
empires, rich-poor, men-women, etc.) and complementary
reterritorializations (on the land of Cain, on work, on reproduction, on
money\dots{}). Now the two systems of reference are in inverse relation to
each other, in the sense that the first eludes the second, or the second
arrests the first, prevents it from flowing further; but at the same
time, they are strictly complementary and coexistent, because one exists
only as a function of the other; yet they are different and in direct
relation to each other, although corresponding term by term, because the
second only effectively arrests the first on a “plane” that is not the
plane specific to the first, while the momentum of the first continues
on its own plane.


A social field is always animated by all kinds of movements of decoding
and deterritorialization affecting “masses” and operating at different
speeds and paces. These are not contradictions but escapes. At this
level, everything is a question of \emph{mass}. For example, from the tenth
to the fourteenth centuries we see an acceleration of factors of
decoding and deterritorialization: the masses of the last invaders
swooping down from north, east, and south; military masses turned into
pillaging bands; ecclesiastical masses confronted with infidels and
heretics, and adopting increasingly deterritorialized objectives;
peasant masses leaving the seigneurial domains; seigneurial masses
forced to find means of exploitation less territorial than serfdom;
urban masses breaking away from the backcountry and finding increasingly
less territorialized social arrangements in the cities; women’s masses
detaching themselves from the old passional and conjugal code; monetary
masses that cease to be a hoard object and inject themselves into great
commercial circuits.\footnote{On all of these points, see especially Maurice Dobb, \emph{Studies in the Development of Capitalism}, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), and Georges Duby, \emph{The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to Twelfth Century}, trans. Howard E. Clarke (London: Weidenfeld \& Nicolson, 1974).} We may cite the Crusades as effecting a
connection of flows, each boosting and accelerating the others (even the
flow of femininity in the “faraway Princess,” even the flow of children
in the Crusades of the thirteenth century). But at the same time, and
inseparably, there occur overcodings and reterritorializations. The
Crusades were overcoded by the pope and assigned territorial objectives.
The Holy Land, the Peace of God, a new type of abbey, new figures of
money, new modes of exploitation of the peasant through leasehold and
the wage system (or revivals of slavery), urban reterritorializations,
etc., form a complex system. At this point, we must introduce a
distinction between the two notions of \emph{connection} and \emph{conjugation} of
flows. “Connection” indicates the way in which decoded and
deterritorialized flows boost one another, accelerate their shared
escape, and augment or stoke their quanta; the “conjugation” of these
same flows, on the other hand, indicates their relative stoppage, like a
point of accumulation that plugs or seals the lines of flight, performs
a general reterritorialization, and brings the flows under the dominance
of a single flow capable of overcoding them. But it is precisely the
most deterritorialized flow, under the first aspect, that always brings
about the accumulation or conjunction of the processes, determines the
overcoding, and serves as the basis for reterritorialization under the
second aspect (we have already encountered a theorem according to which
it is always \emph{on} the most deterritorialized element that
reterritorialization takes place). For example, the merchant bourgeoisie
of the cities conjugated or capitalized a domain of knowledge, a
technology, assemblages and circuits into whose dependency the nobility,
Church, artisans, and even peasants \emph{would enter}. It is precisely
because the bourgeoisie was a cutting edge of deterritorialization, a
veritable particle accelerator, that it also performed an overall
reterritorialization.


The task of the historian is to designate the “period” of coexistence or
simultaneity of these two movements (decoding-deterritorialization and
overcoding-reterritorialization). For the duration of this period, one
distinguishes between the molecular aspect and the molar aspect: on the
one hand, \emph{masses or flows}, with their mutations, quanta of
deterritorialization, connections, and accelerations; on the other hand,
**classes or segments*, with their binary organization, resonance,
conjunction or accumulation, and line of overcoding favoring one line
over the others.\footnote{Rosa Luxemburg, in “Social Reform or Revolution,” and “Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions,” in \emph{Selected Political Writings}, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), formulated the problem of the differences and relations between masses and classes, but from a still-subjective point of view: masses as the “instinctual basis of class consciousness” (see Nicolas Boulte and Jacques Moiroux, “Masse et Parti,” \emph{Partisans}, no. 45, \emph{Rose Luxemburg vivante} [December–January 1969], pp. 29–38. Alain Badiou and François Balmès advance a more objective hypothesis: masses are “invariants” that oppose the State-form in general and exploitation, whereas classes are the historical variables that determine the concrete State, and, in the case of the proletariat, the possibility of its effective dissolution; De \emph{l’idéologie} [Paris: Maspero, 1976]). But it is difficult to see, first of all, why masses are not themselves historical variables, and second, why the word is applied only to the exploited (the “peasant-plebeian” mass), when it is also suitable for seigneurial, bourgeois masses—or even monetary masses.} The difference between macrohistory and
microhistory has nothing to do with the length of the durations
envisioned, long or short, but rather concerns distinct systems of
reference, depending on whether it is an overcoded segmented line that
is under consideration or the mutant quantum flow. The rigid system does
not bring the other system to a halt: the flow continues beneath the
line, forever mutant, while the line totalizes. \emph{Mass} and \emph{class} do
not have the same contours or the same dynamic, even though the same
group can be assigned both signs. The bourgeoisie considered as a mass
**and* as a class \dots{} The relations of a mass to other masses are not the
same as the relations of the “corresponding” class to the other classes.
Of course, there are just as many relations of force, and just as much
violence, on one side as the other. The point is that the same struggle
assumes two very different aspects, in relation to which the victories
and defeats differ. Mass movements accelerate and feed into one another
(or dim for a long while, enter long stupors), but jump from one class
to another, undergo mutation, emanate or emit new quanta that then
modify class relations, bring their overcoding and reterritorialization
into question, and run new lines of flight in new directions. Beneath
the self-reproduction of classes, there is always a variable map of
masses. Politics operates by macrodecisions and binary choices,
binarized interests; but the realm of the decidable remains very slim.
Political decision making necessarily descends into a world of
microdeterminations, attractions, and desires, which it must sound out
or evaluate in a different fashion. Beneath linear conceptions and
segmentary decisions, an evaluation of flows and their quanta. A curious
passage by Michelet reproaches François I for having badly evaluated the
flow of emigration bringing to France large numbers of people in
struggle against the Church: François saw it only as an influx of
potential soldiers, instead of perceiving a mass molecular flow which
France could have used to its own advantage by leading a different
Reformation than the one that occurred.\footnote{Jules Michelet, \emph{Histoire de France au seizième siècle in Oeuvres Complètes}, vol. 7, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–).} Problems are always like
this. Good or bad, politics and its judgments are always molar, but it
is the molecular and its assessment that makes it or breaks it.



\bigskip


Now we are in a better position to draw a map. If we return to a very
general sense of the word “line,” we see that there are not just two
kinds of lines but three. First, a relatively supple line of interlaced
codes and territorialities; that is why we started with so-called
**primitive* segmentarity, in which the social space is constituted by
territorial and lineal segmentations. Second, a rigid line, which brings
about a dualist organization of segments, a concentricity of circles in
resonance, and generalized overcoding; here, the social space implies a
**State apparatus*. This system is different from the primitive system
precisely because overcoding is not a stronger code, but a specific
procedure different from that of codes (similarly, reterritorialization
is not an added territory, but takes place in a different space than
that of territories, namely, overcoded geometrical space). Third, one or
several lines of flight, marked by quanta and defined by decoding and
deterritorialization (there is always something like a \emph{war machine}
functioning on these lines).


This way of presenting things still has the disadvantage of making it
seem as though primitive societies came first. In truth, codes are never
separable from the movement of decoding, nor are territories from the
vectors of deterritorialization traversing them. And overcoding and
reterritorialization do not come after. It would be more accurate to say
that there is a space in which the three kinds of closely intermingled
lines coexist, tribes, empires, and war machines. We could also put it
this way: lines of flight are primary, \emph{or} the already-rigid segments
are, and supple segmentations swing between the two. Take a proposition
like the following one by the historian Pirenne about barbarian tribes:
“The Barbarians did not spontaneously hurl themselves upon the Empire.
They were pushed forward by the flood of the Hunnish advance, which in
this way caused the whole series of invasions.”\footnote{Henri Pirenne, \emph{Mohammed and Charlemagne}, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Norton, 1939), p. 22.} On one side, we
have the rigid segmentarity of the Roman Empire, with its center of
resonance and periphery, its State, its \emph{pax romana}, its geometry, its
camps, its \emph{limes} (boundary lines). Then, on the horizon, there is an
entirely different kind of line, the line of the nomads who come in off
the steppes, venture a fluid and active escape, sow deterritorialization
everywhere, launch flows whose quanta heat up and are swept along by a
Stateless war machine. The migrant barbarians are indeed between the
two: they come and go, cross and recross frontiers, pillage and ransom,
but also integrate themselves and reterritorialize. At times they will
subside into the empire, assigning themselves a segment of it, becoming
mercenaries or confederates, settling down, occupying land or carving
out their own State (the wise Visigoths). At other times, they will go
over to the nomads, allying with them, becoming indiscernible (the
brilliant Ostrogoths). Perhaps because they were constantly being
defeated by the Huns and Visigoths, the Vandals (“zone-two Goths”) drew
a line of flight that made them as strong as their masters; they were
the only band or mass to cross the Mediterranean. But they were also the
ones who produced the most startling reterritorialization: an empire in
Africa.\footnote{See Emile Félix Gautier, \emph{Genséric, roi des Vandales} (Paris: Payot, 1932). (“Precisely because they were the weakest, eternally being pushed from behind, they were forced to go the farthest.”)} Thus it seems that the three lines do not only coexist, but
transform themselves into one another, cross over into one another.
Again, we have taken a summary example in which the lines are
illustrated by different groups. What we have said applies all the more
to cases in which all of the lines are in a single group, a single
individual.


In view of this, it would be better to talk about simultaneous states of
the abstract Machine. There is on the one hand an \emph{abstract machine of
overcoding}: it defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity,
because it produces or rather reproduces segments, opposing them two by
two, making all the centers resonate, and laying out a divisible,
homogeneous space striated in all directions. This kind of abstract
machine is linked to the State apparatus. We do not, however, equate it
with the State apparatus itself. The abstract machine may be defined,
for example, \emph{more geometrico}, or under other conditions by an
“axiomatic”; but the State apparatus is neither geometry nor axiomatics:
it is only the assemblage of reterritorialization effectuating the
overcoding machine within given limits and under given conditions. The
most we can say is that the State apparatus tends increasingly to
identify with the abstract machine it effectuates. This is where the
notion of the totalitarian State becomes meaningful: a State becomes
totalitarian when, instead of effectuating, within its own limits, the
worldwide overcoding machine, it identifies with it, creating the
conditions for “autarky,” producing a reterritorialization by “closed
vessel,” in the artifice of the void (this is never an ideological
operation, but rather an economic and political one).\footnote{Totalitarianism is not defined by the size of the public sector because in many cases there is still a liberal economy. What defines it is the artificial constitution of “closed vessels,” particularly monetary and industrial. It is primarily in this sense that Italian fascism and German Nazism were totalitarian States, as demonstrated by Daniel Guérin in \emph{Fascism and Big Business}, trans. Frances and Mason Merrill (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), chapter 9.}


On the other hand, at the other pole, there is an abstract machine of
mutation, which operates by decoding and deterritorialization. It is
what draws the lines of flight: it steers the quantum flows, assures the
connection-creation of flows, and emits new quanta. It itself is in a
state of flight, and erects war machines on its lines. If it constitutes
another pole, it is because molar or rigid segments always seal, plug,
block the lines of flight, whereas this machine is always making them
flow, “between” the rigid segments and in another, submolecular,
direction. But between the two poles there is also a whole realm of
properly molecular negotiation, translation, and transduction in which
at times molar lines are already undermined by fissures and cracks, and
at other times lines of flight are already drawn toward black holes,
flow connections are already replaced by limitative conjunctions, and
quanta emissions are already converted into center-points. All of this
happens at the same time. It is at the same time that lines of flight
connect and continue their intensities, whip particles-signs out of
black holes; and also retreat into the swirl of micro-black holes or
molecular conjunctions that interrupt them; or again, enter overcoded,
concentricized, binarized, stable segments arrayed around a central
black hole.


**What is a center or focal point of power*? Answering this question will
illustrate the entanglement of the lines. We speak of the power of the
army, Church, and school, of public and private power \dots{} Power centers
obviously involve rigid segments. Each molar segment has one or more
centers. It might be objected that the segments themselves presuppose a
power center, as what distinguishes and unites them, sets them in
opposition and makes them resonate. But there is no contradiction
between the segmentary parts and the centralized apparatus. On the one
hand, the most rigid of segmentarities does not preclude centralization:
this is because the common central point is not where all the other
points melt together, but instead acts as a point of resonance on the
horizon, behind all the other points. The State is not a point taking
all the others upon itself, but a resonance chamber for them all. Even
when the State is totalitarian, its function as resonator for distinct
centers and segments remains unchanged: the only difference is that it
takes place under closed-vessel conditions that increase its internal
reach, or couples “resonance” with a “forced movement.” On the other
hand, and conversely, the strictest of centralizations does not
eradicate the distinctiveness of the centers, segments, and circles.
When the overcoding line is drawn, it assures the prevalence of one
segment, as such, over the other (in the case of binary segmentarity),
gives a certain center a power of relative resonance over the others (in
the case of circular segmentarity), and underscores the dominant segment
through which it itself passes (in the case of linear segmentarity).
Thus centralization is always hierarchical, but hierarchy is always
segmentary.


Each power center is also molecular and exercises its power on a
micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse, dispersed,
geared down, miniaturized, perpetually displaced, acting by fine
segmentation, working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault’s
analysis of “disciplines” or micropowers (school, army, factory,
hospital, etc.) testifies to these “focuses of instability” where
groupings and accumulations confront each other, but also confront
breakaways and escapes, and where inversions occur.\footnote{Foucault, \emph{Discipline and Punish}, p. 27: “These relations go right down into the depths of society, they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and they do not merely reproduce \dots{} the general form of the law or government\dots{}. They define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggle, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relation.”} What we have is
no longer The Schoolmaster but the monitor, the best student, the class
dunce, the janitor, etc. No longer the general, but the junior officers,
the noncommissioned officers, the soldier inside me, and also the
malcontent: all have their own tendencies, poles, conflicts, and
relations of force. Even the warrant officer and janitor are only
invoked for explanatory purposes; for they have a molar side \emph{and} a
molecular side, and make us realize that the general or the landlord
also had both sides all along. We would not say that the proper name
loses its power when it enters these zones of indiscernibility, but that
it takes on a new kind of power. To talk like Kafka, what we have is no
longer the public official Klamm, but maybe his secretary Momus, or
other molecular Klamms the differences between which, and with Klamm,
are all the greater for no longer being assignable. (“[The officials]
don’t always stick to the same book, yet it isn’t the books they change,
but their places, and [they] have to squeeze past one another when they
change places, because there’s so little room.” “This official is rarely
very like Klamm, and if he were sitting in his own office at his own
desk with his name on the door I would have no more doubt at all,”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Kafka, \emph{The Castle}, pp. 233, 238.]}
says Barnabas, whose dream would be a uniquely molar segmentarity, no
matter how rigid and horrendous, as the only guarantee of certainty and
security. But he cannot but notice that the molar segments are
necessarily immersed in the molecular soup that nourishes them and makes
their outlines waver.) And every power center has this microtexture. The
microtextures—not masochism—are what explain how the oppressed can take
an active role in oppression: the workers of the rich nations actively
participate in the exploitation of the Third World, the arming of
dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.


This is not surprising since the texture lies between the line of
overcoding with rigid segments and the ultimate quantum line. It
continually swings between the two, now channeling the quantum line back
into the segmented line, now causing flows and quanta to escape from the
segmented line. This is the third aspect of power centers, or their
limit. For the only purpose these centers have is to translate as best
they can flow quanta into line segments (only segments are totalizable,
in one way or another). But this is both the principle of their power
and the basis of their impotence. Far from being opposites, power and
impotence complement and reinforce each other in a kind of fascinating
satisfaction that is found above all in the most mediocre Statesmen, and
defines their “glory.” For they extract glory from their
shortsightedness, and power from their impotence, because it confirms
that there is no choice. The only “great” Statesmen are those who
connect with flows, like pilot-signs or particles-signs, and who emit
quanta that get out of the black holes: it is not by chance that these
men encounter each other only on lines of flight, in the act of drawing
them, sounding them out, following them, or forging ahead of them, even
though they may make a mistake and take a fall (Moses the Hebrew,
Genseric the Vandal, Genghis the Mongol, Mao the Chinese\dots{}). But there is
no Power regulating the flows themselves. No one dominates the growth of
the “monetary mass,” or money supply. If an image of the master or an
idea of the State is projected outward to the limits of the universe, as
if something had domination over flows as well as segments, and in the
same manner, the result is a fictitious and ridiculous representation.
The stock exchange gives a better image of flows and their quanta than
does the State. Capitalists may be the masters of surplus value and its
distribution, but they do not dominate the flows from which surplus
value derives. Rather, power centers function at the points where flows
are converted into segments: they are exchangers, converters,
oscillators. Not that the segments themselves are governed by a
decision-making power. We have seen, on the contrary, that segments
(classes, for example) form at the conjunction of masses and
deterritorialized flows and that the most deterritorialized flow
determines the dominant segment; thus the dollar segment dominates
currency, the bourgeoisie dominates capitalism, etc. Segments, then, are
themselves governed by an abstract machine. But what power centers
govern are the assemblages that effectuate that abstract machine, in
other words, that continually adapt variations in mass and flow to the
segments of the rigid line, as a function of a dominant segment and
dominated segments. Much perverse invention can enter into the
adaptations.


This is the sense in which we would speak, for example, of banking power
(the World Bank, central banks, credit banks): if the flow of
financing-money, or credit money, involves the mass of economic
transactions, what banks govern is the conversion of the credit money
that has been \emph{created} into segmentary payment-money that is
**appropriated*, in other words, coinage or State money for the purchase
of goods that are themselves segmented (the importance of the interest
rate in this respect). What banks govern is the conversion between the
two kinds of money, and the conversion of the segments of the second
kind into any given good.\footnote{On these aspects of banking power, see Suzanne de Brunhoff, \emph{L’offre de monnaie. Critique d’un concept} (Paris: Maspero, 1971), especially pp. 102–131.} The same could be said of every central
power. Every central power has three aspects or zones: (1) its zone of
power, relating to the segments of a solid rigid line; (2) its zone of
indiscernibility, relating to its diffusion throughout a microphysical
fabric; (3) its zone of impotence, relating to the flows and quanta it
can only convert without being able to control or define. It is always
from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power,
hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity. Better to be a tiny
quantum flow than a molar converter, oscillator, or distributor!
Returning to the example of money, the first zone is represented by the
public central banks; the second by the “indefinite series of private
relations between banks and borrowers”; the third by the desiring flow
of money, whose quanta are defined by the mass of economic transactions.
It is true that the same problems are reformulated at the level of these
very transactions, in relation to other power centers. But the first
zone of the power center is always defined by the State apparatus, which
is the assemblage that effectuates the abstract machine of molar
overcoding; the second is defined in the molecular fabric immersing this
assemblage; the third by the abstract machine of mutation, flows, and
quanta.



\bigskip


We cannot say that one of these three lines is bad and another good, by
nature and necessarily. The study of the dangers of each line is the
object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes
not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and
draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions.
According to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Castaneda’s Indian Don Juan,
there are three or even four dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then
Power, and finally the great Disgust, the longing to kill and to die,
the Passion for abolition.\footnote{Carlos Castaneda, \emph{The Teachings of Don Juan} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 57–60.} We can guess what fear is. We are always
afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organization that
sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that
give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system
of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that. “The values, morals,
fatherlands, religions and private certitudes our vanity and
self-complacency generously grant us are so many abodes the world
furnishes for those who think on that account that they stand and rest
amid stable things; they know nothing of the enormous rout they are
heading for \dots{} \emph{in flight from flight}.”\footnote{Maurice Blanchot, \emph{L’amitié} (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 232.} We flee from flight,
rigidify our segments, give ourselves over to binary logic; the harder
they have been to us on one segment, the harder we will be on another;
we reterritorialize on anything available; the only segmentarity we know
is molar, at the level of the large-scale aggregates we belong to, as
well as at the level of the little groups we get into, as well as at the
level of what goes on in our most intimate and private recesses.
Everything is involved: modes of perception, kinds of actions, ways of
moving, life-styles, semiotic regimes. A man comes home and says, “Is
the grub ready?”, and the wife answers, “What a scowl! Are you in a bad
mood?”: two rigid segments in confrontation. The more rigid the
segmentarity, the more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is,
and how it makes us retreat into the first line.


The second danger, Clarity, seems less obvious. Clarity, in effect,
concerns the molecular. Once again, everything is involved, even
perception, even the semiotic regime, but this time on the second line.
Castaneda illustrates, for example, the existence of a molecular
perception to which drugs give us access (but so many things can be
drugs): we attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces
and voids, like holes in the molar structure. That is precisely what
clarity is: the distinctions that appear in what used to seem full, the
holes in what used to be compact; and conversely, where just before we
saw end points of clear-cut segments, now there are indistinct fringes,
encroachments, overlappings, migrations, acts of segmentation that no
longer coincide with the rigid segmentarity. Everything now appears
supple, with holes in fullness, nebulas in forms, and flutter in lines.
Everything has the clarity of the microscope. We think we have
understood everything, and draw conclusions. We are the new knights; we
even have a mission. A microphysics of the migrant has replaced the
macrogeometry of the sedentary. But this suppleness and clarity do not
only present dangers, they are themselves a danger. First, supple
segmentarity runs the risk of reproducing in miniature the affections,
the affectations, of the rigid: the family is replaced by a community,
conjugality by a regime of exchange and migration; worse,
micro-Oedipuses crop up, microfascisms lay down the law, the mother
feels obliged to titillate her child, the father becomes a mommy. A dark
light that falls from no star and emanates such sadness: this shifting
segmentarity derives directly from the most rigid, for which it is
indirect compensation. The more molar the aggregates become, the more
molecular become their elements and the relations between their
elements: molecular man for molar humanity. One deterritorializes,
massifies, but only in order to knot and annul the mass movements and
movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of marginal
reterritorializations even worse than the others. But above all, supple
segmentarity brings dangers of its own that do not merely reproduce in
small scale the dangers of molar segmentarity, which do not derive from
them or compensate for them. As we have seen, microfascisms have a
specificity of their own that can crystallize into a macro fascism, but
may also float along the supple line on their own account and suffuse
every little cell. A multitude of black holes may very well not become
centralized, and acts instead as viruses adapting to the most varied
situations, sinking voids in molecular perceptions and semiotics.
Interactions without resonance. Instead of the great paranoid fear, we
are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths, and
clarities that gush from every black hole and no longer form a system,
but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody
the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman,
neighborhood SS man. We have overcome fear, we have sailed from the
shores of security, only to enter a system that is no less
concentricized, no less organized: the system of petty insecurities that
leads everyone to their own black hole in which to turn dangerous,
possessing a clarity on their situation, role, and mission even more
disturbing than the certitudes of the first line.


Power (\emph{Pouvoir}) is the third danger, because it is on both lines
simultaneously. It stretches from the rigid segments with their
overcoding and resonance to the fine segmentations with their diffusion
and interactions, and back again. Every man of power jumps from one line
to the other, alternating between a petty and a lofty style, the rogue’s
style and the grandiloquent style, drugstore demagoguery and the
imperialism of the high-ranking government man. But this whole chain and
web of power is immersed in a world of mutant flows that eludes them. It
is precisely its impotence that makes power so dangerous. The man of
power will always want to stop the lines of flight, and to this end to
trap and stabilize the mutation machine in the overcoding machine. But
he can do so only by creating a void, in other words, by first
stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it within the
local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving the
assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in
the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the “closed vessel.”


But there is a fourth danger as well, and this is the one that interests
us most, because it concerns the lines of flight themselves. We may well
have presented these lines as a sort of mutation or creation drawn not
only in the imagination but also in the very fabric of social reality;
we may well have attributed to them the movement of the arrow and the
speed of an absolute—but it would be oversimplifying to believe that the
only risk they fear and confront is allowing themselves to be recaptured
in the end, letting themselves be sealed in, tied up, reknotted,
reterritorialized. They themselves emanate a strange despair, like an
odor of death and immolation, a state of war from which one returns
broken: they have their own dangers distinct from the ones previously
discussed. This is exactly what led Fitzgerald to say: “I had a feeling
that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle
in my hands and the targets down. No problem set—simply a silence with
only the sound of my own breathing\dots{}. My self-immolation was something
sodden-dark.”\footnote{F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up,” in \emph{The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected Pieces}, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), pp. 77–78, 81.} Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back
from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything one could?
This, precisely, is the fourth danger: the line of flight crossing the
wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with
other lines and each time augmenting its valence, \emph{turning to
destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition}. Like
Kleist’s line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide,
double suicide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of
death.


We are not invoking any kind of death drive. There are no internal
drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is
what the assemblage determines it to be. The assemblage that draws lines
of flight is on the same level as they are, and is of the war machine
type. Mutations spring from this machine, \emph{which in no way has war as
its object}, but rather the emission of quanta of deterritorialization,
the passage of mutant flows (in this sense, every creation is brought
about by a war machine). There are many reasons to believe that the war
machine is of a different origin, is a different assemblage, than the
State apparatus. It is of nomadic origin and is directed against the
State apparatus. One of the fundamental problems of the State is to
appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it and make it a piece
in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institution; and the
State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is precisely
when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other object
but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it
frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a
transformation of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure
of mutation, the only object left for the war machine after it has lost
its power to change. War, it must be said, is only the abominable
residue of the war machine, either after it has allowed itself to be
appropriated by the State apparatus, or even worse, has constructed
itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. When this happens,
the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of flight, but a pure, cold
line of abolition. (Later, we will propose a theory of the complex
relation between the war machine and war.)\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See 12, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology,” Proposition IX, pp. 416–423.]}


This brings us back to the paradox of fascism, and the way in which
fascism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State
affair: it essentially concerns the relation between the State as a
localized assemblage and the abstract machine of overcoding it
effectuates. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a State
army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the State to the
totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative.
Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine. When fascism builds
itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the sense of a State army
taking power, but of a war machine taking over the State. A bizarre
remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State is far
less totalitarian than it is \emph{suicidal}. There is in fascism a realized
nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal
all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line
of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and
abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis
announced to Germany what they were bringing: at once wedding bells and
death, including their own death, and the death of the Germans. They
thought they would perish but that their undertaking would be resumed,
all across Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system. And
the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because
they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager
everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the
death of others, and measure everything by “deleometers.” Klaus Mann’s
novel, \emph{Mephisto}, gives samplings of entirely ordinary Nazi speeches
and conversations: “Heroism was something that was being ruled out of
our lives\dots{}. In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling,
staggering. Our beloved Führer is dragging us toward the shades of
darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who have a
special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? \dots{} Fires
blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the
frenzied dancing of the survivors, of \emph{those who are still spared,
around the bodies of the dead!}”\footnote{Klaus Mann, \emph{Mephisto}, trans. Robin Smith (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 202–204. This kind of declaration abounds, at the very moment when the Nazis were succeeding. See Goebbels’s famous formulations: “In the world of absolute fatality in which Hitler moves, nothing has meaning any longer, neither good nor bad, time nor space, \emph{and what other people call success cannot be used as a criterion}\dots{}. Hitler will probably end in catastrophe”; \emph{Hitler parle à ses généraux} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964). This catastrophism can be reconciled with considerable satisfaction, good conscience and comfortable tranquillity. There is a whole bureaucracy of catastrophe. On Italian fascism, one may consult, in particular, the analysis of Maria-Antonietta Macciochi, “Sexualité feminine dans l’idéologie fasciste,” \emph{Tel Quel}, no. 66 (Summer 1976), pp. 26–42: the women’s death squad, the public display of widows and mothers in mourning, the slogan (\emph{mots d’ordre}) “Coffins and Cradles.”} Suicide is presented not as a
punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others. One can
always say that it is just a matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing
but ideology. But that is not true. The insufficiency of economic and
political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on
vague, so-called ideological determinations. We prefer to follow Faye’s
inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements, which are just as
much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of
conversations. They always contain the “stupid and repugnant” cry, \emph{Long
live death!}, even at the economic level, where the arms expansion
replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means
of production toward the means of pure destruction. Paul Virilio’s
analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not by the
notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal
State: so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an
undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the State and channels
into it a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the
suicide of the State itself. “The triggering of a hitherto unknown
material process, one that is limitless and aimless\dots{}. Once triggered,
its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the indirect strategy
effectively places the dominant powers outside the usual categories of
space and time\dots{}. It was in the horror of daily life and its environment
that Hitler finally found his surest means of governing, the
legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right
up to the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total
war, far from discharging the repulsive nature of its power, normally
only increase its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: \emph{If the war
is lost, may the nation perish}. Here, Hitler decides to join forces
with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his own people,
by obliterating the last remaining resources of its life-support system,
civil reserves of every kind (potable water, fuel, provisions,
etc.).”\footnote{Paul Virilio, \emph{L’insécurité du territoire}, chapter 1. Although Hannah Arendt identifies Nazism and totalitarianism, she expressed this principle of Nazi domination: “Their idea of domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion”; \emph{The Origins of Totalitarianism} (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 326; even the war, and the danger of losing the war, acted as accelerators (pp. 325–326, 394ff., 41 Off., 462ff.).} It was this reversion of the line of flight into a line of
destruction that already animated the molecular focuses of fascism, and
made them interact in a war machine instead of resonating in a State
apparatus. \emph{A war machine that no longer had anything but war as its
object} and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the
destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.

\chapter{10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible \dots{}}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-10}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-10}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-45.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage

\section{Memories of a Moviegoer}


I recall the fine film \emph{Willard} (1972, Daniel Mann). A “B” movie
perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular because the heroes are
rats. My memory of it is not necessarily accurate. I will recount the
story in broad outline. Willard lives with his authoritarian mother in
the old family house. Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother orders him
to destroy a litter of rats. He spares one (or two or several). After a
violent argument, the mother, who “resembles” a dog, dies. The house is
coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it. He
likes the principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious
intelligence. There is also a white female rat, Ben’s companion. Willard
spends all his free time with them. They multiply. Willard takes the rat
pack, led by Ben, to the home of the businessman, who is put to a
terrible death. But he foolishly takes his two favorites to the office
with him and has no choice but to let the employees kill the white rat.
Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a long, hard glare. Willard then
experiences a pause in his destiny, in his \emph{becoming-rat}. He tries with
all his might to remain among humans. He even responds to the advances
of a young woman in the office who bears a strong “resemblance” to a
rat—but it is only a resemblance. One day when he has invited the young
woman over, all set to be conjugalized, reoedipalized, Ben suddenly
reappears, full of hate. Willard tries to drive him away, but succeeds
only in driving away the young woman: he then is lured to the basement
by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him to shreds.
It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.


It is all there: there is a becoming-animal not content to proceed by
resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent
an obstacle or stoppage; the proliferation of rats, the pack, brings a
becoming-molecular that undermines the great molar powers of family,
career, and conjugality; there is a sinister choice since there is a
“favorite” in the pack with which a kind of contract of alliance, a
hideous pact, is made; there is the institution of an assemblage, a war
machine or criminal machine, which can reach the point of
self-destruction; there is a circulation of impersonal affects, an
alternate current that disrupts signifying projects as well as
subjective feelings, and constitutes a nonhuman sexuality; and there is
an irresistible deterritorialization that forestalls attempts at
professional, conjugal, or Oedipal reterritorialization. (Are there
Oedipal animals with which one can “play Oedipus,” play family, my
little dog, my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw
us into an irresistible becoming? Or another hypothesis: Can the same
animal be taken up by two opposing functions and movements, depending on
the case?)

\section{Memories of a Naturalist}


One of the main problems of natural history was to conceptualize the
relationships between animals. It is very different in this respect from
later evolutionism, which defined itself in terms of genealogy, kinship,
descent, and filiation. As we know, evolutionism would arrive at the
idea of an evolution that does not necessarily operate by filiation. But
it was unavoidable that it begin with the genealogical motif. Darwin
himself treats the evolutionist theme of kinship and the naturalist
theme of the sum and value of differences or resemblances as very
separate things: groups that are equally related can display highly
variable degrees of difference with respect to the ancestor. Precisely
because natural history is concerned primarily with the sum and value of
differences, it can conceive of progressions and regressions,
continuities and major breaks, but not an evolution in the strict sense,
in other words, the possibility of a descent the \emph{degrees} of
modification of which depend on external conditions. Natural history can
think only in terms of relationships (between A and B), not in terms of
production (from A to \emph{x}).


But something very important transpires at the level of relationships.
For natural history conceives of the relationships between animals in
two ways: series and structure. In the case of a series, I say \emph{a}
resembles \emph{b}, \emph{b} resembles \emph{c}, etc.; all of these terms conform in
varying degrees to a single, eminent term, perfection, or quality as the
principle behind the series. This is exactly what the theologians used
to call an analogy of proportion. In the case of a structure, I say \emph{a}
is to \emph{b} as \emph{c} is to \emph{d}; and each of these relationships realizes
after its fashion the perfection under consideration: gills are to
breathing under water as lungs are to breathing air; or the heart is to
gills as the absence of a heart is to tracheas [in insects]\dots{} This is an
analogy of proportionality. In the first case, I have resemblances that
differ from one another in a single series, and between series. In the
second case, I have differences that resemble each other within a single
structure, and between structures. The first form of analogy passes for
the most sensible and popular, and requires imagination; but the kind of
imagination it requires is a studious one that has to take branchings in
the series into account, fill in apparent ruptures, ward off false
resemblances and graduate the true ones, and take both progressions and
regressions or degraduations into account. The second form of analogy is
considered royal because it requires instead all the resources of
understanding (\emph{entendement}), in order to define equivalent relations
by discovering, on the one hand, the independent variables that can be
combined to form a structure and, on the other hand, the correlates that
entail one another within each structure. As different as they are, the
two themes of series and structure have always coexisted in natural
history; in appearance contradictory, in practice they have reached a
more or less stable compromise.\footnote{On the complementarity between series and structure, and how it differs from evolutionism, see Henri Daudin, \emph{Cuvier et Lamarck. Les classes zoologiques et l’idée de série animale}, vol. 2 of \emph{Etudes d’histoire des sciences naturelles} (Paris: Alcan, 1926); and Michel Foucault, \emph{The Order of Things} (New York: Vintage, 1970).} In the same way, the two figures of
analogy coexisted in the minds of the theologians in various
equilibriums. This is because in both cases Nature is conceived as an
enormous \emph{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 principle 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. (This
mimetic or mimological vision is what made the idea of an
evolution-production possible at that moment.)


This problem is in no way behind us. Ideas do not die. Not that they
survive simply as archaisms. At a given moment they may reach a
scientific stage, and then lose that status or emigrate to other
sciences. Their application and status, even their form and content, may
change; yet they retain something essential throughout the process,
across the displacement, in the distribution of a new domain. Ideas are
always reusable, because they have been usable before, but in the most
varied of actual modes. For, on the one hand, the relationships between
animals are the object not only of science but also of dreams,
symbolism, art and poetry, practice and practical use. And on the other
hand, the relationships between animals are bound up with the relations
between man and animal, man and woman, man and child, man and the
elements, man and the physical and microphysical universe. The twofold
idea “series-structure” crosses a scientific threshold at a certain
moment; but it did not start there and it does not stay there, or else
crosses over into other sciences, animating, for example, the human
sciences, serving in the study of dreams, myths, and organizations. The
history of ideas should never be continuous; it should be wary of
resemblances, but also of descents or filiations; it should be content
to mark the thresholds through which an idea passes, the journeys it
takes that change its nature or object. Yet the objective relationships
between animals have been applied to certain subjective relations
between man and animal, from the standpoint of a collective imagination
or a faculty of social understanding.


Jung elaborated a theory of the Archetype as collective unconscious; it
assigns the animal a particularly important role in dreams, myths, and
human collectivities. The animal is inseparable from a \emph{series}
exhibiting the double aspect of progression-regression, in which each
term plays the role of a possible transformer of the libido
(metamorphosis). A whole approach to the dream follows from this; given
a troubling image, it becomes a question of integrating it into its
archetypal series. That series may include feminine, masculine, or
infantile sequences, as well as animal, vegetable, even elementary or
molecular sequences. In contrast to natural history, man is now no
longer the eminent term of the series; that term may be an animal for
man, the lion, crab, bird of prey, or louse, in relation to a given act
or function, in accordance with a given demand of the unconscious.
Bachelard wrote a fine Jungian book when he elaborated the ramified
series of Lautréamont, taking into account the speed coefficient of the
metamorphoses and the degree of perfection of each term in relation to a
pure aggressiveness as the principle of the series: the serpent’s fang,
the horn of the rhinoceros, the dog’s tooth, the owl’s beak; and higher
up, the claw of the eagle or the vulture, the pincer of the crab, the
legs of the louse, the suckers of the octopus. Throughout Jung’s work a
process of mimesis brings nature and culture together in its net, by
means of analogies of proportion in which the series and their terms,
and above all the animals occupying a middle position, assure cycles of
conversion nature-culture-nature: archetypes as “analogical
representations.”\footnote{See Carl Jung, \emph{Symbols of Transformation}, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Harper, 1962), and Gaston Bachelard, \emph{Lautréamont} (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1939).}


Is it by chance that structuralism so strongly denounced the prestige
accorded the imagination, the establishment of resemblances in a series,
the imitation pervading the entire series and carrying it to its term,
and the identification with this final term? Nothing is more explicit
than Lévi-Strauss’s famous texts on totemism: transcend external
resemblances to arrive at \emph{internal homologies}.\footnote{Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{Totemism}, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 78.} It is no longer a
question of instituting a serial organization of the imaginary, but
instead a symbolic and structural order of understanding. It is no
longer a question of graduating resemblances, ultimately arriving at an
identification between Man and Animal at the heart of a mystical
participation. It is a question of ordering differences to arrive at a
correspondence of relations. The animal is distributed according to
differential relations or distinctive oppositions between species; the
same goes for human beings, according to the groups considered. When
analyzing the institution of the totem, we do not say that this group of
people identifies with that animal species. We say that what group A is
to group B, species A′ is to species B′. This method is profoundly
different from the preceding one: given two human groups, each with its
totem animal, we must discover the way in which the two totems entertain
relations analogous to those between the two groups—the Crow is to the
Falcon\dots{}


The method also applies to Man-child, man-woman relations, etc. If we
note, for example, that the warrior has a certain astonishing relation
to the young woman, we refrain from establishing an imaginary series
tying the two together; instead, we look for a term effecting an
equivalence of relations. Thus Vernant can say that marriage is to the
woman what war is to the man. The result is a homology between the
virgin who refuses marriage and the warrior who disguises himself as a
woman.\footnote{Jean-Pierre Vernant in \emph{Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne} (\emph{Civilisations et sociétés}, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 15–16.} In short, symbolic understanding replaces the analogy of
proportion with an analogy of proportionality; the serialization of
resemblances with a structuration of differences; the identification of
terms with an equality of relations; the metamorphoses of the
imagination with conceptual metaphors; the great continuity between
nature and culture with a deep rift distributing correspondences without
resemblance between the two; the imitation of a primal model with a
mimesis that is itself primary and without a model. A man can never say:
“I am a bull, a wolf\dots{}” But he can say: “I am to a woman what the bull is
to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the sheep.”
Structuralism represents a great revolution; the whole world becomes
more rational. Lévi-Strauss is not content to grant the structural model
all the prestige of a true classification system; he relegates the
serial model to the dark domain of sacrifice, which he depicts as
illusory, even devoid of good sense. The \emph{serial theme of sacrifice}
must yield to the \emph{structural theme of the institution of the totem},
correctly understood. But here, as in natural history, many compromises
are reached between archetypal series and symbolic structures.\footnote{On the opposition between sacrificial series and totemic structure, see Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Savage Mind} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 223–228. Despite all of his severity toward the series, Lévi-Strauss recognizes the compromise between the two themes: structure itself implies a very concrete feeling for affinities (pp. 37–38) and is based on two series between which it organizes homologies of relations. In particular, “becoming-historical” can bring complications or degradations that replace these homologies with resemblances and identifications between terms (see pp. 115ff., and what Lévi-Strauss calls the “flipside of totemism”).}

\section{Memories of a Bergsonian}


None of the preceding satisfies us, from our restricted viewpoint. We
believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing
human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than
the human. “From 1730 to 1735, all we hear about are vampires.”
Structuralism clearly does not account for these becomings, since it is
designed precisely to deny or at least denigrate their existence: a
correspondence of relations does not add up to a becoming. When
structuralism encounters becomings of this kind pervading a society, it
sees them only as phenomena of degradation representing a deviation from
the true order and pertaining to the adventures of diachrony. Yet in his
study of myths, Lévi-Strauss is always encountering these rapid acts by
which a human becomes animal at the same time as the animal becomes \dots{}
(Becomes what? Human, or something else?). It is always possible to try
to explain these \emph{blocks of becoming} by a correspondence between two
relations, but to do so most certainly impoverishes the phenomenon under
study. Must it not be admitted that myth as a frame of classification is
quite incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like
fragments of tales? Must we not lend credence to Jean Duvignaud’s
hypothesis that there are “anomic” phenomena pervading societies that
are not degradations of the mythic order but irreducible dynamisms
drawing lines of flight and implying other forms of expression than
those of myth, even if myth recapitulates them in its own terms in order
to curb them?\footnote{Jean Duvignaud, \emph{L’anomie. Hérésie et Subversion} (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1973).} Does it not seem that alongside the two models,
sacrifice and series, totem institution and structure, there is still
room for something else, something more secret, more subterranean: \emph{the
sorcerer} and becomings (expressed in tales instead of myths or rites)?


A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it
a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification. The
whole structuralist critique of the series seems irrefutable. To become
is not to progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does
not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches the
highest cosmic or dynamic level, as in Jung or Bachelard.
Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly
real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does
not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that
the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the
animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other
than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either
imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of
becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which
becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal
even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. The
becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human
being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even
if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to clarify:
that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it
has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another
becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block,
with the first. This is the principle according to which there is a
reality specific to becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of
very different “durations,” superior or inferior to “ours,” all of them
in communication).


Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by
descent and filiation. Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all
filiation is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than
filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable
becomings, it is in the domain of \emph{symbioses} that bring into play
beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible
filiation. There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the
orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever descend. There is a block
of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between
which is effected by a C virus. There is a block of becoming between
young roots and certain microorganisms, the alliance between which is
effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves (rhizosphere). If
there is originality in neoevolutionism, it is attributable in part to
phenomena of this kind in which evolution does not go from something
less differentiated to something more differentiated, in which it ceases
to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative or
contagious. Accordingly, the term we would prefer for this form of
evolution between heterogeneous terms is “involution,” on the condition
that involution is in no way confused with regression. Becoming is
involutionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the
direction of something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a
block that runs its own line “between” the terms in play and beneath
assignable relations.


Neoevolutionism seems important for two reasons: the animal is defined
not by characteristics (specific, generic, etc.) but by populations that
vary from milieu to milieu or within the same milieu; movement occurs
not only, or not primarily, by filiative productions but also by
transversal communications between heterogeneous populations. Becoming
is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is
certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it
regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing
corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation
or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency
all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,”
“being,” “equaling,” or “producing.”

\section{Memories of a Sorcerer, I}


A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a
peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that.
It may very well be that other agencies, moreover very different from
one another, have a different appraisal of the animal. One may retain or
extract from the animal certain characteristics: species and genera,
forms and functions, etc. Society and the State need animal
characteristics to use for classifying people; natural history and
science need characteristics in order to classify the animals
themselves. Serialism and structuralism either graduate characteristics
according to their resemblances, or order them according to their
differences. Animal characteristics can be mythic or scientific. But we
are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of
expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion.
The Wolf-Man fascinated by several wolves watching him. What would a
lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly? Beelzebub is the Devil,
but the Devil as lord of the flies. The wolf is not fundamentally a
characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing.
The louse is a lousing, and so on. What is a cry independent of the
population it appeals to or takes as its witness? Virginia Woolfs
experiences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys,
a school of fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with
the people she approaches. We do not wish to say that certain animals
live in packs. We want nothing to do with ridiculous evolutionary
classifications à la Lorenz, according to which there are inferior packs
and superior societies. What we are saying is that every animal is
fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has pack modes, rather than
characteristics, even if further distinctions within these modes are
called for. It is at this point that the human being encounters the
animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for
multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity that
fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? In
one of his masterpieces, H. P. Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph
Carter, who feels his “self” reel and who experiences a fear worse than
that of annihilation: “Carters of forms both human and non-human,
vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and
vegetable. And more, there were Carters having nothing in common with
earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other
planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua\dots{}. Merging with
nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet
to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other
beings,” nor from all of the becomings running through us, “that is the
nameless summit of agony and dread.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: H. P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” in \emph{The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath} (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 191–192.]} \#conclusion-rats
<class>Hofmannsthal<\Slash{}class>, or rather Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated
with a “people” of dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the
interstices of his disrupted self that the “soul of the animal bares its
teeth at monsterous fate”:\footnote{Hugo von Hofmannsthal, \emph{Lettres du voyageur à son retour}, trans. Jean-Claude Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901.} not pity, but \emph{unnatural participation}.
Then a strange imperative wells up in him: either stop writing, or write
like a rat \dots{} If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a
becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not
becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf,
etc. We will have to explain why. Many suicides by writers are explained
by these unnatural participations, these unnatural nuptials. Writers are
sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only population
before which they are responsible in principle. \#conclusion-calves
<class>The<\Slash{}class> German preromantic Karl Philipp Moritz feels
responsible not for the calves that die but before the calves that die
and give him the incredible feeling of an unknown Nature—\emph{affect}.\footnote{\emph{Anton Reiser} (extracts) in \emph{La légende dispersée. Anthologie du romantisme allemand} (Paris: Union Générate d’Editions, 1976), pp. 36–43.}
For the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it
is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into
upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not known the violence of these
animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an
instant, making one scrape at one’s bread like a rodent or giving one
the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward
unheard-of becomings. These are not regressions, although fragments of
regression, sequences of regression may enter in.


We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuated animals,
family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty
history, “my” cat, “my” dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us
into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal
psychoanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a
little brother behind them (when psychoanalysis talks about animals,
animals learn to laugh): \emph{anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool}. And
then there is a second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes;
genus, classification, or State animals; animals as they are treated in
the great divine myths, in such a way as to extract from them series or
structures, archetypes or models (Jung is in any event profounder than
Freud). Finally, there are more demonic animals, pack or affect animals
that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale \dots{} Or once
again, cannot any animal be treated in all three ways? There is always
the possibility that a given animal, a louse, a cheetah or an elephant,
will be treated as a pet, my little beast. And at the other extreme, it
is also possible for any animal to be treated in the mode of the pack or
swarm; that is our way, fellow sorcerers. Even the cat, even the dog.
And the shepherd, the animal trainer, the Devil, may have a favorite
animal in the pack, although not at all in the way we were just
discussing. Yes, any animal is or can be a pack, but to varying degrees
of vocation that make it easier or harder to discover the multiplicity,
or multiplicity-grade, an animal contains (actually or virtually
according to the case). Schools, bands, herds, populations are not
inferior social forms; they are affects and powers, involutions that
grip every animal in a becoming just as powerful as that of the human
being with the animal.


Jorge Luis Borges, an author renowned for his excess of culture, botched
at least two books, only the titles of which are nice: first, \emph{A
Universal History of Infamy}, because he did not see the sorcerer’s
fundamental distinction between deception and treason (becomings-animal
are there from the start, on the treason side); second, his \emph{Manual
dezoología fantástica}, where he not only adopts a composite and bland
image of myth but also eliminates all of the problems of the pack and
the corresponding becoming-animal of the human being: “We have
deliberately excluded from this manual legends of transformations of the
human being, the \emph{lobizón}, the werewolf, etc.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: \emph{A Universal History of Infamy}, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1972); Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, \emph{Manual de zoología fantástica} (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957), p. 9. The \emph{lobizón} is a fantastic creature of Uruguayan folklore to which many shapes are attributed.]} Borges is
interested only in characteristics, even the most fantastic ones,
whereas sorcerers know that werewolves are bands, and vampires too, and
that bands transform themselves into one another. But what exactly does
that mean, the animal as band or pack? Does a band not imply a
filiation, bringing us back to the reproduction of given
characteristics? How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a
becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production? A
multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple;
everybody knows it, but it is discussed only in secret. We oppose
epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to
sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal,
proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes.
Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union
that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again every time,
gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participations or nuptials are
the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. Propagation by
epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity,
even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire
does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion,
epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a
human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a
microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig.
These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are
interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature
operates—against itself. This is a far cry from filiative production or
hereditary reproduction, in which the only differences retained are a
simple duality between sexes within the same species, and small
modifications across generations. For us, on the other hand, there are
as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as
elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that many
beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds,
are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be
understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The
Universe does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that
animals are packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by
contagion.


These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by
contagion, enter certain \emph{assemblages}; it is there that human beings
effect their becomings-animal. But we should not confuse these dark
assemblages, which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations
such as the institution of the family and the State apparatus. We could
cite hunting societies, war societies, secret societies, crime
societies, etc. Becomings-animal are proper to them. We will not expect
to find filiative regimes of the family type or modes of classification
and attribution of the State or pre-State type or even serial
organizations of the religious type. Despite appearances and possible
confusions, this is not the site of origin or point of application for
myths. These are tales, or narratives and statements of becoming. It is
therefore absurd to establish a hierarchy even of animal collectivities
from the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs
are lower on the scale and are superseded by State or familial
societies. On the contrary, there is a difference in nature. The origin
of packs is entirely different from that of families and States; they
continually work them from within and trouble them from without, with
other forms of content, other forms of expression. The pack is
simultaneously an animal reality, and the reality of the becoming-animal
of the human being; contagion is simultaneously an animal peopling, and
the propagation of the animal peopling of the human being. The hunting
machine, the war machine, the crime machine entail all kinds of
becomings-animal that are not articulated in myth, \emph{still less in
totemism}. Dumézil showed that becomings of this kind pertain
essentially to the man of war, but only insofar as he is external to
families and States, insofar as he upsets filiations and
classifications. The war machine is always exterior to the State, even
when the State uses it, appropriates it. The man of war has an entire
becoming that implies multiplicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis
and treason, the power of affect. Wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men, men
of every animality, secret brotherhoods, animate the battlefields. But
so do the animal packs used by men in battle, or which trail the battles
and take advantage of them. And together they spread contagion.\footnote{On the man of war, his extrinsic position in relation to the State, the family, and religion, and on the becomings-animal, becomings-wild animal he enters into, see Dumézil, in particular, \emph{Mythes et dieux des Germains} (Paris: E. Leroux, 1939); \emph{Horace et les Curiaces} (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); \emph{The Destiny of the Warrior}, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); \emph{Mythe et épopée} (Paris: Gallimard, 1968–1973), vol. 2. One may also refer to the studies on leopard-man societies, etc., in Black Africa; it is probable that these societies derive from brotherhoods of warriors. But after the colonial State prohibited tribal wars, they turned into crime associations, while still retaining their territorial and political importance. One of the best studies on this subject is Paul Ernest Joset, \emph{Les sociétés secrètes des hommes-léopards en Afrique noire} (Paris: Payot, 1955). The becomings-animal proper to these groups seem to us to be very different from the symbolic relations between human and animal as they appear in State apparatuses, but also in pre-State institutions of the totemism type. Lévi-Strauss clearly demonstrates that totemism already implies a kind of embryonic State, to the extent that it exceeds tribal boundaries (\emph{The Savage Mind}, pp. 157ff).}
There is a complex aggregate: the becoming-animal of men, packs of
animals, elephants and rats, winds and tempests, bacteria sowing
contagion. A single \emph{Furor}. War contained zoological sequences before
it became bacteriological. It is in war, famine, and epidemic that
werewolves and vampires proliferate. Any animal can be swept up in these
packs and the corresponding becomings; cats have been seen on the
battlefield, and even in armies. That is why the distinction we must
make is less between kinds of animals than between the different states
according to which they are integrated into family institutions, State
apparatuses, war machines, etc. (and what is the relation of the writing
machine and the musical machine to becomings-animal?)

\section{Memories of a Sorcerer, II}


\hyperdef{amuse}{conclusion-mouse}{}%
\label{textamuse:conclusion-mouse}%
Our first principle was: pack and contagion, the contagion of the pack,
such is the path becoming-animal takes. But a second principle seemed to
tell us the opposite: wherever there is multiplicity, you will also find
an exceptional individual, and it is with that individual that an
alliance must be made in order to become-animal. There may be no such
thing as a lone wolf, but there is a leader of the pack, a master of the
pack, or else the old deposed head of the pack now living alone, there
is the Loner, and there is the Demon. Willard has his favorite, the rat
Ben, and only becomes-rat through his relation with him, in a kind of
alliance of love, then of hate. \emph{Moby-Dick} in its entirety is one of
the greatest masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible
becoming-whale, but one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating
directly through a monstrous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan,
Moby-Dick. There is always a pact with a demon; the demon sometimes
appears as the head of the band, sometimes as the Loner on the sidelines
of the pack, and sometimes as the higher Power (\emph{Puissance}) of the
band. The exceptional individual has many possible positions.
<class>Kafka<\Slash{}class>, another great author of real
becomings-animal, sings of mouse society; but Josephine, the mouse
singer, sometimes holds a privileged position in the pack, sometimes a
position outside the pack, and sometimes slips into and is lost in the
anonymity of the collective statements of the pack.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” in \emph{The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka}, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983).]} In short, every
Animal has its Anomalous. Let us clarify that: every animal swept up in
its pack or multiplicity has its anomalous. It has been noted that the
origin of the word \emph{anomal} (“anomalous”), an adjective that has fallen
into disuse in French, is very different from that of \emph{anormal}
(“abnormal”): \emph{a-normal}, a Latin adjective lacking a noun in French,
refers to that which is outside rules or goes against the rules, whereas
**an-omalie*, a Greek noun that has lost its adjective, designates the
unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of
deterritorialization.\footnote{Georges Canguilhem, \emph{On the Normal and the Pathological}, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, intro. Michel Foucault (Boston: Reidel, 1978), pp. 73–74.} The abnormal can be defined only in terms of
characteristics, specific or generic; but the anomalous is a position or
set of positions in relation to a multiplicity. Sorcerers therefore use
the old adjective “anomalous” to situate the positions of the
exceptional individual in the pack. It is always with the Anomalous,
Moby-Dick or Josephine, that one enters into alliance to become-animal.


It does seem as though there is a contradiction: between the pack and
the loner; between mass contagion and preferential alliance; between
pure multiplicity and the exceptional individual; between the aleatory
aggregate and a predestined choice. And the contradiction is real: Ahab
chooses Moby-Dick, in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from
elsewhere, and in so doing breaks with the law of the whalers according
to which one should first pursue the pack. Penthesilea shatters the law
of the pack, the pack of women, the pack of she-dogs, by choosing
Achilles as her favorite enemy. Yet it is by means of this anomalous
choice that each enters into his or her becoming-animal, the
becoming-dog of Penthesilea, the becoming-whale of Captain Ahab. We
sorcerers know quite well that the contradictions are real but that real
contradictions are not just for laughs. For the whole question is this:
What exactly is the nature of the anomalous? What function does it have
in relation to the band, to the pack? It is clear that the anomalous is
not simply an exceptional individual; that would be to equate it with
the family animal or pet, the Oedipalized animal as psychoanalysis sees
it, as the image of the father, etc. Ahab’s Moby-Dick is not like the
little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it.
Lawrence’s becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or
domestic relation. Lawrence is another of the writers who leave us
troubled and filled with admiration because they were able to tie their
writing to real and unheard-of becomings. But the objection is raised
against Lawrence: “Your tortoises aren’t real!” And he answers:
Possibly, but my becoming is, my becoming is real, even and especially
if you have no way of judging it, because you’re just little house
dogs\dots{}\footnote{D. H. Lawrence: “I am tired of being told there is no such animal\dots{}. If I am a giraffe, and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me and say they know me are nice well-behaved dogs, there it is, the animals are different\dots{}. You don’t love me. The animal that I am you instinctively dislike”; \emph{The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence}, vol. 2, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking, 1962), letter to J. M. Murry, May 20, 1929, p. 1154.} The anomalous, the preferential element in the pack, has
nothing to do with the preferred, domestic, and psychoanalytic
individual. Nor is the anomalous the bearer of a species presenting
specific or generic characteristics in their purest state; nor is it a
model or unique specimen; nor is it the perfection of a type incarnate;
nor is it the eminent term of a series; nor is it the basis of an
absolutely harmonious correspondence. The anomalous is neither an
individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither familiar
or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics.
Human tenderness is as foreign to it as human classifications. Lovecraft
applies the term “Outsider” to this thing or entity, the Thing, which
arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multiple, “teeming,
seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this
nameless horror.”


If the anomalous is neither an individual nor a species, then what is
it? It is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering. This is our
hypothesis: a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose
it in extension, not by the characteristics that compose it in
comprehension, but by the lines and dimensions it encompasses in
“intension.” If you change dimensions, if you add or subtract one, you
change multiplicity. Thus there is a borderline for each multiplicity;
it is in no way a center but rather the enveloping line or farthest
dimension, as a function of which it is possible to count the others,
all those lines or dimensions constitute the pack at a given moment
(beyond the borderline, the multiplicity changes nature). That is what
Captain Ahab says to his first mate: I have no personal history with
Moby-Dick, no revenge to take, any more than I have a myth to play out;
but I do have a becoming! Moby-Dick is neither an individual nor a
genus; he is the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack
as a whole, to reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it. The
elements of the pack are only imaginary “dummies,” the characteristics
of the pack are only symbolic entities; all that counts is the
borderline—the anomalous. “To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved
near to me.” The white wall. “Sometimes I think there is naught beyond.
But ’tis enough.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Herman Melville, \emph{Moby Dick}, chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck.”]} That the anomalous is the borderline makes it
easier for us to understand the various positions it occupies in
relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders, and the various
positions occupied by a fascinated Self (\emph{Moi}). It is now even possible
to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding the
pitfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior
collective stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular
assemblages they bring into play). In any event, the pack has a
borderline, and an anomalous position, whenever in a given space an
animal is on the line or in the act of drawing the line in relation to
which all the other members of the pack will fall into one of two
halves, left or right: a peripheral position, such that it is impossible
to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the band,
or at the shifting boundary of the band. Sometimes each and every animal
reaches this line or occupies this dynamic position, as in a swarm of
mosquitoes, where “each individual moves randomly unless it sees the
rest of [the swarm] in the same half-space; then it hurries to re-enter
the group. Thus stability is assured in catastrophe by a
**barrier*.”\footnote{René Thorn, \emph{Structural Stability and Morphogenesis}, trans. D. H. Fowler (Reading, Mass.: Benjamin Fowler\Slash{}Cummings, 1975), p. 319.} Sometimes it is a specific animal that draws and
occupies the borderline, as leader of the pack. Sometimes the borderline
is defined or doubled by a being of another nature that no longer
belongs to the pack, or never belonged to it, and that represents a
power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as a
trainer, outsider, etc. In any case, no band is without this phenomenon
of bordering, or the anomalous. It is true that bands are also
undermined by extremely varied forces that establish in them interior
centers of the conjugal, familial, or State type, and that make them
pass into an entirely different form of sociability, replacing pack
affects with family feelings or State intelligibilities. The center, or
internal black holes, assumes the principal role. This is what
evolutionism sees as progress, this adventure also befalls bands of
humans when they reconstitute group familialism, or even
authoritarianism or pack fascism.


Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the
fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of
the village, or \emph{between} villages. The important thing is their
affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed
to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of
alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the
power of the anomalous. The old-time theologians drew a clear
distinction between two kinds of curses against sexuality. The first
concerns sexuality as a process of filiation transmitting the original
sin. But the second concerns it as a power of alliance inspiring illicit
unions or abominable loves. This differs significantly from the first in
that it tends to prevent procreation; since the demon does not himself
have the ability to procreate, he must adopt indirect means (for
example, being the female succubus of a man and then becoming the male
incubus of a woman, to whom he transmits the man’s semen). It is true
that the relations between alliance and filiation come to be regulated
by laws of marriage, but even then alliance retains a dangerous and
contagious power. Leach was able to demonstrate that despite all the
exceptions that seemingly disprove the rule, the sorcerer belongs first
of all to a group united to the group over which he or she exercises
influence only by alliance: thus in a matrilineal group we look to the
father’s side for the sorcerer or witch. And there is an entire
evolution of sorcery depending on whether the relation of alliance
acquires permanence or assumes political weight.\footnote{Edward Leach, \emph{Rethinking Anthropology} (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), pp. 18–25.} In order to
produce werewolves in your own family it is not enough to resemble a
wolf, or to live like a wolf: the pact with the Devil must be coupled
with an alliance with another family, and it is the return of this
alliance to the first family, the reaction of this alliance on the first
family, that produces werewolves by feedback effect. A fine tale by
Erckmann and Chatrian, \emph{Hugues-le-loup}, assembles the traditions
concerning this complex situation.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, \emph{Hugues-le-loup} (Paris: J. Bonaventure, n.d.).]}


The contradiction between the two themes, “contagion through the animal
as pack,” and “pact with the anomalous as exceptional being,” is
progressively fading. It is with good reason that Leach links the two
concepts of alliance and contagion, pact and epidemic. Analyzing Kachin
sorcery, he writes: “Witch influence was thought to be transmitted in
the food that the women prepared\dots{}. Kachin witchcraft is contagious
rather than hereditary \dots{} it is associated with affinity, not
filiation.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Leach, \emph{Rethinking Anthropology}, p. 18.]} Alliance or the pact is the form of expression for an
infection or epidemic constituting the form of content. In sorcery,
blood is of the order of contagion and alliance. It can be said that
becoming-animal is an affair of sorcery because (1) it implies an
initial relation of alliance with a demon; (2) the demon functions as
the borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes or
in which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion; (3) this
becoming itself implies a second alliance, with another human group; (4)
this new borderline between the two groups guides the contagion of
animal and human being within the pack. There is an entire politics of
becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated
in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor
of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that
are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of
recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic,
in other words, anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of a
Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it
is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a
rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves
or seek to become established.


Let us cite pell-mell, not as mixes to be made, but as different cases
to be studied: becomings-animal in the war machine, wildmen of all kinds
(the war machine indeed comes from without, it is extrinsic to the
State, which treats the warrior as an anomalous power); becomings-animal
in crime societies, leopard-men, crocodile-men (when the State prohibits
tribal and local wars); becomings-animal in riot groups (when the Church
and State are faced with peasant movements containing a sorcery
component, which they repress by setting up a whole trial and legal
system designed to expose pacts with the Devil); becomings-animal in
asceticism groups, the grazing anchorite or wild-beast anchorite (the
asceticism machine is in an anomalous position, on a line of flight, off
to the side of the Church, and disputes the Church’s pretension to set
itself up as an imperial institution);\footnote{See Jacques Lacarrière, \emph{Les hommes ivres de dieu} (Paris: Fayard, 1975).} becomings-animal in
societies practicing sexual initiation of the “sacred deflowerer” type,
wolf-men, goat-men, etc. (who claim an Alliance superior and exterior to
the order of families; families have to win from them the right to
regulate their own alliances, to determine them according to relations
of complementary lines of descent, and to domesticate this unbridled
power of alliance).\footnote{Pierre Gordon, in \emph{Sex and Religion}, trans. Renée and Hilda Spodheim (New York: Social Science Publishers, 1949), studied the role of animal-men in rites of “sacred defloration.” These animal-men impose a ritual alliance upon filiative groups, themselves belong to brotherhoods that are on the outside or on the fringes, and are masters of contagion and epidemic. Gordon analyzes the reaction of the villages and cities when they begin to fight the animal-men in order to win the right to perform their own initiations and order their alliances according to their respective filiations (for example, the fight against the dragon). We find the same theme, for example, in Geneviève Calame-Griaule and Z. Ligers, “L’hommehyène dans la tradition soudanaise,” \emph{L’Homme}, 1, 2 (May–August 1961), pp. 89–118: the hyena-man lives on the fringes of the village, or between two villages, and can keep a lookout in both directions. A hero, or even two heroes with a fiancée in each other’s village, triumphs over the man-animal. It is as though it were necessary to distinguish two very different states of alliance: a demonic alliance that imposes itself from without, and imposes its law upon all of the filiations (a forced alliance with the monster, with the man-animal), and a consensual alliance, which is on the contrary in conformity with the law of filiations and is established after the men of the villages have defeated the monster and have organized their own relations. This sheds new light on the question of incest. For it is not enough to say that the prohibition against incest results from the positive requirements of alliance in general. There is instead a kind of alliance that is so foreign and hostile to filiation that it necessarily takes the position of incest (the man-animal always has a relation to incest). The second kind of alliance prohibits incest because it can subordinate itself to the rights of filiation only by lodging itself, precisely, between two distinct filiations. Incest appears twice, once as a monstrous power of alliance when alliance overturns filiation, and again as a prohibited power of filiation when filiation subordinates alliance and must distribute it among distinct lineages.}


The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely
ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always
appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to
relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always
appropriated the war machine in the form of national armies that
strictly limit the becomings of the warrior. The Church has always
burned sorcerers, or reintegrated anchorites into the toned-down image
of a series of saints whose only remaining relation to animals is
strangely familiar, domestic. Families have always warded off the
demonic Alliance gnawing at them, in order to regulate alliances among
themselves as they see fit. We have seen sorcerers serve as leaders,
rally to the cause of despotism, create the countersorcery of exorcism,
pass over to the side of the family and descent. But this spells the
death of the sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. We have seen
becoming spawn nothing more than a big domestic dog, as in Henry
Miller’s damnation (“it would be better to feign, to pretend to be an
animal, a dog for example, and catch the bone thrown to me from time to
time”) or Fitzgerald’s (“I will try to be a correct animal though, and
if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your
hand”). Invert Faust’s formula: So that is what it was, the form of the
traveling scholar? A mere poodle?\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up,” in \emph{The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected Pieces}, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956). The allusion to Faust is to Goethe, \emph{Faust}, Part I, lines 1323–1324.]}

\section{Memories of a Sorcerer, III}


Exclusive importance should not be attached to becomings-animal. Rather,
they are segments occupying a median region. On the near side, we
encounter becomings-woman, becomings-child (becoming-woman, more than
any other becoming, possesses a special introductory power; it is not so
much that women are witches, but that sorcery proceeds by way of this
becoming-woman). On the far side, we find becomings-elementary,
-cellular, -molecular, and even becomings-imperceptible. Toward what
void does the witch’s broom lead? And where is Moby-Dick leading Ahab so
silently? Lovecraft’s hero encounters strange animals, but he finally
reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable
waves and unfindable particles. Science fiction has gone through a whole
evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to
becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things
imperceptible.\footnote{Richard Matheson and Isaac Asimov are of particular importance in this evolution (Asimov extensively develops the theme of symbiosis).} The properly musical content of music is plied by
becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings-animal; however, it tends,
under all sorts of influences, having to do also with the instruments,
to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic lapping
through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the imperceptible
appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule.


If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even
nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of
space-time and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which
becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off. Carlos
Castaneda’s books clearly illustrate this evolution, or rather this
involution, in which the affects of a becoming-dog, for example, are
succeeded by those of a becoming-molecular, microperceptions of water,
air, etc. A man totters from one door to the next and disappears into
thin air: “All I can tell you is that we are fluid, luminous beings made
of fibers.”\footnote{Carlos Castaneda, \emph{Tales of Power} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 159.} All so-called initiatory journeys include these
thresholds and doors where becoming itself becomes, and where one
changes becoming depending on the “hour” of the world, the circles of
hell, or the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms, and cries in
variation. From the howling of animals to the wailing of elements and
particles.


Thus packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into
each other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when
they die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are
the same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a
center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of
dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a
dimension \emph{without changing its nature}. Since its variations and
dimensions are immanent to it, \emph{it amounts to the same thing to say that
each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in
symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself
into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and
doors}. For example, the Wolf-Man’s pack of wolves also becomes a swarm
of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small holes and tiny
ulcerations (the theme of contagion): all these heterogeneous elements
compose “the” multiplicity of symbiosis and becoming. If we imagined the
position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity toward
which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of
another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In
fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two
multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning
as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of
borderlines (\emph{fiber}) following which the multiplicity changes. And at
each threshold or door, a new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an
animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to
particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe
fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or
of deterritorialization. It is evident that the Anomalous, the Outsider,
has several functions: not only does it border each multiplicity, of
which it determines the temporary or local stability (with the highest
number of dimensions possible under the circumstances), not only is it
the precondition for the alliance necessary to becoming, but it also
carries the transformations of becoming or crossings of multiplicities
always farther down the line of flight. Moby-Dick is the \emph{White Wall}
bordering the pack; he is also the demonic \emph{Term of the Alliance};
finally, he is the terrible \emph{Fishing Line} with nothing on the other
end, the line that crosses the wall and drags the captain \dots{} where? Into
the void\dots{}


The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of
logical order to this string, these crossings or transformations. It is
already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal
to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is
symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms,
mad particles, a whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to
these heterogeneities, the Wolf-Man’s wolves, bees, anuses, little
scars. Of course, sorcery always codifies certain transformations of
becomings. Take a novel steeped in the traditions of sorcery, Alexandre
Dumas’s \emph{Meneur de loups}; in a first pact, the man of the fringes gets
the Devil to agree to make his wishes come true, with the stipulation
that a lock of his hair turn red each time he gets a wish. We are in the
hair-multiplicity, hair is the borderline. The man himself takes a
position on the wolves’ borderline, as leader of the pack. Then when he
no longer has a single human hair left, a second pact makes him
become-wolf himself; it is an endless becoming since he is only
vulnerable one day in the year. We are aware that between the
hair-multiplicity and the wolf-multiplicity it is always possible to
induce an order of resemblance (red like the fur of a wolf); but the
resemblance remains quite secondary (the wolf of the transformation is
black, with one white hair). In fact, there is a first multiplicity, of
hair, taken up in a becoming-red fur; and a second multiplicity, of
wolves, which in turn takes up the becoming-animal of the man. Between
the two, there is threshold and fiber, symbiosis of or passage between
heterogeneities. That is how we sorcerers operate. Not following a
logical order, but following alogical consistencies or compatibilities.
The reason is simple. It is because no one, not even God, can say in
advance whether two borderlines will string together or form a fiber,
whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into another
given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will enter
symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning, multiplicity
susceptible to transformation. No one can say where the line of flight
will pass: Will it let itself get bogged down and fall back to the
Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to another
danger, for example, turning into a line of abolition, annihilation,
self-destruction, Ahab, Ahab\dots{}? We are all too familiar with the dangers
of the line of flight, and with its ambiguities. The risks are
ever-present, but it is always possible to have the good fortune of
avoiding them. Case by case, we can tell whether the line is consistent,
in other words, whether the heterogeneities effectively function in a
multiplicity of symbiosis, whether the multiplicities are effectively
transformed through the becomings of passage. Let us take an example as
simple as: x starts practicing piano again. Is it an Oedipal return to
childhood? Is it a way of dying, in a kind of sonorous abolition? Is it
a new borderline, an active line that will bring other becomings
entirely different from becoming or rebecoming a pianist, that will
induce a transformation of all of the preceding assemblages to which \emph{x}
was prisoner? Is it a way out? Is it a pact with the Devil?
Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make a rhizome. But
you don’t know what you can make a rhizome with, you don’t know which
subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter a
becoming, people your desert. So experiment.


That’s easy to say? Although there is no preformed logical order to
becomings and multiplicities, there are \emph{criteria}, and the important
thing is that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in
the course of events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the
dangers. If multiplicities are defined and transformed by the borderline
that determines in each instance their number of dimensions, we can
conceive of the possibility of laying them out on a plane, the
borderlines succeeding one another, forming a broken line. It is only in
appearance that a plane of this kind “reduces” the number of dimensions;
for it gathers in all the dimensions to the extent that \emph{flat
multiplicities}—which nonetheless have \emph{an increasing or decreasing
number of dimensions}—are inscribed upon it. It is in grandiose and
simplified terms that Lovecraft attempted to pronounce sorcery’s final
word: “Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his
understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his
present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every
figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some
corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a
cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three
dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions,
which men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are
cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and
reachless heights of archetypal infinity.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” p. 197.]} Far from reducing the
multiplicities’ number of dimensions to two, the \emph{plane of consistency}
cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence
any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions. The plane
of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms. Therefore all
becomings are written like sorcerers’ drawings on this plane of
consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them.
This is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or veering
into the void. The only question is: Does a given becoming reach that
point? Can a given multiplicity flatten and conserve all its dimensions
in this way, like a pressed flower that remains just as alive dry?
Lawrence, in his becoming-tortoise, moves from the most obstinate animal
dynamism to the abstract, pure geometry of scales and “cleavages of
division,” without, however, losing any of the dynamism: he pushes
becoming-tortoise all the way to the plane of consistency.\footnote{See D. H. Lawrence, the first and second poems of \emph{Tortoises} (New York: T. Selzer, 1921).}
Everything becomes imperceptible, everything is becoming-imperceptible
on the plane of consistency, which is nevertheless precisely where the
imperceptible is seen and heard. It is the Planomenon, or the
Rhizosphere, the Criterium (and still other names, as the number of
dimensions increases). At \emph{n} dimensions, it is called the Hypersphere,
the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since it has no
form itself, the abstract Machine of which each concrete assemblage is a
multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract
machine is the intersection of them all.



\bigskip


\hyperdef{amuse}{conclusion-waves}{}%
\label{textamuse:conclusion-waves}%
<class>Waves<\Slash{}class> are vibrations, shifting
borderlines inscribed on the plane of consistency as so many
abstractions. The abstract machine of the waves. In \emph{The Waves},
Virginia Woolf—who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming,
all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and
kingdoms—intermingles seven characters, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny,
Rhoda, Suzanne, and Percival. But each of these characters, with his or
her name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity (for example,
Bernard and the school of fish). Each is simultaneously in this
multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others. Percival
is like the ultimate multiplicity enveloping the greatest number of
dimensions. But he is not yet the plane of consistency. Although Rhoda
thinks she sees him rising out of the sea, no, it is not he. “When the
white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright—a
column; now a fountain\dots{}. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our
reach.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Virginia Woolf, \emph{The Waves} (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931), p. 139.]} Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of consistency
they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates following a
line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane (each
chapter of Woolf’s novel is preceded by a meditation on an aspect of the
waves, on one of their hours, on one of their becomings).

\section{Memories of a Theologian}


Theology is very strict on the following point: there are no werewolves,
human beings cannot become animal. That is because there is no
transformation of essential forms; they are inalienable and only
entertain relations of analogy. The Devil and the witch, and the pact
between them, are no less real for that, for there is in reality a
**local movement* that is properly diabolical. Theology distinguishes two
cases, used as models during the Inquisition: that of Ulysses’
companions, and that of Diomedes’ companions, the imaginary vision and
the spell. In the first, the subject believes him- or herself to be
transformed into an animal, pig, ox, or wolf, and the observers believe
it too; but this is an internal local movement bringing sensible images
back to the imagination and bouncing them off external meanings. In the
second, the Devil “assumes” real animal bodies, even transporting the
accidents and affects befalling them to other bodies (for example, a cat
or a wolf that has been taken over by the Devil can receive wounds that
are relayed to an exactly corresponding part of a human body).\footnote{See the Inquisition manual, \emph{Le marteau des sorciers} (1486), ed. H. Institoris and J. Sprengler (Paris: Plon, 1973), vol. 1, p. 10, and vol. 2, p. 8. The first and simplest case is that of Ulysses’ companions, who believed themselves, and were believed to have been, transformed into pigs (or again, King Nebuchadnezzar, transformed into an ox). The second case is more complicated: Diomedes’ companions do not believe they have been changed into birds, since they are dead, but demons take over birds’ bodies and pass them off as those of Diomedes’ companions. The need to distinguish this more complex case is explained by phenomena of transfer of affects; for example, a lord on a hunting excursion cuts off the paw of a wolf and returns home to find his wife, who had not left the house, with a hand cut off; or a man strikes cats, and the exact wounds he inflicts turn up on women.} This
is a way of saying that the human being does not become animal in
reality, but that there is nevertheless a demonic reality of the
becoming-animal of the human being. Therefore it is certain that the
demon performs local transports of all kinds. The Devil is a
transporter; he transports humors, affects, or even bodies (the
Inquisition brooks no compromises on this power of the Devil: the
witch’s broom, or “the Devil take you”). But these transports cross
neither the barrier of essential forms nor that of substances or
subjects.


There is another, altogether different, problem concerning the laws of
nature that has to do not with demonology but with alchemy, and above
all physics. It is the problem of accidental forms, distinct from both
essential forms and determined subjects. For accidental forms are
susceptible to \emph{more and less}: more or less charitable, but also more
or less white, more or less warm. A degree of heat is a perfectly
individuated warmth distinct from the substance or the subject that
receives it. A degree of heat can enter into composition with a degree
of whiteness, or with another degree of heat, to form a third unique
individuality distinct from that of the subject. What is the
individuality of a day, a season, an event? A shorter day and a longer
day are not, strictly speaking, extensions but degrees proper to
extension, just as there are degrees proper to heat, color, etc. An
accidental form therefore has a “latitude” constituted by a certain
number of composable individuations. A degree, an intensity, is an
individual, a \emph{Haecceity} that enters into composition with other
degrees, other intensities, to form another individual. Can latitude be
explained by the fact that the subject participates more or less in the
accidental form? But do these degrees of participation not imply a
flutter, a vibration in the form itself that is not reducible to the
properties of a subject? Moreover, if intensities of heat are not
composed by addition, it is because one must add their respective
subjects; it is the subjects that prevent the heat of the whole from
increasing. All the more reason to effect distributions of intensity, to
establish latitudes that are “deformedly deformed,” speeds, slownesses,
and degrees of all kinds corresponding to a body or set of bodies taken
as longitude: a cartography.\footnote{On the problem of intensities in the Middle Ages, the proliferation of theses on this topic, the constitution of kinetics and dynamics, and the particularly important role of Nicholas Oresme, see Pierre Duhem’s classic work, \emph{Le système du monde} (Paris: A. Hermann \& Fils, 1913–1959), vols. 7–9 (\emph{La physique parisienne au XIVe siècle}).} In short, between substantial forms
and determined subjects, \emph{between the two}, there is not only a whole
operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities,
degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations
totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive
them.

\section{Memories of a Spinozist, I}


Substantial or essential forms have been critiqued in many different
ways. Spinoza’s approach is radical: Arrive at elements that no longer
have either form or function, that are abstract in this sense even
though they are perfectly real. They are distinguished solely by
movement and rest, slowness and speed. They are not atoms, in other
words, finite elements still endowed with form. Nor are they
indefinitely divisible. They are infinitely small, ultimate parts of an
actual infinity, laid out on the same plane of consistency or
composition. They are not defined by their number since they always come
in infinities. However, depending on their degree of speed or the
relation of movement and rest into which they enter, they belong to a
given Individual, which may itself be part of another Individual
governed by another, more complex, relation, and so on to infinity.
There are thus smaller and larger infinities, not by virtue of their
number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which
their parts enter. Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and
the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated
multiplicities. The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense
Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the
various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an
infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less
interconnected relations. There is therefore a unity to the plane of
nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the
artificial and the natural. This plane has nothing to do with a form or
a figure, nor with a design or a function. Its unity has nothing to do
with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project in
the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon which everything is laid
out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all
functions; its dimensions, however, increase with those of the
multiplicities of individualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane,
upon which things are distinguished from one another only by speed and
slowness. A plane of immanence or univocality opposed to analogy. The
One is said with a single meaning of all the multiple. Being expresses
in a single meaning all that differs. What we are talking about is not
the unity of substance but the infinity of the modifications that are
part of one another on this unique plane of life.


The never-ending debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: both
agree at least in denouncing resemblances, or imaginary, sensible
analogies, but in Cuvier, scientific definition concerns the relations
between organs, and between organs and functions. Cuvier thus takes
analogy to the scientific stage, making it an analogy of
proportionality. The unity of the plane, according to him, can only be a
unity of analogy, therefore a transcendent unity that cannot be realized
without fragmenting into distinct branches, according to irreducible,
uncrossable, heterogeneous compositions. Baer would later add: according
to noncommunicating types of development and differentiation. The plane
is a hidden plan(e) of organization, a structure or genesis. Geoffroy
has an entirely different point of view because he goes beyond organs
and functions to abstract elements he terms “anatomical,” even to
particles, pure materials that enter into various combinations, forming
a given organ and assuming a given function depending on their degree of
speed or slowness. Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and
rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structure but also the types
of development. This approach later reappears in an evolutionist
framework, with Perrier’s tachygenesis and differential rates of growth
in allometry: species as kinematic entities that are either precocious
or retarded. (Even the question of fertility is less one of form and
function than speed; do the paternal chromosomes arrive early enough to
be incorporated into the nuclei?) In any case, there is a pure plane of
immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is given,
upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distinguished
from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or that
individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their relations
of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows
down or accelerates. A single abstract Animal for all the assemblages
that effectuate it. A unique plane of consistency or composition for the
cephalopod and the vertebrate; for the vertebrate to become an Octopus
or Cuttlefish, all it would have to do is fold itself in two fast enough
to fuse the elements of the halves of its back together, then bring its
pelvis up to the nape of its neck and gather its limbs together into one
of its extremities, like “a clown who throws his head and shoulders back
and walks on his head and hands.”\footnote{Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, \emph{Principes de philosophie zoologique} (Paris: Picton et Didier, 1930). And on particles and their movements, \emph{Notions synthétiques, historiques et physiologiques de philosophie naturelle} (Paris: Denain, 1838).} \emph{Plication}. It is no longer a
question of organs and functions, and of a transcendent Plane that can
preside over their organization only by means of analogical relations
and types of divergent development. It is a question not of organization
but of composition; not of development or differentiation but of
movement and rest, speed and slowness. It is a question of elements and
particles, which do or do not arrive fast enough to effect a passage, a
becoming or jump on the same plane of pure immanence. And if there are
in fact jumps, rifts between assemblages, it is not by virtue of their
essential irreducibility but rather because there are always elements
that do not arrive on time, or arrive after everything is over; thus it
is necessary to pass through fog, to cross voids, to have lead times and
delays, which are themselves part of the plane of immanence. Even the
failures are part of the plane. We must try to conceive of this world in
which a single fixed plane—which we shall call a plane of absolute
immobility \emph{or} absolute movement—is traversed by nonformal elements of
relative speed that enter this or that individuated assemblage depending
on their degrees of speed and slowness. A plane of consistency peopled
by anonymous matter, by infinite bits of impalpable matter entering into
varying connections.


Children are Spinozists. When Little Hans talks about a “peepee-maker,”
he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to
a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary
according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the
different individuated assemblages it enters. Does a girl have a
peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to
conjure away a fear of castration. It is obvious that girls have a
peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather
than an organic function. Quite simply, the same material has different
connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different
assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee
standing or into the distance). Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker?
Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage. Chairs don’t have them: but
that is because the elements of the chair were not able to integrate
this material into their relations, or decomposed the relation with that
material to the point that it yielded something else, a rung, for
example. It has been noted that for children an organ has “a thousand
vicissitudes,” that it is “difficult to localize, difficult to identify,
it is in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy’s
heart\dots{}” This is not at all because the organ is experienced as a
part-object. It is because the organ is exactly what its elements make
it according to their relation of movement or rest, and the way in which
this relation combines with or splits off from that of neighboring
elements. This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it
is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense
abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages.
Children’s questions are poorly understood if they are not seen as
question-machines; that is why indefinite articles play so important a
role in these questions (\emph{a} belly, a child, a horse, a chair, “how is
**a* person made?”). Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher.
We call the \emph{longitude} of a body the particle aggregates belonging to
that body in a given relation; these aggregates are part of each other
depending on the composition of the relation that defines the
individuated assemblage of the body.

\section{Memories of a Spinozist, II}


There is another aspect to Spinoza. To every relation of movement and
rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts, there
corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing,
or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it,
augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these intensities come from
external parts or from the individual’s own parts. Affects are
becomings. Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the \emph{latitude} of a
body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or
rather within the limits of that degree. \emph{Latitude is made up of
intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive
parts falling under a relation}. In the same way that we avoided
defining a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it
by Species or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its
affects. This kind of study is called ethology, and this is the sense in
which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A racehorse is more different from a
workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox. Von Uexküll, in defining
animal worlds, looks for the active and passive affects of which the
animal is capable in the individuated assemblage of which it is a part.
For example, the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself up to the
tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets
itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin,
at the least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of
the time the tick sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all
that goes on in the immense forest. Its degree of power is indeed
bounded by two limits: the optimal limit of the feast after which it
dies, and the pessimal limit of the fast as it waits. It will be said
that the tick’s three affects assume generic and specific
characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true from
the standpoint of physiology, but not from the standpoint of Ethics.
Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from
longitude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know
nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what
its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with
other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that
body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions
with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.


Once again, we turn to children. Note how they talk about animals, and
are moved by them. They make a list of affects. Little Hans’s horse is
not representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an
element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft
horse-omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive
affects in the context of the individuated assemblage it is part of:
having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud,
having a big peepee-maker, pulling heavy loads, being whipped, falling,
making a din with its legs, biting, etc. These affects circulate and are
transformed within the assemblage: what a horse “can do.” They indeed
have an optimal limit at the summit of horsepower, but also a pessimal
threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can’t get back on its
feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping; a
horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days
(Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the
becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage:
his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the
street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the
street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the
dangers of winning it, the fall, shame \dots{} These are not phantasies or
subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse,
“playing” horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of
pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy
between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his
own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that
would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet
unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s, but
that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which
the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his
feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what way would that
ameliorate Hans’s problem, to what extent would it open a way out that
had been previously blocked? When Hofmannsthal contemplates the death
throes of a rat, it is in him that the animal “bares his teeth at
monstrous fate.” \emph{This is not a feeling of pity}, as he makes clear;
still less an identification. It is a composition of speeds and affects
involving entirely different individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat
become a thought, a feverish thought in the man, at the same time as the
man becomes a rat gnashing its teeth in its death throes. The rat and
the man are in no way the same thing, but Being expresses them both in a
single meaning in a language that is no longer that of words, in a
matter that is no longer that of forms, in an affectability that is no
longer that of subjects. \emph{Unnatural participation}. But the plane of
composition, the plane of Nature, is precisely for participations of
this kind, and continually makes and unmakes their assemblages,
employing every artifice.


This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination, but a
composition of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency: a
plan(e), a program, or rather a diagram, a problem, a question-machine.
Vladimir Slepian formulates the “problem” in a thoroughly curious text:
I’m hungry, always hungry, a man should not be hungry, so I’ll have to
become a dog—but how? This will not involve imitating a dog, nor an
analogy of relations. I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body
with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an
original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy.
For I cannot become dog without the dog itself becoming something else.
Slepian gets the idea of using shoes to solve this problem, the artifice
of the shoes. If I wear shoes on my hands, then their elements will
enter into a new relation, resulting in the affect or becoming I seek.
But how will I be able to tie the shoe on my second hand, once the first
is already occupied? With my mouth, which in turn receives an investment
in the assemblage, becoming a dog muzzle, insofar as a dog muzzle is now
used to tie shoes. At each stage of the problem, what needs to be done
is not to compare two organs but to place elements or materials in a
relation that uproots the organ from its specificity, making it become
“with” the other organ. But this becoming, which has already taken in
feet, hands, and mouth, will nevertheless fail. It founders on the tail.
The tail would have had to have been invested, forced to exhibit
elements common to the sexual organ and the caudal appendage, so that
the former would be taken up in the becoming-dog of the man at the same
time as the latter were taken up in a becoming \emph{of} the dog, in another
becoming that would also be part of the assemblage. The plan(e) fails,
Slepian falters on this point. The tail remains an organ of the man on
the one hand and an appendage of the dog on the other; their relations
do not enter into composition in the new assemblage. This is where
psychoanalytic drift sets in, bringing back all the clichés about the
tail, the mother, the childhood memory of the mother threading needles,
all those concrete figures and symbolic analogies.\footnote{Vladimir Slepian, “Fils de chien,” \emph{Minuit}, no. 7 (January 1974). We have given a very simplified presentation of this text.} But this is the
way Slepian wants it in this fine text. For there is a way in which the
failure of the plan(e) is part of the plan(e) itself: The plan(e) is
infinite, you can start it in a thousand different ways; you will always
find something that comes too late or too early, forcing you to
recompose all of your relations of speed and slowness, all of your
affects, and to rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite
undertaking. But there is another way in which the plan(e) fails; this
time, it is because \emph{another plan(e)} returns full force, breaking the
becoming-animal, folding the animal back onto the animal and the person
onto the person, recognizing only resemblances between elements and
analogies between relations. Slepian confronts both dangers.


We wish to make a simple point about psychoanalysis: from the beginning,
it has often encountered the question of the becomings-animal of the
human being: in children, who continually undergo becomings of this
kind; in fetishism and in particular masochism, which continually
confront this problem. The least that can be said is that the
psychoanalysts, even Jung, did not understand, or did not want to
understand. They killed becoming-animal, in the adult as in the child.
They saw nothing. They see the animal as a representative of drives, or
a representation of the parents. They do not see the reality of a
becoming-animal, that it is affect in itself, the drive in person, and
represents nothing. There exist no other drives than the assemblages
themselves. There are two classic texts in which Freud sees nothing but
the father in the becoming-horse of Hans, and Ferenczi sees the same in
the becoming-cock of Arpad. The horse’s blinders are the father’s
eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his mustache, its kicks are
the parents’ “lovemaking.” Not one word about Hans’s relation to the
street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a
child to see the spectacle “a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a
horse falls, a horse is whipped\dots{}” Psychoanalysis has no feeling for
unnatural participations, nor for the assemblages a child can mount in
order to solve a problem from which all exits are barred him: a
**plan(e)\emph{, not a phantasy. Similarly, fewer stupidities would be uttered
on the topic of pain, humiliation, and anxiety in masochism if it were
understood that it is the becomings-animal that lead the masochism, not
the other way around. There are always apparatuses, tools, engines
involved, there are always artifices and constraints used in taking
Nature to the fullest. That is because it is necessary to annul the
organs, to shut them away so that their liberated elements can enter
into the new relations from which the becoming-animal, and the
circulation of affects within the machinic assemblage, will result. As
we have seen elsewhere, this was the case for the mask, the bridle, the
bit, and the penis sheath in \emph{Equus eroticus}: paradoxically, in the
becoming-horse assemblage the man subdues his own “instinctive” forces
while the animal transmits to him its “acquired” forces. Reversal,
unnatural participation. And the boots of the woman-master function to
annul the leg as a human organ, to make the elements of the leg enter a
relation suited to the overall assemblage: “In this way, it will no
longer be women’s legs that have an effect on me\dots{}”\footnote{See Roger Dupouy, “Du masochisme,” \emph{Annales Médico-psychologiques}, series 12, vol. 2 (1929), p. 405.} But to break the
becoming-animal all that is needed is to extract a segment from it, to
abstract one of its moments, to fail to take into account its internal
speeds and slownesses, to arrest the circulation of affects. Then
nothing remains but imaginary resemblances between terms, or symbolic
analogies between relations. This segment refers to the father, that
relation of movement and rest refers to the primal scene, etc. It must
be recognized that psychoanalysis alone is not enough to bring about
this breakage. It only brings out a danger inherent in becoming. There
is always the danger of finding yourself “playing” the animal, the
domestic Oedipal animal, Miller going bowwow and taking a bone,
Fitzgerald licking your hand, Slepian returning to his mother, or the
old man playing horse or dog on an erotic postcard from 1900 (and
“playing” at being a wild animal would be no better). Becomings-animal
continually run these dangers.
}

\section{Memories of a Haecceity}


A body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a
determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or the
functions it fulfills. On the plane of consistency, \emph{a body is defined
only by a longitude and a latitude}: in other words the sum total of the
material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and
rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive
affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential
(latitude). Nothing but affects and local movements, differential
speeds. The credit goes to Spinoza for calling attention to these two
dimensions of the Body, and for having defined the plane of Nature as
pure longitude and latitude. Latitude and longitude are the two elements
of a cartography.


There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person,
subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name \emph{haecceity} for
it.\footnote{This is sometimes written “ecceity,” deriving the word from \emph{ecce}, “here is.” This is an error, since Duns Scotus created the word and the concept from \emph{haec}, “this thing.” But it is a fruitful error because it suggests a mode of individuation that is distinct from that of a thing or a subject.} A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect
individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is
different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the
sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest
between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.
When demonology expounds upon the diabolical art of local movements and
transports of affect, it also notes the importance of rain, hail, wind,
pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious particles, favorable
conditions for these transports. Tales must contain haecceities that are
not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status
of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects. Among
types of civilizations, the Orient has many more individuations by
haecceity than by subjectivity or substantiality: the haiku, for
example, must include indicators as so many floating lines constituting
a complex individual. In Charlotte Brontë, everything is in terms of
**wind*, things, people, faces, loves, words. Lorca’s “five in the
evening,” when love falls and fascism rises. That awful five in the
evening! We say, “What a story!” “What heat!” “What a life!” to
designate a very singular individuation. The hours of the day in
Lawrence, in Faulkner. A degree of heat, an intensity of white, are
perfect individualities; and a degree of heat can combine in latitude
with another degree to form a new individual, as in a body that is cold
here and hot there depending on its longitude. Norwegian omelette. A
degree of heat can combine with an intensity of white, as in certain
white skies of a hot summer. This is in no way an individuality of the
instant, as opposed to the individuality of permanences or durations. A
tear-off calendar has just as much time as a perpetual calendar,
although the time in question is not the same. There are animals that
live no longer than a day or an hour; conversely, a group of years can
be as long as the most durable subject or object. We can conceive of an
abstract time that is equal for haecceities and for subjects or things.
Between the extreme slownesses and vertiginous speeds of geology and
astronomy, Michel Tournier places meteorology, where meteors live at our
pace: “A cloud forms in the sky like an image in my brain, the wind
blows like I breathe, a rainbow spans the horizon for as long as my
heart needs to reconcile itself to life, the summer passes like vacation
drifts by.” But is it by chance that in Tournier’s novel this certitude
can come only to a twin hero who is deformed and desubjectified, and has
acquired a certain ubiquity?\footnote{Michel Tournier, \emph{Les météores} (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), chapter 23, “L’âme déployée.”} Even when times are abstractly equal,
the individuation of a life is not the same as the individuation of the
subject that leads it or serves as its support. It is not the same
Plane: in the first case, it is the plane of consistency or of
composition of haecceities, which knows only speeds and affects; and in
the second case, it is the altogether different plane of forms,
substances, and subjects. And it is not in the same time, the same
temporality. \emph{Aeon}: the indefinite time of the event, the floating line
that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires
into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a
simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to
happen and has just happened. \emph{Chronos}: the time of measure that
situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a
subject.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: On \emph{Aeon} versus \emph{chronos}, see Deleuze, \emph{Logique du sens} (Paris: Minuit, 1969), especially series 23, pp. 190–197.]} Boulez distinguishes tempo and nontempo in music: the
“pulsed time” of a formal and functional music based on values versus
the “nonpulsed time” of a floating music, both floating \emph{and} machinic,
which has nothing but speeds or differences in dynamic.\footnote{Pierre Boulez, \emph{Conversations with Célestin Deliège} (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976), pp. 68–71 (“It is not possible to introduce phenomena of tempo into music that has been calculated only electronically, in \dots{} lengths expressed in seconds or microseconds”; p. 70).} In short,
the difference is not at all between the ephemeral and the durable, nor
even between the regular and the irregular, but between two modes of
individuation, two modes of temporality.


