<<TRANSMATHOME

3.4 Stratificatory Reason, Time and the Plane of Consistency

3.4.1

The points which have just been made are obviously important in themselves, but they have been made in part to make apparent a line of connection between the issue of language and the issue of stratificatory reason (following this line of thought will lead back to questions of language). It has just been shown that this stratificatory mode is vital in understanding what blocks off engagement with the domain of concepts. However, the issue of stratificatory reason goes much deeper than this, and in particular involves the closely related questions of time and memory. Given that intensive cartography is being shown (through the case of abstract machines) to involve the mapping of continually re-effectuated emergences, and of  pathways or contingent succesions of these emergences, it is important to return to the question of time. And the problem of reason is the starting point for thinking about why it is that there is an acute constraint involved in the customary functioning of the term ‘time’, and why it is that there is something alien about this world of emergences.

As was shown in the first chapter, stratificatory reason involves the faculty-affect of reason being locked into engagement with segmental systems that have central or dominatory  points. This can be engagement with societies, families, solar systems, workshops, factories, or animal territories. In relation to time what is at stake here is the fact that this fixation on regulated or central-point systems involves an engagement with transformation only in the minimal form of engagement with zones which are cyclical or structural in their functioning, and insofar as these zones are cyclical or structural in functioning (in depth, there is always far more to these zones than their regularity or patterns of distribution). These domains are engaged with as cyclicalities and structuralities, and also as zones which begin and end.

However, there are also other aspects of this trapped engagement. A first one is the fact that the world of  virtual functionings in the field of the human is over-coded with an image of memory which is drawn in large part from the domain of humans and tools (the memory figured as a store-room, or repository of ‘information’ to be taken up and used by the subject). The other major aspect of the over-coding figures memory along the lines of a separate dominatory point, in the form of an ‘unconscious’, which hands out material to the ‘conscious’. This is merely a baroque addition to the field of the over-coding, involving a figure being installed in the store-room, alongside the one outside it, and recurrently involving secondary over-coding involving ‘border-disputes’ between the two powers (material of kind X posited as being modified on arrival in the domain of the conscious, etc.). The second additional aspect concerns the fact that questions of time are closely bound up,  not just  with punctiform dominatory fields, but also with practises of timing of processes. Timing involves engagement with events in terms of beginnings and ends and in terms of cyclical systems. There are subtle differences involved in the systems deployed in chronological measurement (and beginnings and ends here are also those of the process of timing), but the differences between the two zones only produce the basis of a circuit between different fields of engagement along the lines of cyclicality, commencement and termination.

Overall, the world engaged with by stratificatory reason belongs to the world of forms of individuation which ,  as has been seen, A Thousand Plateaus picks out with the term ‘Chronos’ (TP p.262). This domain of zones is one involving dominatory, gravitional regularity (there is also regularity at the level of play, and at the level of deception, and this is very different in nature), such that one can say that these zones are chronic in their domination and subordination, at the same time as saying that they are chronologically regular.

It is necessary to consider the nature of fixation of engagement on these zones. The crucial point seems to be that it is a trapped engagement on domination and enslavement, which is itself a form of enslavement. It is enslavement because it curtails and precludes domains of engagement with virtual and currently actualised emergences, and therefore involves a continual, trapped de-intensification. The time here is not the time of metamorphosis and of becoming, but is the time of fixation and decline. Once more it needs to be said that it is time in this sense – time in the sense of ‘Chronos’ time – to which Burroughs is referring when he says ‘Time is a human affliction; not a human invention, but a prison’.[14] It is also this idea of time which is in effect in a moment  in The Waves where the young Rhoda has been left in a classroom with a clock ticking, and senses  that she is outside time:

The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join ‑ so ‑ and seal up, and make entire.[15]

The wild dogs, the water and the desert are the zones or forces outside the worlds of loops, of marching, and of things oscillating on hinges. The loop figures the cyclical, in the same way as the clock stands for the associated processes of chronological measurement. Beyond Chronos is the multiply inter-fused  world of virtual and actual emergences of all kinds, variously  categorisable for instance as chemical, organic, social, climatic, astronomical, artistic, geological, perceptual, technological, psychological, and so on. These emergences are what A Thousand Plateaus calls haecceities. One way of making the broad descriptive point involved is that haecceities or emergences are times, in a substantive sense (as in ‘what a time that was’). These emergences can be both landscape-emergences of the kind already outlined, and can also be emergences of a mode of engagement, as with the case of becomings and abstract machines (as has been seen repetition here takes a new form, in that the re-effectuations of an emergence are always manifestly repetitions in the anomalous senses of being transmutations and - sometimes – intensifications). Again, an emergence can be actualised, or it can be virtual, but continually bursting into limited effect, or it can be virtual in the strong sense of being dormant.  

