<<TRANSMATHOME

1.4 Stratification, pragmatics, abstract machines

1.4.1

Addressed in relation to the idea of Substance or the Cosmos, the question of that which goes into effect in thought led to questions concerning  Kant. In contrast, the question of zones or modes has brought the discussion into very direct proximity to the work of Nietzsche (although Nietzsche’s work  was also in effect in the previous stage).   For Nietzsche the question of thought must be addressed in terms of intensive, fluidly differential  bodies (wills) and in terms of socially emplaced modes of constriction.  For Nietzsche, as for Deleuze and Guattari, thought involves bodies, and it involves exteriority. What constricts thought is socially endemic modalities which at the level of bodies (content) involve constricted or regulated states, and at the level of language (expression) involve a fields of functionings of  terms  which conduct engagement along lines which involve a minimum of thought.

It is this last set of issues which makes up the new thread that must be followed.  In particular, the question is this: what are the modalities of constriction  in relation to thought? The answer provided by A Thousand Plateaus can be valuably explored at this point. It is a very subtle and complex answer, and can initially be divided into two parts. Deleuze and Guattari’s response to this question is – firstly - that there  are modalities of constriction of thought at large-scale level, which are de-intensificatory (only ‘locally’ generative) formations of the modalities of engagememt, exemplified here by reason, language and engagement with affects or becomings. However (to go to the second part of the response), at a level ‘nested’ deep within the field of these modes of engagement, there are also modes of constriction that pertain in large part to the field of language, and which can be regarded as constrictions that function in relation to the idea or problematic of thought. The issues here are all extremely intricate. It is the second part of the answer that will be taken up first (the question of constrictions in relation to the  problematic of thought). The first part will be explained later in this section (after a necessary initial examination of the issue of pragmatics or schizoanalysis).

1.4.2

Deleuze and Guattari refer to the modalities of constriction at issue as images of thought. In particular they pick out for analysis an extremely important example which is closely bound up with the world of the State form  of organisation, and which they designate as ‘the classical image of thought’.  They say that there is an ‘image of thought covering all of thought’, and say that this image  ‘is like the State-form developed in thought’. It is this particular  ‘image of thought’ which will now be analysed. This is a further departure for this chapter – one that will hopefully involve a return to the central issues at a much higher point.

What is crucial in relation to an image of thought  is that it  involves the functioning of a field of elements of the social field  as a complex model, so that the field of language involved is in part expressive of the given social assemblage (the notion of the ‘subject’ is the obvious case in point here). It is a question of a direct articulation between, on the one hand, the given  field of institutions of organisation and a field of overcodings of thought in terms of regulation, recognition and judgement (etc.). The ‘image of thought’ analysed by Deleuze and Guattari  is one which sets up the field in terms of a Subject which varies in terms of the  obeying or disobeying of reason, and a field of Being which  is the ground of all reasonable thought, such that the decrees of Being are held to be the object of truth. On the one side, the subject is split into the obeying and that which is obeyed, and on the other side Being is split into the foundation and the domain of the foundation which has been converted into truth. This is the machinery of an interiorisation of the state apparatus, and of a supplimentarty dimension of interiority. Deleuze and Guattari give this account of the two ‘sides’ of the interiority:

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 which converts being into being-for-us. 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’. (TP p.379)

The two sides of the interiority are expressive of the two ‘poles’ of the State field: control through decrees ‘from on high’  and through force, and control through codified alliances and juridical structures. This is the real and differential field of the state assemblage: stretched between ‘pharoahic’ or ‘Mayan’ despotism and intricate ‘republican’ accommodation with other assemblages. To quote, the classical image of thought, for Deleuze and Guattari

has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty: the imperium of true thinking operating by magical capture, seizure or binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (mythos); a republic of free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and juridical organisation, carrying the sanction of a ground (logos). (TP p.374-375)

The web of over-coding exists as a part of a process in which the  state functions as a model (and in which the overcoding functions in a reciprocal relation to help uphold the state). The result is that in ‘place’ of a  world of emergences through relations of exteriority pertaining to bodies there is  the fabrication of a whole suppressive language-scape of subjects, tools, regulative principles, judgements and recognitions.

In relation to thought, language as communication (the making communal of engagements) conducts through delineation toward the intensification of the fields of becomings of bodies, in a way where a living human body is determinable as the locus of invention, dreams, fluent responsiveness, dance, play and experimentation. The ‘image’ or semiotic  of thought at stake here is not an inferior version of this line of thinking (which is why it cannot be said to be in its place): it is a modality within the overall suppressive field of ‘order-word’ compositions of language. This field is, in turn, connected up with the field of the constrictive, ‘habitative’ routines and forms of engagement which belong to the suppressive or deintensificatory form of reason (reason asleep or stratified, and breeding monsters). Instead of the accessing in language  of the multiple, productive body, there is the regulatory language of the subject which is both the obeying and the obeyed, and the language of Being, the  impositions of which are worked up into truth. The projection of the subject and the object into the field of fluid human bodies is a blatant projection of a supplementary or over-coding dimension. It is a question of a kind of incorporated, rational  delirium of the state, where it is both the case that the state as model, and as domain of the constrictional production of reason, is pro-generative of the new specific manifestations of the ‘image’, and also that the fields of production of the image are partially independent fields that are elements of the ongoing production of the state. These points are made in more detail in the following passage:

The exchange that takes place between the State and reason is a curious one; but that exchange is also an analytic proposition, because realised reason is identified with the de jure State, just as the State is the becoming of reason [that is, it is a field of connection between different zones of production pertaining to reason in this sense]. 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 realise the distinction between the legislator and the subject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptualise 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... 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. [...] It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of thought. (TP p.376)

The classical image of thought is centrally a field of meshed constrictive functionings within language. However, at the same time this image is inherently bound up with the controlling operations of States  (hence the bizarre language of subjects and of obeying yourself). States are segmental, dominatory fields, and therefore are zones belonging to the plane of reason. This classical image of thought therefore involves a ‘fixation’ within a particular domain of language connected with the State, and within one zone or assemblage of the attribute of dominatory fields (the State).

