Flatline_Constructs 3.3 Samuel Butler and Surplus Value of Code

Grant: “Surplus value is not a motive but an autocatalytic, synthetic, enzymic alloproduct, hypercyclically mutating towards the next mutant cycle.”[220]

McLuhan: “As early as 1872, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon explored the curious ways in which machines were coming to resemble organisms not only in the way they obtained power by digestion of fuel but in their capacity to evolve ever new types of themselves with the help of the machine tenders. The organic character of the machines, he saw, was more than matched by the speed with which people who minded them were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviourism of the machine.”[221]

Perhaps a little overschematically, we could say that the chief difference between Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari consists in their relationship to the question of “decoding.” Almost uniquely in a theoretical culture shaped and guided by linguistic paradigms, Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari treat the dominating operating systems as running, not primarily on language, but on code. But it is the less melancholic – and not uncoincidentally more rigorously immanent - Deleuze-Guattari who follow the logic of code through to the point where it yields something other than banal reiteration of blind program. Where Baudrillard seems to yearn for a (cultural and semiotic) space transcendent of code – which he nevertheless grants it is impossible now to access – Deleuze-Guattari emphasise the way in which all code includes its own margin of decoding. Decoding is not so much a matter of translating – or understanding, comprehending - code, as dismantling it. “Let us recall that ‘decoding’ does not signify the state of a flow whose code is understood […] (deciphered, translatable, assimilable), but, in a more radical sense, the state of a flow that is no longer contained in […] its own code, that escapes its own code.” (TP 449) And when two – or more – codes come into contact strange, unheralded new assemblages can emerge: this is “surplus value of code” - “the phenomenon […] when a part of a machine captures within its own code a code fragment of another machine: the red clover and the bumble bee; or the orchid and the male wasp that it attracts and intercepts by carrying on its flower the image and odor of the female wasp.” (AO 285) [222]

In A Thousand Plateaus, the “aparallel evolution” of the wasp and the orchid provides a key example of what Deleuze-Guattari call a “rhizomatic” relationship. The rhizome, of course, is defined by contrast with arborescent, or root-based, systems. It is intrinsically multiple, heterogeneous and characterized by a principle of maximum connectivity (any part can connect with any other, and does). Arborescent structures, meanwhile, are dominated by a single central trunk from which everything in the system must pass before “branching off.” For our purposes here, it is important to emphasise the way in which rhizomatic systems tend to operate via a non-sequential temporality: cause does not simply follow effect, there are “co-causal” relations which move both backwards and forwards in time. A rhizome does not reproduce itself, after its own kind; it propagates, via unpredictable symbioses, not “sexed” pairings. Deleuze-Guattari make a point of distinguishing the wasp-orchid relation from models of imitation, which imply a unilinear causality. “It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata - a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on another. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not an imitation, but a capture of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.” (TP 10) Instead, they present the relationship between wasp and orchid as an example of co-caused reciprocal processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. “The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogenous elements, form a rhizome.” (TP 10)

Deleuze-Guattari introduce the concept of “surplus value of code” during a discussion of Samuel Butler’s important Erewhon at the beginning of the fourth section of Anti-Oedipus. Butler’s “Book of Machines” presents a discussion which goes right to the heart of the theme of this chapter – the question of machinic propagation. Butler’s essay is basically a work of Gothic Materialist theory-fiction whose topic is machinic replication. It anticipatively deals with the problem Wiener will later pose in God and Golem; to wit, of what type of reproduction are machines capable? At what point could – or can – machines be classified as an independent (un)life-form? Butler is emphatic. “Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically,” he claims, “we may say that it is a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if it not be a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants not die out if their fertilization was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose identity was entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after their kind with no thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures are part of our own reproductive system; then why not we part of that of the machines?”[223] What is at issue here is not Baudrillard and Benjamin’s “mechanical reproduction” – the mass reproduction of the same object by machines – but the reproduction – or propagation – of machines themselves. Although this is not necessarily a question of Wiener’s “machines making machines in their own image” either; since what needs to be accounted for is the heterogeneity of production, on at least two levels. Firstly, and most importantly, Butler’s “system of reproduction” – Gothic Materialism prefers the term “propagation” – is constituted from heterogeneous materials: in the case of the clover, it includes insect and plant life; in the case of machines, Butler crucially insists, it includes not different species, but a participation between the living (human beings) and the nonliving (machines).[224] The point is that what we would conventionally call nature already furnishes us with examples that make legitimate the description of the production of machines as a reproductive, rather than a simply productive matter; or rather, and as Deleuze-Guattari would ultimately prefer – contra Baudrillard[225] – reproduction needs to be considered as a species of production. In any case, and, in what is a fundamentally cybernetic insight, the heterogeneous nature of the elements in the human-machine interpollenation need not disqualify us from considering it a single system. Secondly, the heterogeneous quality of what appears at different stages of the process of reproduction should not be considered a reason to disqualify a system from being considered a system of reproduction. The “animalacules” from which we develop do not resemble us; with Wiener in mind, we are not made in their “image.” As Butler goes on to point out “the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines after their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery, but it was not made by, neither will it ever make, a thimble.” (211) Butler then alludes to “an abundance of analogies” in nature. “ ‘Very few creatures reproduce after their own kind; they reproduce something which has the potentiality of becoming that which their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly […]’ ” ( 211) It is this emphasis on heterogeneity that so delights Deleuze-Guattari who quote approvingly Butler’s description of a “complicated machine”: “ ‘We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or a society, each member of which was truly bred after its kind.’” (212, qtd AO 285)

