<<TRANSMATHOME

1.6 Depth topography

Several regimes of signs have  been delineated. At the same time, the idea of abstract machines has also been given greater detail. However, in the process, a new question has emerged. This question is: what is the relation of the notion of time to the field of faculty-affects and of attributes of the cosmos?  It is this question which now needs to be answered. It will be partly on the basis of this answer, however, that other remaining questions for the chapter  will be answered.

The field of  the language of time is on one level an aspect of engagement by the faculty-affect of reason with segmented, dominatory fields, and of engagement with chonometric practices which conjugate one process with another - standardised – process. The language of time here is that which pertains to the mode of individuation which Deleuze and Guattari call ‘Chronos’(TP p.262): it is the language of simultaneity, instants, succession, perodicity etc. The notion of chronos pertains to engagement with the ‘chronically’ regular or regulated, with chronometric assignments, and with chronometrically regulated projects.

 However, at a more extraordinary level, what is involved in the language of time is engagement with the  motion-fields of emergences, and with the chains or filaments of the motion-fields of emergences (it will only be possible to talk about this in full detail later in the thesis). This is because the intensive cosmos (Substance) is a continuum of ‘layers’, and a field of emergences such that it has a real immanent past, and a multiple field of emergences which make up the immanent future. It can be seen that everything here concerns lines rather than points, and zones as insistences and emergences, rather than cycles. This is the mode or aspect of individuation (or of production) which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the temporality of Aeon (TP p.262). The language here is that of durations, lines and times, and at the limit the language is that of eternity, which is the absolute  point to which the idea of events extends. In the Ethics Spinoza starts by talking about substance, and ends by talking about eternity, but these are not in fact separable ideas (how could eternity be in any way extrinsic to substance?).

  The ‘history’ of planet Earth becomes a ‘depth topography’, and can be laid out on a single plane of immanence : the singularity of bacteria, the  singularity of capitalism, the singularity of the earth’s crust... It is a question of thinking the way Burroughs does in Ghost of Chance:

...Big Picture, the history of life on earth, is there for anyone to read. Mountain landmasses and jungles slide past, some slowing, some accelerating, vast rivers of land on the move or stagnating in wide deltas, whirlpools of land like saws splitting off islands...[13]

One can take a zone of this topographical field, such that its lineaments are laid out and go into metamorphosis (this can be backwards or forwards), and always be in engagement with insistences of the intensive cosmos. For instance, the time and landscape of ancient Greece after the battle of Salamis can be taken as an example. It is like a film, but the future part of the trajectory is always in effect as the landscape mutates, as are the past elements. The Persian forces recede; the Athenian boats come back; the flows of tribute-money come in from the  Mediterranean Greek network; the Parthenon rises; whole fields of engagements intensify; commerce heightens in the freed-up conditions;  the  flashing into effect of the idea of Dionysus and of forces of self-forgetting associated with the hinterland beyond the towns; Socrates, Plato, the academy, and Aristotle; the north begins to threaten, and then the collapse, and the whole zone tips over into a new modality, that of empire, with Alexander as god-king.  Engagement with both actual and virtual fields  involves a middle, rather than points on a line. That is, it involves a differentiated line surrounded by other lines (or times): ‘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...’.

To engage with time and history in this way is to enter freely into becoming with worlds of zones, which is to say, with worlds of singular forces or modalities of production. It is different from the world of engagement with regular cycles, and it is different in the extreme from the world of engagement dominated or regulated by projects, where engagement is fixated on the zones involved in the end-points of the projects. In this second case regularity has become a constraining aspect of production, rather than being a cyclicality into which productive processes are inserted. As Burroughs says ‘Time is a human affliction; not a human invention, but a prison’ (GC p.16). However beyond envelopment within re-iterating projects, and beyond fixation on deployments and creations  through the pragmatics of cycles and chronometry, there are the emergences involved in entering into composition with singular times or singular durations.

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