1.4.3

These ideas can be given further substance by taking up the question of ‘inventions’ (i.e., inventions, creations, new departures, discoveries...). The ideas  of inventions and of ‘breakthrough’ discoveries are ideas of emergences in particular areas, where this idea of emergence does not at all need to involve the idea of a subject which recognises, places or judges according to pre-existing criteria or categories. The idea of emergence in this sense can be set out in an expanded form. Firstly,  this idea is that of a field of  encountered  zones going into effect in the form of a multiple, combined entering into composition with the zones involved. This is what Deleuze and Guattari are conveying when they say (in the same section from ‘the Nomadology’ that has been cited in the previous quotations): ‘Every thought is a tribe, the opposite of a State’ (TP p.377), and when they add to this by saying, a little later ‘A tribe in the desert, instead of a universal subject within the horizon of all-encompassing being’ (TP p.379). This is the idea of a fluidly molecular and distributive process of the going into effect of encountered zones or forces - a conceiving or seeing which is an emergence rather than an effective repetition as with recognition. Secondly the idea is that of a linked or associated process of communicating the initial breakthrough and the engagements involved in general (whether they are in mathematics, science, philosophy, art, technology...) through the  composition of blocks of language, which in communicating a new field of engagement will involve transmutated constructions, and uses of terms. Language here is a question of ‘relaying’ (in the widest possible sense of this term) rather than of staying caught within habituated, conforming  lines of non-thought, or non-thinking activity. In turn, thought is  being understood as a ‘war machine’, where the process of communicating or relaying engagements is at the same time to be understood as a process which generatively undermines incorporated constrictive modes: ‘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’ (TP p.377).

 With this way of thinking there is no longer any enigma in relation to reports of insights and inventions occuring during dreams, and other ‘dream-like’ states. This is because dreaming engagement is the going into effect of encountered or incorporated zones in relation to the same zones as is the case with waking engagement, which is to say that dreaming pertains to the field of affects of the body, and that dreaming is a modality of thought. Given this fact it would be surprising if dreaming did not occasionally emerge into a sustained ‘lucid’ process of invention or discovery (a line of flight, or of sustained deepening engagement). The dreaming state, like the waking state, involves phases of constriction, and phases of escape or of lucidity. There is no romanticising of dreaming involved in this: dreaming is as much a prey to confusion and stultification as is waking (or more so). It is a question of an escape from the ‘sleep’ of stultification or stratification which can pass into lucidity from either one of two directions.

The misleading  language of ‘inspired states’ is liable to emerge  at this point. This language in fact belongs to a different ‘image of thought’. There is a ‘poetic’ ‘heroic’ or ‘visionary’ image of thought which constructs thought along the lines of gifts from a single  giver, and of missions of assistance or ‘founding’.  With this image dreams are central, whereas for the classical image they are liable to be constructed  as an ‘abberation’ (the section on dreams in the Oxford Companion to the Mind starts by saying ‘In sleep we all intermittently experience insanity’, and does not go on to seriously complicate this statement[5]).

The crucial overarching point is that a human body  is to be understood as a  nexus of forms of thought, or of affects (this in fact applies to all bodies, but in different ways, or at different degrees of intensity). This is to break the fixations with particular assemblages  (and with connections between bodies and these assemblages, such as obeying laws or going on missions), and to think bodies in terms of intensive connections. Because the field of these intensive connections is without limit and involves the attributes of the cosmos, this is to think the body under the species of the cosmos, rather than to be locked  within a de-intensication involving engagements being sucked into the fixation zones of human assemblages.   A body here is a zone of inter-meshed modalities, and as such is pre-eminently a ‘body without organs’, to use a key term from A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus it is a question of  a fluid affective field of encounters which  runs through and ‘underneath’ the organisational body, with its organs,  and its aquired reactive mechanisms.  In an essay called ‘To Have Done with Judgement’ Deleuze refers to the body in this sense as a zone of ‘nonorganic vitality’, this being understood as an entering into composition with the worlds of forces beyond it: ‘This nonorganic vitality is the relation of the body to the imperceptible forces and powers that seize hold of it, or that it seizes hold of’[6]. The relation here is with real inter-meshed zones of differentiation or modulation (which are imperceptible in the sense that they are not recognisable on the basis of any standard empirical procedures, even though they can then come to be zones named within empirical work). This world of ‘forces and powers’, as has been seen, consists of different cross-cutting attributes  or fields of zones. And to return to the main point, it is a concomitant of this fact that the  nonorganic body is differentiated along the lines of  cross-cutting modalities - the modalities being fields that emerge through connections with the fields of zones. If a field of zones has gone into sustained effect (rather than being  unengaged in terms of consistent engagement, and therefore unknown) then there is an intensive  zone of the bodies involved  which  is the modality of engagement with the particular field of zones. Trans-prehension, language, reason: these are names for zones of an intensive  body or ‘body  without organs’, and they are names for zones which are only graspable through their fundamental interconnection with what is beyond this body:

The body without organs is an affective, intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients. It is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality.[7]  

The body must therefore be understood as a kind of vast fluid nexus of modalities, where these modalities cannot be thought without the idea of  forces beyond them with which they are fundamentally connected (as with the terrestrial, atmospheric and cosmic forces with which an ocean is connected).

