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3.8 Reason

However, very little will have been understood unless it is realised  that the deeper counterpart of fixations on particular modes is entrapment within the range of a  particular attribute of Substance, or a particular combination of attributes. This entrapment  has the form of a glidingly mutative fixation on fields of stratified production pertaining to the attribute (whether anthropological or not),  and of a default – hard to over-ride - partial or total reversion to any available domain of the attribute when a deterritorialised  engagement along the lines of another attribute or faculty-affect is in the process of being effectuated. The faculty-affect which displays this tendency to the highest degree is the faculty-affect of reason. In the human zone of the ‘mechanosphere’ reason is the stratificatory abstract machine which is most implacable, (in a way, it is like a distressed child, which will not be ‘placated’), but in particular it has alongside it the ‘abominable faculty’ of order words. In turn both language and reason are  connected  to faciality, but language and faciality can in one way be seen as subordinated to reason, in the sense that they continually break free and form first-level ‘alliances’ with other emergent faculty-affects,  and are continually being brought back into line with reason, that is with the domains of language and body-functioning predominant in the zones of fixation of reason (‘don’t enter into becoming with the non-human, be civil’). Stratificatory reason is the abstract machine of enslavement: it is an engagement with segmental, punctiform, dominatory zones that have single or multiple  centres, and fixated engagement on these involves the intensification of a segmental, dominatory mode of functioning. Stratificatory reason is the production at all levels across the planet of disciplined, striated spaces. To repeat, Deleuze and Guattari give it the last place in the list of major stratificatory abstract machines on the  final page of A Thousand Plateaus: ‘An order-word machine over-codes language, a faciality machine over-codes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes or axiomatizes the earth...’ (TP p.514). It is the whole of the earth that is at stake with reason, and it functions both through the firm (‘legal’) emplacements of over-coding, and through the flexible expansions of ‘project-fields’ on the part of axiomatic systems.

At the widest or most ‘deep-seated’  level reason over-codes the world of becomings with the cycles and circles of dominatory fields, and over-codes memory  with the domain of agents who take up objects to put them to use. In this way engagement with nexuses of becomings is continously supplanted by engagement with co-involved zones of striation and cyclicality, and  the teeming world of the virtual is turned into an attic whose contents are put to use by dominating forces. The   lines of flight of free becomings are supplanted by the completely different lines of the cycles of the pulsatory or punctuated, and the ‘incursions’ of the virtual are transformed into reminiscences or recollections. At the level of specific passions of stratificatory reason, the landscape is one of obsessive modes of discipline.  The grave world of inflexible routines, or the taking of the legal into yourself  - ‘you are the law, and that which obeys’.

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