We must avoid an oversimplified conciliation, as though there were on
the one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the
other hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type. For you
will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what
you are, and that you are nothing but that. When the face becomes a
haecceity: “It seemed a curious mixture that simply made do with time,
weather and these people.”\footnote{Ray Bradbury, \emph{The Machineries of Joy} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 53.} You are longitude and latitude, a set of
speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of
nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season,
a year, \emph{a life} (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog,
a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have
it, you can reach it. A cloud of locusts carried in by the wind at five
in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at full
moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a
decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold
things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its
individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that
is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects,
independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It
is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be
subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an
hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life. The street enters into
composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters into
composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into
composition with each other. At most, we may distinguish assemblage
haecceities (a body considered only as longitude and latitude) and
interassemblage haecceities, which also mark the potentialities of
becoming within each assemblage (the milieu of intersection of the
longitudes and latitudes). But the two are strictly inseparable.
Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things,
animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken
within them. This should be read without a pause: the
animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of
an animal, blood nuptials. Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is
this place! “The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road,”
cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel. Spatiotemporal
relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing but
dimensions of multiplicities. The street is as much a part of the
omnibus-horse assemblage as the Hans assemblage the becoming-horse of
which it initiates. We are all five o’clock in the evening, or another
hour, or rather two hours simultaneously, the optimal and the pessimal,
noon-midnight, but distributed in a variable fashion. The plane of
consistency contains only haecceities, along intersecting lines. Forms
and subjects are not of that world. Virginia Woolf’s walk through the
crowd, among the taxis. Taking a walk is a haecceity; never again will
Mrs. Dalloway say to herself, “I am this, I am that, he is this, he is
that.” And “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She
sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside,
looking on \dots{}. She always had the feeling that it was very, very
dangerous to live even one day.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Virginia Woolf, \emph{Mrs. Dalloway} (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1925), p. 11.]} Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity
has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in
the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome.


And it is not the same language, at least not the same usage of
language. For if the plane of consistency only has haecceities for
content, it also has its own particular semiotic to serve as expression.
A plane of content and a plane of expression. This semiotic is composed
above all of proper names, verbs in the infinitive and indefinite
articles or pronouns. \emph{Indefinite article} + \emph{proper name} + \emph{infinitive
verb} constitutes the basic chain of expression, correlative to the
least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a semiotic that has
freed itself from both formal signifiances and personal
subjectifications. In the first place, the verb in the infinitive is in
no way indeterminate with respect to time; it expresses the floating,
nonpulsed time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure
event or of becoming, which articulates relative speeds and slownesses
independently of the chronometric or chronological values that time
assumes in the other modes. There is good reason to oppose the
infinitive as mode and tense of becoming to all of the other modes and
tenses, which pertain to Chronos since they form pulsations or values of
being (the verb “to be” is precisely the only one that has no
infinitive, or rather the infinitive of which is only an indeterminate,
empty expression, taken abstractly to designate the sum total of
definite modes and tenses).\footnote{Gustave Guillaume has proposed a very interesting conception of the verb. He distinguishes between an interior time, enveloped in the “process,” and an exterior time pertaining to the distinction between epochs (\emph{Epoques et niveaux temporels dans le système de la conjugation française, Cahiers de linguistique structurale} [Universite de Laval, Quebec], no. 4 [1955]). It seems to us that these two poles correspond respectively to the infinitive-becoming, Aeon, and the present-being, Chronos. Each verb leans more or less in the direction of one pole or the other, not only according to its nature, but also according to the nuances of its modes and tenses, with the exception of “becoming” and “being,” which correspond to both poles. Proust, in his study of Flaubert’s style, shows how the imperfect tense in Flaubert takes on the value of an infinitive-becoming: \emph{Chroniques} (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), pp. 197–199.]} Second, the proper name is no way the
indicator of a subject; thus it seems useless to ask whether its
operation resembles the nomination of a species, according to whether
the subject is considered to be of another nature than that of the Form
under which it is classified, or only the ultimate act of that Form, the
limit of classification.\footnote{On the problem of proper names (in what sense is the proper name outside the limits of classification and of another nature, and in what sense is it at the limit and still a part of classification?), see Alan Henderson Gardiner, \emph{The Theory of Proper Names}, 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), and Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Savage Mind}, chapter 7 (“Time Regained”), pp. 217–244.} The proper name does not indicate a
subject; nor does a noun take on the value of a proper name as a
function of a form or a species. The proper name fundamentally
designates something that is of the order of the event, of becoming or
of the haecceity. It is the military men and meteorologists who hold the
secret of proper names, when they give them to a strategic operation or
a hurricane. The proper name is not the subject of a tense but the agent
of an infinitive. It marks a longitude and a latitude. If Tick, Wolf,
Horse, etc., are true proper names, they are so not by virtue of the
specific and generic denominators that characterize them but of the
speeds that compose them and the affects that fill them; it is by virtue
of the event they are in themselves and in the assemblages—the
becoming-horse of Little Hans, the becoming-wolf of the Were [which
etymologically means “man”—Trans.], the becoming-tick of the Stoic
(other proper names).


Third, the indefinite article and the indefinite pronoun are no more
indeterminate than the infinitive. Or rather they are lacking a
determination only insofar as they are applied to a form that is itself
indeterminate, or to a determinable subject. On the other hand, they
lack nothing when they introduce haecceities, events, the individuation
of which does not pass into a form and is not effected by a subject. The
indefinite then has maximum determination: once upon a time; a child is
being beaten; a horse is falling \dots{} Here, the elements in play find their
individuation in the assemblage of which they are a part, independent of
the form of their concept and the subjectivity of their person. We have
remarked several times the extent to which children use the indefinite
not as something indeterminate but, on the contrary, as an individuating
function within a collectivity. That is why we are dumbfounded by the
efforts of psychoanalysis, which desperately wants there to be something
definite hidden behind the indefinite, a possessive, a person. When the
child says “\emph{a} belly,” “\emph{a} horse,” “how do \emph{people} grow up?”
“\emph{someone} is beating \emph{a} child,” the psychoanalyst hears “my belly,”
“the father,” “will I grow up to be like daddy?” The psychoanalyst asks:
Who is being beaten, and by whom?\footnote{We have already encountered this problem of the indifference of psychoanalysis to the use of the indefinite article or pronoun among children: as early as Freud, but more especially in Melanie Klein (the children she analyzes, in particular, Little Richard, speak in terms of “a,” “one,” “people,” but Klein exerts incredible pressure to turn them into personal and possessive family locutions). It seems to us that Laplanche and Pontalis are the only ones in psychoanalysis to have had any inkling that indefinites play a specific role; they protested against any overrapid interpretive reduction: “Fantasme originaire,” \emph{Les temps modernes}, no. 215 (April 1964), pp. 1861, 1868.} Even linguistics is not immune
from the same prejudice, inasmuch as it is inseparable from a
personology; according to linguistics, in addition to the indefinite
article and the pronoun, the third-person pronoun also lacks the
determination of subjectivity that is proper to the first two persons
and is supposedly the necessary condition for all enunciation.\footnote{See the subjectivist or personalist conception of language in Emile Benveniste, \emph{Problems in General Linguistics}, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), chapters 20 (“Subjectivity in Language,” pp. 223–230) and 21 (“Analytical Philosophy and Language,” pp. 231–238), especially pp. 220–221 and 225–226.}


We believe on the contrary that the third person indefinite, \emph{HE},
**THEY*, implies no indetermination from this point of view; it ties the
statement to a collective assemblage, as its necessary condition, rather
than to a subject of the enunciation. Blanchot is correct in saying that
**ONE* and \emph{HE}—\emph{one} is dying, \emph{he} is unhappy—in no way take the place
of a subject, but instead do away with any subject in favor of an
assemblage of the haecceity type that carries or brings out the event
insofar as it is unformed and incapable of being effectuated by persons
(“something happens to them that they can only get a grip on again by
letting go of their ability to say I”).\footnote{The essential texts of Maurice Blanchot serve to refute the theory of the “shifter” and of personology in linguistics. See \emph{L’entretien infini} (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 556–567. And on the difference between the two propositions, “I am unfortunate” and “he is unfortunate,” or between “I die” and “one dies,” see \emph{La part du feu} (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 29–30, and \emph{The Space of Literature}, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 90, 122, 126. Blanchot demonstrates that in all of these cases the indefinite has nothing to do with “the banality of daily life,” which on the contrary would be on the side of the personal pronoun.} The \emph{HE} does not represent
a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It does not
overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first two
persons; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the
tyranny of subjective or signifying constellations, under the regime of
empty redundancies. The contents of the chains of expression it
articulates are those that can be assembled for a maximum number of
occurrences and becomings. “They arrive like fate \dots{} where do they come
from, how have they pushed this far\dots{}?”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: These quotes, the first from Nietzsche, the second from Kafka, are quoted more fully in 12, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology,” p. 353.]} He or one, indefinite
article, proper name, infinitive verb: \emph{A HANS TO BECOME HORSE, A PACK
NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID, THEY ARRIVE
HUNS}. Classified ads, telegraphic machines on the plane of consistency
(once again, we are reminded of the procedures of Chinese poetry and the
rules for translation suggested by the best commentators).\footnote{For example, François Cheng, \emph{Chinese Poetic Writing}, trans. Donald A. Riggs and Jerome P. Seaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), his analysis of what he calls “the passive procedures,” pp. 23–42.}

\section{Memories of a Plan(e) Maker}


Perhaps there are two planes, or two ways of conceptualizing the plane.
The plane can be a hidden principle, which makes visible what is seen
and audible what is heard, etc., which at every instant causes the given
to be given, in this or that state, at this or that moment. But the
plane itself is not given. It is by nature hidden. It can only be
inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise
(simultaneously or successively, synchronically or diachronically). A
plane of this kind is as much a plan(e) of organization as of
development: it is structural or genetic, and both at once, structure
and genesis, the structural plan(e) of formed organizations with their
developments, the genetic plan(e) of evolutionary developments with
their organizations. These are only nuances of this first conception of
the plane. To accord these nuances too much importance would prevent us
from grasping something more important; that the plan(e), conceived or
made in this fashion, always concerns the development of forms and the
formation of subjects. A hidden structure necessary for forms, a secret
signifier necessary for subjects. It ensues that the plan(e) itself will
not be given. It exists only in a supplementary dimension to that to
which it gives rise (\emph{n}+1). This makes it a teleological plan(e), a
design, a mental principle. It is a plan(e) of transcendence. It is a
plan(e) of analogy, either because it assigns the eminent term of a
development or because it establishes the proportional relations of a
structure. It may be in the mind of a god, or in the unconscious of
life, of the soul, or of language: it is always concluded from its own
effects. It is always inferred. \emph{Even if it is said to be immanent}, it
is so only by absence, analogically (metaphorically, metonymically,
etc.). The tree is given in the seed, but as a function of a plan(e)
that is not given. The same applies to music. The developmental or
organizational principle does not appear in itself, in a direct relation
with that which develops or is organized: There is a transcendent
compositional principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not
“audible” by itself or for itself. This opens the way for all possible
interpretations. Forms and their developments, and subjects and their
formations, relate to a plan(e) that operates as a transcendent unity or
hidden principle. The plan(e) can always be described, but as a part
aside, as ungiven in that to which it gives rise. Is this not how even
Balzac, even Proust, describe their work’s plan(e) of organization or
development, as though in a metalanguage? Is not Stockhausen also
obliged to describe the structure of his sound forms as existing
“alongside” them, since he is unable to make it audible? Life plan(e),
music plan(e), writing plan(e), it’s all the same: a plan(e) that cannot
be given as such, that can only be inferred from the forms it develops
and the subjects it forms, since it is \emph{for} these forms and these
subjects.


Then there is an altogether different plane, or an altogether different
conception of the plane. Here, there are no longer any forms or
developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of
subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There
are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between
unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively
unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. There are only
haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute
collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but things arrive late or
early, and form this or that assemblage depending on their compositions
of speed. Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form according to
compositions of nonsubjectified powers or affects. We call this plane,
which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the
plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to the plan(e) of
organization or development). It is necessarily a plane of immanence and
univocality. We therefore call it the plane of Nature, although nature
has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction
between the natural and the artificial. However many dimensions it may
have, it never has a supplementary dimension to that which transpires
upon it. That alone makes it natural and immanent. The same goes for the
principle of contradiction: this plane could also be called the plane of
noncontradiction. The plane of consistency could be called the plane of
nonconsistency. It is a geometrical plane, no longer tied to a mental
design but to an abstract design. Its number of dimensions continually
increases as what happens happens, but even so it loses nothing of its
planitude. It is thus a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but
this proliferation of material has nothing to do with an evolution, the
development of a form or the filiation of forms. Still less is it a
regression leading back to a principle. It is on the contrary an
**involution*, in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times
and speeds. It is a fixed plane, a fixed sound plane, or visual plane,
or writing plane, etc. Here, fixed does not mean immobile: it is the
absolute state of movement as well as of rest, from which all relative
speeds and slownesses spring, and nothing but them. Certain modern
musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said
to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound
plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise,
brings the imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential
speeds and slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: \emph{the work of art
must mark seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds}.\footnote{See the statements of the “repetitive” American musicians, particularly Steve Reich and Philip Glass.} Or rather it
is a question of a freeing of time, Aeon, a nonpulsed time for a
floating music, as Boulez says, an electronic music in which forms are
replaced by pure modifications of speed. It is undoubtedly John Cage who
first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms
a process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against
pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of
interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the
absolute state of movement. The same could be said of the fixed visual
plane: Godard, for example, effectively carries the fixed plane of
cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsists are
tiny variations of speed between movements in composition. Nathalie
Sarraute, for her part, proposes a clear distinction between two planes
of writing: a transcendent plan(e) that organizes and develops forms
(genres, themes, motifs) and assigns and develops subjects (personages,
characters, feelings); and an altogether different plane that liberates
the particles of an anonymous matter, allowing them to communicate
through the “envelope” of forms and subjects, retaining between them
only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating
affects, so that the plane itself is perceived at the same time as it
allows us to perceive the imperceptible (the microplane, the molecular
plane).\footnote{Nathalie Sarraute, in \emph{The Age of Suspicion}, trans. Marie Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), shows how Proust, for example, is torn between the two planes, in that he extracts from his characters “the infinitesimal particles of an impalpable matter,” but also glues all of the particles back into a coherent form, slips them into the envelope of this or that character. See pp. 50, 94–95.} So from the point of view of a well-founded abstraction, we
can make it seem as though the two planes, the two conceptions of the
plane, were in clear and absolute opposition. From this point of view,
we can say, You can see the difference between the following two types
of propositions: (1) forms develop and subjects form as a function of a
plan(e) that can only be inferred (the plan[e] of
organization-development); (2) there are only speeds and slownesses
between unformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers,
as a function of a plane that is necessarily given at the same time as
that to which it gives rise (the plane of consistency or
composition).\footnote{See the distinction between the two Planes in Artaud. One of them is denounced as the source of all illusions: \emph{The Peyote Dance} (translation of \emph{Les Tarahumaras}), trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 12–13.}


Let us consider three major cases from nineteenth-century German
literature, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche. First, Hölderlin’s
extraordinary composition, \emph{Hyperion}, as analyzed by Robert Rovini: the
importance of haecceities of the season type. These constitute, in two
different ways, the “frame of the narrative” (plan[e]) and the details
of what happens within that frame (the assemblages and
interassemblages).\footnote{Robert Rovini, introduction to Friedrich Hölderlin, \emph{Hypérion} (Paris: 10\Slash{}18, 1968).} He also notes how the succession of the seasons
and the superposition of the same season from different years dissolves
forms and persons and gives rise to movements, speeds, delays, and
affects, as if as the narrative progressed something were escaping from
an impalpable matter. And perhaps also the relation to a “realpolitik,”
to a war machine, to a musical machine of dissonance.


Kleist: everything with him, in his writing as in his life, becomes
speed and slowness. A succession of catatonic freezes and extreme
velocities, fainting spells and shooting arrows. Sleep on your steed,
then take off at a gallop. Jump from one assemblage to another, with the
aid of a faint, by crossing a void. Kleist multiplies “life plan(e)s,”
but his voids and failures, his leaps, earthquakes, and plagues are
always included on a single plane. The plane is not a principle of
organization but a means of transportation. No form develops, no subject
forms; affects are displaced, becomings catapult forward and combine
into blocks, like the becoming-woman of Achilles and the becoming-dog of
Penthesilea. Kleist offers a wonderful explanation of how forms and
persons are only appearances produced by the displacement of a center of
gravity on an abstract line, and by the conjunction of these lines on a
plane of immanence. He is fascinated by bears; they are impossible to
fool because their cruel little eyes see through appearances to the true
“soul of movement,” the \emph{Gemüt} or nonsubjective affect: the
becoming-bear of Kleist. Even death can only be conceptualized as the
intersection of elementary reactions of different speeds. \emph{A skull
exploding}, one of Kleist’s obsessions. All of Kleist’s work is
traversed by a war machine invoked against the State, by a musical
machine invoked against painting or the “picture.” It is odd how Goethe
and Hegel hated this new kind of writing. Because for them the plan(e)
must indissolubly be a harmonious development of Form and a regulated
formation of the Subject, personage, or character (the sentimental
education, the interior and substantial solidity of the character, the
harmony or analogy of the forms and continuity of development, the cult
of the State, etc.). Their conception of the Plane is totally opposed to
that of Kleist. The anti-Goetheism, anti-Hegelianism of Kleist, and
already of Hölderlin. Goethe gets to the crux of the matter when he
reproaches Kleist for simultaneously setting up a pure “stationary
process” that is like the fixed plane, introducing voids and jumps that
prevent any development of a central character, and mobilizing a
violence of affects that causes an extreme confusion of feelings.\footnote{We have referred to an unpublished study of Kleist by Mathieu Carriére.}


Nietzsche does the same thing by different means. There is no longer any
development of forms or formation of subjects. He criticizes Wagner for
retaining too much harmonic form, and too many pedagogical personages,
or “characters”: too much Hegel and Goethe. Now Bizet, on the other
hand, Nietzsche says \dots{} It seems to us that fragmentary writing is not so
much the issue in Nietzsche. It is instead speeds and slownesses: not
writing slowly or rapidly, but rather writing, and everything else
besides, as a production of speeds and slownesses between particles. No
form will resist that, no character or subject will survive it.
Zarathustra is only speeds and slownesses, and the eternal return, the
life of the eternal return, is the first great concrete freeing of
nonpulsed time. \emph{Ecce Homo} has only individuations by haecceities. It
is inevitable that the Plan(e), thus conceived, will always fail, but
that the failures will be an integral part of the plan(e): See the
multitude of plans for \emph{The Will to Power}. For a given aphorism, it is
always possible, even necessary, to introduce new relations of speed and
slowness between its elements that truly make it change assemblages,
jump from one assemblage to the next (the issue is therefore not the
fragment). As Cage says, it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it
fail.\footnote{“Where did the title of your second book, \emph{A Year From Monday}, come from?” “From a plan a group of friends and I made to meet each other again in Mexico ‘a year from next Monday.’ We were together on a Saturday. And we were never able to fulfil that plan. It’s a form of silence\dots{}. The very fact that our plan failed, the fact we were unable to meet does not mean that everything failed. The plan wasn’t a failure”; John Cage and Daniel Charles, \emph{For the Birds} (Boston: Marion Boyers, 1981), pp. 116–117.} Precisely because it is not a plan(e) of organization,
development, or formation, but of nonvoluntary transmutation. Or Boulez:
“Program the machine so that each time a tape is played on it, it
produces different time characteristics.” So the plan(e)—life plan(e),
writing plan(e), music plan(e)—must necessarily fail for it is
impossible to be faithful to it; but the failures are a part of the
plan(e) for the plan(e) expands or shrinks along with the dimensions of
that which it deploys in each instance (planitude of \emph{n} dimensions). A
strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and
contagion-proliferation-involution.


Why does the opposition between the two kinds of planes lead to a still
more abstract hypothesis? Because one continually passes from one to the
other, by unnoticeable degrees and without being aware of it, or one
becomes aware of it only afterward. Because one continually
reconstitutes one plane atop another, or extricates one from the other.
For example, all we need to do is to sink the floating plane of
immanence, bury it in the depths of Nature instead of allowing it to
play freely on the surface, for it to pass to the other side and assume
the role of a ground that can no longer be anything more than a
principle of analogy from the standpoint of organization, and a law of
continuity from the standpoint of development.\footnote{That is why we were able to take Goethe as an example of a transcendental plane. Goethe, however, passes for a Spinozist; his botanical and zoological studies uncover an immanent plane of composition, which allies him to Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (this resemblance has often been pointed out). Nonetheless, Goethe retains the twofold idea of a development of form and a formation-education of the Subject; for this reason, his plane of immanence has already crossed over to the other side, to the other pole.} The plane of
organization or development effectively covers what we have called
stratification: Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are “strata”
or relations between strata. The plane of consistency or immanence, on
the other hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature, by even the
most artificial of means. The plane of consistency is the body without
organs. Pure relations of speed and slowness between particles imply
movements of deterritorialization, just as pure affects imply an
enterprise of desubjectification. Moreover, the plane of consistency
does not preexist the movements of deterritorialization that unravel it,
the lines of flight that draw it and cause it to rise to the surface,
the becomings that compose it. The plane of organization is constantly
working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the
lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of
deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute
forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely, the plane of
consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of
organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms
by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of
assemblages or microassemblages. But once again, so much caution is
needed to prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of
abolition or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a
regression to the undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a
minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject
from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages?


In fact, the opposition we should set up between the two planes is that
between two abstract poles: for example, to the transcendent,
organizational plane of Western music based on sound forms and their
development, we oppose the immanent plane of consistency of Eastern
music, composed of speeds and slownesses, movements and rest. In keeping
with our concrete hypothesis, the whole becoming of Western music, all
musical becoming, implies a minimum of sound forms and even of melodic
and harmonic functions; speeds and slownesses are made to pass across
them, and it is precisely these speeds and slownesses that reduce the
forms and functions to the minimum. Beethoven produced the most
astonishing polyphonic richness with relatively scanty themes of three
or four notes. There is a material proliferation that goes hand in hand
with a dissolution of form (involution) but is at the same time
accompanied by a continuous development of form. Perhaps Schumann’s
genius is the most striking case of form being developed only for the
relations of speed and slowness one materially and emotionally assigns
it. Music has always submitted its forms and motifs to temporal
transformations, augmentations or diminutions, slowdowns or
accelerations, which do not occur solely according to laws of
organization or even of development. Expanding and contracting
microintervals are at play within coded intervals. Wagner and the
post-Wagnerians free variations of speed between sound particles to an
even greater extent. Ravel and Debussy retain just enough form to
shatter it, affect it, modify it through speeds and slownesses. \emph{Bolero}
is the classic example, nearly a caricature, of a machinic assemblage
that preserves a minimum of form in order to take it to the bursting
point. Boulez speaks of proliferations of little motifs, accumulations
of little notes that proceed kinematically and affectively, sweeping
away a simple form by adding indications of speed to it; this allows one
to produce extremely complex dynamic relations on the basis of
intrinsically simple formal relations. Even a rubato by Chopin cannot be
reproduced because it will have different time characteristics at each
playing.\footnote{On all of these points (proliferations-dissolutions, accumulations, indications of speed, the affective and dynamic role), see Pierre Boulez, \emph{Conversations with Célestin Deliège}, pp. 21–22, 68–71. In another text, Boulez stresses a little-known aspect of Wagner: not only are the leitmotifs freed from their subordination to the scenic characters, but the speeds of development are freed from the hold of a “formal code” or a tempo (“Le temps re-cherché,” in \emph{Das Rheingold Programmheft}, vol. I [Bayreuth, 1976], pp. 3–11). Boulez pays homage to Proust for being one of the first to understand this floating and transformable role of Wagnerian motifs.} It is as though an immense plane of consistency of
variable speed were forever sweeping up forms and functions, forms and
subjects, extracting from them particles and affects. A clock keeping a
whole assortment of times.


What is a girl, what is a group of girls? Proust at least has shown us
once and for all that their individuation, collective or singular,
proceeds not by subjectivity but by haecceity, pure haecceity. “Fugitive
beings.” They are pure relations of speeds and slownesses, and nothing
else. A girl is late on account of her speed: she did too many things,
crossed too many spaces in relation to the relative time of the person
waiting for her. Thus her apparent slowness is transformed into the
breakneck speed of our waiting. It must be said in this connection, and
for the whole of the \emph{Recherche du temps perdu}, that Swann does not at
all occupy the same position as the narrator. Swann is not a rough
sketch or precursor of the narrator, except secondarily and at rare
moments. They are not at all on the same \emph{plane}. Swann is always
thinking and feeling in terms of subjects, forms, resemblances between
subjects, and correspondences between forms. For him, one of Odette’s
lies is a form whose secret subjective content must be discovered,
provoking amateur detective activity. To him Vinteuil’s music is a form
that must evoke something else, fall back on something else, echo other
forms, whether paintings, faces, or landscapes. Although the narrator
may follow in Swann’s footsteps, he is nonetheless in a different
element, on a different plane. One of Albertine’s lies is nearly devoid
of content; it tends on the contrary to merge with the emission of a
particle issuing from the eyes of the beloved, a particle that stands
only for itself and travels too fast through the narrator’s auditory or
visual field. This molecular speed is unbearable because it indicates a
distance, a \emph{proximity} where Albertine would like to be, and already
is.\footnote{The themes of speed and slowness are most extensively developed in \emph{The Captive}: “To understand the emotions which they arouse, and which others even better-looking do not, we must realise that they are not immobile, but in motion, and add to their person a sign corresponding to that which in physics denotes speed \dots{} to such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings”; vol. 3 of \emph{Remembrance of Things Past}, trans. C. K. Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 86–87, 88.} So that the narrator’s pose is not principally that of the
investigating detective but (a very different figure) that of the
jailer. How can he become master of speed, how can he stand it nervously
(as a headache) and perceptually (as a flash)? How can he build a prison
for Albertine? Jealousy is different in Swann and the narrator, as is
the perception of music: Vinteuil gradually ceases to be apprehended in
terms of forms and comparable subjects, and assumes incredible speeds
and slownesses that combine on a plane of consistency of variation, the
plane of music and of the \emph{Recherche} (just as Wagnerian motifs abandon
all fixity of form and all assignation of personages). It is as though
Swann’s desperate efforts to reterritorialize the flow of things (to
reterritorialize Odette on a secret, painting on a face, music on the
Bois de Boulogne) were replaced by the sped-up movement of
deterritorialization, by a linear speedup of the abstract machine,
sweeping away faces and landscapes, and then love, jealousy, painting,
and music itself, according to increasingly stronger coefficients that
nourish the Work at risk of dissolving everything and dying. For the
narrator, despite partial victories, fails in his project; that project
was not at all to regain time or to force back memories, but to become
master of speeds to the rhythm of his asthma. It was to face
annihilation. But another outcome was possible, or was made possible by
Proust.

\section{Memories of a Molecule}


Becoming-animal is only one becoming among others. A kind of order or
apparent progression can be established for the segments of becoming in
which we find ourselves; becoming-woman, becoming-child;
becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral; becomings-molecular of all
kinds, becomings-particles. Fibers lead us from one to the other,
transform one into the other as they pass through doors and across
thresholds. Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim:
to unleash these becomings. Especially music; music is traversed by a
becoming-woman, becoming-child, and not only at the level of themes and
motifs: the little refrain, children’s games and dances, childhood
scenes. Instrumentation and orchestration are permeated by
becomings-animal, above all becomings-bird, but many others besides. The
lapping, wailing of molecular discordances have always been present,
even if instrumental evolution with other factors is now giving them
growing importance, as the value of a new threshold for a properly
musical content: the sound molecule, relations of speed and slowness
between particles. Becomings-animal plunge into becomings-molecular.
This raises all kinds of questions.


In a way, we must start at the end: all becomings are already molecular.
That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or
someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two
figures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a
subject nor the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one
has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one
fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes
the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are
**closest* to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This
is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire. This principle
of proximity or approximation is entirely particular and reintroduces no
analogy whatsoever. It indicates as rigorously as possible a \emph{zone of
proximity\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: The word translated as “proximity” is \emph{voisinage}, which Deleuze and Guattari draw from set theory. The corresponding mathematical term in English is “neighborhood.”]} or copresence} of a particle, the movement into which any
particle that enters the zone is drawn. Louis Wolfson embarks upon a
strange undertaking: a schizophrenic, he translates as quickly as
possible each phrase in his maternal language into foreign words with
similar sound and meaning; an anorexic, he rushes to the refrigerator,
tears open the packages and snatches their contents, stuffing himself as
quickly as possible.\footnote{Louis Wolfson, \emph{Le schizo et les langues}, preface by Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).} It would be false to believe that he needs to
borrow “disguised” words from foreign languages. Rather, he snatches
from his own language verbal particles that can no longer belong to the
form of that language, just as he snatches from food alimentary
particles that no longer act as formed nutritional substances; the two
kinds of particles enter into proximity. We could also put it this way:
Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement
and rest because they enter a particular zone of proximity. Or, it is to
emit particles that enter that zone because they take on those
relations. A haecceity is inseparable from the fog and mist that depend
on a molecular zone, a corpuscular space. Proximity is a notion, at once
topological and quantal, that marks a belonging to the same molecule,
independently of the subjects considered and the forms determined.


Schérer and Hocquenghem made this essential point in their
reconsideration of the problem of wolf-children. Of course, it is not a
question of a real production, as if the child “really” became an
animal; nor is it a question of a resemblance, as if the child imitated
animals that really raised it; nor is it a question of a symbolic
metaphor, as if the autistic child that was abandoned or lost merely
became the “analogue” of an animal. Schérer and Hocquenghem are right to
expose this false reasoning, which is based on a culturalism or moralism
upholding the irreducibility of the human order: Because the child has
not been transformed into an animal, it must only have a metaphorical
relation to it, induced by the child’s illness or rejection. For their
own part, they appeal to an objective zone of indetermination or
uncertainty, “something shared or indiscernible,” a proximity “that
makes it impossible to say where the boundary between the human and
animal lies,” not only in the case of autistic children, but for all
children; it is as though, independent of the evolution carrying them
toward adulthood, there were room in the child for other becomings,
“other contemporaneous possibilities” that are not regressions but
creative involutions bearing witness to “\emph{an inhumanity immediately
experienced in the body as such},” unnatural nuptials “outside the
programmed body.” There is a reality of becoming-animal, even though one
does not in reality become animal. It is useless, then, to raise the
objection that the dog-child only plays dog within the limits of his
formal constitution, and does nothing canine that another human being
could not have done if he or she had so desired. For what needs to be
explained is precisely the fact that all children, and even many adults,
do it to a greater or lesser degree, and in so doing bear witness to an
inhuman connivance with the animal, rather than an Oedipal symbolic
community.\footnote{René Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem, \emph{Co-ire, Recherche}, no. 22 (1976), pp. 76–82: see their critique of Bettelheim’s thesis, which considers the becomings-animal of the child merely an autistic symbolism that expresses the anxiety of the parents more than any reality of the child. See Bruno Bettelheim, \emph{The Empty Fortress} (New York: Free Press, 1967).} Neither should it be thought that children who graze, or
eat dirt or raw flesh, are merely getting the vitamins and minerals they
need. It is a question of composing a body with the animal, a body
without organs defined by zones of intensity or proximity. Where does
this objective indetermination or indiscernibility of which Schérer and
Hocquenghem speak come from?


An example: Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into
composition with \emph{something else} in such a way that the particles
emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of
the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which
they enter. Clearly, this something else can be quite varied, and be
more or less directly related to the animal in question: it can be the
animal’s natural food (dirt and worm), or its exterior relations with
other animals (you can become-dog with cats, or become-monkey with a
horse), or an apparatus or prosthesis to which a person subjects the
animal (muzzle and reindeer, etc.), or something that does not even have
a localizable relation to the animal in question. For this last case, we
have seen how Slepian bases his attempt to become-dog on the idea of
tying shoes to his hands using his mouth-muzzle. Philippe Gavi cites the
performances of Lolito, an eater of bottles, earthenware, porcelains,
iron, and even bicycles, who declares: “I consider myself half-animal,
half-man. More animal than man. I love animals, dogs especially, I feel
a bond with them. My teeth have adapted; in fact, when I don’t eat glass
or iron, my jaw aches like a young dog’s that craves to chew a
bone.”\footnote{Philippe Gavi, “Les philosophes du fantastique,” \emph{Libération}, March 31, 1977. For the preceding cases, what we must arrive at is an understanding of certain so-called neurotic behaviors as a function of becomings-animal, instead of relegating becomings-animal to a psychoanalytic interpretation of behaviors. We saw this in relation to masochism (and Lolito explains that the origin of his feats lies in certain masochistic experiences; a fine text by Christian Maurel conjugates a becoming-monkey and a becoming-horse in a masochistic pairing). Anorexia would also have to be understood from the point of view of becoming-animal.} If we interpret the word “like” as a metaphor, or propose a
structural analogy of relations (man-iron =
dog-bone), we understand nothing of becoming. The word “like” is one of
those words that change drastically in meaning and function when they
are used in connection with haecceities, when they are made into
expressions of becomings instead of signified states or signifying
relations. A dog may exercise its jaw on iron, but when it does it is
using its jaw as a molar organ. When Lolito eats iron, it is totally
different: he makes his jaw enter into composition with the iron in such
a way that he himself becomes the jaw of a molecular dog. The actor
Robert De Niro walks “like” a crab in a certain film sequence; but, he
says, it is not a question of his imitating a crab; it is a question of
making something that has to do with the crab enter into composition
with the image, with the speed of the image.\footnote{See \emph{Newsweek}, May 16, 1977, p. 57.} That is the essential
point for us: you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements,
you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the
animal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone
of proximity of the animal molecule. You become animal only molecularly.
You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done
with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a
molecular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed
molar species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other
words, proximities between molecules in composition, relations of
movement and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles. Of
course there are werewolves and vampires, we say this with all our
heart; but do not look for a resemblance or analogy to the animal, for
this is becoming-animal in action, the production of the molecular
animal (whereas the “real” animal is trapped in its molar form and
subjectivity). It is within us that the animal bares its teeth like
Hofmannsthal’s rat, or the flower opens its petals; but this is done by
corpuscular emission, by molecular proximity, and not by the imitation
of a subject or a proportionality of form. Albertine can always imitate
a flower, but it is when she is sleeping and enters into composition
with the particles of sleep that her beauty spot and the texture of her
skin enter a relation of rest and movement that place her in the zone of
a molecular vegetable: the becoming-plant of Albertine. And it is when
she is held prisoner that she emits the particles of a bird. And it is
when she flees, launches down a line of flight, that she becomes-horse,
even if it is the horse of death.


Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one
becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects,
objects, or form that we know from the outside and recognize from
experience, through science, or by habit. If this is true, then we must
say the same of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a
becoming-child, that do not resemble the woman or the child as clearly
distinct molar entities (although it is possible—only possible—for the
woman or child to occupy privileged positions in relation to these
becomings). What we term a molar entity is, for example, the woman as
defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a
subject. Becoming-woman is not imitating this entity or even
transforming oneself into it. We are not, however, overlooking the
importance of imitation, or moments of imitation, among certain
homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a real
transformation on the part of certain transvestites. All we are saying
is that these indissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be
understood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming
the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of
movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in
other words, that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular
woman. We do not mean to say that a creation of this kind is the
prerogative of the man, but on the contrary that the woman as a molar
entity \emph{has to become-woman} in order that the man also becomes- or can
become-woman. It is, of course, indispensable for women to conduct a
molar politics, with a view to winning back their own organism, their
own history, their own subjectivity: “we as women\dots{}” makes its appearance
as a subject of enunciation. But it is dangerous to confine oneself to
such a subject, which does not function without drying up a spring or
stopping a flow. The song of life is often intoned by the driest of
women, moved by \emph{ressentiment}, the will to power and cold mothering.
Just as a dessicated child makes a much better child, there being no
childhood flow emanating from it any longer. It is no more adequate to
say that each sex contains the other and must develop the opposite pole
in itself. Bisexuality is no better a concept than the separateness of
the sexes. It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary
machine as it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. It
is thus necessary to conceive of a molecular women’s politics that slips
into molar confrontations, and passes under or through them.


When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women’s writing,
she was appalled at the idea of writing “as a woman.” Rather, writing
should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of
crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating
men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles—but also
very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable. The rise of women in
English novel writing has spared no man: even those who pass for the
most virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller, in
their turn continually tap into and emit particles that enter the
proximity or zone of indiscernibility of women. In writing, they
become-women. The question is not, or not only, that of the organism,
history, and subject of enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in
the great dualism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the
body—the body they \emph{steal} from us in order to fabricate opposable
organisms. This body is stolen first from the girl: Stop behaving like
that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc. The
girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, or
prehistory, upon her. The boy’s turn comes next, but it is by using the
girl as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire,
that an opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too.
The girl is the first victim, but she must also serve as an example and
a trap. That is why, conversely, the reconstruction of the body as a
Body without Organs, the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a
becoming-woman, or the production of a molecular woman. Doubtless, the
girl becomes a woman in the molar or organic sense. But conversely,
becoming-woman or the molecular woman is the girl herself. The girl is
certainly not defined by virginity; she is defined by a relation of
movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a combination of atoms, an
emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases to roam upon a body
without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight. Thus girls
do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in
everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce \emph{n}
molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism
machines they cross right through. The only way to get outside the
dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo—that is what
Virginia Woolf lived with all her energies, in all of her work, never
ceasing to become. The girl is like the block of becoming that remains
contemporaneous to each opposable term, man, woman, child, adult. It is
not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becoming-woman that produces the
universal girl. Trost, a mysterious author, painted a portrait of the
girl, to whom he linked the fate of the revolution: her speed, her
freely machinic body, her intensities, her abstract line or line of
flight, her molecular production, her indifference to memory, her
nonfigurative character—“the nonfigurative of desire.”\footnote{See Trost, \emph{Visible et invisible} (Paris: Arcanes) and \emph{Librement mécanique} (Paris: Minotaure): “She was simultaneously, in her sensible reality and in the ideal prolongation of her lines, like the projection of a human group yet to come.”} Joan of Arc?
The special role of the girl in Russian terrorism: the girl with the
bomb, guardian of dynamite? It is certain that molecular politics
proceeds via the girl and the child. But it is also certain that girls
and children draw their strength neither from the molar status that
subdues them nor from the organism and subjectivity they receive; they
draw their strength from the becoming-molecular they cause to pass
between sexes and ages, the becoming-child of the adult as well as of
the child, the becoming-woman of the man as well as of the woman. The
girl and the child do not become; it is becoming itself that is a child
or a girl. The child does not become an adult any more than the girl
becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just as the
child is the becoming-young of every age. Knowing how to age does not
mean remaining young; it means extracting from one’s age the particles,
the speeds and slownesses, the flows that constitute the youth of \emph{that}
age. Knowing how to love does not mean remaining a man or a woman; it
means extracting from one’s sex the particles, the speeds and
slownesses, the flows, the \emph{n} sexes that constitute the girl of \emph{that}
sexuality. It is Age itself that is a becoming-child, just as Sexuality,
any sexuality, is a becoming-woman, in other words, a girl. This by way
of response to the stupid question, Why did Proust make Albert
Albertine?


Although all becomings are already molecular, including becoming-woman,
it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through
becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings. When the man
of war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides as
a girl, it is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide,
to camouflage oneself, is a warrior function, and the line of flight
attracts the enemy, traverses something and puts what it traverses to
flight; the warrior arises in the infinity of a line of flight. Although
the femininity of the man of war is not accidental, it should not be
thought of as structural, or regulated by a correspondence of relations.
It is difficult to see how the correspondence between the two relations
“man-war” and “woman-marriage” could entail an equivalence between the
warrior and the girl as a woman who refuses to marry.\footnote{See the examples of structural explanation proposed by Jean-Pierre Vernant, in \emph{Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne}, pp. 15–16.} It is just as
difficult to see how the general bisexuality, or even homosexuality, of
military societies could explain this phenomenon, which is no more
imitative than it is structural, representing instead an essential
**anomie* of the man of war. This phenomenon can only be understood in
terms of becoming. We have seen how the man of war, by virtue of his
**furor* and celerity, was swept up in irresistible becomings-animal.
These are becomings that have as their necessary condition the
becoming-woman of the warrior, or his alliance with the girl, his
contagion with her. The man of war is inseparable from the Amazons. The
union of the girl and the man of war does not produce animals, but
simultaneously produces the becoming-woman of the latter and the
becoming-animal of the former, in a single “block” in which the warrior
in turn becomes animal by contagion with the girl at the same time as
the girl becomes warrior by contagion with the animal. Everything ties
together in an asymmetrical block of becoming, an instantaneous zigzag.
It is in the vestiges of a double war machine—that of the Greeks, soon
to be supplanted by the State, and that of the Amazons, soon to be
dissolved—that Achilles and Penthesilea, the last man of war and the
last queen of the girls, choose one another, Achilles in a
becoming-woman, Penthesilea in a becoming-dog.


The rites of transvestism or female impersonation in primitive societies
in which a man becomes a woman are not explainable by a social
organization that places the given relations in correspondence, or by a
psychic organization that makes the woman desire to become a man just as
the man desires to become a woman.\footnote{On transvestism in primitive societies, see Bruno Bettelheim (who offers an identificatory psychological interpretation), \emph{Symbolic Wounds} (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1954), and especially Gregory Bateson (who proposes an original structural interpretation), \emph{Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of Views}, 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1958).} Social structure and psychic
identification leave too many special factors unaccounted for: the
linkage, unleashing, and communication of the becomings triggered by the
transvestite; the power (\emph{puissance}) of the resultant becoming-animal;
and above all the participation of these becomings in a specific war
machine. The same applies for sexuality: it is badly explained by the
binary organization of the sexes, and just as badly by a bisexual
organization within each sex. Sexuality brings into play too great a
diversity of conjugated becomings; these are like \emph{n} sexes, an entire
war machine through which love passes. This is not a return to those
appalling metaphors of love and war, seduction and conquest, the battle
of the sexes and the domestic squabble, or even the Strindberg-war: it
is only after love is done with and sexuality has dried up that things
appear this way. What counts is that love itself is a war machine
endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers. Sexuality is the
production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable
becomings. \emph{Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man
and the becoming-animal of the human}: an emission of particles. There
is no need for bestialism in this, although it may arise, and many
psychiatric anecdotes document it in ways that are interesting, if
oversimplified and consequently off the track, too beastly. It is not a
question of “playing” the dog, like an elderly gentleman on a postcard;
it is not so much a question of making love with animals.
Becomings-animal are basically of another power, since their reality
resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one corresponds but in
themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become—a
**proximity, an indiscernibility* that extracts a shared element from the
animal far more effectively than any domestication, utilization, or
imitation could: “the Beast.”


If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with the
becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all
rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The
imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula. For
example, Matheson’s \emph{Shrinking Man} passes through the kingdoms of
nature, slips between molecules, to become an unfindable particle in
infinite meditation on the infinite. Paul Morand’s \emph{Monsieur Zéro} flees
the larger countries, crosses the smallest ones, descends the scale of
States, establishes an anonymous society in Lichtenstein of which he is
the only member, and dies imperceptible, forming the particle 0 with his
fingers: “I am a man who flees by swimming under water, and at whom all
the world’s rifles fire\dots{}. I must no longer offer a target.” But what
does becoming-imperceptible signify, coming at the end of all the
molecular becomings that begin with becoming-woman?
Becoming-imperceptible means many things. What is the relation between
the (anorganic) imperceptible, the (asignifying) indiscernible, and the
(asubjective) impersonal?


A first response would be: to be like everybody else. That is what
Kierkegaard relates in his story about the “knight of the faith,” the
man of becoming: to look at him, one would notice nothing, a bourgeois,
nothing but a bourgeois. That is how Fitzgerald lived: after a real
rupture, one succeeds \dots{} in being just like everybody else. To go
unnoticed is by no means easy. To be a stranger, even to one’s doorman
or neighbors. If it is so difficult to be “like” everybody else, it is
because it is an affair of becoming. Not everybody becomes everybody
[and everything: \emph{tout le monde}—Trans.], makes a becoming of
everybody\Slash{}everything. This requires much asceticism, much sobriety, much
creative involution: an English elegance, an English fabric, blend in
with the walls, eliminate the too-perceived, the
too-much-to-be-perceived. “Eliminate all that is waste, death, and
superfluity,” complaint and grievance, unsatisfied desire, defense or
pleading, everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves, in
our molarity. For everybody\Slash{}everything is the molar aggregate, but
**becoming everybody\Slash{}everything* is another affair, one that brings into
play the cosmos with its molecular components. Becoming
everybody\Slash{}everything (\emph{tout le monde}) is to world (\emph{faire monde}), to
make a world (\emph{faire un monde}). By process of elimination, one is no
longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that
is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other
lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first
one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the
clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble
nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus
disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand,
and plants, becoming imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet:
not imitative or structural, but cosmic. François Cheng shows that poets
do not pursue resemblance, any more than they calculate “geometric
proportions.” They retain, extract only the essential lines and
movements of nature; they proceed only by continued or superposed
“traits,” or strokes.\footnote{François Cheng, \emph{Chinese Poetic Writing}, p. 13.} It is in this sense that
becoming-everybody\Slash{}everything, making the world a becoming, is to world,
to make a world or worlds, in other words, to find one’s proximities and
zones of indiscernibility. The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and each
world as an assemblage effectuating it. If one reduces oneself to one or
several abstract lines that will prolong itself in and conjugate with
others, producing immediately, directly \emph{a} world in which it is \emph{the}
world that becomes, then one becomes-everybody\Slash{}everything. Kerouac’s
dream, and already Virginia Woolf s, was for the writing to be like the
line of a Chinese poem-drawing. She says that it is necessary to
“saturate every atom,” and to do that it is necessary to eliminate, to
eliminate all that is resemblance and analogy, but also “to put
everything into it”: eliminate everything that exceeds the moment, but
put in everything that it includes—and the moment is not the
instantaneous, it is the haecceity into which one slips and that slips
into other haecceities by transparency.\footnote{\emph{The Diary of Virginia Woolf}, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), vol. 3, p. 209: “The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom.” On all of these points, we make use of an unpublished study on Virginia Woolf by Fanny Zavin.} To be present at the dawn
of the world. Such is the link between imperceptibility,
indiscernibility, and impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself
to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of
indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity
and impersonality of the creator. One is then like grass: one has made
the world, everybody\Slash{}everything, into a becoming, because one has made a
necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself
everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in
the midst of things. One has combined “everything” (\emph{le “tout”}): the
indefinite article, the infinitive-becoming, and the proper name to
which one is reduced. Saturate, eliminate, put everything in.


Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature
imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement of
a moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings, in
other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are
below and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of
perception are relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping
what eludes another: the eagle’s eye \dots{} But the adequate threshold can in
turn operate only as a function of a perceptible form and a perceived,
discerned subject. So that movement in itself \emph{continues} to occur
elsewhere: if we serialize perception, the movement always takes place
above the maximum threshold and below the minimum threshold, in
expanding or contracting intervals (microintervals). Like huge Japanese
wrestlers whose advance is too slow and whose holds are too fast to see,
so that what embraces are less the wrestlers than the infinite slowness
of the wait (what is going to happen?) and the infinite speed of the
result (what happened?). What we must do is reach the photographic or
cinematic threshold; but in relation to the photograph, movement and
affect once again took refuge above and below. When Kierkegaard adopts
the marvelous motto, “I look only at the movements,”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Søren Kierkegaard, \emph{Fear and Trembling}, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 104.]} he is acting
astonishingly like a precursor of the cinema, multiplying versions of a
love scenario (between Agnes and the merman) according to variable
speeds and slownesses. He has all the more reason to say that there is
no movement that is not infinite; that the movement of the infinite can
occur only by means of affect, passion, love, in a becoming that is the
girl, but without reference to any kind of “mediation”; and that this
movement as such eludes any mediating perception because it is already
effectuated at every moment, and the dancer or lover finds him- or
herself already “awake and walking” the second he or she falls down, and
even the instant he or she leaps.\footnote{Ibid., p. 49. \emph{Fear and Trembling} seems to us to be Kierkegaard’s greatest book because of the way it formulates the problem of movement and speed, not only in its content, but also in its style and composition.} Movement, like the girl as a
fugitive being, cannot be perceived.


However, we are obliged to make an immediate correction: movement also
“must” be perceived, it cannot but be perceived, the imperceptible is
also the \emph{percipiendum}. There is no contradiction in this. If movement
is imperceptible by nature, it is so always in relation to a given
threshold of perception, which is by nature relative and thus plays the
role of a mediation on the plane that effects the distribution of
thresholds and percepts and makes forms perceivable to perceiving
subjects. It is the plane of organization and development, the plane of
transcendence, that renders perceptible without itself being perceived,
without being capable of being perceived. But on the \emph{other} plane, the
plane of immanence or consistency, the principle of composition itself
must be perceived, cannot but be perceived at the same time as that
which it composes or renders. In this case, movement is no longer tied
to the mediation of a relative threshold that it eludes ad infinitum; it
has reached, regardless of its speed or slowness, an absolute but
differentiated threshold that is one with the construction of this or
that region of the continued plane. It could also be said that movement
ceases to be the procedure of an always relative deterritorialization,
becoming the process of absolute deterritorialization. The difference
between the two planes accounts for the fact that what cannot be
perceived on one cannot but be perceived on the other. It is in jumping
from one plane to the other, or from the relative thresholds to the
absolute threshold that coexists with them, that the imperceptible
becomes necessarily perceived. Kierkegaard shows that the plane of the
infinite, which he calls the plane of faith, must become a pure plane of
immanence that continually and immediately imparts, reimparts, and
regathers the finite: unlike the man of infinite resignation, the knight
of the faith or man of becoming will get the girl, he will have all of
the finite and perceive the imperceptible, as “heir apparent to the
finite.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: \emph{Fear and Trembling}, p. 61.]} Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a
subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit
of that relation, in the period associated with the subject and object.
Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of
things, throughout its own proximity, as the presence of one haecceity
in another, the prehension of one by the other or the passage from one
to the other: Look only at the movements.


It is odd that the word “faith” should be used to designate a plane that
works by immanence. But if the knight is the man of becoming, then there
are all kinds of knights. Are there not even knights of narcotics, in
the sense that faith is a drug (in a way very different from the sense
in which religion is an opiate)? These knights claim that drugs, under
necessary conditions of caution and experimentation, are inseparable
from the deployment of a plane. And on this plane not only are
becomings-woman, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular,
becomings-imperceptible conjugated, but the imperceptible itself becomes
necessarily perceived at the same time as perception becomes necessarily
molecular: arrive at holes, microintervals between matters, colors and
sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and
intersection.\footnote{Carlos Castaneda, \emph{Journey to Ixtlan} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 297ff.} \emph{Change perception}; the problem has been formulated
correctly because it presents “drugs” as a pregnant whole free of
secondary distinctions (hallucinatory or nonhallucinatory, hard or soft,
etc.). All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of
speed. What allows us to describe an overall Drug assemblage in spite of
the differences between drugs is a line of perceptive causality that
makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived; (2) perception is
molecular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and the perceived.
The Americans of the beat generation had already embarked on this path,
and spoke of a molecular revolution specific to drugs. Then came
Castaneda’s broad synthesis. Leslie Fiedler set forth the poles of the
American Dream: cornered between two nightmares, the genocide of the
Indians and the slavery of the blacks, Americans constructed a
psychically repressed image of the black as the force of affect, of the
multiplication of affects, but a socially repressed image of the Indian
as subtlety of perception, perception made increasingly keen and more
finely divided, infinitely slowed or accelerated.\footnote{Leslie Fiedler, \emph{The Return of the Vanishing American} (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). Fiedler explains the secret alliance of the white American with the black or the Indian by a desire to escape the molar form and ascendancy of the American woman.} In Europe, Henri
Michaux tended to be more willing to free himself of rites and
civilizations, establishing admirable and minute protocols of
experience, doing away with the question of causality with respect to
drugs, delimiting drugs as well as possible, separating them from
delirium and hallucination. But at this point everything reconnects:
again, the problem is well formulated if we say that drugs eliminate
forms and persons, if we bring into play the mad speeds of drugs and the
extraordinary posthigh slownesses, if we clasp one to the other like
wrestlers, if we confer upon perception the molecular power to grasp
microperceptions, microoperations, and upon the perceived the force to
emit accelerated or decelerated particles in a floating time that is no
longer our time, and to emit haecceities that are no longer of this
world: deterritorialization, “I was disoriented\dots{}” (a perception of
things, thoughts, desires in which desire, thought, and the thing have
invaded all of perception: the imperceptible finally perceived). Nothing
left but the world of speeds and slownesses without form, without
subject, without a face. Nothing left but the zigzag of a line, like
“the lash of the whip of an enraged cart driver” shredding faces and
landscapes.\footnote{Henri Michaux, \emph{Miserable Miracle: Mescaline}, trans. Louise Varèse (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963), p. 87: “The horror of it was that I was nothing but a line. In normal life one is a sphere, a sphere that surveys panoramas\dots{}. Now only a line \dots{} the accelerated line I had become.” See Michaux’s line drawings. In the first eighty pages of \emph{The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones}, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), Michaux further develops the analysis of speeds, molecular perceptions, and “microphenomena” or “microoperations.”} A whole rhizomatic labor of perception, the moment when
desire and perception meld.


This problem of specific causality is an important one. Invoking
causalities that are too general or are extrinsic (psychological or
sociological) is as good as saying nothing. There is a discourse on
drugs current today that does no more than dredge up generalities on
pleasure and misfortune, on difficulties in communication, on causes
that always come from somewhere else. The more incapable people are of
grasping a specific causality in extension, the more they pretend to
understand the phenomenon in question. There is no doubt that an
assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure. It does have,
however, and to the highest degree, an abstract line of creative or
specific causality, its \emph{line of flight or of deterritorialization};
this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities
of another nature, but is in no way explained by them. It is our belief
that the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire
directly invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the
same time as the imperceptible is perceived. Drugs then appear as the
agent of this becoming. This is where pharmacoanalysis would come in,
which must be both compared and contrasted to psychoanalysis. For
psychoanalysis must be taken simultaneously as a model, a contrasting
approach, and a betrayal. Psychoanalysis can be taken as a model of
reference because it was able, with respect to essentially affective
phenomena, to construct the schema of a specific causality divorced from
ordinary social or psychological generalities. But this schema still
relies on a plane of organization that can never be apprehended in
itself, that is always concluded from something else, that is always
inferred, concealed from the system of perception: it is called the
Unconscious. Thus the plane of the Unconscious remains a plane of
transcendence guaranteeing, justifying, the existence of psychoanalysis
and the necessity of its interpretations. This plane of the Unconscious
stands in molar opposition to the perception-consciousness system, and
because desire must be \emph{translated} onto this plane, it is itself linked
to gross molarities, like the submerged part of an iceberg (the Oedipal
structure, or the rock of castration). The imperceptible thus remains
all the more imperceptible because it is opposed to the perceived in a
dualism machine. Everything is different on the plane of consistency or
immanence, which is necessarily perceived in its own right in the course
of its construction: experimentation replaces interpretation, now
molecular, nonfigurative, and nonsymbolic, the unconscious as such is
given in microperceptions; desire directly invests the field of
perception, where the imperceptible appears as the perceived object of
desire itself, “the nonfigurative of desire.” The unconscious no longer
designates the hidden principle of the transcendent plane of
organization, but the process of the immanent plane of consistency as it
appears on itself in the course of its construction. For the unconscious
must be constructed, not rediscovered. There is no longer a
conscious-unconscious dualism machine, because the unconscious is, or
rather is produced, there where consciousness goes, carried by the
plane.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: A rewriting of Freud’s famous phrase, “Where id was, there ego shall be” (\emph{New Introductory Lectures, Standard Edition}, vol. 22, p. 80), and Lacan’s earlier rewriting of it in “The Freudian Thing,” \emph{Ecrits}, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 128–129, 136.]} Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that
psychoanalysis has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine
episode marked a turning point that forced Freud to renounce a direct
approach to the unconscious).


But if it is true that drugs are linked to this immanent, molecular
perceptive causality, we are still faced with the question of whether
they actually succeed in drawing the plane necessary for their action.
The causal line, or the line of flight, of drugs is constantly being
segmentarized under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit
and the dose, the dealer. Even in its supple form, it can mobilize
gradients and thresholds of perception toward becomings-animal,
becomings-molecular, but even this is done in the context of a
relativity of thresholds that restrict themselves to imitating a plane
of consistency rather than drawing it on an absolute threshold. What
good does it do to perceive as fast as a quick-flying bird if speed and
movement continue to escape somewhere else? The deterritorializations
remain relative, compensated for by the most abject
reterritorializations, so that the imperceptible and perception
continually pursue or run after each other without ever truly coupling.
Instead of holes in the world allowing the world lines themselves to run
off, the lines of flight coil and start to swirl in black holes; to each
addict a hole, group or individual, like a snail. Down, instead of high.
The molecular microperceptions are overlaid in advance, depending on the
drug, by hallucinations, delusions, false perceptions, phantasies, or
paranoid outbursts; they restore forms and subjects every instant, like
so many phantoms or doubles continually blocking construction of the
plane. Moreover, as we saw in our enumeration of the dangers, not only
is the plane of consistency in danger of being betrayed or thrown
offtrack through the influence of other causalities that intervene in an
assemblage of this kind, but the plane itself engenders dangers of its
own, by which it is dismantled at the same time as it is constructed. We
are no longer, it itself is no longer \emph{master of speeds}. Instead of
making a body without organs sufficiently rich or full for the passage
of intensities, drug addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or a
cancerous one: the causal line, creative line, or line of flight
immediately turns into a line of death and abolition. The abominable
vitrification of the veins, or the purulence of the nose—the glassy body
of the addict. Black holes and lines of death, Artaud’s and Michaux’s
warnings converge (they are more technical, more consistent than the
informational, psychoanalytic, or sociopsychological discourse of
treatment and assistance centers). Artaud: You will not avoid
hallucinations, erroneous perceptions, shameless phantasies, or bad
feelings, like so many black holes on the plane of consistency, because
your conscious will also go in that booby-trapped direction.\footnote{Artaud, \emph{The Peyote Dance}, pp. 12–14.}
Michaux: You will no longer be master of your speeds, you will get stuck
in a mad race between the imperceptible and perception, a race all the
more circular now that everything is relative.\footnote{Michaux, \emph{Miserable Miracle} (“Remaining Master of One’s Speeds,” pp. 87–88).} You will be full of
yourself, you will lose control, you will be on a plane of consistency,
in a body without organs, but at a place where you will always botch
them, empty them, undo what you do, motionless rags. These words are so
much simpler than “erroneous perceptions” (Artaud) or “bad feelings”
(Michaux), but say the most technical of things: that the immanent
molecular and perceptive causality of desire fails in the
drug-assemblage. Drug addicts continually fall back into what they
wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal,
a territorialization all the more artificial for being based on chemical
substances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications. Drug
addicts may be considered as precursors or experimenters who tirelessly
blaze new paths of life, but their cautiousness lacks the foundation for
caution. So they either join the legion of false heroes who follow the
conformist path of a little death and a long fatigue. Or, what is worse,
all they will have done is make an attempt only nonusers or former users
can resume and benefit from, secondarily rectifying the always aborted
plane of drugs, discovering through drugs what drugs lack for the
construction of a plane of consistency. Is the mistake drug users make
always to start over again from ground zero, either going on the drug
again or quitting, when what they should do is make it a stopover, to
start from the “middle,” bifurcate from the middle? To succeed in
getting drunk, but on pure water (Henry Miller). To succeed in getting
high, but by abstention, “to take and abstain, especially abstain,” I am
a drinker of water (Michaux). To reach the point where “to get high or
not to get high” is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs
have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time
perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in
the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where
means other than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee
immanence; rather, the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them. Is
it cowardice or exploitation to wait until others have taken the risks?
No, it is joining an undertaking in the middle, while changing the
means. It is necessary to choose the right molecule, the water,
hydrogen, or helium molecule. This has nothing to do with models, all
models are molar: it is necessary to determine the molecules and
particles in relation to which “proximities” (indiscernibilities,
becomings) are engendered and defined. The vital assemblage, the
life-assemblage, is \emph{theoretically or logically} possible with all kinds
of molecules, silicon, for example. But it so happens that this
assemblage is not \emph{machinically} possible with silicon: the abstract
machine does not let it pass because it does not distribute zones of
proximity that construct the plane of consistency.\footnote{On the possibilities of silicon, and its relation to carbon from the point of view of organic chemistry, see the article, “Silicium,” in the \emph{Encyclopedia Universalis}.} We shall see
that machinic reasons are entirely different from logical reasons or
possibilities. One does not conform to a model, one straddles the right
horse. Drug users have not chosen the right molecule or the right horse.
Drugs are too unwieldy to grasp the imperceptible and
becomings-imperceptible; drug users believed that drugs would grant them
the plane, when in fact the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining
master of speeds and proximities.

\section{Memories of the Secret}


The secret has a privileged, but quite variable, relation to perception
and the imperceptible. The secret relates first of all to certain
contents. The content is \emph{too big} for its form \dots{} or else the contents
themselves have a form, but that form is covered, doubled, or replaced
by a simple container, envelope, or box whose role it is to suppress
formal relations. These are contents it has been judged fitting to
isolate or disguise for various reasons. Drawing up a list of these
reasons (shame, treasure, divinity, etc.) has limited value as long as
the secret is opposed to its discovery as in a binary machine having
only two terms, the secret and disclosure, the secret and desecration.
For on the one hand, the secret as content is superseded by a perception
of the secret, which is no less secret than the secret. It matters
little what the goal is, and whether the aim of the perception is a
denunciation, final divulging, or disclosure. From an anecdotal
standpoint, the perception of the secret is the opposite of the secret,
but from the standpoint of the concept, it is a part of it. What counts
is that the perception of the secret must necessarily be secret itself:
the spy, the voyeur, the blackmailer, the author of anonymous letters
are no less secretive than what they are in a position to disclose,
regardless of their ulterior motives. There is always a woman, a child,
a bird to secretly perceive the secret. There is always a perception
finer than yours, a perception of your imperceptible, of what is in your
box. We can even envision a profession of secrecy for those who are in a
position to perceive the secret. The protector of the secret is not
necessarily in on it, but is also tied to a perception, since he or she
must perceive and detect those who wish to discover the secret
(counterespionage). There is thus a first direction, in which the secret
moves toward an equally secretive perception, a perception that seeks to
be imperceptible itself. A wide variety of very different figures may
revolve around this first point. And then there is a second point, just
as inseparable from the secret as its content: the way in which it
imposes itself and spreads. Once again, whatever the finalities or
results, the secret has a way of spreading that is in turn shrouded in
secrecy. The secret as secretion. The secret must sneak, insert, or
introduce itself into the arena of public forms; it must pressure them
and prod known subjects into action (we are referring to influence of
the “lobby” type, even if the lobby is not in itself a secret society).


In short, the secret, defined as a content that has hidden its form in
favor of a simple container, is inseparable from two movements that can
accidentally interrupt its course or betray it, but are nonetheless an
essential part of it: something must ooze from the box, something will
be perceived through the box or in the half-opened box. The secret was
invented by society; it is a sociological or social notion. Every secret
is a collective assemblage. The secret is not at all an immobilized or
static notion. Only becomings are secrets; the secret has a becoming.
The secret has its origin in the war machine; it is the war machine and
its becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings-animal that bring the
secret.\footnote{Luc de Heusch shows that it is the man of war who brings the secret: he thinks, eats, loves, judges, arrives in secret, while the man of the State proceeds publicly. See \emph{Le roi ivre ou l’origine de l’Etat} (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). The idea of the State secret is a late one and assumes that the war machine has been appropriated by the State apparatus.} A secret society always acts in society as a war machine.
Sociologists who have studied secret societies have determined many of
their laws: protection, equalization and hierarchy, silence, ritual,
deindividuation, centralization, autonomy, compartmentalization,
etc.\footnote{In particular, Georg Simmel. See \emph{The Sociology of Georg Simmel}, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1950), chapter 3.} But perhaps they have not given enough weight to the principal
laws governing the movement of content: (1) every secret society has a
still more secret hindsociety, which either perceives the secret,
protects it, or metes out the punishment for its disclosure (it is not
at all begging the question to define the secret society by the presence
of a secret hindsociety: a society is secret when it exhibits this
doubling, has this special section); (2) every secret society has its
own mode of action, which is in turn secret; the secret society may act
by influence, creeping, insinuation, oozing, pressure, or invisible
rays; “passwords” and secret languages (there is no contradiction here;
the secret society cannot live without the universal project of
permeating all of society, of creeping into all of the forms of society,
disrupting its hierarchy and segmentation; the secret hierarchy
conjugates with a conspiracy of equals, it commands its members to swim
in society as fish in water, but conversely society must be like water
around fish; it needs the complicity of the entire surrounding society).
This is evident in cases as diverse as the mob groups of the United
States and the animal-men of Africa: on the one hand, there is the mode
of influence of the secret society and its leaders on the political or
public figures of its surroundings; and on the other hand, there is the
secret society’s mode of doubling itself with a hindsociety, which may
constitute a special section of killers or guards.\footnote{Paul Ernest Joset clearly notes these two aspects of the secret initiatory society, the Mambela of the Congo: on the one hand, its relation of influence over the traditional political leaders, which gets to the point of a transfer of social powers; and on the other hand, its de facto relation with the Anioto, as a secret hindsociety of crime or leopard-men (even if the Anioto are of another origin than the Mambela). See \emph{Les sociétés secrètes des hommesléopards en Afrique noire}, chapter 5.} Influence and
doubling, secretion and concretion, every secret operates between two
“discreets” [\emph{discrets}: also “discrete (terms)”—Trans.] that can,
moreover, link or meld in certain cases. The child’s secret combines
these elements to marvelous effect: the secret as a content in a box,
the secret influence and propagation of the secret, the secret
perception of the secret (the child’s secret is not composed of
miniaturized adult secrets but is necessarily accompanied by a secret
perception of the adult secret). A child discovers a secret\dots{}


But the becoming of the secret compels it not to content itself with
concealing its form in a simple container, or with swapping it for a
container. The secret, as secret, must now acquire its own form. The
secret is elevated from a finite content to the infinite form of
secrecy. This is the point at which the secret attains absolute
imperceptibility, instead of being linked to a whole interplay of
relative perceptions and reactions. We go from a content that is well
defined, localized, and belongs to the past, to the a priori general
form of a nonlocalizable \emph{something} that has happened. We go from the
secret defined as a hysterical childhood content to secrecy defined as
an eminently virile paranoid form. And this form displays the same two
concomitants of the secret, the secret perception and the mode of action
by secret influence; but these concomitants have become “traits” of a
form they ceaselessly reconstitute, reform, recharge. On the one hand,
paranoiacs denounce the international plot of those who steal their
secrets, their most intimate thoughts; or they declare that they have
the gift of perceiving the secrets of others before they have formed
(someone with paranoid jealousy does not apprehend the other in the act
of escaping; they divine or foresee the slightest intention of it). On
the other hand, paranoiacs act by means of, or else suffer from, rays
they emit or receive (Raymond Roussel and Schreber). Influence by rays,
and doubling by flight or echo, are what now give the secret its
infinite form, in which perceptions as well as actions pass into
imperceptibility. Paranoid judgment is like an anticipation of
perception replacing empirical research into boxes and their contents:
**guilty* a priori, and in any event! (for example, the evolution of the
narrator of the \emph{Recherche} in relation to Albertine). We can say, in
summary fashion, that psychoanalysis has gone from a hysterical to an
increasingly paranoid conception of the secret.\footnote{On the psychoanalytic conceptions of the secret, see \emph{Du secret, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse}, no. 14 (Fall 1976); and for the evolution of Freud on this subject, the article by Claude Girard, “Le secret aux origines,” pp. 55–83.} Interminable
analysis: the Unconscious has been assigned the increasingly difficult
task of itself being the infinite form of secrecy, instead of a simple
box containing secrets. You will tell all, but in saying everything you
will say nothing because all the “art” of psychoanalysis is required in
order to measure your contents against the pure form. At this point,
however, after the secret has been raised to the level of a form in this
way, an inevitable adventure befalls it. When the question “What
happened?” attains this infinite virile form, the answer is necessarily
that nothing happened, and both form and content are destroyed. The news
travels fast that the secret of men is nothing, in truth nothing at all.
Oedipus, the phallus, castration, “the splinter in the flesh”—that was
the secret? It is enough to make women, children, lunatics, and
molecules laugh.


The more the secret is made into a structuring, organizing form, the
thinner and more ubiquitous it becomes, the more its content becomes
molecular, at the same time as its form dissolves. It really wasn’t
much, as Jocasta says. The secret does not as a result disappear, but it
does take on a more feminine status. What was behind President
Schreber’s paranoid secret all along, if not a becoming-feminine, a
becoming-woman? For women do not handle the secret in at all the same
way as men (except when they reconstitute an inverted image of virile
secrecy, a kind of secrecy of the gyneceum). Men alternately fault them
for their indiscretion, their gossiping, and for their solidarity, their
betrayal. Yet it is curious how a woman can be secretive while at the
same time hiding nothing, by virtue of transparency, innocence, and
speed. The complex assemblage of secrecy in courtly love is properly
feminine and operates in the most complete transparency. Celerity
against gravity. The celerity of a war machine against the gravity of a
State apparatus. Men adopt a grave attitude, knights of the secret: “You
see what burden I bear: my seriousness, my discretion.” But they end up
telling everything—and it turns out to be nothing. There are women, on
the other hand, who tell everything, sometimes in appalling technical
detail, but one knows no more at the end than at the beginning; they
have hidden everything by celerity, by limpidity. They have no secret
because they have become a secret themselves. Are they more politic than
we? Iphigenia. \emph{Innocent} a priori. That is the girl’s defense against
the judgment preferred by men: “guilty a priori” \dots{} This is where the
secret reaches its ultimate state: its content is molecularized, it has
become molecular, at the same time as its form has been dismantled,
becoming a pure moving line—in the sense in which it can be said a given
line is the “secret” of a painter, or a given rhythmic cell, a given
sound molecule (which does not constitute a theme or form) the “secret”
of a musician.


If ever there was a writer who dealt with the secret, it was Henry
James. In this respect, he went through an entire evolution, like a
perfecting of his art. For he began by looking for the secret in
contents, even insignificant, half-opened ones, contents briefly
glimpsed. Then he raised the possibility of there being an infinite form
of secrecy that no longer even requires a content and that has conquered
the imperceptible. But he raises this possibility only in order to ask
the question, Is the secret in the content or in the form? And the
answer is already apparent: \emph{neither}.\footnote{Bernard Pingaud shows, on the basis of the exemplary text of Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet” [\emph{The Novels and Tales of Henry James} (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907–1917), vol. 15—Trans.], how the secret jumps from content to form, and escapes both: \emph{Du secret}, pp. 247–249. This text has been frequently commented upon from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis; above all, J.-B. Pontalis, \emph{Après Freud} (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). But psychoanalysis remains prisoner to a necessarily disguised content and a necessarily symbolic form (structure, absent cause\dots{}), at a level that defines both the unconscious and language. That is why, in its aesthetic or literary applications, it misses the secret \emph{in} an author, as well as the secret \emph{of} an author. The same goes for the secret of Oedipus: they concern themselves with the first two kinds of secret but not with the second, which is nevertheless the most important.} James is one of those
writers who is swept up in an irresistible becoming-woman. He never
stopped pursuing his goal, inventing the necessary technical means.
Molecularize the content of the secret and linearize its form. James
explored it all, from the becoming-child of the secret (there is always
a child who discovers secrets: \emph{What Maisie Knew}) to the becoming-woman
of the secret (secrecy by a transparency that is no longer anything more
than a pure line that scarcely leaves any traces of its own passage; the
admirable \emph{Daisy Miller}). James is not as close to Proust as people
say; it is he who raises the cry, “Innocent a priori!” (all Daisy asked
for was a little respect, she would have given her love for that\dots{}) in
opposition to the “Guilty a priori” that condemns Albertine. What counts
in the secret is less its three states (child’s content, virile infinite
form, pure feminine line) than the becomings attached to them, the
becoming-child of the secret, its becoming-feminine, its
becoming-molecular—which occur precisely at the point where the secret
has lost both its content and its form, where the imperceptible, the
clandestine with nothing left to hide, has finally been perceived. From
the gray eminence to the gray immanence. \emph{Oedipus passes through all
three secrets}: the secret of the sphinx whose box he penetrates; the
secret that weighs upon him as the infinite form of his own guilt; and
finally, the secret at Colonus that makes him inaccessible and melds
with the pure line of his flight and exile, he who has nothing left to
hide, or, like an old No actor, has only a girl’s mask with which to
cover his lack of a face. Some people can talk, hide nothing, not lie:
they are secret by transparency, as impenetrable as water, in truth
incomprehensible. Whereas the others have a secret that is always
breached, even though they surround it with a thick wall or elevate it
to an infinite form.

\section{Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks}


Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First
because man is majoritarian par excellence, whereas becomings are
minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say
majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the
determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger
quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian:
white-man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination, not
the reverse. It is not a question of knowing whether there are more
mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how “man” constituted a
standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily
(analytically) form a majority. The majority in a government presupposes
the right to vote, and not only is established among those who possess
that right but is exercised over those who do not, however great their
numbers; similarly, the majority in the universe assumes as pregiven the
right and power of man.\footnote{On the fogginess of the idea of majority, see Kenneth Arrow’s two famous themes, “the Condorcet effect” and the “theorem of collective decision.”} In this sense women, children, but also
animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian. It is perhaps the
special situation of women in relation to the man-standard that accounts
for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a
becoming-woman. It is important not to confuse “minoritarian,” as a
becoming or process, with a “minority”, as an aggregate or a state.
Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain conditions,
but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes,
or allows oneself to be reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but
in a becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black
Panthers said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman. Even
Jews must become-Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if
this is the case, then becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew
as much as the Jew. Becoming-woman necessary affects men as much as
women. In a way, the subject in a becoming is always “man,” but only
when he enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major
identity. As in Arthur Miller’s novel, \emph{Focus}, or Losey’s film,
**Mr. Klein*: it is the non-Jew who becomes Jewish, who is swept up in,
carried off by, this becoming after being rent from his standard of
measure. Conversely, if Jews themselves must become-Jewish, if women
must become-woman, if children must become-child, if blacks must
become-black, it is because only a minority is capable of serving as the
active medium of becoming, but under such conditions that it ceases to
be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority. Becoming-Jewish,
becoming-woman, etc., therefore imply two simultaneous movements, one by
which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another
by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority. There
is an asymmetrical and indissociable block of becoming, a block of
alliance: the two “Mr. Kleins,” the Jew and the non-Jew, enter into a
becoming-Jewish (the same thing happens in \emph{Focus}).


A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of all man. A Jew
becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. A
becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized
medium and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of
the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority;
there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of
a minority. We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the
most unexpected, most insignificant of things. You don’t deviate from
the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and
carries you off. It is because the hero of \emph{Focus}, the average
American, needs glasses that give his nose a vaguely Semitic air, it is
“because of the glasses” that he is thrown into this strange adventure
of the becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. Anything at all can do the job,
but it always turns out to be a political affair. Becoming-minoritarian
is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power (\emph{puissance}),
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.\footnote{See William Faulkner, \emph{Intruder in the Dust} (New York: Vintage, 1948), p. 216. Speaking of Southern whites after the Civil War (not only the poor but also the old monied families), Faulkner writes, “We are in the position of the German after 1933 who had no other alternative but to be a Nazi or a Jew.”} Unlike history, becoming cannot
be conceptualized in terms of past and future. Becoming-revolutionary
remains indifferent to questions of a future and a past of the
revolution; it passes between the two. Every becoming is a block of
coexistence. The so-called ahistorical societies set themselves outside
history, not because they are content to reproduce immutable models or
are governed by a fixed structure, but because they are societies of
becoming (war societies, secret societies, etc.). There is no history
but of the majority, or of minorities as defined in relation to the
majority. And yet “how to win the majority” is a totally secondary
problem in relation to the advances of the imperceptible.


Let us try to say it another way: There is no becoming-man because man
is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular. The
faciality function showed us the form under which man constitutes the
majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based:
white, male, adult, “rational,” etc., in short, the average European,
the subject of enunciation. Following the law of arborescence, it is
this central Point that moves across all of space or the entire screen,
and at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition, depending
on which faciality trait is retained: male-(female), adult-(child),
white-(black, yellow, or red); rational-(animal). The central point, or
third eye, thus has the property of organizing binary distributions
within the dualism machines, and of reproducing itself in the principal
term of the opposition; the entire opposition at the same time resonates
in the central point. The constitution of a “majority” as redundancy.
Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory, through the position of
the central point, its frequency (insofar as it is necessarily
reproduced by each dominant point), and its resonance (insofar as all of
the points tie in with it). Any line that goes from one point to another
in the aggregate of the molar system, and is thus defined by points
answering to these mnemonic conditions of frequency and resonance, is a
part of the arborescent system.\footnote{The subordination of the line to the point is clearly evident in the arborescent schemas: see Julien Pacotte, \emph{Le réseau arborescent, schème primordial de la pensée} (Paris: Hermann, 1936), and the status of centered or hierarchical systems according to Pierre Rosenthiehl and Jean Petitot, “Automate asocial et systèmes acentrés,” \emph{Communications}, no. 22 (1974), pp. 45–62. The arborescent schema of majority could be presented as follows: \protect\endgraf \begin{figure}[p] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-57.png} \end{figure} \clearpage}


What constitutes arborescence is the submission of the line to the
point. Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the
Memory that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian
agency treating them as “childhood memories,” as conjugal, or colonial
memories. It is possible to operate by establishing a conjunction or
collocation of contiguous points rather than a relation between distant
points: you would then have phantasies rather than memories. For
example, a woman can have a female point alongside a male point, and a
man a male point alongside a female one. The constitution of these
hybrids, however, does not take us very far in the direction of a true
becoming (for example, bisexuality, as the psychoanalysts note, in no
way precludes the prevalence of the masculine or the majority of the
“phallus”). One does not break with the arborescent schema, one does not
reach becoming or the molecular, as long as a line is connected to two
distant points, or is composed of two contiguous points. A line of
becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that
compose it; on the contrary, it passes \emph{between} points, it comes up
through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived,
transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous
points.\footnote{A line of becoming, in relation to the localizable connection of A and B (distance), or in relation to their contiguity: \protect\endgraf \begin{figure}[p] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-58.png} \end{figure} \clearpage} A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming
has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor
destination; to speak of the absence of an origin, to make the absence
of an origin the origin, is a bad play on words. A line of becoming has
only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is
the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always in the middle; one
can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor
the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of
flight or descent running perpendicular to both. If becoming is a block
(a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and
indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up
the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of
the other—and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and
to distance. The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the
orchid produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it
becomes a liberated piece of the orchid’s reproductive system, but also
of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp,
also liberated from its own reproduction. A coexistence of two
asymmetrical movements that combine to form a block, down a line of
flight that sweeps away selective pressures. The line, or the block,
does not link the wasp to the orchid, any more than it conjugates or
mixes them: it passes between them, carrying them away in a shared
proximity in which the discernibility of points disappears. The
line-system (or block-system) of becoming is opposed to the point-system
of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from
the point, and renders points indiscernible: the rhizome, the opposite
of arborescence; break away from arborescence. \emph{Becoming is an
antimemory}. Doubtless, there exists a molecular memory, but as a factor
of integration into a majoritarian or molar system. Memories always have
a reterritorialization function. On the other hand, a vector of
deterritorialization is in no way indeterminate; it is directly plugged
into the molecular levels, and the more deterritorialized it is, the
stronger is the contact: it is deterritorialization that makes the
aggregate of the molecular components “hold together.” From this point
of view, one may contrast a \emph{childhood block}, or a becoming-child, with
the \emph{childhood memory}: “a” molecular child is produced \dots{} “a” child
coexists with us, in a zone of proximity or a block of becoming, on a
line of deterritorialization that carries us both off—as opposed to the
child we once were, whom we remember or phantasize, the molar child
whose future is the adult. “This will be childhood, but it must not be
my childhood,” writes Virginia Woolf. (\emph{Orlando} already does not
operate by memories, but by blocks, blocks of ages, block of epochs,
blocks of the kingdoms of nature, blocks of sexes, forming so many
becomings between things, or so many lines of
deterritorialization.)\footnote{\emph{The Diary of Virginia Woolf}, vol. 3, p. 236 (Wednesday, November 28, 1928). The same thing applies to the works of Kafka, in which childhood blocks function as the opposite of childhood memories. Proust’s case is more complicated because he performs a mixture of the two. The situation of the psychoanalyst is to grasp memories or phantasies, but never childhood blocks.} Wherever we used the word “memories” in the
preceding pages, we were wrong to do so; we meant to say “becoming,” we
were saying becoming.


If the line is opposed to the point (or blocks to memories, becoming to
the faculty of memory), it is not in an absolute way: a punctual system
includes a certain utilization of lines, and the block itself assigns
the point new functions. In a punctual system, a point basically refers
to linear coordinates. Not only are a horizontal line and a vertical
line represented, but the vertical moves parallel to itself, and the
horizontal superposes other horizontals upon itself; every point is
assigned in relation to the two base coordinates, but is also marked on
a horizontal line of superposition and on a vertical line or plane of
displacement. Finally, two points are connected when any line is drawn
from one to the other. \emph{A system is termed punctual} when its lines are
taken as coordinates in this way, or as localizable connections; for
example, systems of arborescence, or molar and mnemonic systems in
general, are punctual. Memory has a punctual organization because every
present refers simultaneously to the horizontal line of the \emph{flow} of
time (kinematics), which goes from an old present to the actual present,
and the vertical line of the \emph{order} of time (stratigraphy), which goes
from the present to the past, or to the representation of the old
present. This is, of course, a basic schema that cannot be developed
further without running into major complications, but it is the one
found in representations of art forming a “didactic” system, in other
words, a mnemotechnics. Musical representation, on the one hand, draws a
horizontal, melodic line, the bass line, upon which other melodic lines
are superposed; points are assigned that enter into relations of
counterpoint between lines. On the other hand, it draws a vertical,
harmonic line or plane, which moves along the horizontals but is no
longer dependent upon them; it runs from high to low and defines a chord
capable of linking up with the following chords. Pictorial
representation has an analogous form, with means of its own: this is not
only because the painting has a vertical and a horizontal, but because
the traits and colors, each on its own account, relate to verticals of
displacement and horizontals of superposition (for example, the vertical
cold form, or white, light and tonality; the horizontal warm form, or
black, chromatics and modality, etc.). To cite only relatively recent
examples, this is evident in the didactic systems of Kandinsky, Klee,
and Mondrian, which necessarily imply an encounter with music.


Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a punctual system: (1)
Systems of this kind comprise two base lines, horizontal and vertical;
they serve as coordinates for assigning points. (2) The horizontal line
can be superposed vertically and the vertical line can be moved
horizontally, in such a way that new points are produced or reproduced,
under conditions of horizontal frequency and vertical resonance. (3)
From one point to another, a line can (or cannot) be drawn, but if it
can it takes the form of a localizable connection; diagonals thus play
the role of connectors between points of different levels or moments,
instituting in their turn frequencies and resonances on the basis of
these points of variable horizon or verticon, contiguous or
distant.\footnote{For example, in the system of memory, the formation of a memory implies a diagonal that turns present A into representation A′ in relation to the new present B, and into A″ in relation to C, etc.: \protect\endgraf \begin{figure}[p] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-59.png} \end{figure} \clearpage \protect\endgraf See Edmund Husserl, \emph{The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness}, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill, intro. Calvin O. Schrag (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 48–50.} These systems are arborescent, mnemonic, molar,
structural; they are systems of territorialization or
reterritorialization. The line and the diagonal remain totally
subordinated to the point because they serve as coordinates for a point
or as localizable connections for two points, running from one point to
another.


Opposed to the punctual system are linear, or rather multilinear,
systems. Free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has
this intention. One elaborates a punctual system or a didactic
representation, but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor
through it. A punctual system is most interesting when there is a
musician, painter, writer, philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates
it in order to oppose it, like a springboard to jump from. History is
made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert
themselves into it, or even reshape it). This is not done for
provocation but happens because the punctual system they found
ready-made, or themselves invented, must have allowed this operation:
free the line and the diagonal, draw the line instead of plotting a
point, produce an imperceptible diagonal instead of clinging to an even
elaborated or reformed vertical or horizontal. When this is done it
always goes down in History but never comes from it. History may try to
break its ties to memory; it may make the schemas of memory more
elaborate, superpose and shift coordinates, emphasize connections, or
deepen breaks. The dividing line, however, is not there. The dividing
line passes not between history and memory but between punctual
“history-memory” systems and diagonal or multilinear assemblages, which
are in no way eternal: they have to do with becoming; they are a bit of
becoming in the pure state; they are transhistorical. There is no act of
creation that is not transhistorical and does not come up from behind or
proceed by way of a liberated line. Nietzsche opposes history not to the
eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the Untimely, which
is another name for haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming (in
other words, forgetting as opposed to memory, geography as opposed to
history, the map as opposed to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to
arborescence). “The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which
alone life can germinate and with the destruction of which it must
vanish\dots{}. What deed would man be capable of if he had not first entered
into that vaporous region of the unhistorical?”\footnote{Friedrich Nietzsche, \emph{Untimely Meditations}, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” sec. 1, pp. 63–64.} Creations are like
mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of
representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of
reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems.


When Boulez casts himself in the role of historian of music, he does so
in order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in
each case, invents a kind of diagonal running between the harmonic
vertical and the melodic horizon. And in each case it is a different
diagonal, a different technique, a creation. Moving along this
transversal line, which is really a line of deterritorialization, there
is a \emph{sound block} that no longer has a point of origin, since it is
always and already in the middle of the line; and no longer has
horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own
coordinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point
to another, since it is in “nonpulsed time”: a deterritorialized
rhythmic block that has abandoned points, coordinates, and measure, like
a drunken boat that melds with the line or draws a plane of consistency.
Speeds and slownesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes
impelling it to proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes
to extinction, sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once. The
musician is in the best position to say: “I hate the faculty of memory,
I hate memories.” And that is because he or she affirms the power of
becoming. The Viennese school is exemplary of this kind of diagonal,
this kind of line-block. But it can equally be said that the Viennese
school found a new system of territorialization, of points, verticals,
and horizontals that position it in History. Another attempt, another
creative act, came after it. The important thing is that all musicians
have always proceeded in this way: drawing their own diagonal, however
fragile, outside points, outside coordinates and localizable
connections, in order to float a sound block down a created, liberated
line, in order to unleash in space this mobile and mutant sound block, a
haecceity (for example, chromaticism, aggregates, and complex notes, but
already the resources and possibilities of polyphony, etc.).\footnote{On all of these themes, see Pierre Boulez. (1) On how transversals always tend to escape horizontal and vertical coordinates of music, sometimes even drawing “virtual lines,” see \emph{Notes of an Apprenticeship}, ed. Paule Thevenin, trans. Robert Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 231–232, 295–301, 382–383. (2) On the idea of the sound block or “block of duration,” in relation to this transversal, see \emph{Boulez on Music Today}, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 55–59. (3) On the distinction between points and blocks, “punctual sets,” and “aggregative sets” with varying individuality, see “Senate que me veux-tu?”, \emph{Médiations}, no. 7 (1964). The hatred of memory appears frequently in Boulez; see “Eloge de l’amnésie,” \emph{Musique en jeu}, no. 4 (1971), pp. 5–14, and “J’ai horreur du souvenir,” in \emph{Roger Desormière et son temps}, ed. Denise Mayer and Pierre Souvtchinsky (Monaco: Ed. du Rocher, 1966). Confining ourselves to contemporary examples, one finds analogous declarations in Stravinsky, Cage, Berio. Of course, there is a musical memory that is tied to coordinates and is exercised in social settings (getting up, going to bed, beating a retreat). But the perception of a musical “phrase” appeals less to memory, even of the reminiscence type, than to an extension or contraction of perception of the encounter type. It should be studied how each musician sets in motion veritable \emph{blocks of forgetting}: for example, what Jean Barraqué calls “slices of forgetting” and “absent developments” in the work of Debussy; \emph{Debussy} (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 169–171. One can refer to a general study by Daniel Charles, “La musique et l’oubli,” \emph{Traverses}, no. 4 (1977), pp. 14–23.} Some
have spoken of “oblique vectors” with respect to the organ. The diagonal
is often composed of extremely complex lines and spaces of sound. Is
that the secret of a little phrase or a rhythmic block? Undoubtedly, the
point now assumes a new and essential creative function. It is no longer
simply a question of an inevitable destiny reconstituting a punctual
system; on the contrary, it is now the point that is subordinated to the
line, the point now marks the proliferation of the line, or its sudden
deviation, its acceleration, its slowdown, its furor or agony. Mozart’s
“microblocks.” The block may even be reduced to a point, as though to a
single note (pointblock): Berg’s B in \emph{Wozzeck}, Schumann’s A. Homage to
Schumann, the madness of Schumann: the cello wanders across the grid of
the orchestration, drawing its diagonal, along which the
deterritorialized sound block moves; or an extremely sober kind of
refrain is “treated” by a very elaborate melodic line and polyphonic
architecture.


In a multilinear system, everything happens at once: the line breaks
free of the point as origin; the diagonal breaks free of the vertical
and the horizontal as coordinates; and the transversal breaks free of
the diagonal as a localizable connection between two points. In short, a
block-line passes amid (\emph{au milieu des}) sounds and propels itself by
its own nonlocalizable middle (\emph{milieu}). The sound block is the
**intermezzo*. It is a body without organs, an antimemory pervading
musical organization, and is all the more sonorous: “The Schumannian
body does not stay in place\dots{}. The intermezzo [is] consubstantial with
the entire Schumannian oeuvre\dots{}. At the limit, there are only
intermezzi\dots{}. The Schumannian body knows only bifurcations; it does not
construct itself, it keeps diverging according to an accumulation of
interludes\dots{}. Schumannian beating is panic, but it is also coded \dots{} and it
is because the panic of the blows apparently keeps within the limits of
a docile language that it is ordinarily not perceived\dots{}. Let us imagine
for tonality two contradictory (and yet concomitant) statuses. On the
one hand \dots{} a screen, a language intended to articulate the body \dots{}
according to a known organization\dots{}. On the other hand, contradictorily \dots{}
tonality becomes the ready servant of the beats within another level it
claims to domesticate.”\footnote{Roland Barthes, “Rasch,” in \emph{The Responsibility of Forms}, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp. 300–302, 308–309.}


Does the same thing, strictly the same thing, apply to painting? In
effect, the point does not make the line; the line sweeps away the
deterritorialized point, carries it off under its outside influence; the
line does not go from one point to another, but runs \emph{between points} in
a different direction that renders them indiscernible. The line has
become the diagonal, which has broken free from the vertical and the
horizontal. But the diagonal has already become the transversal, the
semidiagonal or free straight line, the broken or angular line, or the
curve—always in the midst of themselves. Between the white vertical and
the black horizontal lie Klee’s gray, Kandinsky’s red, Monet’s purple;
each forms a block of color. This line is without origin, since it
always begins off the painting, which only holds it by the middle; it is
without coordinates, because it melds with a plane of consistency upon
which it floats and that it creates; it is without localizable
connection, because it has lost not only its representative function but
any function of outlining a form of any kind—by this token, the line has
become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a visual block; and under
these conditions the point assumes creative functions again, as a
color-point or line-point.\footnote{There are many differences among painters, in all respects, but also a common movement: see Wassily Kandinsky, \emph{Point and Line to Plane} in vol. 2 of \emph{Complete Writings on Art}, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Verge (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 524–700; and Paul Klee, \emph{On Modern Art}, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966). The aim of statements like those of Mondrian on the exclusive value of the vertical and the horizontal is to show the conditions under which the vertical and horizontal are sufficient to create a transversal, which does not even have to be drawn; for example, coordinates of unequal thickness intersect inside the frame and extend outside the frame, opening a “dynamic axis” running transversally (see Michel Butor’s comments in \emph{Répertoire} [Paris: Minuit, 1960–], vol. 3, “Le carre et son habitant”). One can also consult Michel Fried’s article on Pollock’s line, \emph{Three American Painters} (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), and Henry Miller’s discussion of Nash’s line, \emph{On Turning Eighty} (London: Village Press, 1973).} The line is between points, in their
midst, and no longer goes from one point to another. It does not outline
a shape. “He did not paint things, he painted between things.” There is
no falser problem in painting than depth and, in particular,
perspective. For perspective is only a historical manner of \emph{occupying}
diagonals or transversals, lines of flight [\emph{lignes de fuite}: here, the
lines in a painting moving toward the vanishing point, or \emph{point de
fuite}—Trans.], in other words, of reterritorializing the moving visual
block. We use the word “occupy” in the sense of “giving an occupation
to,” fixing a memory and a code, assigning a function. But the lines of
flight, the transversals, are suitable for many other functions besides
this molar function. Lines of flight as perspective lines, far from
being made to represent depth, themselves invent the possibility of such
a representation, which occupies them only for an instant, at a given
moment. Perspective, and even depth, are the reterritorialization of
lines of flight, which alone created painting by carrying it farther.
What is called central perspective in particular plunged the
multiplicity of escapes and the dynamism of lines into a punctual black
hole. Conversely, it is true that problems of perspective triggered a
whole profusion of creative lines, a mass release of visual blocks, at
the very moment they claimed to have gained mastery over them. Is
painting, in each of its acts of creation, engaged in a becoming as
intense as that of music?

