<<TRANSMATHOME

III          Continuity

‘Voilà ce que sont les machines désirantes: machines formatives, dont les ratés mêmes sont fonctionnels, et dont le fonctionnement est indiscernable de la formation; machines chronogènes confondues ave leur propre montage.

(Desiring-machines are the following: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from their formation; chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly)’.[254]

The continuity of the process of desiring-production is an immanent cycle of production, distribution and consumption, three syntheses which produce a model of death, a body without organs[255]. Everyone has one, everyone is one and makes one, Deleuze and Guattari write in Mille Plateaux; death does not lodge with God any more, everyone has death, is death, makes death, continuously evacuating the infinite into finitude, making a local absolute, an atheistic infinite. If this process is traced back to the sublime, and the discussion of the war machine, it can be seen that  it is precisely this that Kant could not allow. Because he named his ideas, giving death images which of necessity could not be realized, it necessarily remained contained within reason, an infinite virile secrecy which could not be evacuated; the Kantian system disallows the possibility of exporting chaos, and thus of differentiating its order, its levels, its patterns and its functionings.

The model of death is converted by desiring-machines, or machinic assemblages into an experience of death, conversion being a synthetic cycle,  the production of production or bloc of becoming through which the model moves up from the depths of a body to its surface, simultaneously making and finding a door, and exteriorizing the interiority of a body, breaking down its orders and thus beginning once again from a different order, repeating infinity according to an infinite pattern of variation. This is not a reference to Death: exportation of the model of death into the experience of death does not mean that “one dies” - though it can mean that: nor is it a matter of an authentic death, the ownmost death of one’s self.  It is only by breaking-down the model of death, evicting the interiority of the body that a body functions: breaking-down is the functioning of desiring-machines, a million little demises constructing the operations of a body.

In a thermodynamic model of this process, breaking-down would consist in an increasingly homogeneous field, where differences are reduced into unity, as the end of the possibility of labour, of the conversion of heat into work. This is not the model to which L’anti-oedipe appeals, however. In Mille Plateaux and Logique du Sens Deleuze (and Guattari) refer to the emission of singularities, bursting like spores from a pod: this is the movement outwards of a model of interiority, an export process which conditions the functioning of a body, beginning always from the zero intensity of the model as principle of production, but rather than merely exhausting the model, as if it constituted a finite resource, the experience returns to the model, as difference, and the circuit repeats, but beginning from somewhere else, with a different model. Death and life become mutually immanent and a body  is transalivedead, always in the middle, a conjunction which destroys the exclusivity of the two terms, together with an understanding of finitude as a limit, beyond which is the infinite.

If the cliché “death of the subject” means anything, it is this: the subject is a model continuously exported from the body, the experience of a solution to the problem of death, not as a sudden afflux of power, an exorbitant expenditure, but a continuously leaky process, a smooth plane of consistency rather than a pipe and an outflow into the kingdom of ends. The subject is the residue, rather than the source of this process, however, the creature which turns back and reflects on the circuit, identifies, recognizes, catalogues. In effect, the subject is death, whilst the process is life, for the process is always in advance of the subject, a future potential, an attractor. Because the cycle repeats differently, however, and difference repeats differently on each cycle,  the subject , as the effect of this process, also appears differently; only if the attractor is zero-dimensional - the model of death as a black hole - does it appear to retain an identity, because it is then determined according to a single direction. What sense there is to the term subject becomes lost, however, when the only principle common to all selves is difference, and there is no model of unity - when the attractor is strange, chaotic, and thus unpredictable.

A body is a plane alive and teeming, populated with intensities, a substantial multiplicity, full of holes, not a determinate object. But Deleuze and Guattari advise caution:  it is better, they say, to remain stuck on a strata than to evacuate the model too fast, at the wrong time, without sobriety.

‘Liberez-le d’un geste trop violent, faites sauter les strates sans prudence, vous vous serez tué vous-même, enfoncé dans un trous noir, ou même entraîné dans un catastrophe, au lieu de tracer le plan.

(If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged towards catastrophe)’.[256]

If  the model becomes experience at speeds not practiced, if distances are covered at too much speed that they are not bearable by the finitude of a body, they exhaust its capacity at once, in a sudden movement. It is, they say, a matter of the careful disarticulation of an organization, rather than a wild and mad leap into an unknown. The problem is not how to make the movement, but rather how to continue it, to describe a smooth plane. This caution is evident in Deleuze’s philosohy: by understanding how a philosopher works, how to mimic him (they are always him), and  by being meticulously and rigorously involved in his operations, he succeeds in freeing what is blocked up within them, bringing their depths up to the surface.

The Freudian colouring of this movement is evident: the circuitous routes taken by the organism towards death are, Freud says, misunderstood if characterized as self-preservative. Instead, their function is to ensure that ‘any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself’ are warded off.[257] For Freud, however, the organism seeks to return to an earlier stage, the inorganic. The inorganic serves as a model of death retained internally to the body, which in turn dictates an organic body be understood as a container, a box for the model, and what the organism seeks is to perfect a copy of this model. The route each organism takes is individual to it, but the principle governing the route is universal.  

The movement from depth to surface is also evident in Kant; reason is the experience of death exported from a model of nature as massive, immense, conflictual, and of chaos as overwhelming through might. But the afflux is resolved in one model composed of inter-connected non-conflictual elements - the doctrine of faculties that constitutes the real transcendental method - which contribute to one end, that of the systematic unity of reason.

