Breeding Demons Chapter Four: Passive Synthesis I. Synthesis

In L’anti-oedipe themes from Deleuze’s earlier works are not lost, but by virtue of its language and his alliance with Guattari, they are transformed; the academic tones of Différence et Répetition give way to a compilation vocabulary, built from fragments stolen from a variety of sources, Artaud, Marx, Freud, Lacan and Kant being amongst them.[185] (Theft is another of Deleuze’s methods.) However, the apparatus of the book is familiar, and situates it in the context of Kantian critique: three syntheses as the productive machinery, a distinction between their legitimate immanent use and illegitimate transcendent use, a transcendental principle, paralogisms. To select familiar elements is to run counter to the sentiments the book expresses (Destroy! Destroy! being one); however, to understand why Kant’s theory of intensities is called schizoid by Deleuze and Guattari, it is necessary to look at the way in which synthesis works, and at the transformation of the transcendental. This will connect it with Kant, and the previous two chapters. Women are also introduced in this chapter, but only by identifying in passing those terms with which philosophy has associated then, precursory to the longer discussions in the two following chapters.

In his preface to the English edition of L’anti-oedipe, Foucault cautions against looking for a philosophy in the book, for ‘a flashy Hegel’ [186]; no more should a flashy Kant be looked for. Although the book expresses an explicit alliance with Kantian critique, and with the transcendental method, the networks it deploys are not those of common sense, and the criticism is not confined by reason. The central Kantian themes are immanence of criteria and synthesis. Immanence not to synthesis, or machinic processes, but of machinic processes. That is, there is no containment of syntheses within something which is not synthesis, and nor is there a goal. The language the book uses is not flashy either, but integral to the problems with which it deals. In Kant, imagination synthesizes; however, the psychological overtones of imagination cannot be killed, no matter how careful the attempt. Whilst exploring the Kantian imagination and unhinging it from its proper speculative, aesthetic and practical uses exposes an way of getting from Kant to Deleuze, the space opened up becomes cramped once more if the terminology particular to human machines is used.

Deleuze and Guattari have been criticized for exploiting the term schizophrenia. Elizabeth Grosz writes of objections to their investment

It is indeed not difficult to see the schizo as an image or model, if one is searching for such things. However, the vector of Deleuze’s writing mitigates against this; his critique of the image of thought was referred to in chapter two, and on a more general level, the nature of his writing changes from book to book, using new vocabularies which continuously draw in new elements and open different holes. If one is inclined to personal sympathy rather than to making things work - which is not the same as interpreting what Deleuze means by schizophrenia - then no doubt there are criticisms to be made. But schizophrenia, as it is employed in L’anti-oedipus, refers to a machinic, rather than a human operation, of inclusive disjunction. Rather than the either/or of exclusive disjunction, the schizoid intensity both differentiates and includes difference, in a continuous variation of variables which shucks off orders imposed from the outside; it refers to the release of intensities, the emission of spores.

‘[N]ot only a human fact’ is crucial. L’anti-oedipe is neither an anti-humanist nor post-humanist text, as some enthusiasts would claim; it is simply not interested in this argument, in the same way that Deleuze is disinteresting in tiresome discussions over whether philosophy is dead, whether we live in a post-philosophical age. Machinic synthesis is impersonal, and indifferent to human divisions: it does not differentiate man and nature, nature and industry, industry and history, but is immanent to the cycles it synthesizes, generating difference but not presupposing any pre-given and conditioning articulations of its nature, adding difference at each level of production, rather than cancelling it in extension. Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in formulating an abstract account of production that does not isolate production from desire, nor privatize desire within the family in order to leave a social field free for labour. To say that schizophrenia is not only a human fact is simply to issue a reminder that the term is not used with reference to the social construction of the schizophrenic, but as a potential of thought. Much as Kant says that the transcendental is illegitimate if conceived of in the image of the empirical.