\section{Becoming-Music}


We have tried to define in the case of Western music (although the other
musical traditions confront an analogous problem, under different
conditions, to which they find different solutions) a block of becoming
at the level of expression, or a block of expression: this block of
becoming rests on transversals that continually escape from the
coordinates or punctual systems functioning as musical codes at a given
moment. It is obvious that there is a block of content corresponding to
this block of expression. It is not really a correspondence; there would
be no mobile “block” if a content, itself musical (and not a subject or
a theme), were not always interfering with the expression. What does
music deal with, what is the content indissociable from sound
expression? It is hard to say, but it is something: a child dies, a
child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies
off. We wish to say that these are not accidental themes in music (even
if it is possible to multiply examples), much less imitative exercises;
they are something essential. Why a child, a woman, a bird? It is
because musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman, a
becoming-child, a becoming-animal that constitute its content. Why does
the child die, or the bird fall as though pierced by an arrow? Because
of the “danger” inherent in any line that escapes, in any line of flight
or creative deterritorialization: the danger of veering toward
destruction, toward abolition. Melisande [in Debussy’s opera, \emph{Pelléas
et Mélisande}—Trans.], a child-woman, a secret, dies twice (“it’s the
poor little dear’s turn now”). Music is never tragic, music is joy. But
there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much
happiness as dying happily, being extinguished. Not as a function of a
death instinct it allegedly awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to
its sound assemblage, to its sound machine, the moment that must be
confronted, the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition.
Peace \emph{and} exasperation.\footnote{“There was something tense, exasperated to the point of intolerable anger, in his good-humored breast, as he played the finely-spun peace-music. The more exquisite the music, the more perfectly he produced it, in sheer bliss; and at the same time, the more intense was the maddened exasperation within him”; D. H. Lawrence, \emph{Aaron’s Rod} (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 16.} Music has a thirst for destruction, every
kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its
potential “fascism”? Whenever a musician writes \emph{In Memoriam}, it is not
so much a question of an inspirational motif or a memory, but on the
contrary of a becoming that is only confronting its own danger, even
taking a fall in order to rise again: a becoming-child, a
becoming-woman, a becoming-animal, insofar as they are the content of
music itself and continue to the point of death.


We would say that the \emph{refrain} is properly musical content, the block
of content proper to music. A child comforts itself in the dark or claps
its hands or invents a way of walking, adapting it to the cracks in the
sidewalk, or chants “Fort-Da” (psychoanalysts deal with the Fort-Da very
poorly when they treat it as a phonological opposition or a symbolic
component of the language-unconscious, when it is in fact a refrain).
Tra la la. A woman sings to herself, “I heard her softly singing a tune
to herself under her breath.” A bird launches into its refrain. All of
music is pervaded by bird songs, in a thousand different ways, from
Jannequin to Messiaen. Frr, Frr. Music is pervaded by childhood blocks,
by blocks of femininity. Music is pervaded by every minority, and yet
composes an immense power. Children’s, women’s, ethnic, and territorial
refrains, refrains of love and destruction: the birth of rhythm.
Schumann’s work is made of refrains, of childhood blocks, which he
treats in a very special way: his own kind of becoming-child, his own
kind of becoming-woman, Clara. It would be possible to catalogue the
transversal or diagonal utilizations of the refrain in the history of
music, all of the children’s Games and \emph{Kinderszenen}, all of the bird
songs. But such a catalogue would be useless because it would seem like
a multiplication of examples of themes, subjects, and motifs, when it is
in fact a question of the most essential and necessary content of music.
The motif of the refrain may be anxiety, fear, joy, love, work, walking,
territory \dots{} but the refrain itself is the content of music.


We are not at all saying that the refrain is the origin of music, or
that music begins with it. It is not really known when music begins. The
refrain is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, or
forgoing it. But music exists because the refrain exists also, because
music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of
expression, because it forms a block with it in order to take it
somewhere else. \emph{The child’s refrain, which is not music, forms a block
with the becoming-child of music}: once again, this asymmetrical
composition is necessary. “Ah, vous dirai-je maman” (“Ah, mamma, now you
shall know”) in Mozart, Mozart’s refrains. A theme in C, followed by
twelve variations; not only is each note of the theme doubled, but the
theme is doubled internally. Music submits the refrain to this very
special treatment of the diagonal or transversal, it uproots the refrain
from its territoriality. Music is a creative, active operation that
consists in deterritorializing the refrain. Whereas the refrain is
essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music
makes it a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of
expression. Pardon that sentence: what musicians do should be musical,
it should be written in music. Instead, we will give a figurative
example: Mussorgsky’s “Lullaby,” in \emph{Songs and Dances of Death},
presents an exhausted mother sitting up with her sick child; she is
relieved by a visitor, Death, who sings a lullaby in which each couplet
ends with an obsessive, sober refrain, a repetitive rhythm with only one
note, a point-block: “Shush, little child, sleep my little child” (not
only does the child die, but the deterritorialization of the refrain is
doubled by Death in person, who replaces the mother).


Is the situation similar for painting, and if so, how? In no way do we
believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose
solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. To us, Art is a false
concept, a solely nominal concept; this does not, however, preclude the
possibility of a simultaneous usage of the various arts within a
determinable multiplicity. The “problem” within which painting is
inscribed is that of the \emph{face-landscape}. That of music is entirely
different: it is the problem of the \emph{refrain}. Each arises at a certain
moment, under certain conditions, on the line of its problem; but there
is no possible structural or symbolic correspondence between the two,
unless one translates them into punctual systems. We have distinguished
the following three states of the landscape problem: (1) semiotic
systems of corporeality, silhouettes, postures, colors, and lines (these
semiotic systems are already present in profusion among animals; the
head is part of the body, and the body has the milieu, the biotope as
its correlate; these systems already display very pure lines as, for
example, in the “grass stem” behavior); (2) an organization of the face,
white wall\Slash{}black holes, face\Slash{}eyes, or facial profile\Slash{}sideview of the
eyes (this semiotic system of faciality has the landscape as its
correlate: facialization of the entire body and landscapification of all
the milieus, Christ as the European central point); (3) a
deterritorialization effaces and landscapes, in favor of probe-heads
whose lines no longer outline a form or form a contour, and whose colors
no longer lay out a landscape (this is the pictorial semiotic system:
Put the face and the landscape to flight. For example, what Mondrian
correctly calls a “landscape”: a pure, absolutely deterritorialized
landscape).


For convenience, we presented three successive and distinct states, but
only provisionally. We cannot decide whether animals have painting, even
though they do not paint on canvas, and even when hormones induce their
colors and lines; even here, there is little foundation for a clear-cut
distinction between animals and human beings. Conversely, we must say
that painting does not begin with so-called abstract art but recreates
the silhouettes and postures of corporeality, and is already fully in
operation in the face-landscape organization (the way in which painters
“work” the face of Christ, and make it leak from the religious code in
all directions). The aim of painting has always been the
deterritorialization of faces and landscapes, either by a reactivation
of corporeality, or by a liberation of lines or colors, or both at the
same time. There are many becomings-animal, becomings-woman, and
becomings-child in painting.


The problem of music is different, if it is true that its problem is the
refrain. Deterritorializing the refrain, inventing lines of
deterritorialization for the refrain, implies procedures and
constructions that have nothing to do with those of painting (outside of
vague analogies of the sort painters have often tried to establish).
Again, it is not certain whether we can draw a dividing line between
animals and human beings: Are there not, as Messiaen believes, musician
birds and nonmusician birds? Is the bird’s refrain necessarily
territorial, or is it not already used for very subtle
deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight? The difference
between noise and sound is definitely not a basis for a definition of
music, or even for the distinction between musician birds and
nonmusician birds. Rather, it is the \emph{labor of the refrain}: Does it
remain territorial and territorializing, or is it carried away in a
moving block that draws a transversal across all coordinates—and all of
the intermediaries between the two? Music is precisely the adventure of
the refrain: the way music lapses back into a refrain (in our head, in
Swann’s head, in the pseudo-probe-heads on TV and radio, the music of a
great musician used as a signature tune, a ditty); the way it lays hold
of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few notes,
then takes it down a creative line that is so much richer, no origin or
end of which is in sight\dots{}


Leroi-Gourhan established a distinction and correlation between two
poles, “hand-tool” and “face-language.” But there it was a question of
distinguishing a form of content and a form of expression. Here we are
considering expressions that hold their content within themselves, so we
must make a different distinction: the face with its visual correlates
(eyes) concerns painting; the voice with its auditory correlates (the
ear is itself a refrain, it is shaped like one) concerns music. Music is
a deterritorialization of the voice, which becomes less and less tied to
language, just as painting is a deterritorialization of the face. Traits
of vocability can indeed be indexed to traits of faciality, as in
lipreading; they are not, however, in correspondence, especially when
they are carried off by the respective movements of music and painting.
The voice is far ahead of the face, very far ahead. Entitling a musical
work \emph{Visage} (Face) thus seems to be the greatest of sound
paradoxes.\footnote{Although Luciano Berio indicates otherwise, it seems to us that his work, \emph{Visage}, is composed according to the three states of faciality: first, a multiplicity of sound bodies and silhouettes, then a short symphonic and dominant organization of the face, and finally a launching of probe-heads in all directions. However, there is no question here of music “imitating” the face and its avatars, or of the voice constituting a metaphor. Instead, the sounds accelerate the deterritorialization of the face, giving it a properly acoustical power, and the face reacts musically by in turn inducing a deterritorialization of the voice. This is a molecular face, produced by electronic music. The voice precedes the face, itself forms the face for an instant, and outlives it, increasing in speed—on the condition that it is unarticulated, asignifying, asubjective.} The only way to “line up” the two problems of painting
and music is to take a criterion extrinsic to the fiction of the fine
arts, to compare the forces of deterritorialization in each case. Music
seems to have a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once more
intense and much more collective, and the voice seems to have a much
greater power of deterritorialization. Perhaps this trait explains the
collective fascination exerted by music, and even the potentiality of
the “fascist” danger we mentioned a little earlier: music (drums,
trumpets) draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to
the abyss (much more so than banners and flags, which are paintings,
means of classification and rallying). It may be that musicians are
individually more reactionary than painters, more religious, less
“social”; they nevertheless wield a collective force infinitely greater
than that of painting: “The chorus formed by the assembly of the people
is a very powerful bond\dots{}” It is always possible to explain this force by
the material conditions of musical emission and reception, but it is
preferable to take the reverse approach; these conditions are explained
by the force of deterritorialization of music. It could be said that
from the standpoint of the mutant abstract machine painting and music do
not correspond to the same thresholds, or that the pictorial machine and
the musical machine do not have the same index. There is a
“backwardness” of painting in relation to music, as Klee, the most
musicianly of painters, observed.\footnote{Will Grohman, \emph{Paul Klee} (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.): “Somewhat paradoxically he remarked that perhaps it had been his good fortune to develop painting, at least on the formal plane, to the stage reached in music by Mozart” (p. 71).} Maybe that is why many people
prefer painting, or why aesthetics took painting as its privileged
model: there is no question that it “scares” people less. Even its
relations to capitalism and social formations are not at all of the same
type.


Doubtless, in each case we must simultaneously consider factors of
territoriality, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Animal
and child refrains seem to be territorial: therefore they are not
“music.” But when music lays hold of the refrain and deterritorializes
it, and deterritorializes the voice, when it lays hold of the refrain
and sends it racing off in a rhythmic sound block, when the refrain
“becomes” Schumann or Debussy, it is through a system of melodic and
harmonic coordinates by means of which music reterritorializes upon
itself, \emph{qua} music. Conversely, we shall see that in certain cases even
the animal refrain possesses forces of deterritorialization much more
intense than animal silhouettes, postures, and colors. We must therefore
take a number of factors into consideration: relative territorialities,
their respective deterritorializations, and their correlative
reterritorializations, several types of them (for example, intrinsic
reterritorializations such as musical coordinates, and extrinsic ones
such as the deterioration of the refrain into a hackneyed formula, or
music into a ditty). The fact that there is no deterritorialization
without a special reterritorialization should prompt us to rethink the
abiding correlation between the molar and the molecular: no flow, no
becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without molar
components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible landmarks
for the imperceptible processes.


The becoming-woman, the becoming-child of music are present in the
problem of the machining of the voice. Machining the voice was the first
musical operation. As we know, the problem was resolved in Western music
in two different ways, in Italy and in England: the head voice of the
countertenor, who sings “above his voice,” or whose voice operates
inside the sinuses and at the back of the throat and the palate without
relying on the diaphragm or passing through the bronchial tubes; and the
stomach voice of the castrati, “stronger, more voluminous, more
languid,” as if they gave carnal matter to the imperceptible,
impalpable, and aerial. Dominique Fernandez wrote a fine book on this
subject; he shows, fortunately refraining from any psychoanalytic
discussion of a link between music and castration, that the musical
problem of the machinery of the voice necessarily implies the abolition
of the overall dualism machine, in other words, the molar formation
assigning voices to the “man or woman.”\footnote{Dominique Fernandez, \emph{La rose des Tudors} (Paris: Julliard, 1976) (and the novel \emph{Porporino} [Paris: Grasset, 1974]). Fernandez cites pop music as a timid return to great English vocal music. It would be necessary to take into consideration techniques of circular breathing, in which one sings breathing in as well as out, or of sound filtering using zones of resonance (nose, forehead, cheekbones—a properly musical use of the face).} Being a man \emph{or} a woman no
longer exists in music. It is not certain, however, that the myth of the
androgyne Fernandez invokes is adequate. It is a question not of myth
but of real becoming. The voice itself must attain a becoming-woman or a
becoming-child. That is the prodigious content of music. It is no longer
a question, as Fernandez observes, of imitating a woman or a child, even
if it is a child who is singing. The musical voice itself becomes-child
at the same time as the child becomes-sonorous, purely sonorous. No
child could ever have done that, or if one did, it would be by becoming
in addition something other than a child, a child belonging to a
different, strangely sensual and celestial, world. In short, the
deterritorialization is double: the voice is deterritorialized in a
becoming-child, but the child it becomes is itself deterritorialized,
unengendered, becoming. “The child grew wings,” said Schumann. We find
the same zigzag movement in the becomings-animal of music: Marcel Moré
shows that the music of Mozart is permeated by a becoming-horse, or
becomings-bird. But no musician amuses himself by “playing” horse or
bird. If the sound block has a becoming-animal as its content, then the
animal simultaneously becomes, in sonority, something else, something
absolute, night, death, joy—certainly not a generality or a
simplification, but a haecceity, this death, that night. Music takes as
its content a becoming-animal; but in that becoming-animal the horse,
for example, takes as its expression soft kettledrum beats, winged like
hooves from heaven or hell; and the birds find expression in \emph{gruppeti},
appoggiaturas, staccato notes that transform them into so many
souls.\footnote{Marcel Moré, \emph{Le dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux} (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).} It is the accents that form the diagonal in Mozart, the
accents above all. If one does not follow the accents, if one does not
observe them, one falls back into a relatively impoverished punctual
system. The human musician is deterritorialized in the bird, but it is a
bird that is itself deterritorialized, “transfigured,” a celestial bird
that has just as much of a becoming as that which becomes with it.
Captain Ahab is engaged in an irresistible becoming-whale with
Moby-Dick; but the animal, Moby-Dick, must simultaneously become an
unbearable pure whiteness, a shimmering pure white wall, a silver thread
that stretches out and supples up “like” a girl, or twists like a whip,
or stands like a rampart. Can it be that literature sometimes catches up
with painting, and even music? And that painting catches up with music?
(Moré cites Klee’s birds but on the other hand fails to understand what
Messiaen says about bird song.) 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. Thus imitation self-destructs, since the imitator
unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates with the unknowing
becoming of that which he or she imitates. One imitates only if one
fails, when one fails. The painter and musician do not imitate the
animal, they become-animal at the same time as the animal becomes what
they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with Nature.\footnote{As we have seen, imitation can be conceived either as a resemblance of terms culminating in an archetype (series), or as a correspondence of relations constituting a symbolic order (structure); but becoming is not reducible to either of these. The concept of mimesis is not only inadequate, it is radically false.}
Becoming is always double, that which one becomes becomes no less than
the one that becomes—block is formed, essentially mobile, never in
equilibrium. Mondrian’s is the perfect square. It balances on one corner
and produces a diagonal that half-opens its closure, carrying away both
sides.


Becoming is never imitating. When Hitchcock does birds, he does not
reproduce bird calls, he produces an electronic sound like a field of
intensities or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a
terrible threat welling up inside us.\footnote{François Truffaut, \emph{Hitchcock} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967): “I took the dramatic licence of not having the birds scream at all” (p. 224).} And this applies not only to
the “arts”: \emph{Moby-Dick}’s effect also hinges the pure lived experience
of double becoming, and the book would not have the same beauty
otherwise. The tarantella is a strange dance that magically cures or
exorcises the supposed victims of a tarantula bite. But when the victim
does this dance, can he or she be said to be imitating the spider, to be
identifying with it, even in an identification through an “archetypal”
or “agonistic” struggle? No, because the victim, the patient, the person
who is sick, becomes a dancing spider only to the extent that the spider
itself is supposed to become a pure silhouette, pure color and pure
sound to which the person dances.\footnote{See Ernesto de Martino, \emph{La terre du remords} (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 142–170. Martino, however, retains an interpretation based on the archetype, imitation, and identification.} One does not imitate; one
constitutes a block of becoming. Imitation enters in only as an
adjustment of the block, like a finishing touch, a wink, a signature.
But everything of importance happens elsewhere: in the becoming-spider
of the dance, which occurs on the condition that the spider itself
becomes sound and color, orchestra and painting. Take the case of the
local folk hero, Alexis the Trotter, who ran “like” a horse at
extraordinary speed, whipped himself with a short switch, whinnied,
reared, kicked, knelt, lay down on the ground in the manner of a horse,
competed against them in races, and against bicycles and trains. He
imitated a horse to make people laugh. But he had a deeper zone of
proximity or indiscernibility. Sources tell us that he was never as much
of a horse as when he played the harmonica: precisely because he no
longer needed a regulating or secondary imitation. It is said that he
called his harmonica his “chops-destroyer” and played the instrument
twice as fast as anyone else, doubled the beat, imposed a nonhuman
tempo.\footnote{Jean Claude Larouche, \emph{Alexis le trotteur} (Montreal: Ed. du Jour, 1971). They quote this account: “He didn’t play music with his mouth like one of us; he had a huge harmonica we couldn’t even play\dots{}. When he played with us, he would decide all of a sudden to double us. In other words, he doubled the beat; in the time we played one beat, he played two, which required extraordinary wind” (p. 95).} Alexis became all the more horse when the horse’s bit became
a harmonica, and the horse’s trot went into double time. As always, the
same must be said of the animals themselves. For not only do animals
have colors and sounds, but they do not wait for the painter or musician
to use those colors and sounds in a painting or music, in other words,
to enter into determinate becomings-color and becomings-sounds by means
of components of deterritorialization (we will return to this point
later). Ethology is advanced enough to have entered this realm.


We are not at all arguing for an aesthetics of qualities, as if the pure
quality (color, sound, etc.) held the secret of a becoming without
measure, as in \emph{Philebus}. Pure qualities still seem to us to be
punctual systems: They are reminiscences, they are either transcendent
or floating memories or seeds of phantasy. A functionalist conception,
on the other hand, only considers the function a quality fulfills in a
specific assemblage, or in passing from one assemblage to another. The
quality must be considered from the standpoint of the becoming that
grasps it, instead of becoming being considered from the standpoint of
intrinsic qualities having the value of archetypes or phylogenetic
memories. For example, whiteness, color, is gripped in a becoming-animal
that can be that of the painter or of Captain Ahab, and at the same time
in a becoming-color, a becoming-whiteness, that can be that of the
animal itself. Moby-Dick’s whiteness is the special index of his
becoming-solitary. Colors, silhouettes, and animal refrains are indexes
of becoming-conjugal or becoming-social that also imply components of
deterritorialization. A quality functions only as a line of
deterritorialization of an assemblage, or in going from one assemblage
to another. This is why an animal-block is something other than a
phylogenetic memory, and a childhood block something other than a
childhood memory. In Kafka, a quality never functions for itself or as a
memory, but rather rectifies an assemblage in which it is
deterritorialized, and, conversely, for which it provides a line of
deterritorialization; for example, the childhood steeple passes into the
castle tower, takes it at the level of its zone of indiscernibility
(“battlements that were irregular, broken, fumbling”), and launches down
a line of flight (as if one of the tenants “had burst through the
roof”).\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See Kafka, \emph{The Castle}, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976).]} If things are more complicated and less sober for Proust,
it is because for him qualities retain an air of reminiscence \emph{or}
phantasy, and yet with Proust as well these are functional blocks acting
not as memories or phantasies but as a becoming-child, a becoming-woman,
as components of deterritorialization passing from one assemblage to
another.


To the theorems of simple deterritorialization we encountered earlier
(in our discussion of the face),\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: See 7, “Year Zero: Faciality,” pp. 167–191.]} we can now add others on
generalized double deterritorialization. \emph{Theorem Five}:
deterritorialization is always double, because it implies the
coexistence of a major variable and a minor variable in simultaneous
becoming (the two terms of a becoming do not exchange places, there is
no identification between them, they are instead drawn into an
asymmetrical block in which both change to the same extent, and which
constitutes their zone of proximity). \emph{Theorem Six}: in nonsymmetrical
double deterritorialization it is possible to assign a
deterritorializing force and a deterritorialized force, even if the same
force switches from one value to the other depending on the “moment” or
aspect considered; furthermore, it is the least deterritorialized
element that always triggers the deterritorialization of the most
deterritorializing element, which then reacts back upon it in full
force. \emph{Theorem Seven}: the deterritorializing element has the relative
role of expression, and the deterritorialized element the relative role
of content (as evident in the arts); but not only does the content have
nothing to do with an external subject or object, since it forms an
asymmetrical block with the expression, but the deterritorialization
carries the expression and the content to a proximity where the
distinction between them ceases to be relevant, or where the
deterritorialization creates their indiscernibility (example: the sound
diagonal as the musical form of expression, and becomings-woman, -child,
-animal as the contents proper to music, as refrains). \emph{Theorem Eight}:
one assemblage does not have the same forces or even speeds of
deterritorialization as another; in each instance, the indices and
coefficients must be calculated according to the block of becoming under
consideration, and in relation to the mutations of an abstract machine
(for example, there is a certain slowness, a certain viscosity, of
painting in relation to music; but one cannot draw a symbolic boundary
between the human being and animal. One can only calculate and compare
powers of deterritorialization).


Fernandez demonstrates the presence of becomings-woman, becomings-child
in vocal music. Then he decries the rise of instrumental and orchestral
music; he is particularly critical of Verdi and Wagner for having
resexualized the voice, for having restored the binary machine in
response to the requirements of capitalism, which wants a man to be a
man and a woman a woman, each with his or her own voice: Verdi-voices,
Wagner-voices, are reterritorialized upon man \emph{and} woman. He explains
the premature disappearance of Rossini and Bellini (the retirement of
the first and death of the second) by their hopeless feeling that the
vocal becomings of the opera were no longer possible. However, Fernandez
does not ask under what auspices, and with what new types of diagonals,
this occurs. To begin with, it is true that the voice ceases to be
machined for itself, with simple instrumental accompaniment; it ceases
to be a stratum or a line of expression that stands on its own. But why?
Music crossed a new threshold of deterritorialization, beyond which it
is the instrument that machines the voice, and the voice and instrument
are carried \emph{on the same plane} in a relation that is sometimes one of
confrontation, sometimes one of compensation, sometimes one of exchange
and complementarity. The lied, in particular Schumann’s lieder, perhaps
marks the first appearance of this pure movement that places the voice
and the piano on the same plane of consistency, makes the piano an
instrument of delirium, and prepares the way for Wagnerian opera. Even a
case like Verdi’s: it has often been said that his opera remains lyrical
and vocal in spite of its destruction of the bel canto, and in spite of
the importance of orchestration in the final works; still, voices are
instrumentalized and make extraordinary gains in tessitura or extension
(the production of the Verdi-baritone, of the Verdi-soprano). At any
rate, the issue is not a given composer, especially not Verdi, or a
given genre, but the more general movement affecting music, the slow
mutation of the musical machine. If the voice returns to a binary
distribution of the sexes, this occurs in relation to binary groupings
of instruments in orchestration. There are always molar systems in music
that serve as coordinates; this dualist system of the sexes that
reappears on the level of the voice, this molar and punctual
distribution, serves as a foundation for new molecular flows that then
intersect, conjugate, are swept up in a kind of instrumentation and
orchestration that tend to be part of the creation itself. Voices may be
reterritorialized on the distribution of the two sexes, but the
continuous sound flow still passes between them as in a difference of
potential.


This brings us to the second point: the principal problem concerning
this new threshold of deterritorialization of the voice is no longer
that of a properly vocal becoming-woman or becoming-child, but that of a
becoming-molecular in which the voice itself is instrumentalized. Of
course, becomings-woman and -child remain just as important, even take
on new importance, but only to the extent that they convey another
truth: what was produced was already a molecular child, a molecular
woman \dots{} We need only think of Debussy: the becoming-child and the
becoming-woman in his works are intense but are now inseparable from a
molecularization of the motif, a veritable “chemistry” achieved through
orchestration. The child and the woman are now inseparable from the sea
and the water molecule (\emph{Sirens}, precisely, represents one of the first
complete attempts to integrate the voice with the orchestra). Already
Wagner was reproached for the “elementary” character of his music, for
its aquaticism, or its “atomization” of the motif, “a subdivision into
infinitely small units.” This becomes even clearer if we think of
becoming-animal: birds are still just as important, yet the reign of
birds seems to have been replaced by the age of insects, with its much
more molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking,
scratching, and scraping. Birds are vocal, but insects are instrumental:
drums and violins, guitars and cymbals.\footnote{André Tétry, \emph{Les outils chez les ètres vivants} (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), the chapter on “musical instruments,” with bibliography. An animal’s movement or labor may make noise, but we speak of a musical instrument whenever animals use apparatuses whose sole function is to produce various sounds (the musical character, to the extent that it is determinable, is quite variable, as is the case with the vocal apparatus of birds; there are veritable virtuosos among insects). From this standpoint, we distinguish: (1) stridulatory apparatuses, of the stringed instrument type: the rubbing of a rigid surface against another surface (insects, crustaceans, spiders, scorpions, pedipalps); (2) percussive apparatuses, of the drum, cymbal, or xylophone type: direct application of muscles to a vibratory membrane (crickets and certain fish). Not only is there an infinite variety of apparatuses and sounds, but the same animal varies its rhythm, tonality, intensity according to still more mysterious urgencies. “It then becomes a song of anger, anxiety, fear, triumph, love. When there is keen excitation, the rhythm of the stridulation varies: in \emph{Crioceris lilii}, the frequency of the rubbing goes from 228 strokes per minute to 550 or more.”} A becoming-insect has
replaced becoming-bird, or forms a block with it. The insect is closer,
better able to make audible the truth that all becomings are molecular
(cf. Martenot’s waves, electronic music). The molecular has the capacity
to make the \emph{elementary} communicate with the \emph{cosmic}: precisely
because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse
longitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which
guarantees a continuum by stretching variation far beyond its formal
limits. Rediscover Mozart, and that the “theme” was a variation from the
start. Varese explains that the sound molecule (the block) separates
into elements arranged in different ways according to variable relations
of speed, but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy
irradiating the entire universe, a headlong line of flight. That is how
he populated the Gobi desert with insects and stars constituting a
becoming-music of the world, or a diagonal for a cosmos. Messiaen
presents multiple chromatic durations in coalescence, “alternating
between the longest and the shortest, in order to suggest the idea of
the relations between the infinitely long durations of the stars and
mountains and the infinitely short ones of the insects and atoms: a
cosmic, elementary power that \dots{} derives above all from the labor of
rhythm.”\footnote{Gisèle Brelet, “Musique contemporaine en France,” in \emph{Histoire de la musique}, ed. Roland Manuel, “Pléiade” (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 1166.} The same thing that leads a musician to discover the birds
also leads him to discover the elementary and the cosmic. Both combine
to form a block, a universe fiber, a diagonal or complex space. Music
dispatches molecular flows. Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not
the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of
refrains; the question in music is that of a power of
deterritorialization permeating nature, animals, the elements, and
deserts as much as human beings. The question is more what is not
musical in human beings, and what already is musical in nature.
Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing the
ethologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an
advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual
systems. That is even the opposite of having an advantage; through
becomings-woman, -child, -animal, or -molecular, nature opposes its
power, and the power of music, to the machines of human beings, the roar
of factories and bombers. And it is necessary to reach that point, it is
necessary for the nonmusical sound of the human being to form a block
with the becoming-music of sound, for them to confront and embrace each
other like two wrestlers who can no longer break free from each other’s
grasp, and slide down a sloping line: “Let the choirs represent the
survivors \dots{} Faintly one hears the sound of cicadas. Then the notes of a
lark, followed by the mockingbird. Someone laughs \dots{} A woman sobs \dots{} From
a male a great shout: \emph{WE ARE LOST}! A woman’s voice: WE ARE SAVED!
Staccato cries: Lost! Saved! Lost! Saved!”\footnote{A text by Henry Miller for Varèse, \emph{The Air-Conditioned Nightmare} (New York: New Directions, 1945), pp. 176–177.}

\chapter{11. 1837: Of the Refrain}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-11}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-11}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-46.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Paul Klee, \emph{Twittering Machine}, 1922}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing
under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes
shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The
song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and
stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he
sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip:
it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger
of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s
thread. Or the song of Orpheus.


II. Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to
draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a
limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this,
landmarks and marks of all kinds. This was already true of the previous
case. But now the components are used for organizing a space, not for
the momentary determination of a center. The forces of chaos are kept
outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the
germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. This involves an
activity of selection, elimination and extraction, in order to prevent
the interior forces of the earth from being submerged, to enable them to
resist, or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve
of the space that has been drawn. Sonorous or vocal components are very
important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in
it. A child hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to
hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she
marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and television sets
are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the
neighbor complains when it gets too loud). For sublime deeds like the
foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle,
or better yet walks in a circle as in a children’s dance, combining
rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of
creation as to the differentiated parts of an organism. A mistake in
speed, rhythm, or harmony would be catastrophic because it would bring
back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation.


III. Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets
someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One
opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press
against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As
though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function
of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join
with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth,
hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or
meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along
sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child
and graft themselves onto or begin to bud “lines of drift” with
different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and
sonorities.\footnote{Fernand Deligny, \emph{Voix et Voir, Recherches}, no. 8 (April 1975), on the way in which, among autistic children, a “line of drift” deviates from the customary path and begins to “vibrate,” “toss about,” “yaw.”}


These are not three successive moments in an evolution. They are three
aspects of a single thing, the Refrain (\emph{ritournelle}). They are found
in tales (both horror stories and fairy tales), and in lieder as well.
The refrain has all three aspects, it makes them simultaneous or mixes
them: sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes chaos is an immense
black hole in which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center.
Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable “pace”
(rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one
grafts onto that pace a breakaway from the black hole. Paul Klee
presented these three aspects, and their interlinkage, in a most
profound way. He calls the black hole a “gray point” for pictorial
reasons. The gray point starts out as nonlocalizable, nondimensional
chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled bundle of aberrant lines. Then the
point “jumps over itself” and radiates a dimensional space with
horizontal layers, vertical cross sections, unwritten customary lines, a
whole terrestrial interior force (this force also appears, at a more
relaxed pace, in the atmosphere and in water). The gray point (black
hole) has thus jumped from one state to another, and no longer
represents chaos but the abode or home. Finally, the point launches out
of itself, impelled by wandering centrifugal forces that fan out to the
sphere of the cosmos: one “tries convulsively to fly from the earth, but
at the following level one actually rises above it \dots{} powered by
centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity.”\footnote{Paul Klee, \emph{On Modern Art}, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966), p. 43 [translation modified to agree with the French version cited by the authors]. See Henri Maldiney’s comments in \emph{Regard, parole, espace} (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1973), pp. 149–151.}


The role of the refrain has often been emphasized: it is territorial, a
territorial assemblage. Bird songs: the bird sings to mark its
territory. The Greek modes and Hindu rhythms are themselves territorial,
provincial, regional. The refrain may assume other functions, amorous,
professional or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth
with it; it has a land (sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant;
it has an essential relation to a Natal, a Native. A musical “nome” is a
little tune, a melodic formula that seeks recognition and remains the
bedrock or ground of polyphony (\emph{cantus firmus}). The \emph{nomos} as
customary, unwritten law is inseparable from a distribution of space, a
distribution in space. By that token, it is \emph{ethos}, but the ethos is
also the Abode.\footnote{On the musical nome, the ethos, and the ground or land, notably in polyphony, see Joseph Samson in \emph{Histoire de la musique}, ed. Roland Manuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 1168–1172. One may also refer to the role in Arab music of the “maqām,” which is both a modal type and a melodic formula: Simon Jargy, \emph{La musique arabe} (Paris: PUF, 1971), pp. 55ff.} Sometimes one goes from chaos to the threshold of a
territorial assemblage: directional components, infra-assemblage.
Sometimes one organizes the assemblage: dimensional components,
intra-assemblage. Sometimes one leaves the territorial assemblage for
other assemblages, or for somewhere else entirely: interassemblage,
components of passage or even escape. And all three at once. Forces of
chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each
other and converge in the territorial refrain.


From chaos, \emph{Milieus} and \emph{Rhythms} are born. This is the concern of
very ancient cosmogonies. Chaos is not without its own directional
components, which are its own ecstasies. We have seen elsewhere how all
kinds of milieus, each defined by a component, slide in relation to one
another, over one another. Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a
block of spacetime constituted by the periodic repetition of the
component. Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an
interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an
intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of
energy sources and actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code
being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual
state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the
manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or
conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is
constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only
does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but
the milieus pass into one another, they are essentially communicating.
The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or
intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus’ answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm
have in common is the in-between—between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or
the chaosmos: “\emph{Between} night and day, between that which is
constructed and that which grows naturally, between mutations from the
inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal to
humankind, yet without this series constituting a progression\dots{}” In this
in-between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance
to. Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus.
There is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu
to another, a communication of milieus, coordination between
heterogeneous space-times. Drying up, death, intrusion have rhythm. It
is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter
or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. The
tom-tom is not 1–2, the waltz is not 1, 2, 3, music is not binary or
ternary, but rather forty-seven basic meters, as in Turkish music.
Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of
measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas rhythm is
the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing
transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical; it ties together
critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one milieu to
another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by
heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction. Bachelard is right to say
that “\emph{the link between truly active moments (rhythm) is always effected
on a different plane from the one upon which the action is carried
out}.”\footnote{Gaston Bachelard, \emph{La dialectique de la durée} (Paris: Bovin, 1936), pp. 128–129. Emphasis added.} Rhythm is never on the same plane as that which has rhythm.
Action occurs in a milieu, whereas rhythm is located between two
milieus, or between two intermilieus, on the fence, between night and
day, at dusk, \emph{twilight} or \emph{Zwielicht}, Haecceity. To change milieus,
taking them as you find them: Such is rhythm. Landing, splashdown,
takeoff \dots{} This easily avoids an aporia that threatened to introduce
meter into rhythm, despite all the declarations of intent to the
contrary: How can one proclaim the constituent inequality of rhythm
while at the same time admitting implied vibrations, periodic
repetitions of components? A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a
periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a
difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the
difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless
produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive
meter. This is the “critical solution of the antinomy.”


One case of transcoding is particularly important: when a code is not
content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and
instead takes or receives fragments of a different code as such. The
first case pertains to the leaf-water relation, the second to the
spider-fly relation. It has often been noted that the spider web implies
that there are sequences of the fly’s own code in the spider’s code; it
is as though the spider had a fly in its head, a fly “motif,” a fly
“refrain.” The implication may be reciprocal, as with the wasp and the
orchid, or the snapdragon and the bumblebee. Jakob von Uexküll has
elaborated an admirable theory of transcodings. He sees the components
as melodies in counterpoint, each of which serves as a motif for
another: Nature as music.\footnote{Jakob Johann von Uexküll, \emph{Mondes animaux et monde humain} (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).} Whenever there is transcoding, we can be
sure that there is not a simple addition, but the constitution of a new
plane, as of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, surplus value
of passage or bridging. The two cases, however, are never pure; they are
in reality mixed (for example, the relation of the leaf, this time not
to water in general but to rain).


Still, we do not yet have a \emph{Territory}, which is not a milieu, not even
an additional milieu, nor a rhythm or passage between milieus. The
territory is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that
“territorializes” them. The territory is the product of a
territorialization of milieus and rhythms. It amounts to the same thing
to ask when milieus and rhythms become territorialized, and what the
difference is between a nonterritorial animal and a territorial animal.
A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes
them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions). It is built
from aspects or portions of milieus. It itself has an exterior milieu,
an interior milieu, an intermediary milieu, and an annexed milieu. It
has the interior zone of a residence or shelter, the exterior zone of
its domain, more or less retractable limits or membranes, intermediary
or even neutralized zones, and energy reserves or annexes. It is by
essence marked by “indexes,” which may be components taken from any of
the milieus: materials, organic products, skin or membrane states,
energy sources, action-perception condensates. There is a territory
precisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming
dimensional instead, when they cease to be functional to become
expressive. There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness.
What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression
(qualities). Take the example of color in birds or fish: color is a
membrane state associated with interior hormonal states, but it remains
functional and transitory as long as it is tied to a type of action
(sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes expressive, on the other
hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a spatial range that
make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a
signature.\footnote{“Their glorious dress is constant\dots{}. The coloring of coral fish is distributed in large, sharply contrasting areas of the body. This is quite different from the color patterns not only of most fresh-water fish but of nearly all less aggressive and less territorial fish\dots{}. Like the colors of the coral fish, the song of the nightingale signals from a distance to all members of its species that a territory has found an owner.” Konrad Lorenz, \emph{On Aggression}, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 19–20.} The question is not whether color resumes its functions
or fulfills new ones in the territory. It is clear that it does, but
this reorganization of functions implies first of all that the component
under consideration has become expressive and that its meaning, from
this standpoint, is to mark a territory. The same species of birds may
have colored and uncolored representatives; the colored birds have a
territory, whereas the all-white ones are gregarious. We know what role
urine and excrement play in marking, but territorial excrement, for
example, in the rabbit, has a particular odor owing to specialized anal
glands. Many monkeys, when serving as guards, expose their brightly
colored sexual organs: the penis becomes a rhythmic and expressive
color-carrier that marks the limits of the territory.\footnote{Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, \emph{Ethology}, trans. Erich Klinghammer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975): on monkeys, p. 487; on rabbits, p. 346; on birds, p. 171: “Zebra finches with colorful plumage maintain a certain distance from one another, while all-white birds of the same species perch much closer together.”} A milieu
component becomes both a quality and a property, \emph{quale} and \emph{proprium}.
It has been remarked how quick this becoming is in many cases, the
rapidity with which a territory is constituted at the same time as
expressive qualities are selected or produced. The brown stagemaker
(\emph{Scenopoeetes dentirostris}) lays down landmarks each morning by
dropping leaves it picks from its tree, and then turning them upside
down so the paler underside stands out against the dirt: inversion
produces a matter of expression.\footnote{W. H. Thorpe, \emph{Learning and Instinct in Animals} (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 364 (Fig. 2).}


The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is
the mark that makes the territory. Functions in a territory are not
primary; they presuppose a territory-producing expressiveness. In this
sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, are
products of territorialization. Territorialization is an act of rhythm
that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become
qualitative. The marking of a territory is dimensional, but it is not a
meter, it is a rhythm. It retains the most general characteristic of
rhythm, which is to be inscribed on a different plane than that of its
actions. But now the distinction between the two planes is between
territorializing expressions and territorialized functions. That is why
we cannot accept a thesis like Lorenz’s, \emph{which tends to make
aggressiveness the basis of the territory}: the territory would then be
the product of the phylogenetic evolution of an instinct of aggression,
starting at the point where that instinct became intraspecific, was
turned against the animal’s own kind. A territorial animal would direct
its aggressiveness against members of its own species; the species would
gain the selective advantage of distributing its members throughout a
space where each would have its own place.\footnote{Lorenz has a constant tendency to present territoriality as an effect of intraspecific aggression; see \emph{On Agression}, pp. 38–39, 42–43, 53–54, 161–162.} This ambiguous thesis,
which has dangerous political overtones, seems to us to have little
foundation. It is obvious that the function of aggression changes pace
when it becomes intraspecific. but this reorganization of the function,
rather than explaining the territory, presupposes it. there are numerous
reorganizations within the territory, which also affect sexuality,
hunting, etc.; there are even new functions, such as building a place to
live. These functions are organized or created only because they are
**territorialized*, and not the other way around. The T factor, the
territorializing factor, must be sought elsewhere: precisely in the
becoming-expressive of rhythm or melody, in other words, in the
emergence or proper qualities (color, odor, sound, silhouette\dots{}).


Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the
territory a result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a
boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual,
is derived from that even when it is in the service of war and
oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is
fundamentally \emph{poster}, \emph{placard}. As Lorenz says, coral fish are
posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive;
expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily
appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being.\footnote{On the aesthetic and vital primacy of “having,” see Gabriel Tarde, \emph{L’opposition universelle} (Paris: Alcan, 1897).} Not
in the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense
that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that
carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the
signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject,
but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not
the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain.
Abodes have proper names, and are inspired. “The inspired and their
abodes\dots{}”; it is with the abode that inspiration arises. No sooner do I
like a color that I make it my standard or placard. One puts one’s
signature on something just as one plants one’s flag on a piece of land.
A high school supervisor stamped all the leaves strewn about the school
yard and then put them back in their places. He had signed. Territorial
marks are readymades. And what is called \emph{art brut}
is not at all pathological or
primitive; it is merely this constitution, this freeing, of matters of
expression in the movement of territoriality: the base or ground of art.
Take anything and make it a matter of expression. The stagemaker
practices \emph{art brut}. Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up
their own posters. Of course, from this standpoint art is not the
privilege of human beings. Messiaen is right in saying that many birds
are not only virtuosos but artists, above all in their territorial songs
(if a robber “improperly wishes to occupy a spot which doesn’t belong to
it, the true owner sings and sings so well that the predator goes away\dots{}.
If the robber sings better than the true proprietor, the proprietor
yields his place”).\footnote{Details on Messiaen’s conceptions of bird song, his evaluation of its aesthetic qualities, and his methods for both reproducing it and using it as a material are to be found in Claude Samuel, \emph{Conversations with Olivier Messiaen}, trans. Felix Aprahamian (London: Stainer and Bell, 1976), and in Antoine Goléa, \emph{Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen} (Paris: Julliard, 1961). In particular, on why Messiaen does not use a tape recorder or sonograph as ornithologists usually do, see Samuel, pp. 61–63.} The refrain is rhythm and melody that have been
territorialized because they have become expressive—and have become
expressive because they are territorializing. We are not going in
circles. What we wish to say is that there is a self-movement of
expressive qualities. Expressiveness is not reducible to the immediate
effects of an impulse triggering an action in a milieu: effects of that
kind are subjective impressions or emotions rather than expressions (as,
for example, the temporary color a freshwater fish takes on under a
given impulse). On the other hand, expressive qualities, the colors of
the coral fish, for example, are auto-objective, in other words, find an
objectivity in the territory they draw.


What is this objective movement? What does a matter \emph{do} as a matter of
expression? It is first of all a poster or placard, but that is not all
it is. It merely takes that route. The signature becomes style. In
effect, \emph{expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting
relations with one another that “express” the relation of the territory
they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of
circumstances}. To express is not to depend upon; there is an autonomy
of expression. On the one hand, expressive qualities entertain internal
relations with one another that constitute \emph{territorial motifs};
sometimes these motifs loom above the internal impulses, sometimes they
are superposed upon them, sometimes they ground one impulse in another,
sometimes they pass and cause a passage from one impulse to another,
sometimes they insert themselves between them—but they are not
themselves “pulsed.” Sometimes these nonpulsed motifs arise in a fixed
form, or seem to arise that way, but at other times the same ones, or
others, take on variable speed and articulation; it is as much their
variability as their fixity that makes them independent of the drives
they combine or neutralize. “We know that our dogs go through motions of
smelling, seeking, chasing, biting, and shaking to death with equal
enthusiasm whether they are hungry or not.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Lorenz, \emph{On Aggression}, p. 87.]} Another example is the
dance of the stickleback. Its zigzag is a motif in which the zig is tied
to an aggressive drive toward the partner, and the zag to a sexual drive
toward the nest; yet the zig and the zag are accented, or even oriented,
differently. On the other hand, expressive qualities also entertain
other internal relations that produce \emph{territorial counterpoints}: this
refers to the manner in which they constitute points in the territory
that place the circumstances of the external milieu in counterpoint. For
example, an enemy approaches or suddenly appears, or rain starts to
fall, the sun rises, the sun sets \dots{} Here again, the points or
counterpoints are autonomous in their fixity or variability in relation
to the circumstances of the exterior milieu whose relation to the
territory they express. For this relation can be given without the
circumstances being given, just as the relation to the impulses can be
given without the impulse being given. And even when the impulses and
circumstances are given, the relation is prior to what it places in
relation. Relations between matters of expression express relations of
the territory to internal impulses and external circumstances: they have
an autonomy within this very expression. In truth, territorial motifs
and counterpoints explore potentialities of the interior or exterior
milieu. Ethologists have grouped these phenomena under the concept of
“ritualization” and have demonstrated the link between animal rituals
and territory. But this word is not necessarily appropriate for these
nonpulsed motifs and nonlocalized counterpoints, since it accounts for
neither their variability nor their fixity. It is not one \emph{or} the
other, fixity or variability; certain motifs or points are fixed only if
others are variable, or else they are fixed on one occasion and variable
on another.


We should say, rather, that territorial motifs form \emph{rhythmic faces or
characters}, and that territorial counterpoints form \emph{melodic
landscapes}. There is a rhythmic character when we find that we no
longer have the simple situation of a rhythm associated with a
character, subject, or impulse. The rhythm itself is now the character
in its entirety; as such, it may remain constant, or it may be augmented
or diminished by the addition or subtraction of sounds or always
increasing or decreasing durations, and by an amplification or
elimination bringing death or resuscitation, appearance or
disappearance. Similarly, the melodic landscape is no longer a melody
associated with a landscape; the melody itself is a sonorous landscape
in counterpoint to a virtual landscape. That is how we get beyond the
placard stage: although each expressive quality, each matter of
expression considered in itself, is a placard or poster, the analysis of
them is nevertheless abstract. Expressive qualities entertain variable
or constant relations with one another (that is what matters of
expression \emph{do}); they no longer constitute placards that mark a
territory, but motifs and counterpoints that express the relation of the
territory to interior impulses or exterior circumstances, whether or not
they are given. No longer signatures, but a style. What objectively
distinguishes a musician bird from a nonmusician bird is precisely this
aptitude for motifs and counterpoints that, if they are variable, or
even when they are constant, make matters of expression something other
than a poster—a style—since they articulate rhythm and harmonize melody.
We can then say that the musician bird goes from sadness to joy or that
it greets the rising sun or endangers itself in order to sing or sings
better than another, etc. None of these formulations carries the
slightest risk of anthropomorphism, or implies the slightest
interpretation. It is instead a kind of geomorphism. The relation to joy
and sadness, the sun, danger, perfection, is given in the motif and
counterpoint, even if the term of each of these relations is not given.
In the motif and the counterpoint, the sun, joy or sadness, danger,
become sonorous, rhythmic, or melodic.\footnote{On all of these points, see Claude Samuel, \emph{Conversations}, chapter 4. On the “rhythmic character,” see pp. 36–39.}


Human music also goes this route. For Swann, the art lover, Vinteuil’s
little phrase often acts as a placard associated with the Bois de
Boulogne and the face and character of Odette: as if it reassured Swann
that the Bois de Boulogne was indeed his territory, and Odette his
possession. There is already something quite artistic in this way of
hearing music. Debussy criticized Wagner, comparing his leitmotifs to
signposts signaling the hidden circumstances of a situation, the secret
impulses of a character. The criticism is accurate, on one level or at
certain moments. But as the work develops, the motifs increasingly enter
into conjunction, conquer \emph{their own plane}, become autonomous from the
dramatic action, impulses, and situations, and independent of characters
and landscapes; they themselves become melodic landscapes and rhythmic
characters continually enriching their internal relations. They may then
remain relatively constant, or on the contrary grow or diminish, expand
or contract, vary in the speed at which they unfold: in both cases, they
are no longer pulsed and localized, and even the constants are in the
service of variation; the more provisory they are, the more they display
the continuous variation they resist, the more rigid they become.\footnote{Pierre Boulez, “Le temps re-cherché,” in \emph{Das Rheingold Programmheft}, vol. 1 (Bayreuth, 1976), pp. 5–15.}
Proust was among the first to underscore this life of the Wagnerian
motif. Instead of the motif being tied to a character who appears, the
appearance of the motif itself constitutes a rhythmic character in “the
plenitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many strains, each of
which is a being.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Proust, \emph{The Captive}, vol. 3 of \emph{Remembrance of Things Past}, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 156. Translation modified.]} It is not by chance that the apprenticeship of
the \emph{Recherche} pursues an analogous discovery in relation to Vinteuil’s
little phrases: they do not refer to a landscape; they carry and develop
within themselves landscapes that do not exist on the outside (the white
sonata and red septet\dots{}). The discovery of the properly melodic landscape
and the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it
ceases to be a silent painting on a signboard. This may not be art’s
last word, but art went that route, as did the bird: motifs and
counterpoints that form an autodevelopment, in other words, a style. The
interiorization of the melodic or sonorous landscape finds its exemplary
form in Liszt and that of the rhythmic character in Wagner. More
generally, the lied is the musical art of the landscape, the most
pictorial, impressionist form of music. But the two poles are so closely
bound that in the lied as well Nature appears as a rhythmic character
with infinite transformations.


The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings
of the same species: Mark your distance. What is mine is first of all my
distance; I possess only distances. Don’t anybody touch me, I growl if
anyone enters my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a
relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at
a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door. \emph{Mannerism}: the
ethos is both abode and manner, homeland and style. This is evident in
territorial dances termed baroque or mannerist, in which each pose, each
movement, establishes a distance of this kind (sarabands, allemandes,
bourrees, gavottes\dots{}).\footnote{On mannerism and chaos, baroque dances, and the relation of schizophrenia to mannerism and dance, see Evelyne Sznycer, “Droit de suite baroque,” in \emph{Schizophrénie et art}, ed. Leo Navratil (Paris: Ed. Complexe, 1978).} There is a whole art of poses, postures,
silhouettes, steps, and voices. Two schizophrenics converse or stroll
according to laws of boundary and territory that may escape us. How very
important it is, when chaos threatens, to draw an inflatable, portable
territory. If need be, I’ll put my territory on my own body, I’ll
territorialize my body: the house of the tortoise, the hermitage of the
crab, but also tattoos that make the body a territory. Critical distance
is not a meter, it is a rhythm. But the rhythm, precisely, is caught up
in a becoming that sweeps up the distances between characters, making
them rhythmic characters that are themselves more or less distant, more
or less combinable (intervals). Two animals of the same sex and species
confront each other: the rhythm of the first one “expands” when it
approaches its territory or the center of its territory; the rhythm of
the second contracts when it moves away from its territory. Between the
two, at the boundaries, an oscillational constant is established: an
active rhythm, a passively endured rhythm, and a witness rhythm?\footnote{Lorenz, \emph{On Aggression}, pp. 39–40. On the three rhythmic personages defined respectively as active, passive, and witness, see Messiaen and Goléa, \emph{Rencontres}, pp. 90–91.} Or
else the animal opens its territory a crack for a partner of the
opposite sex: a complex rhythmic character forms through duets,
antiphonal or alternating singing, as in the case of African shrikes.
Furthermore, we must simultaneously take into account two aspects of the
territory: it not only ensures and regulates the coexistence of members
of the same species by keeping them apart, but makes possible the
coexistence of a maximum number of different species in the same milieu
by specializing them. Members of the same species enter into rhythmic
characters at the same time as different species enter into melodic
landscapes; for the landscapes are peopled by characters and the
characters belong to landscapes. An example is Messiaen’s
**Chronochromie*, with its eighteen bird songs forming autonomous
rhythmic characters and simultaneously realizing an extraordinary
landscape in complex counterpoint, with invented or implicit chords.


Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if
art ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated
conditions. It has often been noted that human art was for a long time
bound up with work and rites of a different nature. Saying this,
however, perhaps has no more weight than saying that art begins with
human beings. For it is true that a territory has two notable effects:
**a reorganization of functions and a regrouping of forces*. On the one
hand, when functional activities are territorialized they necessarily
change pace (the creation of new functions such as building a dwelling,
or the transformation of old functions, as when aggressiveness changes
nature and becomes intraspecific). This is like a nascent theme of
specialization or professionalism: if the territorial refrain so often
passes into professional refrains, it is because professions assume that
various activities are performed in the same milieu, and that the same
activity has no other agents in the same territory. Professional
refrains intersect in the milieu, like merchants’ cries, but each marks
a territory within which the same activity cannot be performed, nor the
same cry ring out. In animals as in human beings, there are rules of
critical distance for competition: my stretch of sidewalk. In short, a
territorialization of functions is the condition for their emergence as
“occupations” or “trades.” Thus intraspecific or specialized
aggressiveness is necessarily a territorialized aggressiveness; it does
not explain the territory since it itself derives from it. It is
immediately apparent that all activities within the territory adopt a
new practical pace. But that is no reason to conclude that art in itself
does not exist here, for it is present in the territorializing factor
that is the necessary condition for the emergence of the work-function.


The situation is the same if we consider the other effect of
territorialization. That other effect, which relates not to occupations
but to rites and religions, consists in this: the territory groups all
the forces of the different milieus together in a single sheaf
constituted by the forces of the earth. The attribution of all the
diffuse forces to the earth as receptacle or base takes place only at
the deepest level of each territory. “The surrounding milieu was
experienced as a unity; it is very hard to distinguish in these primal
intuitions what belongs properly to the earth from what is merely
manifested through the earth: mountains, forests, water,
vegetation.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Mircea Eliade, \emph{Patterns in Comparative Religion}, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: World, 1963), pp. 242–243.]} The forces of air and water, bird and fish, thus
become forces of the earth. Moreover, although in extension the
territory separates the interior forces of the earth from the exterior
forces of chaos, the same does not occur in “intension,” in the
dimension of depth, where the two types of force clasp and are wed in a
battle whose only criterion and stakes is the earth. There is always a
place, a tree or grove, in the territory where all the forces come
together in a hand-to-hand combat of energies. The earth is this close
embrace.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: This “close embrace” of energies recalls Proust’s description of Vinteuil’s little phrase; \emph{The Captive}, p. 262.]} This intense center is simultaneously inside the
territory, and outside several territories that converge on it at the
end of an immense pilgrimage (hence the ambiguities of the “natal”).
Inside or out, the territory is linked to this intense center, which is
like the unknown homeland, terrestrial source of all forces friendly and
hostile, where everything is decided.\footnote{On “the primary intuition of the earth as a religious form” (p. 242), see Eliade, \emph{Patterns in Comparative Religion}, pp. 245ff; on the center of the territory, see pp. 374ff. Eliade makes it clear that the center is simultaneously outside the territory, very difficult to attain, and inside the territory, within our immediate reach.} So we must once again
acknowledge that religion, which is common to human beings and animals,
occupies territory only because it depends on the raw aesthetic and
territorializing factor as its necessary condition. It is this factor
that at the same time organizes the functions of the milieu into
occupations and binds the forces of chaos in rites and religions, which
are forces of the earth. \emph{Territorializing marks simultaneously develop
into motifs and counterpoints, and reorganize functions and regroup
forces}. But by virtue of this, the territory already unleashes
something that will surpass it.


We always come back to this “moment”: the becoming-expressive of rhythm,
the emergence of expressive proper qualities, the formation of matters
of expression that develop into motifs and counterpoints. We therefore
need a notion, even an apparently negative one, that can grasp this
fictional or raw moment. The essential thing is the disjunction
noticeable between the code and the territory. The territory arises in a
free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is
determined differently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is
perpetual transcoding between milieus; the territory, on the other hand,
seems to form at the level of a certain \emph{decoding}. Biologists have
stressed the importance of these determined margins, which are not to be
confused with mutations, in other words, changes internal to the code:
here, it is a question of duplicated genes or extra chromosomes that are
not inside the genetic code, are free of function, and offer a free
matter for variation.\footnote{Biologists have often made a distinction between two factors of transformation: those of the mutation type, and processes of isolation or separation, which may be genetic, geographical, or even psychical. Territoriality would be a factor of the second type. See Lucien Cuénot, \emph{L’espèce} (Paris: G. Doin, 1936).} But it is very unlikely that this kind of
matter could create new species independently of mutations, unless it
were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiplying the
interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialization is
precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a
single species and gives the separate representatives of that species
the possibility of differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction
between the territory and the code that the territory can indirectly
induce new species. Wherever territoriality appears, it establishes an
intraspecific \emph{critical distance} between members of the same species;
it is by virtue of its own disjunction in relation to \emph{specific
differences} that it becomes an oblique, indirect means of
differentiation. From all of these standpoints, decoding appears as the
“negative” of the territory, and the most obvious distinction between
territorial animals and nonterritorial animals is that the former are
much less coded than the latter. We have said enough bad things about
the territory that we can now evaluate all the creations that tend
toward it, occur within it, and result or will result from it.


We have gone from forces of chaos to forces of the earth. From milieus
to territory. From functional rhythms to the becoming-expressive of
rhythm. From phenomena of transcoding to phenomena of decoding. From
milieu functions to territorialized functions. It is less a question of
evolution than of passage, bridges and tunnels. We saw that milieus
continually pass into one another. Now we see that the milieus pass into
the territory. The expressive qualities we term aesthetic are certainly
not “pure” or symbolic qualities but proper qualities, in other words,
appropriative qualities, passages from milieu components to territory
components. The territory itself is a place of passage. The territory is
the first assemblage, the first thing to constitute an assemblage; the
assemblage is fundamentally territorial. But how could it not already be
in the process of passing into something else, into other assemblages?
That is why we could not talk about the constitution of the territory
without also talking about its internal organization. We could not
describe the infra-assemblage (posters or placards) without also
discussing the intra-assemblage (motifs and counterpoints). Nor can we
say anything about the intra-assemblage without already being on the
path to other assemblages, or elsewhere. The passage of the Refrain. The
refrain moves in the direction of the territorial assemblage and lodges
itself there or leaves. In a general sense, \emph{we call a refrain any
aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops
into territorial motifs and landscapes} (there are optical, gestural,
motor, etc., refrains). In the narrow sense, we speak of a refrain when
an assemblage is sonorous or “dominated” by sound—but why do we assign
this apparent privilege to sound?



\bigskip


We are now in the intra-assemblage. Its organization is very rich and
complex. It includes not only the territorial assemblage but also
assembled, territorialized functions. Take the Troglodytidae, the wren
family: the male takes possession of his territory and produces a “music
box refrain” as a warning to possible intruders; he builds his own nests
in his territory, sometimes as many as a dozen; when a female arrives,
he sits in front of a nest, invites her to visit, hangs his wings, and
lowers the intensity of his song, reduced to a mere trill.\footnote{Paul Géroudet, \emph{Les passereaux}, 3 vols. (Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1951–1957), vol. 2, pp. 88–94.} It seems
that the nesting function is highly territorialized, since the nests are
prepared by the male alone before the arrival of the female, who only
visits and completes them; the “courtship” function is also
territorialized, but to a lesser degree, since the territorial refrain
becomes seductive by changing in intensity. All kinds of heterogeneous
elements show up in the intra-assemblage: not only the assemblage marks
that group materials, colors, odors, sounds, postures, etc., but also
the various elements of given assembled behaviors that enter into a
motif. For example, a display behavior is composed of a dance, clicking
of the beak, an exhibition of colors, a posture with neck outstretched,
cries, smoothing of the feathers, bows, a refrain \dots{} The first question
to be asked is what holds these territorializing marks, territorial
motifs, and territorialized functions together in the same
intra-assemblage. This is a question of \emph{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.


But another question seems to interrupt or cut across the first one. For
in many cases, a territorialized, assembled function acquires enough
independence to constitute a new assemblage, one that is more or less
deterritorialized, en route to deterritorialization. There is no need to
effectively leave the territory to go this route; but what just a minute
ago was a constituted function in the territorial assemblage has become
the constituting element of another assemblage, the element of passage
to another assemblage. As in courtly love, a color ceases to be
territorial and enters a “courtship” assemblage. The territorial
assemblage opens onto the courtship assemblage, which is a social
assemblage that has gained autonomy. That is what happens when it is
specifically the sexual partner or the members of a group that are
recognized, rather than the territory: The partner is then said to be a
**Tier mit der Heimvalenz*, “an animal with home value.” There is
therefore a distinction to be made between milieu groups and couples
(without individual recognition), territorial groups and couples (in
which there is only recognition inside the territory), and finally
social groups and love couples (when there is recognition independent of
place).\footnote{In \emph{On Aggression}, Lorenz makes a clear distinction between “anonymous flocks” such as schools of fish, which form milieu blocks; “local groups,” where recognition occurs only inside the territory and, at its strongest, between “neighbors”; and finally, societies founded on an autonomous “bond.”} Courtship, or the group, is no longer a part of the
territorial assemblage; a courtship or group assemblage takes on
autonomy—even though it may stay inside the territory. Conversely, in
the new assemblage there is a reterritorialization on the member of the
couple or members of the group that have-the-value-of (valence). This
opening of the assemblage onto other assemblages can be analyzed in
detail, and varies widely. \#conclusion-grass <class>For<\Slash{}class> example,
when the male does not make the nest and confines himself to
transporting materials or mimicking the construction of a nest (as in
Australian grass finches), he either courts the female holding a piece
of stubble in his beak (genus \emph{Bathilda}), uses the grass stem only in
the initial stages of courtship or even beforehand (genera \emph{Aidemosyne}
and \emph{Lonchura}), or pecks at the grass without offering it (genus
**Emblema*).\footnote{K. Immelmann, \emph{Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Biologic australischer Prachtflnken, Zoologische Jahrbücher; Abteilung für Systematik, Ökologie und Geographic de Tiere}, 90 (1962).} It could always be said that these “grass stem”
behaviors are merely archaisms, or vestiges of nesting behavior. But the
notion of behavior itself proves inadequate to this assemblage. For when
the nest is no longer made by the male, nesting ceases to be a component
of the territorial assemblage—it takes wing, so to speak, from the
territory; furthermore, courtship, which now precedes nesting, itself
becomes a relatively autonomous assemblage. In addition, the matter of
expression, “grass stem,” acts as a component of passage between the
territorial assemblage and the courtship assemblage. The fact that the
grass stem has an increasingly rudimentary function in certain species,
the fact that it tends to cancel out in the series under consideration,
is not enough to make it a vestige, much less a symbol. A matter of
expression is never a vestige or a symbol. The grass stem is a
deterritorialized component, or one en route to deterritorialization. It
is neither an archaism nor a transitional or part-object. It is an
operator, a vector. It is an \emph{assemblage converter}. The stem cancels
out precisely because it is a component of passage from one assemblage
to another. This viewpoint is confirmed by the fact that if the stem
cancels out, another relay component replaces it or assumes greater
importance, namely, the refrain, which is not only territorial but
becomes amorous and social, and changes accordingly.\footnote{Eibl-Eibesfeldt, \emph{Ethology}, p. 225: “Carrying nesting material for nest building evolved into the male courtship actions using grass stems. This was again secondarily reduced in some species and became rudimentary, while at the same time the song, which originally served the function of staking out a territory, also underwent a change in function. These animals are gregarious and are not really territorial. Instead of courting with grass stems, these males sing softly while sitting next to the females.” Eibl-Eibesfeldt, however, interprets the grass-stem behavior as a vestige.} The question
of why, in the constitution of new assemblages, the sound component
“refrain” has a stronger valence than the gestural component “grass
stem” can be considered only later on. The important thing for now is to
note this formation of new assemblages within the territorial
assemblage, and this movement from the intra-assemblage to
interassemblages by means of components of passage and relay: An
innovative opening of the territory onto the female, or the group.
Selective pressure proceeds by way of interassemblages. It is as though
forces of deterritorialization affected the territory itself, causing us
to pass from the territorial assemblage to other types of assemblages
(courtship or sexuality assemblages, group or social assemblages). The
grass stem and the refrain are two agents of these forces, two agents of
deterritorialization.


The territorial assemblage continually passes into other assemblages.
Likewise, the infra-assemblage is inseparable from the intra-assemblage,
as is the intra-assemblage from interassemblages; yet these passages are
not necessary but rather take place “on a case-by-case basis.” The
reason is simple: the intra-assemblage, the territorial assemblage,
territorializes functions and forces (sexuality, aggressiveness,
gregariousness, etc.), and in the process of territorializing them,
transforms them. But these territorialized functions and forces can
suddenly take on an autonomy that makes them swing over into other
assemblages, compose other deterritorialized assemblages. In the
intra-assemblage, sexuality may appear as a territorialized function,
but it can just as easily draw a line of deterritorialization that
describes another assemblage; there are therefore quite variable
relations between sexuality and the territory, as if sexuality were
keeping “its distance.” Profession, trade, and specialty imply
territorialized activities, but they can also take wing from the
territory, building a new assemblage around themselves, and between
professions. A territorial or territorialized component may set about
budding, producing: this is the case for the refrain, so much so that we
should perhaps call all cases of this kind refrains. This ambiguity
between the territory and deterritorialization is the ambiguity of the
Natal. It is understood much more clearly if it is borne in mind that
the territory has an intense center at its profoundest depths; but as we
have seen, this intense center can be located outside the territory, at
the point of convergence of very different and very distant territories.
The Natal is outside. We may cite a certain number of troubling and
well-known, more or less mysterious, cases illustrating prodigious
takeoffs from the territory, displaying a vast movement of
deterritorialization directly plugged into the territories and
permeating them through and through: (1) pilgrimages to the source, as
among salmon; (2) supernumerary assemblies, such as those of locusts or
chaffinches, etc. (tens of millions of chaffinches near Thoune in
1950–1951); (3) magnetic or solar-guided migrations; (4) long marches,
such as those of the lobsters.\footnote{See \emph{L’Odyssée sous-marine de l’équipe Cousteau}, film no. 36, \emph{La marche des langoustes} (L. R. A.), commentary by Cousteau-Diolé: spiny lobsters along the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula sometimes leave their territories. They assemble, at first in small groups, before the first winter storm, and before any sign detectable by human instruments. When the storm comes, they form long march processions, in single file, with a leader that is periodically relieved and a rearguard (the speed of the march is five-eighths of a mile per hour, for sixty miles or more). This migration does not seem to be associated with egg laying, which does not take place until six months later. Hernnkind, a lobster specialist, hypothesizes that this is a “vestige” from the last ice age (more than 10,000 years ago). Cousteau leans toward a more current interpretation, even mentioning the possibility that it is a premonition of a new ice age. The factual issue is that in this exceptional case the lobsters’ territorial assemblage opens onto a social assemblage, and that this social assemblage is connected to cosmic forces, or, as Cousteau says, “pulsations of the earth.” But “the enigma remains entirely unsolved,” all the more so because this lobster procession occasions a slaughter by fishermen, and also because lobsters cannot be tagged since they shed their shells.}


Whatever the causes of each of these movements, it is clear that the
nature of the movement is different. It is no longer adequate to say
that there is interassemblage, passage from a territorial assemblage to
another type of assemblage; rather, we should say that one leaves all
assemblages behind, that one exceeds the capacities of any possible
assemblage, entering another plane. In effect, there is no longer a
milieu movement or rhythm, nor a territorialized or territorializing
movement or rhythm; there is something of the Cosmos in these more ample
movements. The localization mechanisms are still extremely precise, but
the localization has become cosmic. These are no longer territorialized
forces bundled together as forces of the earth; they are the liberated
or regained forces of a deterritorialized Cosmos. In migration, the sun
is no longer the terrestrial sun reigning over a territory, even an
aerial one; it is the celestial sun of the Cosmos, as in the two
Jerusalems, the Apocalypse. Leaving aside these two grandiose cases
where deterritorialization becomes absolute while losing nothing of its
precision (because it weds cosmic variables), we must remark that the
territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterritorialization
that are relative and may even occur in place, by which one passes from
the intra-assemblage to interassemblages, without, however, leaving the
territory or issuing from the assemblages in order to wed the Cosmos. A
territory is always en route to an at least potential
deterritorialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a
reterritorialization (something that “has-the-value-of” home). We saw
that the territory constituted itself on a margin of decoding affecting
the milieu; we now see that there is a margin of deterritorialization
affecting the territory itself. There is a series of unclaspings. The
territory is inseparable from certain coefficients of
deterritorialization (which can be evaluated in each case) that place
the relations of each territorialized function to the territory in
variation, as well as the relations of the territory to each
deterritorialized assemblage. It is the same “thing” that appears first
as a territorialized function taken up in the intra-assemblage, and
again as a deterritorialized or autonomous assemblage, as an
interassemblage.


Refrains could accordingly be classified as follows: (1) territorial
refrains that seek, mark, assemble a territory; (2) territorialized
function refrains that assume a special function in the assemblage (the
Lullaby that territorializes the child’s slumber, the Lover’s Refrain
that territorializes the sexuality of the loved one, the Professional
Refrain that territorializes trades and occupations, the Merchant
Refrain that territorializes distribution and products); (3) the same,
when they mark new assemblages, pass into new assemblages by means of
deterritorialization-reterritorialization (nursery rhymes are a very
complicated example: they are territorial refrains that are sung
differently from neighborhood to neighborhood, sometimes from one street
to the next; they distribute game roles and functions within the
territorial assemblage; but they also cause the territory to pass into
the game assemblage, which tends to become autonomous);\footnote{The best book of nursery rhymes, and on nursery rhymes, seems to be \emph{Les complines de langue française}, with the commentary by editors Jean Beaucomot, Franck Guibat, et al. (Paris: Seghers, 1970). The territorial character of nursery rhymes appears in such privileged examples as “Pimpanicaille,” two distinct versions of which exist in Gruyeres on “the two sides of the street” (pp. 27–28); but it is a nursery rhyme in the strict sense only when there is a distribution of specialized roles in a game, and the formation of an autonomous game assemblage that reorganizes the territory.} (4)
refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the
territory, or in order to go outside it (these are refrains of
confrontation or departure that sometimes bring on a movement of
absolute deterritorialization: “Goodbye, I’m leaving and I won’t look
back.” At infinity, these refrains must rejoin the songs of the
Molecules, the newborn wailing of the fundamental Elements, as Millikan
put it. They cease to be terrestrial, becoming cosmic: when the
religious Nome blooms and dissolves in a molecular pantheist Cosmos,
when the singing of the birds is replaced by combinations of water,
wind, clouds, and fog. “Outside, the wind and the rain\dots{}” The Cosmos as
an immense deterritorialized refrain).


The problem of \emph{consistency} concerns the manner in which the components
of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the
manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of
passage and relay. It may even be the case that consistency finds the
totality of its conditions only on a properly cosmic plane, where all
the disparate and heterogeneous elements are convoked. However, from the
moment heterogeneities hold together in an assemblage or
interassemblages a problem of consistency is posed, in terms of
coexistence or succession, and both simultaneously. Even in a
territorial assemblage, it may be the most deterritorialized component,
the deterritorializing vector, in other words, the refrain, that assures
the consistency of the territory. If we ask the general question, “What
holds things together?”, the clearest, easiest answer seems to be
provided by a formalizing, linear, hierarchized, centralized
**arborescent* model. Take Tinbergen’s schema, which presents a coded
linkage of spatiotemporal forms in the central nervous system: a higher
functional center goes automatically into operation and releases an
appetitive behavior in search of specific stimuli (the migrational
center); through the intermediary of the stimulus, a second center that
had been inhibited up to this point is freed and releases a new
appetitive behavior (the territorial center); then other subordinate
centers are activated, centers of fighting, nesting, courtship \dots{} until
stimuli are found that release the corresponding executive acts.\footnote{Nikolaas Tinbergen, \emph{The Study of Instinct} (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969).}
This kind of representation, however, is constructed of oversimplified
binarities: inhibition-release, innate-acquired, etc. Ethologists have a
great advantage over ethnologists: they did not fall into the structural
danger of dividing an undivided “terrain” into forms of kinship,
politics, economics, myth, etc. The ethologists have retained the
integrality of a certain undivided “terrain.” But by orienting it along
the axes of inhibition-release, innate-acquired, they risk reintroducing
souls and centers at each locus and stage of linkage. That is why even
the authors who stress the role of the peripheral and the acquired at
the level of releasing stimuli do not truly overturn the linear
arborescent schema, even if they reverse the direction of the arrows.


It seems more important to us to underline a certain number of factors
liable to suggest an entirely different schema, one favoring rhizomatic,
rather than arborified, functioning, and no longer operating by these
dualisms. First of all, what is called a functional center brings into
play not only a localization but also a distribution of an entire
population of neurons selected from throughout the central nervous
system, as in a “cable network.” This being the case, in considering the
system as a whole we should speak less of automatism of a higher center
than of coordination between centers, and of the cellular groupings or
molecular populations that perform these couplings: there is no form or
correct structure imposed from without or above but rather an
articulation from within, as if oscillating molecules, oscillators,
passed from one heterogeneous center to another, if only for the purpose
of assuring the dominance of one among them.\footnote{On the one hand, the experiments of W. R. Hess have shown that there is not a cerebral center but instead points that are concentrated in one zone and disseminated in another, and are capable of inciting the same effect; conversely, the effect may change according to the duration and intensity of the excitation of a point. On the other hand, E. von Hoist’s experiments on “deafferented” fish demonstrate the importance of central nervous coordination in fin rhythms; Tinbergen’s schema takes these interactions into account only secondarily. The hypothesis of a “population of oscillators” or a “pack of oscillating molecules” forming systems of articulation from the inside, independent of any common measure, is most compelling in view of the problem of circadian rhythms. See A. Reinberg, “La chronobiologie,” Sciences, vol. 1(1970); and T. van den Dreissche and A. Reinberg, “Rythmes biologiques,” in \emph{Encyclopedia Universalis}, vol. 14, p. 572: “It does not seem possible to reduce the mechanism of circadian rhythmicity to a simple sequence of elementary processes.”} This obviously
excludes any linear relation from one center to another, in favor of
packets of relations steered by molecules: the interaction or
coordination may be positive \emph{or} negative (release or inhibition), but
it is never direct, as in a linear relation or chemical reaction; it
always occurs between molecules with at least two heads, and each center
taken separately.\footnote{Jacques Monod, \emph{Chance and Necessity}, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972): on indirect interactions and their nonlinear character, pp. 69–71 and 76–77; on corresponding molecules that are least two-headed, pp. 68–69; on the inhibiting or releasing character of these interactions, pp. 63–67. Circadian rhythms also depend on these characteristics (see the chart in the \emph{Encyclopedia Universalis} under “Rhythmes biologiques”).}


This represents a whole behavioral-biological “machinics,” a whole
molecular engineering that should help increase our understanding of the
nature of problems of consistency. The philosopher Eugène Dupréel
proposed a theory of \emph{consolidation}; he demonstrated that life went not
from a center to an exteriority but from an exterior to an interior, or
rather from a discrete or fuzzy aggregate to its consolidation. This
implies three things. First, that there is no beginning from which a
linear sequence would derive, but rather densifications,
intensifications, reinforcements, injections, showerings, like so many
intercalary events (“there is growth only by intercalation”). Second,
and this is not a contradiction, there must be an arrangement of
intervals, a distribution of inequalities, such that it is sometimes
necessary to make a hole in order to consolidate. Third, there is a
superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within of an
interrhythmicity, with no imposition of meter or cadence.\footnote{Eugène Dupréel elaborated a set of original notions, “consistency” (in relation to “precariousness”), “consolidation,” “interval,” “intercalation.” See \emph{Théorie de la consolidation: La cause et l’intervalle} (Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1933); \emph{La consistance et la probabilité objective} (Brussels: Academic Royale de Belgique, 1961); \emph{Esquisse d’une philosophie des valeurs} (Paris: Alcan, 1939); Bachelard, in \emph{La dialectique de la durée}, draws on Dupréel.}
Consolidation is not content to come after; it is creative. The fact is
that the beginning always begins in-between, intermezzo. Consistency is
the same as consolidation, it is the act that produces consolidated
aggregates, of succession as well as of coexistence, by means of the
three factors just mentioned: intercalated elements, intervals, and
articulations of superposition. Architecture, as the art of the abode
and the territory, attests to this: there are consolidations that are
made afterward, and there are consolidations of the keystone type that
are constituent parts of the ensemble. More recently, matters like
reinforced concrete have made it possible for the architectural ensemble
to free itself from arborescent models employing tree-pillars,
branch-beams, foliage-vaults. Not only is concrete a heterogeneous
matter whose degree of consistency varies according to the elements in
the mix, but iron is intercalated following a rhythm; moreover, its
**self-supporting surfaces* form a complex rhythmic personage whose
“stems” have different sections and variable intervals depending on the
intensity and direction of the force to be tapped (armature instead of
structure). In this sense, the literary or musical work has an
architecture: “Saturate every atom,” as Virginia Woolf said;\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: \emph{The Diary of Virginia Woolf}, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), vol. 3, p. 209.]} or in
the words of Henry James, it is necessary to “begin far away, as far
away as possible,” and to proceed by “blocks of wrought matter.” It is
no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating
an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap
increasingly intense forces. What makes a material increasingly rich is
the same as what holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to
be heterogeneous. What holds them together in this way are intercalary
oscillators, synthesizers with at least two heads; these are interval
analyzers, rhythm synchronizers (the word “synchronizer” is ambiguous
because molecular synchronizers do not proceed by homogenizing and
equalizing measurement, but operate from within, between two rhythms).
Is not consolidation the terrestrial name for consistency? The
territorial assemblage is a milieu consolidation, a space-time
consolidation, of coexistence and succession. And the refrain operates
with these three factors.


The matters of expression themselves must present characteristics making
this taking on of consistency possible. We have seen that they have an
aptitude to enter into internal relations forming motifs and
counterpoints: the territorializing marks become territorial motifs or
counterpoints, the signatures and placards constitute a “style.” These
are the elements of a discrete or fuzzy aggregate; but they become
consolidated, take on consistency. To this extent, they have effects,
such as reorganizing functions and gathering forces. To get a better
grasp on the mechanism of this aptitude, we may lay down certain
conditions of homogeneity, beginning with marks or matters of the same
kind, for example, a set of sonorous marks, the song of a bird. The song
of the chaffinch normally has three distinct phases: the first has from
four to fourteen notes rising in crescendo but decreasing in frequency;
the second has from two to eight notes, lower than the first and of
constant frequency; the third ends with a complex “flourish” or
“ornament.” From the standpoint of acquisition, this “full song” is
preceded by a “subsong” that under normal conditions already assumes
possession of the general tonal quality, overall duration and content of
the stanzas, and even a tendency to end on a higher note.\footnote{On the song of the chaffinch, and the distinction between the “subsong” and “full song,” see Thorpe, \emph{Learning and Instinct}, pp. 420–426.} But the
organization into three stanzas, the order of the stanzas, the details
and the ornament, are not pregiven; it is precisely the articulations
from within that are missing, the intervals, the intercalary notes,
everything making for motif and counterpoint. The distinction between
subsong and full song could thus be presented as follows: the subsong as
mark or placard, the full song as style or motif, and the aptitude to
pass from one to the other, for one to consolidate itself in the other.
Clearly, artificial isolation will have very different effects depending
on whether it takes place before or after the acquisition of the
components of the subsong.


Our present concern, however, is to find out what happens when these
components effectively develop into the motifs and counterpoints of the
full song. We must leave behind the conditions of qualitative
homogeneity we set for ourselves. For as long as we confine ourselves to
marks, marks of one kind coexist with marks of another kind, period: the
sounds of an animal coexist with its colors, gestures, silhouettes; or
else the sounds of a given species coexist with the sounds of other
species, perhaps quite different but close in space. The organization of
qualified marks into motifs and counterpoints necessarily entails a
taking on of consistency, or a capture of the marks of another quality,
a mutual branching of sounds-colors-gestures, or a capture of sounds
from different animal species, etc. Consistency necessarily occurs
between heterogeneities, not because it is the birth of a
differentiation, but because heterogeneities that were formerly content
to coexist or succeed one another become bound up with one another
through the “consolidation” of their coexistence and succession. The
intervals, intercalations, and articulations constitutive of motifs and
counterpoints in the order of an expressive quality also envelop other
qualities of a different order, or qualities of the same order but of
another sex or even another species of animal. A color will “answer to”
a sound. If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are
rhythmic characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there
is the constitution of a veritable \emph{machinic opera} tying together
orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is
precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these
heterogeneities are matters of \emph{expression}, we say that their synthesis
itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly machinic
“statement” or “enunciation.” The varying relations into which a color,
sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species, and in
different species, form so many machinic enunciations.


Let us return to the stagemaker, the magic bird or bird of the opera. He
is not brightly colored (as though there were an inhibition). But his
song, his refrain, can be heard from a great distance (is this a
compensation, or on the contrary the prime factor?). He sings perched on
his singing stick, a vine or branch located just above the display
ground he has prepared by marking it with cut leaves turned upside down
to contrast with the color of the earth. As he sings, he uncovers the
yellow root of certain feathers underneath his beak: he makes himself
visible at the same time as sonorous. His song forms a varied and
complex motif interweaving his own notes and those of other birds that
he imitates in the intervals.\footnote{Alexander James Marshall, \emph{Bower-Birds} (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1954).} This produces a consolidation that
“consists” in species-specific sounds, sounds of other species, leaf
hue, throat color: the stagemaker’s machinic statement or assemblage of
enunciation. Many birds “imitate” the songs of other species. But
imitation may not be the best concept for these phenomena, which vary
according to the assemblage into which they enter. The subsong contains
elements that can enter into melodic and rhythmic organizations distinct
from those of the species under consideration, supplying the full song
with truly alien or added notes. If certain birds such as the chaffinch
seem impervious to imitation, it is because any alien sounds appearing
in their subsong are eliminated from the consistency of the full song.
On the other hand, in cases where added phrases do get included in the
full song, it may be because there is an interspecific assemblage of the
parasitism type; or it may be because the bird’s assemblage itself
effectuates the counterpoints to its melody. Thorpe is not wrong to say
that the problem is one of the occupation of frequency bands, as with
radios (the sound aspect of territoriality).\footnote{Thorpe, \emph{Learning and Instinct}, p. 426. In this respect, songs present an entirely different problem than calls, which are often not very differentiated, and quite similar from species to species.} It is less a question
of imitating a song than of occupying corresponding frequencies; for
there may be an advantage in being able to restrict oneself to a very
determinate zone in some circumstances, and in others to widen or deepen
the zone to assure oneself counterpoints and to invent chords that would
otherwise remain diffuse, as, for example, in the rain forest, which is
precisely where the greatest number of “imitative” birds are found.


From the standpoint of consistency, matters of expression must be
considered not only in relation to their aptitude to form motifs and
counterpoints but also in relation to the inhibitors and releasers that
act on them, and the mechanisms of innateness or learning, heredity or
acquisition, that modulate them. Ethology’s mistake is to restrict
itself to a binary distribution of these factors, even, and especially,
when it is thought necessary to take both into account simultaneously,
to intermix them at every level of a “tree of behaviors.” Instead, what
should be done is to start from a positive notion capable of accounting
for the very particular character the innate and the acquired assume in
the rhizome, and which is like the principle of their mixture. Such a
notion cannot be arrived at in terms of behavior but rather only in
terms of assemblage. Some authors emphasize autonomous developments
encoded in centers (innateness); others emphasize acquired linkages
regulated by peripheral sensations (learning). But Raymond Ruyer has
demonstrated that the animal is instead prey to “musical rhythms” and
“melodic and rhythmic themes” explainable neither as the encoding of a
recorded phonograph disk nor by the movements of performance that
effectuate them and adapt them to the circumstances.\footnote{Raymond Ruyer, \emph{La genèse des formes vivantes} (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), chapter 7.} The opposite
is even true: the melodic or rhythmic themes precede their performance
and recording. What is primary is the consistency of a refrain, a little
tune, either in the form of a mnemic melody that has no need to be
inscribed locally in a center, or in the form of a vague motif with no
need to be pulsed or stimulated. There is perhaps more to be learned
from a musical and poetic notion such as the Natal—in the lied, or in
Hölderlin or Thomas Hardy—than from the slightly vapid and foggy
categories of the innate and the acquired. For from the moment there is
a territorial assemblage, we can say that the innate assumes a very
particular figure, since it is inseparable from a movement of decoding
and passes to the margins of the code, unlike the innate of the interior
milieu; acquisition also assumes a very particular figure, since it is
territorialized, in other words, regulated by matters of expression
rather than by stimuli in the exterior milieu. The natal is the innate,
but decoded; and it is the acquired, but territorialized. The natal is
the new figure assumed by the innate and the acquired in the territorial
assemblage. The affect proper to the natal, as heard in the lied: to be
forever lost, or refound, or aspiring to the unknown homeland. In the
natal, the innate tends to be displaced: as Ruyer says, it is in some
way \emph{prior to} or \emph{downstream from} the act; it concerns less the act or
the behavior than the matters of expression themselves, the perception
that discerns and selects them, and the gesture that erects them, or
itself constitutes them (that is why there are “critical periods” when
the animal valorizes an object or situation, “is impregnated” by a
matter of expression, long before being able to perform the
corresponding act). This is not to say, however, that behavior is at the
mercy of chance learning; for it is predetermined by this displacement,
and finds rules of assemblage in its own territorialization. The natal,
then, consists in a decoding of innateness and a territorialization of
learning, one atop the other, one alongside the other. The natal has a
consistency that cannot be explained as a mixture of the innate and the
acquired, because it is instead what accounts for such mixtures in
territorial assemblage and interassemblages. In short, the notion of
behavior proves inadequate, too linear, in comparison with that of the
assemblage. The natal stretches from what happens in the
intra-assemblage all the way to the center that has been projected
outside; it cuts across all the interassemblages and reaches all the way
to the gates of the Cosmos.


The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of
deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages.
There have been many studies on the influence of artificial conditions
on bird song, but the results vary both by species and according to the
kind and timing of the artifice. Many birds are receptive to the songs
of other species, if they are exposed to them during the critical
period, and will reproduce the alien songs later on. The chaffinch,
however, seems much more devoted to its own matters of expression and
retains an innate sense of its own tonal quality even if exposed to
synthetic sounds. The outcome also depends on whether the birds are
isolated before or after the critical period. In the first case,
chaffinches develop a nearly normal song; in the second, the subjects in
the isolated group (who cannot hear each other) develop an abnormal,
nonspecies-specific song that is nevertheless common to the group (see
Thorpe). In any event, it is necessary to consider the effects of
deterritorialization or denatalization on a given species at a given
moment. Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that
deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial
conditions), we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the
distinction we would like to propose between \emph{machine} and \emph{assemblage}:
a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the
assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and
mutations of it. For there are no mechanical effects; effects are always
machinic, in other words, depend on a machine that is plugged into an
assemblage and has been freed through deterritorialization. What we call
**machinic statements* are machine effects that define consistency or
enter matters of expression. Effects of this kind can be very diverse
but are never symbolic or imaginary; they always have a real value of
passage or relay.


As a general rule, a machine plugs into the territorial assemblage of a
species and opens it to other assemblages, causes it to pass through the
interassemblages of that species; for example, the territorial
assemblage of a bird species opens onto interassemblages of courtship
and gregariousness, moving in the direction of the partner or “socius.”
But the machine may also open the territorial assemblage to
interspecific assemblages, as in the case of birds that adopt alien
songs, and most especially in the case of parasitism.\footnote{In particular, on widow birds (\emph{Viduinae}), parasitic birds whose territorial song is species-specific and whose courtship song is learned from their adoptive host, see J. Nicolai, \emph{Der Brutparasitismus der Viduinae, Z. Tierps}., vol. 21 (1964).} Or it may go
beyond all assemblages and produce an opening onto the Cosmos. Or,
conversely, instead of opening up the deterritorialized assemblage onto
something else, it may produce an effect of closure, as if the aggregate
had fallen into and continues to spin in a kind of black hole. This is
what happens under conditions of precocious or extremely sudden
deterritorialization, and when specific, interspecific, and cosmic paths
are blocked; the machine then produces “individual” group effects
spinning in circles, as in the case of chaffinches that have been
isolated too early, whose impoverished, simplified song expresses
nothing more than the resonance of the black hole in which they are
trapped. It is important to bring up this “black hole” function again
because it can increase our understanding of phenomena of inhibition,
and is in turn capable of breaking with the overnarrow
inhibitor-releaser dualism. We saw earlier that an interassemblage could
include lines of impoverishment and fixation leading to a black hole but
could still perhaps lead into a richer and more positive line of
deterritorialization (for example, the “grass stem” component among
Australian grass finches falls into a black hole and leads into the
“refrain” component).\footnote{The participation of a black hole in an assemblage appears in numerous examples of inhibition, or fascination-ecstasy, notably in the peacock: “The male peacock spreads his tail feathers\dots{}. Then he bends the spread-out tail forward and points downward with his beak, while his head is still upright. As a result, the female runs in front of him and pecks in a searching manner on the ground in the focal point of the concave mirrorlike shape of the fanned tail. The male peacock points, so to speak, with his fanned-out tail toward imaginary food,” Eibl-Eibesfeldt, \emph{Ethology}, p. 116. But the peacock’s focal point is no more imaginary than the finch’s grass stem is a vestige or symbol; it is an assemblage converter, the passage to a courtship assemblage, in this instance, effected by a black hole.} Thus the black hole is a machine effect in
assemblages and has a complex relation to other effects. It may be
necessary for the release of innovative processes that they first fall
into a catastrophic black hole: stases of inhibition are associated with
the release of crossroads behaviors. On the other hand, when black holes
resonate together or inhibitions conjugate and echo each other, instead
of an opening onto consistency, we see a closure of the assemblage, as
though it were deterritorialized in the void: young chaffinches.
**Machines are always singular keys that open or close an assemblage, a
territory*. Moreover, finding the machine in operation in a given
territorial assemblage is not enough; it is already in operation in the
emergence of matters of expression, in other words, in the constitution
of the assemblage and in the vectors of deterritorialization that ply it
from the start.


Thus consistency of matters of expression relates, on the one hand, to
their aptitude to form melodic and rhythmic themes and, on the other
hand, to the power of the natal. Finally, there is one other aspect:
their very special relation to the molecular (the machine starts us down
this road). The very words, “matters of expression,” imply that
expression has a primary relation to matter. As matters of expression
take on consistency they constitute semiotic systems, but the \emph{semiotic}
components are inseparable from \emph{material} components and are in
exceptionally close contact with molecular levels. The whole question is
thus whether or not the molar-molecular relation assumes a new figure
here. In general, it has been possible to distinguish “molar-molecular”
combinations that vary greatly depending on the direction followed.
First, individual atoms can enter into probabilistic or statistical
accumulations that tend to efface their individuality; this already
happens on the level of the molecule, and then again in the molar
aggregate. But they can become complicated in interactions and retain
their individuality inside the molecule, then in the macromolecule,
etc., setting up direct communications between individuals of different
orders.\footnote{Ruyer, \emph{La genèse des formes vivantes}, pp. 54ff.} Second, it is clear that the distinction to be made is not
between the individual and the statistical. In fact, it is always a
question of populations; statistics concerns individual phenomena, and
antistatistical individuality operates only in relation to molecular
populations. The distinction is between two group movements, as in
Alembert’s equation, in which one group tends toward increasingly
equilibrated, homogeneous, and probable states (the divergent wave and
the delayed potential), and the other group tends toward less probable
states of concentration (the convergent wave and the anticipated
potential).\footnote{François Meyer, \emph{Problématique de l’evolution} (Paris: PUF, 1954).} Third, the intramolecular internal forces that give an
aggregate its molar form can be of two types: they are either covalent,
arborescent, mechanical, linear, localizable relations subject to
chemical conditions of action and reaction or to linked reactions, or
they are indirect, noncovalent, machinic and nonmechanical, superlinear,
nonlocalizable bonds operating by stereospecific \emph{discernment or
discrimination}, rather than by linkage.\footnote{Monod, \emph{Chance and Necessity}.}


These are different ways of stating the same distinction, which seems
much broader than the one we are looking for: it is, in effect, a
distinction between matter and life, or rather, since there is only one
matter, between two states, two tendencies of atomic matter (for
example, there are bonds that immobilize the linked atoms in relation to
one another, and other bonds that allow free rotation). Stating the
distinction in the most general way, we could say that it is between
stratified systems or systems of stratification on the one hand, and
consistent, self-consistent aggregates on the other. But the point is
that consistency, far from being restricted to complex life forms, fully
pertains even to the most elementary atoms and particles. There is a
coded system of stratification whenever, horizontally, there are linear
causalities between elements; and, vertically, hierarchies of order
between groupings; and, holding it all together in depth, a succession
of framing forms, each of which informs a substance and in turn serves
as a substance for another form. These causalities, hierarchies, and
framings constitute a stratum, as well as the passage from one stratum
to another, and the stratified combinations of the molecular and molar.
On the other hand, we may speak of aggregates of consistency when
instead of a regulated succession of forms-substances we are presented
with consolidations of very heterogeneous elements, orders that have
been short-circuited or even reverse causalities, and captures between
materials and forces of a different nature: as if \emph{a machinic phylum, a
destratifying transversality}, moved through elements, orders, forms and
substances, the molar and the molecular, freeing a matter and tapping
forces.


