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3.9 Trans-prehension

The question of trans-prehension can now be taken up.   Trans-prehension, as has been indicated, is the discerning or ‘delineation’ of the becomings of zones, in the form of lines of flight, and lines of stratification (passions). It pertains to group bodies, individual bodies, populations, societies, and bodies and fields of all kinds. At the level of a directly applied pragmatics it is the discernment of different kinds of affects and faculty-affects, and the concomitant ‘picking out’ of what becomings to intensify or connect with in a body, and what to ‘pass by’. At the level of writing or communication (which is the point where the idea of an abstract machine starts to apply) it is an intensive cartography which helps to foster this faculty-affect, and which communicates a particular inter-meshed domain of kinds of discernment. For instance, the whole of this thesis has at one level been a  cartography of major becomings or faculty-affects obtaining in the field of the human. The situation is the same with A Thousand Plateaus.  Such perception of becomings extends to the point of perception at the level of attributes of the cosmos, but it also wholly inseparably involves the pragmatics or micropolitics of fostering and releasing  free becomings of all kinds and at all levels. A cosmography of attributes, and a micropolitics of the connecting up and intensification (in groups and individuals) of lines  of deterritorialization.

The study of the affects of the human necessarily involves the field of the virtual which is customarily designated as ‘the past’, in that connections with assemblages and abstract machines are connections with trans-temporal ‘chains’ or fields. To engage for instance with the emergence that is made up of the encounter between the despotic Chinese state  and the counter-state nomad war machine (as Deleuze and Guattari do in ‘Treatise on Nomadology) is simultaneously to engage with a particular field that is still virtually in effect, and to engage with threads or aspects  of the two assemblages (a question of uncovering dangers, and of making contact with lines of deterritorialisation stretching from the assemblages). To engage with such fields is in large part to intensify engagement with the currently actualised forms of elements extending from assemblages and elements of assemblage (which may be subterranean or no longer  prominent in their functioning), and is therefore to delineate fields of affects of group and individual bodies. For instance, the counter-state  nomad assemblage of power - with its field of lines of flight - is still in effect in disparate forms, even though the modes of operation involved are  different (see Appendix, notes 3 and 4), as in the case, for instance, of the difference between horse-nomad jewellery and the counter-state art of the assemblage as it appears in state/urban landscapes.[18]

In the same way, engagement with modes of deterritorialisation are delineations of futures. The future can be relative to a group, an individual, or a social formation, and although it might not happen (or might happen to only a part of the field), it remains the case that it is a future, so long as it is an affect that can undergo some degree of intensification. What is at stake here is in part a question of ‘large-scale’ emergences, but it can also be a question of answering the most basic questions of direction –  ‘should we stay?’ ‘should we move?’, ‘what is emerging here?’. Engagement along these affective lines is one guding process that functions alongside processes of experimentation. The delineation of the emergence, and the experimental process of actualising the emergence (connecting things together, making temporary intensifications, that could have long-term effects). Trans-prehension here is an engagement with  fields of  engagements which are primarily virtual but which are hovering on the edge of actualisation, of becoming plateaus, rather than  sporadic escapes.  

The main stratificatory form of trans-prehension consists of an engagement with connections that makes no contact with becomings, and either overcodes with the case of an-agent-and-tools (a subject) or  with the field of technical machines (which as machines are primarily not zones of consistency in the sense of entering micrologically into composition with other zones – this only applies to the parts). The affects therefore get subsumed  (on the one hand) into simple recurrent processes of ‘acting upon’, or of being ‘acted on’ or (on the other hand) into  recurrent processes whereby a field functions to produce an element or situation X. This is the chief ‘circuit’ of this stratificatory field.

To re-iterate, in terms of its line of escape from stratification, trans-prehension is the becoming lucid, or fully effective (at a first level) of engagement with nodes of intensive connections. The micro-politics of this shift involves both  specific becomings of groups, and the ‘cosmos philosophy’ level of the faculty-affects and attributes. However, it also involves such things as the isolation of  the stratificatory modes that are the regimes of signs, and the understanding  of how fields of functionings of  language pertain to regimes of signs and assemblages of power. A first example is  the non-immanent functionings of the terms ‘truth’ and ‘being’  that are central to the state-despotic regime of signs. A second example is the equivalent non-immanent functionings of the terms ‘rule’ and ‘principle’ in the case of the town-network regime. The worlds of ‘the’ truth, and of ‘the’ principle, as opposed to truths and principles as functionings or elements within processes. To have the questions locked to assemblages of power in this way is to block them off at the same time as setting them out, and it is to trap engagement within a de-intensificatory fixation, or ‘transcendental illusion’.  Trans-prehension involves a cartography of intensive nodes which at the same time is a critique (or a showing of the constrictions that need to be passed by or excised) in relation to zones of functionings of terms which are central to the field of philosophy.

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