Humanity is a term for a particular mode of production, involving the rationalization of processes on the grounds of universal necessity, global superiority, exclusive binaries (reason/nature, man/woman, sane/insane, good/evil etc. etc.); insofar as ‘elle fait du luxe même un moyen d’investissement (it makes luxury itself into a means of investment)’[189] and operates with an arsenal of rules within a complementary framework of cynicism and stupidity, impotence and power. However, L’anti-oedipe is a critical book and as such not sentimental about the values that this mode of production protects and requires. It’s problem is to find out how they work, how to undo them, and let a bit of fresh air into thinking. The schizo is not an image or model, but an illustration, a working attempt to expose the uncritical assumptions in philosophical dogmas.

The schizo is not a metaphor, but a principle, but rather than being based on everyday facts, it is the principle of their criticism, as empty of meaning as God; the schizo exists no more than does God, just as madness exists no more than reason. Everything can be banalized, and at this we are particularly adept. Both are made, under different conditions, according to different modes of production, along different lines of thought. There is not a choice between a world modelled on the schizo and one modelled on God; we are past the opposition between the multiple and the one. There are only markets, connections, breaks and flows, blockages or escapes, consumptions, distributions. To the question: do you believe in God? Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘bien sûr, mais seulement comme au maître du syllogisme disjonctif (of course, but only as the master of the disjunctive syllogism)’.[191] God, like the schizo, is a machinic operation, a production; because there is no unconscious material, no theatre staging myth and fantasy, only the cycle of production, there is no schizo in the unconscious, just as there is no God. Both are produced as effects of machinic synthesis, which either over-code it, and direct it towards defined ends - exclusive disjunction, in the case of God; or displace and differentiate it, intensifying synthesis and proliferating identities, in inclusive disjunctions which add.difference and so shoot relations outside the terms related.

In this chapter synthesis, as the basic apparatus of L’anti-oedipe will be looked at, and drawn out of its connections with Kant and the activity of a subject.

In chapter two, Deleuze’s eliminative deduction was discussed, as a positive selective method which collapses the power operators in a writer, exposing problematic undercurrents, and bringing to the surface of his writing patterns which, under the covers of law, appear as an undifferentiated or chaotic depth. (It is worth remembering this before attempting to read the schizo as such an operator.) Part of the difficulty of reading L’anti-oedipe within a strictly philosophical register is that its language and relations are assembled from philosophy, science, economics, literature, psycho-analysis, politics and art, so reading it solely terms of its connections with Kant is undoubtedly a limited exercise. However, Deleuze’s work feeds back onto Kant, and exposes not a firm ground and a certain unity, but a dynamic, mobile and immanently differentiated space.

This does not mean a space that is unable to function as a basis for a theory of mechanism. However, Kant’s claims for mechanism have to be re-sited: it no longer presents a universally comprehensive theory encompassing the totality of objective movements in space, but becomes a limited description of a motions across empty space according to ideal principles, following predictable and pre-determined channels. In mechanism, the process of individuation, or differenciation, is constrained and governed from an external position. That Kant is aware of this is clear from his discussion of teleology in the third Critique, where he distinguishes the formation of natural bodies from mechanical bodies on precisely the difference between something set into operation from the outside, and something which is formed through the relations of forces immanently to it.[193] Deleuze and Guattari formulate a third theory of production, or synthesis, which is neither purposive, as is the Kantian understanding of a natural body, nor mechanistic, but machinic.

There are several ways in which the relation of passive synthesis to Kant can be addressed. For example, there are three syntheses in both L’anti-oedipe and the first Critique, the former mapping loosely onto the three categories of relation: the synthesis of connection/selection with cause and effect, the synthesis of disjunction/recording with substance and accident, the synthesis of conjunction/consumption with community/reciprocity. These relations can also be connected with the problem of the modes of time specific to each relation - succession, permanence and co-existence respectively, as discussed by Kant in the Analogies of Experience. Another possibility is looking at the qualities of force which correlate with each synthesis, libido with connection, numen with disjunction and voluptas with conjunction. However, because the underlying question in this thesis is where women are situated in the theoretical structures of philosophy, or more precisely in Kant and Deleuze, the axis privileged is that of passivity, women having been situated in relation to this by philosophy, and the problem of how passive synthesis relates to Kantian synthesis.