Now if we ask ourselves where life fits into this distinction, we see
that it undoubtedly implies a gain in consistency, in other words, a
surplus value (surplus value of \emph{destratification}). For example, it
contains a greater number of self-consistent aggregates and processes of
consolidation and gives them molar scope. It is destratifying from the
outset, since its code is not distributed throughout the entire stratum
but rather occupies an eminently specialized genetic line. But the
question is almost contradictory, because asking where life fits in
amounts to treating it as a particular stratum having its own order and
befitting order, having its own forms and substances. It is true that it
is both at once: a particularly complex system of stratification and an
aggregate of consistency that disrupts orders, forms, and substances. As
we have seen, the living thing performs a transcoding of milieus that
can be considered both to constitute a stratum and to effect reverse
causalities and transversals of destratification. The same question can
be asked when life no longer restricts itself to mixing milieus but
assembles territories as well. The territorial assemblage implies a
**decoding* and is inseparable from its own \emph{deterritorialization} (two
new types of surplus value). “Ethology” then can be understood as a very
privileged molar domain for demonstrating how the most varied components
(biochemical, behavioral, perceptive, hereditary, acquired, improvised,
social, etc.) can crystallize in assemblages that respect neither the
distinction between orders nor the hierarchy of forms. What holds all
the components together are \emph{transversals}, and the transversal itself
is only a component that has taken upon itself the specialized vector of
deterritorialization. In effect, what holds an assemblage together is
not the play of framing forms or linear causalities but, actually or
potentially, its most deterritorialized component, a cutting edge of
deterritorialization. An example is the refrain: it is more
deterritorialized than the grass stem, but this does not preclude its
being “determined,” in other words, connected to biochemical and
molecular components. The assemblage holds by its most deterritorialized
component, but deterritorialized is not the same as indeterminate (the
refrain may be narrowly connected to the presence of male
hormones).\footnote{Female birds, which do not normally sing, start singing when they are administered male sex hormones, “and they will sing the song of the species on which they have become imprinted.” Eibl-Eibesfeldt, \emph{Ethology}, p. 265.} A component of this kind entering an assemblage may be
among the most highly determined, even mechanized, of components, but it
will still bring “play” to what it composes; it fosters the entry of new
dimensions of the milieus by releasing processes of discernibility,
specialization, contraction, and acceleration that open new
possibilities, that open the territorial assemblage onto
interassemblages. Back to the stagemaker: one of its acts consists in
discerning and causing to be discerned both sides of the leaf. This act
is connected to the determinism of the “toothed” beak. Assemblages are
defined simultaneously by \emph{matters of expression} that take on
consistency independently of the form-substance relation; reverse
causalities or “advanced” determinisms, decoded innate functions related
to \emph{acts of discernment} or election rather than to linked reactions;
and \emph{molecular combinations} that proceed by noncovalent bonding rather
than by linear relations—in short, a new “pace” produced by the
imbrication of the \emph{semiotic} and the \emph{material}. From this standpoint,
we may oppose the consistency of assemblages to the stratification of
milieus. But once again, this opposition is only relative, entirely
relative. Just as milieus swing between a stratum state and a movement
of destratification, assemblages swing between a territorial closure
that tends to restratify them and a deterritorializing movement that on
the contrary connects them with the Cosmos. Thus it is not surprising
that the distinction we were seeking was not between assemblages and
something else but between the two limits of any possible assemblage, in
other words, between the system of strata and the plane of consistency.
We should not forget that the strata rigidify and are organized on the
plane of consistency, and that the plane of consistency is at work and
is constructed in the strata, in both cases piece by piece, blow by
blow, operation by operation.



\bigskip


We have gone from stratified milieus to territorialized assemblages and
simultaneously, from the forces of chaos, as broken down, coded,
transcoded by the milieus, to the forces of the earth, as gathered into
the assemblages. Then we went from territorial assemblages to
interassemblages, to the opening of assemblages along lines of
deterritorialization; and simultaneously, the same from the ingathered
forces of the earth to the deterritorialized, or rather
deterritorializing, Cosmos. How does Paul Klee present this last
movement, which is not a terrestrial “pace” but instead a cosmic
“breakaway” [\emph{échappée}: also “opening,” “outlet,” “vista”; in
counterpoint, “escape tone”—Trans.]? And why so enormous a word, Cosmos,
to discuss an operation that must be precise? Klee says that one “tries
convulsively to fly from the earth,” and that one “rises above it \dots{}
powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity.” He adds that
the artist begins by looking around him- or herself, into all the
milieus, but does so in order to grasp the trace of creation in the
created, of naturing nature in natured nature; then, adopting “an
earthbound position,”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Klee, \emph{On Modern Art}, p. 43. Translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors.]} the artist turns his or her attention to the
microscopic, to crystals, molecules, atoms, and particles, not for
scientific conformity, but for movement, for nothing but immanent
movement; the artist tells him- or herself that this world has had
different aspects, will have still others, and that there are already
others on other planets; finally, the artist opens up to the Cosmos in
order to harness forces in a “work” (without which the opening onto the
Cosmos would only be a reverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the
earth); this work requires very simple, pure, almost childish means, but
also the forces of a \emph{people}, which is what is still lacking. “We still
lack the ultimate force\dots{}. We seek a people. We began over there in the
Bauhaus\dots{}. More we cannot do.”\footnote{Klee, \emph{On Modern Art}, p. 55 [translation modified—Trans.].}


Classicism refers to form-matter relation, or rather a form-substance
relation (substance is precisely a matter endowed with form). Matter is
organized by a succession of forms that are compartmentalized,
centralized, and hierarchized in relation to one another, each of which
takes charge of a greater or lesser amount of matter. Each form is like
the code of a milieu, and the passage from one form to another is a
veritable transcoding. Even the seasons are milieus. Two coexistent
operations are involved, one by which the form differentiates itself
according to binary distinctions, the other by which the formed
substantial parts, milieus or seasons, enter into an order of succession
that can be the same in either direction. But beneath these operations,
the classical artist hazards an extreme and dangerous adventure. He or
she breaks down the milieus, separates them, harmonizes them, regulates
their mixtures, passes from one to the other. What the artist confronts
in this way is chaos, the forces of chaos, the forces of a raw and
untamed matter upon which Forms must be imposed in order to make
substances, and Codes in order to make milieus. Phenomenal agility. That
is why no one has ever been able to draw a clear line between baroque
and classical.\footnote{See \emph{Renaissance, maniérisme, baroque, Actes du XIe stage international de Tours} (Paris: Vrin, 1972), part 1, “Periodizations.”} All of baroque lies brewing beneath classicism: the
task of the classical artist is God’s own, that of organizing chaos; and
the artist’s only cry is Creation! Creation! The Tree of Creation! An
ancient wooden flute organizes chaos, but chaos reigns like the Queen of
the Night. The classical artist proceeds with a One-Two: the one-two of
the differentiation of form divided (man-woman, masculine and feminine
rhythms, voices, families of instruments, all the binarities of the \emph{ars
nova}); and the one-two of the distinction between parts as they answer
each other (the enchanted flute and the magic bell). The little tune,
the bird refrain, is the binary unity of creation, the differentiating
unity of the pure beginning: “At first the piano complained alone, like
a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a
neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of the world, as if there
were as yet only the two of them on earth, \emph{or rather} in this world
closed to all the rest, fashioned by the logic of a creator, in which
there would never be more than the two of them: this sonata.”\footnote{Proust, \emph{Swann’s Way}, in vol. 1 of \emph{Remembrance of Things Past}, p. 382 [translation modified—Trans.].}


If we attempt an equally summary definition of romanticism, we see that
everything is clearly different. A new cry resounds: the Earth, the
territory and the Earth! With romanticism, the artist abandons the
ambition of de jure universality and his or her status as creator: the
artist territorializes, enters a territorial assemblage. The seasons are
now territorialized. The earth is certainly not the same thing as the
territory. The earth is the intense point at the deepest level of the
territory or is projected outside it like a focal point, where all the
forces draw together in close embrace. The earth is no longer one force
among others, nor is it a substance endowed with form or a coded milieu,
with bounds and an apportioned share. The earth has become that close
embrace of all forces, those of the earth as well as of other
substances, so that the artist no longer confronts chaos, but hell and
the subterranean, the groundless. The artist no longer risks dissipation
in the milieus but rather sinking too deeply into the earth: Empedocles.
The artist no longer identifies with Creation but with the ground or
foundation, the foundation has become creative. The artist is no longer
God but the Hero who defies God: Found, Found, instead of Create. Faust,
especially the second Faust, is impelled by this tendency. Criticism,
the Protestantism of the earth, replaces dogmatism, the Catholicism of
the milieus (code). It is certain that the Earth as an intense point in
depth or in projection, as \emph{ratio essendi}, is always in disjunction
with the territory; and the territory as the condition of “knowledge,”
**ratio cognoscendi*, is always in disjunction with the earth. The
territory is German, the Earth Greek. And this disjunction is precisely
what determines the status of the romantic artist, in that she or he no
longer confronts the gaping of chaos but the pull of the Ground
(\emph{Fond}). The little tune, the bird refrain, has changed: it is no
longer the beginning of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon
the earth. It is then no longer made of two consonant parts that seek
and answer one another; it addresses itself to a deeper singing that
founds it, but also strikes against it and sweeps it away, making it
ring dissonant. The refrain is indissolubly constituted by the
territorial song and the singing of the earth that rises to drown it
out. Thus at the end of \emph{Das Lied von der Erde} (The song of the Earth)
there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the assemblages of
the bird, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal breathing of the
earth. Mahler says that the singing of the birds, the color of the
flowers, and the fragrance of the forest are not enough to make Nature,
that the god Dionysus and the great Pan are needed. The Ur-refrain of
the earth harnesses all refrains whether territorial or not, and all
milieu refrains. By the end of [Berg’s] \emph{Wozzeck}, the lullaby refrain,
military refrain, drinking refrain, hunting refrain, child’s refrain are
so many admirable assemblages swept up by the powerful earth machine and
its cutting edges: Wozzeck’s voice, by which the earth becomes sonorous,
Marie’s death cry moving over the pond, the repeated B note, when the
earth howled \dots{} It is owing to this disjunction, this decoding, that the
romantic artist experiences the territory; but he or she experiences it
as necessarily lost, and experiences him- or herself as an exile, a
voyager, as deterritorialized, \emph{driven back into the milieus}, like the
Flying Dutchman or King Waldemar (whereas the classical artist inhabited
the milieus). Yet this movement is still under earth’s command, the
repulsion from the territory is produced by the attraction of the earth.
The signpost now only indicates the road of no return. This is the
ambiguity of the natal, as it appears in the lied (as well as in
symphony and opera): the lied is simultaneously the territory, the lost
territory, and the earth vector. The intermezzo assumed increasing
importance because it played on all the disjunctions between the earth
and the territory, inserted itself into them, filled them after its
fashion, “between night and day,” “noon-midnight.” From this standpoint,
the fundamental innovations of romanticism can be said to be the
following: There were no longer substantial parts corresponding to
forms, milieus corresponding to codes, or a matter in chaos given order
in forms and by codes. The parts were instead like assemblages produced
and dismantled at the surface. Form itself became \emph{a great form in
continuous development}, a gathering of the forces of the earth taking
all the parts up into a sheaf. Matter itself was no longer a chaos to
subjugate and organize but rather \emph{the moving matter of a continuous
variation}. The universal had become a relation, variation. The
continuous variation of matter and the continuous development of form.
The assemblages thus placed matter and form in a new relation: matter
ceased to be a matter of content, becoming instead a matter of
expression, and form ceased to be a code subduing the forces of chaos,
becoming a force itself, the sum of the forces of the earth. There was a
new relation to danger, madness, limits: romanticism did not go further
than baroque classicism; it went elsewhere, with other givens and other
vectors.


What romanticism lacks most is a people. The territory is haunted by a
solitary voice; the voice of the earth resonates with it and provides it
percussion rather than answering it. Even when there is a people, it is
mediatized by the earth, it rises up from the bowels of the earth and is
apt to return there: more a subterranean than a terrestrial people. The
hero is a hero of the earth; he is mythic, rather than being a hero of
the people and historical. Germany, German romanticism, had a genius for
experiencing the natal territory not as deserted but as “solitary,”
regardless of population density; for the population is only an
emanation of the earth, and has the value of One Alone. The territory
does not open onto a people, it half-opens onto the Friend, the Loved
One; but the Loved One is already dead, and the Friend uncertain,
disturbing.\footnote{See the ambiguous role of the friend at the end of \emph{Das Lied von der Erde}. Or Eichendorff’s poem in Schumann’s lied, \emph{Zwielicht} (in Opus 39): “If you have a friend in this world, do not trust him at this hour, for even if he is kind in eye and mouth, he dreams of war in deceitful peace.” (On the problem of the One-Alone, or “solitary Being,” in German romanticism, see Hölderlin, “Le cours et la destination de l’homme en general,” trans. Emmanuel Marineau, \emph{Poésie}, no. 4 [1978], pp. 6–22.)} As in the lied, everything in the territory occurs in
relation to the One-Alone of the soul and the One-All of the earth. That
is why romanticism takes on an entirely different aspect and even claims
a different name, a different placard, in the Latin and Slavic
countries, where on the contrary everything is put in terms of the theme
of a people and the forces of a people. This time, it is the earth that
is mediatized by the people, and exists only through the people. This
time, the earth can be “deserted,” an arid steppe, or a ravaged,
dismembered territory; yet it is never solitary, it is always filled by
a nomadic population that divides or regroups, contests or laments,
attacks or suffers. This time, the hero is a hero of the people, and not
of the earth; her is related to the \emph{One-Crowd}, not the \emph{One-All}. It
certainly cannot be said that there is more or less nationalism on one
side or the other because nationalism is everywhere in the figures of
romanticism, sometimes as the driving force, sometimes as a black hole
(fascism used Verdi much less than nazism did Wagner). The problem is a
truly musical one, technically musical, and all the more political for
that. The romantic hero, the voice of the romantic hero, acts as a
subject, a subjectified individual with “feelings”; but this subjective
vocal element is reflected in an orchestral and instrumental whole that
on the contrary mobilizes nonsubjective “affects” and that reaches its
height in romanticism. It should not be thought that the vocal element
and the orchestral-instrumental whole are only in an extrinsic relation
to one another: the orchestration imposes a given role on the voice, and
the voice envelops a given mode of orchestration.
Orchestration-instrumentation brings sound forces together or separates
them, gathers or disperses them; but it changes, and the role of the
voice changes too, depending on whether the forces are of the Earth or
of the People, of the One-All or the One-Crowd. In the first case, it is
a question of effecting \emph{grouping of powers}, and these are what
constitute affects; in the second case, it is \emph{group individuations}
that constitute affect and are the object of orchestration. Groupings of
power are fully diversified, but they are like \emph{the relations proper to
the Universal}; we must use another word, the \emph{Dividual}, to designate
the type of musical relations and the intra- or intergroup passages
occurring in group individuation. The sentimental or subjective element
of the voice has a different role and even a different position
depending on whether it internally confronts nonsubjectified groupings
of power or nonsubjectified group individuation, the relations of the
universal or the relations of the “dividual.” Debussy formulated the
problem of the One-Crowd well when he reproached Wagner for not knowing
how to “do” a crowd or a people: a crowd must be fully individuated, but
by group individuations that are not reducible to the individuality of
the subjects that compose the crowd.\footnote{“The people in Mussorgsky’s \emph{Boris} do not form a true crowd; at times one group sings, then another, and then a third, each in turn, and most often in unison. As for the people in \emph{Maîtres chanteurs}, it is not a crowd but an army that is powerfully organized in the German manner and marches in rows. What I would like is something sparser, more divided, more relaxed, more impalpable, something in appearance inorganic and yet at bottom ordered.” Quoted by Jean Barraqué, \emph{Debussy} (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 159. This problem—how to do a crowd—obviously recurs in other arts also, painting, cinema, etc. One may refer in particular to the films of Eisenstein, which proceed by this type of very special group individuation.} The people must be
individualized, not according to the persons within it, but according to
the affects it experiences, simultaneously or successively. The concepts
of the One-Crowd and the Dividual are botched if the people is reduced
to a juxtaposition, or if it is reduced to a power of the universal. In
short, there are two very different conceptions of orchestration,
depending on whether one is seeking to sonorize the forces of the Earth
or the forces of the People. The simplest example of this difference is
doubtless Wagner-Verdi, in that Verdi puts increasing emphasis on the
relations between the voice and instrumentation and orchestration. Even
today, Stockhausen and Berio outline a new version of this difference,
even though they are grappling with a musical problem different from
that of romanticism (in Berio there is a search for a multiple cry, a
cry of the population, in the dividual of the One-Crowd, and not for a
cry of the Earth in the universal of the One-All). The idea of an Opera
of the world, or cosmic music, changes drastically depending on which
pole of orchestration is in play.\footnote{On the relations between the cry, the voice, the instrument, and music as “theater,” see Berio’s statements introducing his records. One will recall the eminently musical Nietzschean theme of \emph{a} multiple cry of all superior men, at the end of \emph{Thus Spoke Zarathustra}.} To avoid an oversimplified
opposition between Wagner and Verdi, we would have to show how Berlioz
had a genius for passing from one pole to the other in his
orchestration, or even hesitating between them: a sonorous Nature \emph{or}
People. And how music like Mussorgsky’s was able to do a crowd (despite
what Debussy says). And how music like Bartók’s was able to use popular,
or population, airs to do populations, themselves sonorous,
instrumental, and orchestral, which impose a Dividual scale, a
prodigious new chromaticism.\footnote{On Bartók’s chromaticism, see Gisèle Brelet’s study in \emph{Histoire de la musique}, vol. 2, pp. 1036–1072.} And then there are all the
non-Wagnerian paths\dots{}


If there is a modern age, it is, of course, the age of the cosmic. Paul
Klee declared himself anti-Faustian. “As for animals and all the other
creatures, I do not like them with a terrestrial cordiality; earthly
things interest me less than cosmic things.” The assemblage no longer
confronts the forces of chaos, it no longer uses the forces of the earth
or the people to deepen itself but instead opens onto the forces of the
Cosmos. All this seems extremely general, and somewhat Hegelian,
testifying to an absolute Spirit. Yet it is, should be, a question of
technique, exclusively a question of technique. The essential relation
is no longer matters-forms (or substances-attributes); neither is it the
continuous development of form and the continuous variation of matter.
It is now a direct relation \emph{material-forces}. A material is a
molecularized matter, which must accordingly “harness” forces; these
forces are necessarily forces of the Cosmos. There is no longer a matter
that finds its corresponding principle of intelligibility in form. It is
now a question of elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces
of a different order: the visual material must capture nonvisible
forces. \emph{Render visible}, Klee said; not render or reproduce the
visible. From this perspective, philosophy follows the same movement as
the other activities; whereas romantic philosophy still appealed to a
formal synthetic identity ensuring a continuous intelligibility of
matter (a priori synthesis), modern philosophy tends to elaborate a
material of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable in
themselves. This is Cosmos philosophy, after the manner of Nietzsche.
The molecular material has even become so deterritorialized that we can
no longer even speak of matters of expression, as we did in romantic
territoriality. \emph{Matters of expression are superseded by a material of
capture}. The forces to be captured are no longer those of the earth,
which still constitute a great expressive Form, but the forces of an
immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos. The painter Millet used to
say that what counts in painting is not, for example, what a peasant is
carrying, whether it is a sacred object or a sack of potatoes, but its
exact weight. This is the postromantic turning point: the essential
thing is no longer forms and matters, or themes, but forces, densities,
intensities. The earth itself swings over, tending to take on the value
of pure material for a force of gravitation or weight. Perhaps it is not
until Cézanne that rocks begin to exist uniquely through the forces of
folding they harness, landscapes through thermal and magnetic forces,
and apples through forces of germination: nonvisual forces that
nevertheless have been rendered visible. When forces become necessarily
cosmic, material becomes necessarily molecular, with enormous force
operating in an infinitesimal space. The problem is no longer that of
the beginning, any more than it is that of a foundation-ground. It is
now a problem of consistency or consolidation: how to consolidate the
material, make it consistent, so that it can harness unthinkable,
invisible, nonsonorous forces. Debussy \dots{} Music molecularizes sound
matter and in so doing becomes capable of harnessing nonsonorous forces
such as Duration and Intensity.\footnote{In his book on Debussy, Barraqué analyzes the “dialogue of the wind and the sea” in terms of forces instead of themes: pp. 153–154. See Messiaen’s statements on his own works: sounds are no longer anything more “than vulgar means of expression intended to make durations measurable.”} \emph{Render Duration sonorous}. Let us
recall Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return as a little ditty, a
refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the
Cosmos. We thus leave behind the assemblages to enter the age of the
Machine, the immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of forces
to be harnessed. Varese’s procedure, at the dawn of this age, is
exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a \emph{sound machine} (not a
machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes,
ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy.\footnote{Odile Vivier describes Varèse’s procedures for treating sound matter, in Varèse (Paris: Seuil, 1973): the use of pure sounds acting as a prism (p. 36); mechanisms of projection onto a plane (pp. 45 and 50); non-octave-forming scales (p. 75); the “ionization” procedure (pp. 98ff.); the theme of sound \emph{molecules}, the transformations of which are determined by forces or energies (\emph{passim}).} If this
machine must have an assemblage, it is the synthesizer. By assembling
modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators,
generators, and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the
synthesizer makes audible the sound process itself, the production of
that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond
sound matter.\footnote{See the interview with Stockhausen on the role of synthesizers and the effectively “cosmic” dimension of music, in \emph{Le Monde}, July 21, 1977: “Work with very limited materials and integrate the universe into them through a continuous variation.” Richard Pinhas has written an excellent analysis of the possibilities of synthesizers in this regard, in relation to pop music: “Input, Output,” in \emph{Atem}, no. 10 (1977).} It unites disparate elements in the material, and
transposes the parameters from one formula to another. The synthesizer,
with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in
a priori synthetic judgment: its synthesis is of the molecular and the
cosmic, material and force, not form and matter, \emph{Grund} and territory.
Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought
synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it
a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).


This synthesis of disparate elements is not without ambiguity. It has
the same ambiguity, perhaps, as the modern valorization of children’s
drawings, texts by the mad, and concerts of noise. Sometimes one
overdoes it, puts too much in, works with a jumble of lines and sounds;
then instead of producing a cosmic machine capable of “rendering
sonorous,” one lapses back to a machine of reproduction that ends up
reproducing nothing but a scribble effacing all lines, a scramble
effacing all sounds. The claim is that one is opening music to all
events, all irruptions, but one ends up reproducing a scrambling that
prevents any event from happening. All one has left is a resonance
chamber well on the way to forming a black hole. A material that is too
rich remains too “territorialized”: on noise sources, on the nature of
the objects \dots{} (this even applies to Cage’s prepared piano). One makes an
aggregate fuzzy, instead of defining the fuzzy aggregate by the
operations of consistency or consolidation pertaining to it. For this is
the essential thing: \emph{a fuzzy aggregate, a synthesis of disparate
elements, is defined only by a degree of consistency that makes it
possible to distinguish the disparate elements constituting that
aggregate (discernibility)}.\footnote{The definition of fuzzy aggregates brings up all kinds of problems because one cannot appeal to a local determination: “The set of all objects on this table” is obviously not a fuzzy set. Mathematicians concerned with the question speak only of “fuzzy subsets” because the reference set must always be an ordinary set. See Arnold Kaufmann, \emph{Introduction to the Theory of Fuzzy Subsets}, foreword L. A. Zadeh, trans. D. L. Swanson (New York: Academic Press, 1975), and Hourya Sinacoeur, “Logique et mathematique du flou,” \emph{Critique}, no. 372 (May 1978), pp. 512–525. In considering fuzziness as the characteristic of certain sets, our point of departure was a functional, as opposed to a local, definition: sets of heterogeneous elements that have a territorial, or rather territorializing, function. But this is a nominal definition that does not take “what happened” into account. The real definition can come only at the level of processes affecting the fuzzy set; a set is fuzzy if its elements belong to it only by virtue of specific operations of consistency and consolidation, which themselves follow a special logic.} The material must be sufficiently
deterritorialized to be molecularized and open onto something cosmic,
instead of lapsing into a statistical heap. This condition is met only
if there is a certain simplicity in the nonuniform material: a maximum
of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate elements and the
parameters. The sobriety of the assemblages is what makes for the
richness of the Machine’s effects. People often have too much of a
tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise. If this is
done, one \emph{fuzzifies} instead of making the fuzzy aggregate consist, or
harnessing cosmic forces in the deterritorialized material. That is why
it infuriated Paul Klee when people would talk about the “childishness”
of his drawings (and Varése when they would talk about sound effects,
etc.). According to Klee, what is needed in order to “render visible” or
harness the Cosmos is a pure and simple line accompanied by the idea of
an object, and nothing more: if you multiply the lines and take the
whole object, you get nothing but a scramble, and visual sound
effects.\footnote{Paul Klee, \emph{On Modern Art}, p. 53: “The legend of the childishness of my drawing must have originated from those linear compositions of mine in which I tried to combine a concrete image, say that of a man, with the pure representation of the linear element. Had I wished to present man ‘as he is,’ then I should have had to use such a bewildering confusion of lines that pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have been vagueness beyond recognition.”} According to Varese, in order for the projection to yield
a highly complex form, in other words, a cosmic distribution, what is
necessary is a simple figure in motion and a plane that is itself
mobile; otherwise, you get sound effects. Sobriety, sobriety: that is
the common prerequisite for the deterritorialization of matters, the
molecularization of material, and the cosmicization of forces. Maybe a
child can do that. But the sobriety involved is the sobriety of a
becoming-child that is not necessarily the becoming \emph{of} the child,
quite the contrary; the becoming-mad involved is not necessarily the
becoming \emph{of} the madman, quite the contrary. It is clear that what is
necessary to make sound travel, and to travel around sound, is very pure
and simple sound, an emission or wave without harmonics (La Monte Young
has been successful at this). The more rarefied the atmosphere, the more
disparate the elements you will find. Your synthesis of disparate
elements will be all the \emph{stronger} if you proceed with a sober gesture,
an act of consistency, capture, or extraction that works in a material
that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively limited,
selected. For there is no imagination outside of technique. The modern
figure is not the child or the lunatic, still less the artist, but the
cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb—it’s very simple really, it’s
been proven, it’s been done. To be an artisan and no longer an artist,
creator, or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the
milieus and the earth behind. The invocation to the Cosmos does not at
all operate as a metaphor; on the contrary, the operation is an
effective one, from the moment the artist connects a material with
forces of consistency or consolidation.


Material thus has three principal characteristics: it is a molecularized
matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined
by the operations of consistency applied to it. Finally, it is clear
that the relation to the earth and the people has changed, and is no
longer of the romantic type. The earth is now at its most
deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy, but one galaxy among
others. The people is now at its most molecularized: a molecular
population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interaction.
The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of
the earth and those of the people. The combat, if combat there is, has
moved. The established powers have occupied the earth, they have built
people’s organizations. The mass media, the great people’s organizations
of the party or union type, are machines for reproduction, fuzzification
machines that effectively scramble all the terrestrial forces of the
people. The established powers have placed us in the situation of a
combat at once atomic and cosmic, galactic. Many artists became aware of
this situation long ago, even before it had been installed (Nietzsche,
for example). They became aware of it because the same vector was
traversing their own domain: a molecularization, an atomization of the
material, coupled with a cosmicization of the forces taken up by that
material. The question then became whether molecular or atomic
“populations” of all natures (mass media, monitoring procedures,
computers, space weapons) would continue to bombard the existing people
in order to train it or control it or annihilate it—or if other
molecular populations were possible, could slip into the first and give
rise to a people yet to come. As Virilio says in his very rigorous
analysis of the depopulation of the people and the deterritorialization
of the earth, the question has become: “To dwell as a poet or as an
assassin?”\footnote{Paul Virilio, \emph{L’insécurité du territoire} (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 49. Henry Miller develops this theme in \emph{The Time of the Assassins. A Study of Rimbaud} (Norfolk, Conn.: J. Laughlin, 1956), and in the text he wrote for Varèse, “Lost! Saved!” (\emph{The Air-Conditioned Nightmare} [New York: New Directions, 1945]). It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in \emph{Sexus}.} The assassin is one who bombards the existing people
with molecular populations that are forever closing all of the
assemblages, hurling them into an ever wider and deeper black hole. The
poet, on the other hand, is one who lets loose molecular populations in
hopes that this will sow the seeds of, or even engender, the people to
come, that these populations will pass into a people to come, open a
cosmos. Once again, we must not make it seem as though the poet gorged
on metaphors: it may be that the sound molecules of pop music are at
this very moment implanting here and there a people of a new type,
singularly indifferent to the orders of the radio, to computer
safeguards, to the threat of the atomic bomb. In this respect, the
relation of artists to the people has changed significantly: the artist
has ceased to be the One-Alone withdrawn into him- or herself, but has
also ceased to address the people, to invoke the people as a constituted
force. Never has the artist been more in need of a people, while stating
most firmly that the people is lacking—the people is what is most
lacking. We are not referring to popular or populist artists. Mallarmé
said that the Book needed a people. Kafka said that literature is the
affair of the people. Klee said that the people is essential \emph{yet
lacking}. Thus the problem of the artist is that the modern depopulation
of the people results in an open earth, and by means of art, or by means
to which art contributes. Instead of being bombarded from all sides in a
limiting cosmos, the people and the earth must be like the vectors of a
cosmos that carries them off; then the cosmos itself will be art. From
depopulation, make a cosmic people; from deterritorialization, a cosmic
earth—that is the wish of the artisan-artist, here, there, locally. Our
governments deal with the molecular and the cosmic, and our arts make
them their affair also, with the same stakes, the people and the earth,
and with unfortunately incomparable, but nevertheless competitive,
means. Is it not of the nature of creations to operate in silence,
locally, to seek consolidation everywhere, to go from the molecular to
an uncertain cosmos, whereas the processes of destruction and
conservation work in bulk, take center stage, occupy the entire cosmos
in order to enslave the molecular and to stick it in a conservatory or a
bomb?


These three “ages,” the classical, romantic, and modern (for lack of a
better term), should not be interpreted as an evolution, or as
structures separated by signifying breaks. They are assemblages
enveloping different Machines, or different relations to the Machine. In
a sense, everything we attribute to an age was already present in the
preceding age. Forces, for example: it has always been a question of
forces, designated either as forces of chaos or forces of the earth.
Similarly, for all of time painting has had the project of rendering
visible, instead of reproducing the visible, and music of rendering
sonorous, instead of reproducing the sonorous. Fuzzy aggregates have
been constituting themselves and inventing their processes of
consolidation all along. A \emph{freeing of the molecular} was already found
in classical matters of content, operating by destratification, and in
romantic matters of expression, operating by decoding. The most we can
say is that when forces appear as forces of the earth or of chaos, they
are not grasped directly as forces but as reflected in relations between
matter and form. Thus it is more a question of thresholds of perception,
or thresholds of discernibility belonging to given assemblages. It is
only after matter has been sufficiently deterritorialized that it itself
emerges as molecular and brings forth pure forces attributable only to
the Cosmos. It had been present “for all of time,” but under different
perceptual conditions. New conditions were necessary for what was buried
or covered, inferred or concluded, presently to rise to the surface.
What was composed in an assemblage, what was still only composed,
becomes a component of a new assemblage. In this sense, all history is
really the history of perception, and what we make history with is the
matter of a becoming, not the subject matter of a story. Becoming is
like the machine: present in a different way in every assemblage,
passing from one to the other, opening one onto the other, outside any
fixed order or determined sequence.


We are now ready to return to the refrain. We can propose a new
classification system: milieu refrains, with at least two parts, one of
which answers the other (the piano and the violin); natal refrains,
refrains of the territory, where the part is related to the whole, to an
immense refrain of the earth, according to relations that are themselves
variable and mark in each instance the disjunction between the earth and
the territory (the lullaby, the drinking song, hunting song, work song,
military song, etc.); folk and popular refrains, themselves tied to an
immense song of the people, according to variable relations of crowd
individuations that simultaneously bring into play affects and nations
(the Polish, Auvergnat, German, Magyar, or Romanian, but also the
Pathetic, Panicked, Vengeful, etc.); molecularized refrains (the sea and
the wind) tied to cosmic forces, the Cosmos refrain. For the Cosmos
itself is a refrain, and the ear also (everything that has been taken
for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain). But precisely why is the refrain
eminently sonorous? Why this privileging of the ear, when even animals
and birds present us with so many visual, chromatic, postural, and
gestural refrains? Does the painter have fewer refrains than the
musician? Are there fewer refrains in Cézanne or Klee than in Mozart,
Schumann, or Debussy? Taking Proust’s examples: Does Vermeer’s little
yellow span of wall, or a painter’s flowers, Elstir’s roses, constitute
less of a refrain than Vinteuil’s little phrase? There is surely no
question here of declaring a given art supreme on the basis of a formal
hierarchy of absolute criteria. Our problem is more modest: comparing
the powers or coefficients of deterritorialization of sonorous and
visual components. It seems that when sound deterritorializes, it
becomes more and more refined; it becomes specialized and autonomous.
Color clings more, not necessarily to the object, but to territoriality.
When it deterritorializes, it tends to dissolve, to let itself be
steered by other components. This is evident in phenomena of
synesthesia, which are not reducible to a simple color-sound
correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and induce colors that \emph{are
superposed} upon the colors we see, lending them a properly sonorous
rhythm and movement.\footnote{On the relation of colors to sound, see Messiaen and Samuel, \emph{Conversations}, pp. 15–17. Messiaen faults drug users for oversimplifying the relation, which they make into a relation between a noise and a color, instead of isolating complexes of sounds-durations and complexes of colors.} Sound owes this power not to signifying or
“communicational” values (which on the contrary presuppose that power),
nor to physical properties (which would privilege light over sound), but
to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and
makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not
happen without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us,
transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop
us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to
die. Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also
effects the most massive of reterritorializations, the most numbing, the
most redundant. Ecstasy and hypnosis. Colors do not move a people. Flags
can do nothing without trumpets. Lasers are modulated on sound. The
refrain is sonorous par excellence, but it can as easily develop its
force into a sickly sweet ditty as into the purest motif, or Vinteuil’s
little phrase. And sometimes the two combine: Beethoven used as a
“signature tune.” The potential fascism of music. Overall, we may say
that music is plugged into a machinic phylum infinitely more powerful
than that of painting: a line of selective pressure. That is why the
musician has a different relation to the people, machines, and the
established powers than does the painter. In particular, the established
powers feel a keen need to control the distribution of black holes and
lines of deterritorialization in this phylum of sounds, in order to ward
off or appropriate the effects of musical machinism. Painters, at least
as commonly portrayed, may be much more open socially, much more
political, and less controlled from without and within. That is because
each time they paint, they must create or recreate a phylum, and they
must do so on the basis of bodies of light and color they themselves
produce, whereas musicians have at their disposal a kind of germinal
continuity, even if it is latent or indirect, on the basis of which they
produce sound bodies. Two different movements of creation: one goes from
**soma to germen*, and the other from \emph{germen to soma}. The painter’s
refrain is like the flipside of the musician’s, a negative of music.


So just what is a refrain? \emph{Glass harmonica}: the refrain is a prism, a
crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or
light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions,
projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic
function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions
in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions
between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to
form organized masses. The refrain is therefore of the crystal or
protein type. The seed, or internal structure, then has two essential
aspects: augmentations and diminutions, additions and withdrawals,
amplifications and eliminations by unequal values, but also the presence
of a retrograde motion running in both directions, as “in the side
windows of a moving streetcar.” The strange retrograde motion of \emph{Joke}.
It is of the nature of the refrain to become concentrated by elimination
in a very short moment, as though moving from the extremes to a center,
or, on the contrary, to develop by additions, moving from a center to
the extremes, and also to travel these routes in both directions.\footnote{On the crystal, or the crystalline type, added and subtracted values, retrograde motion, see also Messiaen’s texts in Samuel, \emph{Conversations}, and those of Paul Klee in his diary, \emph{The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918}, ed. and intro. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).}
The refrain fabricates time (\emph{du temps}). The refrain is the “implied
tense” (\emph{temps}) discussed by the linguist Gustave Guillaume. The
ambiguity of the refrain is more evident now: for if the retrograde
motion merely forms a closed circle, if the augmentations and
diminutions are regular, proceeding, for example, by doubled or halved
values, then this false spatiotemporal rigor leaves the exterior
aggregate all the fuzzier; that aggregate now has only descriptive,
indicative, or associative relations with the seed. It is “a worksite of
inauthentic elements for the formation of impure crystals,” rather than
a pure crystal that harnesses cosmic forces. The refrain remains a
formula evoking a character or landscape, instead of itself constituting
a rhythmic character or melodic landscape. The refrain has two poles.
These poles hinge not only on an intrinsic quality but also on a state
of force on the part of the listener; thus the little phrase from
Vinteuil’s sonata is associated with Swann’s love, the character of
Odette, and the landscape of the Bois de Boulogne for a long time, until
it turns back on itself, opens onto itself, revealing until then
unheard-of potentialities, entering into other connections, setting love
adrift in the direction of other assemblages. Here, Time is not an a
priori form; rather, the refrain is the a priori form of time, which in
each case fabricates different times [\emph{temps}: also, “meters,”
“tempos”—Trans.].


It is odd how music does not eliminate the bad or mediocre refrain, or
the bad usage of the refrain, but on the contrary carries it along, or
uses it as a springboard. “Ah, vous dirai-je maman” (“Ah, mamma, now you
shall know”), “Elle avait une jambe de bois” (“She had a wooden leg”),
“Frere Jacques.” Childhood or bird refrain, folk song, drinking song,
Viennese waltz, cow bells: music uses anything and sweeps everything
away. Not that a folk song, bird song, or children’s song is reducible
to the kind of closed and associative formula we just mentioned.
Instead, what needs to be shown is that a musician requires a \emph{first
type} of refrain, a territorial or assemblage refrain, in order to
transform it from within, deterritorialize it, producing a refrain of
the \emph{second type} as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of a
sound machine. Gisèle Brelet, discussing Bartók, gives a good
formulation of the problem of the two types: beginning from popular and
territorial \emph{melodies} that are autonomous, self-sufficient, and closed
in upon themselves, how can one construct a new chromaticism that places
them in communication, thereby creating “\emph{themes}” bringing about a
development of Form, or rather a becoming of Forces? The problem is a
general one because in many directions refrains will be planted by a new
seed that brings back modes, makes those modes communicate, undoes
temperament, melds major and minor, and cuts the tonal system loose,
slipping through its net instead of breaking with it.\footnote{See Roland-Manuel’s article, “L’évolution de l’harmonie en France et le renouveau de 1880” (pp. 867–879), and the article by Delage on Chabrier (pp. 831–840), in \emph{Histoire de la musique}, vol. 2. And especially, Brelet’s article on Bartók: “Are not the difficulties learned music experiences in utilizing popular music due to this antinomy between melody and theme? Popular music is melody, in its fullest sense, melody persuading us that it is self-sufficient and is in fact synonymous with music itself. How could it not refuse to bend to the learned development of a musical work pursuing its own ends? Many symphonies inspired by folklore are only symphonies \emph{about} a popular theme, to which the learned development remains alien and exterior. The popular melody could never constitute a true theme; and that is why, in popular music, the melody is the entire work, and why once it is over it has no other resource than to repeat itself. But can’t the melody transform itself into a theme? Bartók solves this problem, which was thought insoluble” (p. 1056).} We may say
long live Chabrier, as opposed to Schoenberg, just as Nietzsche said
long live Bizet, and for the same reasons, with the same technical and
musical intent. We go from modality to an untempered, widened
chromaticism. We do not need to suppress tonality, we need to turn it
loose. We go from assembled refrains (territorial, popular, romantic,
etc.) to the great cosmic machined refrain. But the labor of creation is
already under way in the first type; it is there in its entirety.
Deformations destined to harness a great force are already present in
the small-form refrain or rondo. Childhood scenes, children’s games: the
starting point is a childlike refrain, but the child has wings already,
he becomes celestial. The becoming-child of the musician is coupled with
a becoming-aerial of the child, in a nondecomposable block. The memory
of an angel, or rather the becoming of a cosmos. Crystal: the
becoming-bird of Mozart is inseparable from a becoming-initiate of the
bird, and forms a block with it.\footnote{Marcel Moré, \emph{Le dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux} (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 168. And, on the crystal, pp. 83–89.} It is the extremely profound labor
dedicated to the first type of refrain that creates the second type, or
the little phrase of the Cosmos. In a concerto, Schumann requires all
the assemblages of the orchestra to make the cello wander the way a
light fades into the distance or is extinguished. In Schumann, a whole
learned labor, at once rythmic, harmonic, and melodic, has this sober
and simple result: \emph{deterritorialize the refrain}.\footnote{See Alban Berg’s famous analysis of “Rêverie” in \emph{Ecrits} (Paris: Ed. du Rocher, 1957), pp. 44–64.} Produce a
deterritorialized refrain as the final end of music, release it in the
Cosmos—that is more important than building a new system. Opening the
assemblage onto a cosmic force. In the passage from one to the other,
from the assemblage of sounds to the Machine that renders it sonorous,
from the becoming-child of the musician to the becoming-cosmic of the
child, many dangers crop up: black holes, closures, paralysis of the
finger and auditory hallucinations, Schumann’s madness, cosmic force
gone \emph{bad}, a note that pursues you, a sound that transfixes you. Yet
one was already present in the other; the cosmic force was already
present in the material, the great refrain in the little refrains, the
great maneuver in the little maneuver. Except we can never be sure we
will be strong enough, for we have no system, only lines and movements.
Schumann.

\chapter{12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-12}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-12}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-47.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Nomad Chariot, Entirely of Wood, Altai,
Fifth to Fourth Centuries \emph{B.C.}}
\end{figure}
\clearpage



\begin{quote}


**AXIOM I*. \emph{The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus}.



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION I*. \emph{This exteriority is first attested to in mythology,
epic, drama, and games}.



\end{quote}


Georges Dumézil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology,
has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the
magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman,
Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the
binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in
opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and
the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the
“bond” and the “pact,” etc.\footnote{Georges Dumézil, \emph{Mitra-Varuna} (Paris: Gallimard, 1948 [forthcoming in English translation from Zone Books]). On \emph{nexum} and \emph{mutuum}, the bond and the contract, see pp. 118–124.} But their opposition is only relative;
they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a
division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity. “At
once antithetical and complementary, necessary to one another and
consequently without hostility, lacking a mythology of conflict: a
specification on any one level automatically calls forth a homologous
specification on another. The two together exhaust the field of the
function.” They are the principal elements of a State apparatus that
proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a
milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State
apparatus into a \emph{stratum}.


It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus.
**Either* the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled
through war—either it uses police officers and jailers in place of
warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate,
magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat—\emph{or}, the
State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical
integration of war and the organization of a military function.\footnote{“The first pole of the State (Varuna, Uranus, Romulus) operates by magic bond, seizure, or immediate capture: it does not wage battles, and has no war machine, it binds, and that is all.” Its other pole (Mitra, Zeus, Numa) appropriates an army but imposes upon it juridical and institutional rules that become nothing more than a piece in the State apparatus: thus Mars-Tiwaz is not a warrior god, but a god who is a “jurist of war.” See Dumézil, \emph{Mitra-Varuna}, pp. 113ff., 148ff., 202ff.} As
for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State
apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes
from elsewhere. \emph{Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no
less than to Mitra}\footnote{Dumézil, \emph{The Destiny of the Warrior}, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).} He can no more be reduced to one or the other
than he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a pure
and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral
and the power of metamorphosis. \emph{He unties the bond just as he betrays
the pact}. He brings a \emph{furor} to bear against sovereignty, a celerity
against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (\emph{puissance})
against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness
to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times,
but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he unties bonds\dots{}).\footnote{For the role of the warrior as one who “unties” and opposes both the magic bond and the juridical contract, see Dumézil, \emph{Mitra-Varuna}, pp. 124–132. See also the analysis of furor in the works of Dumézil.}
He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with
animals, because he sees all things in relations of \emph{becoming}, rather
than implementing binary distributions between “states”: a veritable
becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside
dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In
every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature,
another origin than the State apparatus.


Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State
apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and
Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the
pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the
court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have
an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements,
situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight
remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a
subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these
relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess
player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are
pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous,
collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a
man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a
nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only
situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two
cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain
biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces:
their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only
a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or
constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or
situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a
Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess
piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war,
but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear,
battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with
neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy,
whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same:
in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus
of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of
squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of
arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the
possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one
point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination,
without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the
“striated” space of chess. The \emph{nomos} of Go against the State of chess,
**nomos* against \emph{polis}. The difference is that chess codes and decodes
space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or
deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space;
consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent
territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from
within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere\dots{}).
Another justice, another movement, another space-time.


“They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext\dots{}” “In
some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the
capital. At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there
are more of them.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: The first quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, \emph{The Genealogy of Morals}, second essay, sect. 17, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 86; the second is from Franz Kafka, “An Old Manuscript,” \emph{The Complete Stories}, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), p. 416.]} Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads
us to the same schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator
of public works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his
half-sisters to the hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves.
Mbidi’s son, a man of secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return
from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army. He kills
Nkongolo and proceeds to build a new State.\footnote{Luc de Heusch emphasizes the public nature of Nkongolo’s actions, in contrast to the secrecy of the actions of Mbidi and his son; in particular, the former eats in public, whereas the others hide during their meals. Later, we will see the essential relation of the war machine with the secret, which is as much a matter of principle as a result: espionage, strategy, diplomacy. Commentators have often underlined this link. \emph{Le roi ivre ou l’origine de l’Etat} (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).} “Between” the
magical-despotic State and the juridical State containing a military
institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriving from without.


From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his
eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity,
deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumézil analyzes the
three “sins” of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the
king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State (for
example, a sexual transgression that compromises the distribution of men
and women, or even a betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the
State).\footnote{For an analysis of the three sins in the cases of the Indian god Indra, the Scandinavian hero Starcatherus, and the Greek god Hercules, see Dumézil, \emph{Mythe et épopée}, vol. 2, pp. 17–19 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See also Dumézil, \emph{The Destiny of the Warrior}.} The warrior is in the position of betraying everything,
including the function of the military, or of understanding nothing. It
happens that historians, both bourgeois and Soviet, will follow this
negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan understood nothing: he
“didn’t understand” the phenomenon of the city. An easy thing to say.
The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to
the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to
conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is
external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of
conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas
the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually
take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.
What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war
machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one
of the two heads of the State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with
the magic violence of the State, at other times with the State’s
military institution. For instance, the war machine invents speed and
secrecy; but there is all the same a certain speed and a certain secrecy
that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily. So there is a great
danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of
political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles,
with the power of war. Dumézil cites the lineage of the Roman kings:
there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series, with
variants and an alternation between these two types of equally
legitimate rulers; but there is also a relation with an “evil king,”
Tullus Hostilius, Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a
disquieting and illegitimate character.\footnote{Dumézil, \emph{Mitra-Varuna}, p. 135. Dumézil analyzes the dangers and causes of the confusion, which could be due to economic variables. See pp. 153, 159.} Shakespeare’s kings could
also be invoked: even violence, murders, and perversion do not prevent
the State lineage from producing “good” kings; but a disturbing
character like Richard III slips in, announcing from the outset his
intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its line (deformed,
treacherous and traitorous, he claims a “secret close intent”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: \emph{Richard III}, act I, scene i, line 158.]}
totally different from the conquest of State power, and another—an
**other*—relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war
power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets
muddled; the war machine can then be understood only through the
categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside
the State. But, returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine
is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin.
One would have to say that it is located between the two heads of the
State, between the two articulations, and that it is necessary in order
to pass from one to the other. But “between” the two, in that instant,
even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility.
**The State has no war machine of its own*; it can only appropriate one
in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause
it problems. This explains the mistrust States have toward their
military institutions, in that the military institution inherits an
extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has a general sense of this
situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States
partially appropriate according to their political needs, and in
relation to which they are more or less good “conductors.”


Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war
seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury,
which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles,
then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from
Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes
to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the
modern State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles’ arms, only to
convert them to other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State—not
Ajax, who is condemned by the goddess he defied and against whom he
sinned.\footnote{On Ajax and the tragedy of Sophocles, see the analysis of Jean Starobinski, \emph{Trois Fureurs} (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Starobinski explicitly raises the question of war and the State.} No one has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at
once eccentric and condemned, better than Kleist. In \emph{Penthesilea},
Achilles is already separated from his power: the war machine has passed
over to the Amazons, a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion,
and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the
Scythians, the Amazons spring forth like lightning, “between” the two
States, the Greek and the Trojan. They sweep away everything in their
path. Achilles is brought before his double, Penthesilea. And in his
ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to prevent himself from marrying
the war machine, or from loving Penthesilea, and thus from betraying
Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time. Nevertheless, he already belongs
enough to the Greek State that Penthesilea, for her part, cannot enter
the passional relation of war with him without herself betraying the
collective law of her people, the law of the pack that prohibits
“choosing” the enemy and entering into one-to-one relationships or
binary distinctions.


Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it
against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start.
Doubtless Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the
imperial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to
the Roman State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and
stands condemned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law
of the State. As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything
more than banditry. Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State
triumphs, to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more
than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, \emph{or to turn
against itself}, to become a double suicide machine for a solitary man
and a solitary woman? Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist
as a monster, and Kleist has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that
the most uncanny modernity lies with him? It is because the elements of
his work are secrecy, speed, and affect.\footnote{These themes are analyzed by Mathieu Carrière in an as yet unpublished study of Kleist.} And in Kleist the secret
is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it
becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always
external to itself. Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the
interiority of a “subject,” to be projected violently outward into a
milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a
catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but
affects. And these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman,
the becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects
transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war. The
deterritorialization velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg’s,
Pentheselea’s) are externalized, by a system of relays and plug-ins,
extrinsic linkages belonging to the war machine. Broken rings. This
element of exteriority—which dominates everything, which Kleist invents
in literature, which he is the first to invent—will give time a new
rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic episodes or fainting spells,
and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is: “This affect is too strong for me,”
and a flash is: “The power of this affect sweeps me away,” so that the
Self (\emph{Moi}) is now nothing more than a character whose actions and
emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of death. Such is
Kleist’s personal formula: a succession of flights of madness and
catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains. There is
much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese fighter, interminably still,
who then makes a move too quick to see. The Go player. Many things in
modern art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to
Kleist. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to
exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its
irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or
creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary
powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the war machine
already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of the same process
whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its
irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure
exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental
thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?



\begin{quote}


**PROBLEM I*. \emph{Is there a way of warding off the formation of a State
apparatus (or its equivalents in a group)?}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION II*. \emph{The exteriority of the war machine is also attested
to by ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).}



\end{quote}


Primitive, segmentary societies have often been defined as societies
without a State, in other words, societies in which distinct organs of
power do not appear. But the conclusion has been that these societies
did not reach the degree of economic development, or the level of
political differentiation, that would make the formation of the State
apparatus both possible and inevitable: the implication is that
primitive people “don’t understand” so complex an apparatus. The prime
interest in Pierre Clastres’s theories is that they break with this
evolutionist postulate. Not only does he doubt that the State is the
product of an ascribable economic development, but he asks if it is not
a potential concern of primitive societies to ward off or avert that
monster they supposedly do not understand. Warding off the formation of
a State apparatus, making such a formation impossible, would be the
objective of a certain number of primitive social mechanisms, even if
they are not consciously understood as such. To be sure, primitive
societies have \emph{chiefs}. But the State is not defined by the existence
of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs
of power. The concern of the State is to conserve. Special institutions
are thus necessary to enable a chief to become a man of State, but
diffuse, collective mechanisms are just as necessary to prevent a chief
from becoming one. Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms,
are a part of chieftainship and keep an apparatus distinct from the
social body from crystallizing. Clastres describes the situation of the
chief, who has no instituted weapon other than his prestige, no other
means of persuasion, no other rule than his sense of the group’s
desires. The chief is more like a leader or a star than a man of power
and is always in danger of being disavowed, abandoned by his people. But
Clastres goes further, identifying war in primitive societies as the
surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State: war
maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups, and the warrior
himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits leading him to
solitude and a prestigious but powerless death.\footnote{Pierre Clastres, \emph{Society against the State}, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Urizen, 1977), and “Archéologie de la violence: la guerre dans les sociétés primitives” and “Malheur du guerrier sauvage” in \emph{Recherches d’anthropologie politique} (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 171–208, 209–248. In the last text, Clastres depicts the destiny of the warrior in primitive society and analyzes the mechanism that prevents the concentration of power (in the same way that Mauss demonstrated that the potlatch was a mechanism preventing the concentration of wealth).} Clastres can thus
invoke natural Law while reversing its principal proposition: just as
Hobbes saw clearly that \emph{the State was against war, so war is against
the State}, and makes it impossible. It should not be concluded that war
is a state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state
that wards off and prevents the State. Primitive war does not produce
the State any more than it derives from it. And it is no better
explained by exchange than by the State: far from deriving from
exchange, even as a sanction for its failure, war is what limits
exchanges, maintains them in the framework of “alliances”; it is what
prevents them from becoming a State factor, from fusing groups.


The importance of this thesis is first of all to draw attention to
collective mechanisms of inhibition. These mechanisms may be subtle, and
function as micromechanisms. This is easily seen in certain band or pack
phenomena. For example, in the case of gangs of street children in
Bogotá, Jacques Meunier cites three ways in which the leader is
prevented from acquiring stable power: the members of the band meet and
undertake their theft activity in common, with collective sharing of the
loot, but they disperse to eat or sleep separately; also, and
especially, each member of the band is paired off with one, two, or
three other members, so if he has a disagreement with the leader, he
will not leave alone but will take along his allies, whose combined
departure will threaten to break up the entire gang; finally, there is a
diffuse age limit, and at about age fifteen a member is inevitably
induced to quit the gang.\footnote{Jacques Meunier, \emph{Les gamins de Bogotá} (Paris: Lattes, 1977), p. 159 (“blackmail for dispersion”) and p. 177: if necessary, “it is the other street children who, by means of a complicated interplay of humiliations and silence, get the idea across that he must leave the gang.” Meunier emphasizes the degree to which the fate of the ex-gang member is jeopardized: not only for health reasons, but because he finds it hard to integrate himself into the criminal underworld, a society too hierarchical, too centralized, too centered on organs of power for him to fit into (p. 178). On child gangs, see also the novel by Jorge Amado, \emph{Capitâes de areia} (Sao Paolo: Livraria Martins, 1944).} These mechanisms cannot be understood
without renouncing the evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs as a
rudimentary, less organized, social form. Even in bands of animals,
leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the
strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in
favor of a fabric of immanent relations.\footnote{See I. S. Bernstein, “La dominance sociale chez les primates” in \emph{La Recherche}, no. 91 (July 1978).} One could just as easily
compare the form “high-society life” to the form “sociability” among the
most highly evolved men and women: high-society groups are similar to
gangs and operate by the diffusion of prestige rather than by reference
to centers of power, as in social groupings (Proust clearly showed this
noncorrespondence of high-society values and social values). Eugène Sue,
a man of high society and a dandy, whom legitimists reproached for
frequenting the Orleans family, used to say: “I’m not on the side of the
family, I side with the pack.” Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome
type, as opposed to the arborescent type that centers around organs of
power. That is why bands in general, even those engaged in banditry or
high-society life, are metamorphoses of a war machine formally distinct
from all State apparatuses or their equivalents, which are instead what
structure centralized societies. We certainly would not say that
discipline is what defines a war machine: discipline is the
characteristic required of armies after the State has appropriated them.
The war machine answers to other rules. We are not saying that they are
better, of course, only that they animate a fundamental indiscipline of
the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by
abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of
which, once again, impedes the formation of the State.


But why does this argument fail to convince us entirely? We follow
Clastres when he demonstrates that the State is explained neither by a
development of productive forces nor by a differentiation of political
forces. It is the State, on the contrary, that makes possible the
undertaking of large-scale projects, the constitution of surpluses, and
the organization of the corresponding public functions. The State is
what makes the distinction between governors and governed possible. We
do not see how the State can be explained by what it presupposes, even
with recourse to dialectics. The State seems to rise up in a single
stroke, in an imperial form, and does not depend on progressive factors.
Its on-the-spot emergence is like a stroke of genius, the birth of
Athena. We also follow Clastres when he shows that the war machine is
directed against the State, either against potential States whose
formation it wards off in advance, or against actual States whose
destruction it purposes. No doubt the war machine is realized more
completely in the “barbaric” assemblages of nomadic warriors than in the
“savage” assemblages of primitive societies. In any case, it is out of
the question that the State could be the result of a war in which the
conquerors imposed, by the very fact of their victory, a new law on the
vanquished, because the organization of the war machine is directed
against the State-form, actual or virtual. The State is no better
accounted for as a result of war than by a progression of economic or
political forces. This is where Clastres locates the break: between
“primitive” counter-State societies and “monstrous” State societies
whose formation it is no longer possible to explain. Clastres is
fascinated by the problem of “voluntary servitude,” in the manner of La
Boétie: In what way did people want or desire servitude, which most
certainly did not come to them as the outcome of an involuntary and
unfortunate war? They did, after all, have counter-State mechanisms at
their disposal: So how and why the State? Why did the State triumph? The
more deeply Clastres delved into the problem, the more he seemed to
deprive himself of the means of resolving it.\footnote{Clastres, \emph{Society against the State}, p. 169: “The emergence of the State brought about the great typological division between Savage and Civilized man; it created the unbridgeable gulf whereby everything was changed, for, on the other side, Time became History.” In order to account for this emergence, Clastres cites first a demographic factor (“but there is no question of replacing an economic determinism with a demographic determinism”; p. 180), then the possibility of a warring machine (?) running amok; he also cites, more unexpectedly, the indirect role of a certain mode of \emph{prophetic speech}, which, directed first against the “chiefs,” produces a formidable new kind of power. But one obviously cannot prejudge more elaborated solutions Clastres might have found for this problem. On the possible role of prophetic speech, refer to Hélène Clastres, \emph{La terre sans mal, le prophétisme tupi-guarani} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).} He tended to make
primitive societies hypostases, self-sufficient entities (he insisted
heavily on this point). He made their formal exteriority into a real
independence. Thus he remained an evolutionist, and posited a state of
nature. Only this state of nature was, according to him, a fully social
reality instead of a pure concept, and the evolution was a sudden
mutation instead of a development. For on the one hand, the State rises
up in a single stroke, fully formed; on the other, the counter-State
societies use very specific mechanisms to ward it off, to prevent it
from arising. We believe that these two propositions are valid but that
their interlinkage is flawed. There is an old scenario: “from clans to
empires,” or “from bands to kingdoms.” But nothing says that this
constitutes an evolution, since bands and clans are no less organized
than empire-kingdoms. We will never leave the evolution hypothesis
behind by creating a break between the two terms, that is, by endowing
bands with self-sufficiency and the State with an emergence all the more
miraculous and monstrous.


We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite
perfect, quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the
more empires they uncover. The hypothesis of the \emph{Urstaat} seems to be
verified: “The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of
humanity.” It is hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have
been in contact with imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly
controlled areas. But of greater importance is the inverse hypothesis:
that the State itself has always been in a relation with an outside and
is inconceivable independent of that relationship. The law of the State
is not the law of All or Nothing (State societies \emph{or} counter-State
societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty.
But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of
appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State, but the
outside of States cannot be reduced to “foreign policy,” that is, to a
set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two
directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire
**ecumenon* at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in
relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the
“multinational” type, or industrial complexes, or even religious
formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic
movements, etc.); but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins,
minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies
in opposition to the organs of State power. The modern world can provide
us today with particularly well developed images of these two
directions: worldwide ecumenical machines, but also a neoprimitivism, a
new tribal society as described by Marshall McLuhan. These directions
are equally present in all social fields, in all periods. It even
happens that they partially merge. For example, a commercial
organization is also a band of pillage, or piracy, for part of its
course and in many of its activities; or it is in bands that a religious
formation begins to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less
than worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and
that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse
and polymorphous war machine. It is a \emph{nomos} very different from the
“law.” The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to
reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations
and easily recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking
public recognition (there is no masked State). But the war machine’s
form of exteriority is such that it exists only in its own
metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation as well as in a
technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a
religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily
allow themselves to be appropriated by the State. It is in terms not of
independence, but of coexistence and competition \emph{in a perpetual field
of interaction}, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority,
war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands
and kingdoms, megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its
interiority in States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes
States or stands against States.



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION III*. \emph{The exteriority of the war machine is also attested
to by epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a
“nomad” or “minor science.”}



\end{quote}


There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very
difficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What
we are referring to are not “technologies” in the usual sense of the
term. But neither are they “sciences” in the royal or legal sense
established by history. According to a recent book by Michel Serres,
both the atomic physics of Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of
Archimedes are marked by it.\footnote{Michel Serres, \emph{La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce. Fleuves et turbulences} (Paris: Minuit, 1977). Serres was the first to make the first three points given in the text; the fourth seems to follow from them.} The characteristics of this kind of
eccentric science would seem to be the following:


1. First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory
of solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is
inseparable from flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency.


2. The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as
opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a
“paradox” to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary
characteristic, a copy; in the \emph{Timaeus}, Plato raises this possibility,
but only in order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal
science. By contrast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity,
and of passage or becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the
famed declination of the atom. The \emph{clinamen}, as the minimum angle, has
meaning only between a straight line and a curve, the curve and its
tangent, and constitutes the original curvature of the movement of the
atom. The clinamen is the smallest angle by which an atom deviates from
a straight path.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: According to Serres, the \emph{clinamen}, or declination of the atom, is the “minimal angle leading to the formation of a vortex, and appears by chance in a laminar flow” (\emph{La naissance de la physique}, p. 14). The \emph{clinamen} is the angle between a curve and its tangent, or “the smallest [angle] one can make, preventing anything from coming between the two lines which form it In other words, the angle appears at the same time as curvature” (p. 18). “The \emph{clinamen} is a differential” (p. 11).]} It is a passage to the limit, an exhaustion, a
paradoxical “exhaustive” model. The same applies to Archimedean
geometry, in which the straight line, defined as “the shortest path
between two points,” is just a way of defining the length of a curve in
a predifferential calculus.


3. One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a
lamellar or laminar flow,\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: A flow is laminar when, “no matter how small we make the layers (or lamellae) into which we divide the flow, they remain strictly parallel to one another in their movements”; Serres, ibid., p. 12.]} but from a curvilinear declination to the
formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest
slope for the smallest angle. From \emph{turba} to \emph{turbo}: in other words,
from bands or packs of atoms to the great vortical organizations.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Turba “designates a multitude, a large population, confusion and tumult.” Turbo “is a round form in movement \dots{} a revolving cone or vortical spiral.” “The origin of things and the beginning of order consists simply in the subtle passage from turba to turbo”; Serres, ibid., pp. 38–39.]}
The model is a vortical one; it operates in an open space throughout
which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed
space for linear and solid things. It is the difference between a
**smooth* (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a \emph{striated}
(metric) space: in the first case “space is occupied without being
counted,” and in the second case “space is counted in order to be
occupied.”\footnote{This is the distinction Pierre Boulez makes between two kinds of space-time in music: in striated space, the measure can be irregular or regular, but it is always assignable; in smooth space, the partition, or break, “can be effected at will.” \emph{Boulez on Music Today}, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 85.}


4. Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures
are considered only from the viewpoint of the \emph{affections} that befall
them: sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by
specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a
stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a
problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves
all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit,
operations in which each figure designates an “event” much more than an
essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the
cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the
theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is
inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creations within
science itself. Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not
an “obstacle”; it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a pro-jection, in
other words, a war machine. All of this movement is what royal science
is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of
the “problem-element” and subordinates it to the “theorem-element.”\footnote{Greek geometry is thoroughly marked by the opposition between these two poles, the theorematic and problematic, and by the relative triumph of the former: in his \emph{Commentary of the First Book of Euclid’s Elements}, trans, and intro. Glenn R. Murrow (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), Proclus analyzes the difference between the poles, taking the Speusippus-Menaechmus opposition as an example. Mathematics has always been marked by this tension also; for example, the axiomatic element has confronted a problematic, “intuitionist,” or “constructivist” current emphasizing a calculus of problems very different from axiomatics, or any theorematic approach. See Georges Bouligand, \emph{Le déclin des absolus mathématico-logiques} (Paris: Ed. d’Enseignement Superieur, 1949).}


This Archimedean science, or this conception of science, is bound up in
an essential way with the war machine: the \emph{problemata} are the war
machine itself and are inseparable from inclined planes, passages to the
limit, vortices, and projections. It would seem that the war machine is
projected into an abstract knowledge formally different from the one
that doubles the State apparatus. It would seem that a whole nomad
science develops eccentrically, one that is very different from the
royal or imperial sciences. Furthermore, this nomad science is
continually “barred,” inhibited, or banned by the demands and conditions
of State science. Archimedes, vanquished by the Roman State, becomes a
symbol.\footnote{Paul Virilio, \emph{L’insécurité du territoire} (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 120: “We know that the youth of geometry, geometry as free, creative investigation, came to an end with Archimedes\dots{}. The sword of a Roman soldier cut the thread, tradition says. In killing geometrical creation, the Roman State lay the foundation for the geometrical imperialism of the West.”} The fact is that the two kinds of science have different
modes of formalization, and State science continually imposes its form
of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad science. State science retains
of nomad science only what it can appropriate; it turns the rest into a
set of strictly limited formulas without any real scientific status, or
else simply represses and bans it. It is as if the “savants” of nomad
science were caught between a rock and a hard place, between the war
machine that nourishes and inspires them and the State that imposes upon
them an order of reasons. The figure of the \emph{engineer} (in particular
the military engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of
this situation. Most significant are perhaps borderline phenomena in
which nomad science exerts pressure on State science, and, conversely,
State science appropriates and transforms the elements of nomad science.
This is true of the art of encampments, “castrametation,” which has
always mobilized projections and inclined planes: the State does not
appropriate this dimension of the war machine without submitting it to
civil and metric rules that strictly limit, control, localize nomad
science, and without keeping it from having repercussions throughout the
social field (in this respect, Vauban is like a repeat of Archimedes,
and suffers an analogous defeat). It is true of descriptive and
projective geometry, which royal science would like to turn into a mere
practical dependency of analytic, or so-called higher, geometry (thus
the ambiguous situation of Monge and Poncelet as “savants”).\footnote{With Monge, and especially Poncelet, the limits of sensible, or even spatial, representation (striated space) are indeed surpassed, but less in the direction of a symbolic power (\emph{puissance}) of abstraction than toward a transspatial imagination, or a transintuition (continuity). See Léon Brunschvicg’s commentary on Poncelet, \emph{Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique} (Paris: PUF, 1947).} It is
also true of differential calculus. For a long time, it had only
parascientific status and was labeled a “Gothic hypothesis”; royal
science only accorded it the value of a convenient convention or a
well-founded fiction. The great State mathematicians did their best to
improve its status, but precisely on the condition that all the dynamic,
nomadic notions—such as becoming, heterogeneity, infinitesimal, passage
to the limit, continuous variation—be eliminated and civil, static, and
ordinal rules be imposed upon it (Carnot’s ambiguous position in this
respect). Finally, it is true of the hydraulic model, for it is certain
that the State itself needs a hydraulic science (there is no going back
on Wittfogel’s theses on the importance of large-scale waterworks for an
empire). But it needs it in a very different form, because the State
needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments,
which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point
to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes
the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar
layers. The hydraulic model of nomad science and the war machine, on the
other hand, consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth
space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously
affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local
movement from one specified point to another.\footnote{Michel Serres (\emph{La naissance de la physique}, pp. 105–107) analyzes the opposition d’Alembert-Bernoulli from this point of view. More generally, what is at issue is the difference between two models of space: “In the Mediterranean basin there is a shortage of water, and he who harnesses water rules. Hence that world of physics in which the conduit is essential, and the \emph{clinamen} seems like freedom because it is precisely a turbulence that rejects forced flow. Incomprehensible to scientific theory, incomprehensible to the master of the waters\dots{}. Hence the great figure of Archimedes: the master of floating bodies and military machines” (p. 106).} Democritus,
Menaechmus, Archimedes, Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, Carnot,
Poncelet, Perronet, etc.: in each case a monograph would be necessary to
take into account the special situation of these savants whom State
science used only after restraining or disciplining them, after
repressing their social or political conceptions.


The sea as a smooth space is a specific problem of the war machine. As
Virilio shows, it is at sea that the problem of the \emph{fleet in being} is
posed, in other words, the task of occupying an open space with a
vortical movement that can rise up at any point. In this respect, the
recent studies on rhythm, on the origin of that notion, do not seem
entirely convincing. For we are told that rhythm has nothing to do with
the movement of waves but rather that it designates “form” in general,
and more specifically the form of a “measured, cadenced” movement.\footnote{See Ben veniste, “The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression” in \emph{Problems in General Linguistics}, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 281–288. This text, often considered decisive, seems ambiguous to us because it invokes Democritus and atomism without dealing with the hydraulic question, and because it treats rhythm as a “secondary specialization” of the form of the body (p. 286).}
However, rhythm is never the same as measure. And though the atomist
Democritus is one of the authors who speak of rhythm in the sense of
form, it should be borne in mind that he does so under very precise
conditions of fluctuation and that the forms made by atoms are primarily
large, nonmetric aggregates, smooth spaces such as the air, the sea, or
even the earth (\emph{magnae res}). There is indeed such a thing as measured,
cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river between its banks
or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a rhythm without
measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other words, to the
manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.


This opposition, or rather this tension-limit between the two kinds of
science—nomad, war machine science and royal, State science—reappears at
different moments, on different levels. The work of Anne Querrien
enables us to identify two of these moments; one is the construction of
Gothic cathedrals in the twelfth century, the other the construction of
bridges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.\footnote{Anne Querrien, \emph{Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de l’Etat} (Paris: Cerfi). We have drawn from this book, as well as from unpublished studies by Anne Querrien.} Gothic
architecture is indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer
and taller than the Romanesque churches. Ever farther, ever higher \dots{} But
this difference is not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative
change: the static relation, form-matter, tends to fade into the
background in favor of a dynamic relation, material-forces. It is the
cutting of the stone that turns it into material capable of holding and
coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing ever higher and
longer vaults. The vault is no longer a form but the line of continuous
variation of the stones. It is as if Gothic conquered a smooth space,
while Romanesque remained partially within a striated space (in which
the vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars). But stone
cutting is inseparable from, on the one hand, a plane of projection at
ground level, which functions as a plane limit, and, on the other hand,
a series of successive approximations (squaring), or
placings-in-variation of voluminous stones. Of course, one appealed to
the theorematic science of Euclid in order to find a foundation for the
enterprise: mathematical figures and equations were thought to be the
intelligible form capable of organizing surfaces and volumes. But
according to the legend, Bernard de Clairvaux quickly abandoned the
effort as too “difficult,” appealing to the specificity of an operative,
Archimedean geometry, a projective and descriptive geometry defined as a
minor science, more a mathegraphy than a matheology. His journeyman, the
monk-mason Garin de Troyes, speaks of an operative logic of movement
enabling the “initiate” to draw, then hew the volumes “in penetration in
space,” to make it so that “the cutting line propels the equation” (\emph{le
trait pousse le chiffre}).\footnote{See Raoul Vergez, \emph{Les illuminés de l’art royal. Huit siècles de compagnonnages} (Paris: Julliard, 1976), p. 54. [\emph{TRANS}: In the present context, \emph{trait} refers to the cutting line followed by the artisan and to the working sketch of the construction under way. Vergez gives the following definition: “The Trait is a kind of graphic poem derived from geometry, which indicates the building plan in sketches drawn with precision on the ground, showing sections, elevations and all other projections, the three dimensions of a volume”; p. 86.]} One does not represent, one engenders
and traverses. This science is characterized less by the absence of
equations than by the very different role they play: instead of being
good forms absolutely that organize matter, they are “generated” as
“forces of thrust” (\emph{poussées}) by the material, in a qualitative
calculus of the optimum. This whole current of Archimedean geometry was
taken to its highest expression, but was also brought to a temporary
standstill, by the remarkable seventeenth-century mathematician
Desargues. Like most of his kind, Desargues wrote little; he
nevertheless exerted a great influence through his actions and left
outlines, rough drafts, and projects, all centered on problem-events:
“Lamentations,” “draft project for the cutting of stones,” “draft
project for grappling with the events of the encounters of a cone and a
plane, \dots{} Desargues, however, was condemned by the \emph{parlement} of Paris,
opposed by the king’s secretary; his practices of perspective were
banned.”\footnote{Gérard Desargues, \emph{Oeuvres} (Paris: Leiber, 1864). See also the text by Michel Chasles [\emph{Aperçu historique sur l’origine et le développement de méthodes en géometrié}\dots{} (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1837)—Trans.], which establishes a continuity between Desargues, Monge, and Poncelet as the “founders of a modern geometry.”} Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appropriates
stone cutting by means of \emph{templates} (the opposite of squaring), under
conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form,
mathematical figures, and measurement. Royal science only tolerates and
appropriates perspective if it is static, subjected to a central black
hole divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities. But the
adventure, or event, of Desargues is the same one that had already
occurred among the Gothic “journeymen” on a collective level. For not
only did the Church, in its imperial form, feel the need to strictly
control the movement of this nomad science (it entrusted the Templars
with the responsibility of determining its locations and objects,
governing the work sites, and regulating construction), but the secular
State, in its royal form, turned against the Templars themselves,
banning the guilds for a number of reasons, at least one of which was
the prohibition of this operative or minor geometry.


Is Anne Querrien right to find yet another echo of the same story in the
case of bridges in the eighteenth century? Doubtless, the conditions
were very different, for the division of labor according to State norms
was by then an accomplished fact. But the fact remains that in the
government agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under
a well-centralized administration while bridges were still the object of
active, dynamic, and collective experimentation. Trudaine organized
unusual, open “general assemblies” in his home. Perronet took as his
inspiration a supple model originating in the Orient: The bridge should
not choke or obstruct the river. To the heaviness of the bridge, to the
striated space of thick and regular piles, he opposed a thinning and
discontinuity of the piles, surbase, and vault, a lightness and
continuous variation of the whole. But his attempt soon ran up against
principled opposition; the State, in naming Perronet director of the
school, followed a frequently used procedure that inhibited
experimentation more than crowning its achievements. The whole history
of the Ecole des Fonts et Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways)
illustrates how this old, plebeian “corps” was subordinated to the Ecole
des Mines, the Ecole des Travaux Publics, and the Ecole Polytechnique,
at the same time as its activities were increasingly normalized.\footnote{Anne Querrien, \emph{Devenir fonctionnaire}, pp. 26–27: “Is the State founded upon the collapse of experimentation? \dots{} The State is not under construction, its construction sites must be short-lived. An installation is made to function, not to be socially constructed: from this point of view, the State involves in the construction only those who are paid to implement or command, and who are obliged to follow the model of a preestablished experimentation.”} We
thus come to the question, What is a collective \emph{body}? Undoubtedly, the
great collective bodies of a State are differentiated and hierarchical
organisms that on the one hand enjoy a monopoly over a power or function
and on the other hand send out local representatives. They have a
special relation to families, because they link the family model to the
State model at both ends and regard themselves as “great families” of
functionaries, clerks, intendants, or farmers. Yet it seems that in many
of these collective bodies there is something else at work that does not
fit into this schema. It is not just their obstinate defense of their
privileges. It is also their aptitude—even caricatural or seriously
deformed—to constitute themselves as a war machine, following other
models, another dynamism, a nomadic ambition, over against the State. As
an example, there is the very old problem of the \emph{lobby}, a group with
fluid contours, whose position is very ambiguous in relation to the
State it wishes to “influence” and the war machine it wishes to promote,
to whatever ends.\footnote{On the question of the “Colbert lobby,” see Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Journet, “Le Lobby Colbert. Un royaume, ou une affaire de famille?” \emph{Annales}, 30, no. 6 (November–December 1975), pp. 1303–1336.}


A \emph{body} (\emph{corps}) is not reducible to an \emph{organism}, any more than
esprit de corps is reducible to the soul of an organism. Spirit is not
better, but it is volatile, whereas the soul is weighted, a center of
gravity. Must we invoke a military origin of the collective body and
esprit de corps? “Military” is not the part that counts, but rather the
distant nomadic origin. Ibn Khaldūn defines the nomad war machine by:
families or lineages PLUS esprit de corps. The war machine entertains a
relation to families that is very different from its relation to the
State. In the war machine, the family is a band vector instead of a
fundamental cell; a genealogy is transferred from one family to another
according to the aptitude of a given family at a given time to realize
the maximum of “agnatic solidarity.” Here, it is not the public eminence
of a family that determines its place in a State organism but the
reverse; it is the secret power (\emph{puissance}), or strength of
solidarity, and the corresponding genealogical mobility that determine
its eminence in a war body.\footnote{See Ibn Khaldūn, \emph{The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History}, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). One of the essential themes of this masterpiece is the sociological problem of the esprit de corps, and its ambiguity. Ibn Khaldūn contrasts bedouinism (the bedouin life-style, not the ethnic group) with sedentarily or city living. The first aspect of this opposition is the inverted relation between the public and the secret: not only is there a secrecy of the bedouin war machine, as opposed to the publicity of the State city dweller, but in the first case “eminence” is based on a secret solidarity, while in the second case the secret is subordinated to the demands of social eminence. Second, bedouinism brings into play both a great purity and a great mobility of the lineages and their genealogy, whereas city life makes for lineages that are very impure, and at the same time rigid and fixed: Solidarity has a different meaning at either pole. Third, and this is the main point, bedouin lineages mobilize an esprit de corps and integrate into it, as a new dimension: this is \emph{asabîyah}, or \emph{ikhtilât}, from which the Arabic word for socialism is derived (Ibn Khaldūn stresses the absence of any “power” residing in the tribal chief, who has no State constraints at his disposal). On the other hand, in city living the esprit de corps becomes a dimension of power and is adapted for “autocracy.”} This has to do neither with the
monopoly of an organic power (\emph{pouvoir}) nor with local representation,
but is related to the potential (\emph{puissance}) of a vortical body in a
nomad space. Of course, the great bodies of a modern State can hardly be
thought of as Arab tribes. What we wish to say, rather, is that
collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that reconstitute
equivalents of the war machine—in sometimes quite unforeseen forms—in
specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals or rendering
judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology \dots{} A
collective body of captains asserts its demands through the organization
of the officers and the organism of the superior officers. There are
always periods when the State as organism has problems with its own
collective bodies, when these bodies, claiming certain privileges, are
forced in spite of themselves to open onto something that exceeds them,
a short revolutionary instant, an experimental surge. A confused
situation: each time it occurs, it is necessary to analyze tendencies
and poles, the nature of the movements. All of a sudden, it is as if the
collective body of the notary publics were advancing like Arabs or
Indians, then regrouping and reorganizing: a comic opera where you never
know what is going to happen next (even the cry “The police are with
us!” is sometimes heard).


Husserl speaks of a protogeometry that addresses \emph{vague}, in other
words, vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences. These essences are
distinct from sensible things, as well as from ideal, royal, or imperial
essences. Protogeometry, the science dealing with them, is itself vague,
in the etymological sense of “vagabond”: it is neither inexact like
sensible things nor exact like ideal essences, but \emph{anexact yet
rigorous} (“essentially and not accidentally inexact”). The circle is an
organic, ideal, fixed essence, but roundness is a vague and fluent
essence, distinct both from the circle and things that are round (a
vase, a wheel, the sun). A theorematic figure is a fixed essence, but
its transformations, distortions, ablations, and augmentations, all of
its variations, form problematic figures that are vague yet rigorous,
“lens-shaped,” “umbelliform,” or “indented.” It could be said that vague
essences extract from things a determination that is more than thinghood
(\emph{choséité}), which is that of \emph{corporeality} (\emph{corporéité}), and which
perhaps even implies an esprit de corps.\footnote{The principal texts of Husserl are \emph{Ideas}, trans. W. R. Gibson (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), part 1, sec. 74, and \emph{Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction}, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., ed. David B. Allison (Stoney Brook, N.Y.: N. Hayes, 1978) (with Derrida’s very important commentary, pp. 118–132). On the issue of a vague yet rigorous science, we may refer to the formula of Michel Serres, in his commentary on the geometrical figure called the \emph{salinon}: “It is rigorous, anexact. And not precise, exact or inexact. Only a metrics is exact” (\emph{Naissance de la physique}, p. 29). Gaston Bachelard’s book \emph{Essai sur la connaissance approchée} (Paris: Vrin, 1927) remains the best study of the steps and procedures constituting a rigor of the anexact, and of their creative role in science.} But why does Husserl see
this as a protogeometry, a kind of halfway point and not a pure science?
Why does he make pure essences dependent upon a passage to the limit,
when any passage to the limit belongs as such to the vague? What we
have, rather, are two formally different conceptions of science, and,
ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal science
continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science while
nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal science loose. At
the limit, all that counts is the constantly shifting borderline. In
Husserl (and also in Kant, though in the opposite direction: roundness
as the “schema” of the circle), we find a very accurate appreciation of
the irreducibility of nomad science, but simultaneously the concern of a
man of the State, or one who sides with the State, to maintain a
legislative and constituent primacy for royal science. Whenever this
primacy is taken for granted, nomad science is portrayed as a
prescientific or parascientific or subscientific agency. And most
important, it becomes impossible to understand the relations between
science and technology, science and practice, because nomad science is
not a simple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the
problem of these relations is brought out and resolved in an entirely
different way than from the point of view of royal science. The State is
perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine
is necessary to make something round. Thus the specific characteristics
of nomad science are what need to be determined in order to understand
both the repression it encounters and the interaction “containing” it.


Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science.
Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough; it
is different. We know of the problems States have always had with
journeymen’s associations, or \emph{compagnonnages}, the nomadic or itinerant
bodies of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths, etc. Settling,
sedentarizing labor power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor,
assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of
organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on
the spot (corvée) or among indigents (charity workshops)—this has always
been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to
conquer both a \emph{band vagabondage} and a \emph{body nomadism}. Let us return
to the example of Gothic architecture for a reminder of how extensively
the journeymen traveled, building cathedrals near and far, scattering
construction sites across the land, drawing on an active and passive
power (mobility and the strike) that was far from convenient for the
State. The State’s response was to take over management of the
construction sites, merging all the divisions of labor in the supreme
distinction between the intellectual and the manual, the theoretical and
the practical, modeled upon the difference between “governors” and
“governed.” In the nomad sciences, as in the royal sciences, we find the
existence of a “plane,” but not at all in the same way. The ground-level
plane of the Gothic journeyman is opposed to the metric plane of the
architect, which is on paper and off site. The plane of consistency or
composition is opposed to another plane, that of organization or
formation. Stone cutting by squaring is opposed to stone cutting using
templates, which implies the erection of a model for reproduction. It
can be said not only that there is no longer a need for skilled or
qualified labor, but also that there is a need for unskilled or
unqualified labor, for a dequalification of labor. The State does not
give power (\emph{pouvoir}) to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on
the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy
that is only imagined yet is sufficient to divest those whose job it
becomes simply to reproduce or implement of all of their power
(\emph{puissance}). This does not shield the State from more trouble, this
time with the body of intellectuals it itself engendered, but which
asserts new nomadic and political claims. In any case, if the State
always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it
opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does
so not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or
because of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a
division of labor opposed to the norms of the State. The difference is
not extrinsic: the way in which a science, or a conception of science,
participates in the organization of the social field, and in particular
induces a division of labor, is part of that science itself. Royal
science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form
that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form; it has often
been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than
from a society divided into governors and governed, and later,
intellectuals and manual laborers. What characterizes it is that all
matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression. It
seems that nomad science is more immediately in tune with the connection
between content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms
encompassing both form and matter. Thus matter, in nomad science, is
never prepared and therefore homogenized matter, but is essentially
laden with singularities (which constitute a form of content). And
neither is expression formal; it is inseparable from pertinent traits
(which constitute a matter of expression). This is an entirely different
schema, as we shall see. We can get a preliminary idea of this situation
by recalling the most general characteristic of nomad art, in which a
dynamic connection between support and ornament replaces the matter-form
dialectic. From the point of view of nomad science, which presents
itself as an art as much as a technique, the division of labor fully
exists, but it does not employ the form-matter duality (even in the case
of biunivocal correspondences). Rather, it \emph{follows} the connections
between singularities of matter and traits of expression, and lodges on
the level of these connections, whether they be natural or forced.\footnote{Gilbert Simondon has contributed much to the analysis and critique of the hylomorphic schema and of its social presuppositions (“form corresponds to what the man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he gives his orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible”). To the form-matter schema, Simondon opposes a dynamic schema, that of matter endowed with singularities-forces, or the energetic conditions at the basis of a system. The result is an entirely different conception of the relations between science and technology. See \emph{L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique} (Paris: PUF, 1964).}
This is another organization of work and of the social field through
work.


It is instructive to contrast two models of science, after the manner of
Plato in the \emph{Timaeus}.\footnote{In \emph{Timaeus}, 28–29, Plato entertains for an instant the thought that Becoming is not simply the inevitable characteristic of copies or reproductions, but could itself be a model rivaling the Identical and the Uniform. He states this hypothesis only in order to reject it; for it is true that if becoming is a model, not only must the duality of the model and the copy, of the model and reproduction, disappear, but the very notions of model and reproduction tend to lose all meaning. [\emph{TRANS}: Deleuze develops this point in “Plato and the Simulacrum,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, \emph{October}, 21 (Winter 1983), pp. 45–56. See especially p. 53.]} One could be called \emph{Compars} and the other
**Dispars*. The compars is the legal or legalist model employed by royal
science. The search for laws consists in extracting constants, even if
those constants are only relations between variables (equations). An
invariable form for variables, a variable matter of the invariant: such
is the foundation of the hylomorphic schema. But for the dispars as an
element of nomad science the relevant distinction is material-forces
rather than matter-form. Here, it is not exactly a question of
extracting constants from variables but of placing the variables
themselves in a state of continuous variation. If there are still
equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential equations
irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible
intuition of variation. They seize or determine singularities in the
matter, instead of constituting a general form. They effect
individuations through events or haecceities, not through the “object”
as a compound of matter and form; vague essences are nothing other than
haecceities. In all these respects, there is an opposition between the
**logos* and the \emph{nomos}, the law and the \emph{nomos}, prompting the comment
that the law still “savors of morality.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Friedrich Nietzsche, \emph{The Will to Power}, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), sec. 630(1885), p. 336.]} This does not mean,
however, that the legal model knows nothing of forces, the play of
forces. That it does is evident in the homogeneous space corresponding
to the compars. Homogeneous space is in no way a smooth space; on the
contrary, it is the form of striated space. The space of \emph{pillars}. It
is striated by the fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity, the
distribution of matter into parallel layers, the lamellar and laminar
movement of flows. These parallel verticals have formed an independent
dimension capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other
dimensions, of striating all of space in all of its directions, so as to
render it homogeneous. The vertical distance between two points provided
the mode of comparison for the horizontal distance between two other
points. Universal attraction became the law of all laws, in that it set
the rule for the biunivocal correspondence between two bodies; and each
time science discovered a new field, it sought to formalize it in the
same mode as the field of gravity. Even chemistry became a royal science
only by virtue of a whole theoretical elaboration of the notion of
weight. Euclidean space is founded on the famous parallel postulate, but
the parallels in question are in the first place gravitational
parallels, and correspond to the forces exerted by gravity on all the
elements of a body presumed to fill that space. It is the point of
application of the resultant of all of these parallel forces that
remains invariable when their common direction is changed or the body is
rotated (the \emph{center of gravity}). In short, it seems that the force of
gravity lies at the basis of a laminar, striated, homogeneous, and
centered space; it forms the foundation for those multiplicities termed
metric, or arborescent, whose dimensions are independent of the
situation and are expressed with the aid of units and points (movements
from one point to another). It was not some metaphysical concern, but an
effectively scientific one, that frequently led scientists in the
nineteenth century to ask if all forces were not reducible to gravity,
or rather to the form of attraction that gives gravity a universal value
(a constant relation for all variables) and biunivocal scope (two bodies
at a time, and no more). It is the form of interiority of all science.


The \emph{nomos}, or the dispars, is altogether different. But this is not to
say that the other forces refute gravity or contradict attraction.
Although it is true that they do not go against them, they do not result
from them either; they do not depend on them but testify to events that
are always supplementary or of “variable affects.” Each time a new
**field* opened up in science—under conditions making this a far more
important notion than that of form or object—it proved irreducible to
the field of attraction and the model of the gravitational forces,
although not contradictory to them. It affirmed a “more” or an excess,
and lodged itself in that excess, that deviation. When chemistry took a
decisive step forward, it was always by adding to the force of weight
bonds of another type (for example, electric) that transformed the
nature of chemical equations.\footnote{The situation is in fact more complex than that, and gravity is not the only feature of the dominant model: there is heat in addition to gravity (already in chemistry, combustion is coupled with weight). Even so, the problem was to know to what extent the “thermal field” deviated from gravitational space, or on the contrary was integrated with it. Monge is a typical example; he began by grouping heat, light, and electricity as “variable affections of bodies,” the concern of “specific physics,” while general physics would deal with extension, gravity, and movement. It was only later that Monge unified all of the fields under general physics (Anne Querrien).} But it will be noted that the
simplest considerations of velocity immediately introduce the difference
between vertical descent and curvilinear motion, or more generally
between the straight line and the curve, in the differential form of the
clinamen, or the smallest deviation, the minimum excess. Smooth space is
precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no
homogeneity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking
of proximities is effected independently of any determined path. It is a
space of contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather
than a visual space like Euclid’s striated space. Smooth space is a
field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth
space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric,
acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without
“counting” it and can “be explored only by legwork.” They do not meet
the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external
to them; an example of this is the system of sounds, or even of colors,
as opposed to Euclidean space.


When we oppose speed and slowness, the quick and the weighty, \emph{Celeritas
and Gravitas}, this must not be seen as a quantitative opposition, or as
a mythological structure (although Dumézil has established the
mythological importance of this opposition, precisely in relation to the
State apparatus and its natural “gravity”). The opposition is both
qualitative and scientific, in that speed is not merely an abstract
characteristic of movement in general but is incarnated in a moving body
that deviates, however slightly, from its line of descent or gravity.
**Slow and rapid are not quantitative degrees of movement but rather two
types of qualified movement*, whatever the speed of the former or the
tardiness of the latter. Strictly speaking, it cannot be said that a
body that is dropped has a speed, however fast it falls; rather it has
an infinitely decreasing slowness in accordance with the law of falling
bodies. Laminar movement that striates space, that goes from one point
to another, is weighty; but rapidity, celerity, applies only to movement
that deviates to the minimum extent and thereafter assumes a vortical
motion, occupying a smooth space, actually drawing smooth space itself.
In this space, matter-flow can no longer be cut into parallel layers,
and movement no longer allows itself to be hemmed into biunivocal
relations between points. In this sense, the role of the qualitative
opposition gravity-celerity, heavy-light, slow-rapid is not that of a
quantifiable scientific determination but of a condition that is
coextensive to science and that regulates both the separation and the
mixing of the two models, their possible interpenetration, the
domination of one by the other, their alternative. And the best
formulation, that of Michel Serres, is indeed couched in terms of an
alternative, whatever mixes or compositions there may be: “Physics is
reducible to two sciences, a general theory of routes and paths, and a
global theory of waves.”\footnote{Serres, \emph{La naissance de la physique}, p. 65.}


A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific
procedures: one consists in “reproducing,” the other in “following.” The
first involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other,
involving itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences.
Itineration is too readily reduced to a modality of technology, or of
the application and verification of science. But this is not the case:
**following is not at all the same thing as reproducing*, and one never
follows in order to reproduce. The ideal of reproduction, deduction, or
induction is part of royal science, at all times and in all places, and
treats differences of time and place as so many variables, the constant
form of which is extracted precisely by the law: for the same phenomena
to recur in a gravitational and striated space it is sufficient for the
same conditions to obtain, or for the same constant relation to hold
between the differing conditions and the variable phenomena. Reproducing
implies the permanence of a fixed point of \emph{view} that is external to
what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is
something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just
different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the
“singularities” of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to
discover a form; when one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field
of celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow
in a determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow; when
one engages in a continuous variation of variables, instead of
extracting constants from them, etc. And the meaning of Earth completely
changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing
around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant
relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of
deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. “Go
first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the
rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the
crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of
the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from
your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are
yours. Later \dots{} you can extend the size of your territory.”\footnote{Carlos Castaneda, \emph{The Teachings of Don Juan} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 88.} \emph{There
are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a
vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many
“accidents”} (problems). For example, why is primitive metallurgy
necessarily an ambulant science that confers upon smiths a quasi-nomadic
status? It could be objected that in these examples it is still a
question of going from one point to another (even if they are singular
points) through the intermediary of channels, and that it is still
possible to cut the flow into layers. But this is only true to the
extent that ambulant procedures and processes are necessarily tied to a
striated space—always formalized by royal science—which deprives them of
their model, submits them to its own model, and allows them to exist
only in the capacity of “technologies” or “applied science.” As a
general rule, a smooth space, a vectorial field, a nonmetric
multiplicity are always translatable, and necessarily translated, into a
“compars”: a fundamental operation by which one repeatedly overlays upon
each point of smooth space a tangent Euclidean space endowed with a
sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism
between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in
this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction, instead of
continuing to follow it in an “exploration by legwork.”\footnote{Albert Lautman has shown quite clearly how Riemann spaces, for example, admit a Euclidean conjunction making it possible at all times to define the parallelism of two neighboring vectors; this being the case, instead of exploring a multiplicity by legwork, the multiplicity is treated as though “immersed in a Euclidean space with a sufficient number of dimensions.” See \emph{Les schémas de structure} (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23–24, 43–47.} This is the
triumph of the \emph{logos} or the law over the \emph{nomos}. But the complexity
of the operation testifies to the existence of resistances it must
overcome. Whenever ambulant procedure and process are returned to their
own model, the points regain their position as singularities that
exclude all biunivocal relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and
vortical motion that excludes any parallelism between vectors, and
smooth space reconquers the properties of contact that prevent it from
remaining homogeneous and striated. There is always a current preventing
the ambulant or itinerant sciences from being completely internalized in
the reproductive royal sciences. There is a type of ambulant scientist
whom State scientists are forever fighting or integrating or allying
with, even going so far as to propose a minor position for them within
the legal system of science and technology.