 It can now be seen more clearly  how it is that the classical image of thought is a constriction or suppressive regulation of thought, rather than it being a bad model, or innacurate account. An image of thought is an aformal  ‘node’ of constrictive functionings of language, which is connected to a particular assemblage or domain of assemblages, and  which keeps processes within a field of circuits or conjugated elements (as opposed to a nomadic relay) and which develops only  along reactive lines: eg.:‘thought is an action performed by a subject; thought has laws of method, and prior laws of effective thought that only have insanity beyond them; thought has Being or all objects as its correlate, and in each case if all appropriate laws are followed the thought of the subject will be truth...’. As has been demonstrated the body as nexus of thought has nothing in any way like a subject  that is a condition of thought. Thought  concerns becomings or connections with an immanent outside, rather than the functioning of a subject, and at the same time lucidity has been shown to be an idea relating to joint unconstrained movements of fields of faculties, rather than to consciousness.  This means that the field of pre-suppositions or linked guide-lines  of the  ‘image of thought’ is nothing but  constrictive in relation to thought, and in particular, to engagement with the body as a micro-corporeal field and as a  nexus of becomings. It is the case that for a body  there can be a dominant inter-connected field of subjectified functioning, but this is a field of reactive forces, and far from being in any way the condition of thought, it is a webwork of dominated relations of the body. This field or webwork is a tissue of extrinsically based proceseses of judgement, recognitions, productions and receptions of order-words, and reactive states or feelings. The account being given here of the body as an impersonal or non-subjective multiplicity (with subjectivity as a densely complex passive affect) clearly provides  a sense of  why Deleuze and Guattari employ the term ‘schizoanalysis’ in the way they do, which is valuable in the light of the fact that, as has been seen, ‘schizoanalysis’ is made equivalent to ‘pragmatics’ in A Thousand Plateaus (the issue of pragmatics will soon be addressed in detail).

1.4.4

 Beyond particular ‘images of thought’ there is the field of such modalities ( image of the world, image of matter, image of society, image of language...), and beyond these is the overall field of constrictive functionings of language. Beyond the constrictive (or ‘stratificatory’) modality  of language, there are the constrictive modalities of the other faculty-affects. And beyond these – there are modes of intensification or lines of flight of group and individual bodies, involving free, de-stratified  faculty-affects and affects, and involving nomad movements amongst the beneficial and dangerous zones of the cosmos (a breath of fresh air from beyond the ‘dark workshop’ of stratification[8]). This by way of a summary. The wider question of the stratificatory modes of faculty-affects will be addressed in what follows (and will turn out to be closely bound up with what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘abstract machines’), but for the time being it is necessary to pause, and consider a domain of other constrictive formations which fall (in part) within the field of language. It is necessary because the ideas in question are involved in a section from A Thousand Plateaus which must shortly be drawn into the account (this section will allow a first explicit treatment of the question of ‘pragmatics’), but also because the discussion which has just taken place has in fact created a foundation for a movement in this direction.

 The modes of constrictive engagement in question are what Deleuze and Guatarri call regimes of signs. A regime of signs can be described as a semiotic, but this is liable to be misleading. The idea of a regime of signs in fact transects language, in that it includes language in the restricted sense, but passes beyond it to include other areas of expression, such as number, gesture, diagrams and graphic art. The crucial points are, firstly, that a regime of signs is a meshed and constrictive field of modes of functioning of expressive elements, and, secondly, that a regime of signs is always in a relationship of reciprocity with a social assemblage, or an ‘assemblage of power’. A regime in this sense can be a modality in a particular social domain, such as the ‘delinquency’ regime which Foucault analyses in Discipline and Punish (this is the first example which Deleuze and Guattari employ in A Thousand Plateaus (TP p.66)). However, it can also be a modality alongside a large-scale assemblage, such as the formation that was encountered in the course of the preceding analysis – the assemblage of the state. The regime of signs that is in reciprocity with the state formation is the one which A Thousand Plateaus defines as the ‘regime of signifiance’: this is the regime that functions along the ‘paranoiac’ lines of single dominatory centres, and of rings or circles of domination spreading from these centres. A regime of signs is a diversely manifested element of a field of order-word functionings, where the manifestations are always emergent productions, and where these manifestations are always liable to involve other modalities as well as the production of language. The regime of ‘signifiance’  is present in its minimal form as one ambient aspect of the functionings of the field of order-words. But for a group or individual body it can be set into intensified motion, in an always idiosyncratic way. By dint of a creativity beginning to take place of a particular kind, a particular regime of signs can be ‘snagged’ such that it is taken up into a new process, like a kind of elastic extension of the field of order-words into an always new manifestation of the regime, a new delirium.

It is now  possible to start giving an explicit account of   ‘pragmatics’ in A Thousand Plateaus, while at the same time continuing the account of sign-regimes. The ‘spiralling’ movement of this chapter in fact all along has two centres, and if the first can be described as the question of thought, the second can be described as the question of pragmatics (schizoanalysis, micropolitics, intensive cartography...). What is to follow is a very  lengthy quotation (this will involve several  new terms coming into play, but a degree of explanatory context has in fact been provided for the terms in question). At the end of ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’ (Plateau 4) it is stated that  regimes of signs have four aspects or ‘components’, and that these ‘form the object of Pragmatics’: the passage continues:

 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 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, 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 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 point 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 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).

[...]

Pragmatics as a whole would consist in this: making a tracing of the mixed semiotics under the generative component; making a transformational map of the regimes, with their possibiltities for translation and creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings; making the 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. (TP pp. 145-146)

A certain amount of complex detail is immediately needed at this stage. Questions have been posed now which in some cases will only be fully answered by the end of the next chapter. What are ‘abstract machines’ for instance? This question, for various reasons, must take precedence; partly because the term involved has not yet been defined, but also because dealing with the issues involved in fact leads directly towards the other problems which are being addressed.

1.4.5

Minimally analysed, abstract machines are singular modalities of engagement between zones or fields, where the engagement involves annexed,  expressive or instrumental side-component materials. With human formations the engagement could be a connection with any phylum or field of zones (a line of engagement between human bodies and fields of metal, for instance), and it could involve ‘side-components’ in the form of inscribed materials, or musical instruments, or tools, or weapons. It is the fact that components are involved in this way which in part explains why the term ‘machine’ is employed.  It is valuable to make two further points at this stage. The first is that at the wide-scale in the field of the human an abstract machine is the extended form of what is here being called a faculty-affect, or is a faculty-affect, but where this is taken as including any annexed components that are involved. The second point is that an abstract machine can have a deintensificatory, or collapsed ‘variant’, as with the case of the field of de-intensicatory or stratificatory functionings of language.