Kant defines synthesis as an act of combining difference under unity, in which elements of knowledge are gathered, whether of pure or empirical origin, and united to form the content of a representation.[194] Although he refers to it as a connection ‘thought without identity’ [195], amplifying rather than analyzing or explicating the content of concepts, he also say that ‘all combination or separation that constitutes thought relates’ to a simple “I”[196]. It is, in other words, a limited amplification. Thinking turns a circle through these two statements on synthesis, from synthesis as relation of difference not constrained by the logical content of a concept to a relation of difference anchored to identity; this latter understanding of synthesis then serves as the model of the possibility of synthesis in general. Synthesis is drawn into the subject, and differences in the flow of imagination and variations in its intensive magnitude are equalized. This allows Kant to propose that the underlying sub-stratum of appearances might also be subordinated to the same unifying manoeuvre:

In Kant’s own terms this is illegitimate, since the thing-in-itself is defined as outside knowledge, so to suggest that it might after all be unified is not a claim that can be validated, and the suggestion damages the critical system, leading to questions of the “location” of the thing-in-itself and the nature of its causality. But having first subordinated synthesis to identity, transcendental matter as the reality of things-in-themselves, to which sensation corresponds, is also postulated as subordinate to unity. Kant says there is a distinction internal to sensation; by anchoring this to identity and ultimately to the master of disjunction, this becomes a binary distinction, cashed out in terms of a subjective element, as pleasure and pain, and an objective element, in the a priori forms of space and time. The master of disjunctive synthesis is at work here.

Kant distinguishes two types of synthesis, figurative syntheses of imagination from intellectual syntheses of understanding. The former are ‘the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul’[198], whilst intellectual synthesis is a spontaneous act of the faculty of representation, an act of understanding to which ‘the general title “synthesis” may be assigned’.[199] The former is synthesis proper, and combines intensive magnitudes, whilst the latter is a function of the unity of the ‘I think’ and combines axiomatized quanta of intuition. The former is implicated with the production of an actual continuum, with the dynamic commercium of machinic synthesis, whilst the latter is associated with an ideal continuity, with the conceptual community of human labour.

A synthesis of imagination produces continously flowing intensive magnitudes[200], but sightlessly, without reference to recognition or concepts: it is in this respect connected with intuition rather than understanding; ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’[201]. Deleuze’s thought of synthesis results from the unhinging of imagination from unity and of intuition from its modes, and theorizes productive synthesis as a positive intensive difference from the empty form of time.

The problem of synthesis is taken back to the question of a relation thought without identity, deducted from the act of understanding which relates it to identity. The starting point from which to explore Deleuze’s formulation of synthesis is the subject. In the second of the four poetic formulae summarizing Kant, introduced by Rimbaud’s phrase ‘Je est un autre’, Deleuze begins by asking under what form indeterminate existence - je suis, I am -is determinable by the je pense, I think. And the answer Kant gives to this problem arising out of Cartesian subject, is that it is determinable in the form of time; “therefore” is not sufficient as a theory of relations between the I and its other. Existence is determinable only in the pure form of time, ‘comme l’existence d’un moi passif, réceptif et changeant (as the existence of a passive, receptive and changing ego.)’ [203], and it is the production of this mobile and passive I am, rather than the activity of the fixed but spontaneous I think which is, for Deleuze, where the real problem of the subject in Kant lies.

The aesthetic is Kant’s most important contribution to philosophy and the insinuation of time into the heart of the subject the explosive moment referred to in chapter one, so Deleuze addresses this as the critical relation in regard to the subject in Kant, rather than the logical vehicle that accompanies representations. The epistemological problem becomes subordinate to one of affects and intensities, bodies and desires, and ontology gives way to blocs of becoming, or cycles of synthetic production.