What makes “The Book of Machines” anticipative of cyberpunk is, perhaps ironically, its (simulated) hostility to machines, and its fear of their unbridled spreading. Lacking the expansive confidence of traditional SF (which was enjoying its heyday at the time Butler was writing), “The Book of Machines” neither assumes that technical machines depend upon human beings for their development, nor that they will be “man’s” beneficient servants. Like the “Turing cops” in Gibson’s Neuromancer – the special police agency dedicated to keeping Artificial Intelligences in check – Butler’s writer assumes that machinic intelligence is not a theoretical possibility to be speculated upon, but an emergent threat that must be vigilantly stamped out. Butler’s “writer” characterises his fear in terms of a swarming that will ultimately bring about the end of the human dominance of the planet. “ ‘[W]hat I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which [the machines] are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time made so rapid a movement forward.” (203) Unlike Marx, Butler does not believe that the agency ascribed to machines is a false reification, a phemenological mystification of authentic human labour power, but that machines may indeed grow to possess what Wiener calls an “uncanny canniness”, a “diabolic” intelligence that will begin to surreptitiously – and not so surreptitiously - erode human power. “ ‘Some people may say that man’s moral influence will suffice to rule [the machines]; but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.’” (203) “The Book of Machines” emerges, then, as a kind of counter-blast to Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgement, in which the special status Kant accords to humanity – as the agent capable of consciousness, purposiveness and moral action – is radically put into question. In particular, Butler questions the conflation of consciousness with purposiveness. Referring to “‘kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers,’” Butler asks “ ‘Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely because it has no ears, or brains? If we say that it acts mechanically only, shall we not be forced to admit that sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are also mechanical?’” (200) What Butler discovers – some sixty years ahead of Wiener – is the cybernetic diagonal cutting across the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism: if everything can be explained mechanically, this entails less the triumph of mechanism as originally understood than the collapsing of the terms of the debate with vitalism. Butler comes close to Spinozism in apprehending a continuum – running into infinity – of conatal impulses, (non-metaphorical) “machines” which very in size from the infintesimally small to the very large. To account for agency, we do not have to make reference to any organic or vital at all, but to these machines sensitive to “disturbances of equilibrium.” What emerges – on the macro-level – as a purposive agent is – on the micro-level - only “a hive or a swarm of parasites” (205), an “ant heap” (206), that is nothing more than the complex agglomeration of a multiplicity of micro-machineries that operate on the most simple impulsive criteria. “‘Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and he knows how to get it […] If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only […] the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical, whether those things which we deem the most spiritual are anything other but disturbances of equilibrium in a finite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of?’ ” (201)