In the immediate context, what this means is that pragmatics  intrinsically does not pertain only to language, or even to regimes of signs, but in fact at the limit becomes a name for a Spinozistic engagement with all the modes and aspects of substance, although a name which carries an emphasis on social assemblages and their fields of signs. This is why pragmatics is made equivalent to ‘rhizomatics’, a term which  is  specifically related to the zone of all bodies and becomings (the cosmos). What becomes clear is that pragmatics is ‘Cosmos philosophy’, but from the perspective of a primary engagement with human assemblages and their sign-regimes. The term is being used because it is the term for the crucial point of emergence within the field of linguistics - the study of language in terms of events or transformations that take place through language. For A Thousand Plateaus this idea becomes that of engagement with language in terms of emergences (communications of engagements), consolidations or entrenchments, and transformations towards specific constricted or de-intensified states. However, this mode of engagement involves engagement with regimes of signs, and in turn this involves engagement with the emergence-modalities of abstract machines. It is because there has been this  deepening (to the level of working ‘under the species of the cosmos’) of the idea of actions through language that Deleuze and Guattari can use the term pragmatics in a way which is both faithful and absolutely ‘in excess’ in relation to its customary sense, as they do in the following important section, which concludes the ‘On Several Regimes’ plateau with an account of the displacement of language that is an aspect of what is being advanced:

Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics or logic. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself. ‘Behind’ statements and semiotisations 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 existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend. (TP p.148)

Pragmatics here is a name for transformations through language, and it is also a name for studying fields that involve language, but in the widest sense, as has been seen,  it is the name for engagement under the species of the aspects or ‘substantial attributes’ (TP p.157) of an intensive cosmos.

1.4.6

There is now a whole raft of questions waiting to be answered. For some time now an appropriate response would have been ‘slow down, explain in detail’. However,  it has been  necessary to lay out all of the main elements involved in the issue of pragmatics, before giving further explanations.  

A first question might concern why it is that abstract machines, assemblages, and deterritorializations are determined by A Thousand Plateaus as  eluding  ‘both the coordinates of language and existence’. A second question is, ‘what, in more detail, are abstract machines’? Again, a third question concerns the need for more detail in relation to regimes of signs and engagement with regimes of signs, given the prominence they have been given in the account of pragmatics just cited, in ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’. Finally, it must also be asked in what way all of this relates back to the initiating question of the chapter and the thesis - the question of thought.

The first problem can be addressed by weaving in a thread from a little earlier. The situation of ‘something’ eluding the coordinates or categories of language and existence is strikingly illustrated by the case of ‘faculty-affects’. These modalities or formations of engagement are not linguistic (though they can find expression in the ‘sequence-blocks’ of language) and nor are they things, in that they are in every sense radically self-heterogeneous, and in particular  through the fact that they are stretched between zones as ongoing real connections.  The faculty-affect of reason does not have a form, or a body, or a colour, or a particular location in space or in time, and nor is it determinable in terms of the predicates of grammar, syntax or semantics.  It is a formation or modality of  becoming pertaining to zones of multiple, intensive, and heterogeneous assemblages, where this formation or modality involves real connections with envelopments, segmentations and zones displaying repeating (non-emergent) processes. It is the same with the  faculty-affect of trans-prehension. This is a zone of becoming which involves engagements running between bodies and multiple fields of affects, whether these affects pertain to societies, species, individuals or planets. This zone of becoming is, again, not at all determinable in terms of the categories of things or the categories of language. As with reason, it is a zone which has a fundamental macrological rift down its ‘centre’, where this rift is nonetheless crossed (or is anything but a rift) at the anorganic, intensive level of  the fluidly micrological (the level of densely multiplicitous real connections, of ‘entering into composition’). Therefore it is in no way predicable according to the coordinates of things, any more than it is predicable according to those of language. Furthermore because in engaging with this modality what is being engaged is the overall zone of  the modality, irrespective of whether particular cases are past or present, it can be seen that at the level of temporality and actuality the formation does not ‘exist’ in the same sense that things do (it is becoming clearer now why Spinoza wrote about thinking ‘under the species of eternity’).

Everything that has just been said in relation to ‘faculty-affects’ applies in exactly the same way to the field laid out in the section from ‘On Several Regimes’ - that is, to the field of ‘machines [abstract machines], assemblages, and movements of deterritorialisation’. Starting with the case of abstract machines (in order in fact to answer the second of the questions set out above), what can now be said is that abstract machines are affects of group formations and populations.  As has been indicated, Deleuze and Guattari use the term to pick out affects which involve ‘added on’ or ‘satellite’ components being drawn into the engagement involved. This clearly includes the whole domain of human socially instantiated affects involving tools, books, artistic instruments, weapons etc., and it also involves the wider domain of group instantiated affects where tools or ‘satellite’ elements are involved. An example of the first case would be the affect of breaking into shells on the part of sea-otters, with its involvement of stones as hammers. An example of the second case would be the mating affects of certain birds - analysed in the ‘Of the Refrain’ plateau -  where the additional elements cannot be defined as tools, as with the ‘bowers’ constructed by the bower bird. It should also be said that the ‘added on’ elements need not be transported in order to be drawn into the affect, and can be flows, rather than specific bodies. This is the case with flows of water being used to power turbines, and it is the case with certain populations of crows, which  perch above roads and use passing traffic to break nuts (in some cases they even do this at pedestrian crossings, and wait for the flow of cars to stop before retrieiving the food). However, the main point in this context, is that, given that these abstract machines are affects, everything which was said above in relation to faculty-affects also applies here. For instance, the affect of engaging with fields of diffuse and focussed light beams (and with materials which produce these) is the affect that involves the production of emergences and modifications in the field of lasers. This affect is a field of engagement, and as with faculty-affects, even though it might not be being actualised at a particular point it would still subsist in the field of bodies and materials as a real potential - a potential pertaining to light, ongoing modulations of bodily fields, and to arrays of produced examples, treatises and diagrams.   Also,  as with the earlier cases, it is absolutely heterogeneous, in that it is split or spread between a phylum of incandescences and a field of formations of human bodies, and therefore is very much not a thing, in any customary sense. It is precisely because an abstract machine is a subsisting (sometimes effectuated) non-thing that it is an abstract machine, rather than a concrete one (although the term abstract here pertains to a teemingly real intensive engagement). Finally, it is also the case that this affect is not at all a linguistic entity, in that although it can and does involve expression at the level of the production of blocks of language, the affect itself is not a field of semantic, syntactical or logical ordering (it is a fundamental category mistake to predicate these of an abstract machine).