It is not that the ambulant sciences are more saturated with irrational
procedures, with mystery and magic. They only get that way when they
fall into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also
surround themselves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what
becomes apparent in the rivalry between the two models is that the
ambulant or nomad sciences do not destine science to take on an
autonomous power, or even to have an autonomous development. They do not
have the means for that because they subordinate all their operations to
the sensible conditions of intuition and construction—\emph{following} the
flow of matter, \emph{drawing and linking up} smooth space. Everything is
situated in an objective zone of fluctuation that is coextensive with
reality itself. However refined or rigorous, “approximate knowledge” is
still dependent upon sensitive and sensible evaluations that pose more
problems than they solve: problematics is still its only mode. In
contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its theorematic or
axiomatic power, is to isolate all operations from the conditions of
intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or “categories.” That is
precisely why deterritorialization, in this kind of science, implies a
reterritorialization in the conceptual apparatus. Without this
categorical, apodictic apparatus, the differential operations would be
constrained to follow the evolution of a phenomenon; what is more, since
the experimentation would be open-air, and the construction at ground
level, the coordinates permitting them to be erected as stable models
would never become available. Certain of these requirements are
translated in terms of “safety”: the two cathedrals at Orléans and
Beauvais collapsed at the end of the twelfth century, and control
calculations are difficult to effect for the constructions of ambulant
science. Although safety is a fundamental element in the theoretical
norms of the State, and of the political ideal, there is also something
else at issue as well. Due to all their procedures, the ambulant
sciences quickly overstep the possibility of calculation: they inhabit
that “more” that exceeds the space of reproduction and soon run into
problems that are insurmountable from that point of view; they
eventually resolve those problems by means of a real-life operation. The
solutions are supposed to come from a set of activities that constitute
them as nonautonomous. Only royal science, in contrast, has at its
disposal a metric power that can define a conceptual apparatus or an
autonomy of science (including the autonomy of experimental science).
That is why it is necessary to couple ambulant spaces with a space of
homogeneity, without which the laws of physics would depend on
particular points in space. But this is less a translation than a
constitution: precisely that constitution the ambulant sciences did not
undertake, and do not have the means to undertake. In the field of
interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant sciences confine
themselves to \emph{inventing problems} whose solution is tied to a whole set
of collective, nonscientific activities but whose \emph{scientific solution}
depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has
transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus
and its organization of work. This is somewhat like intuition and
intelligence in Bergson, where only intelligence has the scientific
means to solve formally the problems posed by intuition, problems that
intuition would be content to entrust to the qualitative activities of a
humanity engaged in \emph{following} matter.\footnote{In Bergson, the relations between intuition and intelligence are very complex, and they are in perpetual interaction. Bouligand’s theme is also relevant here: the dualism of the two mathematical elements, the “problem” and the “global synthesis,” is developed only when they enter a field of interaction in which the global synthesis defines the “categories” without which the problem would have no general solution. See \emph{Le déclin des absolus mathématico-logiques}.}



\begin{quote}


**PROBLEM II*. \emph{Is there a way to extricate thought from the State
model?}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION IV*. \emph{The exteriority of the war machine is attested to,
finally, by noology.}



\end{quote}


Thought contents are sometimes criticized for being too conformist. But
the primary question is that of form itself. Thought as such is already
in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and
which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an
entire \emph{organon}. There is thus an image of thought covering all of
thought; it is the special object of “noology” and is like the
State-form developed in thought. This image has two heads, corresponding
to the two poles of sovereignty: the \emph{imperium} of true thinking
operating by magical capture, seizure or binding, constituting the
efficacy of a foundation (\emph{mythos}); a republic of free spirits
proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and juridical
organization, carrying the sanction of a ground (\emph{logos}). These two
heads are in constant interference in the classical image of thought: a
“republic of free spirits whose prince would be the idea of the Supreme
Being.” And if these two heads are in interference, it is not only
because there are many intermediaries and transitions between them, and
because the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses
and retains the first, but also because, antithetical and complementary,
they are necessary to one another. It is not out of the question,
however, that in order to pass from one to the other there must occur,
“between” them, an event of an entirely different nature, one that hides
outside the image, takes place outside.\footnote{Marcel Detienne, in \emph{Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque} (Paris: Maspero, 1973), clearly articulates these two poles of thought, which correspond to the two aspects of sovereignty according to Dumézil: the magico-religious speech of the despot or of the “old man of the sea,” and the dialogue-speech of the city. Not only are the principal character types of Greek thought (the Poet, the Physicist, the Philosopher, the Sophist, etc.) situated in relation to these poles, but Detienne interposes between the two poles a distinct group, the Warriors, which brings about transition or evolution.} But confining ourselves to
the image, it appears that it is not simply a metaphor when we are told
of an \emph{imperium} of truth and a republic of spirits. It is the necessary
condition for the constitution of thought as principle, or as a form of
interiority, as a stratum.


It is easy to see what thought gains from this: a gravity it would never
have on its own, a center that makes everything, including the State,
appear to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction. But the
State gains just as much. Indeed, by developing in thought in this way
the State-form gains something essential: a whole consensus. Only
thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal
by right, of elevating the State to the level of de jure universality.
It is as if the sovereign were left alone in the world, spanned the
entire ecumenon, and now dealt only with actual or potential subjects.
It is no longer a question of powerful, extrinsic organizations, or of
strange bands: the State becomes the sole principle separating rebel
subjects, who are consigned to the state of nature, from consenting
subjects, who rally to its form of their own accord. If it is
advantageous for thought to prop itself up with the State, it is no less
advantageous for the State to extend itself in thought, and to be
sanctioned by it as the unique, universal form. The particularity of
States becomes merely an accident of fact, as is their possible
perversity, or their imperfection. For the modern State defines itself
in principle as “the rational and reasonable organization of a
community”: the only remaining particularity a community has is interior
or moral (\emph{the spirit of a people}), at the same time as the community
is funneled by its organization toward the harmony of a universal
(\emph{absolute spirit}). The State gives thought a form of interiority, and
thought gives that interiority a form of universality: “The goal of
worldwide organization is the satisfaction of reasonable individuals
within particular free States.” The exchange that takes place between
the State and reason is a curious one; but that exchange is also an
analytic proposition, because realized reason is identified with the de
jure State, just as the State is the becoming of reason.\footnote{There exists a Hegelianism of the right that lives on in official political philosophy and weds the destiny of thought to the State. Alexandre Kojève (“Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, \emph{On Tyranny} [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963]) and Eric Weil (\emph{Hegel et l’Etat. Philosophie politique} [Paris: Vrin, 1974]) are its recent representatives. From Hegel to Max Weber there developed a whole line of reflection on the relation of the modern State to Reason, both as rational-technical and as reasonable-human. If it is objected that this rationality, already present in the archaic imperial State, is the \emph{optimum} of the governors themselves, the Hegelians respond that the rational-reasonable cannot exist without a minimum of participation by everybody. The question, rather, is whether the very form of the rational-reasonable is not extracted from the State, in a way that necessarily makes it right, gives it “reason” (\emph{lui donner nécessairement “raison”}).} In
so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or rational
State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject. The
State must realize the distinction between the legislator and the
subject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to
conceptualize their identity. Always obey. The more you obey, the more
you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other
words yourself \dots{} Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of
ground it has been giving the established powers its blessing, and
tracing its doctrine of faculties onto the organs of State power. Common
sense, the unity of all the faculties at the center constituted by the
Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the absolute. This was most
notably the great operation of the Kantian “critique,” renewed and
developed by Hegelianism. Kant was constantly criticizing bad usages,
the better to consecrate the function. It is not at all surprising that
the philosopher has become a public professor or State functionary. It
was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of thought.
With full reciprocity. Doubtless, the image itself assumes different
contours in accordance with the variations on this form: it has not
always delineated or designated the philosopher, and will not always
delineate him. It is possible to pass from a magical function to a
rational function. The poet in the archaic imperial State was able to
play the role of image trainer.\footnote{On the role of the ancient poet as a “functionary of sovereignty,” see Dumézil, \emph{Servius et la Fortune} (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 64ff., and Detienne, \emph{Les maîtres de vérité}, pp. 17ff.} In modern States, the sociologist
succeeded in replacing the philosopher (as, for example, when Durkheim
and his disciples set out to give the republic a secular model of
thought). Even today, psychoanalysis lays claim to the role of
**Cogitatio universalis* as the thought of the Law, in a magical return.
And there are quite a few other competitors and pretenders. Noology,
which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of images of
thought, and their historicity. In a sense, it could be said that all
this has no importance, that thought has never had anything but
laughable gravity. But that is all it requires: for us not to take it
seriously. Because that makes it all the easier for it to think for us,
and to be forever engendering new functionaries. Because the less people
take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the
State wants. Truly, what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry
impossible thing—to be a thinker?


But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their
acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is
mobile in history. These are the acts of a “private thinker,” as opposed
to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov.
Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy
images. Nietzsche’s \emph{Schopenhauer as Educator} is perhaps the greatest
critique ever directed against the image of thought and its relation to
the State. “Private thinker,” however, is not a satisfactory expression,
because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of \emph{outside
thought}.\footnote{See Michel Foucault’s analysis of Maurice Blanchot and the form of exteriority of thought: “La pensée du dehors,” \emph{Critique}, no. 229 (June 1966), pp. 523–548.} To place thought in an immediate relation with the
outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war
machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be
studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from
the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic
State act or sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its
meaning from a new external force, a final force that must conquer or
subjugate it, utilize it). There is another reason why “private thinker”
is not a good expression. Although it is true that this counterthought
attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude,
like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to
come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it,
though it is not yet here. “We are lacking that final force, in the
absence of a people to bear us. We are looking for that popular
support.” Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State. And
this form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the
form of Anteriority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between
different poles or focal points of interiority. But the form of
exteriority of thought—the force that is always external to itself, or
the final force, the \emph{n}th power—is not at all \emph{another image} in
opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus. It is, rather,
a force that destroys both the image \emph{and} its copies, the model \emph{and}
its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model
of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian just,
Hegelian right, etc.). A “method” is the striated space of the
**cogitatio universalis* and draws a path that must be followed from one
point to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a
smooth space that it must occupy without counting, and for which there
is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays,
intermezzos, resurgences. Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image,
either to constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen,
the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any
point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the
archer and the target. The problem of the war machine is that of
relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or
the monument. An ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model
society. “Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it
takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But countless
times it misses and is depressed at the fact The artist and the
philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards
the means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the
wisdom of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought
to strike home at everybody—and even these few are not struck with the
force with which the philosopher and artist launch their shot.”\footnote{Nietzsche, \emph{Schopenhauer as Educator}, in \emph{Untimely Meditations}, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 177–178.}


We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in
them thought is truly a \emph{pathos} (an \emph{antilogos} and an \emph{antimythos}).
One is a text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Rivière, explaining
that thought operates on the basis of a \emph{central breakdown}, that it
lives solely by its own incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief
only traits of expression in a material, developing peripherally, in a
pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of singularities impossible to
universalize, of circumstances impossible to interiorize. The other is
the text by Kleist, “On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in Speech” (“Über
die allmächliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden”), in which Kleist
denounces the central interiority of the concept as a means of
control—the control of speech, of language, but also of affects,
circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this from thought as a
proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dialogue, an
antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before knowing
while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says, is
the thought of the \emph{Gemüt}, which proceeds like a general in a war
machine should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure
intensity. “I mix inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as
well as using appositions when they are unnecessary.” Gain some time,
and then perhaps renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control
over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to
draw speech to oneself and “bring something incomprehensible into the
world.” Such is the form of exteriority, the relation between brother
and sister, the becoming-woman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of
the woman: the \emph{Gemüt} that refuses to be controlled, that forms a war
machine. A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being
gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming
an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a
problem-thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem; a thought that
appeals to a people instead of taking itself for a government ministry.
Is it by chance that whenever a “thinker” shoots an arrow, there is a
man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that
counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or “aim”?
Jacques Rivière does not hesitate to respond to Artaud: work at it, keep
on working, things will come out all right, you will succeed in finding
a method and in learning to express clearly what you think in essence
(\emph{cogitatio universalis}). Rivière is not a head of State, but he would
not be the last in the \emph{Nouvelle Revue Française} to mistake himself for
the secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a
State of right. Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose
genius, of all men of letters a veritable man of the State. But that is
not the worst of it: the worst is the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud
themselves have ended up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be
copied—a model far more insidious than the others—for the artificial
stammerings and innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal.


The classical image of thought, and the striating of mental space it
effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two
“universals,” the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing
horizon, and the Subject as the principle that converts being into
being-for-us.\footnote{A curious text of Karl Jaspers, entitled \emph{Descartes und die Philosophie} (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1956), develops this point of view and accepts its implications.} \emph{Imperium} and republic. Between the two, all of the
varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental
space, from the double point of view of Being and the Subject, under the
direction of a “universal method.” It is now easy for us to characterize
the nomad thought that rejects this image and does things differently.
It does not ally itself with a universal thinking subject but, on the
contrary, with a singular race; and it does not ground itself in an
all-encompassing totality but is on the contrary deployed in a
horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or sea. An
entirely different type of adequation is established here, between the
race defined as “tribe” and smooth space defined as “milieu.” A tribe in
the desert instead of a universal subject within the horizon of
all-encompassing Being. Kenneth White recently stressed this
dissymmetrical complementarity between a race-tribe (the Celts, those
who feel they are Celts) and a milieu-space (the Orient, the Gobi
desert\dots{}). White demonstrates that this strange composite, the marriage
of the Celt and the Orient, inspires a properly nomad thought that
sweeps up English literature and constitutes American literature.\footnote{Kenneth White, \emph{Intellectual Nomadism}. The title of the second volume of this unpublished work is \emph{Poetry and Tribe}.}
We immediately see the dangers, the profound ambiguities accompanying in
this enterprise, as if each effort and each creation faced a possible
infamy. For what can be done to prevent the theme of a race from turning
into a racism, a dominant and all-encompassing fascism, or into a sect
and a folklore, microfascisms? And what can be done to prevent the
oriental pole from becoming a phantasy that reactivates all the fascisms
in a different way, and also all the folklores, yoga, Zen, and karate?
It is certainly not enough to travel to escape phantasy, and it is
certainly not by invoking a past, real or mythical, that one avoids
racism. But here again, the criteria for making the distinction are
simple, whatever the de facto mixes that obscure them at a given level,
at a given moment. The race-tribe exists only at the level of an
oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is
no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is
defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it
by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of
race. Rimbaud said it all on this point: only he or she can invoke race
who says, “I have always been of an inferior race \dots{} I am of an inferior
race for all eternity \dots{} There I am on the Breton shore \dots{} I am a beast, a
nigger \dots{} I am of a distant race: my ancestors were Norsemen.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Arthur Rimbaud, \emph{A Season in Hell}, trans. Louise Varèse (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1952), pp. 9, 13, 17, 39.]} In
the same way that race is not something to be rediscovered, the Orient
is not something to be imitated: it only exists in the construction of a
smooth space, just as race only exists in the constitution of a tribe
that peoples and traverses a smooth space. All of thought is a becoming,
a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and the
representation of a Whole.



\begin{quote}


**AXIOM II*. \emph{The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as
it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military
institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a
spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an
affective aspect.}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION V*. \emph{Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions
of the war machine in space.}



\end{quote}


The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one
point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling
points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life
is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although
the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths
they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The
water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a
relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points,
but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an
autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the
intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of
the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them.\footnote{Anny Milovanoff, “La seconde peau du nomade,” \emph{Nouvelles littéraires}, no. 2646 (July 27, 1978), p. 18: “The Larbaâ nomads, on the border of the Algerian Sahara, use the word \emph{trigâ}, which generally means road or way, to designate the woven straps serving to reinforce the cords holding the tent to the stakes\dots{}. In nomad thought, the dwelling is tied not to a territory but rather to an itinerary. Refusing to take possession of the land they cross, the nomads construct an environment out of wool and goat hair, one that leaves no mark at the temporary site it occupies\dots{}. Thus wool, a soft material, gives nomad life its unity\dots{}. Nomads pause at the representation of their journeys, not at a figuration of the space they cross. They leave space to space\dots{}. Woolly polymorphism.”} The nomad is not at
all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one
point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or
not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a
consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are
relays along a trajectory. Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or
form a common aggregate; their causes and conditions are no less
distinct for that (for example, those who joined Mohammed at Medina had
a choice between a nomadic or bedouin pledge, and a pledge of hegira or
emigration).\footnote{See W. Montgomery Watt, \emph{Mohammed at Medina} (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 85–86, 242.}


Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or
customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary
road, which is to \emph{parcel out a closed space to people}, assigning each
person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The
nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it \emph{distributes people (or
animals) in an open space}, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.
The \emph{nomos} came to designate the law, but that was originally because
it was distribution, a mode of distribution. It is a very special kind
of distribution, one without division into shares, in a space without
borders or enclosure. The \emph{nomos} is the consistency of a fuzzy
aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law
or the \emph{polis}, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse
around a city (“either nomos or polis”).\footnote{Emmanuel Laroche, \emph{Histoire de la ratine “Nem” en grec ancien} (Paris: Klincksieck, 1949). The root “Nem” indicates distribution, not allocation, even when the two are linked. In the pastoral sense, the distribution of animals is effected in a nonlimited space and implies no parceling out of land: “The occupation of shepherd, in the Homeric age, had nothing to do with a parceling of land; when the agrarian question came to the foreground, in the time of Solon, it was expressed in an entirely different vocabulary.” \emph{To take to pasture} (nemô) refers not to a parceling out but to a scattering, to a repartition of animals. It was only after Solon that Nomos came to designate the principle at the basis of the laws and of right (Thesmoï and Dikè), and then came to be identified with the laws themselves. Prior to that, there was instead an alternative between the city, or polis, ruled by laws, and the outskirts as the place of the nomos. A similar alternative is found in the work of Ibn Khaldūn: between \emph{hadara} as city living, and \emph{badiya} as nomos (not the town, but the preurban countryside, the plateau, steppe, mountain, or desert).} Therefore, and this is the
third point, there is a significant difference between the spaces:
sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between
enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that
are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the
desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad
distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that
space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to
define the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest
that the nomad is on the contrary \emph{he who does not move}. Whereas the
migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the
nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to
the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the
desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this
challenge.\footnote{Arnold Toynbee, \emph{A Study of History} (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), abridged by D. C. Somerwell, vol. 1, pp. 164–186: “They flung themselves upon the Steppe, not to escape beyond its bounds but to make themselves at home on it” (p. 168).} Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is
only seated while moving (the Bedouin galloping, knees on the saddle,
sitting on the soles of his upturned feet, “a feat of balance”). The
nomad knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed,
catatonia and rush, a “stationary process,” station as process—these
traits of Kleist’s are eminently those of the nomad. It is thus
necessary to make a distinction between \emph{speed} and \emph{movement}: a
movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may
be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is
extensive; speed is intensive. Movement designates the relative
character of a body considered as “one,” and which goes from point to
point; \emph{speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a
body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in
the manner of a vortex}, with the possibility of springing up at any
point. (It is therefore not surprising that reference has been made to
spiritual voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity,
in one place: these are part of nomadism.) In short, we will say by
convention that only nomads have absolute movement, in other words,
speed; vortical or swirling movement is an essential feature of their
war machine.


It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land, even
though they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the
Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no
reterritorialization \emph{afterward} as with the migrant, or upon \emph{something
else} as with the sedentary (the sedentary’s relation with the earth is
mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus).
With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that
constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad
reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that
deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a
territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground
(\emph{sol}) or support. The earth does not become deterritorialized in its
global and relative movement, but at specific locations, at the spot
where the forest recedes, or where the steppe and the desert advance.
Hubac is right to say that nomadism is explainable less by universal
changes in climate (which relate instead to migrations) as by the
“divagation of local climates.”\footnote{See Pierre Hubac, \emph{Les nomades} (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1948), pp. 26–29 (although Hubac tends to confuse nomads and migrants).} The nomads are there, on the land,
wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in
all directions. The nomads inhabit these places; they remain in them,
and they themselves make them grow, for it has been established that the
nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it. They are
vectors of deterritorialization. They add desert to desert, steppe to
steppe, by a series of local operations whose orientation and direction
endlessly vary.\footnote{On the nomads of the sea, or of the archipelago, José Emperaire writes: “They do not grasp an itinerary as a whole, but in a fragmentary manner, by juxtaposing in order its various successive stages, from campsite to campsite in the course of the journey. For each of these stages, they estimate the length of the crossing and the successive changes in direction marking it.” \emph{Les nomades de la mer} (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 225.} The sand desert has not only oases, which are like
fixed points, but also rhizomatic vegetation that is temporary and
shifts location according to local rains, bringing changes in the
direction of the crossings.\footnote{Wilfred Thesiger, \emph{Arabian Sands} (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), pp. 112–113, 125, 165–166.} The same terms are used to describe ice
deserts as sand deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky;
there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility
is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that
relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of
relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or
the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile
space, or rather “haptic,” a sonorous much more than a visual
space.\footnote{See the two admirable descriptions, of the sand desert by Wilfred Thesiger and of the ice desert by Edmund Carpenter, in \emph{Eskimo} (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964): the winds, and tactile and sound qualities; the secondary character of visual data, particularly the indifference of the nomads to astronomy as a royal science; and yet the presence of a whole minor science of qualitative variables and traces.} The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an
essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters
their cartography. The nomad, nomad space, is localized and not
delimited. What is both limited and limiting is striated space, the
**relative global*: it is limited in its parts, which are assigned
constant directions, are oriented in relation to one another, divisible
by boundaries, and can interlink; what is limiting (\emph{limes} or wall, and
no longer boundary) is this aggregate in relation to the smooth spaces
it “contains,” whose growth it slows or prevents, and which it restricts
or places outside. Even when the nomad sustains its effects, he does not
belong to this relative global, where one passes from one point to
another, from one region to another. Rather, he is in a \emph{local
absolute}, an absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a
series of local operations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice,
sea.


Making the absolute appear in a particular place—is that not a very
general characteristic of religion (recognizing that the nature of the
appearance, and the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the images that
reproduce it are open to debate)? But the sacred place of religion is
fundamentally a center that repels the obscure \emph{nomos}. The absolute of
religion is essentially a horizon that encompasses, and, if the absolute
itself appears at a particular place, it does so in order to establish a
solid and stable center for the global. The encompassing role of smooth
spaces (desert, steppe, or ocean) in monotheism has been frequently
noted. In short, religion converts the absolute. Religion is in this
sense a piece in the State apparatus (in both of its forms, the “bond”
and the “pact or alliance”), even if it has within itself the power to
elevate this model to the level of the universal or to constitute an
absolute \emph{Imperium}. But for the nomad the terms of the question are
totally different: locality is not delimited; the absolute, then, does
not appear at a particular place but becomes a nonlimited locality; the
coupling of the place and the absolute is achieved not in a centered,
oriented globalization or universalization but in an infinite succession
of local operations. Limiting ourselves to this opposition between
points of view, it may be observed that nomads do not provide a
favorable terrain for religion; the man of war is always committing an
offense against the priest or the god. The nomads have a vague,
literally vagabond “monotheism,” and content themselves with that, and
with their ambulant fires. The nomads have a sense of the absolute, but
a singularly atheistic one. The universalist religions that have had
dealings with nomads—Moses, Mohammed, even Christianity with the
Nestorian heresy—have always encountered problems in this regard, and
have run up against what they have termed obstinate impiety. These
religions are not, in effect, separable from a firm and constant
orientation, from an imperial de jure State, even, and especially, in
the absence of a de facto State; they have promoted an ideal of
sedentarization and addressed themselves more to the migrant components
than the nomadic ones. Even early Islam favored the theme of the hegira,
or migration, over nomadism; rather, it was through certain schisms
(such as the Khārijī movement) that it won over the Arab or Berber
nomads.\footnote{Emile Félix Gautier, \emph{Le passé de l’Afrique du Nord} (Paris: Payot, 1952), pp. 267–316.}


However, it does not exhaust the question to establish a simple
opposition between two points of view, religion-nomadism. For
monotheistic religion, at the deepest level of its tendency to project a
universal or spiritual State over the entire ecumenon, is not without
ambivalence or fringe areas; it goes beyond even the ideal limits of the
State, even the imperial State, entering a more indistinct zone, an
outside of States where it has the possibility of undergoing a singular
mutation or adaptation. We are referring to religion as an element in a
war machine and the idea of holy war as the motor of that machine. The
**prophet*, as opposed to the state personality of the king and the
religious personality of the priest, directs the movement by which a
religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of such a
machine. It has often been said that Islam, and the prophet Mohammed,
performed such a conversion of religion and constituted a veritable
esprit de corps: in the formula of Georges Bataille, “early Islam, a
society reduced to the military enterprise.” This is what the West
invokes in order to justify its antipathy toward Islam. Yet the Crusades
were a properly Christian adventure of this type. The prophets may very
well condemn nomad life; the war machine may very well favor the
movement of migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in
general may very well compensate for its specific deterritorialization
with a spiritual and even physical reterritorialization, which in the
case of the holy war assumes the well-directed character of a conquest
of the holy lands as the center of the world. Despite all that, when
religion sets itself up as a war machine, it mobilizes and liberates a
formidable charge of nomadism or absolute deterritorialization; it
doubles the migrant with an accompanying nomad, or with the potential
nomad the migrant is in the process of becoming; and finally, it turns
its dream of an absolute State back against the State-form.\footnote{From this perspective, Clastres’s analysis of Indian prophetism can be generalized: “On one side, the chiefs, on the other, and standing against them, the prophets\dots{}. And the prophetic machine worked perfectly well since the \emph{karai} were able to sweep astonishing masses of Indians along behind them the insurrectional act of the prophets against the chiefs conferred on the former, through a strange reversal of things, infinitely more power than was held by the latter.” \emph{Society against the State}, pp. 184–185.} And
this turning-against is no less a part of the “essence” of religion than
that dream. The history of the Crusades is marked by the most
astonishing series of directional changes: the firm orientation toward
the Holy Land as a center to reach often seems nothing more than a
pretext. But it would be wrong to say that the play of self-interest, or
economic, commercial, or political factors, diverted the crusade from
its pure path. The idea of the crusade \emph{in itself implies this
variability of directions}, broken and changing, and intrinsically
possesses all these factors or all these variables from the moment it
turns religion into a war machine and simultaneously utilizes and gives
rise to the corresponding nomadism.\footnote{One of the most interesting themes of the classic work by Paul Alphandéry (\emph{La chrétienté et l’idée de croisade} [Paris: Albin Michel, 1959] is his demonstration that the changes in course, the pauses, the detours were an integral part of the Crusade: “this army of crusaders that we envision as a modern army, like those of Louis XIV or Napoleon, marching with absolute passivity, obeying the will of a diplomatic officer and staff. Such an army knows where it is going, and when it makes a mistake, it is not for lack of reflection. A history more attentive to differences accepts a more realistic image of the army of the Crusade. The army of the Crusade was freely, sometimes anarchically alive\dots{}. This army was motivated from within, as a function of a complex coherence by virtue of which nothing happened by chance. It is certain that the conquest of Constantinople had its reason, necessity and a religious character, like the other deeds of the Crusades” (vol. 2, p. 7). Alphandery shows in particular that the idea of a battle against the Infidel, \emph{at any point}, appeared early on, along with the idea of liberating the Holy Land (vol. 1, p. 219).} The necessity of maintaining
the most rigorous of distinctions between sedentaries, migrants, and
nomads does not preclude de facto mixes; on the contrary, it makes them
all the more necessary in turn. And it is impossible to think of the
general process of sedentarization that vanquished the nomads without
also envisioning the gusts of local nomadization that carried off
sedentaries and doubled migrants (notably, to the benefit of religion).


Smooth or nomad space lies between two striated spaces: that of the
forest, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with
its grids and generalized parallels, its now independent arborescence,
its art of extracting the tree and wood from the forest. But being
“between” also means that smooth space is controlled by these two
flanks, which limit it, oppose its development, and assign it as much as
possible a communicational role; or, on the contrary, it means that it
turns against them, gnawing away at the forest on one side, on the other
side gaining ground on the cultivated lands, affirming a
noncommunicating force or a force of \emph{divergence} like a “wedge” digging
in. The nomads turn first against the forest and the mountain dwellers,
then descend upon the farmers. What we have here is something like the
flipside or the outside of the State-form—but in what sense? This form,
as a global and relative space, implies a certain number of components:
forest-clearing of fields; agriculture-grid laying; animal raising
subordinated to agricultural work and sedentary food production;
commerce based on a constellation of town-country (\emph{polis-nomos})
communications. When historians inquire into the reasons for the victory
of the West over the Orient, they primarily mention the following
characteristics, which put the Orient in general at a disadvantage:
deforestation rather than clearing for planting, making it extremely
difficult to extract or even to find wood; cultivation of the type “rice
paddy and garden” rather than arborescence and field; animal raising for
the most part outside the control of the sedentaries, with the result
that they lacked animal power and meat foods; the low communication
content of the town-country relation, making commerce far less
flexible.\footnote{Modern historians have been inspired to fine analyses by this confrontation between the East and the West, which began in the Middle Ages (and is tied to the question, Why did capitalism develop in the West and not elsewhere?). See especially Fernand Braudel, \emph{Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800}, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 97–108; Pierre Chaunu, \emph{L’expansion européenne du XIIIe au XVe siècle} (Paris: PUF, 1969), pp. 334–339 (“Why Europe? Why not China?”); Maurice Lombard, \emph{Espaces et réseaux du haut Moyen Age} (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), chapter 8 (and p. 219: “What is called deforestation in the East is named clearing in the West. The first deep cause of the shift of the dominant centers from the East to the West is therefore a geographical reason: forest-clearing proved to have more potential than desert-oasis”).} The conclusion is not that the State-form is absent in
the Orient. Quite to the contrary, a more rigid agency becomes necessary
in order to retain and reunite the various components plied by escape
vectors. States always have the same composition; if there is even one
truth in the political philosophy of Hegel, it is that every State
carries within itself the essential moments of its existence. States are
made up not only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals,
and commodities. There is a unity of \emph{composition} of all States, but
States have neither the same \emph{development} nor the same \emph{organization}.
In the Orient, the components are much more disconnected, disjointed,
necessitating a great immutable Form to hold them together: “despotic
formations,” Asian or African, are rocked by incessant revolts, by
secessions and dynastic changes, which nevertheless do not affect the
immutability of the form. In the West, on the other hand, the
interconnectedness of the components makes possible transformations of
the State-form through revolution. It is true that the idea of
revolution itself is ambiguous; it is Western insofar as it relates to a
transformation of the State, but Eastern insofar as it envisions the
destruction, the abolition of the State.\footnote{Marx’s observations on the despotic formations of Asia have been confirmed by the African analyses of Max Gluckman, \emph{Custom and Conflict in Africa} (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1959): at the same time immutability of form and constant rebellion. The idea of a “transformation” of the State indeed seems to be a Western one. And that other idea, the “destruction” of the State, belongs much more to the East and to the conditions of a nomad war machine. Attempts have been made to present the two ideas as successive phases of revolution, but there are too many differences between them and they are difficult to reconcile; they reflect the opposition between the socialist and anarchist currents of the nineteenth century. The Western proletariat itself is perceived from two points of view: as having to seize power and transform the State apparatus (the point of view of labor power), and as willing or wishing for the destruction of the State (this time, the point of view of nomadization power). Even Marx defines the proletariat not only as alienated (labor) but as deterritorialized. The proletariat, in this second perspective, appears as the heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did many anarchists invoke nomadic themes originating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above all were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a city haunted by nomads (see Louis Chevalier, \emph{Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century}, trans. Frank Jellenck [New York: H. Fertig, 1973], pp. 362–366).} The great empires of the
Orient, Africa, and America run up against wide-open smooth spaces that
penetrate them and maintain gaps between their components (the \emph{nomos}
does not become countryside, the countryside does not communicate with
the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.):
the oriental State is in direct confrontation with a nomad war machine.
This war machine may fall back to the road of integration and proceed
solely by revolt and dynastic change; nevertheless, it is the war
machine, as nomad, that invents the abolitionist dream and reality.
Western States are much more sheltered in their striated space and
consequently have much more latitude in holding their components
together; they confront the nomads only indirectly, through the
intermediary of the migrations the nomads trigger or adopt as their
stance.\footnote{See Lucien Mussel, \emph{Les invasions. Le secondassaut} (Paris: PUF, 1965), for example, the analysis of the Danes’ three “phases,” pp. 135–137.}


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 and, more
generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior,” over
all of the flows traversing the ecumenon. 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.
There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which
restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure
in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects. That is why
Paul Virilio’s thesis is important, when he shows that “the political
power of the State is \emph{polis}, police, that is, management of the public
ways,” and that “the gates of the city, its levies and duties, are
barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the
penetration power of migratory packs,” people, animals, and goods.\footnote{Paul Virilio, \emph{Speed and Politics}, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986), pp. 12–13 and \emph{passim}. Not only is the “town” unthinkable apart from the exterior flows with which it is in contact, and the circulation of which it regulates, but specific architectural aggregates, the fortress, for example, are veritable transformers, by virtue of their interior spaces, which allow an analysis, prolongation, or restitution of movement. Virilio concludes that the issue is less confinement than the management of the public ways, or the control of movement. Foucault was already moving in this direction with his analysis of the \emph{naval hospital} as operator and filter; see \emph{Discipline and Punish}, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 143–146.}
Gravity, \emph{gravitas}, such is the essence of the State. It is not at all
that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement,
even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body
occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a
“moved body” going from one point to another in a striated space. In
this sense, the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and
transform movement, or to regulate speed. The State as town surveyor,
converter, or highway interchange: the role of the engineer from this
point of view. Speed and absolute movement are not without their laws,
but they are the laws of the \emph{nomos}, of the smooth space that deploys
it, of the war machine that populates it. If the nomads formed the war
machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being “synonymous” with
speed. And each time there is an operation against the
State—insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as
act—it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic
potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth
space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth (Virilio
discusses the importance of the riot or revolutionary theme of “holding
the street”). It is in this sense that the response of the State against
all that threatens to move beyond it is to striate space. The State does
not appropriate the war machine without giving even it the form of
relative movement: this was the case with the model of the \emph{fortress} as
a regulator of movement, which was precisely the obstacle the nomads
came up against, the stumbling block and parry by which absolute
vortical movement was broken. Conversely, when a State does not succeed
in striating its interior or neighboring space, the flows traversing
that State necessarily adopt the stance of a war machine directed
against it, deployed in a hostile or rebellious smooth space (even if
other States are able to slip their striations in). This was the
adventure of China: toward the end of the fourteenth century, and in
spite of its very high level of technology in ships and navigation, it
turned its back on its huge maritime space, saw its commercial flows
turn against it and ally themselves with piracy, and was unable to react
except by a politics of immobility, of the massive restriction of
commerce, which only reinforced the connection between commerce and the
war machine.\footnote{On Chinese, and Arab, navigation, the reasons behind their failure, and the importance of this question in the East-West “dossier,” see Braudel, \emph{Capitalism and Material Life}, pp. 300–309, and Chaunu, \emph{L’expansion européenne}, pp. 145–147.}


The situation is much more complicated than we have let on. The sea is
perhaps principal among smooth spaces, the hydraulic model par
excellence. But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one
attempts were made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the
land, with its fixed routes, constant directions, relative movements, a
whole counterhydraulic of channels and conduits. One of the reasons for
the hegemony of the West was the power of its State apparatuses to
striate the sea by combining the technologies of the North and the
Mediterranean and by annexing the Atlantic. But this undertaking had the
most unexpected result: the multiplication of relative movements, the
intensification of relative speeds in striated space, ended up
reconstituting a smooth space or absolute movement. As Virilio
emphasizes, the sea became the place of the \emph{fleet in being}, where one
no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space
beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it
with a vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion. This modern
strategy was communicated from the sea to the air, as the new smooth
space, but also to the entire Earth considered as desert or sea. As
converter and capturer, the State does not just relativize movement, it
reimparts absolute movement. It does not just go from the smooth to the
striated, it reconstitutes smooth space; it reimparts smooth in the wake
of the striated. It is true that this new nomadism accompanies a
worldwide war machine whose organization exceeds the State apparatuses
and passes into energy, military-industrial, and multinational
complexes. We say this as a reminder that smooth space and the form of
exteriority do not have an irresistible revolutionary calling but change
meaning drastically depending on the interactions they are part of and
the concrete conditions of their exercise or establishment (for example,
the way in which total war and popular war, and even guerrilla warfare,
borrow one another’s methods).\footnote{Virilio gives a very good definition of the fleet in being and its historical consequences: “The fleet in being \dots{} is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able to strike no matter where and no matter when \dots{} it is a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation \dots{} but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency\dots{}. Henceforth it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or an ocean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates \dots{} the notion of displacement without destination in space and time\dots{}. The strategic submarine has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain invisible \dots{} the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves neither departure nor arrival\dots{}. If, as Lenin claimed,‘strategy means choosing which points we apply force to,’ we must admit that these ‘points’, today, are no longer geostrategic strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it might be \dots{} \emph{geographic localization} seems to have definitively lost its strategic value, and, inversely, that this same value is attributed to the \emph{delocalization of the vector}, of a vector in permanent movement”; \emph{Speed and Politics}, pp. 38, 40–41, 134–135. Virilio’s texts are of great importance and originality in every respect. The only point that presents a difficulty for us is his assimilation of three groups of speed that seem very different to us: (1) speeds of nomadic, or revolutionary, tendency (riot, guerrilla warfare); (2) speeds that are regulated, convened, appropriated by the State apparatus (management of the public ways); (3) speeds that are reinstated by a worldwide organization of total war, or planetary overarmament (from the fleet in being to nuclear strategy). Virilio tends to equate these groups on account of their interactions and makes a general case for the “fascist” character of speed. It is, nevertheless, his own analyses that make these distinctions possible.}



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION VI*. \emph{Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical
elements of a war machine.}



\end{quote}


Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal
groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe
to assume the presence of a military organization. Is this not the way
an army deterritorializes its soldiers? An army is composed of units,
companies, and divisions. The Numbers may vary in function, in
combination; they may enter into entirely different strategies; but
there is always a connection between the Number and the war machine. It
is a question not of quantity but of organization or composition. When
the State creates armies, it always applies this principle of numerical
organization; but all it does is adopt the principle, at the same time
as it appropriates the war machine. For so peculiar an idea—the
numerical organization of people—came from the nomads. It was the
Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to Egypt; and when Moses
applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the advice of his nomad
father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite, and was done in such a way as to
constitute a war machine, the elements of which are described in the
biblical book of Numbers. The \emph{nomos} is fundamentally numerical,
arithmetic. When Greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab
arithmetism, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable
to the logos: not that the nomads “do” arithmetic or algebra, but
because arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad influenced
world.


Up to now we have known three major types of human organization:
**lineal*, \emph{territorial}, and \emph{numerical}. Lineal organization allows us
to define so-called primitive societies. Clan lineages are essentially
segments in action; they meld and divide, and vary according to the
ancestor considered, the tasks, and the circumstances. Of course, number
plays an important role in the determination of lineage, or in the
creation of new lineages—as does the earth, since a clan segmentarity is
doubled by a tribal segmentarity. The earth is before all else the
matter upon which the dynamic of lineages is inscribed, and the number,
a means of inscription: the lineages write upon the earth and with the
number, constituting a kind of “geodesy.” Everything changes with State
societies: it is often said that the territorial principle becomes
dominant. One could also speak of deterritorialization, since the earth
becomes an object, instead of being an active material element in
combination with lineage. Property is precisely the deterritorialized
relation between the human being and the earth; this is so whether
property constitutes a good belonging to the State, superposed upon
continuing possession by a lineal community, or whether it itself
becomes a good belonging to private individuals constituting a new
community. In both cases (and according to the two poles of the State),
something like an overcoding of the earth replaces geodesy. Of course,
lineages remain very important, and numbers take on their own
importance. But what moves to the forefront is a “territorial”
organization, in the sense that all the segments, whether of lineage,
land, or number, are taken up by \emph{an astronomical space or a geometrical
extension} that overcodes them—but certainly not in the same way in the
archaic imperial State and in modern States. The archaic State envelops
a \emph{spatium} with a summit, a differentiated space with depth and levels,
whereas modern States (beginning with the Greek city-state) develop a
homogeneous \emph{extensio} with an immanent center, divisible homologous
parts, and symmetrical and reversible relations. Not only do the two
models, the astronomical and the geometrical, enter into intimate mixes,
but even when they are supposedly pure, both imply the subordination of
lineages and numbers to this metric power, as it appears either in the
**imperial spatium* or in the \emph{political extensio}.\footnote{Jean-Pierre Vernant in particular has analyzed the connection between the Greek city-state and a homogeneous geometrical extension, \emph{Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs} (Paris: Maspero, 1971–1974), vol. 1, part 3. The problem is necessarily more complicated in relation to the archaic empires, or in relation to formations subsequent to the classical city-state. That is because the space in question is very different. But it is still the case that the number is subordinated to space, as Vernant suggests with regard to Plato’s ideal state. The Pythagorean or Neoplatonic conceptions of number envelop imperial astronomical spaces of a type other than homogeneous extension, but they maintain the subordination of the number; that is why Numbers become \emph{ideal}, but not strictly speaking “numbering.”} Arithmetic, the
number, has always had a decisive role in the State apparatus: this is
so even as early as the imperial bureaucracy, with the three conjoined
operations of the census, taxation, and election. It is even truer of
modern forms of the State, which in developing utilized all the
calculation techniques that were springing up at the border between
mathematical science and social technology (there is a whole social
calculus at the basis of political economy, demography, the organization
of work, etc.). This arithmetic element of the State found its specific
power in the treatment of all kinds of matter: primary matters (raw
materials), the secondary matter of wrought objects, or the ultimate
matter constituted by the human population. Thus the number has always
served to gain mastery over matter, to control its variations and
movements, in other words, to submit them to the spatiotemporal
framework of the State—either the imperial \emph{spatium}, or the modern
**extensio*.\footnote{Dumézil stresses the role played by the arithmetic element in the earliest forms of political sovereignty. He even tends to make it a third pole of sovereignty. See \emph{Servius et la Fortune and Le troisième souverain} (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1949). But the role of this arithmetic element is, rather, to organize a matter; in so doing it submits that matter to one or the other of the two principal poles.} The State has a territorial principle, or a principle
of deterritorialization, that links the number to metric magnitudes
(taking into account the increasingly complex metrics effecting the
overcoding). We do not believe that the conditions of independence or
autonomy of the Number are to be found in the State, even though all the
factors of its development are present.


The \emph{Numbering Number}, in other words, autonomous arithmetic
organization, implies neither a superior degree of abstraction nor very
large quantities. It relates only to conditions of possibility
constituted by nomadism and to conditions of effectuation constituted by
the war machine. It is in State armies that the problem of the treatment
of large quantities arises, in relation to other matters; but the war
machine operates with small quantities that it treats using numbering
numbers. These numbers appear as soon as one distributes something in
space, instead of dividing up space or distributing space itself. The
number becomes a subject. The independence of the number in relation to
space is a result not of abstraction but of the concrete nature of
smooth space, which is occupied without itself being counted. The number
is no longer a means of counting or measuring but of moving: it is the
number itself that moves through smooth space. There is undoubtedly a
geometry of smooth space: but as we have seen, it is a minor, operative
geometry, a geometry of the trait. The more independent space is from a
metrics, the more independent the number is from space. Geometry as a
royal science has little importance for the war machine (its only
importance is in State armies, and for sedentary fortification, but it
leads generals to serious defeats).\footnote{Karl von Clausewitz stresses the secondary role of geometry, in tactics and in strategy: \emph{On War}, trans. Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 214–216 (“The Geometrical Factor”).} The number becomes a principle
whenever it occupies a smooth space, and is deployed within it as
subject, instead of measuring a striated space. The number is the mobile
occupant, the movable (\emph{meuble}) in smooth space, as opposed to the
geometry of the immovable (\emph{immeuble}) in striated space. The nomadic
numerical unit is the ambulant fire, and not the tent, which is still
too much of an immovable: “The fire takes precedence over the yurt.” The
numbering number is no longer subordinated to metric determinations or
geometrical dimensions, but has only a dynamic relation with
geographical directions: it is a directional number, not a dimensional
or metric one. Nomad organization is indissolubly arithmetic and
directional; quantity is everywhere, tens, hundreds, direction is
everywhere, left, right: the numerical chief is also the chief of the
left or the right.\footnote{See one of the most profound ancient texts relating the number and direction to the war machine, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, \emph{The Records of the Grand Historian}, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 155–193 (“The Account of the Hsiung-nu”).} The numbering number is rhythmic, not harmonic.
It is not related to cadence or measure: it is only in State armies, and
for reasons of discipline and show, that one marches in cadence; but
autonomous numerical organization finds its meaning elsewhere, whenever
it is necessary to establish an \emph{order of displacement} on the steppe,
the desert—at the point where the lineages of the forest dwellers and
the figures of the State lose their relevance. “He moved with the random
walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in his
passage would [indicate] that human flesh moved there. It was a way of
walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn’t need to think about
it. The feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their
pacing.”\footnote{Frank Herbert, \emph{Children of Dune} (New York: Berkley Books, 1977), p. 212. One may refer to the characteristics proposed by Julia Kristeva to define the numbering number. “arrangement,” “plural and contingent distribution,” “infini-point,” “rigorous approximation,” etc. \emph{Semeiotikè. Recherches pour une sémanalyse} (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 293–297.} In the war machine and nomadic existence, the number is no
longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher (\emph{Chiffre}), and it is in this
capacity that it constitutes the “esprit de corps” and invents the
secret and its outgrowths (strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush,
diplomacy, etc.).


A ciphered, rhythmic, directional, autonomous, movable, numbering
number: the war machine is like the necessary consequence of nomadic
organization (Moses experienced it, with all its consequences). Some
people nowadays are too eager to criticize this numerical organization,
denouncing it as a military or even concentration-camp society where
people are no longer anything more than deterritorialized “numbers.” But
that is false. Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people
is certainly no crueler than the lineal or State organizations. Treating
people like numbers is not necessarily worse than treating them like
trees to prune, or geometrical figures to shape and model. Moreover, the
use of the number as a numeral, as a statistical element, is proper to
the numbered number of the State, not to the numbering number. And the
world of the concentration camp operates as much by lineages and
territories as by numeration. The question is not one of good or bad but
of specificity. The specificity of numerical organization rests on the
nomadic mode of existence and the war machine function. The numbering
number is distinct both from lineal codes and State overcoding.
Arithmetic composition, on the one hand, selects, extracts from the
lineages the elements that will enter into nomadism and the war machine
and, on the other hand, directs them against the State apparatus,
opposing a machine and an existence to the State apparatus, drawing a
deterritorialization that cuts across both the lineal territorialities
and the territory or deterritoriality of the State.


A first characteristic of the numbering, nomadic or war, number is that
it is always complex, that is, articulated. A complex of numbers every
time. It is exactly for this reason that it in no way implies large,
homogenized quantities, like State numbers or the numbered number, but
rather produces its effect of immensity by its fine articulation, in
other words, by its distribution of heterogeneity in a free space. Even
State armies do not do away with this principle when they deal with
large numbers (despite the predominance of “base” 10). The Roman legion
was a number made up of numbers, articulated in such a way that the
segments became mobile, and the figures geometrical, changing,
transformational. The complex or articulated number comprises not only
men but necessarily weapons, animals, and vehicles. The arithmetic base
unit is therefore a unit of assemblage, for example, man-horse-bow,
1×1×1, according to the formula that carried the Scythians to triumph;
and the formula becomes more complicated to the extent that certain
“weapons” assemble or articulate several men or animals, as in the case
of the chariot with two horses and two men, one to drive and the other
to throw, 2×1×2=1; or in the case of the famous
two-handled shield of the hoplite reform, which soldered together human
chains. However small the unit, it is articulated. The numbering number
always has several bases at the same time. It is also necessary to take
into account arithmetic relations that are external yet still contained
in the number, expressing the proportion of combatants among the members
of a lineage or tribe, the role of reserves and stocks, the upkeep of
people, things, and animals. \emph{Logistics} is the art of these external
relations, which are no less a part of the war machine than the internal
relations of \emph{strategy}, in other words, the composition of combat units
in relation to one another. The two together constitute the science of
the articulation of numbers of war. Every assemblage has this strategic
aspect and this logistical aspect.


But the numbering number has a second, more secret, characteristic.
Everywhere, the war machine displays a curious process of arithmetic
replication or doubling, as if it operated along two nonsymmetrical and
nonequal series. \emph{On the one hand}, the lineages are indeed organized
and reshuffled numerically; a numerical composition is superimposed upon
the lineages in order to bring the new principle into predominance. But
**on the other hand*, men are simultaneously extracted from each lineage
to form a special numerical body—as if the new numerical composition of
the lineage-body could not succeed without the constitution of a body
proper to it, itself numerical. We believe that this is not an
accidental phenomenon but rather an essential constituent of the war
machine, a necessary operation for the autonomy of the number: the
number of the body must have as its correlate a body of the number; the
number must be doubled according to two complementary operations. For
the social body to be numerized, the number must form a special body.
When Genghis Khan undertook his great composition of the steppe, he
numerically organized the lineages, and the fighters in each lineage,
placing them under a cipher and a chief (groups of ten with decurions,
groups of one hundred with centurions, groups of one thousand with
chiliarchs). He also extracted from each arithmetized lineage a small
number of men who were to constitute his personal guard, in other words,
a dynamic formation comprising a staff, commissars, messengers, and
diplomats (“antrustions”).\footnote{Boris Iakovlevich Vladimirtsov, \emph{Le régime social des Mongols}, trans. Michel Carsow (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948). The term used by Vladimirtsov, “antrustions,” is borrowed from the Saxon regime, in which the king’s company, or “trust,” was composed of Franks.} One is never without the other: a double
deterritorialization, the second of which is to a higher power. When
Moses undertook his great composition of the desert—where the influence
he felt from the nomads was necessarily stronger than that of Yahweh—he
took a census of each tribe and organized them numerically; he also
decreed a law according to which the firstborn of each tribe at that
particular time belonged by right to Yahweh. As these firstborn were
obviously still too young, their role in the Number was transferred to a
special tribe, the Levites, who provided the body of the Number or the
special guard of the ark; and as the Levites were less numerous than the
new firstborn of the tribes taken together, the excess firstborn had to
be bought back by the tribes in the form of taxes (bringing us back to a
fundamental aspect of logistics). The war machine would be unable to
function without this double series: it is necessary both that numerical
composition replace lineal organization and that it conjure away the
territorial organization of the State. Power in the war machine is
defined according to this double series: power is no longer based on
segments and centers, on the potential resonance of centers and
overcoding of segments, but on these relations internal to the Number
and independent of quantity. Tensions or power struggles are also a
result of this: between Moses’ tribes and the Levites, between Genghis’s
“noyans” and “antrustions.” This is not simply a protest on the part of
lineages wishing to regain their former autonomy; nor is it the
prefiguration of a struggle for control over a State apparatus. It is a
tension inherent in the war machine, in its special power, and in the
particular limitations placed on the power of the “chief.”


Thus numerical composition, or the numbering number, implies several
operations: the arithmetization of the starting aggregates or sets (the
lineages); the union of the extracted subsets (the constitution of
groups often, one hundred, etc.); and the formation by substitution of
another set in correspondence with the united set (the special body). It
is this last operation that implies the most variety and originality in
nomad existence. The same problem arises even in State armies, when the
war machine is appropriated by the State. In effect, if the
arithmetization of the social body has as its correlate the formation of
a distinct special body, itself arithmetic, this special body may be
constructed in several ways: (1) from a privileged lineage or tribe, the
dominance of which subsequently takes on a new meaning (the case of
Moses, with the Levites); (2) from representatives of each lineage, who
subsequently serve also as hostages (the firstborn; this would actually
be the Asian case, or the case of Genghis); (3) from a totally different
element, one exterior to the base society, slaves, foreigners, or people
of another religion (this was already the case as early as the Saxon
regime, in which the king used Frankish slaves to compose his special
body; but Islam is the prime example, even inspiring a specific
sociological category, that of “military slavery”: the Mameluks of
Egypt, slaves from the steppe or the Caucasus who were purchased at a
very early age by the sultan; or the Ottoman Janissaries, who came from
Christian communities).\footnote{A particularly interesting case is that of a special body of smiths among the Tuareg, called the \emph{Enaden} (the “Others”); the Enaden are thought to have been originally Sudanese slaves, Jewish settlers in the Sahara, or descendants of the knights of Saint Louis. See René Pettier, “Les artisans sahariens du métal chez les Touareg,” in \emph{Techniques et civilisations}, vol. 1 (\emph{Métaux et civilisations}), no. 2 (1945), pp. 31–40.}


Is this not the origin of an important theme, “the nomads as child
stealers”? It is clear, especially in the last example, how the special
body is instituted as an element determinant of power in the war
machine. The war machine and nomadic existence have to ward off two
things simultaneously: a return of the lineal aristocracy and the
formation of imperial functionaries. What complicates everything is that
the State itself has often been determined in such a way as to use
slaves as high functionaries. As we shall see, the reasons for this
varied, and although the two currents converged in armies, they came
from two distinct sources. For the power of slaves, foreigners, or
captives in a war machine of nomadic origin is very different from the
power of lineal aristocracies, as well as from that of State
functionaries and bureaucrats. They are “commissars,” emissaries,
diplomats, spies, strategists, and logisticians, sometimes smiths. They
cannot be explained away as a “whim of the sultan.” On the contrary, it
is the possibility of the war chief having whims that is explained by
the objective existence and necessity of this special numerical body,
this Cipher that has value only in relation to a \emph{nomos}. There is both
a deterritorialization and a becoming proper to the war machine; the
special body, in particular the slave-infidel-foreigner, is the one who
**becomes* a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized in
relation to the lineages and the State. You have to be born an infidel
to become a believer; you have to be born a slave to become a soldier.
Specific schools or institutions are needed for this purpose: the
special body is an invention proper to the war machine, which States
always utilize, adapting it so totally to their own ends that it becomes
unrecognizable, or restituting it in bureaucratic staff form, or in the
technocratic form of very special bodies, or in “esprit de corps” that
serve the State as much as they resist it, or among the commissars who
double the State as much as they serve it.


It is true that the nomads have no history; they only have a geography.
And the defeat of the nomads was such, so complete, that history is one
with the triumph of States. We have witnessed, as a result, a
generalized critique dismissing the nomads as incapable of any
innovation, whether technological or metallurgical, political or
metaphysical. Historians, bourgeois or Soviet (Grousset or
Vladimirtsov), consider the nomads a pitiable segment of humanity that
understands nothing: not technology, to which it supposedly remained
indifferent; not agriculture, not the cities and States it destroyed or
conquered. It is difficult to see, however, how the nomads could have
triumphed in war if they did not possess strong metallurgical
capabilities (the idea that the nomads received their technical weapons
and political counseling from renegades from an imperial State is highly
improbable). It is difficult to see how the nomads could have undertaken
to destroy cities and States, except in the name of a nomad organization
and a war machine defined not by ignorance but by their positive
characteristics, by their specific space, by a composition all their own
that broke with lineages and warded off the State-form. History has
always dismissed the nomads. Attempts have been made to apply a properly
military category to the war machine (that of “military democracy”) and
a properly sedentary category to nomadism (that of “feudalism”). But
these two hypotheses presuppose a territorial principle: either that an
imperial State appropriates the war machine, distributing land to
warriors as a benefit of their position (\emph{cleroi} and false fiefs), or
that property, once it has become private, in itself posits relations of
dependence among the property owners constituting the army (true fiefs
and vassalage).\footnote{Feudalism is no less a military system than so-called military democracy; but both systems assume an army integrated into some kind of State apparatus (for feudalism, it was the Carolingian land reform). It is Vladimirtsov who developed a feudal interpretation of the nomads of the steppe, whereas Mikhail Griaznov, \emph{The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia}, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), leans toward military democracy. But one of Vladimirtsov’s main arguments is that the organization of the nomads becomes feudal precisely to the extent that it is in disintegration, or is integrated into the empires it conquers. He himself remarks that in the beginning the Mongols did not organize the sedentary land they took over into fiefs, true or false.} In both cases, the number is subordinated to an
“immobile” fiscal organization, in order to establish which land can be
or has been ceded, as well as to set the taxes owed by the beneficiaries
themselves. There is no doubt that nomad organization and the war
machine deal with these same problems, both the level of land and of
taxation (in which the nomadic warriors were great innovators, despite
what is said to the contrary). But they invent a territoriality and a
“movable” fiscal organization that testify to the autonomy of a
numerical principle: there can be a confusion or combination of the
systems, but the specificity of the nomadic system remains the
subordination of land to numbers that are displaced and deployed, and of
taxation to relations internal to those numbers (already with Moses, for
example, taxation played a role in the relation between the numerical
bodies and the special body of the number). In short, military democracy
and feudalism, far from explaining the numerical composition of the
nomads, instead testify to what may survive of them in sedentary
regimes.



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION VII*. \emph{Nomad existence has for “affects” the weapons of a
war machine.}



\end{quote}


A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the basis
of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). But although this
extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a
technical object, it does not preclude a general convertibility between
the two groups, to the extent that it seems very difficult to propose an
intrinsic difference between weapons and tools. The types of percussion,
as defined by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, are found on both sides. “For ages on
end agricultural implements and weapons of war must have remained
identical.”\footnote{J. F. C. Fuller, \emph{Armament and History} (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), p. 5.} Some have spoken of an “ecosystem,” not only situated
at the origin, in which work tools and weapons of war exchange their
determinations: it seems that the same \emph{machinic phylum} traverses both.
And yet we have the feeling that there are many internal differences,
even if they are not intrinsic, in other words, logical or conceptual,
and even if they remain approximate. As a first approximation, weapons
have a privileged relation with projection. Anything that throws or is
thrown is fundamentally a weapon, and propulsion is its essential
moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very notion of the “problem” is
related to the war machine. The more mechanisms of projection a tool
has, the more it behaves like a weapon, potentially or simply
metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compensating for the
projective mechanisms they possess, or else they adapt them to other
ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, whether
projected or projecting, are only one kind among others; but even
handheld weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that
required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts.
The tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it
prepares a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of
equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a
distance exists in both cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in
the other, centripetal. One could also say that the tool encounters
resistances, to be conquered or put to use, while the weapon has to do
with counterattack, to be avoided or invented (the counterattack is in
fact the precipitating and inventive factor in the war machine, to the
extent that it is not simply reducible to a quantitative rivalry or
defensive parade).


Second, weapons and tools do not “tendentially” (approximately) have the
same relation to movement, to speed. It is yet another essential
contribution of Paul Virilio to have stressed this weapon-speed
complementarity: the weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed
invents the weapon (the projective character of weapons is the result).
The war machine releases a vector of speed so specific to it that it
needs a special name; it is not only the power of destruction, but
“dromocracy” (= \emph{nomos}). Among other advantages,
this idea articulates a new mode of distinction between the hunt and
war. For it is certain not only that war does not derive from the hunt
but also that the hunt does not promote weapons: either war evolved in
the sphere of indistinction and convertibility between weapons and
tools, or it used to its own advantage weapons already distinguished,
already constituted. As Virilio says, war in no way appears when man
applies to man the relation of the \emph{hunter} to the animal, but on the
contrary when he captures the force of the \emph{hunted} animal and enters an
entirely new relation to man, that of war (enemy, no longer prey). It is
therefore not surprising that the war machine was the invention of the
animal-raising nomads: animal breeding and training are not to be
confused either with the primitive hunt or with sedentary domestication,
but are in fact the discovery of a projecting and projectile system.
Rather than operating by blow-by-blow violence, or constituting a
violence “once and for all,” the war machine, with breeding and
training, institutes an entire economy of violence, in other words, a
way of making violence durable, even unlimited. “Bloodletting, immediate
killing, run contrary to the unlimited usage of violence, that is, to
its economy\dots{}. \emph{The economy of violence is not that of the hunter in the
animal raiser, but that of the hunted animal}. In horseback riding, one
conserves the kinetic energy, the speed of the horse, and no longer its
proteins (the motor, and no longer the flesh)\dots{}. Whereas in the hunt the
hunter’s aim was to arrest the movement of wild animality through
systematic slaughter, the animal breeder [sets about] conserving it,
and, by means of training, the rider joins with this movement, orienting
it and provoking its acceleration.” The technological motor would
develop this tendency further, but “horseback riding was the first
projector of the warrior, his first system of arms.”\footnote{Paul Virilio, “Métempsychose du passager,” \emph{Traverses}, no. 8 (May 1977), pp. 11–19. Virilio, however, asserts that there was an indirect transition from hunting to war: when women served as “portage or pack” animals, which already enabled the hunters to enter into a relation of “homosexual duel” transcending the hunt. But it seems that Virilio himself invites us to make a distinction between \emph{speed}, as projector and projectile, and \emph{displacement}, as transport and portage. The war machine is defined from the first point of view, while the second relates to the public sphere. The horse, for example, is not a part of the war machine if it serves only to transport men who dismount to do battle. The war machine is defined by action, not transport, even if the transport reacts upon the action.} Whence
becoming-animal in the war machine. Does this mean that the war machine
did not exist before horseback riding and the cavalry? That is not the
issue. The issue is that the war machine implies the release of a Speed
vector that becomes a free or independent variable; this does not occur
in the hunt, where speed is associated primarily with the hunted animal.
It is possible for this race vector to be released in an infantry,
without recourse to horseback riding; it is possible, moreover, for
there to be horseback riding, but as a means of transportation or even
of portage having nothing to do with the free vector. In any event, what
the warrior borrows from the animal is more the idea of the motor than
the model of the prey. He does not generalize the idea of the prey by
applying it to the enemy; he abstracts the idea of the motor, applying
it to himself.


Two objections immediately arise. According to the first, the war
machine possesses as much weight and gravity as it does speed (the
distinction between the heavy and the light, the dissymmetry between
defense and attack, the opposition between rest and tension). But it
would be easy to demonstrate that phenomena of “temporization,” and even
of immobility and catatonia, so important in wars, relate in certain
cases to a component of pure speed. And the rest of the time, they
relate to the conditions under which State apparatuses appropriate the
war machine, notably by arranging a striated space where opposing forces
can come to an equilibrium. It can happen that speed is abstracted as
the property of a projectile, a bullet or artillery shell, which
condemns the weapon itself, and the soldier, to immobility (for example,
immobility in the First World War). But an equilibrium of forces is a
phenomenon of resistance, whereas the counterattack implies a rush or
change of speed that breaks the equilibrium: it was the tank that
regrouped all of the operations in the speed vector and recreated a
smooth space for movement by uprooting men and arms.\footnote{J. F. C. Fuller, \emph{Armaments and History}, pp. 137ff., shows that the First World War was first conceived as an offensive war of movement based on artillery. But artillery was turned against artillery, forcing immobility. It was not possible to reinstate mobility in the war through “ever-increasing shell fire” (p. 138) since the craters made the terrain all the harder to negotiate. The solution, to which the English, and General Fuller in particular, made decisive contributions, came in the form of the tank: the tank, a “landship” (p. 139), reconstituted a kind of maritime or smooth space on land, and “superimposed naval tactics on land warfare” (p. 140). As a general rule, military response is never in kind: the tank was the response to artillery, the helicopter to the tank, etc. This makes for an innovation factor in the war machine that is very different from innovation in the work machine.}


The opposite objection is more complex: it is that speed does indeed
seem to be as much a part of the tool as of the weapon, and is no way
specific to the war machine. The history of the motor is not only
military. But perhaps there is too much of a tendency to think in terms
of quantities of movement, instead of seeking qualitative models. The
two ideal models of the motor are those of work and \emph{free action}. Work
is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is
consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to
the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no
resistance to overcome, operates only upon the mobile body itself, is
not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next.
Whatever its measure or degree, speed is relative in the first case,
absolute in the second (the idea of a \emph{perpetuum mobile}). In work, what
counts is the point of application of a resultant force exerted by the
weight of a body considered as “one” (gravity), and the relative
displacement of this point of application. In free action, what counts
is the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to
occupy absolutely a nonpunctuated space. Weapons and weapon handling
seem to be linked to a free-action model, and tools to a work model.
Linear displacement, from one point to another, constitutes the relative
movement of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation of a space that
constitutes the absolute movement of the weapon. It is as though the
weapon were moving, self-propelling, while the tool is moved. This link
between tools and work remains obscured unless work receives the motor,
or real, definition we have just given it. The tool does not define
work; just the opposite. The tool presupposes work. It must be added
that weapons, also, obviously imply a renewal of the cause, an expending
or even disappearance in the effect, the encountering of external
resistances, a displacement of force, etc. It would be futile to credit
weapons with a magical power in contrast to the constraints of tools:
weapons and tools are subject to the same laws, which define, precisely,
their common sphere. But the principle behind all technology is to
demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely
undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an \emph{assemblage} it
presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the
technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of
elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage
that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is
its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.


It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the \emph{phylum} selects,
qualifies, and even invents the technical elements. Thus one cannot
speak of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages
they presuppose and enter into. This is what we meant when we said that
weapons and tools are not merely distinguished from one another in an
extrinsic manner, and yet they have no distinctive intrinsic
characteristics. They have internal (and not intrinsic) characteristics
relating to the respective assemblages with which they are associated.
What effectuates a free-action model is not the weapons in themselves
and in their physical aspect but the “war machine” assemblage as formal
cause of the weapons. And what effectuates the work model is not the
tools but the “work machine” assemblage as formal cause of the tools.
When we say that the weapon is inseparable from a speed vector, while
the tool remains tied to conditions of gravity, we are claiming only to
signal a difference between two types of assemblage, a distinction that
holds even if in the assemblage proper to it the tool is abstractly
“faster,” and the weapon abstractly “weightier.” The tool is essentially
tied to a genesis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force whose
laws reside in work, while the weapon concerns only the exercise or
manifestation of force in space and time, in conformity with free
action. The weapon does not fall from the sky, and obviously assumes
production, displacement, expenditure, and resistance. But this aspect
relates to the common sphere of the weapon and the tool, and does not
yet concern the specificity of the weapon, which appears only when force
is considered in itself, when it is no longer tied to anything but the
number, movement, space, or time, or \emph{when speed is added to
displacement}.\footnote{On this general distinction between the two models, “work-free action,” “consuming force\Slash{}conserving force,” “real effect\Slash{}formal effect,” etc., see Martial Guéroult’s exposition, \emph{Dynamique et métaphysique leibniziennes} (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), pp. 55, 119 ff., 222–224.} Concretely, a weapon as such relates not to the Work
model but to the Free-Action model, with the assumption that the
conditions of work are fulfilled elsewhere. In short, from the point of
view of force, the tool is tied to a gravity-displacement, weight-height
system, and the weapon to a speed-\emph{perpetuum mobile} system (it is in
this sense that it can be said that speed in itself is a “weapons
system”).


The very general primacy of the collective and machinic assemblage over
the technical element applies generally, for tools as for weapons.
Weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences. It has
often been remarked that a weapon is nothing outside of the combat
organization it is bound up with. For example, “hoplite” weapons existed
only by virtue of the phalanx as a mutation of the war machine: the only
new weapon at the time, the two-handled shield, was created by this
assemblage; the other weapons were preexistent, but in other
combinations where they had a different function, a different
nature.\footnote{Marcel Detienne, “La phalange, problèmes et controverses,” in \emph{Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne} (\emph{Civilisations et sociétés}, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 119–143: “Technology is in a way internal to the social and the mental,” (p. 134).} It is always the assemblage that constitutes the weapons
system. The lance and the sword came into being in the Bronze Age only
by virtue of the man-horse assemblage, which caused a lengthening of the
dagger and pike, and made the first infantry weapons, the morning star
and the battle-ax, obsolete. The stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new
figure of the man-horse assemblage, entailing a new type of lance and
new weapons; and this man-horse-stirrup constellation is itself
variable, and has different effects depending on whether it is bound up
with the general conditions of nomadism, or later readapted to the
sedentary conditions of feudalism. The situation is exactly the same for
the tool: once again, everything depends on an organization of work, and
variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing. Thus the heavy plow
exists as a specific tool only in a constellation where “long open
fields” predominate, where the horse tends to replace the ox as draft
animal, where the land begins to undergo triennial rotation, and where
the economy becomes communal. Beforehand, the heavy plow may well have
existed, but on the margins of other assemblages that did not bring out
its specificity, that left unexploited its differential character with
the scratch plow.\footnote{On the stirrup and the plow, see Lynn Townsend White, Jr., \emph{Medieval Technology and Social Change} (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), chapters 1 and 2. Similarly, it has been shown in the case of dry rice cultivation in Asia that the digging stick, the hoe, and the plow depend upon collective assemblages that vary according to population density and the fallow period. This enables Braudel to conclude: “The tool, according to this theory, is the result and no longer the cause”; \emph{Capitalism and Material Life}, p. 116.}


Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has
nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no
desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the
efficiency, of an assemblage does not exist without the passions the
assemblage brings into play, without the desires that constitute it as
much as it constitutes them. Detienne has shown that the Greek phalanx
was inseparable from a whole reversal of values, and from a passional
mutation that drastically changed the relations between desire and the
war machine. It is a case of man dismounting from the horse, and of the
man-animal relation being replaced by a relation between men in an
infantry assemblage that paves the way for the advent of the
peasant-soldier, the citizen-soldier: the entire Eros of war changes, a
group homosexual Eros tends to replace the zoosexual Eros of the
horseman. Undoubtedly, whenever a State appropriates the war machine, it
tends to assimilate the education of the citizen to the training of the
worker to the apprenticeship of the soldier. But if it is true that all
assemblages are assemblages of desire, the question is whether the
assemblages of war and work, considered in themselves, do not
fundamentally mobilize passions of different orders. Passions are
effectuations of desire that differ according to the assemblage: it is
not the same justice or the same cruelty, the same pity, etc. The work
regime is inseparable from an organization and a development of Form,
corresponding to which is the formation of the subject. This is the
passional regime of feeling as “the form of the worker.” Feeling implies
an evaluation of matter and its resistances, a direction (\emph{sens}, also
“meaning”) to form and its developments, an economy of force and its
displacements, an entire gravity. But the regime of the war machine is
on the contrary that of \emph{affects}, which relate only to the moving body
in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among elements. Affect is
the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is
an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are
projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools.
There is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not
only in mythology but also in the \emph{chanson de geste}, and the chivalric
novel or novel of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons.
From this standpoint, the most absolute immobility, pure catatonia, is a
part of the speed vector, is carried by this vector, which links the
petrification of the act to the precipitation of movement. The knight
sleeps on his mount, then departs like an arrow. Kleist is the author
who best integrated these sudden catatonic fits, swoons, suspenses, with
the utmost speeds of a war machine. He presents us with a
becoming-weapon of the technical element simultaneous to a
becoming-affect of the passional element (the Penthesilea equation). The
martial arts have always subordinated weapons to speed, and above all to
mental (absolute) speed; for this reason, they are also the arts of
suspense and immobility. The affect passes through both extremes. Thus
the martial arts do not adhere to a \emph{code}, as an affair of the State,
but follow \emph{ways}, which are so many paths of the affect; upon these
ways, one learns to “unuse” weapons as much as one learns to use them,
as if the power and cultivation of the affect were the true goal of the
assemblage, the weapon being only a provisory means. Learning to undo
things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the
“not-doing” of the warrior, the undoing of the subject. A movement of
decoding runs through the war machine, while overcoding solders the tool
to an organization of work and of the State (the tool is never
unlearned; one can only compensate for its absence). It is true that the
martial arts continually invoke the center of gravity and the rules for
its displacement. That is because these ways are not the ultimate ones.
However far they go, they are still in the domain of Being, and only
translate absolute movements of another nature into the common
space—those effectuated in the Void, not in nothingness, but in the
smooth of the void where there is no longer any goal: attacks,
counterattacks, and headlong plunges.\footnote{Treatises on martial arts remind us that the Ways, which are still subject to the laws of gravity, must be transcended in the void. Kleist’s \emph{About Marionettes}, trans. Michael Lebeck (Mindelheim: Three Kings Press, 1970), without question one of the most spontaneously oriental texts in Western literature, presents a similar movement: the linear displacement of the center of gravity is still “mechanical” and relates to something more “mysterious” that concerns the soul and knows nothing of weight.}


Still from the standpoint of the assemblage, there is an essential
relation between tools and signs. That is because the work model that
defines the tool belongs to the State apparatus. It has often been said
that people in primitive societies do not, strictly speaking, work, even
if their activities are very constrained and regulated; and the man of
war, in his capacity as a man of war, does not work either (the “labors”
of Hercules assume submission to a king). The technical element becomes
a tool when it is abstracted from the territory and is applied to the
earth as an object; but at the same time, the sign ceases to be
inscribed upon the body and is written upon an immobile, objective
matter. For there to be work, there must be a capture of activity by the
State apparatus, and a semiotization of activity by writing. Hence the
affinity between the assemblages signs-tools, and signs of
writing-organization of work. Entirely different is the case of the
weapon, which is in an essential relation with jewelry. Jewelry has
undergone so many secondary adaptations that we no longer have a clear
understanding of what it is. But something lights up in our mind when we
are told that metalworking was the “barbarian,” or nomad, art par
excellence, and when we see these masterpieces of minor art. These
fibulas, these gold or silver plaques, these pieces of jewelry, are
attached to small movable objects; they are not only easy to transport,
but pertain to the object only as object in motion. These plaques
constitute traits of expression of pure speed, carried on objects that
are themselves mobile and moving. The relation between them is not that
of form-matter but of motif-support, where the earth is no longer
anything more than ground (\emph{sol}), where there is no longer even any
ground at all because the support is as mobile as the motif. They lend
colors the speed of light, turning gold to red and silver to white
light. They are attached to the horse’s harness, the sheath of the
sword, the warrior’s garments, the handle of the weapon; they even
decorate things used only once, such as arrowheads. Regardless of the
effort or toil they imply, they are of the order of free action, related
to pure mobility, and not of the order of work with its conditions of
gravity, resistance, and expenditure. The ambulant smith links
metalworking to the weapon, and vice versa. Gold and silver have taken
on many other functions but cannot be understood apart from this nomadic
contribution made by the war machine, in which they are not matters but
traits of expression appropriate to weapons (the whole mythology of war
not only subsists in money but is the active factor in it). Jewels are
the affects corresponding to weapons, that are swept up by the same
speed vector.


Metalworking, jewelry making, ornamentation, even decoration, do not
form a writing, even though they have a power of abstraction that is in
every way equal to that of writing. But this power is assembled
differently. In the case of writing, the nomads had no need to create
their own system; they borrowed that of their sedentary imperial
neighbors, who even furnished them with a phonetic transcription of
their languages.\footnote{See Paul Pelliot, “Les systèmes d’écriture en usage chez les anciens Mongols,” \emph{Asia Major 2} (1925), pp. 284–289: The Mongols used the Uighur script, with the Syriac alphabet (it was the Tibetans who produced a phonetic theory of Uighur writing); the two versions of the \emph{Secret History of the Mongols} that have been passed down to us are a Chinese translation and a phonetic transcription in Chinese characters.} “The goldsmith’s and silversmith’s is the
barbarian art par excellence; filigree and gold and silver plating\dots{}.
Scythian art, tied as it was to a nomadic and warlike economy that both
used and repudiated a commerce reserved for foreigners, now moved toward
this luxurious and decorative type of work. The barbarians \dots{} did not
need to possess or create a precise code, such as for instance an
elementary picto-ideographic one—still less a syllabic writing of their
own, which would indeed have had to compete with the ones in use among
their more advanced neighbors. Toward the fourth and third centuries
**B.C.* the Scythian art of the Black Sea region thus tends naturally
toward a graphic schematization of its forms, which makes them more of a
linear ornamentation than a proto-writing.”\footnote{Georges Charriere, \emph{Scythian Art} (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), p. 185 [translation modified].} Of course, one may
write on jewelry, metal plaques, or even weapons, but only in the sense
that one applies a preexisting writing system to these matters. The case
of \emph{runic writing} is more troubling because its origins seem
exclusively tied to jewelry, fibulas, elements of metalworking, small
movable objects. The point is that in its early period runic writing had
only a weak communication value and a very restricted public function.
Its secret character has led many to interpret it as magical writing.
Rather, it is an affective semiotic, comprising in particular: (1)
signatures, as marks of possession or fabrication, and (2) short war or
love messages. It constitutes a text that is “ornamental” rather than
scriptural, “an invention with little utility, half-aborted,” a
substitute writing. It only takes on the value of writing during a
second period, when monumental inscriptions appear, with the Danish
reform of the ninth century \emph{A.D.}, in connection with the State and
work.\footnote{See Lucien Mussel, \emph{Introduction à la runologie} (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1965).}


It may be objected that tools, weapons, signs, and jewelry in fact occur
everywhere, in a common sphere. But that is not the problem, any more
than it is to seek an origin in each case. It is a question of assigning
assemblages, in other words, of determining the \emph{differential traits}
according to which an element formally belongs to one assemblage rather
than to another. It could also be said that architecture and cooking
have an apparent affinity with the State, whereas music and drugs have
differential traits that place them on the side of the nomadic war
machine.\footnote{There are, of course, forms of cooking and architecture that are part of the nomad war machine, but they fall under a different “trait,” one distinguishing them from their sedentary form. Nomad architecture, for example, the Eskimo igloo or the Hunnish wooden palace, is a derivative of the tent: its influence on sedentary art came by way of domes and half-domes, and above all of \emph{space starting very low}, as in a tent. As for nomad cooking, it consists literally of break-fast (the paschal tradition is nomadic). And it is under this trait that it can be part of a war machine: for example, the Janissaries used a cooking pot as their rallying point; there were different ranks of cooks, and their hat had a wooden spoon through it.} \emph{It is therefore a differential method that establishes
the distinction between weapons and tools}, from at least five points of
view: the direction (sens) (projection-introception), the vector
(speed-gravity), the model (free action-work), the expression
(jewelry-signs), and the passional or desiring tonality
(affect-feeling). Doubtless the State apparatus tends to bring
uniformity to the regimes, by disciplining its armies, by making work a
fundamental unit, in other words, by imposing its own traits. But it is
not impossible for weapons and tools, if they are taken up by new
assemblages of metamorphosis, to enter other relations of alliance. The
man of war may at times form peasant or worker alliances, but it is more
frequent for a worker, industrial or agricultural, to reinvent a war
machine. Peasants made an important contribution to the history of
artillery during the Hussite wars, when Žižka armed mobile fortresses
made from oxcarts with portable cannons. A worker-soldier, weapon-tool,
sentiment-affect affinity marks the right time, however fleeting, for
revolutions and popular wars. There is a schizophrenic taste for the
tool that moves it away from work and toward free action, a
schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace,
for obtaining peace. A counterattack and a resistance simultaneously.
Everything is ambiguous. But we do not believe that Ernst Junger’s
analyses are disqualified by this ambiguity when he portrays the “Rebel”
as a transhistorical figure drawing the Worker, on the one hand, and the
Soldier, on the other, down a shared line of flight where one says
simultaneously “I seek a weapon” and “I am looking for a tool”: Draw the
line, or what amounts to the same thing, cross the line, pass over the
line, for the line is only drawn by surpassing the line of
separation.\footnote{It is in the \emph{Traité du rebelle} (Paris: Bourgois, 1981) that Jünger takes his clearest stand against national socialism and develops certain points contained in \emph{Der Arbeiter}: a conception of the “line” as an active escape passing between the two figures of the old Soldier and the modern Worker, carrying both toward another destiny in another assembly (nothing of this remains in Heidegger’s notion of the Line, although it is dedicated to Jünger).} Undoubtedly, nothing is more outmoded than the man of
war: he has long since been transformed into an entirely different
character, the military man. And the worker himself has undergone so
many misadventures \dots{} And yet men of war reappear, with many ambiguities:
they are all those who know the uselessness of violence but who are
adjacent to a war machine to be recreated, one of active, revolutionary
counterattacks. Workers also reappear who do not believe in work but who
are adjacent to a work machine to be recreated, one of active resistance
and technological liberation. They do not resuscitate old myths or
archaic figures; they are the new figures of a transhistorical
assemblage (neither historical nor eternal, but untimely): the nomad
warrior and the ambulant worker. A somber caricature already precedes
them, the mercenary or mobile military adviser, and the technocrat or
transhumant analyst, \emph{CIA} and \emph{IBM}. But transhistorical figures must
defend themselves as much against old myths as against preestablished,
anticipatory disfigurations. “One does not go back to reconquer the
myth, one encounters it anew, when time quakes at its foundations under
the empire of extreme danger.” Martial arts and state-of-the-art
technologies have value only because they create the possibility of
bringing together worker and warrior masses of a new type. The shared
line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility, a
mutation. There arise subterranean, aerial, submarine technicians who
belong more or less to the world order, but who involuntarily invent and
amass virtual charges of knowledge and action that are usable by others,
minute but easily acquired for new assemblages. The borrowings between
warfare and the military apparatus, work and free action, always run in
both directions, for a struggle that is all the more varied.



\begin{quote}


**PROBLEM III*. \emph{How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION VIII*. \emph{Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily
confluent with nomadism.}



\end{quote}


The political, economic, and social regime of the peoples of the steppe
are less well known than their innovations in war, in the areas of
offensive and defensive weapons, composition or strategy, and
technological elements (the saddle, stirrup, horseshoe, harness, etc.).
History contests each innovation but cannot succeed in effacing the
nomad traces. What the nomads invented was the man-animal-weapon,
man-horse-bow assemblage. Through this assemblage of speed, the ages of
metal are marked by innovation. The socketed bronze battle-ax of the
Hyksos and the iron sword of the Hittites have been compared to
miniature atomic bombs. It has been possible to establish a rather
precise periodization of the weapons of the steppe, showing the
alternation between heavy and light armament (the Scythian type and the
Sarmatian type), and their mixed forms. The cast steel saber, often
short and curved, a weapon for side attack with the edge of the blade,
envelops a different dynamic space than the forged iron sword used for
frontal attack with the point: it was the Scythians who brought it to
India and Persia, where the Arabs would later acquire it. It is commonly
agreed that the nomads lost their role as innovators with the advent of
firearms, in particular the cannon (“gunpowder overtook them”). But it
was not necessarily because they did not know how to use them. Not only
did armies like the Turkish army, whose nomadic traditions remained
strong, develop extensive firepower, a new space, but additionally, and
even more characteristically, light artillery was thoroughly integrated
into mobile formations of wagons, pirate ships, etc. If the cannon marks
a limit for the nomads, it is on the contrary because it implies an
economic investment that only a State apparatus can make (even
commercial cities do not suffice). The fact remains that for weapons
other than firearms, and even for the cannon, there is always a nomad on
the horizon of a given \emph{technological lineage}.\footnote{Lynn White, Jr., who is actually not inclined to ascribe much power of innovation to the nomads, sometimes establishes extensive technological lineages with surprising origins: he traces hot-air and turbine technologies to Malaya (\emph{Medieval Technology and Social Change}, p. 95 and note): “Thus a chain of technological stimuli may be traced back from some of the major figures of early modern science and technology through the later Middle Ages to the jungles of Malaya. A second, and related, Malay invention, the fire piston, may have had significant influence upon the European understanding of air pressure and its applications.”}


Obviously, each case is controversial, as demonstrated by the debates on
the stirrup.\footnote{On the particularly thorny question of the stirrup, see Lynn White, Jr., \emph{Medieval Technology and Social Change}, chapter 1.} The problem is that it is generally difficult to
distinguish between what comes from the nomads as such, and what they
receive from the empire they communicate with, conquer, or integrate
with. There are so many gray areas, intermediaries, and combinations
between an imperial army and a nomad war machine that it is often the
case that things originate in the empire. The example of the saber is
typical, and unlike the stirrup, there is no longer any doubt. Although
it is true that the Scythians were the propagators of the saber,
introducing it to the Hindus, Persians, and Arabs, they were also its
first victims, they started off on the receiving end; it was invented by
the Chinese empire of the Ch’in and Han dynasties, the exclusive master
of steel casting or crucible steel.\footnote{See the fine article by A. Mazaheri, “Le sabre centre l’épée,” \emph{Annales 13}, no. 4 (October–December 1958), pp. 669–686.} This is a good example to
illustrate the difficulties facing modern archaeologists and historians.
Even archaeologists are not immune from a certain hatred or contempt for
the nomads. In the case of the saber, where the facts already speak
sufficiently in favor of an imperial origin, the best of the
commentators finds it fitting to add that the Scythians could not have
invented it at any rate—poor nomads that they were—and that crucible
steel necessarily came from a sedentary milieu. But why follow the very
old, official Chinese version according to which deserters from the
imperial army revealed the secrets to the Scythians? And what can
“revealing the secret” mean if the Scythians were incapable of putting
it to use, and understood nothing of all that? Blame the deserters, why
don’t you. You don’t make an atomic bomb with a secret, any more than
you make a saber if you are incapable of reproducing it, and of
integrating it under different conditions, of transferring it to other
assemblages. Propagation and diffusion are fully a part of the line of
innovation; they mark a bend in it. On top of that, why say that
crucible steel is necessarily the property of sedentaries or imperial
subjects, when it is first of all the invention of metallurgists? It is
assumed that these metallurgists were necessarily controlled by a State
apparatus; but they also had to enjoy a certain technological autonomy,
and social clandestinity, so that, even controlled, they did not belong
to the State any more than they were themselves nomads. There were no
deserters who betrayed the secret, but rather metallurgists who
communicated it and made its adaptation and propagation possible: an
entirely different kind of “betrayal.” In the last analysis, what makes
the discussions so difficult (both in the controversial case of the
stirrup and in the definite case of the saber) are not only the
prejudices about the nomads but also the absence of a sufficiently
elaborated concept of the technological lineage (what defines a
**technological line or continuum*, and its variable extension, from a
given standpoint?).


It would be useless to say that metallurgy is a science because it
discovers constant laws, for example, the melting point of a metal at
all times and in all places. For metallurgy is inseparable from several
lines of variation: variation between meteorites and indigenous metals;
variation between ores and proportions of metal; variation between
alloys, natural and artificial; variation between the operations
performed upon a metal; variation between the qualities that make a
given operation possible, or that result from a given operation (for
example, twelve varieties of copper identified and inventoried at Sumer
by place of origin and degree of refinement).\footnote{Henri Limet, \emph{Le travail du métal au pays de Sumer au temps de la IIIe dynastie d’Ur} (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960), pp. 33–40.} All of these
variables can be grouped under two overall rubrics: \emph{singularities or
spatiotemporal haecceities} of different orders, and the operations
associated with them as processes of deformation or transformation;
**affective qualities or traits of expression* of different levels,
corresponding to these singularities and operations (hardness, weight,
color, etc.). Let us return to the example of the saber, or rather of
crucible steel. It implies the actualization of a first singularity,
namely, the melting of the iron at high temperature; then a second
singularity, the successive decarbonations; corresponding to these
singularities are traits of expression—not only the hardness, sharpness,
and finish, but also the undulations or designs traced by the
crystallization and resulting from the internal structure of the cast
steel. The iron sword is associated with entirely different
singularities because it is forged and not cast or molded, quenched and
not air cooled, produced by the piece and not in number; its traits of
expression are necessarily very different because it pierces rather than
hews, attacks from the front rather than from the side; even the
expressive designs are obtained in an entirely different way, by
inlay.\footnote{Along these lines, Mazaheri effectively demonstrates that the saber and sword belong to two distinct technological lineages. In particular, \emph{damasking} (\emph{damassage}), which does not come from Damascus at all, but rather from the Greek or Persian word for diamond, designates the treatment of cast steel that makes it as hard as a diamond and the designs in this steel resulting from the crystallization of the cement (“true damask was made in the centers that had never experienced Roman domination”). But on the other hand, \emph{damascening} (\emph{damasquinage}), which did come from Damascus, designates only inlay in metal (or in fabric), intentional designs imitating damasking using entirely different means.} We may speak of a machinic phylum, or technological lineage,
wherever we find \emph{a constellation of singularities, prolongable by
certain operations, which converge, and make the operations converge,
upon one or several assignable traits of expression}. If the
singularities or operations diverge, in different materials or in the
same material, we must distinguish two different phyla: this is
precisely the case for the iron sword, descended from the dagger, and
the steel saber, descended from the knife. Each phylum has its own
singularities and operations, its own qualities and traits, which
determine the relation of desire to the technical element (the affects
the saber “has” are not the same as those of the sword).


But it is always possible to situate the analysis on the level of
singularities that are prolongable from one phylum to another, and to
tie the two phyla together. At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic
lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of
matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying
singularities and traits of expression. This operative and expressive
flow is as much artificial as natural: it is like the unity of human
beings and Nature. But at the same time, it is not realized in the here
and now without dividing, differentiating. We will call an \emph{assemblage}
every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the
flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a way as to converge
(consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense,
is a veritable invention. Assemblages may group themselves into
extremely vast constellations constituting “cultures,” or even “ages”;
within these constellations, the assemblages still differentiate the
phyla or the flow, dividing it into so many different phylas, of a given
order, on a given level, and introducing selective discontinuities in
the ideal continuity of matter-movement. The assemblages cut the phylum
up into distinct, differentiated lineages, at the same time as the
machinic phylum cuts across them all, taking leave of one to pick up
again in another, or making them coexist. A certain singularity embedded
in the flanks of the phylum, for example, the chemistry of carbon, will
be brought up to the surface by a given assemblage that selects,
organizes, invents it, and through which all or part of the phylum
passes, at a given place at a given time. We may distinguish in every
case a number of very different lines. Some of them, phylogenetic lines,
travel long distances between assemblages of various ages and cultures
(from the blowgun to the cannon? from the prayer wheel to the propeller?
from the pot to the motor?); others, ontogenetic lines, are internal to
one assemblage and link up its various elements or else cause one
element to pass, often after a delay, into another assemblage of a
different nature but of the same culture or age (for example, the
horseshoe, which spread through agricultural assemblages). It is thus
necessary to take into account the selective action of the assemblages
upon the phylum, and the evolutionary reaction of the phylum as the
subterranean thread that passes from one assemblage to another, or quits
an assemblage, draws it forward and opens it up. \emph{Vital impulse}?
Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest toward a technological vitalism
taking biological evolution in general as the model for technical
evolution: a \emph{Universal Tendency}, laden with all of the singularities
and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior milieus that
refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities and
traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to
converge, invents.\footnote{André Leroi-Gourhan, \emph{Milieu et techniques} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945), pp. 356ff. Gilbert Simondon, discussing short series, takes up the question of the “absolute origins of a technological lineage,” or of the creation of a “technical essence”: \emph{Du mode d’existence des objects techniques} (Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 41–49.} There is indeed a machinic phylum in variation
that creates the technical assemblages, whereas the assemblages invent
the various phyla. A technological lineage changes significantly
according to whether one draws it upon the phylum or inscribes it in the
assemblages; but the two are inseparable.


So how are we to define this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this
matter-flow, this matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves
them? It is a destratified, deterritorialized matter. It seems to us
that Husserl brought thought a decisive step forward when he discovered
a region of \emph{vague and material} essences (in other words, essences that
are vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed,
metric and formal, essences. We have seen that these vague essences are
as distinct from formed things as they are from formal essences. They
constitute fuzzy aggregates. They relate to a \emph{corporeality}
(materiality) that is not to be confused either with an intelligible,
formal essentiality or a sensible, formed and perceived, thinghood. This
corporeality has two characteristics: on the one hand, it is inseparable
from passages to the limit as changes of state, from processes of
deformation or transformation that operate in a space-time itself
anexact and that act in the manner of events (ablation, adjunction,
projection\dots{}); on the other hand, it is inseparable from expressive or
intensive qualities, which can be higher or lower in degree, and are
produced in the manner of variable affects (resistance, hardness,
weight, color\dots{}). There is thus an ambulant coupling, \emph{events-affects},
which constitutes the vague corporeal essence and is distinct from the
sedentary linkage, “fixed essence-properties of the thing deriving from
the essence,” “formal essence-formed thing.” Doubtless Husserl had a
tendency to make the vague essence a kind of intermediary between the
essence and the sensible, between the thing and the concept, a little
like the Kantian schema. Is not roundness a schematic or vague essence,
intermediary between rounded sensible things and the conceptual essence
of the circle? In effect, roundness exists only as a threshold-affect
(neither flat nor pointed) and as a limit-process (becoming rounded),
through sensible things and technical agents, millstone, lathe, wheel,
spinning wheel socket, etc. But it is only “intermediary” to the extent
that what is intermediary is autonomous, initially stretching \emph{itself}
between things, and between thoughts, to establish a whole new relation
between thoughts and things, a \emph{vague} identity between the two.


Certain distinctions proposed by Simondon can be compared to those of
Husserl. For Simondon exposes the technological insufficiency of the
matter-form model, in that it assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed
homogeneous. It is the idea of the law that assures the model’s
coherence, since laws are what submit matter to this or that form, and
conversely, realize in matter a given property deduced from the form.
But Simondon demonstrates that the \emph{hylomorphic} model leaves many
things, active and affective, by the wayside. On the one hand, to the
formed or formable matter we must add an entire energetic materiality in
movement, carrying \emph{singularities} or \emph{haecceities} that are already
like implicit forms that are topological, rather than geometrical, and
that combine with processes of deformation: for example, the variable
undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the operation of
splitting wood. On the other hand, to the essential properties of the
matter deriving from the formal essence we must add \emph{variable intensive
affects}, now resulting from the operation, now on the contrary making
it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous, more or less
elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrendering to
the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a
materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one
addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality
possessing a \emph{nomos}. One addresses less a form capable of imposing
properties upon a matter than material traits of expression constituting
affects. Of course, it is always possible to ” translate” into a model
that which escapes the model; thus, one may link the materiality’s power
of variation to laws adapting a fixed form and a constant matter to one
another. But this cannot be done without a distortion that consists in
uprooting variables from the state of continuous variation, in order to
extract from them fixed points and constant relations. Thus one throws
the variables off, even changing the nature of the equations, which
cease to be immanent to matter-movement (inequations, adequations). The
question is not whether such a translation is conceptually legitimate—it
is—but what intuition gets lost in it. In short, what Simondon
criticizes the hylomorphic model for is taking form and matter to be two
terms defined separately, like the ends of two half-chains whose
connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of molding
behind which there is a perpetually variable, continuous modulation that
it is no longer possible to grasp.\footnote{On the mold-modulation relation, and the way in which molding hides or contracts an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, \emph{Du mode d’existence}, pp. 28–50 (“modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable manner”; p. 42). Simondon clearly shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to the technological operation but to the social model of \emph{work} subsuming that operation (pp. 47–49).} The critique of the hylomorphic
schema is based on “the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of
medium and intermediary dimension,” of energetic, molecular dimension—a
space unto itself that deploys its materiality through matter, a number
unto itself that propels its traits through form.