When Deleuze-Guattari reconstruct Butler’s arguments in Anti-Oedipus, they use “The Book of Machines” precisely as a way out of the impasse created by “the old polemic between vitalism and mechanism.” For Deleuze-Guattari, what needs to be accounted for in both vitalism and mechanism – but what both have tended to leave out – is the immanence of desire to all assemblages. Unlike Butler, both mechanism and vitalism leave desire in an “extrinsic” relationship, either to machines in the case of mechanism, or to organisms in the case of vitalism. “This is even the point around which the usual polemic between vitalism and mechanism revolves: the machine’s ability to account for the workings of the organism, but its fundamental inability to account for its formations.” (AO 284) The organism’s functioning, that is to say, can be described merely mechanically, but mechanism cannot account for its own production, just as the existence of machines is – supposedly – dependent upon the “vitalistic” role of human beings. For Deleuze-Guattari, what mechanism and vitalism both posit is a different kind of unity or reification: mechanism posits a “structural unity” of machines, whereas vitalism posits an “individual and specific unity of the living.” Neither account for the multiplicity of relations into which machines and “the living” enter, and from which they are constituted; and in each case, desire is construed as something “secondary and indirect.” The desire of human beings supposedly explains the existence of machines, but how are we to account for this desire? How is it produced? [226] (Kant’s claim that machines have merely motive force, and lack formative force – the ability to organize matter, which is supposedly a feature of “organized beings” alone – is a version of this argument.) By contrast, and as we have seen, Butler anticipates Deleuze-Guattari’s “machinic desire” by locating desire across a continuum of “levers” sensitive to “disturbances of equilibrium” rather than in any animate or quasi-animate region alone. Indeed, the basis for the distinction between animate and inanimate is radically put into question. “What is essential,” Deleuze-Guattari write, “is this double movement whereby Butler drives both arguments beyond their limits. He shatters the vitalist arguments by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling in question the structural unity of the machine. (AO 284/285) [227] Butler in fact shows that there is no hard and fast distinction to be made between anorganic matter and organisms. We do not even have to consider humanity’s increasing dependence upon machines, Butler urges, to see that the organic is inextricable from the inorganic. Consider, he says, the case of a hen’s egg. “ ‘Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the shell is the device for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same function; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside herself but it is not more of a machine than the egg-shell is.’” (199)

Thus “Man” becomes re-defined as “a machinate mammal.” (223) “The lower animals,” Butler writes, “keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man’s are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world.” (223) While this does, in some ways, anticipate McLuhan and Freud’s meta-organicism – the claim that technology is a simple “extension” of the human body we critiqued in the previous chapter – what is crucial, for Deleuze-Guattari, is the de-privileging of the specifically organic. If machines are – in Butler’s sense – “organs”, then organs are also machines. What matters is less the terms used – whether “organ” or “machine” – and more the perception of a single continuum populated by heterogeneous matters. “At the point of dispersion of the two arguments, it becomes immaterial whether one says that machines are organs, or organs, machines. The two machines are exact equivalents: man as a ‘vertebro-machinate mammal,’ or as an ‘aphidian parasite of machines.’ [...] Desire is not in the subject, but the machine in desire, with the residual subject off to the side, alongside the machine, around the entire periphery, a parasite of machines, an accessory of verbetro-machinate desire. In a word, the real difference is not between the living and the machine, vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the machine that are two states of the living as well. The machine taken in its structural unity, the living taken in its specific and even personal unity, are mass phenomena or molar aggregates; for this reason each points to the extrinsic existence of the other.” (AO 286)

What is important here is the delocalization of desire, and its fusion with a generalized production. Thinking desire and production together entails answering the question, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” with the answer: the circuit. The circuit’s looped temporality replaces the transcendent time of the Creator-Father. And the Anti-Oedipus attack on psychoanalysis’ temporal reductionism broadens out by the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia into an attack on monocausal frameworks of explanations in general, accounts of causality which we might call patrogenic, in which the future is assumed to be no more than the playing out of what has already happened in the past. Opposed to these seminal models of causality, Deleuze-Guattari invoke “reverse causalities that are without finality but which nonetheless testify to the action of the present on the past, for example the convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply an inversion of time.” (TP 431)

We might be reminded here of McLuhan’s many arguments against unilinear causality. For McLuhan, electrification - which “ended sequence by making things instant” (UM 12) – precisely brings about a need to “to invent nonlineal logics,” (UM 85) to give a new account of causal processes. [228] “With instant speed the cause of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.” (UM 12) Or, to put it in Wiener’s terms, it suddenly seemed that God was a golem’s idea for getting more golems.

This opens the way to McLuhan’s claim, in Understanding Media, that humanity is the “sex organs of the machine world.” McLuhan argues that, far from simply using technology as if they were its master, human beings enters into relations with technical machines that cause the human body to be altered (just as the human body produces changes in the machines). A feedback loop is in place, which McLuhan characterizes in terms of a trade, or pact. In exchange for greater “wealth”, humanity innovates new types of technical machine (thus faciliating machinic propagation). “Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely in providing him with wealth.” (UM 46) Neither man nor machine is in charge of the process; there is an operation of reciprocal extraction of surplus value of code that has its own trajectory, and which treats both human beings and technical apparatuses as non-autonomous components.