The I am is an affect, but passively, rather than actively synthesized, and is characterized intensively: Kant himself says that ‘consciousness itself always has a degree, which ...allows of diminution’[204], so putting the problem on an intensive register. Deleuze focuses on the relation of the degree of intensity to pure empty time, rather than to inner sense, the formal appropriation of time into the subject. That is, he does not theorize it in relation to modes of time which are analogous to conceptual relations. Set into variation through the deduction of the I think, the recognized principle of thought, the I am becomes a problem of becoming, in formation but never a form, because there is a continuous modulation of intensities through time and a continuous transformation in the quantitative degree which composes consciousness. This move is immediately of interest in relation to the question of womens’ location in philosophy, since the passive/active and receptive/spontaneous axes have been amongst those used to articulate their difference from men, women being attributed with the first arm of each of the two disjunctions. Women are also associated with imagination in Kant. Deleuze’s shift of synthesis from an active mode of production to a passive producing process, and from understanding as agent of unity to imagination as synthetizing continuous flows is implicated with the philosophical positioning of women.[205] But a fuller discussion of this follows in the next two chapters; this remark is merely to begin weaving women into the discussion -to create an undertow, as it were.

The relation of passive synthesis to the distinction in Kant between productive or figurative synthesis and the intellectual synthesis which subordinates the former to unity is not one of opposition, and nor does passive synthesis correlate directly with the synthesis of imagination. Firstly, passive synthesis describes a transverse line across the oppositional axis, so is not directly associable with Kant’s active/passive distinction. As has been said before, Deleuze’s subtractive method does not remove through exclusion, but is instead a positive privation which removes the belts and blockages of limitation and negation.

In Kant’s table of the concepts of nothing, the negation of reality results in ‘a concept of the absence of an object, such as shadow, cold (nihil privativum)’[206], a trace of what was real remaining as a negative imprint. Deleuze’s use of privation is positive, and rather than leaving a shadow of what has been removed, brings to the surface what was covered over by the concept. ‘Soustraire et mettre en variation, retrancher et mettre en variation, c’est une seule et même opération (subtract and place in variation, remove and place in variation: a single operation).’[207] Subtraction effects the release of variations which do not fall onto either side of the disjunction, but include both as potentials, not in the form of binaries, but as elements of a multiplicity which cannot be scored down the middle, or reduced to the sum of its parts. Rather than the removal of a quality of reality - an intensive magnitude - leaving the shadow of itself, it opens up the quality of distributions which the axiomatization of quantities suppressed. The deduction of activity from synthesis does not therefore leave the problem of passive synthesis in a Kantian register, but opens a space for the re-formulation of passivity stripped of psychological overtones and cultural constructions of women as the “passive (= weaker) sex.”

It is not that there is a movement between active and passive which cannot be exposed, an undecidable median which is neither simply one or the other, and which distributes this difference but is not determined by it. What effects a division in a multiplicity does not straddle a distance between divided states nor make a clean break. In Dialogues, Deleuze writes:

The border or gorge does not institute a relation between intensity and extensity, or active and passive syntheses; to formulate it thus turns the transversal line into a diagonal which can be plotted on a plane graph. Intensity becomes subordinated to the qualities filling extensity - force becomes relative to distance, for example, or pressure to volume. The multiplicity, or in-between, or frontier, however, neither distributes dualisms, nor reduces to them, because it is effected by asymmetrical and differential conjunctions which, by including both arms of a disjunction construct an assemblage which is not commensurate with the conditions of its production, but escapes them, giving relations another direction.[209] A very simple illustration might be that of transsexuals: whilst the desire professed by a man might be to become a woman, or by a woman to become a man, becoming-transsexual does not result in a simple switch - this is an extensive appearance, effected by surgery - but the inclusion of both terms, and the creation of a new sex contained by neither.[210] What appears are n-sexes, not two sexes; n-qualities, distributed not as the result of the qualification or axiomatization of quanta necessitated by the attachment of production to identity, but through the connections and relations into which a body enters, and of which it is assembled.

This is the logic of empiricism, and of rhizomatics, the principle of which has been quoted in relation to deduction in chapter two: subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted. Deduction works at the level of principles; it is not merely a matter of taking a bit off, as if one were removing part of an argument which did not contribute to the proof. Every qualification of force resulting from unity and the monopolization of power by substance removed shifts the nature of the problem: each movement changes space, each change in space effects the direction and speed of movement. Evacuation of the principles which structure transcendental matter, or intensities, according to unity, and of the principles which regulate the stability, purity and upkeep of unity, shifts Deleuze’s logic away from one of being, and the ‘subordination des conjonctions au verbe être (subordination of conjunctions to the verb to be)’[211]. His operator is the AND,