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


But in the course of the preceding discussion, we have wandered from the
question: Why is the \emph{machinic phylum}, the flow of matter, essentially
metallic or metallurgical? Here again, it is only the distinct concept
that can give us an answer, in that it shows that there is a special,
primary relation between itinerance and metallurgy
(deterritorialization). However, the examples we took from Husserl and
Simondon concerned wood and clay as well as metals. Besides, are there
not flows of grass, water, herds, which form so many phyla or matters in
movement? It is easier for us to answer these questions now. For it is
as if metal and metallurgy imposed upon and raised to consciousness
something that is only hidden or buried in the other matters and
operations. The difference is that elsewhere the operations occur
between two thresholds, one of which constitutes the matter prepared for
the operation, and the other the form to be incarnated (for example, the
clay and the mold). The hylomorphic model derives its general value from
this, since the incarnated form that marks the end of an operation can
serve as the matter for a new operation, but in a fixed order marking a
succession of thresholds. In metallurgy, on the other hand, the
operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic
materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative
deformation or transformation overspills the form.\footnote{Simondon feels no special attraction for the problems of metallurgy. His analysis is not, in fact, historical and prefers to deal with examples drawn from electronics. But, historically, there is no electronics without metallurgy. Thus Simondon pays homage to metallurgy: “Metallurgy does not entirely accommodate itself to an analysis using the hylomorphic schema. The fixing of the form is not accomplished visibly in a single stroke, but in several successive operations; the forging and quenching of steel are anterior and posterior, respectively, to the fixing of the form in the strict sense; forging and quenching are, nevertheless, operations that constitute objects” (\emph{L’individu}, p. 59).} For example,
quenching follows forging and takes place after the form has been fixed.
Or, to take another example, in molding, the metallurgist in a sense
works inside the mold. Or again, steel that is melted and molded later
undergoes a series of successive decarbonations. Finally, metallurgy has
the option of melting down and reusing a matter to which it gives an
**ingot-form*: the history of metal is inseparable from this very
particular form, which is not to be confused with either a stock or a
commodity; monetary value derives from it. More generally, the
metallurgical idea of the “reducer” expresses this double liberation of
a materiality in relation to a prepared matter, and of a transformation
in relation to the form to be incarnated. Matter and form have never
seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms tends
to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the
variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a
continuous variation. If metallurgy has an essential relation with
music, it is by virtue not only of the sounds of the forge but also of
the tendency within both arts to bring into its own, beyond separate
forms, a continuous development of form, and beyond variable matters, a
continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both
music and metallurgy; the musical smith was the first
“transformer.”\footnote{Not only must myths be taken into account, but also positive history, for example, the role of “the brass” in the evolution of musical form; or again, the constitution of a “metallic synthesis” in electronic music (Richard Pinhas).} In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light
is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material
vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or
covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model.
Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal
the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal
is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to
metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the
animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is
metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter.
The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head,
as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device. And thought is born more
from metal than from stone: metallurgy is minor science in person,
“vague” science or the phenomenology of matter. The prodigious idea of
**Nonorganic Life*—the very same idea Worringer considered the barbarian
idea par excellence\footnote{Wilhelm Worringer defines Gothic art in terms of a geometrical line that is “primitive” but has taken on life. But this vitality is not organic, as it will be in the classical world: this line “embodies no organic expression \dots{} it is nevertheless of the utmost vitality\dots{}. Since this line is lacking in all organic timbre, its expression of life must, as an expression, be divorced from organic life \dots{} The pathos of movement which lies in this vitalized geometry—a prelude to the vitalized mathematics of Gothic architecture—forces our sensibility to an effort unnatural to it.” \emph{Form in Gothic} (London: Putnam’s and Sons, 1927), pp. 41–42.}—was the invention, the intuition of metallurgy.
Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a \emph{body} without organs.
The “Northern, or Gothic, line” is above all a mining or metallic line
delimiting this body. The relation between metallurgy and alchemy
reposes not, as Jung believed, on the symbolic value of metal and its
correspondence with an organic soul but on the immanent power of
corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it.


The first and primary itinerant is the artisan. But artisans are neither
hunters, farmers, nor animal raisers. Neither are they winnowers or
potters, who only secondarily take up craft activity. Rather, artisans
are those who follow the matter-flow as pure productivity: therefore in
mineral form, and not in vegetable or animal form. They are not of the
land, or of the soil, but of the subsoil. Because metal is the pure
productivity of matter, those who follow metal are producers of objects
par excellence. As demonstrated by V. Gordon Childe, the metallurgist is
the first specialized artisan, and in this respect forms a collective
**body* (secret societies, guilds, journeymen’s associations).
Artisans-metallurgists are itinerants because they follow the
matter-flow of the subsoil. Of course metallurgists have relations with
“the others,” those of the soil, land, and sky. They have relations with
the farmers of the sedentary communities, and with the celestial
functionaries of the empire who overcode those communities; in fact,
they need them to survive, they depend on an imperial agricultural
stockpile for their very sustenance.\footnote{This is one of the essential points of V. Gordon Childe’s argument in \emph{The Prehistory of European Civilization} (London: Cassell, 1962): the metallurgist is the first specialized artisan, whose sustenance is made possible by the formation of an agricultural surplus. The relation of the smith to agriculture has to do not only with the tools smiths manufacture but also with the food they take or receive. The Dogon myth, as analyzed in its variants by Griaule, can be seen as marking this relation, in which the smith receives or steals grains, and hides them in his mallet.} But in their work, they have
relations with the forest dwellers, and partially depend on them: they
must establish their workshops near the forest in order to obtain the
necessary charcoal. In their space, they have relations with the nomads,
since the subsoil unites the ground (\emph{sol}) of smooth space and the land
of striated space: there are no mines in the alluvial valleys of the
empire-dominated farmers; it is necessary to cross deserts, approach the
mountains; and the question of control over the mines always involves
nomadic peoples. \emph{Every mine is a line of flight} that is in
communication with smooth spaces—there are parallels today in the
problems with oil.


Archaeology and history remain strangely silent on this question of the
control over the mines. There have been empires with a strong
metallurgical organization that had no mines; the Near East lacked tin,
so necessary for the fabrication of bronze. Large quantities of metal
arrived in ingot form, and from very far away (for instance, tin from
Spain or even from Cornwall). So complex a situation implies not only a
strong imperial bureaucracy and elaborate long-distance commercial
circuits; it also implies a shifting politics, in which States confront
an outside, in which very different peoples confront one another, or
else reach some accommodation on particular aspects of the control of
mines (extraction, charcoal, workshops, transportation). It is not
enough to say that there are wars and mining expeditions; or to invoke
“a Eurasian synthesis of the nomadic workshops from the approaches of
China to the tip of Britanny,” and remark that “the nomadic populations
had been in contact with the principal metallurgical centers of the
ancient world since prehistoric times.”\footnote{Maurice Lombard, \emph{Les métaux dans l’ancien monde du Ve au XIe siècle} (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), pp. 75, 255.} What is needed is a better
knowledge of the nomads’ relations with these centers, with the smiths
they themselves employed or frequented, with properly metallurgical
peoples or groups who were their neighbors. What was the situation in
the Caucasus and in the Altai? In Spain and North Africa? Mines are a
source of flow, mixture, and escape with few equivalents in history.
Even when they are well controlled by an empire that owns them (as in
the Chinese and Roman empires), there is a major movement of clandestine
exploitation, and of miners’ alliances either with nomad and barbarian
incursions or peasant revolts. The study of myths, and even ethnographic
considerations on the status of smiths, divert us from these political
questions. Mythology and ethnology do not have the right method in this
regard. It is too often asked how \emph{the others} “react” to the smith, and
as a result, one succumbs to the usual platitudes about the ambivalence
of \emph{feelings}; it is said that the smith is simultaneously honored,
feared, and scorned—more or less scorned among the nomads, more or less
honored among the sedentaries.\footnote{The social position of the smith has been the object of detailed studies; for Africa in particular see the classic study by W. B. Cline, “Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa,” \emph{General Series in Anthropology}, no. 5 (1937); and Pierre Clément, “Le forgeron en Afrique noire,” \emph{Revue de géographie humaine et d’ethnologie}, no. 2 (April–June 1948), pp. 35–58. But these studies are hardly conclusive; the better defined the principles invoked—“reaction of contempt,” “of approbation,” “of apprehension”—the hazier and more overlapping the results, as seen in Clément’s tables.} But this loses sight of the reasons
for this situation, of the specificity of the smiths themselves, of the
nonsymmetrical relation they entertain with the nomads and the
sedentaries, the type of \emph{affects} they invent (metallic affect). Before
looking at the feelings of others toward smiths, it is necessary to
evaluate the smiths themselves as Other; as such, they have different
affective relations with the sedentaries and the nomads.


There are no nomadic or sedentary smiths. Smiths are ambulant,
itinerant. Particularly important in this respect is the way in which
smiths live: their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary
nor the smooth space of the nomad. Smiths may have a tent, they may have
a house; they inhabit them in the manner of an “ore bed” (gîte, shelter,
home, mineral deposit), like metal itself, in the manner of a cave or a
hole, a hut half or all underground. They are cave dwellers not by
nature but by artistry and need.\footnote{See Jules Bloch, \emph{Les Tziganes}, Que sais-je?, no. 580 (Paris: PUF, 1969). Bloch demonstrates precisely that the distinction between sedentaries and nomads becomes secondary in connection with cave dwelling.} A splendid text by Elie Faure
evokes the infernal progress of the itinerant peoples of India as they
bore holes in space and create the fantastic forms corresponding to
these breakthroughs, the vital forms of nonorganic life: “There at the
shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain, they encountered a great
wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite; in its shadows they
lived, loved, worked, died, were born, and, three or four centuries
afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed the
mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hollowed
out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or
artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand
horrible or charming figures\dots{}. Here man confesses unresistingly his
strength and his nothingness. He does not exact the affirmation of a
determined ideal from form\dots{}. He extracts it rough from formlessness,
according to the dictates of the formless. He utilizes the indentations
and accidents of the rock.”\footnote{Elie Faure, \emph{Medieval Art}, vol. 2 of \emph{History of Art}, trans. Walter Pach (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 12–14.} Metallurgical India. Transpierce the
mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land instead of
striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the
earth into swiss cheese. An image from the film \emph{Strike} [by Eisenstein]
presents a holey space where a disturbing group of people are rising,
each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field mined in all
directions. The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign of the
subsoil, passing through both the striated land of sedentary space and
the nomadic ground (\emph{sol}) of smooth space without stopping at either
one, the vagabond sign of itinerancy, the double theft and double
betrayal of the metallurgist, who shuns agriculture at the same time as
animal raising. Must we reserve the name Cainite for these metallurgical
peoples who haunt the depths of History? Prehistoric Europe was
crisscrossed by the \emph{battle-ax people}, who came in off the steppes like
a detached metallic branch of the nomads, and the people known for their
bell-shaped pottery, the \emph{beaker people}, originating in Andalusia, a
detached branch of megalithic agriculture.\footnote{On these peoples and their mysteries, see the analyses of V. Gordon Childe, \emph{The Prehistory of European Society}, chapter 7 (“Missionaries, Traders and Warriors of Temperate Europe”), and \emph{The Dawn of European Civilization} (New York: Knopf, 1958).} Strange peoples,
dolicocephalics and brachycephalics who mix and spread across all of
Europe. Are they the ones who kept up the mines, boring holes in
European space from every direction, constituting our European space?


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-48.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Holey Space}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


Smiths are not nomadic among the nomads and sedentary among the
sedentaries, nor half-nomadic among the nomads, half-sedentary among
sedentaries. Their relation to others results from their internal
itinerancy, from their vague essence, and not the reverse. It is in
their specificity, it is by virtue of their itinerancy, by virtue of
their inventing a holey space, that they necessarily communicate with
the sedentaries \emph{and} with the nomads (and with others besides, with the
transhumant forest dwellers). They are in themselves double: a hybrid,
an alloy, a twin formation. As Griaule says, Dogon smiths are not
“impure” but “mixed,” and it is because they are mixed that they are
**endogamous*, that they do not intermarry with the pure, who have a
simplified progeny while they reconstitute a twin progeny.\footnote{Maurice Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, \emph{Le renard pâle}, vol. 1 (Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, 1965), p. 376.} Childe
demonstrates that metallurgists are necessarily doubled, that they exist
two times, once as captured by and maintained within the apparatus of
the oriental empire, again in the Aegean world, where they were much
more mobile and much freer. \emph{But the two segments cannot be separated},
simply by relating each of them to their particular context. The
metallurgist belonging to an empire, the worker, presupposes a
metallurgist-prospector, however far away; and the prospector ties in
with a merchant, who brings the metal to the first metallurgist. In
addition, the metal is worked on by each segment, and the ingot-form is
common to them all: we must imagine less separate segments than a chain
of mobile workshops constituting, from hole to hole, a line of
variation, a gallery. Thus the metallurgists’ relation to the nomads and
the sedentaries also passes through the relations they have with other
metallurgists.\footnote{The book by Robert James Forbes, \emph{Metallurgy in Antiquity} (Leiden: Brill, 1950), analyzes the different ages of metallurgy, as well as the types of metallurgists that existed in the “ore stage”: the “miner,” who did the prospecting and mining; the “smelter” [who produced the crude metal or alloy]; the “blacksmith” [who manufactured mass products from crude metals]; and the “metalworker” [who produced smaller objects; includes gold- and silversmiths] (pp. 74–76). The specialization system becomes more complicated in the Iron Age, with attendant variations in the nomad-itinerant-sedentary distribution.} This hybrid metallurgist, a weapon- and toolmaker,
communicates with the sedentaries \emph{and} with the nomads at the same
time. Holey space itself communicates with smooth space and striated
space. In effect, the machinic phylum or the metallic line passes
through all of the assemblages: nothing is more deterritorialized than
matter-movement. But it is not at all in the same way, and the two
communications are not symmetrical. Worringer, in the domain of
aesthetics, said that the abstract line took on two quite different
expressions, one in barbarian Gothic art, the other in the organic
classical art. Here, we would say that the phylum simultaneously has two
different modes of liaison: it is always \emph{connected} to nomad space,
whereas it \emph{conjugates} with sedentary space. On the side of the nomadic
assemblages and war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps,
detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On
the other side, the sedentary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a
capture of the phylum, put the traits of expression into a form or a
code, make the holes resonate together, plug the lines of flight,
subordinate the technological operation to the work model, impose upon
the connections a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions.



\begin{quote}


**AXIOM III*. \emph{The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which
itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-49.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION IX*. \emph{War does not necessarily have the battle as its
object, and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have
war as its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary
result (under certain conditions).}



\end{quote}


We now come to three successive problems. First, is the battle the
“object” of war? But also, is war the “object” of the war machine? And
finally, to what extent is the war machine the “object” of the State
apparatus? The ambiguity of the first two problems is certainly due to
the term “object,” but implies their dependency on the third. We must
nevertheless approach these problems gradually, even if we are reduced
to multiplying examples. The first question, that of the battle,
requires an immediate distinction to be made between two cases: when a
battle is sought, and when it is essentially avoided by the war machine.
These two cases in no way coincide with the offensive and the defensive.
But war in the strict sense (according to a conception of it that
culminated in Foch) does seem to have the battle as its object, whereas
guerrilla warfare explicitly aims for the \emph{nonbattle}. However, the
development of war into the war of movement, and into total war, also
places the notion of the battle in question, as much from the offensive
as the defensive points of view: the concept of the nonbattle seems
capable of expressing the speed of a flash attack, and the counterspeed
of an immediate response.\footnote{The texts of T. E. Lawrence, \emph{Seven Pillars of Wisdom} (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1935) and “The Science of Guerrilla War,” in \emph{Encyclopedia Britannica}, 14\textsuperscript{th} ed. (1929), vol. 10, pp. 950–953, remain among the most significant works on guerrilla warfare; they present themselves as an “anti-Foch” theory and elaborate the notion of the nonbattle. But the nonbattle has a history that is not entirely dependent on guerrilla warfare: (1) the traditional distinction between the “battle” and the “maneuver” in war; see Raymon Aron, \emph{Penser la guerre. Clausewitz} (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 122–131; (2) the way in which the war of movement places the role and importance of the battle in question (as early as Marshal de Saxe, and the controversial question of the battle during the Napoleonic Wars); (3) finally, more recently, the critique of the battle in the name of nuclear arms, which play a deterrent role, with conventional forces now having a role only in “testing” or “maneuver”; see the Gaullist conception of the nonbattle, and Guy Brossollet, \emph{Essai sur la non-bataille} (Paris: Belin, 1975). The recent return to the notion of the battle cannot be explained simply by technological factors such as the development of tactical nuclear arms, but implies political considerations—it is upon these that the role assigned to the battle (or nonbattle) in war depends.} Conversely, the development of guerilla
warfare implies a moment when, and forms under which, a battle must be
effectively sought, in connection with exterior and interior “support
points.” And it is true that guerrilla warfare and war proper are
constantly borrowing each other’s methods and that the borrowings run
equally in both directions (for example, stress has often been laid on
the inspirations land-based guerrilla warfare received from maritime
war). All we can say is that the battle and the nonbattle are the double
object of war, according to a criterion that does not coincide with the
offensive and the defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla
warfare.


That is why we push the question further back, asking if war itself is
the object of the war machine. It is not at all obvious. To the extent
that war (with or without the battle) aims for the annihilation or
capitulation of enemy forces, the war machine does not necessarily have
war as its object (for example, the \emph{raid} can be seen as another
object, rather than as a particular form of war). But more generally, we
have seen that 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 its sole and veritable
positive object (\emph{nomos}). Make the desert, the steppe, grow; do not
depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it is
because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of
striation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine
has as its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon,
and adopts as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that
the war machine becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy
the State-form. The Attila, or Genghis Khan, adventure clearly
illustrates this progression from the positive object to the negative
object. Speaking like Aristotle, we would say that war is neither the
condition nor the object of the war machine, but necessarily accompanies
or completes it; speaking like Derrida, we would say that war is the
“supplement” of the war machine. It may even happen that this
supplementarity is comprehended through a progressive, anxiety-ridden
revelation. Such, for example, was the adventure of Moses: leaving the
Egyptian State behind, launching into the desert, he begins by forming a
war machine, on the inspiration of the old past of the nomadic Hebrews
and on the advice of his father-in-law, who came from the nomads. This
is the machine of the Just, already a war machine, but one that does not
yet have war as its object. Moses realizes, little by little, in stages,
that war is the necessary supplement of that machine, because it
encounters or must cross cities and States, because it must send ahead
spies (\emph{armed observation}), then perhaps take things to extremes (\emph{war
of annihilation}). Then the Jewish people experience doubt, and fear
that they are not strong enough; but Moses also doubts, he shrinks
before the revelation of this supplement. And it will be Joshua, not
Moses, who is charged with waging war. Finally, speaking like Kant, we
would say that the relation between war and the war machine is necessary
but “synthetic” (Yahweh is necessary for the synthesis).


The question of war, in turn, is pushed further back and is subordinated
to the relations between the war machine and the State apparatus. States
were not the first to make war: war, of course, is not a phenomenon one
finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence. But war is
not the object of States, quite the contrary. The most archaic States do
not even seem to have had a war machine, and their domination, as we
will see, was based on other agencies (comprising, rather, the police
and prisons). It is safe to assume that the intervention of an extrinsic
or nomad war machine that counterattacked and destroyed the archaic but
powerful States was one of the mysterious reasons for their sudden
annihilation. But the State learns fast. One of the biggest questions
from the point of view of universal history is: How will the State
**appropriate* the war machine, that is, constitute one for itself, in
conformity with its size, its domination, and its aims? And with what
risks? (What we call a military institution, or army, is not at all the
war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by
the State.) In order to grasp the paradoxical character of such an
undertaking, we must recapitulate the hypothesis in its entirety. (1)
The war machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its
primary object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic
objective, in the sense that it is determined in such a way as to
destroy the State-form and city-form with which it collides. (2) When
the State appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in
nature and function, since it is afterward directed against the nomad
and all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to
the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State
or impose its aims upon it. (3) It is precisely after the war machine
has been appropriated by the State in this way that it tends to take war
for its direct and primary object, for its “analytic” object (and that
war tends to take the battle for its object). In short, it is at one and
the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war machine, that
the war machine takes war as its object, and that war becomes
subordinated to the aims of the State.


This question of appropriation is so varied historically that it is
necessary to distinguish between several kinds of problems. The first
concerns the possibility of the operation: it is precisely because war
is only the supplementary or synthetic object of the nomad war machine
that it experiences the hesitation that proves fatal to it, and that the
State apparatus for its part is able to lay hold of war and thus turn
the war machine back against the nomads. The hesitation of the nomad is
legendary: What is to be done with the lands conquered and crossed?
Return them to the desert, to the steppe, to open pastureland? Or let a
State apparatus survive that is capable of exploiting them directly, at
the risk of becoming, sooner or later, simply a new dynasty of that
apparatus: sooner or later because Genghis Khan and his followers were
able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves
into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth
space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated.
That was their genius, the \emph{Pax Mongolica}. It remains the case that the
integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one of the most
powerful factors of appropriation of the war machine by the State
apparatus: the inevitable danger to which the nomads succumbed. But
there is another danger as well, the one threatening the State when it
appropriates the war machine (all States have felt the weight of this
danger, as well as the risks this appropriation represents for them).
Tamerlane is the extreme example. He was not Genghis Khan’s successor
but his exact opposite: it was Tamerlane who constructed a fantastic war
machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was
obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive
since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that
machine.\footnote{On the fundamental differences between Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, see René Grousset, \emph{The Empire of the Steppes}, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), pp. 417–419.} Turning the war machine back against the nomads may
constitute for the State a danger as great as that presented by nomads
directing the war machine against States.


A second type of problem concerns the concrete forms the appropriation
of the war machine takes: Mercenary or territorial? A professional army
or a conscripted army? A special body or national recruiting? Not only
are these formulas not equivalent, but there are all the possible mixes
between them. Perhaps the most relevant distinction to make, or the most
general one, would be: Is there merely “encastment” of the war machine,
or “appropriation” proper? The capture of the war machine by the State
apparatus took place following two paths, by encasting a society of
warriors (who arrived from without or arose from within), or on the
contrary by constituting it in accordance with rules corresponding to
civil society as a whole. Once again, there is passage and transition
from one formula to another. Last, the third type of problem concerns
the means of appropriation. We must consider from this standpoint the
various data pertaining to the fundamental aspects of the State
apparatus: \emph{territoriality, work or public works, taxation}. The
constitution of a military institution or an army necessarily implies a
territorialization of the war machine, in other words, the granting of
land (“colonial” or domestic), which can take very diverse forms. But at
the same time, fiscal regimes determine both the nature of the services
and taxes owed by the beneficiary warriors, and especially the kind of
civil tax to which all or part of society is subject for the maintenance
of the army. And the State enterprise of public works must be
reorganized along the lines of a “laying out of the territory” in which
the army plays a determining role, not only in the case of fortresses
and fortified cities, but also in strategic communication, the
logistical structure, the industrial infrastructure, etc. (the role and
function of the Engineer in this form of appropriation).\footnote{See \emph{Armées et fiscalité dans le monde antique}, ed. A. Chastagnol, C. Nicolet, and H. van Effenterre (Paris: CNRS, 1977); this colloquium best covers the fiscal aspect but deals with the other two as well. The question of the distribution of land to soldiers and the families of soldiers comes up in every State and plays an essential role. In one particular form, it lay the foundation for fiefs and feudalism. But it already lay at the basis of “false fiefs” around the world, most notably of the \emph{cleros} and cleruchy in Greek civilization. Claire Préaux, \emph{L’économie royale des Lagides} (Brussels: Ed. de la Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth, 1939), pp. 463ff.}


Let us compare this hypothesis as a whole with Clausewitz’s formula:
“War is the continuation of politics by other means.” As we know, this
formula is itself extracted from a theoretical and practical, historic
and transhistoric, aggregate whose parts are interconnected. (1) There
is a pure concept of war as absolute, unconditioned war, an Idea not
given in experience (bring down or “upset” the enemy, who is assumed to
have no other determination, with no political, economic, or social
considerations entering in). (2) What is given are real wars as
submitted to State aims; States are better or worse “conductors” in
relation to absolute war, and in any case condition its realization in
experience. (3) Real wars swing between two poles, both subject to State
politics: the war of annihilation, which can escalate to total war
(depending on the objectives of the annihilation) and tends to approach
the unconditioned concept via an ascent to extremes; and limited war,
which is no “less” a war, but one that effects a descent toward limiting
conditions, and can de-escalate to mere “armed observation.”\footnote{Clausewitz, \emph{On War}, especially book 8, and the commentary on these three theses by Raymond Aron, \emph{Penser la guerre}, vol. 1 (particularly pp. 139 ff., “Pourquoi les guerres de la deuxième espèce?”).}


In the first place, the distinction between absolute war as Idea and
real wars seems to us to be of great importance, but only if a different
criterion than that of Clausewitz is applied. The pure Idea is not that
of the abstract elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine
**that does not have war as its object* and that only entertains a
potential or supplementary synthetic relation with war. Thus the nomad
war machine does not appear to us to be one case of real war among
others, as in Clausewitz, but on the contrary the content adequate to
the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and
composition of the \emph{nomos}. Nevertheless it is still an Idea, and it is
necessary to retain the concept of the pure Idea, even though this war
machine was realized by the nomads. It is the nomads, rather, who remain
an abstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual, and for several
reasons: first, because the elements of nomadism, as we have seen, enter
into de facto mixes with elements of migration, itinerancy, and
transhumance; this does not affect the purity of the concept, but
introduces always mixed objects, or combinations of space and
composition, which react back upon the war machine from the beginning.
Second, even in the purity of its concept, the nomad war machine
necessarily effectuates its synthetic relation with war as supplement,
uncovered and developed in opposition to the State-form, the destruction
of which is at issue. But that is exactly it; it does not effectuate
this supplementary object or this synthetic relation without the State,
for its part, finding the opportunity to appropriate the war machine,
and the means of making war the direct object of this turned-around
machine (thus the integration of the nomad into the State is a vector
traversing nomadism from the very beginning, from the first act of war
against the State).


The question is therefore less the realization of war than the
appropriation of the war machine. It is at the same time that the State
apparatus \emph{appropriates} the war machine, subordinates it to its
“political” \emph{aims}, and gives it war as its direct \emph{object}. And it is
one and the same historical tendency that causes State to evolve from a
triple point of view: going from figures of encastment to forms of
appropriation proper, going from limited war to so-called total war, and
transforming the relation between aim and object. The factors that make
State war total war are closely connected to capitalism: it has to do
with the investment of constant capital in equipment, industry, and the
war economy, and the investment of variable capital in the population in
its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of
war).\footnote{Erich Ludendorff, \emph{Der totale Krieg} (Munich: Ludendorff Verlag, 1935), notes that the evolution has been toward attributing more and more importance to the “people” and “domestic policies” in war, whereas Clausewitz still puts the emphasis on armies and foreign policy. This criticism is true overall, despite certain texts of Clausewitz. The same criticism is also made by Lenin and the Marxists (although they obviously have a totally different conception of the people and domestic policy than Ludendorff). Certain authors have convincingly demonstrated that the proletariat is as much of military origin, naval in particular, as of industrial origin; see, for example, Virilio, \emph{Speed and Politics}, pp. 38, 40–41, 134–35.} Total war is not only a war of annihilation but arises when
annihilation takes as its “center” not only the enemy army, or the enemy
State, but the entire population and its economy. The fact that this
double investment can be made only under prior conditions of limited war
illustrates the irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to
develop total war.\footnote{As John Ulric Nef shows, it was during the great period of “limited war” (1640–1740) that the phenomena of concentration, accumulation, and investment emerged—the same phenomena that were later to determine “total war.” See \emph{War and Human Progress} (New York: Norton, 1968). The Napoleonic code of war represents a turning point that brought together the elements of total war: mobilization, transport, investment, information, etc.} It is therefore true that total war remains
subordinated to State political aims and merely realizes the \emph{maximal
conditions} of the appropriation of the war machine by the State
apparatus. But it is also true that when total war becomes the object of
the appropriated war machine, then at this level in the set of all
possible conditions, the object and the aim enter into new relations
that can reach the point of contradiction. This explains Clausewitz’s
vacillation when he asserts at one point that total war remains a war
conditioned by the political aim of States, and at another that it tends
to effectuate the Idea of unconditioned war. In effect, the aim remains
essentially political and determined as such by the State, but the
object itself has become unlimited. We could say that the appropriation
has changed direction, or rather that States tend to unleash,
reconstitute, an immense war machine of which they are no longer
anything more than the opposable or apposed parts. This worldwide war
machine, which in a way “reissues” from the States, displays two
successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited
movement with no other aim than itself; but fascism is only a rough
sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine
that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or
Survival. 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 adapted to that machine. This is the point at which
Clausewitz’s formula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say that
politics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to
invert the order of the words as if they could be spoken in either
direction; it is necessary to follow the real movement at the conclusion
of which the States, having appropriated a war machine, and having
adapted it to their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes charge of
the aim, appropriates the States, and assumes increasingly wider
political functions.\footnote{On this “transcending” of fascism, and of total war, and on the new point of inversion of Clausewitz’s formula, see Virilio’s entire analysis in \emph{L’insécurité du territoire}, especially chapter 1.}


Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched
the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction
story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more
terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the
most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its
sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another
regime, but the “unspecified enemy”; we have seen it put its
counterguerrilla elements into place, so that it can be caught by
surprise once, but not twice. Yet the very conditions that make the
State or World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital
(resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually
recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen
initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant
machines. The definition of the Unspecified Enemy testifies to this:
“multiform, maneuvering and omnipresent \dots{} of the moral, political,
subversive or economic order, etc.,” the unassignable material Saboteur
or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms.\footnote{Guy Brossollet, \emph{Essai sur la non-bataille}, pp. 15–16. The axiomatic notion of the “unspecified enemy” is already well developed in official and unofficial texts on national defense, on international law, and in the judicial or police spheres.} The first
theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war machine has
many varied meanings, and this is \emph{precisely because the war machine has
an extremely variable relation to war itself}. The war machine is not
uniformly defined, and comprises something other than increasing
quantities of force. We have tried to define two poles of the war
machine: \emph{at one pole}, it takes war for its object and forms a line of
destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the
shapes it assumes here—limited war, total war, worldwide
organization—war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war
machine but only, whatever the machine’s power, either the set of
conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so
far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order
of which the States themselves are now only parts. \emph{The other pole}
seemed to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely
lower “quantities,” has as its object not war but the drawing of a
creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the
movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does
indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now
directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed
by States.


We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the
nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating
that the war machine as such was invented, even if it displayed from the
beginning all of the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition
with the other pole, and swing toward it from the start. However, in
conformity with the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an
“ideological,” scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war
machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to a
**phylum*, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth
space of displacement. It is not the nomad who defines this
constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation that defines
the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine. If
guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are
in conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object
all the more necessary for being merely “supplementary”: \emph{they can make
war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something
else}, if only new nonorganic social relations. The difference between
the two poles is great, even, and especially, from the point of view of
death: the line of flight that creates, \emph{or} turns into a line of
destruction; the plane of consistency that constitutes itself, even
piece by piece, \emph{or} turns into a plan(e) of organization and
domination. We are constantly reminded that there is communication
between these two lines or planes, that each takes nourishment from the
other, borrows from the other: the worst of the world war machines
reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the
earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of
flight, its smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth.
The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable
character of the quantities that confront one another in the two kinds
of war machine, according to the two poles. War machines take shape
against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their
affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the
great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.

\chapter{13. 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-13}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-13}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-50.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION X*. \emph{The State and its poles.}



\end{quote}


Let us return to Dumézil’s theses: (1) Political sovereignty has two
poles, the fearsome magician-emperor, operating by capture, bonds,
knots, and nets, and the jurist-priest-king, proceeding by treaties,
pacts, contracts (the couples Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr, Wotan-Tiwaz,
Uranus-Zeus, Romulus-Numa\dots{}); (2) the war function is exterior to
political sovereignty and is equally distinct from both its poles (Indra
or Thor or Tullus Hostilius\dots{}).\footnote{The principal book in this respect is \emph{Mitra-Varuna} (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) (it also contains the analysis of the “One-Eyed” and the “One-Armed” gods).}


1. The State apparatus is thus animated by a curious rhythm, which is
first of all a great mystery: that of the Binder-Gods or magic emperors,
**One-Eyed* men emitting from their single eye signs that capture, tie
knots at a distance. The jurist-kings, on the other hand, are
**One-Armed* men who raise their single arm as an element of right and
technology, the law and the tool. In the succession of men of State,
look always for the One-Eyed and the One-Armed, Horatius Cocles and
Mucius Scaevola (de Gaulle and Pompidou?). This is not to say that one
has exclusive right to signs, the other to tools. The fearsome emperor
is already the master of large-scale works; the wise king takes up and
transforms the entire regime of signs. What it means is that the
combination, signs-tools, constitutes the differential trait of
political sovereignty, or the complementarity of the State.\footnote{The theme of the Binder-God and the magic knot has been the object of general studies in mythology, notably Mircea Eliade, \emph{Images and Symbols}, trans. Philip Mairet (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1961), chapter 3. But these studies are ambiguous because they use a syncretic and archetypal method. Dumézil’s method, on the other hand, is differential: the theme of capture or of the bond only groups various data together under a differential trait, which is constituted precisely by political sovereignty. On the opposition between these two methods, one can refer to Edmond Ortigues, \emph{Le discours et le symbole} (Paris: Aubier, 1962).}


2. Of course, the two men of State are always getting mixed up in
affairs of war. But either the magic emperor sends to battle warriors
who are not his own, whom he takes into his service by capture; or, more
important, when he makes his appearance on the battlefield, he suspends
the use of weapons, he throws his net over the warriors, his single eye
throws them into petrified catatonia, “he binds without combat,” he
encasts the war machine (this State capture is not to be confused with
the captures of war: conquests, prisoners, spoils).\footnote{Dumézil, \emph{Mitra-Varuna}, pp. 113–114, 151, 202–203.} As for the
other pole, the jurist-king is a great organizer of war; but he gives it
laws, lays out a field for it, makes it principled, imposes a discipline
upon it, subordinates it to political ends. He turns the war machine
into a military institution, he \emph{appropriates} the war machine for the
State apparatus.\footnote{Ibid., p. 150: “There are many ways of being a god of war, and Tiwaz defines one that is very badly expressed by the labels warrior god, god of combat\dots{}. Tiwaz is something else: the jurist of war, and at the same time a kind of diplomat” (the same applies for Mars).} We should not be too hasty in speaking of a
softening, a humanization: on the contrary, this is perhaps when the war
machine has only one remaining object, that of war itself. Violence is
found everywhere, but under different regimes and economies. The
violence of the magic emperor: his knot, his net, his way of “making his
moves once and for all” \dots{} The violence of the jurist-king: his way of
beginning over again every move, always with attention to ends,
alliances, and laws \dots{} All things considered, the violence of the war
machine might appear softer and more supple than that of the State
apparatus because it does not yet have war as its “object,” because it
eludes both poles of the State. That is why the man of war, in his
exteriority, is always protesting the alliances and pacts of the
jurist-king, as well as severing the bonds of the magic emperor. He is
equally an unbinder and a betrayer: twice the traitor.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 124–132.} He has
another economy, another cruelty, but also another justice, another
pity. To the signs and tools of the State, the man of war opposes his
weapons and jewelry. Once again, who could say which is better and which
is worse? It is true that war kills, and hideously mutilates. But it is
especially true after the State has appropriated the war machine. Above
all, the State apparatus makes the mutilation, and even death, come
first. It needs them preaccomplished, for people to be born that way,
crippled and zombielike. The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is
a work myth and not a war myth. Mutilation is a consequence of war, but
it is a necessary condition, a presupposition of the State apparatus and
the organization of work (hence the native infirmity not only of the
worker but also of the man of State himself, whether of the One-Eyed or
the One-Armed type): “The brutal exhibition of severed flesh shocked
me\dots{}. Wasn’t it an integral part of technical perfection and the
intoxication of it\dots{}? Mankind has waged wars since the world began, but I
can’t remember one single example in the \emph{Iliad} where the loss of an
arm or a leg is reported. Mythology reserved mutilation for monsters,
for human beasts of the race of Tantalus or Procrustes\dots{}. It is an
optical illusion to attribute these mutilations to accidents. Actually,
accidents are the result of mutilations that took place long ago in the
embryo of our world; and the increase in amputations is one of the
symptoms bearing witness to the triumph of the morality of the scalpel.
The loss occurred long before it was visibly taken into account.”\footnote{Ernst Jünger, \emph{The Glass Bees}, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), p. 112 [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors].}
The State apparatus needs, at its summit as at its base, predisabled
people, preexisting amputees, the stillborn, the congenitally infirm,
the one-eyed and one-armed.


Thus there is a tempting three-part hypothesis: the war machine is
“between” the two poles of political sovereignty and assures the passage
from one pole to the other. It is indeed in that order, 1-2-3, that
things seem to present themselves in myth and history. Take two versions
of the One-Eyed and the One-Armed gods analyzed by Dumézil: (1) the god
Odin, who has a single eye, ties up the wolf of war and holds him in his
magic bond; (2) but the wolf is wary and has at its disposal all its
power of exteriority; (3) the god Tyr gives the wolf a legal security by
leaving one of his hands in the wolf’s mouth so the wolf can bite it off
if it does not succeed in extricating itself from the bond. (1) Horatius
Cocles, the One-Eyed, using only his face, his grimace and magic power,
prevents the Etruscan commander from attacking Rome; (2) the war
commander then decides to lay siege; (3) Mucius Scaevola takes a
political tack, offering his hand as a security in order to persuade the
warrior that it would be best to abandon the siege and conclude a pact.


In an entirely different, historical, context, Marcel Detienne suggests
an analogous schema in three moments for ancient Greece: (1) The magic
sovereign, the “Master of Truth,” has at his disposal a war machine that
doubtless does not originate with him, and which enjoys a relative
autonomy within his empire; (2) this class of warriors has its own
rules, defined by “isonomy,” an isotropic space, and a “milieu” (war
spoils are in the middle [\emph{au milieu}], he who speaks places himself in
the middle of the assembly); this is another space, the rules are
different from those of the sovereign, who captures and speaks from on
high; (3) the hoplite reform, the groundwork for which was laid in the
warrior class, spread throughout the social body, promoting the
formation of an army of citizen-soldiers; at the same time, the last
vestiges of the imperial pole of sovereignty were replaced by the
juridical pole of the city-state (with isonomy as its law, and isotropy
as its space).\footnote{Marcel Detienne, \emph{Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque} (Paris: Maspero, 1973), and “Le phalange, problemes et controverses,” in \emph{Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne} (Civilisations et sociétés, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968). See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, \emph{The Origins of Greek Thought} (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982).} Thus in every case, the war machine seems to
intervene “between” the two poles of the State apparatus, assuring and
necessitating the passage from one to the other.


We cannot, however, assign this schema a causal meaning (the authors
cited do not do so). In the first place, the war machine explains
nothing; for it is either exterior to the State, and directed against
it; or else it already belongs to the State, encasted and appropriated,
and presupposes it. If the war machine has a part in the evolution of
the State, it is therefore necessarily in conjunction with other
internal factors. And this is the second point: if there is an evolution
of the State, the second pole, the evolved pole, must be in resonance
with the first, it must continually recharge it in some way, and the
State must have only one milieu of interiority; in other words, it must
have a \emph{unity of composition}, in spite of all the differences in
organization and development among States. It is even necessary for each
State to have both poles, as the essential moments of its existence,
even though the organization of the two varies. Third, if we call this
interior essence or this unity of the State “capture,” we must say that
the words “magic capture” describe the situation well because it always
appears as preaccomplished and self-presupposing; but how is this
capture to be explained then, if it leads back to no \emph{distinct}
assignable cause? That is why theses on the origin of the State are
always tautological. At times, exogenous factors, tied to war and the
war machine, are invoked; at times endogenous factors, thought to
engender private property, money, etc.; and at times specific factors,
thought to determine the formation of “public functions.” All three of
these theses are found in Engels, in relation to a conception of the
diversity of the roads to Domination. But they beg the question. War
produces the State only if at least one of the two parts is a
preexistent State; and the organization of war is a State factor only if
that organization is a part of the State. Either the State has no war
machine (and has policemen and jailers before having soldiers), or else
it has one, but in the form of a military institution or public
function.\footnote{Jacques Harmand cites an “enterprise using extensive manpower exceptionally directed by a functionary, Ouni, under the Pharaoh Pepi I toward 1400 B.C.”; \emph{La guerre antique} (Paris: PUF, 1973), p. 28. Even the military democracy Morgan described does not explain, but presupposes, an archaic State of the imperial type (the work of Detienne and Vernant establishes this). This imperial State itself functions first with jailers and police, and not warriors: see Dumézil, \emph{Mitra-Varuna}, pp. 200–204.} Similarly, private property presupposes State public
property, it slips through its net; and money presupposes taxation. It
is even more difficult to see how public functions could have existed
before the State they imply. We are always brought back to the idea of a
State that comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single
stroke, the unconditioned \emph{Urstaat}.



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION XI*. \emph{Which comes first?}



\end{quote}


We shall call the first pole of capture imperial or despotic. It
corresponds to Marx’s Asiatic formation. Archaeology discovers it
everywhere, often lost in oblivion, at the horizon of all systems or
States—not only in Asia, but also in Africa, America, Greece, Rome.
Immemorial \emph{Urstaat}, dating as far back as Neolithic times, and perhaps
farther still. Following the Marxist description: a State apparatus is
erected upon the primitive agricultural communities, which already have
lineal-territorial codes; \emph{but it overcodes them}, submitting them to
the power of a despotic emperor, the sole and transcendent
public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the stock, the
organizer of large-scale works (surplus labor), the source of public
functions and bureaucracy. This is the \emph{paradigm} of the bond, the knot.
Such is the regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier.
It is a system of \emph{machinic enslavement} the first “megamachine” in the
strict sense, to use Mumford’s term. A prodigious success in a single
stroke; other States will be mere runts measured against this model. The
emperor-despot is not a king or a tyrant; these will come into existence
only as a function of private property once it has arisen.\footnote{The idea itself of an Asiatic despotic formation appeared in the eighteenth century, notably in Montesquieu, but was used to describe an evolved state of the empires and corresponded to absolute monarchy. Entirely different is the viewpoint of Marx, who recreates the notion in order to define the archaic empires. The principal texts in this regard are Marx, \emph{Grundrisse}, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 471–514; Karl Wittfogel, \emph{Oriental Despotism} (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957); and Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s preface to the first French edition, \emph{Le despotisme oriental} (Paris: Minuit, 1964), which was surpressed in the second edition at Wittfogel’s request; Ferenc Tökei, \emph{Essays on the Asiatic Mode of Production} (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1979); and the studies in CERM, \emph{Sur le mode de production asiatique} (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1969).} In the
imperial regime, everything is public: ownership of land is communal,
each individual is an owner only insofar as he or she is a member of the
community; the eminent property of the despot is that of the supposed
Unity of the communities; and the functionaries themselves have land
only if it comes with their position (although the position may be
hereditary). Money may exist, notably in the form of the tax that the
functionaries owe the emperor, but it is not used for buying-selling,
since land does not exist as an alienable commodity. This is the regime
of the \emph{nexum}, the bond: something is lent or even given without a
transfer of ownership, without private appropriation, and the
compensation for it does not come in the form of interest or profit for
the donor but rather as a “rent” that accrues to him, accompanying the
lending of something for another’s use or the granting of revenue.\footnote{Varron made a famous pun on \emph{nexum} and \emph{nec suum fit} (= the thing does not become the property of he who receives it). In effect, the \emph{nexum} is a fundamental form of archaic Roman law, according to which it is not an accord between contracting parties that creates an obligation, but the borrower’s or donor’s word, in a magico-religious mode. This is not a contract (\emph{mancipatio}), and it involves no buying-selling, even deferred, and no interest, although it seems to us that it may involve a kind of rent. See in particular Pierre Noailles, \emph{Fas et Jus} (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948); and Dumézil, who stresses the connection between the \emph{nexum} and the magic bond, \emph{Mitra-Varuna}, pp. 118–124.}


Marx, the historian, and Childe, the archaeologist, are in agreement on
the following point: the archaic imperial State, which steps in to
overcode agricultural communities, presupposes at least a certain level
of development of these communities’ productive forces since there must
be a potential surplus capable of constituting a State stock, of
supporting a specialized handicrafts class (metallurgy), and of
progressively giving rise to public functions. That is why Marx links
the archaic State to a certain “mode of production.” However, the origin
of these Neolithic States is still being pushed back in time. What is at
issue when the existence of near-Paleolithic empires is conjectured is
not simply the quantity of time; the qualitative problem changes. Çatal
Hüyük, in Anatolia, makes possible a singularly reinforced imperial
paradigm: it is a stock of uncultivated seeds and relatively tame
animals from different territories that performs, and makes it possible
to perform, at first by chance, hybridizations and selections \emph{from
which agriculture and small-scale animal raising arise}.\footnote{See the excavations and studies of James Mellaart, \emph{Earliest Civilizations in the Near East} (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) and \emph{Çatal Hüyük} (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). The urbanist Jane Jacobs has drawn on this work in proposing an imperial model she calls “New Obsidian” (after the name of the lava used to make tools), which may go back to the beginning of Neolithic times, or even much further into the past. She stresses the “urban” origin of agriculture and the role of hybridizations occurring in the urban grain stocks: It is agriculture that presupposes the stock, and not the reverse. In an as yet unpublished study, Jean Robert analyzes Mellaart’s theses and Jacobs’s hypothesis, applying them to new perspectives (\emph{Décoloniser l’espace}).} It is easy
to see the significance of this change in the givens of the problem. It
is no longer the stock that presupposes a potential surplus, but the
other way around. It is no longer the State that presupposes advanced
agricultural communities and developed forces of production. On the
contrary, the State is established directly in a milieu of
hunter-gatherers having no prior agriculture or metallurgy, and it is
the State that creates agriculture, animal raising, and metallurgy; it
does so first on its own soil, then imposes them upon the surrounding
world. It is not the country that progressively creates the town but the
town that creates the country. It is not the State that presupposes a
mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that makes
production a “mode.” The last reasons for presuming a progressive
development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a
chance intermixing. The “state and urban revolution” may be Paleolithic,
not Neolithic as Childe believed.


Evolutionism has been challenged in many different ways (zigzag
movements, stages skipped here or there, irreducible overall breaks). We
have seen in particular how Pierre Clastres tried to shatter the
evolutionist framework by means of the following two theses: (1)
societies termed primitive are not societies without a State, in the
sense that they failed to reach a certain stage, but are counter-State
societies organizing mechanisms that ward off the State-form, which make
its crystallization impossible; (2) when the State arises, it is in the
form of an irreducible break, since it is not the result of a
progressive development of the forces of production (even the “Neolithic
revolution” cannot be defined in terms of an economic
infrastructure).\footnote{Clastres, \emph{Society against the State}, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Urizen, 1977). We have seen that, according to Clastres, primitive war is one of the principal mechanisms warding off the State in that it maintains the opposition and dispersion of small segmentary groups. But also, from this viewpoint, primitive war remains subordinated to these preventive mechanisms and does not become autonomous as a machine, even when it comprises a specialized body.} However, one does not depart from evolutionism by
establishing a clean break. In the final state of his work, Clastres
maintained the preexistence and autarky of counter-State societies, and
attributed their workings to an overmysterious presentiment of what they
warded off and did not yet exist. More generally, one marvels at the
bizarre indifference that ethnology manifests for archaeology. It seems
as though ethnologists, fenced off in their respective territories, are
willing to compare their territories in an abstract, or structural, way,
if it comes to that, but refuse to set them against archaeological
territories that would compromise their autarky. They take snapshots of
their primitives but rule out in advance the coexistence and
superposition of the two maps, the ethnographical and the
archaeological. Çatal Hüyük, however, would have had a zone of influence
extending two thousand miles; how can the ever-recurring problem of the
relation of coexistence between primitive societies and empires, even
those of Paleolithic times, be left unattended to? As long as
archaeology is passed over, the question of the relation between
ethnology and history is reduced to an idealist confrontation, and fails
to wrest itself from the absurd theme of society without history, or
society against history. \emph{Everything is not of the State precisely
because there have been States always and everywhere}. Not only does
writing presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. The
self-sufficiency, autarky, independence, preexistence of primitive
communities, is an ethnological dream: not that these communities
necessarily depend on States, but they coexist with them in a complex
network. It is plausible that “from the beginning” primitive societies
have maintained distant ties to one another, not just short-range ones,
and that these ties were channeled through States, even if States
effected only a partial and local capture of them. Speech communities
and languages, independently of writing, do not define closed groups of
people who understand one another but primarily determine relations
between groups who do not understand one another: if there is language,
it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the same tongue.
Language is made for that, for translation, not for communication. And
in primitive societies there are as many tendencies that “seek” the
State, as many vectors working in the direction of the State, as there
are movements within the State or outside it that tend to stray from it
or guard themselves against it, or else to stimulate its evolution, or
else already to abolish it: everything coexists, in perpetual
interaction.


Economic evolutionism is an impossibility; even a ramified evolution,
“gatherers—hunters—animal breeders—farmers—industrialists,” is hardly
believable. An evolutionary ethnology is no better:
“nomads—seminomads—sedentaries.” Nor an ecological evolutionism:
“dispersed autarky of local groups—villages and small
towns—cities—States.” All we need to do is combine these abstract
evolutions to make all of evolutionism crumble; for example, it is the
city that creates agriculture, without going through small towns. To
take another example, the nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather,
nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as
sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads. Griaznov has
shown in this connection that the most ancient nomadism can be
accurately attributed only to populations that abandoned their semiurban
sedentarity, or their primitive itineration, to set off nomadizing.\footnote{According to Griaznov, it was the sedentary farmers who went out on the steppe and became nomadic, during the Bronze Age: This is a case of a zigzag movement in evolution. See \emph{The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia}, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), pp. 97–98, 131–133.}
It is under these conditions that the nomads invented the war machine,
as that which occupies or fills nomad space and opposes towns and
States, which its tendency is to abolish. Primitive peoples already had
mechanisms of war that converged to prevent the State formation; but
these mechanisms change when they gain autonomy in the form of a
specific nomadism machine that strikes back against the States. We
cannot, however, infer from this even a zigzag evolution that would go
from primitive peoples to States, from States to nomad war machines; or
at least the zigzagging is not successive but passes through the loci of
a topology that defines primitive societies here, States there, and
elsewhere war machines. And even when the State appropriates the war
machine, once again changing its nature, it is a phenomenon of
transport, of transfer, and not one of evolution. The nomad exists only
in becoming, and in interaction; the same goes for the primitive. All
history does is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a
succession. And collectivities can be transhumant, semisedentary,
sedentary, or nomadic, without by the same token being preparatory
stages for the State, which is already there, elsewhere or beside.


Can it at least be said that the hunter-gatherers are the “true”
primitives and remain in spite of it all the basis or minimal
presupposition of the State formation, however far back in time we place
it? This point of view can be maintained only at the price of a very
inadequate conception of causality. And it is true that the human
sciences, with their materialist, evolutionary, and even dialectical
schemas, lag behind the richness and complexity of causal relations in
physics, or even in biology. Physics and biology present us with reverse
causalities that are \emph{without finality} but testify nonetheless to an
action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past, for
example, the convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply
an inversion of time. More than breaks or zigzags, it is these reverse
causalities that shatter evolution. Similarly, in the present context,
it is not adequate to say that the Neolithic or even Paleolithic State,
once it appeared, reacted back on the surrounding world of the
hunter-gatherers; it was already acting before it appeared, as the
actual limit these primitive societies warded off, or as the point
toward which they converged but could not reach without
self-destructing. These societies simultaneously have vectors moving in
the direction of the State, mechanisms warding it off, and a point of
convergence that is repelled, set outside, as fast as it is approached.
To ward off is also to anticipate. Of course, it is not at all in the
same way that the State appears in existence, and that it preexists in
the capacity of a warded-off limit; hence its irreducible contingency.
But in order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a “presentiment”
of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what
does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that
of its existence. Once it has appeared, the State reacts back on the
hunter-gatherers, imposing upon them agriculture, animal raising, an
extensive division of labor, etc.; it acts, therefore, in the form of a
centrifugal or divergent wave. But before appearing, the State already
acts in the form of the convergent or centripetal wave of the
hunter-gatherers, \emph{a wave that cancels itself out precisely at the point
of convergence marking the inversion of signs or the appearance of the
State} (hence the functional and intrinsic instability of these
primitive societies).\footnote{Jean Robert develops this notion of an “inversion of signs and messages”: “In a first phase, information circulates principally from the periphery toward the center, but at a certain critical point, the town begins to emit, in the direction of the rural world, increasingly imperative messages”; the town becomes an exporter (\emph{Décoloniser l’espace}).} It is necessary from this standpoint to
conceptualize the contemporaneousness or coexistence of the two inverse
movements, of the two directions of time—of the primitive peoples
“before” the State, and of the State “after” the primitive peoples—as if
the two waves that seem to us to exclude or succeed each other unfolded
simultaneously in an “archaeological,” micropolitical, micrological,
molecular field.


There exist collective mechanisms that simultaneously ward off and
anticipate the formation of a central power. The appearance of a central
power is thus a function of \emph{a threshold or degree} beyond which what is
anticipated takes on consistency or fails to, and what is conjured away
ceases to be so and arrives. This threshold of consistency, or of
constraint, is not evolutionary but rather coexists with what has yet to
cross it. Moreover, a distinction must be made between different
thresholds of consistency: the town and the State, however
complementary, are not the same thing. The “urban revolution” and the
“state revolution” may coincide but do not meld. In both cases, there is
a central power, but it does not assume the same figure. Certain authors
have made a distinction between the palatial or imperial system
(temple-palace), and the urban, town system. In both cases there is a
town, but in one case the town is an outgrowth of the palace or temple,
and in the other case the palace, the temple, is a concretion of the
town. In one case, the town par excellence is the capital, and in the
other it is the metropolis. Sumer already attests to a town solution, as
opposed to the imperial solution of Egypt. But to an even greater
extent, it was the Mediterranean world, with the Pelasgians,
Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, that created an urban fabric
distinct from the imperial organisms of the Orient.\footnote{On Chinese towns and their subordination to the imperial principle, see Etienne Balazs, \emph{Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy}, trans. H. M. Wright (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 410: “The social structures in both India and China automatically rejected the town and offered, as it were, refractory, substandard material to it. It was because society was well and truly frozen in a sort of irreducible system, a previous crystallization.”} Once again, the
question is one not of evolution but of two thresholds of consistency
that are themselves coexistent. They differ in several respects.


The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a
function of circulation, and of circuits; it is a remarkable point on
the circuits that create it, and which it creates. It is defined by
entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes
a frequency. It effects a polarization of matter, inert, living or
human; it causes the \emph{phylum}, the flow, to pass through specific
places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of
**transconsistency*, a \emph{network}, because it is fundamentally in contact
with other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization,
because whatever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized
enough to enter the network, to submit to the polarization, to follow
the circuit of urban and road receding. The maximum deterritorialization
appears in the tendency of maritime and commercial towns to separate off
from the backcountry, from the countryside (Athens, Carthage, Venice).
The commercial character of the town has often been emphasized, but the
commerce in question is also spiritual, as in a network of monasteries
or temple-cities. Towns are circuit-points of every kind, which enter
into counterpoint along horizontal lines; they effect a complete but
local, town-by-town, integration. Each one constitutes a central power,
but it is a power of polarization or of the middle (\emph{milieu}), of forced
coordination. That is why this kind of power has egalitarian
pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, democratic,
oligarchic, aristocratic. Town power invents the idea of the
**magistrature*, which is very different from the State \emph{civil-service
sector} (\emph{fonctionnariat}).\footnote{From all of these standpoints, François Châtelet questions the classical notion of the city-state and doubts that the Athenian city can be equated with any variety of State: “La Grèce classique, la Raison, l’Etat,” in Alberto Asor Rosa et al., \emph{En marge. L’Occident etses “autres”}, (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978). Islam was to confront analogous problems, as would Italy, Germany, and Flanders beginning in the eleventh century; in these cases, political power does not imply the State-form. An example is the community of Hanseatic towns, which lacked functionaries, an army, and even legal status. The town is always inside a network of towns, but, precisely, “the network of towns” does not coincide with “mosaic of States.” On all of these points, see the analyses of François Fourquet and Lion Murard, \emph{Les équipements de pouvoir. ville, territoires et équipements collectifs} (Paris: 10\Slash{}18, 1976), pp. 79–106.} Who can say where the greatest civil
violence resides?


The State indeed proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of
**intraconsistency*. It makes points \emph{resonate} together, points that are
not necessarily already town-poles but very diverse points of order,
geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological
particularities. It makes the town resonate with the countryside. It
operates by stratification; in other words, it forms a vertical,
hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines in a dimension of
depth. In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts off their
relations with other elements, which become exterior, it inhibits, slows
down, or controls those relations; if the State has a circuit of its
own, it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon resonance, it is
a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder of the
network, even if in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls
over its relations with that remainder. The question is not to find out
whether what is retained is natural or artificial (boundaries), because
in any event there is deterritorialization. But in this case
deterritorialization is a result of the territory itself being taken as
an object, as a material to stratify, to make resonate. Thus the central
power of the State is hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service
sector; the center is not in the middle (\emph{au milieu}), but on top,
because the only way it can recombine what it isolates is through
subordination. Of course, there is a multiplicity of States no less than
of towns, but it is not the same type of multiplicity: there are as many
States as there are vertical cross sections in a dimension of depth,
each separated from the others, whereas the town is inseparable from the
horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global (not local)
integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an operation
of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the
milieu).


It is possible to reconstruct how primitive societies warded off both
thresholds while at the same time anticipating them. Lévi-Strauss has
shown that the same villages are susceptible to two presentations, one
segmentary and egalitarian, the other encompassing and hierarchized.
These are like \emph{two potentials}, one anticipating a central point common
to two horizontal segments, the other anticipating a central point
external to a straight line.\footnote{Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{Structural Anthropology}, trans Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 150–151.} Primitive societies do not lack
formations of power; they even have many of them. But what prevents the
potential central points from crystallizing, from taking on consistency,
are precisely those mechanisms that keep the formations of power both
from resonating together in a higher point and from becoming polarized
at a common point: the circles are not concentric, and the two segments
require a third segment through which to communicate.\footnote{Louis Berthe analyzes a specific example of the need for a “third village” to prevent the directional circuit from closing: “Aînés et cadets, l’alliance et la hiérarchic chez les Baduj,” \emph{L’Homme}, vol. 5, no. 3\Slash{}4 (July–December 1965), pp. 214–215.} This is the
sense in which primitive societies have crossed neither the
town-threshold nor the State-threshold.


If we now turn our attention to the two thresholds of consistency, it is
clear that they imply a deterritorialization in relation to the
primitive territorial codes. It is futile to ask which came first, the
city or the State, the urban or state revolution, because the two are in
reciprocal presupposition. Both the melodic lines of the towns and the
harmonic cross sections of the States are necessary to effect the
striation of space. The only question that arises is the possibility
that there may be an inverse relation at the heart of this reciprocity.
For although the archaic imperial State necessarily included towns of
considerable size, they remained more or less strictly subordinated to
the State, depending on how complete the State’s monopoly over foreign
trade was. On the other hand, the town tended to break free when the
State’s \emph{overcoding} itself provoked \emph{decoded} flows. A decoding was
coupled with the deterritorialization, and amplified it; the necessary
receding was then achieved through a certain autonomy of the towns, or
else directly through corporative and commercial towns freed from the
State-form. Thus towns arose that no longer had a connection to their
own land, because they assured the trade between empires, or better,
constituted on their own a free commercial network with other towns.
There is therefore an adventure specific to towns in the zones where the
most intense decoding occurs, for example, the ancient Aegean world or
the Western world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Could it not
be said that capitalism is the fruit of the towns, and arises when an
urban receding tends to replace State overcoding? This, however, was not
the case. The towns did not create capitalism. The banking and
commercial towns, being unproductive and indifferent to the backcountry,
did not perform a receding without also inhibiting the general
conjunction of decoded flows. If it is true that they anticipated
capitalism, they in turn did not anticipate it without also warding it
off. They do not cross this new threshold. Thus it is necessary to
expand the hypothesis of mechanisms both anticipatory and inhibiting:
these mechanisms are at play not only in primitive societies but also in
the conflict of towns “against” the State \emph{and} “against” capitalism.
Finally, it was through the State-form and not the town-form that
capitalism triumphed; this occurred when the Western States became
models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows, and in that way
resubjugated the towns. As Braudel says, there were “\emph{always two
runners}, the state and the town”—two forms and two speeds of
deterritorialization—and “the state usually won\dots{}. everywhere in Europe,
it disciplined the towns with instinctive relentlessness, whether or not
it used violence\dots{}. [The states] caught up with the forward gallop of the
towns.”\footnote{Fernand Braudel, \emph{Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800}, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), <literal style=“html”><!--60),--><\Slash{}literal> pp. 398, 405, 411. Emphasis added. (On town-State relations in the West, see pp. 396–406.) And as Braudel notes, one of the reasons for the victory of the States over the towns from the beginning of the fifteenth century was that the State alone had the ability fully to appropriate the war machine: by means of the territorial recruitment of men, material investment, the industrialization of war (it was more in the arms factories than in the pin factories that mass production and mechanical division appeared). The commercial towns, on the other hand, required wars of short duration, resorted to mercenaries, and were only able to encast the war machine.} But the relation is a reciprocal one: if it is the modern
State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus
realized is an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single
City, megalopolis, or “megamachine” of which the States are parts, or
neighborhoods.


We define social formations by \emph{machinic processes} and not by modes of
production (these on the contrary depend on the processes). Thus
primitive societies are defined by mechanisms of
prevention-anticipation; State societies are defined by apparatuses of
capture; urban societies, by instruments of polarization; nomadic
societies, by war machines; and finally international, or rather
ecumenical, organizations are defined by the encompassment of
heterogeneous social formations. But precisely because these processes
are variables of coexistence that are the object of a social topology,
the various corresponding formations are coexistent. And they coexist in
two fashions, extrinsically and intrinsically. Primitive societies
cannot ward off the formation of an empire or State without anticipating
it, and they cannot anticipate it without its already being there,
forming part of their horizon. And States cannot effect a capture unless
what is captured coexists, resists in primitive societies, or escapes
under new forms, as towns or war machines \dots{} The numerical composition of
the war machine is superposed upon the primitive lineal organization and
simultaneously opposes the geometric organization of the State and the
physical organization of the town. It is this extrinsic
coexistence—interaction—that is brought to its own expression in
international aggregates. For these obviously did not wait for
capitalism before forming: as early as Neolithic times, even
Paleolithic, we find traces of ecumenical organizations that testify to
the existence of long-distance trade, and simultaneously cut across the
most varied of social formations (as we have seen in the case of
metallurgy). The problem of diffusion, or of diffusionism, is badly
formulated if one assumes a center at which the diffusion would begin.
Diffusion occurs only through the placing in communication of potentials
of very different orders: all diffusion happens in the in-between, goes
between, like everything that “grows” of the rhizome type. An
international ecumenical organization does not proceed from an imperial
center that imposes itself upon and homogenizes an exterior milieu;
neither is it reducible to relations between formations of the same
order, between States, for example (the League of Nations, the United
Nations). On the contrary, it constitutes an intermediate milieu between
the different coexistent orders. Therefore it is not exclusively
commercial or economic, but is also religious, artistic, etc. From this
standpoint, we shall call an international organization anything that
has the capacity to move through diverse social formations
simultaneously: States, towns, deserts, war machines, primitive
societies. The great commercial formations in history do not simply have
city-poles, but also primitive, imperial, and nomadic segments through
which they pass, perhaps issuing out again in another form. Samir Amin
is totally correct in saying that there can be no economic theory of
international relations, even economic ones, because they sit astride
heterogeneous formations.\footnote{This theme is frequently developed by Samir Amin: “Since the theory of relations between different social formations cannot be an economistic one, international relations, which belong precisely to this context, cannot give rise to an economic theory.” \emph{Unequal Development}, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 146.} The point of departure for ecumenical
organization is not a State, even an imperial one; the imperial State is
only one part of it, and it constitutes a part of it in its own mode,
according to its own order, which consists in capturing everything it
can. It does not proceed by progressive homogenization, or by
totalization, but by the taking on of consistency or the consolidation
of the diverse as such. For example, monotheistic religion is
distinguished from territorial worship by its pretension to
universality. But this pretension is not homogenizing, it makes itself
felt only by spreading everywhere; this was the case with Christianity,
which became imperial and urban, but not without giving rise to bands,
deserts, war machines of its own.\footnote{See Jacques Lacarriere, \emph{Les hommes ivres de Dieu} (Paris: Fayard, 1975).} Similarly, there is no artistic
movement that does not have its towns and empires, but also its nomads,
bands, and primitives.


It might be objected that, at least in the case of capitalism,
international economic relations, and at the limit all international
relations, tend toward the homogenization of social formations. One
could cite not only the cold and concerted destruction of primitive
societies but also the fall of the last despotic formations, for
example, the Ottoman Empire, which met capitalist demands with too much
resistance and inertia. This objection, however, is only partially
accurate. To the extent that capitalism constitutes an axiomatic
(production for the market), all States and all social formations tend
to become \emph{isomorphic} in their capacity as models of realization: there
is but one centered world market, the capitalist one, in which even the
so-called socialist countries participate. Worldwide organization thus
ceases to pass “between” heterogeneous formations since it assures the
isomorphy of those formations. But it would be wrong to confuse
isomorphy with homogeneity. For one thing, isomorphy allows, and even
incites, a great heterogeneity among States (democratic, totalitarian,
and, especially, “socialist” States are not facades). For another thing,
the international capitalist axiomatic effectively assures the isomorphy
of the diverse formations only where the domestic market is developing
and expanding, in other words, in “the center.” But it tolerates, in
fact it requires, a certain peripheral polymorphy, to the extent that it
is not saturated, to the extent that it actively repels its own
limits;\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: On capitalism repelling its limits, see Deleuze and Guattari, \emph{Anti-Oedipus}, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 230–232.]} this explains the existence, at the periphery, of
heteromorphic social formations, \emph{which certainly do not constitute
vestiges or transitional forms} since they realize an ultramodern
capitalist production (oil, mines, plantations, industrial equipment,
steel, chemistry), but which are nonetheless precapitalist, or
extracapitalist, owing to other aspects of their production and to the
forced inadequacy of their domestic market in relation to the world
market.\footnote{Samir Amin analyzes this particularity of the “peripheral formations” of the Third World and distinguishes two principal types, the oriental and African, and the American: “The Americas, Asia and the Arab world, and Black Africa were not transformed in the same way because they were not integrated at the same stage of capitalist development at the center and therefore did not fulfill the same function in development.” \emph{Unequal Development}, p. 295. See also \emph{Accumulation on a World Scale}, vol. 2, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 390–394. We shall see, however, that under certain conditions the center and the periphery are determined in such a way as to exchange their characteristics.} When international organization becomes the capitalist
axiomatic, it continues to imply a heterogeneity of social formations,
it gives rise to and organizes its “Third World.”


There is not only an external coexistence of formations but also an
intrinsic coexistence of machinic processes. Each process can also
function at a “power” other than its own; it can be taken up by a power
corresponding to another process. The State as apparatus of capture has
a \emph{power of appropriation}; but this power does not consist solely in
capturing all that it can, all that is possible, of a matter defined as
**phylum*. The apparatus of capture also appropriates the war machine,
the instruments of polarization, and the anticipation-prevention
mechanisms. This is to say, conversely, that anticipation-prevention
mechanisms have a high \emph{power of transference}: they are at work not
only in primitive societies, but move into the towns that ward off the
State-form, into the States that ward off capitalism, into capitalism
itself, insofar as it wards off and repels its own limits. And they are
not satisfied to switch over to other powers but form new focal points
of resistance and contagion, as we have seen in the case of “band”
phenomena, which have their own towns, their own brand of
internationalism, etc. Similarly, war machines have a \emph{power of
metamorphosis}, which of course allows them to be captured by States,
but also to resist that capture and rise up again in other forms, with
other “objects” besides war (revolution?). Each power is a force of
deterritorialization that can go along with the others or go against
them (even primitive societies have their vectors of
deterritorialization). Each process can switch over to other powers, but
also subordinate other processes to its own power.



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION XII*. \emph{Capture.}



\end{quote}


Is it possible to conceive of an “exchange” between separate primitive
groups, independent of any reference to such notions as stock, labor,
and commodity? It seems that a modified marginalism provides a basis for
a hypothesis. For the interest of marginalism resides not in its
economic theory, which is extremely weak, but in a logical power that
makes Jevons, for example, a kind of Lewis Carroll of economics. Take
two abstract groups, one of which (A) gives seeds and receives axes,
while the other (B) does the opposite. What is the collective evaluation
of the objects based on? It is based on the \emph{idea} of the last objects
received, or rather receivable, on each side. By “last” or “marginal” we
must understand not the most recent, nor the final, but rather the
penultimate, the next to the last, in other words, the last one \emph{before}
the apparent exchange loses its appeal for the exchangers, or forces
them to modify their respective assemblages, to enter another
assemblage. We will consider that the farmer-gatherer group A, which
receives axes, has an “idea” of the number of axes that would force it
to change assemblage; and the manufacturing group B, of the quantity of
seeds that would force it to change assemblage. We may say, then, that
the seed-ax relation is determined by the last quantity of seeds (for
group B) corresponding to the last ax (for group A). The last as the
object of a collective evaluation determines the value of the entire
series. It marks the exact point at which the assemblage must reproduce
itself, begin a new operation period or a new cycle, lodge itself on
another territory, and beyond which the assemblage could not continue as
such. This is indeed a next-to-the-last, a penultimate, since it comes
before the ultimate. The ultimate is when the assemblage must change its
nature: B would have to plant the excess seeds. A would have to increase
the rhythm of its own plantings and remain on the same land.


We can now posit a conceptual difference between the “limit” and the
“threshold”: the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary
rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable
change. It is an economic given of every enterprise to include an
evaluation of the limit beyond which the enterprise would have to modify
its structure. Marginalism claims to demonstrate the frequency of this
penultimate mechanism: it applies not only to the last exchangeable
objects but also to the last producible object, or the last producer
him- or herself, the marginal or limit-producer before the assemblage
changes.\footnote{Gaëtan Pirou, \emph{Economie libérate et économic dirigée}, vol. 1 (Paris: Ed. Sedes, 1946–1947), p. 117: “The productivity of the marginal worker determines not only that worker’s wage but that of all the others, in the same way that, when it was a question of commodities, the utility of the last bucket of water or last sack of wheat governed the value not only of that bucket or that sack but of all the other buckets and all the other sacks.” (Marginalism seeks to quantify the assemblage, when in fact all kinds of qualitative factors are at work in the evaluation of the “last.”)} This is an economics of everyday life. For example, what
does an alcoholic call the \emph{last glass}? The alcoholic makes a
subjective evaluation of how much he or she can tolerate. What can be
tolerated is precisely the limit at which, as the alcoholic sees it, he
or she will be able to start over again (after a rest, a pause\dots{}). But
beyond that limit there lies a threshold that would cause the alcoholic
to change assemblage: it would change either the nature of the drinks or
the customary places and hours of the drinking. Or worse yet, the
alcoholic would enter a suicidal assemblage, or a medical, hospital
assemblage, etc. It is of little importance that the alcoholic may be
fooling him- or herself, or makes a very ambiguous use of the theme “I’m
going to stop,” the theme of \emph{the last one}. What counts is the
existence of a spontaneous marginal criterion and marginalist evaluation
determining the value of the entire series of “glasses.” The same goes
for having the last word in a domestic-squabble assemblage. Both
partners evaluate from the start the volume or density of the last word
that would give them the advantage and conclude the discussion, marking
the end of an operation period or cycle of the assemblage, allowing it
to start all over again. Both calculate their words in accordance with
their evaluation of this last word, and the vaguely agreed time for it
to come. And beyond the last (penultimate) word there lie still other
words, this time final words that would cause them to enter another
assemblage, divorce, for example, because they would have overstepped
“bounds.” The same could be said for the \emph{last love}. Proust has shown
how a love can be oriented toward its own limit, its own margin: it
repeats its own ending. A new love follows, so that each love is serial,
so that there is a series of loves. But once again, “beyond” lies the
ultimate, at the point where the assemblage changes, where the
assemblage of love is superseded by an artistic assemblage—the Work to
be written, which is the problem Proust tackles\dots{}


Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the value
of the last receivable object (limit-object), and the apparent
equivalence derives from that. The equalization results from the two
heterogeneous series, the exchange or communication results from two
monologues (\emph{palabre}). There is neither exchange value nor use value
but rather an evaluation of the last by both parties (a calculation of
the risk involved in crossing the limit), an anticipation-evaluation
that takes into account the ritual character as well as the utilitarian,
the serial character as well as the exchangist. The evaluation of the
limit is there from the start in both groups, and already governs the
first “exchange” between them. Of course there is groping in the dark;
the evaluation is inseparable from a collective feeling out. But it does
not bear on the quantity of social labor but on the idea of the last on
both sides; the speed with which it is accomplished varies, but it is
always done faster than the time necessary effectively to arrive at the
last object, or even to pass from one operation to another.\footnote{On the importance of the theory of evaluation and feeling out for marginalism, see Jacques Fradin’s critical discussion, \emph{Les fondements logiques de la théorie néoclassique de l’échange} (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976). For Marxists, there is also a groping evaluation, but one that can bear only on the quantity of socially necessary labor; Engels speaks of this precisely in the context of precapitalist societies. He invokes “a process of zig-zag approximation, often groping back and forth in the dark,” which is governed more or less by the “need for each person to have a rough idea of his costs” (one may wonder if this last part of the phrase does not reinstate a sort of marginalist criterion). Engels, “Supplement to Volume Three of Capital,” in Marx, \emph{Capital}, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 1036.} This is
the sense in which the evaluation is essentially anticipatory, that it
is already present in the first terms of the series. It can be seen that
marginal utility (pertaining to the last objects receivable on both
sides) is relative not to an abstractly posited stock but to the
respective assemblages of the two groups. Pareto was moving in this
direction when he spoke of “ophelimity” rather than of marginal
utility.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: “Ophelimity” (from the Greek for “useful,” “serviceable”) was introduced by Vilfredo Pareto in his \emph{Cours d’économie politique} (1896), ed. G.-H. Bousquet and G. Busino (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964), pp. 2–16. The first portion of this discussion is translated in Vilfredo Pareto, \emph{Sociological Writings}, ed. and intro. S. E. Fine, trans. Derick Mirtin (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 97–102.]} The issue is one of \emph{desirability} as an assemblage
component: every group desires according to the value of the last
receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage.
And every assemblage has two sides, the machining of bodies or objects,
and group enunciation. The evaluation of the last is the collective
enunciation to which the \emph{entire series} of objects corresponds; in
other words, it is an assemblage cycle or operation period. Exchangist
primitive groups thus appear to be serial groups. Theirs is a special
regime, even with respect to violence. For even violence can be
submitted to a marginal ritual treatment, that is, to an evaluation of
the “last violence” insofar as it impregnates the entire series of blows
(beyond which another regime of violence would begin). We previously
defined primitive societies by the existence of
**anticipation-prevention* mechanisms. Now we can see more clearly how
these mechanisms are constituted and distributed: it is the evaluation
of the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously
wards off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage).


The threshold comes “after” the limit, “after” the last receivable
objects: it marks the moment when the apparent exchange is no longer of
interest. We believe that it is precisely at this moment that
stockpiling begins; beforehand, there may be exchange granaries,
granaries specifically for exchange purposes, but there is no stock in
the strict sense. Exchange does not assume a preexistent stock, it
assumes only a certain “elasticity.” Stockpiling begins only once
exchange has lost its interest, its desirability for both parties.
Additionally, conditions must exist giving stockpiling an interest in
its own right, a desirability of its own (otherwise, the objects would
be destroyed or depleted rather than stockpiled: depletion is the means
by which primitive groups ward off the stock and maintain their
assemblage). The stock depends on a new type of assemblage. The
expressions “after,” “new,” “to be superseded” are doubtless very
ambiguous. The threshold is in fact already there, but outside the
limit, which is satisfied to place the threshold at a distance, keep it
at a distance. The problem is to know what this other assemblage is that
gives the stock an actual interest, a desirability. The stock seems to
us to have a necessary correlate: \emph{either the coexistence of
simultaneously exploited territories, or a succession of exploitations
on one and the same territory}. It is at this point that the territories
form a Land, are superseded by a Land. This is the assemblage that
necessarily includes stockpiling, and which constitutes in the first
case an extensive system of cultivation, in the second case an intensive
system of cultivation (following Jane Jacobs’s paradigm). The way in
which the stock-threshold differs from the exchange-limit is now clear:
primitive assemblages of hunter-gatherers have an operation period
defined by the exploitation of a territory; the law is one of temporal
succession because the assemblage perseveres only by switching
territories at the conclusion of each operation period (itinerancy,
itineration); and within each operation period there is a repetition or
temporal series that tends toward the last object as an “index,” as the
marginal or limit-object of the territory (this iteration will govern
the apparent exchange). On the other hand, in the other assemblage, in
the stock assemblage, the law is one of spatial coexistence and concerns
the simultaneous exploitation of different territories; or, when the
exploitation is successive, the succession of operation periods bears on
one and the same territory; and in the framework of each operation
period or exploitation the force of serial iteration is superseded by a
power of symmetry, reflection, and global comparison. In solely
descriptive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant,
or territorial assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary,
global, or Land assemblages (which operate by overcoding).


Ground rent, in its abstract model, appears precisely when a comparison
is drawn between different simultaneously exploited territories, or
between the successive exploitations of the same territory. The worst
land (or the poorest exploitation) bears no rent, but it makes it so
that the other soils do bear rent, “produce” it in a comparative
way.\footnote{David Ricardo, \emph{On the Principles of Political Economy}, in \emph{The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo}, vol. 1, ed. Piero Sraffa (London: Cambridge University Press, 1962), chapter 2. See also Marx’s analysis of the two forms of “differential rent,” \emph{Capital}, vol. 3, part 6.} A stock is what permits the yields to be compared (the same
planting on different soils, or various successive plantings on the same
soil). The category of the \emph{last} confirms once again its economic
importance, but it has totally changed meaning: it no longer designates
the end point of a self-fulfilling movement but the center of symmetry
for two movements, one of which is descending and the other ascending;
it no longer designates the limit of an ordinal series but the lowest
element in a cardinal set, that set’s threshold—the least fertile land
in the set of simultaneously exploited lands.\footnote{Of course, the least fertile land is also in theory the most recent or the last in a series (which allows many commentators to say that Ricardo prefigured marginalism in his theory of rent). But this is not even a rule, and Marx shows that an “increasing sequence” is just as possible as a “decreasing sequence” and that a better soil can “take the lowest place instead of that which was formerly the worst.” \emph{Capital}, vol. 3, p. 798.} Ground rent
homogenizes, equalizes different conditions of productivity by linking
the excess of the highest conditions of productivity over the lowest to
a \emph{landowner}: since the price (profit included) is established on the
basis of the least productive land, rent taps the surplus profit
accruing to the best lands; it taps “the difference between the product
of two equal amounts of capital and labor.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: \emph{Capital}, vol. 3, p. 788.]} This is the very model
of an apparatus of capture, inseparable from a process of relative
deterritorialization. The land as the object of agriculture in fact
implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people being
distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed
among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility
of plots of equal surface area). That is why the earth, unlike other
elements, forms the basis of a striation, proceeding by geometry,
symmetry, and comparison. The other elements, water, air, wind, and
subsoil, cannot be striated and for that very reason bear rent only by
virtue of their emplacement, in other words, as a function of the
land.\footnote{Ricardo, \emph{On the Principles of Political Economy}, p. 75: “If air, water, the elasticity of steam, and the pressure of the atmosphere, were of different qualities; if they could be appropriated, and each quality existed only in moderate abundance, they, as well as the land, would afford a rent, as the successive qualities were brought into use.”} The land has two potentialities of deterritorialization: (1)
its differences in quality are \emph{comparable} to one another, from the
standpoint of a quantity establishing a correspondence between them and
exploitable pieces of land; (2) the set of exploited lands is
**appropriable*, as opposed to exterior unclaimed land, from the
standpoint of a monopoly that fixes the landowner or -owners.\footnote{The two forms of \emph{differential} rent are based on comparison. But Marx maintains the existence of another form, unknown to the theorists (Ricardo), but with which the practitioners, he says, are quite familiar: \emph{absolute rent}, based on the special character of landed property as monopoly. In effect, land is not a commodity like the others because it is not reproducible at the level of a determinable aggregate. There is therefore monopoly, which is not the same as “monopoly price” (monopoly price, and the eventual corresponding rent, are totally different questions). In the simplest terms, differential rent and absolute rent can be distinguished in the following manner: since the price of the product is calculated on the basis of the worst soil, the entrepreneur with the best soil would have a surplus profit if the latter were not transformed into differential rent accruing to the landowner; but on the other hand, since agricultural surplus value is proportionally greater than industrial surplus value (?), the agricultural entrepreneur in general would have a surplus profit if the latter were not transformed into absolute rent accruing to the landowner. Rent is thus a necessary element in the equalization and adjustment of profit: whether it be the equalization of the agricultural profit rate (differential rent), or the equalization of this rate and the rate of industrial profit (absolute rent). Certain Marxist economists have proposed an entirely different schema of absolute rent, but one that maintains Marx’s necessary distinction. [\emph{TRANS}: On absolute rent, see Marx, \emph{Capital}, vol. 3, part 6, chapter 45, pp. 895–899.]} The
second potentiality is the necessary condition for the first. Both were
warded off by the territory’s territorialization of the earth but are
now effectuated in the agricultural assemblage thanks to stockpiling, by
means of a deterritorialization of the territory. Land as compared and
appropriated extracts from the territories a center of convergence
located outside them; the land is an idea of the town.


Rent is not the only apparatus of capture. The stock has as its
correlate not only the land, from the double point of view of the
comparison of lands and the monopolistic appropriation of land; it has
work as another correlate, from the double point of view of the
comparison of activities and the monopolistic appropriation of labor
(surplus labor). Once again, it is by virtue of the stock that
activities of the “free action” type come to be compared, linked, and
subordinated to a common and homogeneous quantity called labor. Not only
does labor concern the stock—either its constitution, conservation,
reconstitution, or utilization—but labor itself is stockpiled activity,
just as the worker is a stockpiled “actant.” Moreover, even when labor
is clearly separated from surplus labor, they cannot be held to be
independent: there is no so-called necessary labor, and beyond that
surplus labor. Labor and surplus labor are strictly the same thing; the
first term is applied to the quantitative comparison of activities, the
second to the monopolistic appropriation of labor by the entrepreneur
(and no longer the landowner). As we have seen, even when they are
distinct and separate, there is no labor that is not predicated on
surplus labor. Surplus labor is not that which exceeds labor; on the
contrary, labor is that which is subtracted from surplus labor and
presupposes it. It is only in this context that one may speak of labor
value, and of an evaluation bearing on the quantity of social labor,
whereas primitive groups were under a regime of free action or activity
in continuous variation. Since it depends on surplus labor and surplus
value, entrepreneurial profit is just as much an apparatus of capture as
proprietary rent: not only does surplus labor capture labor, and
landownership the earth, but labor and surplus labor are the apparatus
of capture of activity, just as the comparison of lands and the
appropriation of land are the apparatus of capture of the
territory.\footnote{Bernard Schmitt, \emph{Monnaie, salaires et profit} (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 289–290, distinguishes between two forms of capture or “harnessing,” which correspond moreover to the two principal figures of the hunt, \emph{waiting} and \emph{pursuit}. Rent would be a residual or waiting kind of capture because it depends on external forces and operates by transfer; profit would be a capture of pursuit or conquest because it derives from a specific action and requires a force of its own or a “creation.” This holds true, however, only in relation to differential rent; as Marx noted, absolute rent represents the “creative” aspect of landed property (\emph{Capital}, vol. 3, p. 889).}


Finally, there is a third apparatus of capture in addition to rent and
profit: taxation. To understand this third form, and its creative range,
we must first determine the internal relation upon which the commodity
depends. Edouard Will has shown, in relation to the Greek city and in
particular the Corinthian tyranny, that money derived not from exchange,
the commodity, or the demands of commerce, but from taxation, which
first introduces the possibility of an equivalence money
= goods or services and which makes money a general
equivalent. In effect, money is a correlate of the stock; it is a subset
of the stock in that it can be constituted by any object that can be
preserved over the long term. In the case of Corinth, metal money was
first distributed to the “poor” (in their capacity as producers), who
used it to by land rights; it thus passed into the hands of the “rich,”
on the condition that it not stop there, that everyone, rich and poor,
pay a tax, the poor in goods or services, the rich in money, such that
an equivalence money-goods and services was established.\footnote{Edouard Will, \emph{Korinthiaka} (Paris: Ed. De Boccard, 1955), pp. 470ff., analyzes a late, but exemplary, case, that of the tyrant Cypselos’s reform in Corinth: (1) a portion of the land belonging to the hereditary aristocracy was confiscated and distributed to the poor peasants; (2) but at the same time a metallic stock was constituted, through seizure of the property of proscribed persons; (3) this money itself was distributed to the poor, but in order for them to give it to the old owners as an indemnity; (4) the old owners from then on paid their taxes in money, so as to ensure a circulation or turnover of the currency, and an equivalence between money, goods, and services. We already find analogous figures directly inscribed in the archaic empires, independently of the problems of private property. For example, land is distributed to the functionaries in their capacity as functionaries, and they exploit or lease it. But if the functionary thereby receives a rent in labor or in kind from it, he owes the emperor a tax payable in money. Hence the necessity of “banks,” which, under complex conditions, ensure the equivalence, conversion, and circulation of goods-money throughout the economy; see Guillaume Cardascia, “Armée et fiscalité dans la Babylone achéménide,” in \emph{Armées et fiscalité dans le monde antique} (Paris: CNRS, 1977).} We will
return to the significance of this reference to rich and poor in the
already late case of Corinth. But beyond the context and particularities
of this example, money is always distributed by an apparatus of power
under conditions of conservation, circulation, and turnover, so that an
equivalence goods-services-money can be established. We therefore do not
believe in a succession. according to which labor rent would come first,
followed by rent in kind, followed by money rent.\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: On these three forms of rent, see Marx, \emph{Capital}, vol. 3, part 6, chapter 47, pp. 925–938.]} It is directly in
taxation that the equivalence and simultaneity of the three develop. As
a general rule, it is taxation that monetarizes the economy; it is
taxation that creates money, and it necessarily creates it in motion, in
circulation, with turnover, and also in a correspondence with services
and goods in the current of that circulation. The State finds in
taxation the means for foreign trade, insofar as it appropriates that
trade. Yet it is not from trade but from taxation that the money-form
derives.\footnote{Authors like Will and Gabriel Ardant have demonstrated that the commercial function does not account for the origin of money, tied to ideas of “payment,” “settlement,” “taxation.” Will proves this in particular for the Greek and Western worlds; but even in the oriental empires, we think that the monopoly over monetarized trade assumes monetary taxation. See Edouard Will, “Réflexions et hypothèses sur les origines du monnayage,” \emph{Revue numismatique}, vol. 17 (1955), pp. 3–24; Gabriel Ardant, \emph{Histoire flnancière de l’antiquité à nos jours} (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 28ff.: “The milieus that gave rise to taxation also gave rise to money.”} And the money-form thus derived from taxation makes
possible a monopolistic appropriation of outside exchange by the State
(monetarized trade). Everything is different in the regime of exchanges.
We are no longer in the “primitive” situation where exchange is carried
out indirectly, subjectively, through the respective equalization of the
last receivable objects (the law of demand). Of course, exchange remains
what it is in essence, that is to say, unequal, productive of an
equalization resulting from inequality: but this time there is direct
comparison, objective pricing, and monetary equalization (the law of
supply). It is through taxation that goods and services come to be like
commodities, and the commodity comes to be measured and equalized by
money. That is why, even today, the meaning and impact of taxation
appear in what is called indirect taxation, in other words, a tax that
is included in the price and influences the value of the commodity,
independent of and outside the market.\footnote{On this aspect of indirect taxation, see Arghiri Emmanuel, \emph{Unequal Exchange}, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 1–2, 228–236 (in relation to foreign trade). Concerning the relations taxation-trade, a particularly interesting case is that of mercantilism, analyzed by Eric Alliez (\emph{Capital et pouvoir}, unpublished manuscript).} However, the indirect tax is
not simply an additional element that is tacked onto prices and inflates
them. It is only the index or expression of a deeper movement, in which
the tax constitutes the first layer of an “objective” price, the
monetary magnet to which the other elements—price, rent, and profit—add
on and adhere, converging in the same apparatus of capture. It was a
great moment in capitalism when the capitalists realized that taxation
could be productive, that it could be particularly favorable to profits
and even to rents. But as with indirect taxation, this is a favorable
case; it should not obscure an even deeper and more archaic accord, a
convergence and essential identity between three aspects of a single
apparatus. A three-headed apparatus of capture, a “trinity formula”
derived from that of Marx (although it distributes things
differently):\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Marx presents his trinity formula (capital-profit, land-ground rent, labor-wages) in \emph{Capital}, vol. 3, chapter 48.]}


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-51.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


1. The stock has three simultaneous aspects: land and seeds, tools,
money. Land is stockpiled territory, the tool is stockpiled activity,
and money is stockpiled exchange. But the stock does not \emph{come} from
either territories, activities, or exchanges. It marks another
assemblage; it comes from that other assemblage.


2. That assemblage is the “megamachine,” or the apparatus of capture,
the archaic empire. It functions in three modes, which correspond to the
three aspects of the stock: rent, profit, taxation. And the three modes
converge and coincide in it, in an agency of overcoding (or
signifiance): the despot, at once the eminent landowner, entrepreneur of
large-scale projects, and master of taxes and prices. This is like three
capitalizations of power, or three articulations of “capital.”


3. What forms the apparatus of capture are two operations always found
in the convergent modes: direct comparison and monopolistic
appropriation. And the comparison always presupposes the appropriation:
labor presupposes surplus labor; differential rent presupposes absolute
rent; commercial money presupposes taxation. The apparatus of capture
constitutes a general space of comparison and a mobile center of
appropriation. This is a white wall\Slash{}black hole system of the kind that,
as we have seen, constitutes the \emph{face} of the despot. A point of
resonance circulates in a space of comparison and constitutes that space
as it circulates. That is what distinguishes the State apparatus from
primitive mechanisms, with their noncoexistent territories and
nonresonating centers. What begins with the State or the apparatus of
capture is a general semiology that overcodes the primitive semiotic
systems. Instead of traits of expression that follow a machinic \emph{phylum}
and wed it in a distribution of singularities, the State constitutes a
form of expression that subjugates the phylum: the phylum or matter is
no longer anything more than an equalized, homogenized, compared
content, while expression becomes a form of resonance or appropriation.
Apparatus of capture—the semiological operation par excellence \dots{} (In
this sense, the associationist philosophers were not wrong in explaining
political power by operations of the mind dependent upon the association
of ideas.)


Bernard Schmitt has proposed a model of the apparatus of capture that
takes into account the operations of comparison and appropriation. This
model admittedly revolves around money as a capitalist economics. But it
seems to be based on abstract principles that transcend these
limits.\footnote{Bernard Schmitt, \emph{Monnaie, salaires et profits}.}


A. The point of departure is an undivided flow that has yet to be
appropriated or compared, a “pure availability,” “nonpossession and
nonwealth”: this is precisely what occurs when banks create money, but
taken more generally it is the establishment of the stock, which is the
creation of an undivided flow.


B. The undivided flow becomes divided to the extent it is allocated to
the “factors,” distributed to the “factors.” There is only one kind of
factor, the immediate producers. We could call them the “poor” and say
that the flow is distributed among the poor. But this would be
inaccurate because there are no preexistent “rich.” What counts, the
important thing, is that the producers do not yet acquire possession of
what is distributed to them, and that what is distributed to them is not
yet wealth: \emph{remuneration} assumes neither comparison and appropriation,
nor buying-selling; it is much more an operation of the \emph{nexum} type.
There is only equality between set B and set A, between the distributed
set and the undivided set. The distributed set could be called \emph{nominal
wage}; nominal wages are the form of expression of the entire undivided
set (“the entire nominal expression,” or as it is often put, “the
expression of total national income”). This is the point at which the
apparatus of capture becomes semiological.


C. Thus it cannot even be said that wages, conceived as distribution,
remuneration, constitute a purchase; on the contrary, purchasing power
derives from wages: “The remuneration of the producers is not a
purchase, it is the operation by which purchasing becomes possible in a
second moment, when money begins to exercise its new power.” It is after
it has been distributed that set B becomes wealth, or acquires a
comparative power, in relation to something else entirely. This
something else is the determinate set of the goods that have been
produced and are thus purchasable. At first heterogeneous to goods and
products, money later becomes a good homogeneous to the products it can
buy; it acquires a purchasing power that is extinguished with the real
purchase. Or more generally, between the two sets, the distributed set B
and the set of real goods C, there is established a \emph{correspondence}, a
**comparison* (“the power of acquisition is created in direct conjunction
with the set of real productions”).