Seen from this perspective, a figure that has been central to the Gothic – the experimenter-technician or artificial father – think not only of Victor Frankenstein, but also of Rotwang in Metropolis, and more latterly Tyrell in Blade Runner – becomes decoded from being a transcendent-creator into becoming a part of the machinic process. In the case of Blade Runner, for Iain Hamilton Grant, “Tyrell is no more Batty’s father than Leon has a mother [...] Both emerge from the military-industrial matrix whose artist-god is Tyrell the ‘molecular cyberneticist’, as Monod says, of recombinant DNA.”[229] From the point of view of the replicants – as what Nick Land calls “Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction” [230] agents of “Cyberrevolution.” [231] – Tyrell is not a father, but a component, a machine-part of their unnatural replication process. They are not born, nor can they reproduce; if their unlives are produced by anything, it is by an agency no less inorganic than they: planetary capital as a distributed process. “But the god of biomechanics is dead, crushed in his offspring’s embrace; not an Oedipal parricide, but a demonic phylic revolt. The Tyrell corporation is the cybernetic matrix from which the replicants issue, in which Tyrell is only its orbital subject-component (personalised capital), a deterritorializing confluence within the machinic phylum.”[232] As opposed to Freudo-Oedipalized patrogenesis, this is a matter of what Octavia Butler calls xenogenesis[233]: alien, replicative propagation rather than familial (or filial) reproduction.

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^[218] “Meltdown”, (no page refs)

^[219]Mark Downham, “Cyberpunk”, 41

^[220] Iain Hamilton Grant, “Burning AutopoiOedipus”, Abstract Culture 10, Summer 1997, 14

^[221] McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, 99

²²²

^[223]Samuel Butler, Erewhon, Harmondworth: Penguin, 1985, 210

^[224] It is of course the case now – if not in Butler’s time – that human reproduction – as Baudrillard urges in his commentary on the Second Order Simulacrum – is becoming almost as dependent on machines as machinic reproduction is dependent upon humans.

^[225] Now is not the time, or place, to go into the Deleuze-Guattari debate with Baudrillard on “desiring-production.” Suffice to say that the author of The Mirror of Production – who also mischievously – threatened to write The Mirror of Desire – finds neither term congenial.

^[226]This is by contrast with the Baudrillard of The Transparency of Evil, who uses familiar vitalist objections to dismiss the concept of artificial intelligence. The novelty of Baudrillard’s argument is that it focuses on the supposed failure of AIs to be artificial (rather than on their inability to achieve intelligent thought): “Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice.” (TE 52) “Artifice is the power of illusion. These machines have the artlessness of pure calculation, and the games they offer are based solely on commutations and combinations.” And “artifice is in no way concerned with what generates, merely with what alters, reality” (TE 52). The rest amounts to exactly the kind of argument which Deleuze-Guattari attack in Anti-Oedipus. Machines have no desire (or pleasure), he claims. There is certainly no question of any “excess” (Deleuze-Guattari surplus value of code), only a dreary – and inexorable – augmentation of operative function. “There are prostheses that can work better than humans, ‘think’ or move around better than humans (or in place of humans), but there is no such thing, from the point of view of technology or in terms of the human media, as a replacement for human pleasure, or for the pleasure of being human. For that to exist, machines would have to have an idea of man, have to be able to invent man – but inasmuch as man has already invented them, it is too late for that. That is why man can always be more than he is, whereas machines can never be more than they are. Even the most intelligent machines are just what they are – except, perhaps, when accidents or failures occur, events which might conceivably be attributed to some obscure desire on the part of the machine. Nor do machines manifest that ironical surplus or excess functioning which contributes the pleasure, or suffering, thanks to which human beings transcend their determinations – and thus come closer to their raison d’etre. Alas for the machine, it can never transcend its own operation – which, perhaps, explains the profound melancholy of the computer.” (TE 53)

^[227] We have already considered Butler’s arguments as to why the claim “it is said that machines do not reproduce themselves, or that they only reproduce themselves through the intermediary of man [...]” is invalid (AO 285).

^[228] McLuhan uses arguments from Hume to show what he thinks of as the illegitimacy of standard accounts of causality. “In Western literate society it is still plausible and acceptable to say that something ‘follows’ from something, as if there were some cause at work that makes such a sequence. It was David Hume who, in the eighteenth century, demonstrated that there is no causality indicated in any sequence, natural or logical. The sequential is merely additive, not causative [...] Today in the electric age we feel as free to invent nonlineal logics as we do to make non-Euclidean geometries. Even the assembly line, as the method of analytic sequence for mechanizing every kind of making and production, is nowadays yielding to new forms.” (UM 8)

^[229] Grant, “LA 2019”, (no page refs)

^[230] Land, “Machinic Desire” ,171

^[231]Land, “Machinic Desire” , 171

^[232] Iain Hamilton Grant, “Burning AutopoiOedipus”, Abstract Culture 10, Summer 1997, 10-11

^[233] The term serves as the overall title for her trilogy, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, London: Gollancz