Consciousness loses unitary sense and is no longer a priori but a posteriori, the real effect of a singularity already in action, but in a different form than that of its existence.[213] Transversality is not a diagonal on a co-ordinate system, but a movement which generates new co-ordinates and a different system. Synthesis becomes an additive function, rather than a relation with identity. Not, however, the addition of equal units, but the addition of difference. Where God is the master of disjunctive syllogism, unity is added to differential relations of empirical and heterogeneous sequences, and difference is articulated according to the either/or: either production is social or it is desiring - either it is public or it is private, familial, secret. The inclusive disjunction of machinic production affirms diversity and adds difference, adds value without siphoning off profit, breeding flows from flows, breaking and detaching elements and setting them into motion in other directions.

[185]. DP, 1977:13; 1987:7

‘Rencontrer, c’est trouver, c’est capturer, c’est voler, mais il n’y a pas de méthode pour trouver, rien qu’une longue préparation. Voler, c’est le contraire de plagier, de copier, d’imiter ou de faire comme. La capture est toujours une double-capture, le vol, un double-vol, et c’est cela qui fait, non pas quelque chose de mutuel, mais un bloc asymétrique, une évolution a-parallèle, des noces, toujours «hors» et «entre».

(To encounter is to find, to capture, to steal, but there is no method for finding other than a long preparation. Stealing is the opposite of plagiarizing, copying, imitating, or doing like. Capture is always a double-capture, theft a double-theft, and it is that which creates not something mutual, but an asymmetrical block, an a-parallel evolution, nuptials, always “outside” and “between”).’

[193]. ‘[A] machine has only motive force [bewegende Kraft]. But an organized being has within it formative force (bildende Kraft) that this being imparts to the kinds of matter that lack it (thereby organizing it). This force is therefore a formative force that propagates itself - a force that a mere ability to move (Bewegungsvermögen) (i.e., mechanism) cannot explain.’ (K,V:374)

Kant’s third Critique was influential not only on the naturphilosophische movement emerging around Jena, but, more broadly, helped to shape the theoretical foundations of nineteenth century German biology; Blumenbach, an anthropologist and comparative anatomist, provided empirical confirmation of problems on which Kant had been working, and Kant in turn influenced the course of Blumenbach’s own work.

In the third Critique Kant eliminates analogs for the formative force of natural bodies. To call organisms analogs of art is, for Kant, to suggest an external design agency, a rational power which can in principle be isolated from matter. Natural self-organization is implicated with a force which, whilst strictly unknown, is inseparable from matter and ‘preformed virtualiter in the intrinsic purposive predispositions imparted to the stock (Stamm).’ (K,V:423) Influenced by Blumenbach, Kant calls the force Bildungstrieb. Unlike mechanical or aesthetic relations, where the form of possibility is extrinsic to their sensible configuration, the reciprocal relations of force in a natural product are not formalized in advance of their dynamic distribution, and their qualities cannot be qualified and equalized in extension.

The direction in which this force develops, the nature of the material filling of space, is not determined mathematically, as is the space-filling force in mechanistic dynamics, but is, Kant argues, the function of a purpose - at least for the purposes of judgement. A natural purpose (Zweck) is an order manifest in a particular arrangement of the parts, from whose interrelation a result eventually emerges. Each part not only exists for the sake of every other part, but each part also stands in a mutually reciprocal productive relation to every other part.

Variations in the result can become hereditary, as mechanical feedback from the concrete situation of a body potentiates different aspects of the pattern of virtual preformation. However, the concept of intrinsic purposiveness requires that localized changes are conceived of as no more than the capacitation of ‘undeveloped original predispositions’ (K,V:420) in the virtual pattern. If this were not the case, the separation of mechanism and teleology would be compromised; if mechanical action were understood as a primary function in the material organization of the body, rather than simply a consequence of local selective pressures, or as Kant puts it, ‘a subordinate cause of intentional effects’ (K,V:414), then the door would be held open to suggestions of animism, to mystical internal forms, or the ‘alien principle (a soul)’ (K,V:375) as explanatory principles for the workings of a body which has been reduced back to mechanism.