D. This is where the mystery or the magic resides, in a kind of
disjunction. For if we call B′ the comparative set, in other words, the
set placed in correspondence with the real goods, we see that it is
necessarily smaller than the distributed set. B′ is necessarily smaller
than B: even if we assume that purchasing power has available to it all
of the objects produced during a given period, the distributed set is
always greater than the set that is used or compared, meaning that the
immediate producers are able to convert only a portion of the
distributed set. Real \emph{wages} are only a portion of nominal wages;
similarly, “useful” labor is only a portion of labor, and “utilized”
land is only a portion of the land that has been distributed. We shall
call Capture this difference or excess constitutive of profit, surplus
labor, or the surplus product: “Nominal wages include everything, but
the wage-earners retain only the income \emph{they succeed in converting into
goods}; they lose the income siphoned off by the enterprises.” It can be
said that the whole was in fact distributed to the “poor”; the poor,
however, find themselves extorted of everything they do not succeed in
converting in the course of this strange race: the capture effects an
inversion of the wave or of the divisible flow. It is precisely capture
that is the object of monopolistic appropriation. And this appropriation
(by the “rich”) does not come after: it is included in nominal wages,
while eluding real wages. It is between the two, it inserts itself
between the distribution without possession and the conversion by
correspondence or comparison; it expresses the difference in power
between the two sets, between B′ and B. In the end, there is no mystery
at all: \emph{the mechanism of capture contributes from the outset to the
constitution of the aggregate upon which the capture is effectuated}.


This schema, according to its author, is very difficult to understand,
and yet it is operative. It consists in bringing into relief an abstract
machine of capture or of extortion by presenting a very specific “order
of reasons.” For example, remuneration is not itself a purchase since
purchasing power derives from it. As Schmitt says, there is neither
thief nor victim, for the producer only loses what he does not have and
has no chance of acquiring: as in seventeenth-century philosophy, there
are negations but not privation \dots{} And everything coexists in this
logical apparatus of capture. Any succession is purely logical: the
capture in itself appears between B and C, but exists as well between A
and B, between C and A; it impregnates the entire apparatus, it acts as
a nonlocalizable liaison for the system. The same goes for surplus
labor: How could one specify its location since labor presupposes it?
Now the State—the archaic imperial State in any case—is this very
apparatus. It is always a mistake to appeal to a supplementary
explanation for the State: this pushes the State back behind the State,
ad infinitum. It is better to leave it where it is from the start, for
it exists punctually, beyond the limit of the primitive series. It is
enough for this point of comparison and appropriation to be effectively
occupied in order for the apparatus of capture to function, an apparatus
that overcodes the primitive codes, substitutes sets for the series, or
reverses the direction of the signs. This point is necessarily occupied,
effectuated, because it already exists in the convergent wave that moves
through the primitive series and draws them toward a threshold at which,
after passing their limits, the wave itself changes direction. Primitive
peoples have always existed only as vestiges, already plied by the
reversible wave that carries them off (vector of deterritorialization).
What is contingent upon external circumstances is only the place where
the apparatus is effectuated—the place where the agricultural “mode of
production” was able to arise: the Orient. It is in this sense that the
apparatus is abstract. But in itself, it marks not simply an abstract
possibility of reversibility but the real existence of a point of
inversion as an autonomous, irreducible phenomenon.


Hence the very particular character of State violence: it is very
difficult to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as
preaccomplished. It is not even adequate to say that the violence rests
with the mode of production. Marx made the observation in the case of
capitalism: there is a violence \emph{that necessarily operates through the
State}, precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the
“primitive accumulation,” and makes possible the capitalist mode of
production itself. From a standpoint within the capitalist mode of
production, it is very difficult to say who is the thief and who the
victim, or even where the violence resides. That is because the worker
is born entirely naked and the capitalist objectively “clothed,” an
independent owner. That which gave the worker and the capitalist this
form eludes us because it operated in other modes of production. It is a
violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is
reactivated every day.\footnote{Marx often emphasizes the following points, particularly in his analysis of primitive accumulation: (1) Primitive accumulation precedes the mode of production and makes it possible. (2) It therefore implies specific action by the State and the law, which are not opposed to violence but, on the contrary, promote it (“These methods depend in part on brute force\dots{}. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society.” \emph{Capital}, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage, 1977], chapter 31, p. 915). (3) This lawful violence appears first in its raw form but ceases to be conscious to the degree that the mode of production becomes established; it seems to be a fact of nature pure and simple (“direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases”; ibid., p. 899). (4) A movement such as this is explained by the particular character of this violence, which is in no case reducible to theft, crime, or illegality (see \emph{Notes sur Adolph Wagner} in \emph{Oeuvres de Karl Marx}, “Pléiade” edition, vol. 2, ed. Maximilien Rubel [Paris: Gallimard, 1968]): what is taken away from the worker is not something surface level; the capitalist “does not limit himself to taking away or stealing, but extorts the production of a surplus value, \emph{in other words}, he first contributes to the creation of that from which he takes away\dots{}. A part of the value created without the labor of the capitalist can be appropriated legally by the capitalist, in other words, without violating the corresponding right to the exchange of commodities.”} This is the place to say it, if ever there
was one: \emph{the mutilation is prior, preestablished}. However, these
analyses of Marx should be enlarged upon. For the fact remains that
there is a primitive accumulation that, far from deriving from the
agricultural mode of production, precedes it: as a general rule, there
is primitive accumulation whenever an apparatus of capture is mounted,
with that very particular kind of violence that creates or contributes
to the creation of that which it is directed against, and thus
presupposes itself.\footnote{Jean Robert thoroughly demonstrates, in this context, that primitive accumulation implies the violent construction of a homogenized, “colonized” space (“Décoloniser l’espace,” unpublished manuscript).} The problem then becomes one of distinguishing
between regimes of violence. We can draw a distinction between struggle,
war, crime and policing as so many regimes of violence. \emph{Struggle} would
be like the regime of primitive violence (including primitive “wars”);
it is a blow-by-blow violence, which is not without its code, since the
value of the blows is fixed according to the law of the series, as a
function of the value of the last exchangeable blow, or of the last
woman to conquer, etc. Thus there is a certain ritualization of
violence. \emph{War}, at least when linked to the war machine, is another
regime, because it implies the mobilization and autonomization of a
violence directed first and essentially against the State apparatus (the
war machine is in this sense the invention of a primary nomadic
organization that turns against the State). \emph{Crime} is something else,
because it is a violence of illegality that consists in taking
possession of something to which one has no “right,” in capturing
something one does not have a “right” to capture. But \emph{State policing or
lawful violence} is something else again, because it consists in
capturing while simultaneously constituting a right to capture. It is an
incorporated, structural violence distinct from every kind of direct
violence. The State has often been defined by a “monopoly of violence,”
but this definition leads back to another definition that describes the
State as a “state of Law” (\emph{Rechtsstaat}). State overcoding is precisely
this structural violence that defines the law, “police” violence and not
the violence of war. There is lawful violence wherever violence
contributes to the creation of that which it is used against, or as Marx
says, wherever capture contributes to the creation of that which it
captures. This is very different from criminal violence. It is also why,
**in contradistinction to* primitive violence, State or lawful violence
always seems to presuppose itself, for it preexists its own use: the
State can in this way say that violence is “primal,” that it is simply a
natural phenomenon the responsibility for which does not lie with the
State, which uses violence only against the violent, against
“criminals”—against primitives, against nomads—in order that peace may
reign.



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION XIII*. \emph{The State and its forms.}



\end{quote}


We start with the archaic imperial State: overcoding, apparatus of
capture, machine of enslavement. It comprises a particular kind of
property, money, public works—a formula complete in a single stroke but
one that presupposes nothing “private” and does not even assume a
preexistent mode of production since it is what gives rise to the mode
of production. The point of departure that the preceding analyses give
us is well established by archaeology. The question now becomes: Once
the State has appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve?
What are its factors of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation
between evolved States and the archaic imperial State?


The principle of evolution is internal, whatever the external factors
that contribute to it. \emph{The archaic State does not overcode without also
freeing a large quantity of decoded flows that escape from it}. Let us
recall that “decoding” does not signify the state of a flow whose code
is understood (\emph{compris}) (deciphered, translatable, assimilable), but,
in a more radical sense, the state of a flow that is no longer contained
in (\emph{compris dans}) its own code, that escapes its own code. On the one
hand, when the primitive codes cease to be self-regulating and are
subordinated to the higher agency, flows that had been coded in a
relative way by the primitive communities find the opportunity to
escape. But on the other hand, \emph{the overcoding of the archaic State
itself makes possible and gives rise to new flows that escape from it}.
The State does not created large-scale works without a flow of
independent labor escaping its bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in
metallurgy). It does not create the monetary form of the tax without
flows of money escaping, and nourishing or bringing into being other
powers (notably in commerce and banking). And above all, it does not
created a system of public property without a flow of private
appropriation growing up \emph{beside} it, then beginning to pass beyond its
grasp; this private property does not itself issue from the archaic
system but is constituted on the margins, all the more necessarily and
inevitably, slipping through the net of overcoding. It is undoubtedly
Tokei who has formulated the problem of an origin of private property in
the most serious way, in the context of a system that seems to exclude
it from every angle. For private property can arise neither on the side
of the emperor-despot nor on the side of the peasants, whose autonomy is
tied to communal possession, nor on the side of the functionaries whose
existence and income are based on that public communal form (“the
aristocrats can under these conditions become petty despots but not
private landowners”). Even the slaves belong to the community or the
public function. The question then becomes, Are there people who are
constituted in the overcoding empire, but constituted as necessarily
excluded and decoded? Tokei’s answer is the \emph{freed slaves}. It is they
who have no place. It is their lamentations that are heard the length
and breadth of the Chinese Empire: the plaint (elegy) has always been a
political factor. But it is also they who form the first seeds of
private property, who develop trade, and with metallurgy invent a kind
of private slavery in which they will be the new master.\footnote{Ferenc Tokei, “Les conditions de la propriété foncière dans la Chine de l’epoque Tcheou,” \emph{Acta Antiqua}, vol. 6 (1958), pp. 245–300. Marx and Engels already noted that the Roman plebs (partially composed of freedmen) alone had the right to the “transfer of property out of the \emph{ager publicus}” (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 477): the plebeians became private owners of landed property, and also of commercial and industrial wealth, precisely insofar as they were “excluded from all public rights” (Engels, \emph{The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State} [New York: International Publishers, 1972], p. 190).} We saw
previously the role played by freed slaves in the war machine, in the
formation of the special body. It is in a different form, and following
entirely different principles, that they play an important role in the
State apparatus and in the evolution of that apparatus, this time in the
formation of a private body. The two aspects can combine, but they
belong to two different lines.


What counts is not the particular case of the freed slave. What counts
is the collective figure of the Outsider. What counts is that in one way
or another the apparatus of overcoding gives rise to flows that are
themselves decoded—flows of money, labor, property \dots{} These flows are the
correlate of the apparatus. And the correlation is not only social,
internal to the archaic empire, it is also geographical. This would be
the place to bring up the confrontation between the East and the West.
According to V. Gordon Childe’s great archaeological thesis, the archaic
imperial State implies a stockpiled agricultural surplus, which makes
possible the maintenance of a specialized body of mercantile and
metallurgical artisans. Indeed, the surplus as the content proper to
overcoding must be not only stockpiled but absorbed, consumed, realized.
Doubtless, this economic requirement that the surplus be absorbed is one
of the principal aspects of the appropriation of the war machine by the
imperial State: The military institution is from the start one of the
most effective means of absorbing surplus. If, however, we assume that
the bureaucratic and military institutions are not enough, the way is
cleared for this specialized body of nonagricultural artisans, whose
labor will reinforce the sedentarization of agriculture. It was in
Afro-Asia and the Orient that all of these conditions were fulfilled and
that the State apparatus was invented: in the Middle East, Egypt, and
Mesopotamia, but also in the valley of the Indus (and in the Far East).
That was where agricultural stock and its bureaucratic, military, but
also metallurgical and commercial concomitants came into being. But this
oriental or imperial “solution” is threatened by an impasse: State
overcoding keeps the metallurgists, both craft and mercantile, within
strict bounds, under powerful bureaucratic control, with monopolistic
appropriation of foreign trade in the service of a ruling class, so that
the peasants themselves benefit little from the State innovations. So it
is indeed true that the State-form spreads and that archaeology
discovers it everywhere on the horizon of Western history in the Aegean
world. But not under the same conditions. Minos and Mycenae are more a
caricature of an empire, Agamemnon of Mycenae is not the Chinese emperor
or Egyptian pharaoh; the Egyptian can say to the Greeks: “You will
always be like children\dots{}” That is because the Aegean peoples were both
too far away to fall into the oriental sphere and too poor to stockpile
a surplus themselves, but neither far enough away nor impoverished
enough to ignore the markets of the Orient. Moreover, oriental
overcoding itself assigned its merchants a long-distance role. Thus the
Aegean peoples found themselves in a situation where they could take
advantage of the oriental agricultural stock \emph{without having to
constitute one for themselves}: they plundered it when they could, and
on a more regular basis procured a share of it in exchange for raw
materials (notably wood and metals), coming from as far away as Central
and Western Europe. Of course, the Orient continually had to reproduce
its stocks; but formally, it had made a move “once and for all,” from
which the West benefited without having to reproduce it. It follows that
the metallurgical artisans and the merchants assumed an entirely
different status in the West, since their existence did not directly
depend on a surplus accumulated by a local State apparatus: even if the
peasant suffered an exploitation as bad as or worse than that of the
Orient, the artisan and the merchant enjoyed a freer status and a more
diversified market, prefiguring a middle class. Many metallurgists and
merchants from the Orient moved to the Aegean world, where they were to
find freer, more varied and more stable conditions. In short, \emph{the same
flows that are overcoded in the Orient tend to become decoded in
Europe}, in a new situation that is like the flipside or correlate of
the other. Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding)
but becomes surplus value of flow. It is as if two solutions were found
for the same problem, the Oriental solution and then the Western one,
which grafts itself upon the first and brings it out of the impasse
while continuing to presuppose it. The European metallurgist and
merchant faced a much less thoroughly coded international market, one
not limited to an imperial house or class. And as Childe said, the
Western and Aegean States were immersed in a supranational economic
system from the start; they bathed in it, instead of containing it
within the limits of their own net.\footnote{See the two great books by V. Gordon Childe, \emph{The Most Ancient East} (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1928) and especially \emph{The Prehistory of European Civilization} (London: Cassell, 1962). In particular, archaeological analysis permits Childe to conclude that nowhere in the Aegean world were there accumulations of wealth or food comparable to those of the Orient (\emph{The Prehistory of European Civilization}, pp. 106–110).}


It is indeed another pole of the State that arises, one that could be
defined in summary fashion as follows. The \emph{public sphere} no longer
characterizes the objective nature of property but is instead the shared
means for a now private appropriation; this yields the public-private
mixes constitutive of the modern world. The \emph{bond becomes personal};
personal relations of dependence, both between owners (contracts) and
between owned and owners (conventions), parallel or replace community
relations or relations based on one’s public function. Even slavery
changes; it no longer defines the public availability of the communal
worker but rather private property as applied to individual
workers.\footnote{On the differences between “generalized slavery” in the archaic empire, and private slavery, feudal corvée, etc., see Charles Parain, “Protohistoire méditerranéenne et mode de production asiatique,” in CERM, \emph{Sur le mode de production asiatique}, pp. 170–173.} The \emph{law} in its entirety undergoes a mutation, becoming
subjective, conjunctive, “topical” law: this is because the State
apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in overcoding
already coded flows than in \emph{organizing conjunctions of decoded flows as
such}. Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects,
the operation of the imperial “signifier” has been superseded by
**processes of subjectification*; machinic enslavement tends to be
replaced by a regime of \emph{social subjection}. And unlike the relatively
uniform imperial pole, this second pole presents the most diverse of
forms. But as varied as relations of personal dependence are, they
always mark qualified and topical conjunctions. It was the evolved
empires, of the East and of the West, that first developed this new
public sphere of the private, through institutions such as the
**consilium* and the \emph{fiscus} in the Roman Empire (it was through these
institutions that freed slaves acquired a political power paralleling
that of the functionaries).\footnote{Gérard Boulvert, \emph{Domestique et fonctionnaire sous le haul-empire romain} (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974). More generally, Paul Veyne has analyzed the formation of “subjective law” in the Roman Empire, the corresponding institutions, and the new meaning of the public and private. He demonstrates that Roman law is a “law without concepts” that proceeds by “topics,” and in this sense differs from the modern, “axiomatic” conception of the law. See Veyne, \emph{Le pain et le cirque} (Paris: Seuil, 1976), chapters 3 and 4, and p. 744.} But it was also the autonomous cities,
the feudal systems \dots{} The question as to whether these last-mentioned
formations still answer to the concept of the State can be formulated
only after certain correlations have been taken into account. Every bit
as much as the evolved empires, the autonomous cities, and feudal
systems presuppose an archaic empire that served as their foundation;
they were themselves in contact with evolved empires that reacted back
upon them; they actively prepared the way for new forms of the State
(for example, absolute monarchy as the culmination of a certain kind of
subjective law and a feudal process).\footnote{See François Hincker, “La monarchic absolue française,” in CERM, \emph{Sur le féodalisme} (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1971).} In effect, in the rich domain
of personal relations, what counts is not the capriciousness or
variability of the individuals but the consistency of the relations, and
the adequation between a subjectivity that can reach the point of
delirium and qualified acts that are sources of rights and obligations.
In a beautiful passage, Edgar Quinet underlines this coincidence between
“the delirium of the twelve Cesars and the golden age of Roman
law.”\footnote{Edgar Quinet, \emph{La génie des religions}, vol. 1 of \emph{Oeuvres Complètes} (Paris: Hachette, ca. 1899).}


The subjectifications, conjunctions, and appropriations do not prevent
the decoded flows from continuing to flow, and from ceaselessly
engendering new flows that escape (we saw this, for example, at the
level of a micropolitics of the Middle Ages). This is where there is an
ambiguity in these apparatuses: they can only function with decoded
flows, and yet they do not let them stream together; they perform
topical conjunctions that stand as so many knots or recodings. This
accounts for the historians’ impression that capitalism “could have”
developed beginning at a certain moment, in China, in Rome, in
Byzantium, in the Middle Ages, that the conditions for it existed but
were not effectuated or even capable of being effectuated. The situation
is that the pressure of the flows draws capitalism in negative outline,
but for it to be realized there must be a whole \emph{integral of decoded
flows, a whole generalized conjunction} that overspills and overturns
the preceding apparatuses. And in fact when Marx sets about defining
capitalism, he begins by invoking the advent of a single unqualified and
global Subjectivity, which capitalizes all of the processes of
subjectification, “all activities without distinction”: “productive
activity in general,” “the sole subjective essence of wealth\dots{}” And this
single Subject now expresses itself in an Object in general, no longer
in this or that qualitative state: “Along with the abstract universality
of wealth-creating activity we have now the universality of the object
defined as wealth, viz. the product in general, or labor in general, but
as past, materialized labor.”\footnote{Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy,” in \emph{A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy}, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), p. 298 [translation modified].} Circulation constitutes capital as a
subjectivity commensurate with society in its entirety. But this new
social subjectivity can form only to the extent that the decoded flows
overspill their conjunctions and attain a level of decoding that the
State apparatuses are no longer able to reclaim: \emph{on the one hand}, the
flow of labor must no longer be determined as slavery or serfdom but
must become naked and free labor; and \emph{on the other hand}, wealth must
no longer be determined as money dealing, merchant’s or landed wealth,
but must become pure homogeneous and independent capital. And doubtless,
these two becomings at least (for other flows also converge) introduce
many contingencies and many different factors on each of the lines. But
it is their abstract conjunction in a single stroke that constitutes
capitalism, providing a universal subject and an object in general for
one another. Capitalism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth
encounters the flow of unqualified labor and conjugates with it.\footnote{On the historical independence of the two series, and their “encounter,” see Etienne Balibar in Althusser and Balibar, \emph{Lire le Capital}, vol. 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 286–289.}
This is what the preceding conjunctions, which were still topical or
qualitative, had always inhibited (the two principal inhibitors were the
feudal organization of the countryside and the corporative organization
of the towns). This amounts to saying that capitalism forms with \emph{a
general axiomatic of decoded flows}. “Capital is a right, or, to be more
precise, a relation of production that is manifested as a right, and as
such it is independent of the concrete form that it cloaks at each
moment of its productive function.”\footnote{Arghiri Emmanuel, \emph{Unequal Exchange}, pp. 13–14, and the following passage he cites from Paul Sweezy, \emph{The Theory of Capitalist Development} (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1942), p. 338: “‘Capital’ is not simply another name for means of production; it is means of production reduced to a qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively measurable fund of value” (whence the equalization of profit). In his analysis of the primitive accumulation of capital, Maurice Dobb (\emph{Studies in the Development of Capitalism}, rev. ed. [New York: International Publishers, 1964], pp. 177–186) effectively demonstrates that primitive accumulation bears not on the means of production but on “rights or titles to wealth” (p. 177; modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors), which, depending on the circumstances, are convertible into means of production.} Private property no longer
expresses the bond of personal dependence but the independence of a
Subject that now constitutes the sole bond. This makes for an important
difference in the evolution of private property: private property in
itself relates to rights, instead of the law relating it to the land,
things, or people (this raises in particular the famous question of the
elimination of ground rent in capitalism). \emph{A new threshold of
deterritorialization}. And when capital becomes an active right in this
way, the entire historical figure of the law changes. The law ceases to
be the overcoding of customs, as it was in the archaic empire; it is no
longer a set of topics, as it was in the evolved States, the autonomous
cities, and the feudal systems; it increasingly assumes the direct form
and immediate characteristics of an axiomatic, as evidenced in our civil
“code.”\footnote{See the distinction certain jurists make between Roman, “topical,” law, and modern, “axiomatic,” law of the civil-code type. We may define certain fundamental ways in which the French Civil Code is closer to an axiomatic than to a code: (1) the predominance of the enunciative form over the imperative and over affective formulas (damnation, exhortation, admonishment, etc.); (2) the code’s pretension that it forms a complete and saturated rational system; (3) but at the same time the relative independence of the propositions, which permit axioms to be added. On these aspects, see Jean Ray, \emph{Essai sur la structure logique du code civil français} (Paris: Alcan, 1926). It has been established that the systematization of Roman law took place very late, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.}


When the flows reach this capitalist threshold of decoding and
deterritorialization (naked labor, independent capital), it seems that
there is no longer a need for a State, for distinct juridical and
political domination, in order to ensure appropriation, which has become
directly economic. The economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic, a
“universal cosmopolitan energy which overflows every restriction and
bond,”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Marx, \emph{Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844}, ed. and intro. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 129.]} a mobile and convertible substance “such as the total value
of annual production.” Today we can depict an enormous, so-called
stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchange and
across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational
ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto supranational power
untouched by governmental decisions.\footnote{See Jean Saint-Geours, \emph{Pouvoir et finance} (Paris: Fayard, 1979). Saint-Geours is one of the best analysts of the monetary system, as well as of “private-public” mixes in the modern economy.} But whatever dimensions or
quantities this may have assumed today, capitalism has from the
beginning mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely
surpassing the deterritorialization proper to the State. For since
Paleolithic and Neolithic times, the State has been deterritorializing
to the extent that it makes the earth an \emph{object} of its higher unity, a
forced aggregate of coexistence, instead of the free play of territories
among themselves and with the lineages. But this is precisely the sense
in which the State is termed “territorial.” Capitalism, on the other
hand, is not at all territorial, even in its beginnings: its power of
deterritorialization consists in taking as its object, not the earth,
but “materialized labor,” the commodity. And private property is no
longer ownership of the land or the soil, nor even of the means of
production as such, but of convertible abstract rights.\footnote{On the tendency toward the elimination of ground rent in capitalism, see Samir Amin and Kostas Vergopoulos, \emph{La question paysanne et le capitalisme} (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974). Amin analyzes the reasons why ground rent and rent of mines keep or assume a present-day meaning in the peripheral regions, although in different ways; \emph{The Law of Value and Historical Materialism}, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), chapters 4 and 6.} That is why
capitalism marks a mutation in worldwide or ecumenical organizations,
which now take on a consistency of their own: the worldwide axiomatic,
instead of resulting from heterogeneous social formations and their
relations, for the most part distributes these formations, determines
their relations, while organizing an international division of labor.
From all these standpoints, it could be said that capitalism develops an
economic order that could do without the State. And in fact capitalism
is not short on war cries against the State, not only in the name of the
market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization.


This, however, is only one very partial aspect of capital. If it is true
that we are not using the word axiomatic as a simple metaphor, we must
review what distinguishes an axiomatic from all manner of codes,
overcodings, and recodings: the axiomatic deals directly with purely
functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and
which are immediately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously;
codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express
specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by
a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an
indirect fashion. The \emph{immanent axiomatic} finds in the domains it moves
through so many models, termed \emph{models of realization}. It could
similarly be said that capital as right, as a “qualitatively homogeneous
and quantitatively commensurable element,” is realized in sectors and
means of production (or that “unified capital” is realized in
“differentiated capital”). However, the different sectors are not alone
in serving as models of realization—\emph{the States} do too. Each of them
groups together and combines several sectors, according to its
resources, population, wealth, industrial capacity, etc. Thus the
States, in capitalism, are not canceled out but change form and take on
a new meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that
exceeds them. But to exceed is not at all the same thing as doing
without. We have already seen that capitalism proceeds by way of the
State-form rather than the town-form; the basis for the fundamental
mechanisms described by Marx (the colonial regime, the public debt, the
modern tax system and indirect taxation, industrial protectionism, trade
wars) may be laid in the towns, but the towns function as mechanisms of
accumulation, acceleration, and concentration only to the extent that
they are appropriated by States. Recent events tend to confirm this
principle from another angle. For example, NASA appeared ready to
mobilize considerable capital for interplanetary exploration, as though
capitalism were riding a vector taking it to the moon; but following the
USSR, which conceived of extraterrestrial space as a belt that should
circle the earth taken as the “object,” the American government cut off
funds for exploration and returned capital in this case to a more
centered model. It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to
moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the
latter with compensatory reterritorializations. More generally, this
extreme example aside, we must take into account a “materialist”
determination of the modern State or nation-state: a group of producers
in which labor and capital circulate freely, in other words, in which
the homogeneity and competition of capital is effectuated, in principle
without external obstacles. In order to be effectuated, capitalism has
always required there to be a new force and a new law of States, on the
level of the flow of labor as on the level of the flow of independent
capital.


So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but
immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows. Once
again, our use of the word “axiomatic” is far from a metaphor; we find
literally the same theoretical problems that are posed by the models in
an axiomatic repeated in relation to the State. For models of
realization, though varied, are supposed to be \emph{isomorphic} with regard
to the axiomatic they effectuate; however, this isomorphy, concrete
variations considered, accommodates itself to the greatest of formal
differences. Moreover, a single axiomatic seems capable of encompassing
polymorphic models, not only when it is not yet “saturated,” but with
those models as integral elements of its saturation.\footnote{Introductory books on the axiomatic method emphasize a certain number of problems. For example, Robert Blanché’s fine book, \emph{L’axiomatique} (Paris: PUF, 1959) [abridged and translated by G. B. Keeneas as \emph{Axiomatics} (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962)]. There is first of all the question of the respective independence of the axioms, and whether or not the system is saturated, or “strongly complete” (sec. 14 and 15). Second, there is the question of “models of realization,” their heterogeneity, but also their isomorphy in relation to the axiomatic system (sec. 12). Then there is the possibility of a polymorphy of models, not only in a nonsaturated system, but even in a saturated axiomatic (sec. 12, 15, and 26). Then, once again, there is the question of the “undecidable propositions” an axiomatic confronts (sec. 20). Finally, there is the question of “power,” by which nondemonstrable infinite sets exceed the axiomatic (sec. 26 and “the power of the continuum”). The comparison of politics to an axiomatic is based on all of these aspects.} These
“problems” become singularly political when we think of modern States.


1. Are not all modern States isomorphic in relation to the capitalist
axiomatic, to the point that the difference between democratic,
totalitarian, liberal, and tyrannical States depends only on concrete
variables, and on the worldwide distribution of those variables, which
always undergo eventual readjustments? Even the so-called socialist
States are isomorphic, to the extent that there is \emph{only one world
market}, the capitalist one.


2. Conversely, does not the world capitalist axiomatic tolerate a real
polymorphy, or even a heteromorphy, of models, and for two reasons? On
the one hand, capital as a general relation of production can very
easily integrate concrete sectors or modes of production that are
noncapitalist. But on the other hand, and this is the main point, the
bureaucratic socialist States can themselves develop different modes of
production that only conjugate with capitalism to form a set whose
“power” exceeds that of the axiomatic itself (it will be necessary to
try to determine the nature of this power, why we so often think of it
in apocalyptic terms, what conflicts it spawns, what slim chances it
leaves us\dots{}).


3. A typology of modern States is thus coupled with a metaeconomics: it
would be inaccurate to treat all States as “interchangeable” (even
isomorphy does not have that consequence), but it would be no less
inaccurate to privilege a certain form of the State (forgetting that
polymorphy establishes strict complementarities between the Western
democracies and the colonial or neocolonial tyrannies that they install
or support in other regions) or to equate the bureaucratic socialist
States with the totalitarian capitalist States (neglecting the fact that
the axiomatic can encompass a real heteromorphy from which the higher
power of the aggregate derives, even if it is for the worse).


What is called a nation-state, in the most diverse forms, is precisely
the State as a model of realization. And the birth of nations implies
many artifices: Not only are they constituted in an active struggle
against the imperial or evolved systems, the feudal systems, and the
autonomous cities, but they crush their own “minorities,” in other
words, minoritarian phenomena that could be termed “nationalitarian,”
which work from within and if need be turn to the old codes to find a
greater degree of freedom. The constituents of the nation are a land and
a people: the “natal,” which is not necessarily innate, and the
“popular,” which is not necessarily pregiven. The problem of the nation
is aggravated in the two extreme cases of a land without a people and a
people without a land. How can a people and a land be made, in other
words, a nation—a refrain? The coldest and bloodiest means vie with
upsurges of romanticism. The axiomatic is complex, and is not without
passions. The natal or the land, as we have seen elsewhere, implies a
certain deterritorialization of the territories (community land,
imperial provinces, seigneurial domains, etc.), and the people, a
decoding of the population. The nation is constituted on the basis of
these flows and is inseparable from the modern State that gives
consistency to the corresponding land and people. It is the flow of
naked labor that makes the people, just as it is the flow of Capital
that makes the land and its industrial base. In short, the nation is the
very operation of a collective subjectification, to which the modern
State corresponds as a process of subjection. It is in the form of the
nation-state, with all its possible variations, that the State becomes
the model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic. This is not at
all to say that nations are appearances or ideological phenomena; on the
contrary, they are the passional and living forms in which the
qualitative homogeneity and the quantitative competition of abstract
capital are first realized.


We distinguish \emph{machinic enslavement} and \emph{social subjection} as two
separate concepts. There is enslavement when human beings themselves are
constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and
with other things (animals, tools), under the control and direction of a
higher unity. But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes
the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can
be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a
component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected
**to* the machine and no longer enslaved \emph{by} the machine. This is not to
say that the second regime is more human. But the first regime does seem
to have a special relation to the archaic imperial formation: human
beings are not subjects but pieces of a machine that overcodes the
aggregate (this has been called “generalized slavery,” as opposed to the
private slavery of antiquity, or feudal serfdom). We believe that Lewis
Mumford is right in designating the archaic empires megamachines, and in
pointing out that, once again, it is not a question of a metaphor: “If a
machine can be defined more or less in accord with the classic
definition of Reuleaux, as a combination of resistant parts, each
specialized in function, operating under human control to transmit
motion and to perform work, then the \emph{human machine} was a real
machine.”\footnote{Lewis Mumford, “The First Megamachine,” \emph{Diogenes}, no. 55 (July–September 1966), p. 3. [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors].} Of course, it was the modern State and capitalism that
brought the triumph of machines, in particular of motorized machines
(whereas the archaic State had simple machines at best); but what we are
referring to now are \emph{technical machines}, which are definable
extrinsically. One is not enslaved by the technical machine but rather
subjected to it. It would appear, then, that the modern State, through
technological development, has substituted an increasingly powerful
social subjection for machinic enslavement. Ancient slavery and feudal
serfdom were already procedures of subjection. But the naked or “free”
worker of capitalism takes subjection to its most radical expression,
since the processes of subjectification no longer even enter into
partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In effect, capital acts as
the point of subjectification that constitutes all human beings as
subjects; but some, the “capitalists,” are subjects of enunciation that
form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the
“proletarians,” are subjects of the statement, subjected to the
technical machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage
regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an
unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be
justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we
don’t treat them like machines, we certainly don’t confuse variable
capital and constant capital\dots{}


Capitalism arises as a worldwide enterprise of subjectification by
constituting an axiomatic of decoded flows. Social subjection, as the
correlate of subjectification, appears much more in the axiomatic’s
models of realization than in the axiomatic itself. It is within the
framework of the nation-State, or of national subjectivities, that
processes of subjectification and the corresponding subjections are
manifested. The axiomatic itself, of which the States are models of
realization, restores or reinvents, in new and now technical forms, an
entire system of machinic enslavement. This in no way represents a
return to the imperial machine since we are now in the immanence of an
axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a formal Unity. But it is
the reinvention of a machine of which human beings are constituent
parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized machines
constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and
informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized
regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible “humans-machines systems”
replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of subjection
between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is
based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or
action.\footnote{Ergonomics distinguishes between “human-machine” systems (or work posts) and “humans-machines” systems (communicational aggregates composed of human and nonhuman elements). But this is not only a difference of degree; the second point of view is not a generalization of the first: “The notion of information loses its anthropocentric aspect,” and the problems are not of adaptation but of the choice of a human or nonhuman element depending on the case. See Maurice de Montmollin, \emph{Les systèmes hommes-machines} (Paris: PUF, 1967). The issue is no longer to adapt, even under violence, but to localize: Where is your place? Even handicaps can be made useful, instead of being corrected or compensated for. A deaf-mute can be an essential part of a “humans-machines” communicational system.} In the organic composition of capital, variable capital
defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the
principal framework of which is the business or factory. But with
automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant
capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the
work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework
expands to all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of
subjectification took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large
amount brings us back to it. Attention has recently been focused on the
fact that modern power is not at all reducible to the classical
alternative “repression or ideology” but implies processes of
normalization, modulation, modeling, and information that bear on
language, perception, desire, movement, etc., and which proceed by way
of microassemblages. This aggregate includes both subjection and
enslavement taken to extremes, as two simultaneous parts that constantly
reinforce and nourish each other. For example, one is subjected to TV
insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular situation of
a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a
subject of enunciation (“you, dear television viewers, who make TV what
it is\dots{}”); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But
one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television
viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who
supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and
“output,” feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the
machine in such a way as to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement,
there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information, some
of which are mechanical, others human.\footnote{One of the basic themes of science fiction is to show how machinic enslavement combines with processes of subjection, but exceeds and differs from them, performing a qualitative leap. Take Ray Bradbury: television not as an instrument located at the center of the house, but as forming the walls of the house.} The term “subjection,” of
course, should not be confined to the national aspect, with enslavement
seen as international or worldwide. For information technology is also
the property of the States that set themselves up as humans-machines
systems. But this is so precisely to the extent that the two aspects,
the axiomatic and the models of realization, constantly cross over into
each other and are themselves in communication. Social subjection
proportions itself to the model of realization, just as machinic
enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic that is
effectuated in the model. We have the privilege of undergoing the two
operations simultaneously, in relation to the same things and the same
events. Rather than stages, subjection and enslavement constitute two
coexistent poles.


We may return to the different forms of the State, from the standpoint
of a universal history. We distinguish three major forms: (1) imperial
archaic States, which are paradigms and constitute a machine of
enslavement by overcoding already-coded flows (these States have little
diversity, due to a certain formal immutability that applies to all of
them); (2) extremely diverse States—evolved empires, autonomous cities,
feudal systems, monarchies—which proceed instead by subjectification and
subjection, and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded
flows; (3) the modern nation-States, which take decoding even further
and are models of realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation
of flows (these States combine social subjection and the new machinic
enslavement, and their very diversity is a function of isomorphy, of the
eventual heteromorphy or polymorphy of the models in relation to the
axiomatic).


There are, of course, all kinds of external circumstances that mark
profound breaks between these types of States, and above all submit the
archaic empires to utter oblivion, a shrouding lifted only by
archaeology. The empires disappeared suddenly, as though in an
instantaneous catastrophe. As in the Dorian invasion, a war machine
looms up and bears down from without, killing memory. Yet things proceed
quite differently on the inside, where all the States resonate together,
appropriate armies for themselves, and exhibit a unity of composition in
spite of their differences in organization and development. It is
evident that all decoded flows, of whatever kind, are prone to forming a
war machine directed against the State. But everything changes depending
on whether these flows connect up with a war machine or, on the
contrary, enter into conjunctions or a general conjugation that
appropriates them for the State. From this standpoint, the modern States
have a kind of transspatiotemporal unity with the archaic State. The
internal correlation between 1 and 2 appears most clearly in the fact
that the fragmented forms of the Aegean world presuppose the great
imperial form of the Orient and find in it a stock or agricultural
surplus, which they consequently have no need to produce or accumulate
for themselves. And to the extent that the States of the second age are
nevertheless obliged to reconstitute a stock, if only because of
external circumstances—what State can do without one?—in so doing they
always reactivate an evolved imperial form. We find the revival of this
form in the Greek, Roman, and feudal worlds: there is always an empire
on the horizon, which for the subjective States plays the role of
signifier and encompassing element. And the correlation between 2 and 3
is no less pronounced, for industrial revolutions are not wanting, and
the difference between topical conjunctions and the great conjugation of
decoded flows is so thin that one is left with the impression that
capitalism was continually being born, disappearing and reviving at
every crossroads of history. And the correlation between 3 and 1 is also
a necessary one: the modern States of the third age do indeed restore
the most absolute of empires, a new “megamachine,” whatever the novelty
or timeliness of its now immanent form; they do this by realizing an
axiomatic that functions as much by machinic enslavement as by social
subjection. Capitalism has reawakened the \emph{Urstaat}, and given it new
strength.\footnote{See Lewis Mumford, \emph{The Pentagon of Power}, vol. 2 of \emph{The Myth of the Machine} (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 236–360 (a comparison of the “old megamachine” and the modern one; despite writing, the old megamachine notably suffered from difficulties in “communication”).}


Not only, as Hegel said, does every State imply “the essential moments
of its existence as a State,” but there is a unique moment, in the sense
of a coupling of forces, and this moment of the State is capture, bond,
knot, \emph{nexum}, magical capture. Must we speak of a second pole, which
would operate instead by pact and contract? Is this not instead that
other force, with capture as the unique moment of coupling? For the two
forces are the overcoding of coded flows, and the treatment of decoded
flows. The contract is a juridical expression of the second aspect: it
appears as the proceeding of subjectification, the outcome of which is
subjection. And the contract must be pushed to the extreme; in other
words, it is no longer concluded between two people but between self and
self, within the same person—\emph{Ich} = \emph{Ich}—as
subjected and sovereign. The extreme perversion of the contract,
reinstating the purest of knots. The knot, bond, capture, thus travel a
long history: first, the objective, imperial collective bond; then all
of the forms of subjective personal bonds; finally, the Subject that
binds itself, and in so doing renews the most magical operation, “a
cosmopolitan, universal energy which overflows every restriction and
bond so as to establish itself instead as the sole bond.”\footnote{Marx, \emph{Manuscripts of 1844}, p. 129.} Even
subjection is only a relay for the fundamental moment of the State,
namely, civil capture or machinic enslavement. The State is assuredly
not the locus of liberty, nor the agent of a forced servitude or war
capture. Should we then speak of “voluntary servitude”? This is like the
expression “magical capture”: its only merit is to underline the
apparent mystery. There is a machinic enslavement, about which it could
be said in each case that it presupposes itself, that it appears as
preaccomplished; this machinic enslavement is no more “voluntary” than
it is “forced.”



\begin{quote}


**PROPOSITION XIV*. \emph{Axiomatics and the presentday situation.}



\end{quote}


Politics is by no means an apodictic science. It proceeds by
experimentation, groping in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances,
retreats. The factors of decision and prediction are limited. It is an
absurdity to postulate a world supergovernment that makes the final
decisions. No one is even capable of predicting the growth in the money
supply. Similarly, the States are affected by all kinds of coefficients
of uncertainty and unpredictability. John Kenneth Galbraith and François
Châtelet have formulated the concept of constant and decisive errors,
which make the glory of men of State no less than their rare successful
evaluations. But that is just one more reason to make a connection
between politics and axiomatics. For in science an axiomatic is not at
all a transcendent, autonomous, and decision-making power opposed to
experimentation and intuition. On the one hand, it has its own gropings
in the dark, experimentations, modes of intuition. Axioms being
independent of each other, can they be added, and up to what point (a
saturated system)? Can they be withdrawn (a “weakened” system)? On the
other hand, it is of the nature of axiomatics to come up against
**so-called undecidable propositions*, to confront \emph{necessarily higher
powers} that it cannot master.\footnote{Historically, these have been the major problems in axiomatics: “undecidable” propositions (contradictory statements are also nondemonstrable); the powers of infinite sets, which by nature elude axiomatic treatment (“the continuum, for example, cannot be conceived axiomatically in its structural specificity since every axiomatization one can give it will rely on a denumerable model”). See Blanché, \emph{L’axiomatique}, p. 80.} Finally, axiomatics does not
constitute the cutting edge of science; it is much more a stopping
point, a reordering that prevents decoded semiotic flows in physics and
mathematics from escaping in all directions. The great axiomaticians are
the men of State of science, who seal off the lines of flight that are
so frequent in mathematics, who would impose a new \emph{nexum}, if only a
temporary one, and who lay down the official policies of science. They
are the heirs of the theorematic conception of geometry. When
intuitionism opposed axiomatics, it was not only in the name of
intuition, of construction and creation, but also in the name of a
calculus of problems, a problematic conception of science that was not
less abstract but implied an entirely different abstract machine, one
working in the undecidable and the fugitive.\footnote{The “intuitionist” school (Brouwer, Heytig, Griss, Bouligand, etc.) is of great importance in mathematics, not because it asserted the irreducible rights of intuition, or even because it elaborated a very novel constructivism, but because it developed a conception of \emph{problems}, and of a \emph{calculus of problems} that intrinsically rivals axiomatics and proceeds by other rules (notably with regard to the excluded middle).} It is the real
characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and
present-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense. But it is
precisely for this reason that nothing is played out in advance. From
this standpoint, we may present a summary sketch of the “givens.”



\bigskip


1. \emph{Addition, subtraction}. The axioms of capitalism are obviously not
theoretical propositions, or ideological formulas, but operative
statements that constitute the semiological form of Capital and that
enter as component parts into assemblages of production, circulation,
and consumption. The axioms are primary statements, which do not derive
from or depend upon another statement. In this sense, a flow can be the
object of one or several axioms (with the set of all axioms constituting
the conjugation of the flows); but it can also lack any axioms of its
own, its treatment being only a consequence of other axioms; finally, it
can remain out of bounds, evolve without limits, be left in the state of
an “untamed” variation in the system. There is a tendency within
capitalism continually to add more axioms. After the end of World War I,
the joint influence of the world depression and the Russian Revolution
forced capitalism to multiply its axioms, to invent new ones dealing
with the working class, employment, union organization, social
institutions, the role of the State, the foreign and domestic markets.
Keynesian economics and the New Deal were axiom laboratories. Examples
of the creation of new axioms after the Second World War: the Marshall
Plan, forms of assistance and lending, transformations in the monetary
system. It is not only in periods of expansion or recovery that axioms
multiply. What makes the axiomatic vary, in relation to the States, is
the distinction and relation between the foreign and domestic markets.
There is a multiplication of axioms most notably when an integrated
domestic market is being organized to meet the requirements of the
foreign market. Axioms for the young, for the old, for women, etc. A
very general pole of the State, “social democracy,” can be defined by
this tendency to add, invent axioms in relation to spheres of investment
and sources of profit: the question is not that of freedom and
constraint, nor of centralism and decentralization, but of the manner in
which one masters the flows. In this case, they are mastered by the
multiplication of directing axioms. The opposite tendency is no less a
part of capitalism: the tendency to withdraw, subtract axioms. One falls
back on a very small number of axioms regulating the dominant flows,
while the other flows are given a derivative, consequential status
(defined by the “theorems” ensuing from the axioms), or are left in an
untamed state that does not preclude the brutal intervention of State
power, quite the contrary. The “totalitarianism” pole of the State
incarnates this tendency to restrict the number of axioms, and operates
by the exclusive promotion of the foreign sector: the appeal to foreign
sources of capital, the rise of industries aimed at the exportation of
foodstuffs or raw materials, the collapse of the domestic market. The
totalitarian State is not a maximum State but rather, following
Virilio’s formulation, the \emph{minimum State} of anarcho-capitalism
(cf. Chile). At the limit, the only axioms that are retained concern the
equilibrium of the foreign sector, reserve levels and the inflation
rate; “the population is no longer a given, it has become a
consequence.” As for untamed evolutions, they appear among other places
in the variations in the employment level, in the phenomena of exodus
from the countryside, shantytown-urbanization, etc.


The case of fascism (“national socialism”) is distinct from
totalitarianism. It coincides with the totalitarian pole in the collapse
of the domestic market and the reduction in the number of axioms.
However, the promotion of the foreign sector does not at all take place
through an appeal to foreign sources of capital and through export
industries, but through a war economy, which entails an expansionism
foreign to totalitarianism and an autonomous fabrication of capital. As
for the domestic market, it is effectuated in a specific production of
the \emph{Ersatz}. This means that fascism, too, brings a proliferation of
axioms, which explains why it has often been compared to a Keynesian
economy. Fascism, however, is a tautological or fictitious
proliferation, a multiplication by subtraction; this makes it a very
special case.\footnote{In our opinion, one of the best analyses of the Nazi economy is Jean-Pierre Faye’s \emph{Langages totalitaires} (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 664–676. Faye shows that Nazism is indeed a totalitarianism, precisely because of its minimal State, its refusal of any statification of the economy, its reduction of wages, its hostility toward large-scale public works. But at the same time, he shows that Nazism carries out the creation of domestic capital, strategic construction, and the building of an arms industry, which makes it rival or sometimes even meld with an economy of socialist leaning (“something that seems to resemble the Swedish loans praised by Myrdal with a view to large-scale projects, but which is in fact and immediately its opposite, the writing of an arms economy and a war economy,” and the corresponding difference between “the public works entrepreneur” and the “army supplier”; pp. 668, 674).}



\bigskip


2. \emph{Saturation}. Can we express the distribution of the two opposite
tendencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point
of inversion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. If Marx
demonstrated the functioning of capitalism as an axiomatic, it was above
all in the famous chapter on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Capitalism is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent
ones. It would like for us to believe that it confronts the limits of
the Universe, the extreme limit of resources and energy. But all it
confronts are its own limits (the periodic depreciation of existing
capital); all it repels or displaces are its own limits (the formation
of new capital, in new industries with a high profit rate). This is the
history of oil and nuclear power. And it does both at once: capitalism
confronts its own limits and simultaneously displaces them, setting them
down again farther along. It could be said that the totalitarian
tendency to restrict the number of axioms corresponds to the
confrontation with the limits, whereas the social democratic tendency
corresponds to the displacement of the limits. But one does not come
without the other, either in two different but coexistent places or in
two successive but closely linked moments; they always have a hold on
each other, or are even contained in each other, constituting the same
axiomatic. A typical example would be present-day Brazil, with its
ambiguous alternative “totalitarianism-social democracy.” As a general
rule, the limits are all the more mobile if axioms are subtracted in one
place but added elsewhere.


It would be an error to take a disinterested stance toward struggle on
the level of the axioms. It is sometimes thought that every axiom, in
capitalism or in one of its States, constitutes a “recuperation.” But
this disenchanted concept is not a good one. The constant readjustments
of the capitalist axiomatic, in other words, the additions (the
enunciation of new axioms) and the withdrawals (the creation of
exclusive axioms), are the object of struggles in no way confined to the
technocracy. Everywhere, the workers’ struggles overspill the framework
of the capitalist enterprises, which imply for the most part derivative
propositions. The struggles bear directly upon the axioms that preside
over the State’s public spending, or that even concern a specific
international organization (for example, a multinational corporation can
at will plan the liquidation of a factory inside a country). The
resulting danger of a worldwide labor bureaucracy or technocracy taking
charge of these problems can be warded off only to the extent that local
struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the
precise point of their insertion in the field of immanence (the
potential of the rural world in this respect). There is always a
fundamental difference between living flows and the axioms that
subordinate them to centers of control and decision making, that make a
given segment correspond to them, which measure their quanta. But the
pressure of the living flows, and of the problems they pose and impose,
must be exerted inside the axiomatic, as much in order to fight the
totalitarian reductions as to anticipate and precipitate the additions,
to orient them and prevent their technocratic perversion.



\bigskip


3. \emph{Models, isomorphy}. In principle, all States are isomorphic; in
other words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of
a sole external world market. But the first question is whether
isomorphy implies a homogeneity or even a homogenization of States. The
answer is yes, as can be seen in present-day Europe with respect to
justice and the police, the highway code, the circulation of
commodities, production costs, etc. But this is true only insofar as
there is a tendency toward a single integrated domestic market.
Otherwise, isomorphy in no way implies homogeneity: there is isomorphy,
but heterogeneity, between totalitarian and social democratic States
wherever the mode of production is the same. The general rules regarding
this are as follows: the consistency, \emph{the totality} (\emph{l’ensemble}), \emph{or
unity of the axiomatic} are defined by capital as a “right” or relation
of production (for the market); \emph{the respective independence of the
axioms} in no way contradicts this totality but derives from the
divisions or sectors of the capitalist mode of production; \emph{the
isomorphy of the models}, with the two poles of addition and
subtraction, depends on how the domestic and foreign markets are
distributed in each case.


But this is only a first bipolarity, applying to the States that are
located at the center and are under the capitalist mode of production. A
second, West-East, bipolarity has been imposed on the States of the
center, that of the capitalist States and the bureaucratic socialist
States. Although this new distinction may share certain traits of the
first (the so-called socialist States being assimilable to the
totalitarian States), the problem lies elsewhere. The numerous
“convergence” theories that attempt to demonstrate a certain
homogenization of the States of the East and West are not very
convincing. Even isomorphism is not applicable: there is a real
heteromorphy, not only because the mode of production is not capitalist,
but also because the relation of production is not Capital (rather, it
is the Plan). If the socialist States are nevertheless still models of
realization for the capitalist axiomatic, it is due to the existence of
a single external world market, which remains the deciding factor here,
even above and beyond the relations of production from which it results.
It can even happen that the \emph{socialist bureaucratic plan(e)} takes on a
parasitic function in relation to the \emph{plan(e) of capital}, which
manifests a greater creativity, of the “virus” type.


Finally, the third fundamental bipolarity is the center and the
periphery (North-South). In view of the respective independence of the
axioms, we can join Samir Amin in saying that the axioms of the
periphery differ from those of the center.\footnote{See the critical list of the axioms of the periphery presented by Samir Amin, \emph{Accumulation on a Worldscale}, pp. 390–394.} And here again, the
difference and independence of the axioms in no way compromise the
consistency of the overall axiomatic. On the contrary, central
capitalism needs the periphery constituted by the Third World, where it
locates a large part of its most modern industries; it does not just
invest capital in these industries, but is also furnished with capital
by them. The issue of the dependence of the Third World States is of
course an obvious one, but not the most important one (it was bequeathed
by the old colonialism). It is obvious that having independent axioms
has never guaranteed the independence of States; rather it ensures an
international division of labor. The important question, once again, is
that of isomorphy in relation to the worldwide axiomatic. To a large
extent, there is isomorphy between the United States and the bloodiest
of the South American tyrannies (or between France, England, and West
Germany and certain African States). The center-periphery bipolarity,
States of the center and States of the Third World, may well exhibit
some of the distinguishing traits of the two preceding bipolarities, but
it also evades them, raising other problems. Throughout a vast portion
of the Third World, the general relation of production is capital—even
throughout the entire Third World, in the sense that the socialized
sector may utilize that relation, adopting it in this case. But the mode
of production is not necessarily capitalist, either in the so-called
archaic or transitional forms, or in the most productive, highly
industrialized sectors. This indeed represents a third case, included in
the worldwide axiomatic: when capital acts as the relation of production
but in noncapitalist modes of production. We may therefore speak of a
polymorphy of the Third World States in relation to the States of the
center. And this dimension of the axiomatic is no less necessary than
the others; it is even much more necessary, for the heteromorphy of the
so-called socialist States was imposed upon capitalism, which digested
it as best it could, whereas the polymorphy of the Third World States is
partially organized by the center, as an axiom providing a substitute
for colonization.


We are always brought back to the literal question of the models of
realization of a worldwide axiomatic: there is in principle an
**isomorphy* of the States of the center, a \emph{heteromorphy} imposed by the
bureaucratic socialist State, and a \emph{polymorphy} organized by the Third
World States. Once again, it would be absurd to think that the insertion
of popular movements is condemned in advance throughout this field of
immanence, and to assume that there are either “good” States that are
democratic, social democratic or at the other extreme socialist, or that
on the contrary all States are equivalent and homogeneous.



\bigskip


4. \emph{Power} (\emph{puissance}). Let us suppose that the axiomatic necessarily
marshals a power higher than the one it treats, in other words, than
that of the aggregates serving as its models. This is like a power of
the continuum, tied to the axiomatic but exceeding it. We immediately
recognize this power as a power of destruction, of war, a power
incarnated in financial, industrial, and military technological
complexes that are in continuity with one another. On the one hand, war
clearly follows the same movement as capitalism: In the same way as the
proportion of constant capital keeps growing, war becomes increasingly a
“war of matériel” in which the human being no longer even represents a
variable capital of subjection, but is instead a pure element of
machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and this is the main point, the
growing importance of constant capital in the axiomatic means that the
depreciation of existing capital and the formation of new capital assume
a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the route of a war machine now
incarnated in the complexes: the complexes actively contribute to the
redistributions of the world necessary for the exploitation of maritime
and planetary resources. There is a continuous “threshold” of power that
accompanies in every instance the shifting of the axiomatic’s limits; it
is as though the power of war always supersaturated the system’s
saturation, and was its necessary condition.


The classical conflicts among the States of the center (as well as
peripheral colonization) have been joined, or rather replaced, by two
great conflictual lines, between West and East and North and South;
these lines intersect and together cover everything. But the
overarmament of the West and East not only leaves the reality of local
wars entirely intact and gives them a new force and new stakes; it not
only founds the “apocalyptic” possibility of a direct confrontation
along the two great axes; it also seems that the war machine takes on a
specific supplementary meaning: industrial, political, judicial, etc. It
is indeed true that the States, throughout their history, have
repeatedly appropriated the war machine; and it was after the war
machine was appropriated that war, its preparation and effectuation,
became the exclusive object of the machine, but as a more or less
“limited” war. As for the aim, it remained the political aim of the
States. The various factors that tended to make war a “total war,” most
notably the fascist factor, marked the beginning of an inversion of the
movement: as though the States, through the war they waged against one
another, had after a long period of appropriation reconstituted an
autonomous war machine. But this unchained or liberated war machine
continued to have as its object war in action, a now total, unlimited
kind of war. The entire fascist economy became a war economy, but the
war economy still needed total war as its object. For this reason,
fascist war still fell under Clausewitz’s formula, “the continuation of
politics by other means,” even though those other means had become
exclusive, in other words, the political aim had entered into
contradiction with the object (hence Virilio’s idea that the fascist
State was a “suicidal” State more than a totalitarian one). It was only
after World War II that the automatization, then automation of the war
machine had their true effect. The war machine, the new antagonisms
traversing it considered, no longer had war as its exclusive object but
took in charge and as its object peace, politics, the world order, in
short, the aim. This is where the inversion of Clausewitz’s formula
comes in: it is politics that becomes the continuation of war; \emph{it is
peace that technologically frees the unlimited material process of total
war}. War ceases to be the materialization of the war machine; \emph{the war
machine itself becomes materialized war}. In this sense, there was no
longer a need for fascism. The Fascists were only child precursors, and
the absolute peace of survival succeeded where total war had failed. The
Third World War was already upon us. The war machine reigned over the
entire axiomatic like the power of the continuum that surrounded the
“world-economy,” and it put all the parts of the universe in contact.
The world became a smooth space again (sea, air, atmosphere), over which
reigned a single war machine, even when it opposed its own parts. Wars
had become a part of peace. More than that, the States no longer
appropriated the war machine; they reconstituted a war machine of which
they themselves were only the parts.


Of all the authors who have developed an apocalyptic or millenarian
sense, it is to Paul Virilio’s credit to have emphasized these five
rigorous points: that the war machine finds its new object in the
absolute peace of terror or deterrence; that it performs a
technoscientific “capitalization”; that this war machine is terrifying
not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as by
blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the real, very special
kind of peace it promotes and has already installed; that this war
machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity with the
requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the “unspecified enemy,”
domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world);
that there arose from this a new conception of security as materialized
war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed
catastrophe.\footnote{Paul Virilio, \emph{L’insécurité du territoire} (Paris: Stock, 1975); Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986); \emph{Défense populaire et luttes écologiques} (Paris: Galilee, 1978), forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e) as \emph{Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles}: it is precisely beyond fascism and total war that the war machine finds its complete object, in the menacing peace of nuclear deterrence. It is there that the reversal of Clausewitz’s formula takes on a concrete meaning, at the same time as State politics tends to wither and the war machine takes over a maximum of civil functions (“place the whole of civil society under the regime of military security,” “disqualify the whole of the planet’s habitat by stripping the peoples of their quality of inhabitant,” “erase the distinction between wartime and peacetime”; see the role of the media in this respect). Certain European police forces could be taken as an example, when they claim the right to “shoot on sight”: they cease to be a cogwheel in the State apparatus and become pieces in a war machine.}



\bigskip


5. \emph{The included middle}. No one has demonstrated more convincingly than
Braudel that the capitalist axiomatic requires a center and that this
center was constituted in the North, at the outcome of a long historical
process: “There can only be a world-economy when the mesh of the network
is sufficiently fine, and when exchange is regular and voluminous enough
to give rise to a central zone.”\footnote{Braudel shows how this center of gravity formed in northern Europe, but at the outcome of movements that, starting in the ninth and tenth centuries, put the European spaces of the North and the South in competition or rivalry with one another (this problem is not to be confused with that of the town-form and State-form, but does intersect with it). See “Naissance d’une économie-monde,” \emph{Urbi}, no. 1 (September 1979), pp. 3–20.} Many authors believe on this
account that the North-South, center-periphery axis is more important
today than the West-East axis, and even principally determines it. This
is expressed in a common thesis, taken up and developed by Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing: the more equilibrated things become at the center
between the West and the East, beginning with the equilibrium of
overarmament, the more they become disequilibrated or “destabilized”
from North to South and destabilize the central equilibrium. It is clear
that in these formulas the South is an abstract term designating the
Third World or the periphery; and even that there are Souths or Third
Worlds inside the center. It is also clear that this destabilization is
not accidental but is a (theorematic) consequence of the axioms of
capitalism, principally of the axiom called \emph{unequal exchange}, which is
indispensable to capitalism’s functioning. This formula is therefore the
modern version of the oldest formula, which already obtained in the
archaic empires under different conditions. The more the archaic empire
overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows that turned
back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded flows
enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the
periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of
resolving or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the
periphery).


The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world
economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of
population, the flow of food, and the urban flow. The situation seems
inextricable because the axiomatic never ceases to create all of these
problems, while at the same time its axioms, even multiplied, deny it
the means of resolving them (for example, the circulation and
distribution that would make it possible to feed the world). Even a
social democracy adapted to the Third World surely does not undertake to
integrate the whole poverty-stricken population into the domestic
market; what it does, rather, is to effect the class rupture that will
select the integratable elements. And the States of the center deal not
only with the Third World, each of them has not only an external Third
World, but there are internal Third Worlds that rise up within them and
work them from the inside. It could even be said in certain respects
that the periphery and the center exchange determinations: a
deterritorialization of the center, a decoding of the center in relation
to national and territorial aggregates, cause the peripheral formations
to become true centers of investment, while the central formations
peripheralize. This simultaneously strengthens and relativizes Samir
Amin’s theses. The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry
and highly industrialized agriculture at the periphery, provisionally
reserving for the center so-called postindustrial activities
(automation, electronics, information technologies, the conquest of
space, overarmament, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of
underdevelopment inside the center, internal Third Worlds, internal
Souths. “Masses” of the population are abandoned to erratic work
(subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy),
and their official subsistence is assured only by State allocations and
wages subject to interruption. It is to the credit of thinkers like
Antonio Negri to have formulated, on the basis of the exemplary case of
Italy, the theory of this internal margin, which tends increasingly to
merge the students with the \emph{emarginati}.\footnote{A movement in Marxist research formed on the basis of the work of Mario Tronti (\emph{Operai e capitate} [Turin: G. Einaudi, 1971]; French translation, \emph{Ouvriers et capital} [Paris: Bourgois, 1977]), then that of Italian autonomy and Antonio Negri, whose aim was to analyze the new forms of work and the struggle against work. It was a question of showing simultaneously: (1) that the struggle against work is not an accidental or “marginal” phenomenon in capitalism, but one essential to the composition of capital (the growth in the proportion of constant capital), and, (2) that this phenomenon engenders a new type of worldwide struggle—workers’ struggles, popular struggles, ethnic struggles—in every domain. See Antonio Negri, especially \emph{Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse}, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizion Viano (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1984); Karl Heinz Roth, \emph{Die “andere” Arbeiterbewegung} (Munich: Trikont, 1974); and the current work in France of Yann Moulier, Alain and Daniele Guillerm, Benjamin Coriat, etc. [\emph{TRANS}: The best sources on the autonomy movement in English are \emph{Italy: Autonomia. Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e)}, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980) and \emph{Autonomy and the Crisis. Italian Marxist Texts of ’the Theory and Praxis of a Class Movement: 1964–1979} (London: Red Notes and CSE Books, 1979). \emph{Marx Beyond Marx} includes a lengthy epilogue by Michael Ryan summarizing Negri’s major works and a bibliography of writings on the Italian movement available in English.]} These phenomena confirm
the difference between the new machinic enslavement and classical
subjection. For subjection remained centered on labor and involved a
bipolar organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat. In
enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital, on the other
hand, labor seems to have splintered in two directions: intensive
surplus labor that no longer even takes the route of labor, and
extensive labor that has become erratic and floating. The totalitarian
tendency to abandon axioms of employment and the social democratic
tendency to multiply statutes can combine here, but always in order to
effect class ruptures. The opposition between the axiomatic and the
flows it does not succeed in mastering becomes all the more accentuated.



\bigskip


6. \emph{Minorities}. Ours is becoming the age of minorities. We have seen
several times that minorities are not necessarily defined by the
smallness of their numbers but rather by becoming or a line of
fluctuation, in other words, by the gap that separates them from this or
that axiom constituting a redundant majority (“Ulysses, or today’s
average, urban European”; or as Yann Moulier says, “the national Worker,
qualified, male and over thirty-five”). A minority can be small in
number; but it can also be the largest in number, constitute an
absolute, indefinite majority. That is the situation when authors, even
those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great capitalist warning cry:
in twenty years, “whites” will form only 12 percent of the world
population \dots{} Thus they are not content to say that the majority will
change, or has already changed, but say that it is impinged upon by a
nondenumerable and proliferating minority that threatens to destroy the
very concept of majority, in other words, the majority as an axiom. And
the curious concept of nonwhite does not in fact constitute a
denumerable set. What defines a minority, then, is not the number but
the relations internal to the number. A minority can be numerous, or
even infinite; so can a majority. What distinguishes them is that in the
case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set
that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the
minority is defined as a nondenumerable set, however many elements it
may have. What characterizes the nondenumerable is neither the set nor
its elements; rather, it is the \emph{connection}, the “and” produced between
elements, between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them
and constitutes a line of flight. The axiomatic manipulates only
denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas the minorities constitute
“fuzzy,” nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, “masses,”
multiplicities of escape and flux.


Whether it be the infinite set of the nonwhites of the periphery, or the
restricted set of the Basques, Corsicans, etc., everywhere we look we
see the conditions for a worldwide movement: the minorities recreate
“nationalitarian” phenomena that the nation-states had been charged with
controlling and quashing. The bureaucratic socialist sector is certainly
not spared by these movements, and as Amalrik said, the dissidents are
nothing, or serve only as pawns in international politics, if they are
abstracted from the minorities working the USSR. It matters little that
the minorities are incapable of constituting viable States from the
point of view of the axiomatic and the market, since in the long run
they promote compositions that do not pass by way of the capitalist
economy any more than they do the State-form. The response of the
States, or of the axiomatic, may obviously be to accord the minorities
regional or federal or statutory autonomy, in short, to add axioms. But
this is not the problem: this operation consists only in translating the
minorities into denumerable sets or subsets, which would enter as
elements into the majority, which could be counted among the majority.
The same applies for a status accorded to women, young people, erratic
workers, etc. One could even imagine, in blood and crisis, a more
radical reversal that would make the white world the periphery of a
yellow world; there would doubtless be an entirely different axiomatic.
But what we are talking about is something else, something even that
would not resolve: women, nonmen, as a minority, as a nondenumerable
flow or set, would receive no adequate expression by becoming elements
of the majority, in other words, by becoming a denumerable finite set.
Nonwhites would receive no adequate expression by becoming a new yellow
or black majority, an infinite denumerable set. What is proper to the
minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable, even if that
minority is composed of a single member. That is the formula for
multiplicities. Minority as a universal figure, or
becoming-everybody\Slash{}everything (\emph{devenir tout le monde}). Woman: we all
have to become that, whether we are male or female. Nonwhite: we all
have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.


Once again, this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the
axioms is without importance; on the contrary, it is determining (at the
most diverse levels: women’s struggle for the vote, for abortion, for
jobs; the struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the
Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in the
East or West\dots{}). But there is also always a sign to indicate that these
struggles are the index of another, coexistent combat. However modest
the demand, it always constitutes a point that the axiomatic cannot
tolerate: when people demand to formulate their problems themselves, and
to determine at least the particular conditions under which they can
receive a more general solution (hold to the \emph{Particular} as an
innovative form). It is always astounding to see the same story
repeated: the modesty of the minorities’ initial demands, coupled with
the impotence of the axiomatic to resolve the slightest corresponding
problem. In short, the struggle around axioms is most important when it
manifests, itself opens, the gap between two types of propositions,
propositions of flow and propositions of axioms. The power of the
minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make
themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the
necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear
the force of the nondenumerable sets, however small they may be, against
the denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed,
even they if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The
issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism
versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of
nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a
calculus may have its own compositions, organizations, even
centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the
axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of minorities.



\bigskip


7. \emph{Undecidable propositions}. It will be objected that the axiomatic
itself marshals the power of a nondenumerable infinite set: precisely
that of the war machine. It seems difficult, however, to use the war
machine in the general “treatment” of minorities without triggering the
absolute war it is supposed to ward off. We have seen the war machine
institute quantitative and qualitative processes, miniaturizations, and
adaptations that enable it to graduate its attacks or counterattacks,
each time as a function of the nature of the “unspecified enemy”
(individuals, groups, peoples\dots{}). But under these conditions, the
capitalist axiomatic continually produces and reproduces what the war
machine tries to exterminate. Even the organization of famine multiplies
the starving as much as it kills them. Even the organization of \emph{camps},
an area where the socialist sector has dreadfully distinguished itself,
does not assure the radical solution of which power dreams. The
extermination of a minority engenders a minority of that minority.
However relentless the killing, it is relatively difficult to liquidate
a people or a group, even in the Third World, once it has enough
connections with elements of the axiomatic. In still other respects, it
can be predicted that the impending problems of the economy, which will
consist in reforming capital in relation to new resources (undersea oil,
metallic nodules, foodstuffs), will require not only a redistribution of
the world that will mobilize the worldwide war machine and train its
parts on the new objectives; we will also probably see the formation or
re-formation of minoritarian aggregates, in relation to the affected
regions.


Generally speaking, minorities do not receive a better solution of their
problem by integration, even with axioms, statutes, autonomies,
independences. Their tactics necessarily go that route. But if they are
revolutionary, it is because they carry within them a deeper movement
that challenges the worldwide axiomatic. The power of minority, of
particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the
proletariat. But as long as the working class defines itself by an
acquired status, or even by a theoretically conquered State, it appears
only as “capital,” a part of capital (variable capital), and does not
leave the \emph{plan(e) of capital}. At best, the plan(e) becomes
bureaucratic. On the other hand, it is by leaving the plan(e) of
capital, and never ceasing to leave it, that a mass becomes increasingly
revolutionary and destroys the dominant equilibrium of the denumerable
sets.\footnote{This is one of the essential theses of Tronti, who defined the new conceptions of the “mass-worker” and of the relation to work: “To struggle against capital, the working class must fight against itself insofar as it is capital; this is the maximal stage of contradiction, not for the workers, but for the capitalists\dots{}. The plan of capital begins to run backward, not as a \emph{social development}, but as a \emph{revolutionary process}.” See \emph{Ouvriers et capital}, p. 322; this is what Negri has called the “crisis of the planning state” (\emph{Crisi dello Stato-plano} [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974]).} It is hard to see what an Amazon-State would be, a women’s
State, or a State of erratic workers, a State of the “refusal” of work.
If minorities do not constitute viable States culturally, politically,
economically, it is because the State-form is not appropriate to them,
nor the axiomatic of capital, nor the corresponding culture. We have
often seen capitalism maintain and organize inviable States, according
to its needs, and for the precise purpose of crushing minorities. The
minorities issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining
socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world
war machine by other means.


If the two solutions of extermination and integration hardly seem
possible, it is due to the deepest law of capitalism: it continually
sets and then repels its own limits, but in so doing gives rise to
numerous flows in all directions that escape its axiomatic. \emph{At the same
time as capitalism is effectuated in the denumerable sets serving as its
models, it necessarily constitutes nondenumerable sets that cut across
and disrupt those models}. It does not effect the “conjugation” of the
deterritorialized and decoded flows without those flows forging farther
ahead; without their escaping both the axiomatic that conjugates them
and the models that reterritorialize them; without their tending to
enter into “connections” that delineate a new Land; without their
constituting a war machine whose aim is neither the war of extermination
nor the peace of generalized terror, but revolutionary movement (the
connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable aggregates, the
becoming-minoritarian of everybody\Slash{}everything). This is not a dispersion
or a fragmentation: we are instead back at \emph{the opposition between, on
the one hand, a plane of consistency and, on the other, the plane of
organization and development of capital and the bureaucratic socialist
plane}. There is in each case a constructivism, a “diagrammatism,”
operating by the determination of the conditions of the problem and by
transversal links between problems: it opposes both the automation of
the capitalist axioms and bureaucratic programming. From this
standpoint, when we talk about “undecidable propositions,” we are not
referring to the uncertainty of the results, which is necessarily a part
of every system. We are referring, on the contrary, to the coexistence
and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which
never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves
connectable. The undecidable is the germ and locus par excellence of
revolutionary decisions. Some people invoke the high technology of the
world system of enslavement; but even, and especially, this machinic
enslavement abounds in undecidable propositions and movements that, far
from belonging to a domain of knowledge reserved for sworn specialists,
provides so many weapons for the becoming of everybody\Slash{}everything,
becoming-radio, becoming-electronic, becoming-molecular\dots{}\footnote{This is another aspect of the present-day situation: in addition to the new struggles tied to work and the evolution in work, there is the entire domain of what are called “alternative practices” and the construction of such practices (pirate radio stations would be the simplest example; other examples are urban community networks, the alternative to psychiatry, etc.). On all these points, and the link between the two aspects, see Franco Berardi Bifo, \emph{Finalemente il cielo e caduto sulla terra} (Milan: Squilibri, 1978); and \emph{Les Untorelli, Recherches}, no. 30 (1977) (special issue on autonomia).} Every
struggle is a function of all of these undecidable propositions and
constructs \emph{revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations
of the axiomatic}.

\chapter{14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-14}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-14}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-52.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Quilt}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


Smooth space and striated space—nomad space and sedentary space—the
space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the
State apparatus—are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a
simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a
much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of
the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done
that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist
only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated,
transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being
reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes
even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two
can happen simultaneously. But the de facto mixes do not preclude a de
jure, or abstract, distinction between the two spaces. That there is
such a distinction is what accounts for the fact that the two spaces do
not communicate with each other in the same way: it is the de jure
distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de facto mix
and the direction or meaning of the mix (is a smooth space captured,
enveloped by a striated space, or does a striated space dissolve into a
smooth space, allow a smooth space to develop?). This raises a number of
simultaneous questions: the simple oppositions between the two spaces;
the complex differences; the de facto mixes, and the passages from one
to another; the principles of the mixture, which are not at all
symmetrical, sometimes causing a passage from the smooth to the
striated, sometimes from the striated to the smooth, according to
entirely different movements. We must therefore envision a certain
number of models, which would be like various aspects of the two spaces
and the relations between them.

\section{The Technological Model}


A fabric presents in principle a certain number of characteristics that
permit us to define it as a striated space. First, it is constituted by
two kinds of parallel elements; in the simplest case, there are vertical
and horizontal elements, and the two intertwine, intersect
perpendicularly. Second, the two kinds of elements have different
functions; one is fixed, the other mobile, passing above and beneath the
fixed. Leroi-Gourhan has analyzed this particular figure of “supple
solids” in basketry and weaving: stake and thread, warp and woof.\footnote{André Leroi-Gourhan, \emph{L’homme et la matière} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971), pp. 244ff. (and the opposition between fabric and felt).}
Third, a striated space of this kind is necessarily delimited, closed on
at least one side: the fabric can be infinite in length but not in
width, which is determined by the frame of the warp; the necessity of a
back and forth motion implies a closed space (circular or cylindrical
figures are themselves closed). Finally, a space of this kind seems
necessarily to have a top and a bottom; even when the warp yarn and woof
yarn are exactly the same in nature, number, and density, weaving
reconstitutes a bottom by placing the knots on one side. Was it not
these characteristics that enabled Plato to use the model of weaving as
the paradigm for “royal science,” in other words, the art of governing
people or operating the State apparatus?


Felt is a supple solid product that proceeds altogether differently, as
an anti-fabric. It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining,
only an entanglement of fibers obtained by fulling (for example, by
rolling the block of fibers back and forth). What becomes entangled are
the microscales of the fibers. An aggregate of intrication of this kind
is in no way \emph{homogeneous}: it is nevertheless smooth, and contrasts
point by point with the space of fabric (it is in principle infinite,
open, and unlimited in every direction; it has neither top nor bottom
nor center; it does not assign fixed and mobile elements but rather
distributes a continuous variation). Even the technologists who express
grave doubts about the nomads’ powers of innovation at least give them
credit for felt: a splendid insulator, an ingenious invention, the raw
material for tents, clothes, and armor among the Turco-Mongols. Of
course, the nomads of Africa and the Maghreb instead treat wool as a
fabric. Although it might entail displacing the opposition, do we not
detect two very different conceptions or even practices of weaving, the
distinction between which would be something like the distinction
between fabric as a whole and felt? For among sedentaries,
clothes-fabric and tapestry-fabric tend to annex the body and exterior
space, respectively, to the immobile house: fabric integrates the body
and the outside into a closed space. On the other hand, the weaving of
the nomad indexes clothing and the house itself to the space of the
outside, to the open smooth space in which the body moves.


There are many interfacings, mixes between felt and fabric. Can we not
displace the opposition yet again? In knitting, for example, the needles
produce a striated space; one of them plays the role of the warp, the
other of the woof, but by turns. Crochet, on the other hand, draws an
open space in all directions, a space that is prolongable in all
directions—but still has a center. A more significant distinction would
be between embroidery, with its central theme or motif, and patchwork,
with its piece-by-piece construction, its infinite, successive additions
of fabric. Of course, embroidery’s variables and constants, fixed and
mobile elements, may be of extraordinary complexity. Patchwork, for its
part, may display equivalents to themes, symmetries, and resonance that
approximate it to embroidery. But the fact remains that its space is not
at all constituted in the same way: there is no center; its basic motif
(“block”) is composed of a single element; the recurrence of this
element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from the harmonies of
embroidery (in particular, in “crazy” patchwork, which fits together
pieces of varying size, shape, and color, and plays on the \emph{texture} of
the fabrics). “She had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying
about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing
odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never
bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and
mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient
puzzle-picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern out
of them without using her scissors, smoothing her colored scraps with
flaccid, putty-colored fingers.”\footnote{William Faulkner, \emph{Sartoris} (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 151.} An amorphous collection of
juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of
ways: we see that patchwork is literally a Riemannian space, or vice
versa. That is why very special work groups were formed for patchwork
fabrication (the importance of the quilting bee in America, and its role
from the standpoint of a women’s collectivity). The smooth space of
patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that “smooth” does not mean
homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an \emph{amorphous}, nonformal space
prefiguring op art.


The story of the quilt is particularly interesting in this connection. A
quilt comprises two layers of fabric stitched together, often with a
filler in between. Thus it is possible for there to be no top or bottom.
If we follow the history of the quilt over a short migration sequence
(the settlers who left Europe for the New World), we see that there is a
shift from a formula dominated by embroidery (so-called “plain” quilts)
to a patchwork formula (“appliqué quilts,” and above all “pieced
quilts”). The first settlers of the seventeenth century brought with
them plain quilts, embroidered and striated spaces of extreme beauty.
But toward the end of the century patchwork technique was developed more
and more, at first due to the scarcity of textiles (leftover fabric,
pieces salvaged from used clothes, remnants taken from the “scrap bag”),
and later due to the popularity of Indian chintz. It is as though a
smooth space emanated, sprang from a striated space, but not without a
correlation between the two, a recapitulation of one in the other, a
furtherance of one through the other. Yet the complex difference
persists. Patchwork, in conformity with migration, whose degree of
affinity with nomadism it shares, is not only named after trajectories,
but “represents” trajectories, becomes inseparable from speed or
movement in an open space.\footnote{On the history of the quilt and patchwork in American immigration, see Jonathan Holstein, \emph{American Pieced Quilts} (New York: Viking, 1973) (with reproductions and bibliography). Holstein does not claim that the quilt is the principal source of American art, but he does note the extent to which the “white on white” of plain quilts and patchwork compositions inspired or gave impetus to certain tendencies in American painting: “We can see in many [quilts] such phenomena as ‘op’ effects, serial images, use of ‘color fields,’ deep understanding of negative space, mannerisms of formal abstraction and the like,” (p. 13).}

\section{The Musical Model}


Pierre Boulez was the first to develop a set of simple oppositions and
complex differences, as well as reciprocal nonsymmetrical correlations,
between smooth and striated space. He created these concepts and words
in the field of music, defining them on several levels precisely in
order to account for the abstract distinction at the same time as the
concrete mixes. In the simplest terms, Boulez says that in a smooth
spacetime one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated
space-time one counts in order to occupy. He makes palpable or
perceptible the difference between nonmetric and metric multiplicities,
directional and dimensional spaces. He renders them sonorous or musical.
Undoubtedly, his personal work is composed of these relations, created
or recreated musically.\footnote{Pierre Boulez, \emph{Boulez on Music Today}, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 83ff. We provide a summary of Boulez’s analysis in the following paragraph.}


At a second level, it can be said that space is susceptible to two kinds
of breaks: one is defined by a standard, whereas the other is irregular
and undetermined, and can be made wherever one wishes to place it. At
yet another level, it can be said that frequencies can be distributed
either in the intervals between breaks, or statistically without breaks.
In the first case, the principle behind the distribution of breaks and
intervals is called a “module”; it may be constant and fixed (a
**straight* striated space), or regularly or irregularly variable
(\emph{curved} striated spaces, termed focalized if the variation of the
module is regular, nonfocalized if it is irregular). When there is no
module, the distribution of frequencies is without break: it is
“statistical,” however small the segment of space may be; it still has
two aspects, however, depending on whether the distribution is equal
(nondirected smooth space), or more or less rare or dense (directed
smooth space). Can we say that in the kind of smooth space that is
without break or module there is no interval? Or, on the contrary, has
everything become interval, intermezzo? The smooth is a nomos, whereas
the striated always has a logos, the octave, for example. Boulez is
concerned with the communication between the two kinds of space, their
alternations and superpositions: how “a strongly directed smooth space
tends to meld with a striated space,” how “a striated space in which the
statistical distribution of the pitches used is \emph{in fact} equal tends to
meld with a smooth space”;\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Boulez, \emph{Boulez on Music Today}, p. 87. Translation modified.]} how the octave can be replaced by
“non-octave-forming scales” that reproduce themselves through a
principle of spiraling; how “texture” can be crafted in such a way as to
lose fixed and homogeneous values, becoming a support for slips in
tempo, displacements of intervals, and \emph{son art} transformations
comparable to the transformations of \emph{op art}.


Returning to the simple opposition, the striated is that which
intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and
succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and
vertical harmonic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation,
continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody
in favor of the production of properly rythmic values, the pure act of
the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.

\section{The Maritime Model}


Of course, there are points, lines, and surfaces in striated space as
well as in smooth space (there are also volumes, but we will leave this
question aside for the time being). In striated space, lines or
trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point
to another. In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are
subordinated to the trajectory. This was already the case among the
nomads for the clothes-tent-space vector of the outside. The dwelling is
subordinated to the journey; inside space conforms to outside space:
tent, igloo, boat. There are stops and trajectories in both the smooth
and the striated. But in smooth space, the stop follows from the
trajectory; once again, the interval takes all, the interval is
substance (forming the basis for rhythmic values).\footnote{On this indexing of the inside and the outside among the nomads of the desert, see Annie Milovanoff, “La seconde peau du nomade,” \emph{Nouvelles littéraires}, no. 2646 (July 27, 1978), p. 18. And on the relations between the igloo and the outside among the nomads of the ice, see Edmund Carpenter, \emph{Eskimo} (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1964).}


In smooth space, the line is therefore a vector, a direction and not a
dimension or metric determination. It is a space constructed by local
operations involving changes in direction. These changes in direction
may be due to the nature of the journey itself, as with the nomads of
the archipelagoes (a case of “directed” smooth space); but it is more
likely to be due to the variability of the goal or point to be attained,
as with the nomads of the desert who head toward local, temporary
vegetation (a “nondirected” smooth space). Directed or not, and
especially in the latter case, smooth space is directional rather than
dimensional or metric. Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities,
far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects,
more than one of properties. It is \emph{haptic} rather than optical
perception. Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter, in the
smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an
intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures
and properties. Intense \emph{Spatium} instead of \emph{Extensio}. A Body without
Organs instead of an organism and organization. Perception in it is
based on symptoms and evaluations rather than measures and properties.
That is why smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise,
forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or
ice.\footnote{See the two convergent descriptions of the space of ice and the space of sand: Edmund Carpenter, \emph{Eskimo}, and Wilfred Thesiger, \emph{Arabian Sands} (London: Longmans, Green, 1959). (In both cases, there is an indifference to astronomy.)} The creaking of ice and the song of the sands. Striated space,
on the contrary, is canopied by the sky as measure and by the measurable
visual qualities deriving from it.


This is where the very special problem of the sea enters in. For the sea
is a smooth space par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the
demands of increasingly strict striation. The problem did not arise in
proximity to land. On the contrary, the striation of the sea was a
result of navigation on the open water. Maritime space was striated as a
function of two astronomical and geographical gains: \emph{bearings},
obtained by a set of calculations based on exact observation of the
stars and the sun; and \emph{the map}, which intertwines meridians and
parallels, longitudes and latitudes, plotting regions known and unknown
onto a grid (like a Mendeleyev table). Must we accept the Portuguese
argument and assign 1440 as the turning point that marked the first
decisive striation, and set the stage for the great discoveries? Rather,
we will follow Pierre Chaunu when he speaks of an extended confrontation
at sea between the smooth and the striated during the course of which
the striated progressively took hold.\footnote{See Pierre Chaunu’s study, \emph{L’expansion européenne du XIIIe au XVe siècle} (Paris: PUF, 1969), pp. 288–305.} For before longitude lines
had been plotted, a very late development, there existed a complex and
empirical nomadic system of navigation based on the wind and noise, the
colors and sounds of the seas; then came a directional, preastronomical
or already astronomical, system of navigation employing only latitude,
in which there was no possibility of “taking one’s bearings,” and which
had only portolanos lacking “translatable generalization” instead of
true maps; finally, improvements upon this primitive astronomical
navigation were made under the very special conditions of the latitudes
of the Indian Ocean, then of the elliptical circuits of the Atlantic
(straight and curved spaces).\footnote{See in particular Paul Adam, “Navigation primitive et navigation astronomique,” in \emph{Les aspects internationaux de la découverte océanique aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Ve Collogue international d’histoire maritime}, ed. Michel Mollat and Paul Adam (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960), pp. 91–112. (See the operative geometry of the pole star.)} It is as if the sea were not only the
archetype of all smooth spaces but the first to undergo a gradual
striation gridding it in one place, then another, on this side and that.
The commercial cities participated in this striation, and were often
innovators; but only the States were capable of carrying it to
completion, of raising it to the global level of a “politics of
science.”\footnote{Guy Beaujouan, “Science livresque et nautique au XVe siècle,” \emph{Les aspects internationaux de la découverte océanique}, pp. 61–90.} A \emph{dimensionality} that subordinated \emph{directionality}, or
superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly entrenched.


This is undoubtedly why the sea, the archetype of smooth space, was also
the archetype of all striations of smooth space: the striation of the
desert, the air, the stratosphere (prompting Virilio to speak of a
“vertical coastline,” as a change in direction). It was at sea that
smooth space was first subjugated and a model found for the laying-out
and imposition of striated space, a model later put to use elsewhere.
This does not contradict Virilio’s other hypothesis: in the aftermath of
striation, the sea reimparts a kind of smooth space, occupied first by
the “fleet in being,” then by the perpetual motion of the strategic
submarine, which outflanks all gridding and invents a neonomadism in the
service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States, which
reconstitute it at the limit of their striations. The sea, then the air
and the stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but, in the strangest
of reversals, it is for the purpose of controlling striated space more
completely.\footnote{See Paul Virilio, \emph{L’insécurité du territoire} (Paris: Stock, 1975), on how the sea reconstitutes a smooth space with the “fleet in being,” etc.; and how a vertical smooth space of aerial and stratospheric domination springs up (especially chapter 4, “Le littoral vertical,” pp. 93–109).} The smooth always possesses a greater power of
deterritorialization than the striated. When examining the new
professions, or new classes even, how can one fail to mention the
military technicians who stare into screens night and day and live for
long stretches in strategic submarines (in the future it will be on
satellites), and the apocalyptic eyes and ears they have fashioned for
themselves, which can barely distinguish any more between a natural
phenomenon, a swarm of locusts, and an “enemy” attack originating at any
given point? All of this serves as a reminder that the smooth itself can
be drawn and occupied by diabolical powers of \emph{organization}; value
judgments aside, this demonstrates above all that there exist two
nonsymmetrical movements, one of which striates the smooth, and one of
which reimparts smooth space on the basis of the striated. (Do not new
smooth spaces, or holey spaces, arise as parries even in relation to the
smooth space of a worldwide organization? Virilio invokes the beginnings
of subterranean habitation in the “mineral layer,” which can take on
very diverse values.)


Let us return to the simple opposition between the smooth and the
striated since we are not yet at the point where we can consider the
dissymmetrical and concrete mixes. The smooth and the striated are
distinguished first of all by an inverse relation between the point and
the line (in the case of the striated, the line is between two points,
while in the smooth, the point is between two lines); and second, by the
nature of the line (smooth-directional, open intervals;
dimensional-striated, closed intervals). Finally, there is a third
difference, concerning the surface or space. In striated space, one
closes off a surface and “allocates” it according to determinate
intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one “distributes” oneself in
an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one’s
crossings (\emph{logos} and \emph{nomos}).\footnote{Emmanuel Laroche, \emph{Histoire de la racine “Nem” en grec ancien} (Paris: Klincksieck, 1949), clearly notes the difference between the ideas of distribution and allocation, between the two linguistic groups concerned, between the two kinds of space, between the “province” pole and the “city” pole.} As simple as this opposition is,
it is not easy to place it. We cannot content ourselves with
establishing an immediate opposition between the smooth ground of the
nomadic animal raiser and the striated land of the sedentary cultivator.
It is evident that the peasant, even the sedentary peasant, participates
fully in the space of the wind, the space of tactile and sonorous
qualities. When the ancient Greeks speak of the open space of the
**nomos*—nondelimited, unpartitioned; the preurban countryside;
mountainside, plateau, steppe—they oppose it not to cultivation, which
may actually be part of it, but to the \emph{polis}, the city, the town. When
Ibn Khaldūn speaks of \emph{badiya}, bedouinism, the term covers cultivators
as well as nomadic animal raisers: he contrasts it to \emph{hadara}, or “city
life.” This clarification is certainly important, but it does not change
much. For from the most ancient of times, from Neolithic and even
Paleolithic times, \emph{it is the town that invents agriculture}: it is
through the actions of the town that the farmers and their striated
space are superposed upon the cultivators operating in a still smooth
space (the transhumant cultivator, half-sedentary or already completely
sedentary). So on this level we reencounter the simple opposition we
began by challenging, between farmers and nomads, striated land and
smooth ground: but only after a detour through the town as a force of
striation. Now not only the sea, desert, steppe, and air are the sites
of a contest between the smooth and the striated, but the earth itself,
depending on whether there is cultivation in nomos-space or agriculture
in city-space. Must we not say the same of the city itself? In contrast
to the sea, the city is the striated space par excellence; the sea is a
smooth space fundamentally open to striation, and the city is the force
of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it back into operation
everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside but also inside
itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of
worldwide organization, but also of a counterattack combining the smooth
and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary,
shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and
fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing
are no longer even relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the city,
and corresponding to Thorn’s mathematical formula: “retroactive
smoothing.”\footnote{This expression is found in René Thorn, who applies it to a continuous variation in which the variable reacts upon its antecedents: \emph{Modèles mathématiques de la morphogenèse} (Paris: 10\Slash{}18, 1974), pp. 218–219.} Condensed force, the potential for counterattack?


In each instance, then, the simple opposition “smooth-striated” gives
rise to far more difficult complications, alternations, and
superpositions. But these complications basically confirm the
distinction, precisely because they bring dissymmetrical movements into
play. For now, it suffices to say that there are two kinds of voyage,
distinguished by the respective role of the point, line, and space.
Goethe travel and Kleist travel? French travel and English (or American)
travel? Tree travel and rhizome travel? But nothing completely
coincides, and everything intermingles, or crosses over. This is because
the differences are not objective: it is possible to live striated on
the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth even in the
cities, to be an urban nomad (for example, a stroll taken by Henry
Miller in Clichy or Brooklyn is a nomadic transit in smooth space; he
makes the city disgorge a patchwork, differentials of speed, delays and
accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations \dots{} The
beatniks owe much to Miller, but they changed direction again, they put
the space outside the cities to new use). Fitzgerald said it long ago:
it is not a question of taking off for the South Seas, that is not what
determines a voyage. There are not only strange voyages in the city but
voyages in place: we are not thinking of drug users, whose experience is
too ambiguous, but of true nomads. We can say of the nomads, following
Toynbee’s suggestion: \emph{they do not move}. They are nomads by dint of not
moving, not migrating, of holding a smooth space that they refuse to
leave, that they leave only in order to conquer and die. Voyage in
place: that is the name of all intensities, even if they also develop in
extension. To think is to voyage; earlier we tried to establish a
theo-noological model of smooth and striated spaces. In short, what
distinguishes the two kinds of voyages is neither a measurable quantity
of movement, nor something that would be only in the mind, but the mode
of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space.
Voyage smoothly or in striation, and think the same way \dots{} But there are
always passages from one to the other, transformations of one within the
other, reversals. In his film, \emph{Kings of the Road}, Wenders intersects
and superposes the paths of two characters; one of them takes a still
educational, memorial, cultural, Goethean journey that is thoroughly
striated, whereas the other has already conquered smooth space, and only
experiments, induces amnesia in the German “desert.” But oddly enough,
it is the former who opens space for himself and performs a kind of
retroactive smoothing, whereas striae reform around the latter, closing
his space again. Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult,
uncertain becoming at that. It is not a question of returning to
preastronomical navigation, nor to the ancient nomads. The confrontation
between the smooth and the striated, the passages, alternations and
superpositions, are under way today, running in the most varied
directions.

\section{The Mathematical Model}


It was a decisive event when the mathematician Riemann uprooted the
multiple from its predicate state and made it a noun, “multiplicity.” It
marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a typology and
topology of multiplicities. Each multiplicity was defined by \emph{n}
determinations; sometimes the determinations were independent of the
situation, and sometimes they depended upon it. For example, the
magnitude of a vertical line between two points can be compared to the
magnitude of a horizontal line between two other points: it is clear
that the multiplicity in this case is metric, that it allows itself to
be striated, and that its determinations are magnitudes. On the other
hand, two sounds of equal pitch and different intensity cannot be
compared to two sounds of equal intensity and different pitch; in this
case, two determinations can be compared only “if one is a part of the
other and if we restrict ourselves to the judgment that the latter is
smaller than the former, without being able to say by how much.”\footnote{On Riemann’s and Helmholtz’s presentations of multiplicity, see Jules Vuillemin, \emph{Philosophie de l’algèbre} (Paris: PUF, 1962), pp. 409ff.}
Multiplicities of this second kind are not metric and allow themselves
to be striated and measured only by indirect means, which they always
resist. They are anexact yet rigorous. Meinong and Russell opposed the
notion of \emph{distance} to that of \emph{magnitude}.\footnote{See Bertrand Russell, \emph{The Principles of Mathematics} (New York: Norton, 1964), chapter 31. The following discussion does not conform to Russell’s theory. An excellent analysis of the notions of distance and magnitude according to Meinong and Russell may be found in Albert Spaier, \emph{La pensée et la quantité} (Paris: Alcan, 1927).} Distances are not,
strictly speaking, indivisible: they can be divided precisely in cases
where the situation of one determination makes it part of another. But
unlike magnitudes, \emph{they cannot divide without changing in nature each
time}. An intensity, for example, is not composed of addable and
displaceable magnitudes: a temperature is not the sum of two smaller
temperatures, a speed is not the sum of two smaller speeds. Since each
intensity is itself a difference, it divides according to an order in
which each term of the division differs in nature from the others.
Distance is therefore a set of ordered differences, in other words,
differences that are enveloped in one another in such a way that it is
possible to judge which is larger or smaller, but not their exact
magnitudes. For example, one can divide movement into the gallop, trot,
and walk, but in such a way that what is divided changes in nature at
each moment of the division, without any one of these moments entering
into the composition of any other. Therefore these multiplicities of
“distance” are inseparable from a process of continuous variation,
whereas multiplicities of “magnitude” distribute constants and
variables.


