<<TRANSMATHOME

Note 3. Drugs

The question of drugs is the question of a particular domain of strategies for intensifying modes of engagement – strategies for helping forms of engagement to pass over thresholds. As A Thousand Plateaus points out, drugs are in no way indispensible, but it is necessary to emphasise  the power or importance of drugs, while at the same time laying  out the subtle and diverse dangers that accompany their use. Meanwhile, the overtly political aspect of the question of drugs lies in the fact that something so valuable is being systematically blocked off, and made more dangerous by mis-information.

It is the intensification of all of the faculty-affects that is at stake in relation to drugs. That is to say, what  chiefly is at stake are the connections with the attributes of the cosmos pre-eminently engaged by humans. A problem with giving an emphasis to the language of perception in connection with drugs is that this is  liable to suggest that in some  way it is only ‘the senses’ which are at issue. Whereas it is very much the case that all the human modes of thought can be set free or broken open with the help of psychotropic substances. Artaud’s phrase is precise when he refers to ‘the  immense utility of these poisons to liberate and heighten the mind’.[1] In drug experiences engagement with nodes of becomings can be intensified (trans-prehension), as can engagement with the microcorporeal,  or engagement with segmented, dominatory fields (reason), or engagement with language... Drugs are involved at many levels in initiating transformations of fields of relations of speed and slowness in those  who take them (and as Deleuze and Guattari indicate (TP p.283), they are also involved in transforming engagement with fields of relations of speed and slowness). It can be seen therefore that everything concerns the body after all, only the body has come into focus as not just involving the senses, and the transformed or de-stratified modes of the senses,  but the field of the faculty-affects as well. The domain of processes of coming to see aspects of the world more acutely in drug experiences  includes all kinds of processes that would customarily be designated as thought (which helps to explain why it is that the language of drugs is bound up with the language of ‘visions’), though at the the same time processes of thought are affects of the body  (which helps to explain why it is that drugs can be initiators of transformations).

In an exemplary  passage in ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal’ Deleuze and Guattari discuss drug-initiated experiences in terms of coming to perceive the imperceptible. However, they are careful to stress in advance that the imperceptible is in fact already perceived, only before the transformation the perception is virtual and continually held back , rather than being  pervasive or effectuated. This idea gives more complexity to the idea of transitions over thresholds. It is a question of intensifying already existing connections, so that they break free from being continually shut off, or  from being continually unfocussed.

 But it is always a question here of a threshold, whether or not succeeding thresholds might  always involve incursions of stratification. It is a matter of a nexus of engagement entering into composition with the forces of the world at a new level of intensity.  This point, together with the last one, make up crucial aspects of what is at stake in relation to the idea of a ‘nomadology’. The ideas are of a journey in intensity (with major ‘leaps’ or thresholds) rather than of finding ‘what is behind everything’,  and of a world of virtual engagement or ‘going into effect’ whose zones can come into  effect  to ever higher degrees.

Drugs can open up intensified engagement, letting in an immanent ‘outside’. The story at this point starts with drugs, but instantly moves to the ‘perceived’. It is necessary to see that the perceived in this sense has

the force to emit accellerated or decelerated particles in a floating time that is no longer our time, and to emit haecceities that are no longer of this world: deterritorialisation, ‘I was disoriented...’ (a perception of things, thoughts, desires in which desire thought and the thing have invaded all of perception: the imperceptible finally perceived) (TP p.283)

The use of drugs is only one means of melting constricted forms of engagement, and it is neither a necessary aspect of a process of deterritorialisation, nor sufficient on its own. What is more, the process is one of learning to get to the intensified modes  without the aid of the drugs. Sober intoxication is what must be arrived at to the greatest extent possible, given that drugs almost always have temporary weakening or damaging effects. It seems to be the case that – if they are used at all – pyschotropic plants and chemicals should come to be increasingly held in reserve.

Clearly, the other problems with drugs are addiction, and the associated shift into a drug-fixated sub-culture or ‘drug assemblage’. The experiments and lines of escape that take place under these circumstances are continually being vitiated,  over-coded, and blocked off:

...the line of flight of drugs is constantly being segmentarised under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer. [...] The deterritorializations remain relative, compensated for by the most abject reterritorializations... Instead of holes in the world allowing the world lines themselves to run off, the lines of flight coil and start to swirl in black holes; to each addict a hole, group or individual... [...] The molecular microperceptions are overlaid in advance, depending on the drug, by hallucinations, delusions, false perceptions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts: they restore forms and subjects every instant... [...] Instead of making a body without organs sufficiently rich or full for the passage of intensities, drug addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or a cancerous one: the causal line, creative line, or line of flight immediately turns into a line of death or abolition. (TP p.285)     

