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1.8 Thought, bodies, micropolitics

Thought here is being understood in terms of individual and group bodies and their fusions or interpenetrations, a fact which makes everything here deeply political. At the widest level what is being set out in this chapter is a whole micropolitics of becoming-active or of intensification  which involves bodies breaking free from the forces of constriction which  are constitutive of formations of power, or social formations, and breaking away down lines of flight in the form of becomings – in the form of their own processes of entering into composition with exterior zones. The question of thought is nothing other than the question of becomings. The micropolitics of freed intensifications with encountered zones and bodies, whether these are designated in terms of groups, or topographies, or bodies, or mathematics, or music...

But is there more that can be said in this context about bodies, at the level of individual bodies?  What, specifically, are Deleuze and Guattari bringing to light with the idea of the stratificatory abstract machine of faciality, to which they devote a whole chapter? An analysis has been given of the abstract machines of enslavement (stratificatory reason) and of order-words. But what is this third abstract machine, and what is the modality of free engagement which is its overcoming or reversal?

This is not a question concerning shape, or figurality, and nor is it a question of size. It can be said in passing that these areas pertain to the field engaged by a faculty-affect of morphography or of extension (it is not possible to deal with this faculty-affect in detail in the course of the thesis – to do this would involve a whole further thesis). The question of faciality, is instead a question of relative movements on the part of a micro-corporeal field. That is (following both Spinoza and Deleuze at this point), it is a question of relations of speed and slowness, and of movement and rest, in a field which is beneath or alongside any segmented, molar (as opposed to molecular or micrological) functionings in the domain involved. A human body’s molar regularity (for, instance with respect to a school or an army) is a separate issue from the micro-corporeal field of inter-related movements which at each point make up the field of the body’s expressiveness, and of its emotions.  As well as being a nexus of affects a human individual body is also a shifting field of relations of speed and slowness, movement and rest.

The questions involved here must now be answered in a new chapter. Answering them will involve giving answers to the other questions which have been raised, and in general will continue the process of giving an explication of the different aspects of pragmatics. It will be a while before some of the issues which have been in effect in the last few sections return, but hopefully it will be a question of ‘going back in order to jump further’. For instance, the long passage on pragmatics from A Thousand Plateaus  (from ‘On Several Regimes’ and quoted at length earlier) will be addressed in detail at the end of the next chapter. In turn, the next chapter will pave the way for a deeper or more inclusive account of the different attributes and faculty-affects which this thesis is attempting to delineate. The first cycle of  spiral departures and returns has been completed. The central question remains that of thought, and there must now be a movement toward the question of the ‘motionally molecular’ or  micro-corporeal fields of bodies.

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