In relation to these issues ‘memory’ no longer has any connection with reaching for (or recieving) stored information. Instead, in cases where becoming is not directly involved with an encounter, everything is a question of the flaring up of forms of ‘entering into composition’, where the ‘external’ zone or zones involved are in effect precisely because they are not really external, but have been taken up and are entering into composition with the ‘remembering’ body. Memory as the virtual here becomes  affective or ‘connective’; it becomes a term picking out a broad field within the overall field of thought, or the going-into-effect of one zone in relation to another. It is these points which are at stake when (at the end of ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal) Deleuze and Guattari put aside the compromised term ‘memory’ in favour of the term ‘becoming’: ‘Wherever we used the term ‘memories’ in the preceding pages, we were wrong to do so; we meant to say ‘becoming’, we were saying becoming’ (TP p.294).

As has been seen, leaving behind this zone of over-coding of memory is an escape from stratificatory reason, with it’s fixation on centred systems. However, there is another, and even more deep-seated aspect of the functioning of stratificatory reason in relation to the world of emergences. This aspect is not a specific or localised  human mode of over-coding  (with a tendency to emerge implicitly or explicity in academic work) but instead pertains more generally to human practise, insofar as it is stratified. This further functioning of stratificatory reason is the process whereby individuals are set up to create a personalised trap for themselves, through selecting speeches and actions on the basis of past gravely conforming and territorialising statements and processes, in a process which involves  the co-functioning of the faculty-affect of order-words (the faculty-affect of statements and actions which close down lines of engagement in a spirit of ‘being sensible’, and of making, or fortifying a territory). Stratificatory reason here figures the body as having a dominatory point or ruler, and selects engagements and statements on the basis that this central figure is to be anticipated like a ruler, on the basis that in principle the ruler is not to be tangled with (who knows what crises of conscience or sanity might follow...), and, perhaps most importantly, on the basis that this ruler is in fact inseparable from a further power  invested in the social field. The A Thousand Plateaus passage quoted in the first chapter can now be included at greater length:

A strange invention: as if in one form the doubled subject were the cause of the statements of which, in its other form, it itself is a part. This is the paradox of the legislator-subject replacing the signifying despot: 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 slave to oneself, or to pure ‘reason’, the Cogito. Is there anything more passional than pure reason? Is there a colder, more extreme, more self-interested passion than the Cogito? (TP p.130)

The only grain of truth involved in this process is that stratificatory reason is in effect both in individuals and in the social field. But instead of it being a central point – custodian of sanity and sensible behaviour -  it is a crippling or de-intensifying form of just one of many faculty-affects pertaining to the human, which as such functions alongside other stratificatory modes - in particular the stratificatory form of the faculty-affect of language. 

In an un-interrupted form, this  stratificatory process (or passion)  involves a continual entrenchment and/or proliferation of routines in all different domains of engagement, and a continual increasing of fixatory territorial functionings (defensive, consolidatory functionings not required by circumstances),  as stratificatory reason  selects activity on the basis of more and more past personal processes of conformist, territorial (and territorialised) actions and statements. It is not even that the circumstances involved generally have anything closely in common with  circumstances calling for a territorial closing down of engagements (and even in situations involving species of combat it is important to remember that combat is perhaps pre-eminently a question of distributing your forces across space, rather than of putting up barriers). The passion is a kind of background transcendental ‘fear-process’, involving a fixation on punctiform, dominatory zones, and on person-specific, subjugated, or conformist actions, and as such it involves a becoming with zones which are markedly dominatory (a becoming always centred around the regularities or laws of these zones) such that the bodies involved become continually more  regulated or routinised themselves. The individual becomes, at the limit, something you could set your watch by (or something you could recurrently anticipate) and this is the result of an adaptive ‘trap-becoming’ with punctiform, dominatory fields that involves a closing down of engagements along other lines. The grim irony is that what is invisible for this passion is that the passion is itself a mode of being dominated, only the domination does not involve a central point. To think in terms of fields of subjection being spread endemically right across the domain of social fields (and in terms of them functioning within the bodies which set out to escape them) is to think in a way which pertains to de-stratified reason. The faculty-affect of  reason proper is not limited to engagement with punctiform dominatory fields.

 It is now possible to return to the issue of time. What is beyond the zones engaged by reason is – properly speaking - the entire world of all of the other attributes of the intensive cosmos. However, in relation to the question of time, what can be counter-posed to the domain of ‘chronic’ or dominatory fields is the  ‘multi-linear’ domain of inter-fused emergences (or ‘haecceities’ or ‘times’), and of the initiation of emergences. This is the sphere of the mode of temporality or individuation  which A Thousand Plateaus refers to as ‘Aeon’: to quote from ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming –Animal’ it is the sphere of ‘ the floating, nonpulsed time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure event or of becoming, which articulates relative speeds and slownesses independently of the chronometric or chronological values that time assumes in the other modes’(TP p.263). The language of eternity, of Aeon and of eons has never been in expressive connection with the same zones and aspects as the language of chronometric repetitions and processes.  Time here becomes a name for a field or force-field of virtual and actual singular emergences, in which the past is the real in the mode of the virtual. Stratificatory reason both functions to close down lines of engagement, and to deflect lines of engagement (as with the case of ‘memory’) towards punctiform dominatory zones which block  connections with anything other than  subjected aspects of the zones involved. 

