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2.7 Intensive Cartography

It is now possible to ‘work back’ all the way to the initial and over-arching issues of thought, and of faculty-affects. The main thesis concerning  the existence of the five major faculty-affects has now been given a degree of substantiation on all counts. The case of micro-corporeality was the last of these five faculty-affects that required an account, but this has now been provided, in detail, in the course of this chapter. Simultaneously, there has also been a further exemplification of the faculty-affect of prehension or ‘apperception’, in the process of laying out the field of the stratificatory and intensificatory forms of reason, language and micro-corporeality. Thought is therefore being brought into focus as being a differentiated field of kinds of engagement whereby a group or individual body enters into composition with another zone or  zones, or (to state it differently) whereby there is a transmutative ‘going-into-effect’ of the zone or zones in relation to the body.

Three instances can be taken, in a linked re-iteration, which will also deepen the accounts being given. Trans-prehension, firstly,  is engagement with nexuses of becomings, both at the level of attributes and faculty-affects, and at the level of engagements with the becomings of bodies in relation to particular bodies, assemblages, populations and fields. This expresses itself in selections of actions, directions and affiliations, and also in the form of intensive cartographies in writing, speech, and diagrams etc. Reason, secondly, is engagement with segmental, centred (sometimes multi-centred)  spaces, both at the level of zones such as astrological systems, and at  levels such as that  of systems made up of effectively homogenous segments, together with a controlling segment (eg. a mathematician distributing a set of elements, or a commander distributing a group of soldiers). This, in turn, expresses itself in actions, and in the form of predictions, and of  expressions of properties, and principles (the principles can bear upon recurring aspects of bodies, as well as upon distributive fields). The predictive aspect is the equivalent  of the engagement with thresholds in relation to prehension, as in the case of the threshold from stratificatory entrapment to free intensification in the case of faculty-affects. Finally, micro-corporeality or ‘faciality’ is engagement with bodies, or zones of inter-consistent functioning or development. This expresses itself in acquisitions of bodily and vocal capacities and modalities (including singular, non-subjective modes of poise and perceptiveness), and in the form of typologies, and cartographies of cycles (as with the cycle of elation and depression).

Unless an ethereal or Cartesian dimension is invoked, all processes of engagement of these kinds must involve fields of micrological transformations  at the level of the bodies involved. At the same time, given that all of these processes are emergences in fluid fields it is necessary to think of them not as permutations or manipulations (this is an overcoding from classical computation and from the handling of systems and tools) but as processes of transductive or transformative micrological contact between the differential fields of the zones of the different attributes, and the differential fields of the body. Therefore, the conclusion is what was stated above – that thought is an entering into composition between different bodies and zones.

What is at stake  in all of this is thought being understood as pertaining micrologically and connectively to bodies, where thought is neither subjective nor conceptual, and has reason as only one of its many instances. This idea is like a breath of fresh air – like Nietzsche’s ‘thawing wind’[20] A body – a person - is a world or ocean of micro-corporeality, and they can intensify along multiple lines of engagement or thought (in a process which is both a combat and a dance, where the stakes are freedom) and in doing so can progressively leave behind constrictive, stratificatory forms of functioning such as subjectification. Nomad worlds (fluid bodies) alongside each other on the nomad world of the planet, with jungles and deserts in every direction - often human jungles and deserts -, surrounded and permeated by  the attributes of the intensive cosmos, and with the diverse fields of the assemblages whirring in the distance like huge, segmental insects. As Nietzsche says, it is a question of freedom replacing the modes of the ‘spirit of gravity’.[21]

Several important point can now be made in relation to regimes of signs. The first is that the analysis of regimes and assemblages is not to be viewed as simply an exercise in typology and fine-grained differentiation. It is a cartography of traps or modes of de-intensification where the traps are capable of being in effect to one degree or another in the bodies engaged in the analysis. The analysis is therefore in part a process of leaving  behind certain modes of engagement, at the same time as it is a process of setting out a cartography (a field of guide-lines) in relation to traps which are immanently emplaced and socially embedded. For instance, the analysis of the ‘transformational component’ of particular regimes is a following of connections which  brings further regimes into focus, and which shows directions in which stratification can shift, moving along already existing paths.

A second point is that the process of making a ‘tracing’ of mixed semiotics is one of learning how to distinguish what ‘field’ is at work in a statement (what assemblage is ‘speaking’), and is therefore in one sense at a molecular level in relation to the other aspects of pragmatics. It is a question of learning a nuanced grasping of where a statement is coming from (whether the statement is in a book or in speech), so as to know how to respond, and what to anticipate, given that, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, the same combination of terms can go into effect in the form of very different utterances (through context and mode of speech or presentation).This capacity is in turn bound up with the capacity to hear the modulations of the voice. The ability to hear expressive phonic modes and shifts is allied with knowledge of the different regimes of signs, and with engagement with the immediate contextual field, both in terms of other statements, and in terms of the situation.  The need for these two forms of engagement explains why Deleuze and Guattari  say what they do about Russell and Chomsky and the ‘transcendentalisation’ of language - ‘All methods for the transcendentalisation 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’ (TP p. 148). These ‘transcendentalising’ processes of analysis  are too abstract in the sense that they fail to make contact with the concrete levels of specific circumstances and modulations, and they are not abstract enough in the sense that they fail to analyse the trans-temporal fields of the regimes of signs and abstract machines that are at work in different ways in the production of statements.

The final point (and one that brings back the widest field of focus of the chapter) is the re-iteration of the fact that beyond and surrounding engagement with traps or de-intensificatory modes there is engagement with the zones and overall fields of free, globally intensificatory, destratifying abstract machines, at the level of named or dated modes of engagement, or at the level of the abstract machines pertaining to faculty-affects such as microcorporeality. At the widest level certain points can be made in terms of absolute ‘inseperabilities’, in that the fields or attributes involved in the faculty-affects are attributes of one substance – the intensive cosmos. The idea of microcorporeal fields of modulation is inseparable from the idea of affects, and in turn the idea of affects is inseparable from the plane of connective-fields  involving dominatory relations (the use of tools, tyranny, consumption of food by an organism). However, the crux of the issue lies in the fact that these attributes of the cosmos consist of fields of zones which can be engaged with in processes of intensification. The crux is therefore cosmographic in the sense that a mapping of attributes is a nomadological or micropolitical map for movements of intensification or deterritorialization. In the language of Thus Spoke Zarathustra it is important to grasp the details of how it is that the snake of the spirit of gravity is inside your own mouth, but in terms of freedom it is even more important to work in terms of  intensifying becomings along all available lines (the second includes the first). Schizoanalytic engagement with the fields and connections of fluid bodies includes the ‘critical’ process of pointing out dangers, but dangers are only one feature of the terrain.

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