Social attacks on the use of drugs are pre-eminently the functioning of the ‘counter-state’ nomadic war machine captured by the state assemblage, and transformed into a war machine opposed to those who are ‘beyond’ the state in a readily apparent  way. The war machine is a permanent war against whatever overtly can not be turned into a capitalist, familial or state-institutional enterprise. The differential ‘path’ is from nomadic distribution without war as an aim, to war against the emergent  states (hence the Great Wall of China), to a capture on the part of the state which in turn leads to states being encompassed by a global, capitalist war machine, which functions as a counterpart of the global town-network mega-assemblage. Other assemblages and sub-assemblages  are also involved in attacks on drugs, but it is the war machine which is the major component of this field of reactive activity. It is global and wide-ranging undercover and  intelligence  operations that are involved in the ‘war on drugs’, involving  all of the espionage strategies deployed in warfare. But as well as this, the language of the process is not only that of war, but is that of a pervading corruption, or deadly micrological dissolution, positing as many centres as there are users and organisations for production and distribution. This is the language of ‘the corruption of  youth’, of viral delinquency, and of soulless demonic ‘pushers’. The language  of states is centrally that of betrayal and dereliction of duty, and the language of town-networks is that of threats to property and citizens, but the order-words of the war-machine concern an implacably spreading, multi-centred corruption. There are many other targets of the war machine, with the overall world of these areas of corruption being the ‘unspecified enemy’ (TP p.467) or unspecifiable enemy: the corruption of upright enterprises that can always emerge in a new form. The nomad mode of engagement can turn into a mode dedicated to attacking the multi-headed, and shifting domain of bordering state assemblages (it is only at this point that it becomes necessary to think about it in terms of a split between an assemblage of power and a regime of signs). And it can also  be captured: at which point the old creeping and poly-tentacled enemy is replaced by a new one. 

At the same time, the medical assemblage is also closely involved in the process of suppression of drugs. Psychotropic substances are coded within this assemblage as either sedatives, recreational ‘relaxants’, or  tools for curing (conventionally designatable) mal-functions. Centrally, it is either a question of something which cures and gives a return to local or global normality, or of something which in some way gives ‘happiness’. The mechanical object, and the emotional subject. These are the ‘preconceptions’ that are in effect in official accounts of drugs coming from the medical assemblage. The order-word constructions involved  leave no space for the  fact that ‘stimulant’ and ‘hallucinogenic’ drugs can be  initiators of intensified modes of  thought or engagement. There are isolated people lodged within the assemblage who guardedly make reference to this fact, but such accounts do not pertain to the assemblage and its regime. If such accounts make a connection with someone speaking in the voice of the assemblage, the response is either a rejection or a more subtle statement to the effect that experiments should take place under scientific supervision.

At the level of the assemblage (as opposed to the regime of signs) the use of drugs provides a whole field of territories for the medical assemblage, consisting of hospitals, treatment centres, research programmes, psychotherapy centres  etc. The assemblage makes a terrain out of drug-use, exposes users to high doses of its disabling sign-regime, and therefore helps in generating the ‘addict’ entity, who can travel in a melancholy  relay from the drug-culture  assemblage to the clinical assemblage. It is also the case that the idea of singular fine-grained processes of experimentation is a threat  to medical ‘authority’or – specifically to a zone of the medical terrain.

The suppression or stratification processes of the  captured war machine (and of the states that have the war machine embedded in them) are therefore allied to the stratificatory functioning of the component assemblage of medicine. It can be seen that none of this has to do with ‘ideaology’ (or the disastrous idealogy model). Everything is a question of an intricate ‘anti-production production’ involving assemblages, de-intensificatory transformations, preventions,  order-word processes, and the concomitant initiating of the singular emission of order–words on the part of new people. The dangers of drugs are very great, but one of the greatest of their dangers is that they can lead back to the grinding subservience of stratification, with its slow-burn fear, and its world of different modes of ‘gravity’.

It is a question of seeing drugs as initiators and intricate perturbations. And it is a question of seeing  them as one possible element in a process of creating other  kinds of intensificatory materials:

To reach the point where “to get high or not to get high’ is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather, the immanence of drugs allows one to forego them.. Is it cowardice or exploitation to wait until others have taken the risks? No, it is joining an undertaking in the middle, while changing the means. (TP p.286).

In this thesis the idea of changing ‘the general conditions of space and time perception’ has been given substance in particular by the delineation of the faculty-affects of trans-prehension, and microcorporeality.

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