3.4.2

What, again, is the ‘Aeonic’ mode of individuation? It  is process as emergence, and process which is not ‘pulsed’ or regularly punctuated. Furthermore, it is the form of process where the past is virtually in effect, and where the past emergence can turn out to be a next emergence along a line of intensification, such that it is not only the virtual past, but the virtual future. Beyond the Nietzsche abstract machine, the Dionysus abstract machine...

The upshot of this is that ‘Aeon’ is a term principally denoting the plane of consistency, and which can be used in arriving at the idea of this plane from questions bound up with the idea of  time. In the same way, ‘Chronos’ denotes what A Thousand Plateaus calls the ‘plane of organisation’. The plane of consistency transects the planes of affects, and of microcorporeality. Contrasting Aeon with Chronos Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘It is not the same Plane: in the first case , it is the plane of consistency or of composition of haecceities, which knows only speeds and affects, and in the second case, it is the altogether different plane [the plane of organisation] of forms, substances, and subjects’(TP p.262). It seems to be a criterion or rule of thumb that it is likely to be necessary to have an actualised or effectuated  engagement with affects, microcorporeality and haecceities (rather than a virtual engagement), in order to pass into engagement along the lines of the plane of consistency. However, the plane of consistency is not the sum of these other attributes: it is the non-territorial and non-stratificatory threshold-field of inter-fusings or  borderings between all kinds of  emergences (emergences in their depth dimension of recurring transfigured forms), in relation to which the term ‘emergence’ comes to include not only haecceities, but also abstract machines, affects and faculty-affects. With the plane of affects or becomings, everything is a question of bodies as nexuses, and with the plane of microcorporality (or of individuated zones of consistency) everything is a question of particular bodies or regions of relations of speed and slowness, but with the plane of consistency the field is of of non-individuated but singular lines of effectuations of emergences in their communicative, and generative connections with each other. A becoming in engagement with sound, can lead into a becoming in engagement with colour, or colour can lead to sound, and out of the two can emerge abstract machines of engagement with colour along the lines of music, or engagement with sound along the lines of painting.

As A Thousand Plateaus says the plane of consistency ‘is like a row of doors’ (‘le plan est comme une enfilade de portes’ [16]), where this at its minimal point involves the idea of movements through successive doors, as well as the idea of doors which are alongside each other (the term ‘enfilade’ can refer to a field of linkages in three dimensions). However, it is important to see that there is no absolutely fixed order for the emergences, or  passages over thresholds. The plane of consistency consists of the  ‘chains’ of co-emplaced modes or ‘stages’ of abstract machines and of assemblages, and overall of the field of co-emplaced becomings or intensive fields of all kinds, where some becomings are very closely connected with others, such that it is possible to say for instance that from a particular position one becoming is beyond another one. However, this does not mean that in such cases it can be known in advance for certain that one threshold must be crossed before another one: what it means instead is that criteria can be developed – criteria which will always be subject to being modified or left behind on the basis of the specific circumstances: ‘Although there is no preformed logical order to becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of events...’(TP p.251).

3.4.3

And what is the plane of organisation? The plane of organisation is in fact the plane engaged by the faculty-affect of reason. This is the field which includes simple punctiform/ dominatory systems, but in fact comprises the field of all zones which are fields of ‘gravitational’ constriction or domination. This field therefore includes the entire domain of stratificatory fields which has been given detailed exemplification in the course of the thesis. The plane of organisation involves the complex ‘double-articulated’ zones of regimes of signs and assemblages of power. It is a question of fields of polarisation, and of increasing entrapment of particular zones into one functional or ‘trajectorial’ mode. This fixing down of organic roles or functioning can under certain circumstances provide situations and materials which can be beneficial, but at the level of the pragmatics of individual and group bodies, it can be seen that an ‘organ-ising’ process of fixing down roles goes in the direction of de-intensification. Everything at every level passes in the direction of checking or delimiting forms of engagement, and zones of substance (rather than of freeing up and creating lines of engagement), which at the level of the human involves a field of subjectification in the form of a deepening and broadening of conventional responses, and a delimiting of the functionings of the parts of the body (think of how a child plays, in comparison to the way in which an adult plays).

At the level of organic stratification everything is principally a question of fields of co-functioning of organs which involve an ever-increasing degree of ‘routinising’ or fixation of functioning. One hand becomes a ‘subordinate’ hand to the other, the diaphragm and lungs settle down into one standardised pattern of operating, the sexual organs lock down into a particular mode or field of modes, etc. The field of fixations and specialisations is hierarchical, but with reversals of hierarchical relations, dependent on the circumstances. At the level of ‘anthropological’ stratification there are also fields of organs involving fixation and specialisation (unless an emergence of some kind disturbs the stratification): law-courts, police-forces, medical institutions, artistic and scientific institutions. However, in relation to this field, group and individual human bodies are subject to a further stratification; one which is liable to settle them down overall into a particular and de-intensifying field of engagement. An aspect of the wider stratification is in each zone a fixation or regulation of language and of engagements, and what this entails is that  human bodies take up a field of ready-made constricted modes. The wider field of the reactive, stratificatory  functionings  is the major segment of the dominatory field, and the individual is a  minor segment. This in part has been an exemplification of how it is that the strata are piled on top of each other (with the entire field being that of the plane of organisation).

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