The concept of a natural purpose holds teleology and mechanism, and the distribution of forces each implies, apart: understanding a maggot as a natural purpose gives no reason to ‘count on there being a mechanical way of producing it’ (K,V:412). But once a maggot is understood mechanistically, and disassembled through putrefaction, the idea of a purposive causality will not put the elements back together, and reproduce the same product. The forces of mechanism and teleology - gravity and Bildungstreib - are materially incompatible, non-communicating distributions.

When discussing the character of natural organization, Kant differentiates the causality implicated in it from that which determines mechanical relations. In the latter, causal connectivity is progressive, ‘constituting a descending series’ (K,V:372) of efficient causes; a cause conditions an effect and the necessity of the relation is enclosed within them, as between two points or states. When the will is implicated, dependency is both progressive and regressive, and any connection is both caused and effected. The general idea of reason covering the systematic and collective unity of this doubled causality is purpose. It is tempting to see a connection between Kant’s theory of self-organization and purposive causality and the immanent distribution and reverse causality referred to by Deleuze and Guattari. However, they emphasize that reverse causality is without finality, and equate teleology with good sense. Whilst Kant’s concept of teleology introduces the problem of self-organization, his solution is reconciled with the universality and necessity of mechanism, through the supersensible principle of convertibility; it is this collapse into unity which Deleuze and Guattari argue against, together with the exclusive disjunction which separates the zones of teleology and mechanism. In L’anti-oedipe they gloss the problem in the following terms: in both systems ‘the machine and desire...remain in an extrinsic relationship, either because desire appears as an effect determined by a system of mechanical causes, or because the machine is itself a system of means in terms of the aims of desire.’(DG,1972, 1980:284)

An additional incidental point is that Kant’s relation with Blumenbach illustrates his ongoing reference to empirical data.

[194].There are clearly arguments to be had concerning what Kant means by the content of a concept: if it is taken to mean partial concepts conjoined under one more general concept, the definition is purely logical. In this discussion, however, it is to be understood as the heterogeneous manifold of intuition (empirical and/or a priori) combined according to a rule of synthesis given by understanding. It thus involves references to matter and to time and space. A real definition of concepts involves ‘descending to the conditions of sensibility, and so to the form of appearances’ (K,III:A240-41/B300) which separates logical content from real content, and contributes to the objective validity of a pure concept.

[198].K,III:A78/B103

In the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in Refutation of Mendelssohn’s Proof of the Permanence of the Soul’ (K,III:B142), Kant argues against the possibility of proving a continuity of existence of a soul by any of the following means: negative arguments to the effect that since it cannot disappear or vanish, or be annihilated, it must be permanent; rational arguments seeking to prove the inexplicability of the I think based on a heterogeneous ground; logical arguments appealing to contradiction; materialist arguments based on the dynamical division of intensive quantities. His own case is based on a difference between intensive magnitudes of existence and the real. The real, ‘the supposed substance - the thing [das Ding]’, he argues ‘may be changed into nothing, not indeed by dissolution, but by gradual loss (remissio) of its powers, and so, if I may be permitted use of the term, by elanguescence.’(K,III:B414). However, the real is no less real for this remission of powers. This is important in relation to Deleuze’s argument against possibility, as a logical intervention which produces paralogisms by separating the real from what it can do. In Différence et Répetition, he writes: ‘Le virtuel ne s’opposé pas au réel, mais seulement à l’actual. Le virtuel possède une plein réalité, en tant que virtual (the virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual)’.(D,1968:269; 1994:208) (Also cf. Deleuze’s Bergsonism, where the relation of the virtual to memory is explored.)

Elanguescence, or the remission of intensities, is a relaxation or diminution in the the density of intensive magnitude, a difformation of qualities, and comes out of early work on the problem of calculus. In a brief discussion in Superpositions, Deleuze refers to attempts by physicists in the middle ages to theorize the multiplicity of types of qualitative variations in intensive forms, calling the geometry arising from this ‘une géometrie des vitesses et des intensités, des affects’(D, 1979:115); he mentions Nicholas Oresme (c.1323-1382), who investigated the latitude of forms. Boyer’s The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development, refers to the use of the word ‘form’ here in the following terms: ‘There seems to be no scientific term which correctly expresses the equivalent of the word form as here used. It refers in general to any quality which admits of variation and which involves the intuitive idea of intensity - that is, to such notions as velocity, acceleration, density...In general the latitude of a form was the degree to which the latter possessed a certain quality, and the discussion centred about the intensio and the remissio of the form, or the alterations by which this quality is acquired or lost.’(B, 1949:73) The connection with Deleuze’s theory of intensive magnitudes is quite clear: in Mille Plateaux, it is mentioned explicitly:

