<<TRANSMATHOME

3.2 Abstract Machines

3.2.1

An abstract machine is always an affect, or mode of engagement, but at the same time the term has particular reference to detached fields of elements, including expressive materials such as books, and things such as tools, musical instruments, or devices for measurement. But if a particular case is taken, what can be said in connection with the fact that  an abstract machine is impersonal, or non-subjective in nature, and what account can be given of the mode involved?

Take the proper name ‘Nietzsche’. This name does not  chiefly refer to a particular human being or life (although it can refer to this). Instead it is a name for a form of engagement which is continually  re-effectuated, or re-initiated, and which can be transformed and taken up over thresholds. To ‘take up’  the Nietzschean world of engagement is to re-effectuate the Nietzsche abstract machine. It is this which takes place with Bataille, and also with Deleuze.  This is the sense of the idea of abstract machines being ‘impersonal’. As A Thousand Plateaus says,  proper names in this sense do not refer ‘to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and dates that refer to the singularities of the machines’ (TP p. 511).

What is it to engage along Nietzschean lines, and what are the principle elements and ‘figures’ of the Nietzschean landscape?.To engage along these lines is to engage with domains of emergence, dance, play, experiment and laughter, and to counterpose these with the constrictive worlds of repeating functionings which can be referred to by the terms ‘law’ and ‘reason’ (the ‘eternal spider of reason’ which is not at the centre of the cosmos[1]). It is also to analyse forms of reactive or nihilistic existence in a way which deals simultaneously with the actual and virtual/past fields of social formations and the co-emplaced actual and virtual/past fields of functionings of language. At the ‘widest’ level it is to think in terms of bodies as being elements of a world of active and de-intensificatory (subjugated) forces, and to analyse this intensive cosmos (will to power) as at a deep level involving a continual  recurrence or re-emergence of its formations or of its passages over thresholds (eternal recurrence).

One of many potential lists of major figures of the Nietzschean landscape[2] is the following: the sea and voyages across the sea; the third metamorphosis, or the child; Dionysus; Ariadne; night and the stars (the world ‘is deeper than day can comprehend’[3]); Zarathustra; the Eagle and the Snake; the Madman; the Spirit of Gravity; the Higher Men (the names of the Higher Men should really be listed separately: each is a name for a kind of reactive engagement). To take up an abstract machine of this kind is to acquire an affect; it is to acquire a way of engaging which is at once a way of seeing or encountering, and a way of working or of acting/composing.  At the level of language, what is involved is a functioning  of the abstract machine in the form of the emergence of a way of composing terms and blocks of terms. It is not possible to give a formula for a manner of composition of this kind, precisely because the process of production  involved is  abstract and aformal (to try to give a formula here would be effectively the same as trying to give a formula for an artist’s paintings). However, a  characterisation of  the mode of composition of the Nietzsche abstract machine  is, firstly,  that the language of emotions and values is continually brought together with the language of science or ‘objectivity’ (this can be symbolised by the idea of ‘frohliche wissenschaft’, or ‘gay science’), and, secondly,  that the language with this mode of engagement involves writing being set out in - often very small- blocks or waves of composed terms.

Once they have appeared within a field abstract machines are always virtually in effect, but they are also recurrently and fortuitously re-effectuated, in a sporadic process of re-emergence, intensification and tranfiguration of the mode of engagement involved. It is a question of thinking of ‘space-time’ as a field of virtual/actual forces, where major proper names classified under the rubric of the ‘past’, are in fact names for powerful forces currently in effect at one degree of intensity or another. The Plato abstract machine is still very much in effect, as is the Sophocles abstract machine. This field of forces  surrounds and subsists on every side, its zones continually flaring up into transformed life (this field of forces also involves emergences of other kinds: as A Thousand Plateaus indicates   dates such as 1492, or 1789, are names for emergences which are in effect in a substantial way).

3.2.2

The zones and names central to the Nietzsche abstract machine involve other abstract machines. Another proper name which can be taken up at this point is the name Dionysus. This further name also pertains to an abstract machine. Dionysus is also a part of the present, in the form of a mode of engagement, or abstract machine. The setting out of the schema of this abstract machine involves geographico-political terms, and terms concerning transformation, intoxication and music. The Dionysus mode concerns hinterlands, zones on the edge of the state assemblage, which are recurrently partly outside, and partly inside its territory; it also concerns transfiguration, intoxication,  rhythm, dance, music... As Deleuze says Dionysus is ‘the god of places of passage and things of forgetting’.[4] The Dionysus affect is one which catches hold of the whole body and sets it free onto a line of flight: a breaking  away of the world of slavish modalities (‘forgetting’), and the inrush of dense zones of becoming with landscapes beyond or to the side of human assemblages (‘places of passage’).

What is left behind with this affect is an obsessive, subjectified remembering of everything, where this remembering involves the passions or sad affects of faciality, and the routines and regimes of signs of stratificatory reason and stratificatory language. What is taken up is  a dance of engagement which moves freely across the zones of the different attributes, in a movement across nexuses of becomings and fluid bodies, and across all  of the trans-human and non-human zones that extend beyond the zones of the human assemblages of power. This is not  the same as the Nietzsche abstract machine, which preeminently concerns a line of flight from out of the philosophical, scientific and artistic assemblages. The central  geo-political  and psychotropic elements of the Dionysus schema (hinterlands and modes of intoxication) show that it pertains to a significantly different ‘level’ in comparison with the Nietzsche abstract machine. The line of flight of the Dionysus abstract machine is a line of escape from facialised, subjectified modes of the body, and from all forms of adherence to the practices integral to assemblages of power. As a result, this abstract machine is liable to go into effect in the expressive matters of music as well as those of language, and to go  into effect in relation to (non-programmatic, or non-projective) strategies in many different areas. Nevertheless, the Dionysus affect is one of the primary elements in effect in Nietzsche’s work (as he says himself[5]). The Dionysus abstract machine is beyond the Nietzsche abstract machine, but the two are still meshed together as two co-emplaced zones  of what A Thousand Plateaus  calls the ‘plane of consistency’. Beyond the Nietzsche mode there is the Dionysus mode (although the Dionysus mode could be reached first - there is no pre-set order here (TP p.251)). Beyond becoming child, there is becoming animal (TP p.248). Beyond one mode of intensive cartography, and of intensification of engagement, a further deepened and widened mode emerges.

<<Back to CONTENTS | Chapter 3.3 Fiction, Philosophy, Language >>

I set this freedom and celestial cheerfulness over all things like an azure bell when I taught that no ‘eternal will’ acts over them and through them.
I set this wantonness and foolishness in place of that will when I taught: ‘With all things one thing is impossible – rationality!’
A little reason, to be sure, a seed of wisdom scattered from star to star – this leaven is mingled with all things!
A little wisdom is no doubt possible; but I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer  - to dance on the feet of chance.
O sky above me, you pure lofty sky! This is now your purity to me, that there is no eternal reason-spider and spider’s web in you –
That you are to me a dance floor for divine chances...