That is why we consider Bergson to be of major importance (much more so
than Husserl, or even Meinong or Russell) in the development of the
theory of multiplicities. Beginning in \emph{Time and Free Will}, he presents
duration as a type of multiplicity opposed to metric multiplicity or the
multiplicity of magnitude. Duration is in no way indivisible, but is
that which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division
(Achilles’ running is not divided into steps, his steps do not compose
it in the manner of magnitudes).\footnote{Beginning in chapter 2 of \emph{Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness}, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Bergson repeatedly uses the noun “multiplicity,” under conditions that should attract the attention of commentators; that there is an implicit reference to Riemann seems beyond doubt. Later, in \emph{Matter and Memory}, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Humanities Press, 1978), he explains that Achilles’ stride can be divided perfectly into “submultiples” that differ in nature, however, from that which they divide; the same goes for the tortoise’s stride; and the submultiples, “in both cases,” themselves differ in nature.} On the other hand, in a
multiplicity such as homogeneous extension, the division can be carried
as far as one likes without changing anything in the constant object; or
the magnitudes can vary with no other result than an increase or a
decrease in the amount of space they striate. Bergson thus brought to
light “two very different kinds of multiplicity,” one qualitative and
fusional, continuous, the other numerical and homogeneous, discrete. It
will be noted that \emph{matter} goes back and forth between the two;
sometimes it is already enveloped in qualitative multiplicity, sometimes
already developed in a metric “schema” that draws it outside of itself.
The confrontation between Bergson and Einstein on the topic of
Relativity is incomprehensible if one fails to place it in the context
of the basic theory of Riemannian multiplicities, as modified by
Bergson.


We have on numerous occasions encountered all kinds of differences
between two types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric; extensive and
qualitative; centered and acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic;
numerical and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses and of packs;
of magnitude and of distance; of breaks and of frequency; \emph{striated and
smooth}. Not only is that which peoples a smooth space a multiplicity
that changes in nature when it divides—such as tribes in the desert:
constantly modified distances, packs that are always undergoing
metamorphosis—but smooth space itself, desert, steppe, sea, or ice, is a
multiplicity of this type, nonmetric, acentered, directional, etc. Now
it might be thought that the Number would belong exclusively to the
**other multiplicities*, that it would accord them the scientific status
nonmetric multiplicities lack. But this is only partially true. It is
true that the number is the correlate of the metric: magnitudes can
striate space only by reference to numbers, and conversely, numbers are
used to express increasingly complex relations between magnitudes, thus
giving rise to ideal spaces reinforcing the striation and making it
coextensive with all of matter. There is therefore a correlation within
metric multiplicities between geometry and arithmetic, geometry and
algebra, which is constitutive of major science (the most profound
authors in this respect are those who have seen that the number, even in
its simplest forms, is exclusively cardinal in character, and the unit
exclusively divisible).\footnote{See Bergson, \emph{Time and Free Will}, p. 82: if a multiplicity “implies the possibility of treating any number whatever as a provisional unit which can be added to itself, inversely the units in their turn are true numbers which are as big as we like, but are regarded as provisionally indivisible for the purpose of compounding them with one another.”} It could be said on the other hand that
nonmetric multiplicities or the multiplicities of smooth space pertain
only to a minor geometry that is purely operative and qualitative, in
which calculation is necessarily very limited, and the local operations
of which are not even capable of general translatability or a
homogeneous system of location. Yet this “inferiority” is only apparent;
for the independence of this nearly illiterate, ametric geometry is what
makes possible the independence of the number, the subsequent function
of which is to measure magnitudes in striated space (or to striate). The
number distributes itself in smooth space; it does not divide without
changing nature each time, without changing units, each of which
represents a distance and not a magnitude. The ordinal, directional,
nomadic, articulated number, the numbering number, pertains to smooth
space, just as the numbered number pertains to striated space. So we may
say of every multiplicity that it is already a number, and still a unit.
But the number and the unit, and even the way in which the unit divides,
are different in each case. Minor science is continually enriching major
science, communicating its intuitions to it, its way of proceeding, its
itinerancy, its sense of and taste for matter, singularity, variation,
intuitionist geometry and the numbering number.


But so far we have only considered the first aspect of smooth and
nonmetric multiplicities, as opposed to metric multiplicities: how the
situation of one determination can make it part of another without our
being able either to assign that situation an exact magnitude or common
unit, or to discount it. This is the enveloping or enveloped character
of smooth space. But there is a second, more important, aspect: when the
situation of the two determinations precludes their comparison. As we
know, this is the case for Riemannian spaces, or rather, Riemannian
patches of space: “Riemann spaces are devoid of any kind of homogeneity.
Each is characterized by the form of the expression that defines the
square of the distance between two infinitely proximate points\dots{}. It
follows that two neighboring observers in a Riemann space can locate the
points in their immediate vicinity but cannot locate their spaces in
relation to each other without a new convention. Each vicinity is
therefore like a shred of Euclidean space, \emph{but the linkage between one
vicinity and the next is not defined and can be effected in an infinite
number of ways. Riemann space at its most general thus presents itself
as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not
attached to each other}.” It is possible to define this multiplicity
without any reference to a metrical system, in terms of the conditions
of frequency, or rather \emph{accumulation}, of a set of vicinities; these
conditions are entirely different from those determining metric spaces
and their breaks (even though a relation between the two kinds of space
necessarily results).\footnote{Albert Lautman, \emph{Les schémas de structure} (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23, 34–35.} In short, if we follow Lautman’s fine
description, Riemannian space is pure patchwork. It has connections, or
tactile relations. It has rhythmic values not found elsewhere, even
though they can be translated into a metric space. Heterogeneous, in
continuous variation, it is a smooth space, insofar as smooth space is
amorphous and not homogeneous. We can thus define two positive
characteristics of smooth space in general: when there are
determinations that are part of one another and pertain to enveloped
distances or ordered differences, independent of magnitude; when,
independent of metrics, determinations arise that cannot be part of one
another but are connected by processes of frequency or accumulation.
These are the two aspects of the \emph{nomos} of smooth space.


We are always, however, brought back to a dissymmetrical necessity to
cross from the smooth to the striated, and from the striated to the
smooth. If it is true that itinerant geometry and the nomadic number of
smooth spaces are a constant inspiration to royal science and striated
space, conversely, the metrics of striated spaces (\emph{metron}) is
indispensable for the translation of the strange data of a smooth
multiplicity. Translating is not a simple act: it is not enough to
substitute the space traversed for the movement; a series of rich and
complex operations is necessary (Bergson was the first to make this
point). Neither is translating a secondary act. It is an operation that
undoubtedly consists in subjugating, overcoding, \emph{metricizing} smooth
space, in neutralizing it, but also in giving it a milieu of
propagation, extension, refraction, renewal, and impulse without which
it would perhaps die of its own accord: like a mask without which it
could neither breathe nor find a general form of expression. Major
science has a perpetual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the
minor would be nothing if it did not confront and conform to the highest
scientific requirements. Let us take just two examples of the richness
and necessity of translations, which include as many opportunities for
openings as risks of closure or stoppage: first, the complexity of the
means by which one translates intensities into extensive quantities, or
more generally, multiplicities of distance into systems of magnitudes
that measure and striate them (the role of logarithms in this
connection); second, and more important, the delicacy and complexity of
the means by which Riemannian patches of smooth space receive a
Euclidean conjunction (the role of the parallelism of vectors in
striating the infinitesimal).\footnote{On this properly Euclidean conjunction (which is very different from the process of accumulation), see Lautman, ibid., pp. 45–48.} The mode of connection proper to
patches of Riemannian space (“accumulation”) is not to be confused with
the Euclidean conjunction of Riemann space (“parallelism”). Yet the two
are linked and give each other impetus. Nothing is ever done with:
smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts
a smooth space, with potentially very different values, scope, and
signs. Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated
space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space.


Is it possible to give a very general mathematical definition of smooth
spaces? Benoit Mandelbrot’s “fractals” seem to be on that path. Fractals
are aggregates whose number of dimensions is fractional rather than
whole, or else whole but with continuous variation in direction. An
example would be a line segment whose central third is replaced by the
angle of an equilateral triangle; the operation is repeated for the four
resulting segments, and so on ad infinitum, following a relation of
similarity—such a segment would constitute an infinite line or curve
with a dimension greater than one, but less than a surface
(= 2). Similar results can be obtained by making
holes, by cutting, “windows” into a circle, instead of adding “points”
to a triangle; likewise, a cube into which holes are drilled according
to the principle of similarity becomes less than a volume but more than
a surface (this is the mathematical presentation of the affinity between
a free space and a holey space). In still other forms, Brownian motion,
turbulence, and the sky are “fractals” of this kind.\footnote{Benoit Mandelbrot, \emph{Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension} (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977).} Perhaps this
provides us with another way of defining \emph{fuzzy aggregates}. But the
main thing is that it provides a general determination for smooth space
that takes into account its differences from and relations to striated
space: (1) we shall call striated or metric any aggregate with a whole
number of dimensions, and for which it is possible to assign constant
directions; (2) nonmetric smooth space is constituted by the
construction of a line with a fractional number of dimensions greater
than one, or of a surface with a fractional number of dimensions greater
than two; (3) a fractional number of dimensions is the index of a
properly directional space (with continuous variation in direction, and
without tangent); (4) what defines smooth space, then, is that it does
not have a dimension higher than that which moves through it or is
inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity, for example, a
line that fills a plane without ceasing to be a line; (5) space and that
which occupies space tend to become identified, to have the same power,
in the anexact yet rigorous form of the numbering or nonwhole number
(occupy without counting); (6) a smooth, amorphous space of this kind is
constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumulation
defines a \emph{zone of indiscernibility} proper to “becoming” (more than a
line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a
surface).


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-53.png}
\caption[]{\noindent \textbf{\emph{Von Koch’s curve: more than a line, less
than a surface}}. The middle third of segment \emph{AE} (1) is removed and
replaced with the triangle \emph{BCD} (2). In (3), this operation is repeated
separately for each of the segments \emph{AB}, \emph{AC}, \emph{CD}, and \emph{DE}. This
yields an angled line of equal segments (4), and so on, ad infinitum.
The end result is a “curve” composed of an infinite number of angled
points that preclude any tangent being drawn to any of their points. The
length of the curve is infinite and its dimension is higher than one: it
represents a space of 1.261859 dimensions (log 4\Slash{}log 3 exactly).}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-54.png}
\caption[]{\noindent \textbf{\emph{Sierpensky’s sponge: more than a surface,
less than a volume}}. The law according to which this cube was hollowed
can be understood intuitively at a glance. Each square hole is
surrounded by eight holes a third its size. These holes are in turn
surrounded by eight holes, also a third their size. And so on,
endlessly. The illustrator could not represent the infinity of holes of
decreasing size beyond the fourth degree, but it is plain to see that
this cube is in the end infinitely hollow. Its total volume approaches
zero, while the total lateral surface of the hollowings infinitely
grows. This space has a dimension of 2.7268. It therefore lies between a
surface (with a dimension of 2) and a volume (with a dimension of 3).
“Sierpinsky’s rug” is one face of this cube; the hollowings are then
squares and the dimension of the “surface” is 1.2618. From \emph{Studies in
Geometry} by Leonard M. Blumenthal and Karl Menger. Copyright © 1970 W.
H. Freeman and Company. Reprinted with permission.}
\end{figure}
\clearpage



\begin{center}

Figures: Concerning Benoit Mandelbrot’s “Fractals”


\end{center}

\section{The Physical Model}


The various models confirm a certain idea of striation: two series of
parallels that intersect perpendicularly, some of which, the verticals,
are more in the role of fixed elements or constants, whereas the others,
the horizontals, are more in the role of variables. This is roughly the
case for the warp and the woof, harmony and melody, longitude and
latitude. The more regular the intersection, the tighter the striation,
the more homogeneous the space tends to become; it is for this reason
that from the beginning homogeneity did not seem to us to be a
characteristic of smooth space, but on the contrary, the extreme result
of striation, or the limit-form of a space striated everywhere and in
all directions. If the smooth and the homogeneous seem to communicate,
it is only because when the striated attains its ideal of perfect
homogeneity, it is apt to reimpart smooth space, by a movement that
superposes itself upon that of the homogeneous but remains entirely
different from it. In each model, the smooth actually seemed to pertain
to a fundamental heterogeneity: felt or patchwork rather than weaving,
rhythmic values rather than harmony-melody, Riemannian space rather than
Euclidean space—a continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of
constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass
between two points, the formation of a plane that does not proceed by
parallel and perpendicular lines.


The link between the homogeneous and the striated can be expressed in
terms of an imaginary, elementary physics. (1) You begin by striating
space with parallel \emph{gravitational} verticals. (2) The resultant of
these parallels or forces is applied to a point inside the body
occupying the space (\emph{center of gravity}). (3) The position of this
point does not change when the direction of the parallel forces is
changed, when they become \emph{perpendicular} to their original direction.
(4) You discover that gravity is a particular case of a universal
**attraction* following straight lines or biunivocal relations between
two bodies. (5) You define a general notion of \emph{work} as a
force-displacement relation in a certain direction. (6) You then have
the physical basis for an increasingly perfect striated space, running
not only vertically and horizontally, but in every direction
subordinated to points.


It is not even necessary to invoke this Newtonian pseudophysics. The
Greeks already went from a space striated vertically, top to bottom, to
a centered space with reversible and symmetrical relations in all
directions, in other words, striated in every direction in such a way as
to constitute a homogeneity. There is no question that these are like
two models of the State apparatus, the vertical apparatus of the empire
and the isotropic apparatus of the city-state.\footnote{On these two kinds of space, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, \emph{Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs}, vol. 1 (Paris: Maspero, 1971–1974), pp. 174–175.} Geometry lies at the
crossroads of a physics problem and an affair of the State.


It is obvious that the striation thus constituted has its limits: they
are reached not only when the infinite (either infinitely large or
small) is brought in, but also when more than two bodies are considered
(“the three-body problem”). Let us try to understand in the simplest
terms how space escapes the limits of its striation. At one pole, it
escapes them by \emph{declination}, in other words, by the smallest
deviation, by the infinitely small deviation between a gravitational
vertical and the arc of a circle to which the vertical is tangent. At
the other pole, it escapes them by the \emph{spiral or vortex}, in other
words, a figure in which all the points of space are simultaneously
occupied according to laws of frequency or of accumulation,
distribution; these laws are distinct from the so-called laminar
distribution corresponding to the striation of parallels. From the
smallest deviation to the vortex there is a valid and necessary relation
of consequence: what stretches between them is precisely a smooth space
whose element is declination and which is peopled by a spiral. Smooth
space is constituted by the minimum angle, which deviates from the
vertical, and by the vortex, which overspills striation. The strength of
Michel Serres’s book is that it demonstrates this link between the
**clinamen* as a generative differential element, and the formation of
vortices and turbulences insofar as they occupy an engendered smooth
space; in fact, the atom of the ancients, from Democritus to Lucretius,
was always inseparable from a hydraulics, or a generalized theory of
swells and flows. The ancient atom is entirely misunderstood if it is
overlooked that its essence is to course and flow. The theory of atomism
is the basis for a strict correlation between Archimedean geometry (very
different from the striated and homogeneous space of Euclid) and
Democritean physics (very different from solid or lamellar matter).\footnote{Michel Serres, \emph{La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce. Fleuves et turbulences} (Paris: Minuit, 1977): “Physics is based much more on a vectorial space than on a metric space” (p. 79). On the hydraulic problem, see pp. 104–107.}
The same coincidence means that this aggregate is no longer tied in any
way to a State apparatus, but rather to a war machine: a physics of
packs, turbulences, “catastrophes,” and epidemics corresponding to a
geometry of war, of the art of war and its machines. Serres states what
he considers to be Lucretius’s deepest goal: to go from Mars to Venus,
to place the war machine in the service of peace.\footnote{Serres, \emph{La naissance de la physique}, pp. 35, 135ff.} But this
operation is not accomplished through the State apparatus; it expresses,
on the contrary, an ultimate metamorphosis of the war machine, and
occurs in smooth space.


Earlier we encountered a distinction between “free action” in smooth
space and “work” in striated space. During the nineteenth century a
twofold elaboration was undertaken: of a physicoscientific concept of
Work (weight-height, force-displacement), and of a socioeconomic concept
of labor-power or abstract labor (a homogeneous abstract quantity
applicable to all work, and susceptible to multiplication and division).
There was a profound link between physics and sociology: society
furnished an economic standard of measure for work, and physics a
“mechanical currency” for it. The wage regime had as its correlate a
mechanics of force. Physics had never been more social, for in both
cases it was a question of defining the constant mean value of a force
of lift and pull exerted in the most uniform way possible by a
standard-man. Impose the Work-model upon every activity, translate every
act into possible or virtual work, discipline free action, or else
(which amounts to the same thing) relegate it to “leisure,” which exists
only by reference to work. We now understand why the Work-model, in both
its physical and social aspects, is a fundamental part of the State
apparatus. Standard-man began as the man of \emph{public works}.\footnote{Anne Querrien has clearly demonstrated the importance of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées (School of Bridges and Roadways) in this elaboration of the concept of work. For example, Navier, an engineer and professor of mechanics, wrote in 1819: “We must establish a mechanical currency with which to estimate the quantities of work used to accomplish every kind of fabrication.”} It was
not in relation to pin manufacturing that the problems of abstract
labor, the multiplication of its results, and the division of its
operations were first formulated; it was in public construction and in
the organization of armies (not only the disciplining of men, but also
the industrial production of weapons). Nothing more normal. The war
machine in itself did not imply this normalization. But the State
apparatus, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found a new way
of appropriating the war machine: by subjugating it before all else to
the Work-model of the construction site and factory, which were in the
process of developing elsewhere, but more slowly. The war machine was
perhaps the first thing to be striated, to produce an abstract
labor-time whose results could be multiplied and operations divided.
That is where free action in smooth space must have been conquered. The
physicosocial model of Work pertains to the State apparatus, it is one
of its inventions, and for two reasons. First, because labor appears
only with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labor that is not
devoted to \emph{stockpiling}; in fact, labor (in the strict sense) begins
only with what is called \emph{surplus labor}. 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 in the essential enterprise of the State, namely, its conquest of the
war machine.


Counterdemonstration: where there is no State and no surplus labor,
there is no Work-model either. Instead, there is the continuous
variation of free action, passing from speech to action, from a given
action to another, from action to song, from song to speech, from speech
to enterprise, all in a strange chromaticism with intense but rare peak
moments or moments of effort that the outside observer can only
“translate” in terms of work. It is true that it has been said of blacks
through the ages that “they don’t work, they don’t know what work is.”
It is true that they were forced to work, and to work more than anyone
else, in terms of abstract quantity. It also seems to be true that the
Indians had no understanding of, and were unsuited for, any organization
of work, even slavery: the Americans apparently imported so many blacks
only because they could not use the Indians, who would rather die.
Certain outstanding ethnologists have raised an essential question. They
have turned the problem around: so-called primitive societies are not
societies of shortage or subsistence due to an absence of work, but on
the contrary are societies of free action and smooth space that have no
use for a work-factor, anymore than they constitute a stock.\footnote{It is a commonplace of missionaries’ narratives that there is nothing corresponding to the category of work, even in transhumant agriculture, with its laborious ground-clearing activities. Marshall Sahlins is not content to remark the briefness of the time devoted to the labor necessary for maintenance and reproduction, but goes on to stress qualitative factors: the continuous variation that regulates activity, and the mobility or freeness of movement, which excludes stockpiling and is measured in terms of the “convenience of transporting the object.” “La première société d’abondance,” \emph{Les temps modernes}, no. 268 (October 1968), pp. 654–656, 662–663, 672–673.} They
are not societies of sloth, even though their differences with work may
be expressed in the form of a “right to laziness.” They are not without
laws, even though their differences with the law may be expressed in the
guise of “anarchy.” What they have instead is a law of the nomos
regulating a continuous variation of activity with a rigor and cruelty
all its own (get rid of whatever cannot be transported, the old,
children\dots{}).


If work constitutes a striated space-time corresponding to the State
apparatus, is this not especially true of its archaic or ancient forms?
For it is there that surplus labor is isolated, distinguished, in the
form of tribute or corvée. Consequently, it is there that the concept of
labor appears at its clearest, for example, in the large-scale works of
the empires, the urban, agricultural, or hydraulic works by which a
“laminar” flow in supposedly parallel layers (striation) is imposed upon
the waters. It seems on the contrary that in the capitalist regime,
surplus labor becomes less and less distinguishable from labor “strictly
speaking,” and totally impregnates it. Modern public works have a
different status from that of large-scale imperial works. How could one
possibly distinguish between the time necessary for reproduction and
“extorted” time, when they are no longer separated in time? This remark
certainly does not contradict the Marxist theory of surplus value, for
Marx shows precisely that surplus value \emph{ceases to be localizable} in
the capitalist regime. That is even his fundamental contribution. It
gave him a sense that machines would themselves become productive of
surplus value and that the circulation of capital would challenge the
distinction between variable and constant capital. In these new
conditions, it remains true that all labor involves surplus labor; but
surplus labor no longer requires labor. Surplus labor, capitalist
organization in its entirety, operates less and less by the striation of
space-time corresponding to the physicosocial concept of work. Rather,
it is as though human alienation through surplus labor were replaced by
a generalized “machinic enslavement,” such that one may furnish
surplus-value without doing any work (children, the retired, the
unemployed, television viewers, etc.). Not only does the user as such
tend to become an employee, but capitalism operates less on a quantity
of labor than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes
of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment
industries, ways of perceiving and feeling—every semiotic system. It is
as though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was able to
carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital
necessarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooth space in which
the destiny of human beings is recast. Striation, of course, survives in
the most perfect and severest of forms (it is not only vertical but
operates in all directions); however, it relates primarily to the state
pole of capitalism, in other words, to the role of the modern State
apparatuses in the organization of capital. On the other hand, at the
complementary and dominant level of integrated (\emph{or rather integrating})
**world capitalism*, a new smooth space is produced in which capital
reaches its “absolute” speed, based on machinic components rather than
the human component of labor. The multinationals fabricate a kind of
deterritorialized smooth space in which points of occupation as well as
poles of exchange become quite independent of the classical paths to
striation. What is really new are always the new forms of turnover. The
present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making
the distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed
and circulating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is
instead the distinction between \emph{striated capital} and \emph{smooth capital},
and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter through
complexes that cut across territories and States, and even the different
types of States.

\section{The Aesthetic Model}


Nomad Art. Several notions, both practical and theoretical, are suitable
for defining nomad art and its successors (barbarian, Gothic, and
modern). First, “close-range” vision, as distinguished from
long-distance vision; second, “tactile,” or rather “haptic” space, as
distinguished from optical space. “Haptic” is a better word than
“tactile” since it does not establish an opposition between two sense
organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill
this nonoptical function. It was Aloïs Riegl who, in some marvelous
pages, gave fundamental aesthetic status to the couple, \emph{close
vision-haptic space}. But for the moment we should set aside the
criteria proposed by Riegl (then by Wilhelm Worringer, and more recently
by Henri Maldiney), and take some risks ourselves, making free use of
these notions.\footnote{The principal texts are Aloïs Riegl, \emph{Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie} (Vienna: Staatdruckerei, 1927); Wilhelm Worringer, \emph{Abstraction and Empathy; A Contribution to the Psychology of Style}, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1963); Henri Maldiney, \emph{Regard, parole, espace} (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1973), especially “L’art et le pouvoir du fond,” and Maldiney’s discussion of Cezanne.} It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of
a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which
may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the
contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical
space—although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this
capacity. Once again, as always, this analysis must be corrected by a
coefficient of transformation according to which passages between the
striated and the smooth are at once necessary and uncertain, and all the
more disruptive. The law of the painting is that it be done at close
range, even if it is viewed from relatively far away. One can back away
from a thing, but it is a bad painter who backs away from the painting
he or she is working on. Or from the “thing” for that matter: Cézanne
spoke of the need to \emph{no longer see} the wheat field, to be too close to
it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space. Afterward,
striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, “stubborn geometry,”
the “measure of the world,” “geological foundations,” “everything falls
straight down” \dots{} The striated itself may in turn disappear in a
“catastrophe,” opening the way for a new smooth space, and another
striated space\dots{}


A painting is done at close range, even if it is seen from a distance.
Similarly, it is said that composers do not hear: they have close-range
hearing, whereas listeners hear from a distance. Even writers write with
short-term memory, whereas readers are assumed to be endowed with
long-term memory. The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close
vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in
continuous variation; it operates step by step. Examples are the desert,
steppe, ice, and sea, local spaces of pure connection. Contrary to what
is sometimes said, one never sees from a distance in a space of this
kind, nor does one see it from a distance; one is never “in front of,”
any more than one is “in” (one is “on”\dots{}). Orientations are not constant
but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and
precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that
would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class
assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are
tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as “monads” but
are instead \emph{nomads} entertaining tactile relations among themselves.
The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the
multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invariant;
rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give
rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.\footnote{All of these points already relate to Riemannian space, with its essential relation to “monads” (as opposed to the unitary Subject of Euclidean space): see Gilles Châtelet, “Sur une petite phrase de Riemann,” \emph{Analytiques}, no. 3 (May 1979). Although the “monads” are no longer thought to be closed upon themselves, and are postulated to entertain direct, step-by-step local relations, the purely monadological point of view proves inadequate and should be superseded by a “nomadology” (the ideality of striated space versus the realism of smooth space).}
These questions of orientation, location, and linkage enter into play in
the most famous works of nomad art: the twisted animals have no land
beneath them; the ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial
acrobatics; the paws point in the opposite direction from the head, the
hind part of the body is turned upside down; the “monadological” points
of view can be interlinked only on a nomad space; the whole and the
parts give the eye that beholds them a function that is haptic rather
than optical. This is an animality that can be seen only by touching it
with one’s mind, but without the mind becoming a finger, not even by way
of the eye. (In a much cruder fashion, the kaleidoscope has exactly the
same function: to give the eye a digital function.) Striated space, on
the contrary, is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision:
constancy of orientation, invariance of distance through an interchange
of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient
milieu, constitution of a central perspective. It is less easy to
evaluate the creative potentialities of striated space, and how it can
simultaneously emerge from the smooth and give everything a whole new
impetus.


The opposition between the striated and the smooth is not simply that of
the global and the local. For in one case, the global is still relative,
whereas in the other the local is already absolute. Where there is close
vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic,
nonoptical function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of the
same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective
nor limit nor outline or form nor center; there is no intermediary
distance, or all distance is intermediary. Like Eskimo space.\footnote{See Edmund Carpenter’s description in \emph{Eskimo} of ice space, and of the igloo: “There is no middle distance, no perspective, no outline, nothing the eye can cling to except thousands of smokey plumes of snow \dots{} a land without bottom or edge \dots{} a labyrinth alive with the movements of crowded people. No flat static walls arrest the ear or eye \dots{} and the eye can glance through here, past there” (no pagination).} In a
totally different way, in a totally different context, Arab architecture
constitutes a space that begins very near and low, placing the light and
the airy below and the solid and heavy above. This reversal of the laws
of gravity turns \emph{lack of direction} and negation of volume into
constructive forces. There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local
integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an
infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an
absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the
absolute of passage, which in nomad art merges with its manifestation.
Here the absolute is local, precisely because place is not delimited. If
we now turn to the striated and optical space of long-distance vision,
we see that the relative global that characterizes that space also
requires the absolute, but in an entirely different way. The absolute is
now the horizon or background, in other words, the Encompassing Element
without which nothing would be global or englobed. It is against this
background that the relative outline or form appears. The absolute
itself can appear in the Encompassed, but only in a privileged place
well delimited as a center, which then functions to repel beyond the
limits anything that menaces the global integration. We can see clearly
here how smooth space subsists, but only to give rise to the striated.
The desert, sky, or sea, the Ocean, the Unlimited, first plays the role
of an encompassing element, and tends to become a horizon: the earth is
thus surrounded, globalized, “grounded” by this element, which holds it
in immobile equilibrium and makes Form possible. Then to the extent that
the encompassing element itself appears at the center of the earth, it
assumes a second role, that of casting into the loathesome deep, the
abode of the dead, anything smooth or nonmeasured that may have
remained.\footnote{These two aspects, the Encompassing Element and the Center, figure in Jean-Pierre Vernant’s analysis of space in Anaximander; \emph{Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs} (Paris: Maspero, 1971–1974), vol. 1, part 3. From another perspective, the entire history of the desert concerns the possibility of its becoming the encompassing element, and also of being repelled, rejected by the center, as though in an inversion of movement. In a phenomenology of religion like that of Van der Leeuw, the \emph{nomos} itself does indeed appear as the encompassing-limit or ground, and also as that which is repelled, excluded, in a centrifugal movement.} The striation of the earth implies as its necessary
condition this double treatment of the smooth: on the one hand, it is
carried or reduced to the absolute state of an encompassing horizon, and
on the other it is expelled from the relative encompassed element. Thus
the great imperial religions need a smooth space like the desert, but
only in order to give it a law that is opposed to the \emph{nomos} in every
way, and converts the absolute.


This perhaps explains for us the ambiguity of the excellent analyses by
Riegl, Worringer, and Maldiney. They approach haptic space under the
imperial conditions of Egyptian art. They define it as the presence of a
horizon-background; the reduction of space to the plane (vertical and
horizontal, height and width); and the rectilinear outline enclosing
individuality and withdrawing it from change. Like the pyramid-form,
every side a plane surface, against the background of the immobile
desert. On the other hand, they show how in Greek art (then in Byzantine
art, and up to the Renaissance), an optical space was differentiated
from haptic space, one merging background with form, setting up an
interference between the planes, conquering depth, working with cubic or
voluminous extension, organizing perspective, and playing on relief and
shadow, light and color. Thus at the very beginning they encounter the
haptic at a point of mutation, in conditions under which it already
serves to striate space. The optical makes that striation tighter and
more perfect, or rather tight and perfect in a different way (it is not
associated with the same “artistic will”). Everything occurs in a
striated space that goes from empires to city-states, or evolved
empires. It is not by chance that Riegl tends to eliminate the specific
factors of nomad or even barbarian art; or that Worringer, when he
introduces the idea of Gothic art in the broadest sense, relates it on
the one hand to the Germanic and Celtic migrations of the North, and on
the other to the empires of the East. But between the two were the
nomads, who are reducible neither to empires they confronted nor the
migrations they triggered. The Goths themselves were nomads of the
steppe, and with the Sarmatians and Huns were an essential vector of
communication between the East and the North, a factor irreducible to
either of these two dimensions.\footnote{Whatever interactions there may be, the “art of the steppes” had a specificity that was communicated to the migrating Germans; in spite of his many reservations about nomad culture, René Grousset makes this point in \emph{The Empire of the Steppes}, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970). pp. 11–25. He notes the irreducibility of Scythian art to Assyrian art, Sarmatian art to Persian art, and Hunnic art to Chinese art. He even points out that the art of the steppes influenced more than it borrowed (see in particular the question of Ordos art and its relations to China).} On one side, Egypt had its Hyksos,
Asia Minor its Hittites, China its Turco-Mongols; and on the other, the
Hebrews had their Habiru, the Germans, Celts, and Romans their Goths,
the Arabs their Bedouins. The nomads have a specificity that is too
hastily reduced to its consequences, by including them in the empires or
counting them among the migrants, assimilating them to one or the other,
denying them their own “will” to art. Again, there is a refusal to
accept that the intermediary between the East and the North had its own
absolute specificity, that the intermediary, the interval, played
exactly this substantial role. Moreover, it does not have that role in
the guise of a “will”; it only has a becoming, it invents a
“becoming-artist.”


When we invoke a primordial duality between the smooth and the striated,
it is in order to subordinate the differences between “haptic” and
“optic,” “close vision” and “distant vision” to this distinction. Hence
we will not define the haptic by the immobile background, by the plane
and the contour, because these have to do with an already mixed state in
which the haptic serves to striate, and uses its smooth components only
in order to convert them to another kind of space. The haptic function
and close vision presuppose the smooth, which has no background, plane,
or contour, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between
parts. Conversely, the developed optical function is not content to take
striation to a new level of perfection, endowing it with an imaginary
universal value and scope; it is also capable of reinstating the smooth,
liberating light and modulating color, restoring a kind of aerial haptic
space that constitutes the unlimited site of intersection of the
planes.\footnote{On this question of light and color, in particular in Byzantine art, see Henri Maldiney, \emph{Regard, parole, espace}, pp. 203ff., 239ff.} In short, the smooth and the striated must be defined in
themselves before the relative distinctions between haptic and optical,
near and distant, can be derived.


This is where a third couple enters in: “abstract line-concrete line”
(in addition to “haptic-optical,” “close-distant”). It is Worringer who
accorded fundamental importance to the abstract line, seeing it as the
very beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will. Art
as abstract machine. Once again, it will doubtless be our inclination to
voice in advance the same objections: for Worringer, the abstract line
seems to make its first appearance in the crystalline or geometrical
imperial Egyptian form, the most rectilinear of forms possible. It is
only afterward that it assumes a particular avatar, constituting the
“Gothic or Northern line” understood very broadly.\footnote{The correlation, “haptic-close-abstract,” was already suggested by Riegl. But it was Worringer who developed the theme of the abstract line. Although he conceives of it essentially in its Egyptian form, he describes a second form in which the abstract assumes an intense life and an expressionist value, all the while remaining inorganic: \emph{Abstraction and Empathy}, chapter 5, and especially \emph{Form in Gothic} (London: Putnam’s and Sons, 1927), pp. 38–55.} For us, on the
other hand, the abstract line is fundamentally “Gothic,” or rather,
nomadic, not rectilinear. Consequently, we do not understand the
aesthetic motivation for the abstract line in the same way, or its
identity with the beginning of art. Whereas the rectilinear (or
“regularly” rounded) Egyptian line is negatively motivated by anxiety in
the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, and erects the constancy
and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is abstract in an entirely
different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientation and
passes between points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated
by the smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to
ward off anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The abstract line is the
affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth
striation. Furthermore, although it is true that art begins only with
the abstract line, the reason is not, as Worringer says, that the
rectilinear is the first means of breaking with the nonaesthetic
imitation of nature upon which the prehistoric, savage, and childish
supposedly depend, lacking, as he thinks they do, a “will to art.” On
the contrary, if prehistoric art is fully art it is precisely because it
manipulates the abstract, though nonrectilinear, line: “Primitive art
begins with the abstract, and even the prefigurative\dots{}. Art is abstract
from the outset, and at its origin could not have been otherwise.”\footnote{André Leroi-Gourhan, \emph{Le geste et la parole} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964–1965), vol. 1, \emph{Technique et langage}, pp. 263ff.; vol. 2, \emph{La mémoire et les rythmes}, pp. 219ff. (“Rhythmic marks are anterior to explicit figures.”) Worringer’s position is very ambiguous; thinking that prehistoric art is fundamentally figurative, he excludes it from Art, on the same grounds as he excludes the “scribblings of a child” (\emph{Abstraction and Empathy}, pp. 51–55). Then he advances the hypothesis that the cave dwellers were the “ultimate result” of a series he says began with the abstract (p. 130). But would not such a hypothesis force Worringer to revise his conception of the abstract, and to cease identifying it with Egyptian geometricism?}
In effect, the line is all the more abstract when writing is absent,
either because it has yet to develop or only exists outside or
alongside. When writing takes charge of abstraction, as it does in
empires, the line, already downgraded, necessarily tends to become
concrete, even figurative. Children forget how to draw. But in the
absence of writing, or when peoples have no need for a writing system of
their own because theirs is borrowed from more or less nearby empires
(as was the case for the nomads), the line is necessarily abstract; it
is necessarily invested with all the power of abstraction, which finds
no other outlet. That is why we believe that the different major types
of imperial lines—the Egyptian rectilinear line, the Assyrian (or Greek)
organic line, the supraphenomenal, encompassing Chinese line—convert the
abstract line, rend it from its smooth space, and accord it concrete
values. Still, it can be argued that these imperial lines are
contemporaneous with the abstract line; the abstract line is no less at
the “beginning,” inasmuch as it is a pole always presupposed by any line
capable of constituting another pole. The abstract line is at the
beginning as much because of its historical abstraction as its
prehistoric dating. It is therefore a part of the originality or
irreducibility of nomad art, even when there is reciprocal interaction,
influence, and confrontation with the imperial lines of sedentary art.


The abstract is not directly opposed to the figurative. The figurative
as such is not inherent to any “will to art.” In fact, we may oppose a
figurative line in art to one that is not. The figurative, or imitation
and representation, is a consequence, a result of certain
characteristics of the line when it assumes a given form. We must
therefore define those characteristics first. Take a system in which
transversals are subordinated to diagonals, diagonals to horizontals and
verticals, and horizontals and verticals to points (even when there are
virtual). A system of this kind, which is rectilinear or unilinear
regardless of the number of lines, expresses the formal conditions under
which a space is striated and the line describes a contour. Such a line
is inherently, formally, representative in itself, even if it does not
represent anything. On the other hand, \emph{a line that delimits nothing,
that describes no contour}, that no longer goes from one point to
another but instead passes between points, that is always declining from
the horizontal and the vertical and deviating from the diagonal, that is
constantly changing direction, a mutant line of this kind that is
without outside or inside, form or background, beginning or end and that
is as alive as a continuous variation—such a line is truly an abstract
line, and describes a smooth space. It is not inexpressive. Yet is true
that it does not constitute a stable and symmetrical \emph{form of
expression} grounded in a resonance of points and a conjunction of
lines. It is nevertheless accompanied by \emph{material traits of
expression}, the effects of which multiply step by step. This is what
Worringer means when he says that the Gothic line (for us, the nomadic
line invested with abstraction) has the power of expression and not of
form, that it has repetition as a power, not symmetry as form. Indeed,
it is through symmetry that rectilinear systems limit repetition,
preventing infinite progression and maintaining the \emph{organic} domination
of a central point with radiating lines, as in reflected or star-shaped
figures. It is free action, however, which by its essence unleashes the
power of repetition as a \emph{machinic} force that multiplies its effect and
pursues an infinite movement. Free action proceeds by disjunction and
decentering, or at least by peripheral movement: disjointed polythetism
instead of symmetrical antithetism.\footnote{Worringer establishes an opposition between the power of repetition, which is mechanical, multiplying, and without fixed orientation, and the force of symmetry, which is organic, additive, oriented, and centered. He sees this as the fundamental difference between Gothic ornamentation and Greek or classical ornamentation: \emph{Form in Gothic}, pp. 53–55 (“The Ceaseless Melody of the Northern Line”). In a fine book, \emph{Esthétiques d’Orient et d’Occident} (Paris: E. Leroux, 1937), Laura Morgenstern develops a particular example, distinguishing the “symmetrical antithetism” of Sassanid Persian art from the “disjointed antithetism” of the art of the proto-Iranian nomads (Sarmatians). Many authors, however, have stressed the centered and symmetrical motifs in barbarian or nomad art. Worringer anticipated this objection: “Instead of the regular and invariably geometrical star or rosette or similar restful forms, in the North we find the revolving wheel, the turbine or the so-called sun wheel, all designs which express violent movement. Moreover, the movement is peripheral and not radial” (\emph{Form in Gothic}, p. 54). The history of technology confirms the importance of the turbine in the life of the nomads. In another, bio-aesthetic, context, Gabriel Tarde opposes repetition as indefinite potential (\emph{puissance}) to symmetry as limitation. With symmetry, life constituted an organism for itself, taking a star-shaped or reflected, infolded form (the radiata and mollusks). It is true that in doing so it unleashed another type of repetition, external reproduction; see \emph{L’opposition universelle} (Paris: Alcan, 1897).} Traits of expression describing
a smooth space and connecting with a matter-flow thus should not be
confused with striae that convert space and make it a form of expression
that grids and organizes matter.


Worringer’s finest pages are those in which he contrasts the abstract
with the organic. The organic does not designate something represented,
but above all the form of representation, and even the feeling that
unites representation with a subject (\emph{Einfühlung}, “empathy”). “Formal
processes occur within the work of art which correspond to the natural
organic tendencies in man.”\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Worringer, \emph{Abstraction and Empathy}, p. 33]} But the rectilinear, the geometrical,
cannot be opposed to the organic in this sense. The Greek organic line,
which subordinates volume and spatiality, takes over from the Egyptian
geometrical line, which reduced them to the plane. The organic, with its
symmetry and contours inside and outside, still refers to the
rectilinear coordinates of a striated space. The organic body is
prolonged by straight lines that attach it to what lies in the distance.
Hence the primacy of human beings, or of the face: We are this form of
expression itself, simultaneously the supreme organism and the relation
of all organisms to metric space in general. The abstract, on the
contrary, begins only with what Worringer presents as the “Gothic”
avatar. It is this nomadic line that he says is mechanical, but in free
action and swirling; it is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive
for being inorganic. It is distinguished both from the geometrical and
the organic. It raises “mechanical” relations to the level of
**intuition*. Heads (even a human being’s when it is not a face) unravel
and coil into ribbons in a continuous process; mouths curl in spirals.
Hair, clothes \dots{} This streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish
line of variation liberates a power of life that human beings had
rectified and organisms had confined, and which matter now expresses as
the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it. If everything is alive, it is
not because everything is organic or organized but, on the contrary,
because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in
question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without
organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs,
everything that passes \emph{between} organisms (“once the natural barriers
of organic movement have been overthrown, there are no more
limits”).\footnote{[\emph{TRANS}: Worringer, \emph{Abstraction and Empathy}, p. 42]} Many authors have wished to establish a kind of duality
in nomad art between the ornamental abstract line and animal motifs, or
more subtly, between the speed with which the line integrates and
carries expressive traits, and the slowness or fixity of the animal
matter traversed, between a line of flight without beginning or end and
an almost immobile swirling. But in the end everyone agrees that it is a
question of a single will, or a single becoming.\footnote{On all of these points, see Georges Charrière’s very intuitive book, \emph{Scythian Art} (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), which includes a great number of reproductions. It is doubtless René Grousset who has most effectively emphasized “slowness” as a dramatic pole of nomad art: \emph{The Empire of the Steppes}, pp. 13–14.} This is not
because the abstract engenders organic motifs, by chance or by
association. Rather, it is precisely because pure animality is
experienced as inorganic, or supraorganic, that it can combine so well
with abstraction, and even combine the slowness or heaviness of a matter
with the extreme speed of a line that has become entirely spiritual. The
slowness belongs to the same world as the extreme speed: relations of
speed and slowness between elements, which surpass in every way the
movement of an organic form and the determination of organs. The line
escapes geometry by a fugitive mobility at the same time as life tears
itself free from the organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind.
This vital force specific to the Abstraction is what draws smooth space.
The abstract line is the affect of smooth space, just as organic
representation was the feeling presiding over striated space. The
haptic-optical, near-distant distinctions must be subordinated to the
distinction between the abstract line and the organic line; they must
find their principle in a general confrontation of spaces. The abstract
line cannot be defined as geometrical and rectilinear. What then should
be termed \emph{abstract} in modern art? A line of variable direction that
describes no contour and delimits no form\dots{}\footnote{Dora Vallier, in her preface to the French translation of \emph{Abstraction and Empathy} (\emph{Abstraction et Einfühlung} [Paris: Klincksieck, 1978]), is right to note Worringer and Kandinsky’s independence from one another, and the differences between the problems they were addressing. However, she maintains that there is still convergence and resonance between them. In a sense, all art is abstract, with the figurative springing from certain types of abstraction. But in another sense, since there are very different types of lines (Egyptian-geometrical, Greek-organic, Gothic-vital, etc.), the question then becomes one of determining which line remains abstract, or realizes abstraction as such. It is doubtful that it is the geometrical line, since it still draws a figure, even though an abstract and nonrepresentative one. Rather, the abstract line is that defined by Michael Fried in relation to certain works by Pollock: multidirectional, with neither inside nor outside, form nor background, delimiting nothing, describing no contour, passing between spots or points, filling a smooth space, stirring up a close-lying haptic visual matter that “both invites the act of seeing on the part of the spectator yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all,” (\emph{Three American Painters} [Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965], p. 14). In Kandinsky himself, abstraction is realized not so much by geometrical structures as by lines of march or transit that seem to recall Mongolian nomadic motifs.}



\bigskip


Do not multiply models. We are well aware that there are many others: a
ludic model, which would compare games according to their type of space
and found game theory on different principles (for example, the smooth
space of Go versus the striated space of chess); and a noological model
concerned not with thought contents (ideology) but with the form, manner
or mode, and function of thought, according to the mental space it draws
and from the point of view of a general theory of thought, a thinking of
thought. And so on. Moreover, there are still other kinds of space that
should be taken into account, for example, holey space and the way it
communicates with the smooth and the striated in different ways. What
interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the
passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space
continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it
develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. Even the most
striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a
nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are
sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces
are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or
displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new
obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a
smooth space will suffice to save us.

\chapter{15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines}
\hyperdef{amuse}{plateau-15}{}%
\label{textamuse:plateau-15}%


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{a-t-a-thousand-plateaus-55.png}
\caption[]{\noindent Computer Einstein}
\end{figure}
\clearpage

\section{\textbf{S} \emph{Strata, stratification}}


The strata are phenomena of thickening on the Body of the earth,
simultaneously molecular and molar: accumulations, coagulations,
sedimentations, foldings. They are Belts, Pincers, or
Articulations.\footnote{3} Summarily and traditionally, we distinguish three
major strata: physicochemical, organic, and anthropomorphic (or
“alloplastic”). Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus
and formed substances. \emph{Forms and substances, codes and milieus} are not
really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.


A stratum obviously presents very diverse forms and substances, a
variety of codes and milieus. It thus possesses both different formal
Types of organization and different substantial Modes of development,
which divide it into \emph{parastrata and epistrata}, for example, the
divisions of the organic stratum. The epistrata and parastrata
subdividing a stratum can be considered strata themselves (so that the
list is never exhaustive). A given stratum retains a unity of
composition in spite of the diversity in its organization and
development. The unity of composition relates to formal traits common to
all of the forms or codes of a stratum, and to substantial elements,
materials common to all of the stratum’s substances or milieus.


The strata are extremely mobile. One stratum is always capable of
serving as the \emph{substratum} of another, or of colliding with another,
independently of any evolutionary order. Above all, between two strata
or between two stratic divisions, there are \emph{interstratic} phenomena:
transcodings and passages between milieus, intermixings. Rhythms pertain
to these interstratic movements, which are also acts of stratification.
Stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a
continual, renewed creation. And the strata constitute the Judgment of
God. Classical artists are like God, they make the world by organizing
forms and substances, codes and milieus, and rhythms.


Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double
articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a \emph{content and an
expression}. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, content
and expression are. Hjelmslev’s net is applicable to the strata:
articulation of content and articulation of expression, with content and
expression each possessing its own form and substance. Between them,
between content and expression, there is neither a correspondence nor a
cause-effect relation nor a signified-signifier relation: there is real
distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and only isomorphy. But content
and expression are not distinguished from each other in the same fashion
on each stratum: the distribution of content and expression is not the
same on the three major strata (there is, for example, a “linearization”
of expression on the organic stratum, and a “superlinearity” of the
anthropomorphic strata). That is why the molar and the molecular have
very different combinations depending on the stratum considered.


What movement, what impulse, sweeps us outside the strata
(\emph{metastrata})?\footnote{3 and 4} Of course, there is no reason to think that all
matter is confined to the physicochemical strata: there exists a
submolecular, unformed Matter. Similarly, not all Life is confined to
the organic strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against
itself in order to limit itself, and there is a life all the more
intense, all the more powerful for being anorganic. There are also
nonhuman Becomings of human beings that overspill the anthropomorphic
strata in all directions. But how can we reach this “plane,” or rather
how can we construct it, and how can we draw the “line” leading us
there? For outside the strata or in the absence of strata we no longer
have forms or substances, organization or development, content or
expression. We are disarticulated; we no longer even seem to be
sustained by rhythms. How could unformed matter, anorganic life,
nonhuman becoming be anything but chaos pure and simple? Every
undertaking of destratification (for example, going beyond the organism,
plunging into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete rules of
extreme caution: a too-sudden destratification may be suicidal, or turn
cancerous.\footnote{6} In other words, it will sometimes end in chaos, the void
and destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which
become more rigid still, losing their degrees of diversity,
differentiation, and mobility.

\section{\textbf{A} \emph{Assemblages}}


Assemblages are already different from strata. They are produced in the
strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded: they begin by
extracting a \emph{territory} from the milieus.\footnote{11} Every assemblage is
basically territorial. The first concrete rule for assemblages is to
discover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one: in
their trash can or on their bench, Beckett’s characters stake out a
territory. Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or
animal: “home.” The territory is made of decoded fragments of all kinds,
which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of
“properties”: even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains). The
territory makes the assemblage. The territory is more than the organism
and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the
assemblage goes beyond mere “behavior” (hence the importance of the
relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu animals).


Inasmuch as they are territorial, assemblages still belong to the
strata. At least they pertain to them in one of their aspects, and it is
under this aspect that we distinguish in every assemblage content from
expression.\footnote{4} It is necessary to ascertain the content and the
expression of each assemblage, to evaluate their real distinction, their
reciprocal presupposition, their piecemeal insertions. The reason that
the assemblage is not confined to the strata is that expression in it
becomes a \emph{semiotic system}, a regime of signs, and content becomes a
**pragmatic system*, actions and passions. This is the double
articulation face-hand, gesture-word, and the reciprocal presupposition
between the two. This is the first division of every assemblage: it is
simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage
of enunciation. In each case, it is necessary to ascertain both what is
said and what is done. There is a new relation between content and
expression that was not yet present in the strata: the statements or
expressions express \emph{incorporeal transformations} that are “attributed”
as such (properties) to bodies or contents. In the strata, expressions
do not form signs, nor contents \emph{pragmata}, so this autonomous zone of
incorporeal transformations expressed by the former and attributed to
the latter does not appear. Of course, regimes of signs develop only in
the alloplastic or anthropomorphic strata (including territorialized
animals). But this does not mean that they do not permeate all of the
strata, and overspill each of them. Assemblages belong to the strata to
the extent that the distinction between content and expression still
holds for them. We may also think of regimes of signs and pragmatic
systems as strata in their own right, in the broad sense previously
mentioned. But because the content-expression distinction assumes a new
figure, we are already in a different element than that of the strata in
the narrow sense.


The assemblage is also divided along another axis. Its territoriality
(content and expression included) is only a first aspect; the other
aspect is constituted by \emph{lines of deterritorialization} that cut across
it and carry it away. These lines are very diverse: some open the
territorial assemblage onto other assemblages (for example, the
territorial refrain of the animal becomes a courtship or group refrain).
Others operate directly upon the territoriality of the assemblage, and
open it onto a land that is eccentric, immemorial, or yet to come (for
example, the game of territory and the earth in the lied, or in the
romantic artist in general). Still others open assemblages onto abstract
and cosmic machines that they effectuate.\footnote{11 and 4} The territoriality of the
assemblage originates in a certain decoding of milieus, and is just as
necessarily extended by lines of deterritorialization. The territory is
just as inseparable from deterritorialization as the code from decoding.
Following these lines, the assemblage no longer presents an expression
distinct from content, only unformed matters, destratified forces, and
functions. The concrete rules of assemblage thus operate along these two
axes: On the one hand, what is the territoriality of the assemblage,
what is the regime of signs and the pragmatic system? On the other hand,
what are the cutting edges of deterritorialization, and what abstract
machines do they effectuate? The assemblage is tetravalent: (1) content
and expression; (2) territoriality and deterritorialization. That is why
there were four aspects in the privileged example of Kafka’s
assemblages.

\section{\textbf{R} \emph{Rhizome}}


Not only strata, assemblages are complexes of lines.\footnote{10} We can
identify a first state of the line, or a first kind of line: the line is
subordinated to the point; the diagonal is subordinated to the
horizontal and vertical; the line forms a contour, whether figurative or
not; the space it constitutes is one of striation; the countable
multiplicity it constitutes remains subordinated to the One in an always
superior or supplementary dimension. Lines of this type are molar, and
form a segmentary, circular, binary, arborescent system.


The second kind is very different, molecular and of the “rhizome”
type.\footnote{9 and 1} The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no
longer forms a contour, and instead passes \emph{between} things, \emph{between}
points. It belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more
dimensions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it
constitutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a
consistency of its own. These are multiplicities of masses or packs, not
of classes; anomalous and nomadic multiplicities, not normal or legal
ones; multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities,
not countable elements and ordered relations; fuzzy, not exact
aggregates, etc.\footnote{2, 10, 12, and 14} At the level of \emph{pathos}, these multiplicities are
expressed by psychosis and especially schizophrenia. At the level of
pragmatics, they are utilized by sorcery. At the level of theory, the
status of multiplicities is correlative to that of spaces, and vice
versa: smooth spaces of the type desert, steppe, or sea are not without
people; they are not depopulated but rather are populated by
multiplicities of this second kind (mathematics and music have gone
quite far in the elaboration of this theory of multiplicities).


It is not enough, however, to replace the opposition between the One and
the multiple with a distinction between types of multiplicities.\footnote{9}
For the distinction between the two types does not preclude their
immanence to each other, each “issuing” from the other after its
fashion. It is not so much that some multiplicities are arborescent and
others not, but that there is an arborification of multiplicities. That
is what happens when the black holes scattered along a rhizome begin to
resonate together, or when the stems form segments that striate space in
all directions, rendering it comparable, divisible, homogeneous (as we
saw in particular in the case of the Face).\footnote{12} That is also what
happens when “mass” movements or molecular flows conjugate at points of
accumulation or stoppage that segment and rectify them. But conversely,
and without symmetry, the stems of the rhizome are always taking leave
of the trees, the masses and flows are constantly escaping, inventing
connections that jump from tree to tree and uproot them: a whole
smoothing of space, which in turn reacts back upon striated space. Even,
and especially, territories are perturbed by these deep movements. Or
language: the trees of language are shaken by buddings and rhizomes. So
that rhizome lines oscillate between tree lines that segment and even
stratify them, and lines of flight or rupture that carry them away.\footnote{8 and 9}


We are therefore made of three lines, but each kind of line has its
dangers. Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose upon us
the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular lines,
already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally the lines of
flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative
potentialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a
line of destruction pure and simple (fascism).

\section{\textbf{C} \emph{Plane of Consistency, Body without Organs}}


The plane of consistency or of composition (planomenon) is opposed to
the plane of organization and development.\footnote{10} Organization and
development concern form and substance: at once the development of form
and the formation of substance or a subject. But the plane of
consistency knows nothing of substance and form: haecceities, which are
inscribed on this plane, are precisely modes of individuation proceeding
neither by form nor by the subject. The plane consists abstractly, but
really, in relations of speed and slowness between unformed elements,
and in compositions of corresponding intensive affects (the “longitude”
and “latitude” of the plane). In another sense, consistency concretely
ties together heterogeneous, disparate elements as such: it assures the
consolidation of fuzzy aggregates, in other words, multiplicities of the
rhizome type.\footnote{11} In effect, consistency, proceeding by consolidation,
acts necessarily in the middle, by the middle, and stands opposed to all
planes of principle or finality. Spinoza, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche
are the surveyors of such a plane of consistency. Never unifications,
never totalizations, but rather consistencies or consolidations.


Inscribed on the plane of consistency are \emph{haecceities}, events,
incorporeal transformations that are apprehended in themselves;\footnote{10}
**nomadic essences*, vague yet rigorous; \emph{continuums of intensities} or
continuous variations, which go beyond constants and variables;\footnote{4, 6}
**becomings*, which have neither culmination nor subject,\footnote{7, 9} but draw
one another into zones of proximity or undecidability; \emph{smooth spaces},
composed from within striated space. We will say that a body without
organs, or bodies without organs (plateaus) comes into play in
individuation by haecceity, in the production of intensities beginning
at a degree zero, in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming
or transformation, and in the smoothing of space.\footnote{6 and 10} A powerful
nonorganic life that escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and
draws an abstract line without contour, a line of nomad art and
itinerant metallurgy.\footnote{14}


Does the plane of consistency constitute the body without organs, or
does the body without organs compose the plane? Are the Body without
Organs and the Plane the same thing? In any event, composer and composed
have the same power: the line does not have a dimension superior to that
of the point, nor the surface to that of the line, nor the volume to
that of the surface, but always an anexact, fractional number of
dimensions that constantly increase or decrease with the number of its
parts.\footnote{10 and 14} The plane sections multiplicities of variable dimensions.
The question is, therefore, the mode of connection between the different
parts of the plane: To what extent do the bodies without organs
interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity extended? What is the
order of the transformational series? What are these alogical linkages
always effected in the middle, through which the plane is constructed
piece by piece in ascending or descending fractional order? The plane is
like a row of doors. And the concrete rules for the construction of the
plane obtain to the extent that they exercise a selective role. It is
the plane, in other words, the mode of connection, that provides the
means of eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies that rival the body
without organs, of rejecting the homogeneous surfaces that overlay
smooth space, and neutralizing the lines of death and destruction that
divert the line of flight. What is retained and preserved, therefore
created, what consists, is only \emph{that which increases the number of
connections} at each level of division or composition, thus in
descending as well as ascending order (that which is cannot be divided
without changing in nature, or enter into a larger composition without
requiring a new criterion of comparison\dots{}).

\section{\textbf{D} \emph{Deterritorialization}}


The function of deterritorialization: D is the movement by which “one”
leaves the territory.\footnote{5} It is the operation of the line of flight.
There are very different cases. D may be overlaid by a compensatory
reterritorialization obstructing the line of flight: D is then said to
be \emph{negative}. Anything can serve as a reterritorialization, in other
words, “stand for” the lost territory; one can reterritorialize on a
being, an object, a book, an apparatus or system \dots{} For example, it is
inaccurate to say that the State apparatus is territorial: it in fact
performs a D, but one immediately overlaid by reterritorializations on
property, work, and money (clearly, that landownership, public or
private, is not territorial but reterritorializing). Among regimes of
signs, the \emph{signifying regime} certainly attains a high level of D; but
because it simultaneously sets up a whole system of
reterritorializations on the signified, and on the signifier itself, it
blocks the line of flight, allowing only a negative D to persist.
Another case is when D becomes positive—in other words, when it prevails
over the reterritorializations, which play only a secondary role—but
nevertheless remains \emph{relative} because the line of flight it draws is
segmented, is divided into successive “proceedings,” sinks into black
holes, or even ends up in a generalized black hole (catastrophe). This
is the case of the \emph{regime of subjective signs}, with its passional and
consciousness-related D, which is positive but only in a relative sense.
It will be noted immediately that these two major forms of D are not in
a simple evolutionary relation to each other: the second may break away
from the first, or it may lead into it (notably when the segmentations
of converging lines of flight bring an overall reterritorialization or
one benefiting a particular segment, thus arresting the movement of
escape). There are all kinds of mixed figures, assuming highly varied
forms of D.


Is there \emph{absolute} D, and what does “absolute” mean? We must first have
a better understanding of the relations between D, the territory,
reterritorialization, and the earth. To begin with, the territory itself
is inseparable from vectors of deterritorialization working it from
within: either because the territoriality is supple and “marginal,” in
other words, itinerant,\footnote{9 and 13} or because the territorial assemblage
itself opens onto and is carried off by other types of assemblages.\footnote{11}
Second, D is in turn inseparable from correlative reterritorializations.
D is never simple, but always multiple and composite: not only because
it participates in various forms at the same time, but also because it
converges distinct speeds and movements on the basis of which one may
assign at a given moment a “deterritorialized element” and a
“deterritorializing element.” Now, reterritorialization as an original
operation does not express a return to the territory, but rather these
differential relations internal to D itself, this multiplicity internal
to the line of flight (cf. “Theorems of D”).\footnote{7 and 10} Finally, the earth is
not at all the opposite of D: This can already be seen in the mystery of
the “natal,” in which the earth as ardent, eccentric, or intense focal
point is outside the territory and exists only in the movement of
D.\footnote{11} More than that, the earth, the glacial, is Deterritorialization
par excellence: that is why it belongs to the Cosmos, and presents
itself as the material through which human beings tap cosmic
forces.\footnote{3} We could say that the earth, as deterritorialized, is
itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that D can be called the
creator of the earth—of a new land, a universe, not just a
reterritorialization.


This is the meaning of “absolute.” The absolute expresses nothing
transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity
that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a
type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement. A
movement is absolute when, whatever its quantity and speed, it relates
“a” body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it occupies in
the manner of a vortex.\footnote{7 and 14} A movement is relative, whatever its
quantity and speed, when it relates a body considered as \emph{One} to a
striated space through which it moves, and which it measures with
straight lines, if only virtual. D is negative or relative (yet already
effective) when it conforms to the second case and operates either by
principal reterritorializations that obstruct the lines of flight, or by
secondary reterritorializations that segment and work to curtail them. D
is absolute when it conforms to the first case and brings about the
creation of a new earth, in other words, when it connects lines of
flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line, or draws a
plane of consistency. Now what complicates everything is that this
absolute D necessarily proceeds by way of relative D, precisely because
it is not transcendent. Conversely, relative or negative D itself
requires an absolute for its operation: it makes the absolute something
“encompassing,” something totalizing that overcodes the earth and then
conjugates lines of flight in order to stop them, destroy them—rather
than connecting them in order to create (it is in this sense that we
have opposed \emph{conjunction} to \emph{connection}, although we have often
treated them as synonyms from a very general point of view). Thus there
is a limitative absolute already at work in properly negative, or even
relative, D’s. Above all, at this turning point the lines of flight are
not only obstructed or segmented but turn into lines of destruction or
death.\footnote{9 and 14} For the stakes here are indeed the negative and the positive
in the absolute: the earth girded, encompassed, overcoded,\footnote{11}
conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal organization
surrounding it on all sides, \emph{or} the earth consolidated, connected with
the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines of creation that cut
across it as so many becomings (Nietzsche’s expression: Let the earth
become lightness\dots{}). There are thus at least four forms of D that
confront and combine, and must be distinguished from one another
following concrete rules.

\section{\textbf{M} \emph{Abstract Machines (Diagram and Phylum)}}


There is no abstract machine, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic
Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate within
concrete assemblages: They are defined by the fourth aspect of
assemblages, in other words, the cutting edges of decoding and
deterritorialization.\footnote{11} They draw these cutting edges. Therefore they
make the territorial assemblage open onto something else, assemblages of
another type, the molecular, the cosmic; they constitute becomings. Thus
they are always singular and immanent. Contrary to the strata, and the
assemblages considered under their other aspects, abstract machines know
nothing of forms and substances. This is what makes them abstract, and
also defines the concept of the machine in the strict sense. They
surpass any kind of mechanics. They are opposed to the abstract in the
ordinary sense. Abstract machines consist of \emph{unformed matters and
nonformal functions}. Every abstract machine is a consolidated aggregate
of matters-functions (\emph{phylum} and \emph{diagram}).\footnote{5} This is evident on a
technological “plane”: such a plane is not made up simply of formed
substances (aluminum, plastic, electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms
(program, prototypes, etc.), but of a composite of unformed matters
exhibiting only degrees of intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating,
stretching, speed or delay, induction, transduction\dots{}) and diagrammatic
functions exhibiting only differential equations or, more generally,
“tensors.” Of course, within the dimensions of the assemblage, the
abstract machine, or machines, is effectuated in forms and substances,
in varying states of freedom. But the abstract machine must first have
composed itself, and have simultaneously composed a plane of
consistency. Abstract, singular, and creative, here and now, real yet
nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated—that is why abstract machines are
dated and named (the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract
machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven, etc.). Not
that they refer to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary,
it is the names and dates that refer to the singularities of the
machines, and to what they effectuate.


But if abstract machines know nothing of form and substance, what
happens to the other determination of strata, or even of
assemblages—content and expression? In a certain sense, it could be said
that this distinction is also irrelevant to the abstract machine,
precisely because it no longer has the forms and substances the
distinction requires.\footnote{3} The plane of consistency is a plane of
continuous variation; each abstract machine can be considered a
“plateau” of variation that places variables of content and expression
in continuity. Content and expression thus attain their highest level of
relativity, becoming “functives of one and the same function” or
materials of a single matter [see 4, “November 20, 1923: Postulates of
Linguistics,” \hyperref{}{amuse}{fn4-21}{note 21}—Trans.]. But in another sense, it
could be said that the distinction subsists, and is even recreated, on
the level of \emph{traits}: there are traits of content (unformed matters or
intensities) and traits of expression (nonformal functions or
tensors).\footnote{4 and 5} Here, the distinction has become entirely displaced, or
even a different distinction, since it now concerns cutting edges of
deterritorialization. Absolute deterritorialization implies a
“deterritorializing element” and a “deterritorialized element,” one of
which in each case is allocated to expression, the other to content, \emph{or
vice versa}, but always in such a way as to convey a relative
distinction between the two. Thus both content and expression are
necessarily affected by continuous variation, but it still assigns them
two dissymmetrical roles as elements of a single becoming, or as quanta
of a single flow. That is why it is impossible to define a continuous
variation that would not take in both the content and the expression,
rendering them indiscernible, while simultaneously proceeding by one
**or* the other, determining the two mobile and relative poles of that
which has become indiscernible. For this reason, one must define both
traits or intensities of content and traits or tensors of expression
(\emph{indefinite article, proper name, infinitive, and date}),\footnote{1, 2} which
take turns leading one another across the plane of consistency.\footnote{4, 10}
Unformed matter, the phylum, is not dead, brute, homogeneous matter, but
a matter-movement bearing singularities or haecceities, qualities, and
even operations (itinerant technological lineages);\footnote{12} and the
nonformal function, the diagram, is not an inexpressive metalanguage
lacking a syntax, but an expressivity-movement always bearing a foreign
tongue within each language and nonlinguistic categories within language
as a whole (nomad poetic lineages).\footnote{4} One writes, then, on the same
level as the real of an unformed matter, at the same time as that matter
traverses and extends all of nonformal language: a becoming-animal like
Kafka’s mouse [\hyperref{}{amuse}{conclusion-mouse}{p. 243}], Hofmannsthal’s rats
[\hyperref{}{amuse}{conclusion-rats}{p. 240}], Moritz’s calves
[\hyperref{}{amuse}{conclusion-calves}{p. 240}]?\footnote{10} A revolutionary machine, all the
more abstract for being real. A regime that no longer operates by the
signifier or the subjective.


That covers singular and immanent abstract machines. What we have said
does not preclude the possibility of “the” abstract machine serving as a
transcendent model, under very particular conditions. This time the
concrete assemblages are related to an abstract idea of the Machine and,
depending on how they effectuate it, are assigned coefficients taking
into account their potentialities, their creativity. The coefficients
that “quantify” assemblages bear on the varying assemblage components
(territory, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, earth, Cosmos),
the various entangled lines constituting the “map” of an assemblage
(molar lines, molecular lines, lines of flight), and the different
relations between the assemblage and the plane of consistency (phylum
and diagram). For example, the “grass stem” component may have different
coefficients in assemblages of animal species that are nevertheless
closely related [\hyperref{}{amuse}{conclusion-grass}{p. 324–25}].\footnote{11} As a general
rule, an assemblage is all the closer to the abstract machine the more
lines without contour passing between things it has, and the more it
enjoys a power of metamorphosis (transformation and transsubstantiation)
corresponding to the matter-function: cf. The Waves machine
[\hyperref{}{amuse}{conclusion-waves}{p. 252}].\footnote{4 and 10}


We have considered in particular two great alloplastic and
anthropomorphic assemblages, \emph{the war machine and the State apparatus}.
These two assemblages not only differ in nature but are quantifiable in
relation to “the” abstract machine in different ways. They do not have
the same relation to the phylum, the diagram; they do not have the same
lines, or the same components. This analysis of the two assemblages and
their coefficients demonstrates \emph{that the war machine does not in itself
have war for its object}, but necessarily adopts it as its object when
it allows itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus.\footnote{12 and 13} At this
very precise point, the line of flight and the abstract vital line it
effectuates turn into a line of death and destruction. Hence the name
war “machine,” which is much closer to the abstract machine than is the
State apparatus, which divests the war machine of its power of
metamorphosis. Writing and music can be war machines. The more an
assemblage opens and multiplies connections and draws a plane of
consistency with its quantifiers of intensities and of consolidation,
the closer it is to the living abstract machine.\footnote{1, 4} But it strays from
it to the extent that it replaces creative connections with
conjunctions\footnote{5, 9} causing blockages (\emph{axiomatics}), organizations
forming strata (\emph{stratometers}), reterritorializations forming black
holes (\emph{segmentometers}), and conversions into lines of death
(\emph{deleometers}).\footnote{12 and 14} Thus there is a whole process of selection of
assemblages according to their ability to draw a plane of consistency
with an increasing number of connections. Schizoanalysis is not only a
qualitative analysis of abstract machines in relation to the
assemblages, but also a quantitative analysis of the assemblages in
relation to a presumably pure abstract machine.


There is one last point of view, that of typological analysis. For there
exist general types of abstract machines. The abstract machine or
machines of the plane of consistency do not exhaust or dominate the
entirety of the operations that constitute the strata and even the
assemblages. The strata “take” on the plane of consistency itself,
forming areas of thickening, coagulations, and belts organized and
developing along the axes of another plane (substance-form,
content-expression).\footnote{3} This means that each stratum has a unity of
consistency or of composition relating above all to substantial elements
and formal traits, and testifying to the existence of a properly stratic
abstract machine presiding over this other plane. And there is a third
type: on the alloplastic strata, which are particularly propitious for
the assemblages, there arise abstract machines that compensate for
deterritorializations with reterritorializations, and especially for
decodings with overcodings or overcoding equivalents.\footnote{9} We have seen
in particular that if abstract machines open assemblages they also close
them. An order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine
overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes
or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real
machinic effects.\footnote{4, 7 and 8} We can no longer place the assemblages on a
quantitative scale measuring how close or far they are from the plane of
consistency. There are different types of abstract machines that overlap
in their operations and qualify the assemblages: \emph{abstract machines of
consistency}, singular and mutant, with multiplied connections;
**abstract machines of stratification* that surround the plane of
consistency with another plane; and \emph{axiomatic} or \emph{overcoding abstract
machines} that perform totalizations, homogenizations, conjunctions of
closure.\footnote{5 and 13} Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract
machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic,
scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active,
thinking, physical, and semiotic—but because their various types are as
intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.

\chapter{Bibliography}


(compiled by Brian Massumi)



\bigskip


I before an entry indicates an interview.\forcelinebreak 
P before an entry indicates a preface, postface, introduction, or
afterword.

\section{by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari}

\subsection{English}


**Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. Preface by Michel
Foucault. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York:
Viking, 1977; rpt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Translation of \emph{l’Anti-Oedipe}.


**Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature*. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Translation of \emph{Kafka: Pour une
littérature mineure}.


**Nomadology: The War Machine*. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1986. Translation of Chapter 2 of \emph{Mille Plateaux}.


**On the Line*. Trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Translation of “Rhizome” (the final version published in \emph{Mille
plateaux}) and “Politics” (Chapter 6 of \emph{Dialogues}).


**A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. Trans. Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Translation
of \emph{Mille Plateaux}.


“Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring-Machines.” Trans. Robert Hurley.
**Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus*, vol. 2, no. 5 (1977), pp. 117–135.
Translation of “Bilan-programme pour machines desirantes.”


“Becoming-Woman.” Trans. Brian Massumi. \emph{Subjects\Slash{}Objects}, no. 3
(Spring 1985), pp. 24–32. Extracts from Chapter 10 of \emph{Mille Plateaux}.


“A Bloated Oedipus.” Trans. Rachel McComas. \emph{Semiotext(e),
Polysexuality}, vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 97–101. Abridged translation
of Chapter 2 of Kafka: \emph{Pour une littérature} mineure.


“City-State.” Trans. Brian Massumi. \emph{Zone}, no. 1\Slash{}2 (1985), pp. 195–199.
Extract from Chapter 13 of \emph{Mille Plateaux}.


“Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines.” Trans. Charles Stivale.
**Sub\Slash{}Stance*, vol. 13, nos. 3\Slash{}4 (1984), pp. 7–19. Translation of Chapter
13 of \emph{Mille Plateaux}.


“How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs.” Trans. Suzanne Guerlac.
**Semiotext(e), Polysexuality*, vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 265–270.
Abridged translation of “Comment se faire un corps sans organes,” first
version.


“The Interpretation of Utterances.” With Claire Parnet and A. Scala.
Trans, and ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. In \emph{Language, Sexuality and
Subversion}. Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sydney: Feral
Publications, 1978, pp. 141–157. Papers delivered at the Milan
conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics (May 1973); published in
Deleuze and Guattari, \emph{Politique et psychanalyse}.


“One or Several Wolves?” Trans. Mark Seem. \emph{Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus},
vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 137–147. Translation of “Un seul ou plusieurs
loups?”, first version.


“Nomad Art.” Trans. Brian Massumi. \emph{Art and Text}, no. 19
(Oct.–Dec. 1985), pp. 16–24. Extracts from Chapter 14 of \emph{Mille
Plateaux}.


“Rhizome.” Trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton. In \emph{Ideology and
Consciousness}, no. 8 (Spring 1981), pp. 49–71. Translation of Rhizome
(the first version, published as a separate book). “What Is a Minor
Literature?” Trans. Robert Brinkley. \emph{Mississippi Review}, vol. 2, no. 3
(Winter\Slash{}Spring 1983), pp. 13–33. Translation of Chapter 3 of \emph{Kafka}.

\subsection{French}


**l’Anti-Oedipe*. Vol. I of \emph{Capitalisme et schizophrénic}. Paris:
Minuit, 1972; 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed., 1973, with added appendix, “Bilan-Programme pour
machines désirantes.”


**Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure*. Paris: Minuit, 1975.


**Mille Plateaux*. Vol. 2 of \emph{Capitalisme et schizophrénic}. Paris:
Minuit, 1980.


**Politique et psychanalyse*. Alençon: Bibliothèque des Mots Perdues,
1977. Texts from the Milan conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics
(May 1973). Contains: “La place du signifiant dans l’institution,”
Guattari (revised version reprinted in \emph{La révolution moléculaire}, and
included in the English edition); “Psychanalyse et politique,” Guattari;
“Quatre propositions sur la psychanalyse,” Deleuze; and
“L’interprétation des énoncés,” Deleuze, Guattari, Claire Parnet, and
Andre Scala.


**Rhizome*. Paris: Minuit, 1976. Modified and reprinted as the
introduction to \emph{Mille Plateaux}.


“Bilan-Programme pour machines désirantes.” \emph{Minuit}, no. 2 (January
1973), pp. 1–25. Reprinted as appendix to second edition of
**l’Anti-Oedipe*.


Discussions, in François Fourquet and Lion Murard, \emph{Les équipements de
pouvoir} (Paris: 10\Slash{}18,1976), pp. 39–47, 161–195, 212–227. Revised
version of \emph{Recherches}, no. 13 [December 1973], \emph{Les équipements
collectifs}.


“Le nouvel arpenteur. Intensités et blocs d’enfance dans ‘le Château.’”
**Critique*, vol. 29, no. 318 (November 1973), pp. 1046–1054.


“La synthèse disjonctive.” \emph{L’Arc, Klossowski}, no. 43 (1970),
pp. 54–62. Modified and reprinted as Chapter 2, part 4 of
**l’Anti-Oedipe*.


“Un seul ou plusieurs loups?” \emph{Minuit}, no. 5 (Sept. 1973), pp. 2–16.
Modified and reprinted as Chapter 2 of \emph{Mille Plateaux}.

\section{by Gilles Deleuze}

\subsection{English}


**Cinema 1: The Movement-Image*. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Translation
of \emph{Cinéma I: L’image-mouvement}.


Kant’s \emph{Critical Philosophy}. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. With
preface to the English edition. Translation of \emph{La philosophie critique
de Kant}.


**Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty*. Trans Jean
McNeil. New York: Braziller, 1971. With the text of \emph{Venus in Furs},
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Translation of \emph{Présentation de
Sacher-Masoch}.


**Nietzsche and Philosophy*. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983. Translation of \emph{Nietzsche et la philosophie}.


**Proust and Signs*. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Braziller, 1972.
Translation of \emph{Proust et les signes}, 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed.


“Active and Reactive.” Trans. Richard Cohen. In \emph{The New Nietzsche},
ed. David B. Allison. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, pp. 80–106.
Translation of Chapter 2 of \emph{Nietzsche et la philosophie}.


“Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis.” Trans. Meaghan Morris. In
**Language, Sexuality and Subversion*. Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris.
Sidney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 134–140. Translation of “Quatre
propositions sur la psychanalyse” in Deleuze and Guattari, \emph{Politique et
psychanalyse}.


“I Have Nothing to Admit.” Trans. Janis Forman. \emph{Semiotext(e),
Anti-Oedipus}, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 111–116. Translation of “Lettre
à Michel Cressole.”


“Intellectuals and Power.” Discussion with Michel Foucault in \emph{Foucault,
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice}. Ed. and trans. Donald Bouchard.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 205–217. Also trans.
Mark Seem, \emph{Telos} 16 (Summer 1973), pp. 103–109. Translation of “Les
intellectuals et le pouvoir.”


“On Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy.”
Preface to Deleuze, Kant’s \emph{Critical Philosophy}.


“Open Letter to Negri’s Judges.” Trans. Committee April 7, London.
**Semiotext(e), Italy: Autonomia*, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 182–184.
From \emph{La Repubblica}.


“Nomad Thought.” Trans. Jacqueline Wallace. \emph{Semiotext(e), Nietzsche’s
Return}, vol. 3, no. 1 (1978), pp. 12–20. Translation of “Pensée
nomade.” Also trans. David B. Allison in \emph{The New Nietzsche}, ed. David
B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 142–149.


“Plato and the Simulacrum.” Trans. Rosalind Krauss. \emph{October}, no. 16
(Winter 1983), pp. 45–56. Translation of “Platon et le simulacre.” “The
Rise of the Social.” Foreword to Jacques Donzelot, \emph{The Policing of
Families}. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1979, pp. ix–xvii.
Translation of “L’ascension du social.”


“The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and
Antonin Artaud.” In \emph{Textual Strategies}. Ed. and trans. Josué Harari.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 277–295. Translation
of “Le schizophrène et le mot.” Reprinted in \emph{Literature and
Psychoanalysis}. Ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983.


“Three Group Problems.” Trans. Mark Seem. \emph{Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus},
vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 99–109. Translation of “Trois problèmes de
groupe.”

\subsection{French}


**Le Bergsonisme*. Paris: PUF, 1966.


**Bergson. Mémoire et vie*. Paris: PUF, 1957. Extracts from Bergson
selected by Deleuze.


**Cinema I: L’image-mouvement*. Paris: Minuit, 1983.


**Cinema II: L’image-temps*. Paris: Minuit, 1985.


**David Hume, la vie, son oeuvre*. Paris: PUF, 1952. Extracts from Hume
with an introduction by Deleuze and Andre Cresson.


**Dialogues*. With Claire Parnet. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.


**Difference et Répétition*. Paris: PUF, 1968.


**Empirisme et subjectivité*. Paris: PUF, 1953. 3\textsuperscript{rd} ed., 1980.


**Foucault*. Paris: Minuit, 1986.


**Francis Bacon. Logique de la Sensation*. 2 vols. Paris: Ed. de la
Différence, 1981.


**Instincts et Institutions*. Paris: Hachette, 1953. Texts selected by
Deleuze.


**Logique du sens*. Paris: Minuit, 1969.


**Nietzsche*. Paris: PUF, 1965. Extracts from Nietzsche with an
introduction by Deleuze.


**Nietzsche et la philosophie*. Paris: PUF, 1962. 4\textsuperscript{th} ed., 1973.


**Un nouvel archiviste*. Illustrations by d’Ipoustiguy. Montpellier: Fata
Morgana, 1972. Reprint of “Un nouvel archiviste.”


**La philosophie critique de Kant*. Paris: PUF, 1963.


**Présentation de Sacher-Masoch*. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Rpt. Paris: 10\Slash{}18,
1971. Lengthy introduction by Deleuze with the text of Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch’s \emph{La Venus à la fourrure}.


**Proust et les signes*. Paris: PUF, 1964. Augmented 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed., 1970.


**Spinoza et le problème de l’expression*. Paris: Minuit, 1968.


**Spinoza. Philosophie pratique*. Paris: PUF, 1970. Augmented 2\textsuperscript{nd}
ed. Paris: Minuit, 1981.


**Superpositions*. With Carmelo Bene. Paris: Minuit, 1979. The play,
**Richard III*, by Bene with an essay on Bene by Deleuze entitled “Un
manifeste de moins.”


***I** “A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un problème plus général.”
**Le Monde*, June 19–20, 1977, p. 16. Reprinted \emph{Recherches, Les
Untorelli}, no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 179–184. Interview from June 5,
1977.


***P** “L’ascension du social.” Postface to Jacques Donzelot, \emph{La police
des families}. Paris: Minuit, 1977, pp. 220.


“Capitalisme et schizophrénic.” \emph{L’Arc, Deleuze}, no. 49 (1972; 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed.,
1980), pp. 47–55. Interview with Catherine Bakis-Clément from March 2,
1972.


“La conception de la différence chez Bergson.” \emph{Etudes bergsoniennes},
vol. 4 (1956), pp. 79–112.


“Deux régimes de fous.” In \emph{Psychanalyse et Sémiotique. Actes du
Collogue de Milan}, 1974. Ed. Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10\Slash{}18, 1975,
pp. 165–186. Presentation by Deleuze with discussion.


“Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe.” \emph{Critique}, no. 343 (December
1975), pp. 1207–1227. Review of Michel Foucault, \emph{Surveiller et Punir}
(\emph{Discipline and Punish}). Modified and reprinted as “Un nouveau
cartographe” in \emph{Foucault}, pp. 31–51.


“En quoi la philosophie peut servir à des mathématiciens ou même à des
musiciens, même et surtout quand elle ne parle pas de musique ou de
mathématiques,” in \emph{Vincennes, ou le désir d’apprendre}. Ed. Pierre
Merlin. Paris: Alain, Moreau, 1979, pp. 120–121.


“Faille et feux locaux. Kostas Axelos.” \emph{Critique} no. 275 (April 1970),
pp. 344–351.


“Grandeur de Yasser Arafat.” \emph{Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes}, no. 10
(Winter 1984), pp. 41–43.


“L’Homme: une existence douteuse.” \emph{Le Nouvel Observateur}, no. 81 (June
1–7, 1966), pp. 32–34. Review of Michel Foucault, \emph{Les mots et les
chases} (The Order of Things).


***I** “Huit ans après.” \emph{L’Arc, Deleuze}, no. 49 (1972; 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed., 1980),
pp. 99–102. Interview with Catherine Clément from 1980.


“Hume.” In \emph{La philosophie}, ed. François Châtelet. Paris: Hachette,
1979. Vol. 2, pp. 226–239.


***I** “Les intellectuals et le pouvoir.” \emph{L’Arc, Deleuze}, no. 49 (1972;
2\textsuperscript{nd} ed., 1980), pp. 3–10. Discussion with Michel Foucault.


***I** Interview. \emph{Libération}. October 23, 1980, pp. 16–17.


***I** Interview. \emph{Libération}. October 3, 1983, pp. 30–31.


***I** Interview. \emph{Le Monde}. October 6, 1983, pp. 1, 17.


***I** Interview. \emph{L’autre journal}, no. 8 (October 1985), pp. 12–22.


***I** Interview. \emph{Libération}. September 2, 1986, pp. 27–28 and
September 3, 1986, p. 38.


***P** “Introduction à ‘La Bête humaine’ de Balzac.” In \emph{Oeuvres
Complètes d’Emile Zola}. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967. Vol. 6,
pp. 13–21. Modified and reprinted under the title “Zola et la fêlure” as
an appendix to \emph{Logique du sens}.


***P** Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, \emph{Le gai savoir. Les fragments
posthumes} (1881–82). Trans. Pierre Klossowski. Vol. 5 of \emph{Oeuvres
philosophiques complètes}. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, pp. i–iv. With Michel
Foucault.


***P** Introduction to Johann Malfatti von Monteregio, \emph{Etudes sur la
mathèse, ou anarchie et hierarchic de la science}. Paris: Ed. du Griffon
d’Or, 1946, pp. ix–xxiv.


“Klossowski et le corps-langage.” \emph{Critique}, no. 214 (March 1965),
pp. 199–219. Modified and reprinted as an appendix to \emph{Logique du sens}.


“Lettre à Michel Cressole,” in Michel Cressole, \emph{Deleuze}. Paris:
Editions Universitaires, 1973, pp. 107–118. Translated as “I Have
Nothing to Admit.”


“Lucrèce et le naturalisme.” \emph{Etudes philosophiques}, series 16, no. 1
(Jan.–March 1961), pp. 19–29. Modified and reprinted under the title
“Lucrèce et le simulacre” as an appendix to \emph{Logique du sens}.


“Lucrèce et le simulacre.” See “Lucrèce et le naturalisme.”


“Méthode de dramatisation.” \emph{Bulletin de la Société Française de
Philosophie}, vol. 61, no. 3 (July–September 1967), pp. 89–118.
Presentation followed by discussion.


“Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui.” See “Une théorie d’Autrui.”


“Mystère d’Ariane.” \emph{Etudes nietzschéennes} (1963).


“Nous croyons au caractère constructiviste de certaines agitations de
gauche.” \emph{Recherches, Les Untorelli}, no. 30 (November 1977),
pp. 149–150. Statement on repression in Italy written by Deleuze and
signed by a number of French Intellectuals, September 20, 1977.


“Un nouvel archiviste.” Critique, no. 274 (March 1970), pp. 195–209.
Review of Michel Foucault, \emph{L’archéologie du savoir}. Modified and
reprinted in \emph{Foucault}, pp. 11–30.


“Pensée nomade.” In \emph{Nietzsche aujourd’hui?} Vol. I. Paris: 10\Slash{}18, 1973,
pp. 159–190. Presentation by Deleuze to the Colloque de Cérisy (1972),
with discussion.


“Philosophie et minorité.” \emph{Critique}, no. 369 (February 1978),
pp. 154–155.


“La photographic est déjà tirée dans le schoses,” \emph{Cahiers du Cinéma},
no. 352 (October 1983), pp. 35–40. Interview with Pascal Bonitzer and
Jean Narboni.


“Platon et le simulacre.” See “Renverser le platonisme.”


***P** Preface to Antonio Negri, \emph{L’anomalie sauvage. Puissance et
pouvoir chez Spinoza}. Paris: PUF, 1981, pp. 9–12.


***P** Preface to Guy Hocquenghem. \emph{L’après-mai des faunes}. Paris:
Grasset, 1974, pp. 7–17.


***P** “Qu’est-ce que c’est, tes ‘machines désirantes’ à toi?” \emph{Les Temps
Modernes}, no. 316 (November 1972), pp. 854–856. Introduction to Pierre
Bénichou, “Saint Jackie, Comedienne et Bourreau.”


“A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” In \emph{La philosophie}. Ed.
François Châtelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 4, pp. 293–339. (Abridged
version of \emph{Histoire de la philosophie}. 8 volumes. Paris: Hachette,
1972–1973.)


“Renverser le platonisme (les simulacres),” \emph{Revue de Métaphysique et de
Morale}, vol. 71, no. 4 (October–December 1967), pp. 426–438. Modified
and reprinted under the title “Platon et le simulacre” as an appendix to
**Logique du sens*.


“De Sacher Masoch au masochisme.” \emph{Arguments}, vol. 5, no. 21
(Jan.–April 1961), pp. 40–46.


***P** “Schizologie.” Preface to Louis Wolfson, \emph{Le schizo et les
langues}. Paris: Gallimard, 1970, pp. 5–23.


“Le schizophrène et le mot.” \emph{Critique}, no. 255\Slash{}256 (August–September
1968), pp. 731–746. Modified and reprinted in \emph{Logique du sens}, series
2 and 13.


“Schizophrénie et société” in \emph{Encyclopaedia Universalis} (1985),
vol. 16, pp. 524–527. “Sens et valeurs.” \emph{Arguments}, vol. 3, no. 15
(Sept.–Dec. 1959), pp. 20–28. Modified and reprinted in Chapter 1 of
**Nietzsche et la philosophie*.


“Spinoza et la méthode générate de M. Gueroult.” \emph{Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale}, vol. 74, no. 2 (April–June 1970), pp. 426–437.


“Spinoza et nous.” \emph{Revue de Synthèse}, 3\textsuperscript{rd} series, nos. 89–91
(January–September 1978). Reprinted as Chapter 6 of \emph{Spinoza.
Philosophie pratique}, 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed.


“Une théorie d’Autrui. Michel Tournier.” \emph{Critique}, no. 241 (June
1967), pp. 503–525. Modified and reprinted under the title “Michel
Tournier et le monde sans autrui” as an appendix to \emph{Logique du sens}.
Reprinted as the postface to Tournier, \emph{Vendredi, ou les limbes du
Pacifique}. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.


***P** “Trois problemes de groupe.” Preface to Félix Guattari,
**Psychanalyse et transversalité*. Paris: Maspero, 1972, pp. i–xi.


“Unité de’A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.’” \emph{Revue de Métaphysique et de
Morale}, vol. 68, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1963), pp. 427–442.


“Sur la volonté de puissance et l’éternel retour.” In \emph{Nietzsche.
Cahiers de Royaumont}. Paris: Minuit, 1967, pp. 275–287.


“Zola et la fêlure.” See “Introduction à ‘la Bête humaine’ de Balzac.”

\section{by Felix Guattari}

\subsection{English}


**Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics*. Trans. Rosemary Sheed.
New York: Penguin, 1984. A selection of essays from \emph{Psychanalyse et
transversalité} and the two versions of \emph{La révolution moléculaire},
with a previously unpublished essay, “Capitalistic Systems, Structures
and Processes” (with Eric Alliez), later published in French in
Guattari, \emph{Les années d’hiver}.


“Becoming-Woman.” Trans. Rachel McComas and Stamos Metzidakis.
**Semiotext(e), Polysexuality*, vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 86–88. Also
translated as “Becoming a Woman” by Rosemary Sheed in Guattari,
**Molecular Revolution*, pp. 233–235. Translation of “Devenir femme,” \emph{La
revolution moleculaire} (both editions).


“Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist.” Trans. Suzanne Fletcher.
**Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus*, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 87–98.


“Freudo-Marxism.” \emph{Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus}, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977),
pp. 73–75. Intended for \emph{Le Nouvel Observateur} but never published in
French.


“Genet Regained.” Trans. Brian Massumi. \emph{LAICA Journal}, vol. 5, no. 47
(Spring 1987).


***I** Interview with Félix Guattari by Mark Seem. \emph{Diacritics}, vol. 4,
no. 3 (Fall 1974), pp. 38–41.


“Like an Echo of a Collective Melancholy.” Trans. Mark Polizzotti.
**Semiotext(e), The German Issue*, vol. 4, no. 2 (1982), pp. 102–110.
Translation of “Comme un écho de la mélancholic collective,” in \emph{La
révolution moléculaire} (10\Slash{}18 edition).


***I** “The New Alliance.” Interview with Sylvère Lotringer. \emph{Impulse},
vol. 10, no. 2 (Winter 1982), pp. 41–44.


“The Proliferation of Margins.” Trans. Richard Gardner and Sybil Walker.
**Semiotext(e), Italy: Autonomia*, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 108–111.


“Psychoanalysis and Politics.” Trans. Paul Foss. \emph{Language, Sexuality
and Subversion}. Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sydney: Feral
Publications, 1978, pp. 125–133. Translation of “Psychanalyse et
politique,” first published in \emph{Politique et psychanalyse}. Revised and
published in \emph{La révolution moleculaire} under the title “Les luttes du
désir et la psychanalyse”; translated in \emph{The Molecular Revolution} as
“Psychoanalysis and the Struggles of Desire.”


“Psycho-Analysis and Schizo-Analysis.” Trans. Janis Forman.
**Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus*, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 77–85. Extracts
from an interview about \emph{Anti-Oedipus} with Arno Munster originally
published in the \emph{Frankfurter Rundschau} (January 17,1973). Other
portions of this interview were published as “La fin de fétichismes,”
**La révolution moléculaire*.


Response to questionnaire on the city. Trans. Bruce Henderson. Zone,
no.1\Slash{}2 (1985), p. 460.


***I** “Why Italy?” Trans. John Johnston. \emph{Semiotext(e), Italy:
Autonomia}, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 234–237. Interview, unpublished in
French.

\subsection{French}


**Les années d’hiver*. Paris: Barrault, 1986. Collected essays 1980–1985.


**L’inconscient moléculaire. Essais de Schizo-analyse*. Paris:
Recherches, 1979.


**Les nouveaux espaces de liberté*. With Toni Negri. Followed by
Guattari, “Des libertés en Europe,” and Negri, “Lutte archéoligique.”
Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985.


**Psychanalyse et transversalité*. Preface by Gilles Deleuze (“Trois
problèmes de groupe”). Paris: Maspero, 1972. Collected essays 1965–1970.


**La révolution moléculaire*. Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977.
Essays 1971–1977. \emph{La révolution moléculaire}. Paris: Union Générale
d’Editions (10\Slash{}18), 1980. Essays 1972–1979.\forcelinebreak 
**NOTE*: The two collections entitled \emph{La révolution moléculaire} are
substantially different. The Recherches edition includes a section on
cinema and extensive selections on semiotics that do not appear in the
10\Slash{}18 version; the 10\Slash{}18 version deals extensively with the Italian
Autonomia movement.


***I** Interview. \emph{L’Autre Journal}, no. 5 (May 1985), pp. 6–22.


“Masses et minorités à la recherche d’une nouvelle stratégic.”
**Recherches, Les Untorelli*, no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 113–122.


“Sémiologies signifiantes et sémiologies asignifiantes,” in
**Psychanalyse et sémiotique. Actes du Colloque de Milan*, 1974. Ed.
Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10\Slash{}18, 1975, pp. 151–163.









% begin final page

\clearpage


% if we are on an odd page, add another one, otherwise when imposing
% the page would be odd on an even one.
\ifthispageodd{\strut\thispagestyle{empty}\clearpage}{}


% new page for the colophon

\thispagestyle{empty}

\begin{center}

The Anarchist Library



\smallskip
Anti-Copyright



\bigskip
\includegraphics[width=0.25\textwidth]{logo-en}
\bigskip

\end{center}

\strut

\vfill

\begin{center}


Deleuze \& Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

1987


\bigskip



   

       

       

       

       

       

       

   



\bigskip
\textbf{theanarchistlibrary.org}


\end{center}

% end final page with colophon


% end closing pages



\end{document}


% No format ID passed.