‘Nous distinguons: 1) les CsO, qui diffèrent comme des types, des genres, des attributs substantiels, par exemple le Froid du CsO drogué, le Dolorifère du CsO masochiste: chacun a son degré 0 comme principe de production (c’est la remissio); 2) ce qui se passe sur chaque type de CsO, c’est-à-dire les modes, les intensités produites, les ondes et vibrations qui passent (la latitudo); 3) l’ensemble éventuel de tous les CsO, le plan de consistance (l’Omnitudo, qu’on appelle parfois le CsO).

(We distinguish between: (1) BwO’s, which are different types, genuses, or substantial attributes. For example, the Cold of the drugged BwO, the Pain of the masochist BwO. Each has its degree 0 as its principle of production (remissio). (2) What happens on each type of BwO, in other words, the modes, the intensities that are produced, the waves that pass (latitudo). (3) The potential totality of all BwO’s, the plane of consistency (Omnitudo, sometimes called the BwO))’. (DG, 1980:195; 1988:159)

Other references include discussions of: intensive latitudes as ‘difformément difformes (deformedly deformed)’ - Oresme’s latitudo difformiter difformis, (DG, 1980:310; 1988:253); Spinoza’s question of what a body can do, where latitude is defined as ‘faite de parties intensives sous une capacité (made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity)’ (Ibid.314/256) - which draws connections between the Omnitudo or “allness” of the plane of consistency and Spinoza’s substance, central to Deleuze (and Guattari’s) work; Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, p35ff, where Omnitudo is associated with fractals and immanence.

[205].An essay by Irigaray focuses specifically on matters of fluidity. In This Sex Which is Not One, in The “Mechanics of Fluids” she points out ‘a complicity of long standing between rationality and a mechanics of solids alone’(I,1985E:107), which leaves unconsidered the specific dynamics of fluids, having various “tricks” with which to side-step the problems it generates for a mechanics of solids. The theoretical engagement with fluid dynamics has, she argues, detached them from the reality of bodies. Her argument crosses Deleuze (and Guattari) on several points, including the non-denumerability of fluid diffusions, on its greater sensitivity to pressure, on the infinite nearness of its elements, and on its instability. It must thus also have closenesses to Kant’s theory of intensities. Irigaray correlates the exclusion of fluidity with that of women: ‘what she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring.’(Ibid.112) Like fluidity, she argues, women lack definite identification, and are irreducible to the symmetry consecrated between the subject and its world in the theatre of representation.

There is also a connection between Irigaray’s questions regarding mathematical analyses of fluids and the problem of instantaneous velocity implied by the quantitative study of variation addressed in the theory of the latitude of forms (cf.Note 16). Irigaray argues that fluid currents are considered in relation to a privileged axis, a point, which leaves some remainder: ‘Up to infinite: the centre of these “movements” corresponding to zero supposes in them an infinite speed, which is physically unacceptable’.(Ibid.p109) Deleuze’s response to this is complex; very briefly, it involves the insistence that absolute or infinite speed proceeds by way of relative speeds; in other words, it is immanent to the creation of a plane of consistency, rather than transcendent, produced rather than discovered. Absolute speed is associated with nomos, or nomadic distributions; ‘seul le nomade a un mouvement absolu, c’est-à-dire une vitesse ; le mouvement tourbillonnaire ou tournant appartient essentiellement à sa machine de guerre (only nomads have absolute movement, in other words, speed; vortical or swirling movement is an essential feature of their war machine)’; a nomad is ‘dans un absolu local (in a local absolute)’. (DG, 1980:473-4; 1988:381-2)