In relation to language, what has just been said  also applies to abstract machines which predominantly involve language at the level of the added on components, as with  abstract machines determinable as philosophical or literary/fictional or historical. An example here is the Spinoza abstract machine, where so far  the major satellite components are books (although there can also be diagrams on paper or on blackboards). The fact that the Spinoza abstract machine involves whole ongoing and proliferating  zones of new ways of sequencing terms and blocks of terms should not distract from it being the case that this  affect is a formation of engagement in the form of a modality of practice (a becoming free) in relation with the engaged cosmos. This means that although this abstract machine can and does involve expression or production in the form of language it is not in itself linguistic. It is a mistake to conflate the field of produced expressions with the affect or abstract machine - to conflate the expressions with the zone of production (in the same way the affect that involves the emergences of logics is not itself logical). It can also be pointed out that even at the level of the production of blocks of language (communication, or the passing on of engagements) syntax and semantics are not generative instances in terms of the thought involved. This can be seen in the fact that the language of the Spinoza abstract machine is intrinsically a dense field of semantically/syntactically anomalous sequencings at all levels (micro and macro), and by definition the production of these sequencings is not attributable to semantics or syntactical structures. All of these questions will be taken up in detail in the third chapter.

An abstract machine is of course not at all  a machine in the same sense as technical machines. But what it has in common with a technical machine is that it can lie ‘dormant’ and then be re-effectuated. The Spinoza abstract machine can be only an intricate potential involving human bodies and a body of writings, and then it can go into renewed effect (which always involves the transmutation or development of the machine, unlike with technical machines). It can be seen that this situation has a paralell in the case of an engineer finding a diagram of an invention and putting the diagram into effect. However, ‘added on’ elements do not necessarily need to survive during a period of non-effectuation, in order for the abstract machine to come into effect again. The ideas of  components and of re-effectuations should not be allowed to obscure the fact that an abstract machine is a non-concrete (real abstract) modality or becoming of a society or population.

Part of what is at stake here in relation to thought (the last of the four questions) has now in fact been indicated, in that after a lengthy departure there has been a return to the idea of ‘thought as affect’, although now, the idea has been extended to include abstract machinic affects at the level of populations, groups  and social, regulated fields. What has been analysed is a fundamental self-heterogeneity on the part of modalities of thought, and this has taken place in the context of a ‘placing’ of the affects and faculty-affects of group and individual bodies in relation to group societal formations. Group and individual bodies are nodes of real connections stretching elsewhere (where the entering into composition can be the ‘incursive’ encounter, or primarily the shifting into intensified actualisation of that which has been ‘taken up’).   These becomings will generally pre-eminently be instantiations of abstract machines that are established or at least tenuously lodged within group and societal formations, or  abstract machines which are the becomings of non-regulatory groups (group-body lines of flight). What this means is that the encounters with the abstract machines trigger new singular  instances of the modalities of becoming which are the abstract machines.  It is also the case that group and individual bodies can be the  main locus of the emergence of a new abstract machine, though with an individual this takes place through the individual being part of a group or an assemblage spread through a society (which remains an assemblage even if some  of its members are dead and are ‘speaking’ only through their books etc.). In music  there was the emergence of a ‘Bach abstract machine’  - a western-world modality of conjugating sound-lines involving a kind of tempering of instruments, and an overall modality of engagement with fields of sound-waves and  other zones (mathematics; sparse or tranquil fields of pulsations). However, although this abstract machine is named after Bach, it is not limited to Bach in terms of its effectuation, and nor did it emerge independently of the assemblage within which Bach was a member (TP, p100). Finally, it is also the case that group and individual bodies can have becomings or modalities of thought which do not (or do not currently) involve ‘added on’ elements (these becomings remain abstract in the strongest sense, but the sense in which they are machinic differs slightly).

It is important to see that the thought of an abstract machine remains the thought of a relationship of exteriority, although now in a way where societal formations have been included in the account. What this chiefly means is that although for a body an abstract machine may be triggered into effect, partially and at an initial level, by an encounter with communicative or expressive effects of the abstract machine insofar as it is functioning in (or on) a social formation, what has been effectuated is a real connection with an ‘outside’ - with a domain of zones - rather than this effectuation  being that of some field of categories or coordinates internal to a society, and concieved as being constitutive in some way in relation to thought. It is not a question of acquiring a grammar of abstract machines, but of there being powerful ‘conductive’ processes and compositions intruded into societies at different points, where these processes and compositions can initiate (always in a new form) the abstract-machinic becoming that produced them. In part this is communication in action (the transmission of engagements involving language and other forms of expression), but it is also the effect of the enactments of the engagements.

