<<TRANSMATHOME

3.6 Micro-corporeality

At one level, what  is at stake in relation to engagement with micro-corporeal fields is freedom from stratified, passive modes of being a body (freedom in a Spinozistic sense). Stated otherwise, what is in question at this point is fluent engagement with the non-subjectified aspects of intensive bodies, and with micro-corporeal fields which are not in any way subjectified. To enter into composition at deeper and deeper levels with fields of relations of speed and slowness (and motion and rest) is in part to engage  with fields of aformal relations and transformations, where the connections involved in the transformations can for instance be mutually intensificatory, mutually de-intensificatory, or can be subjugatory or dominatory (the point of intersection between micro-corporeality and reason is clearly discernible here: reason ‘snips out’ dominatory fields in an engagement with causal and stochastic regularities). It is a question of co-emplaced paces, and rhythms: to engage with the movements of an animal or the movements of a body of  water (eddies, layer-currents, waves) is an engagement on its own: an intellectual process that has the form of a particular becoming-animal, or of a becoming-water (at the same time as the process is one of discerning of singular flows and singular zones of contraction or relaxation etc). This process is an intensification of the body, and can be expressed in transductions which in turn will also be intensifications for the bodies which encounter them, as with a musician who takes the co-emplaced paces of a landscape  and transduces them into music (see Appendix, note 4). In relation to engaging with sound (as opposed to expressions in the form of sound) it is a question of hearing resonances, dissonances and timbres – in hearing voices one hears sound emanating from a whole cavernous field of co-functioning movements (movements of the diaphragm, vocal-chords, tongue, lips...), and this in part involves the apprehension of a whole nuanced dance of ‘brightening’ and ‘dimming’ on the part of the speaker. However, again, it is also a question of taking up or taking on (acquiring-transducing) the micro-corporeal modes that are encountered.

Microcorporeality is a major part of what is in effect in the taking up of a particular  laughing or positive mode of being a body. However, it is also centrally in effect in taking up  a specific melancholy or grave modality. A subjectified modality (or emotion) is a whole semi-global field of functioning of the body, which in principle can be taken up on its own (at which point it is not really subjectificatory, as in the case of an actor or con-man) but which is closely tied in with a whole inter-meshed field of engagements and compositions of language. At the level of micro-corporeality the mode or ‘mood’ includes the movements of the voice, and it is a specific field of kinds of statement which is customarily consonant with such a voice. Such an overall field of micro-corporeality and production of statements affects other people unless they by-pass or undermine it, either by closing down engagements, or by putting into effect another ‘grave’ modality, or by initiating a departure or rejection. In this way, a grave, reproaching  mode can be very active, while remaining the central aspect of a de-intensification. In themselves such  processes have the form of a ‘slow-burn’ pain. Microcorporeality  here is an engagement with ‘controlled’ passions where the source of the pain (or fear) is diffuse, and where it expresses itself in the creation and re-enforcement of territories, and in the production of order-words. Beyond these subjectified modes there is the endless  world of modes of being a body which have the ‘lightness’ of intensification or of freedom. Here it is always a question of lines of flight, or lines of fluid movement.

However, the immanent ‘beyond’ of subjectified modes also involves the  field of affective tones in the modality of ‘terror’ or ‘horror’, involving a non-subjectified concentration of activity. These are the affective modalities that are most effectively designated by the term ‘panic’(the rising of panic is something which can be apprehended through micro-corporeality). Panic here is a ‘shock-wave’ or upsurge  which must also be understood as a beneficial perturbation in the form of an engagement with forces of dissolution and constriction.(see Appendix, note 6). The following passage is from the end of ‘The Geology of Morals’, with its conceptual figure, Professor Challenger:

Disarticulated, deterritorialised, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. He whispered something else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs proliferate. Panic is creation.. A young woman cried out, her face ‘convulsed with a wilder, deeper epilepsy of stark panic than they had seen on human countenance before’. No one had heard the summary, and no-one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assemblage serving as a drum gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms beating out the absolute: [quotation from a story by Lovecraft] ‘The figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock ... the figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it... The abnormal clicking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings’ - the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere. (TP: pp. 73-74)

To take ideas from this passage which do not relate directly to panic, it can be pointed out that micro-corporeality is very much a domain of ‘conjugated rhythms’, and that ‘intensive clickings’ are processes of motion and rest.

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