[209]. The simplest example is that of convection. Take a cell of fluid which can be heated on the bottom and cooled from the top. The difference in temperature (an intensive quantity) controls the flow, heat being conducted towards the top of the cell; as the heat increases the fluid expands, becoming less dense, lighter, and the molecules move more rapidly, colliding as they push towards the surface. The system becomes chaotic. However, further increases in heat give rise to behaviour which is counter to assumptions possible from the point of view of the two constraints on the system, gravity and the second law of thermodynamics. A cylindrical role develops, heated fluid rising and cooling fluid falling in a continuous cycle, and the system displays a consistency and activity than either of the two constraints on the system, gravity and the second law of thermodynamics, would allow. cf. Massumi, A User’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, p58ff.

[210]. Sandy Stone notes the ultra-femininity of both pre- and post-operative male to female transsexuals. The imperative which defines them is that of passing: they must pass as women both in order to be considered suitable candidates for the medical procedure and to minimize the difficulty of settling into the socially defined ways of a woman once they have been physically reconfigured. In the ‘60’s, when these operations became economically and medically interesting, a single book outlined the criteria according to which suitability was determined. Strangely, all applicants fulfilled these criteria: they had the book too.

Stone’s point is that the fixation on medical procedures and defined psychological criteria, and the willingness of medical institutions and their clients to satisfy them, is socially produced along with binary sexual difference and neither have any necessary relevance to the processes implicated in the continual invention of a body, processes which the theft of a child’s body channel along a pre-determined course. Male? Fourteen? Time to be a social nuisance, smash a window, get a gun. Female? Forty? Time to go grey and wear sensible shoes. A molar body is fixed across a set of interconnected criteria whose most basic resolution is in terms of a sexual biology and a psychological and intellectual make-up which “fits” that sex and which has appropriate phenomena attached to it at any given age and in any given socio-economic bracket. Paul Broca, working in the second half of the nineteenth century, laboured hard to prove that brain size was correlated with intelligence. Since it was common knowledge that European males were more intelligent than women and other lesser human types, Broca’s task was to generate quantitative data which would confirm this a priori truth. To do so, ‘[h]e traversed the gap between fact and conclusion by what may be the usual route - predominantly in reverse’(G,1992:85). Broca wanted to fix a brain which would correlate with the body in which he found it, rather than research the brain as such, and Stone’s argument aims implicitly at thwarting this insistence on the permitted band of deviation dictated by the demand for unity, both historically and of the body. (Cuvier’s brain, - which ‘reflects a Euclidean space’(DG,1980:63; 1988:47) - was, incidentally, discovered by Broca to be the largest in France.)

When expressions of desire become incommensurate with the codes applied to the body, the gulf is corrected by providing the body with a new set of sexual characteristics, making the content fit the expression. That is, if psycho-analysis cannot cure this problem it produced first. The misfit of desire with the socially coded body is clearly associated with the sex/gender distinction: the proper alignment of gender, or social coding and sex, or biological coding, results in the organization of a whole system, a whole man or woman. The paucity of this distinction is made clear by Stone, who argues for bodies in continual invention, becomings, rather than the medical re-invention of the occasional body so that it might properly contain the psychological make-up analysis has exposed. She calls these post-transsexual because there are no longer gulfs and gaps and sexual lines to be crossed but n-sexes, bodies machined by desire. Not the institutionalized re-arrangement of an object so that it’s gender and it’s sex might once more meet, and the facts fit the advance conclusion.

Stone’s desire for post-transsexualism is caught up with discussions in Difference and Repetition and A Thousand Plateaus of Geoffroy St. Hilaire’s abstract Animal, because both refuse conditions extrinsic to the material processes through which bodies are formed as organs of a machinic assemblage, and repel the positions and places, images and instincts allotted to them, the fixation of desire on an object and the pre-occupation of bodies by imaginary values. Real engineering does not make objects, but assembles bits and pieces, partial-objects, transposable elements which, depending on their location and their movements transform the timing and control of development. The basic unit is the assemblage, a body composed through its own functioning, not organized from on high, and the human body is but a part of this, not its controller.

cf. Stone, S (S, 1991) ‘The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto’ in J. Epstein and K. Straub (ed) Body guards: the cultural politics of gender ambiguity (London: Routledge)