For this context, the other point at stake regarding thought concerns the nature of regimes of signs. Regimes of signs are aspects of fields of processes which, insofar as they involve regimes of signs, are constricted and constrictive in relation to the ‘enterings-into-composition’ or emergences of thought.  To use the language of A Thousand Plateaus, what this means is that regimes of signs are strata, i.e., zones of  systemically limited engagement, such that generativity is definitionally either production of modified forms of the stratification involved (as with fields of new kinds of statement being taken up into a regime and acquiring constrictive forms), or is in the form of the limited fields of emergence that take place within, or on the fringes of ‘fixated’ or stratified zones. Several additional points are  needed at this stage. The first is that the stratum of practises of a regime of signs is always paired with a stratum in the form of a zone of practises involving technologies, and  artefacts (this is what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘double articulation’ (TP p.40)). For instance, in the world of the ‘urban-network’ or ‘town-network’ formation of power  there is  a projective regime - a regime of projects and of projection. bringing together  mercantile,  juridical, religious and  academic elements  in one stratum of signs. A projective regime of needs, ends, time and of processes with pre-specifiable outcomes. Articulated with each regime of signs there is a ‘formation of power’, where this is made up of far more than just elements which can be called tools, in the same way as a regime of signs goes beyond language to include zones such as painting. To quote from the third plateau,‘The Geology of Morals’: ‘A formation of power is much more than a tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language’ (TP p.63). A second point is that with each regime of signs there are many modalities, where in each case these modalities are different abstract machines which intrinsically involve the regime, and which in themselves are specific zones of limited engagement generative  only of a modified or more intricate form of the stratification involved (these are ‘abstract machines of stratification’). A Kantian/scientific form of the projective regime, a psychoanalytic form (desire as the ‘lacked’ projected state), a Hegelian form (projected future in the form of a discovered ‘negation’ in the present). This is why it is - in part - that in the long passage quoted above it states that at the critical moment (critical in both senses) of exceeding or breaking open sign-regimes ‘everything operates through abstract-real machines’ (TP p.146). The final point to be made is that the sense of strata being constrictive or constricting can be explained in this context  by pointing out that compositions of language in the form of ‘order-words’ are the central aspect of strata in the form of regimes of signs, and order-word statements (insofar as they impact, rather than being eluded) are de-intensifications or constrictions of particular becomings pertaining to group and individual bodies. Stratification produces more stratification, passing on its constricted, ‘semi-fixed’ or ‘fixated’ modality. This is not to say that stratificatory zones as a whole are always deletirious in relation to free processes of becoming (they can be put into effect as tools): the point is rather that being subsumed into a constricted domain (being stratified) is clearly deletirious in this way. And if the products of stratification are used as tools, this new process is not in fact stratification.

So what is taking place here in relation to the idea of thought? The key point is that the stratificatory abstract machines that are the different instantiations of regimes of signs - and of their paired formations of power -  are to be understood as what is at stake in relation to the idea of ‘transcendental illusions’. These modalities are  illusions in the specific, intensive sense of  blockages in relation to thought, so that for any individual group or body the overcoming of an illusion is an incursion of  lines of engagement or emergence which dissolves the field of constricted or fixated processes. Such illusions are transcendental in the sense that they are the (socially emplaced) modalities which are  in effect in relation to particular empirical cases of unthinkingly making a habituated kind of connection, or of constructing a regulatory block of language, and in the sense that  a  body  functioning along the lines of a stratificatory abstract machine is in a dominated relation vis a vis this modality (even for instance when it is judgementally dominating over another body, by inhibiting this other body’s lines of thought). A stratificatory abstract machine   is ‘taken up’ by a group or individual body and in one sense is made this body’s own, but this is only in the sense that there will be a particular, shifting ‘signature’ generated by the specific field of becomings involved. In fact the ‘parasitic’ incursion will be dominant or transcendental in that (unlike something with which one enters into composition, in a process of intensification) it will involve de-intensification of lines of engagement, and will only involve becoming at the level of adaptation in relation to new practises and terms which come into effect. It can be seen that the regimes of signs of stratificatory abstract machines (just to concentrate on the regimes, for the time being) make up an example of what Spinoza referred to as ‘passions’ - they are affects, but affects in relation to which people are in a passive relation. It is because these ‘illusions’ are blocking modalities pertaining in this way to the body that in each case they can in part be determined in terms of specific complex fields of emotions. For instance, in the case of the world of the projective regime the emotions vary from guilt (‘we have failed to attain the right or intended state’), to the ‘flipside’ of this, in the form of the priestly state of grave triumph or calm disdain (‘we are applying the approved or upright criteria; we are right; we are  in the right’).

The crux of the  matter is that regimes of signs (as varying modalities pertaining to particular abstract machines) are fields of  selections of points  and processes of engagement which involve this engagement (or thought) staying in a specific extremely low intensive state. Engagement here has an intricate sequentiality, but it is fundamentally limited in its form, as is the case with the way in which rocks flow, in comparison to water. This is not simply a question of relative degrees of engagement: the difference between ‘bound’ and ‘freed’ engagement can be said to be both relative and more than relative (the continuum has a threshold, as with the continuum of ice and water, or of rock and magma). It therefore makes sense to say that once in effect a regime of signs is an aspect of a modality of  fixated thought, or of thought  at human degree zero.

It is helpful  at this stage to address the question of the ‘locus’ of regimes of signs. To what zone  or field are they to be attributed? The answer is that regimes of signs pertain both to individual and group bodies, and also (in a different way) to social assemblages.

In relation to individual bodies a regime of signs is a constrictive modality (an ‘affliction of the will’) which to one extent or another has been made the body’s own, through it having gone into effect under singular circumstances. Articulated with the regimes of signs are the fields of practices bound up with the formations of power. In the terms of A Thousand Plateaus, this distinction is between expression (regimes of signs) and content (formations of power):

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. (TP p.64)

In relation to individual bodies, the formations of power can be either the field of the encountered forms of a kind of component assemblage  of social machines, or can be the encountered forms of the social machine as a whole (that is, it is a question of the encountered phylum of the assemblage or component assemblage). An example of the first kind is the ‘clinical’ regime of signs of twentieth-century psychiatry and psychology (or, to repeat, the ‘delinquency’ regime of signs of the prison system).  As has been seen, an example of the second kind is that of the regime of ‘signifiance’, which in basing all interpretation around some transcendent centre of power is bound up with the state modality in its despotic aspect (in contrast, the regime of projects/projection is bound up with  the republican state, and the trading networks of towns). It can be seen that where a whole social machine is involved there is liable to be a much greater degree of ‘permeation’ or ‘pervasiveness’ of the regime of signs in relation to the bodies which have incorporated them. The elations and depressions of passional subjectivity can be effortlessly set into effect in relation to anything, as can the paranoias of signification. All of this involves the body in a sense that simultaneously involves fields of actions and micrological fields of distribution and modulation (although this is at the level of organisation or stratification, rather than at the level of faculty-affects, or of deterritorialisation). The following passage from A Thousand Plateaus sets out the micrological aspect of this account:

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 organisation. Rather, it constitutes the pre-human soup immersing us. Our hands and faces are immersed in it. The brain is a population, a set of tribes tending toward two poles [...] ...the manual articulation of content  and the facial articulation of expression. (TP p.64).