There is mechanism, or more generally, extensively empty and interiorized space, logical common sense: aesthetics, or more generally, harmonic reflection on the form of an object, resulting in a concept of an aesthetic common sense shared amongst men, which serves as the basis of other forms of common sense; teleology, or more generally, the reflection of nature as objectively and systematically purposive and of the body as an organism, nature’s good sense; and, as the instigator of their contributions being directed towards a  systematic unity, or kingdom of ends, reason - more generally, a juridical system based on the exclusion of intensities, which proposes a theory of desire as production of an object according to a model represented in advance by the law. Once it is established, the return of experience to the model as an intensive quantity which effects a transformation in its functioning is precluded. As Kant says, the model is produced out of the depths of reason, and by reason, and the completeness of this production leaves ‘no task to our successors save that of adapting it in a didactic manner’.[258]

***

The Kantian transcendental functions as a splitting device, which separates the problem of experience into two elements, the model which conditions it and the real content which materializes those conditions - the effect of this on sensation has been remarked above, its division into objective and subjective elements disallowing any reciprocal communication between the empty form of time and the intensive magnitudes of sensation. The model expresses its content, but both expression and content are themselves divided into form and substance, allowing for two different understandings of difference. But because of the master of exclusive disjunction, which is the principle of division between content and expression, the two arms of difference do not communicate. Reason is borne from chaos once only and then communications are cut, and reason constructs its own order, according to its own principles.

Kant writes:

‘the causality of an alteration in general, presupposing, as it does, empirical principles, lies altogether outside the limits of a transcendental philosophy’.[259]

For Kant, there is no real interaction of the heterogeneous and diverse distributions of experience and the homogeneous and unified divisions of the transcendental; the potential of experience is limited within the terms of the model, which, as an earlier chapter has shown, has for its ground an inert and permanent substance. And the model of death is contained within reason, by its monopoly over the legitimate application of pain.

Although for Kant, transcendental philosophy cannot answer some questions, such as that of the causality of alteration, or the particularity of its contents, it is founded on the elimination of the possibility of de facto evidence collapsing the structural order it imposes on the empirical, so whilst it cannot explain the particular, it can reduce the relations into which it enters to formally legitimated functions of the understanding. Kant knows about the doors; he just thinks they open on to known routes, or that passage through them is regulated. A substantial unity, ultimate subject of existence and ground of activity, whose genesis is not comprehended by the transcendental, but presupposed by it, defines the empirical subject within a limited intensive range, and this model of death does not rise.

The continuity of the process of desiring-production and the continuous exportation of the model of death constitute a response to this universe, and to Kant. Intensities are implemented as  intrinsic genetic elements of the real, differentiated immanently and asymmetrically, rather than split according to principles of either/or: either phenomena or noumena, either empirical or transcendental, either man or nature, either reason or death. L’anti-oedipe removes the problem of critique from the court-house and transcendental analysis becomes the problem of determining the criteria for escape, for production of a line of flight of the smallest interval and the sequencing of connections which do not return to the conditions of their origin. Nature is no longer massive but molecular.

‘Elles [machines désirantes] fonctionnent suivant des régimes de synthèses qui n’ont pas d’équivalent dans les grands ensembles (desiring-machines work according to régimes of syntheses that have no equivalent in the large aggregate’[260]; the relations into which they enter are not between objects, but connect partial objects, the elements of which desiring-machines are composed. Not as parts which go to make a whole, since desiring-machines are also partial objects, the elements of another machine. ‘Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is itself likewise a similar garden or pond’.[261]

There are no simples, or ultimate elements, only a nested system of involuting differences: partial objects are desiring-machines are BwO’s are partial objects. The most quoted example Deleuze and Guattari give of the relation of partial objects is that of the wasp and orchid: the wasp is a liberated element of the orchid’s reproductive system, whilst the orchid ‘devient l’objet d’un orgasme de la guêpe elle-même libérée de sa propre reproduction (becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction)’.[262] The connection is not a link between the wasp and the orchid, but a conjugation of the two asymmetrical relations effecting a line of flight, a relation not confined by its terms, a bloc of becoming.

The model of the transcendental is not evacuated in a single output, but through an infinitely diffuse repulsion, the tiny intervals or demons leaps of the actual continuum, from the depths of a body, which is individuated or corporealized through that process but does not pre-exist it, in either principle or fact. A body does not exist as an individual, but as a series of variable affects, effected by the connections into which it enters, as a process, or bloc of becoming. To define a body is thus to discover what machines it  plugs into, rather than, in the Kantian manner, as a product in isolation of its environment. ‘Un corps ne se réduit pas à un organisme (a body is not reducible to an organism’.[263] And in the absence of the organism, there is no soul, no house for the person.

Subtracting the unique from Kant’s theory of forces, Deleuze and Guattari set about the construction of a machine in which form and formation and functioning are not separable. A body is not defined socially, or biologically, or mechanically, but as an individuated band of schizoid intensities, none of which function as structural elements, but which are continually evacuated and replaced, as part of the process of its formation. There is never The Schizo, only schizoid quanta, break-flows, connections, intersections and interactions, transmissions and transformations. Related to unity, the system breaks down in a way that is not produced by the system itself. As a positive distance from zero, absent of presupposition (which is of course, impossible; a completed critique is not possible), a body is only what it does.

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