<<TRANSMATHOME

II          Passive

Deleuze fuses the problem of consciousness defined as a degree of intensity, and thus as a multiplicity, or assemblage, with the real which forces thought, the imperceptible and contingent cycles of the sufficient reason of sense. He does not focus on either the I think or the I am, however, but on the ‘position passive (ce que Kant appelle la réceptivité d’intuition (passive position [what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition])’ which is implicated with the pure form of time, a nonformal intuition, and with the passive syntheses of perception and individuation.[214] This is the vector of passivity which does not resolve back into the system of binaries, but brings the underlying differences on which it is founded to the surface, so introducing variations which cannot be comprehended in biunivocal relations.

‘Une faille ou une fêlure dans le Je, une passivité dans le moi, voilà ce que signifie le temps; et la corrélation du moi passif et du Je fêlé constitue la découverte du transcendental ou l’élément de la révolution copernicienne.

(Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution)'.(Ibid.)

Deleuze does not find a self in Kant’s Deduction: it is this, he argues, that betrays the death of God signified by the pure form of time, as condition of a finite empirical animal. Starting from a passionate and receptive self, a “me”, rather than an “I”, which is always an effect not an origin, a peripheral residue rather than a source, and defined in terms of affects, as a substantial multiplicity  replete with faculties, not as functions of common sense but of multiplicities it plugs into, Deleuze then asks: what are the real conditions of its production?  One no longer starts from one, but from zero, the pure and empty form of time.

The problem becomes one of the difference of thresholds and limits and the passive becomes a transient limit, a skin immanent to a  threshold, rather than an existence contained within an I think, or a border distinguishing an inside from an outside. Mobile and ambulatory, the passive “me” is a variable affect, and rather than being located behind the eyes, travels a body, changing its qualities as it engages different connections and  transforms functions, each movement of different order, of different relations, different syntheses and times; every change in degree is a change in quality. If the passive has an apparent objective constancy or identity, this is a function of its empirical circumstances, of the social orders and codes which define it, rather than of the real conditions of its production; it is always corporeal, corporealizing, a thought of sense not of understanding or reason. Constants are temporary and mobile, rather than fixing parameters; relations are explosive and escapist, rather than placid and imprisoned.

The passive is a crack which transmits only itself, and transmission is not more or less than this crack: the cracked or fractured subject is its negative inversion, its dead consequence, an old transmission from Kant.[215] Rather than the crack being encased between the I and its other, it is infiltrated by Ideas, abstract material problems ‘émergent constamment sur les bords de cette fêlure, sortant et rentrant sans cesse, se composant de mille manières diverses (constantly emerging on its edges, ceaseless coming out and going back, being composed in a thousand different manners’, which do not form a unified totality, but inform the process of individuation which constitutes a self, not as a subject, but as a mobile affect.[216] However, the passive is not to be mistaken for a subject nor the self mistaken for a body; a body is teeming assemblage of larval selves, bacterial, chemical, electrical, social, sexual affects composing a surface; Deleuze’s argument against the image of thought is that it inscribes an image on that surface, and so precludes exploration of the complexities of the interactions amongst all these different orders of selves. Unlike the subject, the assemblage does not say “mine”: the possibility of possession is bound up with identity, with law, with the deduction of right and to say “mine” presupposes I own myself as an object, contain another. The passive without possession is composed of affects, is a crowd, a population, units of production, larvae, intensive degrees of imagination at a positive distance from the zero of the pure form of time.

Saying “mine”, and expressing possession of a space, is an effect of the illegitimate or paralogical use of the third machinic synthesis, conjunction. This has already been referred to in its legitimate formulation, as the AND logics of empiricism. In its paralogical employment, the actual dynamics of the commercium, the infinite proximities of the elements of repulsive force filling space, are contained within the boundaries of a subject, and conceptualized independently of  real interaction. So the subject becomes prior to the lived state, and possesses its body as an object, owning its behaviour, rather than being a peripheral effect of the mobile affects which cross its surface.  An assemblage of larval and swarming selves becomes totalized under the name of the agent, as the principle of its definition, in relation to which the dynamics of intensive space become passive; not in the sense of passive synthesis as the blind generation of real affects, but as inert in relation to the spontaneity of the acting subject.

Kant refers to this difference in the third Analogy,  noting that a local spatial community has for its real condition the dynamic commercium  of  real interactions, which are co-existing and co-ordinated, but not according to any extrinsic rule. However, he turns this relation inside out, by making an ideal community the condition of the possibility of knowledge of the commercium, so  situating the subject outside, in an elevated position; the subject does not then co-exist with the dynamic space, as a continuously mobile variant, but becomes the principle of its  subordination to unity. Whilst the first synthesis, connection, is indicative of the escape of abstract flows  which have neither code or territory, and which effect the deterritorialization of space and the decoding of flows, conjunction in its illegitimate formulation

‘indique...leur arrêt relatif, comme un point d’accumulation qui bouche ou colmate maintenant les lignes de fuite, opère une reterritorialisation générale, et fait passer les flux soul la dominance de l’un d’eux capable de les surcoder.

(indicates their relative stoppage, like a point of accumulation that plugs or seal the lines of flight, performs a general reterritorialization, and brings the flows under the dominance of a single flow capable of overcoding them)’.[217]

It is in the context of the relation of connection and conjunction that Deleuze and Guattari come closest to admitting to history: they distinguish between a history which takes for its elements classes and segments, and follows the major line overcoding the vectors of escape and a microhistory which traces masses and flows - a history of populations and packs, flows of money, of sperm, of blood, milk, rivers, bodies; history as market, rather than as capital. The former, macrohistory, attaches to the conjunction specific to subject as agent of synthesis: it is the acts of men which constitute this history, allowing for the claim of this illegitimate use of conjunction - ‘c’est donc moi, le roi! c’est donc à moi, que revient le royaume! (so I am the king! So the kingdom belongs to me)’.[218] The subject becomes the single flow overcoding all flows, the consumer of time and of history from which both appear to emanate.

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