However, although a regime of signs on one level pertains to bodies, on another level it pertains to assemblages. These assemblages of course primarily subsist in human fields, but they have macrological concretions that have humans as their ‘cells’ or ‘organs’, as it were, and it is also the case that they involve many other incorporated elements - administrative buildings, houses, roads, tools, materials for inscription, plants, domesticated animals, etc. It is through this aspect of regimes of signs that it becomes possible to understand in what sense a body is in a dominated relation insofar as it has a modality in the form of a regime of signs. That is, to be precise, it becomes possible to understand how it is that a body is in a passive, servile relation insofar as it involves modalities in the form  of stratificatory abstract machines which have instances of the regime of signs as their ‘expression’ element.  The assemblage is the body in connection with which the individual bodies are in a dominated or deintensifactory relation: it is the assemblage which in each case is the other pole of the ‘sad affects’ or ‘passions’ that are the stratificatory abstract machines in effect in the individual bodies. It is a question here of a ‘natural history of morals’[9]; a question, specifically, of passions or sad affects, where the relation between the assemblage and the affected group and individual bodies is understood as a force, that is, as a specific power of ‘fixation’ stretched between the assemblage and the bodies. What this means is that the relation involved is not essentially different from the geological relation between  fields  of sediment and  wider geological fields bearing down on them, which transmutate them in a process of compression. In both cases it is a question of a ‘fixing’ or stratification. The domination involved is not at all a question of subjective consciousness: it is a question of fixatory and de-intensicatory powers pertaining on the one hand to human assemblages taken as bodies, and, on the other, to affected group and individual  bodies that are within these, and that are within them precisely in that they have been affected in this way (otherwise they would be alongside them, or ‘lodged’ within them as independent elements). A crucial strand of thought in The Geology of Morals has here been explicated in the process of showing that  systemic, or overarching  illusions are aspects of forces pertaining to societies.

It is now necessary to point out that there are abstract machines (and fields of stratification) at two separate levels in relation to the areas that have just been analysed. Regimes of signs  (‘separated’ or ‘abstracted’ for the purpose of analysis), are fields of  component aspects of specific abstract machines, where the abstract machine could involve instantiations of more than one regime of signs, and where the practises of formations of power are the other major aspect  of the machine. The abstract machines here can have names or dates, but they are perhaps more likely to have names (the Leibniz abstract machine, the Freud abstract machine...). However, there is a wider or deeper level that emerges in relation to sign-regimes, and to the larger field within which they function. Regimes of signs are in fact demarcatable zones pertaining to the field of order-words, and the field of order-words is itself an abstract machine. Not only this, but there are other abstract machines on the same ‘large-scale’ level, notably an abstract machine of regulatory reason, which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘abstract machine of enslavement’ (the reactive states of ‘slave morality’ involve a real enslavement for all involved). A Thousand Plateaus makes reference to these two abstract machines on the final page, along with another which they have named earlier (the abstract machine of ‘faciality’):

We have seen in particular that if some abstract machines open assemblages there are also abstract machines which close them. An order-word machine over-codes language, a faciality machine overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes or axiomatises the earth... (TP p.514 – translation modified)

 The question of these abstract machine is in fact in the strongest sense inseparable from the question of faculty-affects. There is an abstract machine of language/communication, which has a fundamentally distinct stratificatory or ‘reversed’ form, this being the abstract machine of order-words. The faculty-affect of language is the abstract machine of language, only without reference to the incorporated and associated elements that are parts of abstract machines (the faculty-affect can be in effect without any of these being immediately involved, so there is a strong basis for the distinction). The same situation applies with the abstract machine of enslavement, only here the faculty-affect is reason. The reversed form of this abstract machine is ‘enslavement’ or regulatory reason. It is these two abstract machines which must now be considered (faciality will be analysed in the next chapter).

At the beginning of Plateau 4 – ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ – A Thousand Plateaus  refers to the stratificatory mode of language as an ‘abominable faculty’, saying the following on this subject: ‘we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words’. What precisely is this faculty? The answer is that it is the ‘dark workshop’ of judgement. That is, to be precise, it is the fundamentally linguistic world of ‘instilling’ and of being ‘instilled’ through the functioning of ‘judgemental’ compositions of language. These judgement-compositions go into effect in the external form of statements and wriiten compositions, but they also have an internalised, recurring and ramifying form, which can in turn pass out into effect in the form of new order-word constructions. The first point about the idea of being ‘instilled’, is that this is literally a process of de-intensification, or diminution of activity (the world of all forms of closed-minded, pious, and ‘common-sensical’  discouragement), so that the sense of being ‘stilled’ is entirely appropriate. The second point is that the going-into-effect of an order-word construction is also a ‘taking up’ of a mode of engagement with language (in the area of language involved) which expresses itself in the composition of this kind of order-word. Therefore, it is also the process of ‘being instilled’ in this sense as well.

A dogmatic proponent of a reactive stance in relation to some domain (morality,  science, philosophy etc.) can be using language of many kinds, but order-word compositions (insofar as they take hold) always have the form of a ‘shutting down’ of a line of engagement or thought;

Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order [...] 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. (TP p.107)

Order-word compositions are always disciplined or dominated  in their use of language. They stay within the domain of standard semantic, grammatical, and syntactic functionings in the domain involved (to create or draw upon anomalous constructions is pre-eminently a function of thought involving wider domains of engagement, whereas the construction of order-words  is basically only an engagement with language). It is also the case that in speech order-words almost always have a ‘tone’ belonging to a vast range of grave ways of speaking. The ‘spirit of gravity’ in speech comes in many forms: piety, irony, the firmly avuncular or ‘teacherly’, smiling disdain,  contempt, outrage etc. Order-words can be separated from constructions of language which warn from a damaging path, because they close down lines of engagement, rather than preventing a mishap, a de-intensification. However, they borrow and transduce  the tones of warnings, and put them into effect in a different way.

The faculty-affect of the order-word is closely connected, in more than one way, to the faculty-affect of regulatory or stratificatory reason. This stratificatory mode of reason consists of fixated engagement with segmented fields of control, and with routines and sequences pertaining to these systems. One example of such a field is the solar system. Another example is an army controlled in a predictable way by a commander (where, for instance, an opponent, can reason along lines such as these: ‘this commander always does X or Y, they have not done X, therefore...’). But in this context the most important examples are the fields of control of the assemblages of power, and of their component assemblages (such as the legal assemblage). ‘Locked’ engagement with these last domains in particular involves the adoption of routines and ‘micro’ fields of organisation which spring from entering into composition with these domains, and it also involves a close engagement with fields of language that pertain to these assemblages. Stratificatory reason here functions in a tight connection with the abstract machine of the order-word (as the pre-eminent  aspect of the ‘hand-tool’ pole of human stratification). Firstly, this is at the  level of fixation on regulatory or dominatory system. A focus of engagement of this kind entails that the language engaged with will to a great extent be stratificatory, or ‘order-word’ language. Secondly, it involves an over-coding of the individual body in terms of it having a controlling subject, where the  ‘foundation’ for this over-coding is in each case the singular field of routinised, conventionalised actions and productions of statements:

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 a slave to oneself, or to pure ‘reason’ [...] Is there anything  more passional than pure reason? (TP p.130).

What is meant by ‘pure reason’ here is the stratificatory abstract machine of enslavement. It is stratificatory in that it involves de-intensification, which is what is being stated in referring to it as ‘passional’ (this is the Spinozist sense of passion – passion as  affect in the deintensificatory form).

The idea of abstract machines on this ‘wider scale’ has therefore now been exemplified (and in a way which has woven back in the earlier idea of faculty-affects). What has now been made possible is a more detailed  account of stratification in relation to the idea of the different  kinds of abstract machines in question. The main background question at this stage has been the importance of the ideas of regimes of signs and abstract machines in relation to the question of thought. This has now been given an extensive answer, but the question of the ‘deintensification’ involved in abstract machines of stratification requires a little more detail.

The question in relation to deintensification concerns how it is that an abstract machine (even of stratification) can be deintensificatory given that it must be understood as a modality of production. An abstract machine of stratification is a passion. But how therefore can it be a field of production? The answer is that in each case what is produced is adaptations and emergences in the field of constrained and constrictive practises making up the abstract machine. What is involved therefore is a thread  or core of ‘reactive’ production which functions to stratify or constrain a whole zone of lines of entering into composition, or of lines of deterritorialisation. For, example, with the abstract machine of order-words  there can be great adaptive creativity in using and receiving language in a way which  constrains  becomings (and in fact, to one degree or another there is always adaptive creativity insofar as the abstract machine is in effect), but the fact that a whole zone of connections or modalities of emergence are being inhibited or blocked off means that the abstract machine is deintensificatory. Order-words come in many different forms, but they are always a question of an ‘instilling’ judgement, and because this modality has nothing to do with deliberate manipulation (it is not a question of deception, in other words) the body which issues order-words is affected in the issuing of them  as well as in recieving them. The same situation applies with the abstract machine of enslavement or regulatory reason. A group or individual body can be creative in terms of the generation of networks of regulated practises (‘we have discovered these new instantiations of the Law, and will obey them’), but at the same time this modality is a deintensification: it is a passion, the passion of  ‘reason’ as Deleuze and Guattari say. The regulated practises in question function to suppress active becomings; processes of entering into composition.

However, it is important at this stage not to omit an important fact in relation to abstract machines, which has already been indicated, in passing. This is the fact that an abstract machine of stratification  can cross over a threshold and become something radically different  - an abstract machine of deterritorialisation,  or of free (active) becoming. What this means is that the lines of becoming in the field involved start being inter-connected, intensified and augmented in what can be understood as a deepening ‘diagrammatic’ process, where the phylum of zones involved has stopped being segmented along the lines of the stratification. It can be seen therefore that abstract machines are like  forces which have two ‘polarities’ or direction. The polarity of trapped cooling-down or deintensification (with its tiny core of adaptive production) and the utterly different polarity of free becoming. Deleuze and Guattari characterise these two state of an abstract machine towards the end of‘The Geology of Morals’, saying they are respectively  ‘the state in which it [the abstract machine] remains enveloped in a corresponding stratum [...] and the state in which it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of consistency...’. In this movement that which previously was virtual (the field of the connections between the becomings) comes to be effectuated, to be set into unconstrained motion, instead of it being a field of fugitive connections, or partial ‘firings’ held in check by a specific mode of constriction. Beyond the abstract machine of enslavement, there is the abstract machine (and faculty-affect) of reason, and beyond the abstract machine of order-words there is the abstract machine (and faculty-affect) of language.  It can be seen that everything here concerns forces and states of forces: the enveloped and stratificatory abstract machine, and the free, intensificatory abstract machine.

The ‘wider scale’ abstract machines which have just been detailed  cannot be given precise dates. Their points of emergence or initial effectuation are very far back in time, as is the case with the other faculty-affects (and their stratifificatory forms) which have been brought into the account. However, what has been said in relation to stratification broadly applies also to the other zone of abstract machines in question, that of the Kant abstract machine, the Bach abstract machine, etc. To trace back via the side of stratification,  the abstract machine of order words has all of the regimes of signs as its component zones, and in turn these regimes of signs are instantiated (generally in a ‘mixed’ or multiple way) in particular abstract machines, the emergence of which involves densely complex adaptations of the regimes. Here also, therefore, there is the difference in polarity or direction, between the deterritorialising form of the abstract machine and the  enveloped one. It can be pointed out, as an illustrative point in connection with this situation, that at the point of the initial emergence of the abstract machine the works involved could be largely or entirely unstratified, but that the stratificatory mode of the abstract machine can appear later (the reverse of this can also take place as well). It will be apparent why it is the case that an abstract machine is not something pertaining to an individual, even if it is named after an individual who was a major ‘node’ at the point of emergence.

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