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FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION |
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3. XEROX AND XENOGENESIS: MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION AND GOTHIC PROPAGATION |
3.1 Let
Me Tell You About My Mother 3.3 Samuel
Butler and Surplus Value of Code 3.4 Nuptials Against
Nature: Sorcery and Propagation 3.5 The Wasp Factory: Neuromancer |
3.4 Nuptials against Nature: Sorcery
and Propagation
Deleuze-Guattari’s account of “propagation” comes during their discussion
of sorcery, towards the beginning of the “Becoming” plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze-Guattari’s
sorcery valorizes what the more security-inclined Wiener fears about “magic” –
it is precisely aimed at the production of unanticipated consequences. Indeed,
sorcery as Deleuze-Guattari understand it could be defined as the engineering
of the unexpected and the unprecedented; the art of avoiding the probable.
That
is how we sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following
alogical consistencies or compatibilities. The reason is simple. It is because
no one, not even God, can say in advance whether a given multiplicity will or
will not cross over into another given multiplicity, or even if given
heterogeneous elements will enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or
cofunctioning, multiplicity susceptible to transformation. (TP 250)
The sorcerer is thus not a Promethean dominator, since they are no
more able than “God” to foresee the outcome of his dabblings; they are a
participant in experimental processes whose very goals are at issue in the
experiment; they are themselves a part of the “unnatural participations” they
are engineering. (TP 240)
The Deleuze-Guattari discussion of sorcery fundamentally concerns
the question of “becoming-animal”,
although, as Deleuze-Guattari hasten to add, sorcerous practice is by no means
limited to the production of such becomings; “[e]xclusive importance should not
be attached to becoming-animal.” (TP 248) Indeed, closely related to becoming-animal
– ultimately inextricable from it – is the theme of the pact or alliance with
the demon (a properly Gothic Materialist theme, to be unraveled at more length
in the final chapter). As they subsequently state, “becoming animal is an
affair of sorcery” because “it implies an initial relation of alliance with a
demon” and “the demon functions as the borderline of an animal pack, into which
the human being passes or in which his or her becoming takes place, by
contagion.” (TP 247) Gothic Materialism’s interest is less in becoming-animal per se[234] than in the abstract processes which
Deleuze-Guattari’s becoming-animal plays out: processes of swarming, teeming,
seething and spreading familiar from Horror fiction. In any case, as
Deleuze-Guattari point out in their commentary on the Gothic, in Nomad or
Gothic art “it is precisely because pure animality is expressed as inorganic,
or supraorganic that it can combine so well with abstraction.”[235]
Deleuze-Guattari proceed, in the three sections of “Memories of a Sorcerer”, by outlining a
series of – what they initially characterise as - “contradictory” – principles.
The first section of “Memories of a
Sorcerer” concerns the principle of “packs”; the second concerns the apparently
“opposite” principle of the “anomalous.” Yet Deleuze-Guattari insist that, in a
true account of “demonic Alliance”, (TP 248) the two principles are not only
reconcilable, but ultimately require each other.
To reconstruct this argument more slowly. (i) The pack. Packing is not to be thought of as an animal
“characteristic”, Deleuze-Guattari say: “we are not interested in
characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation,
occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion.” (TP 239) It is in the experience
of the abstract process of swarming
that becoming (which is always a becoming-multiple; or a
becoming-multiplicity – the theorization of becoming and that of multiplicity
fold into one another) is encountered. As Deleuze-Guattari write of Lovecraft’s
Randolph Carter, the self “‘reels’” as
the sense of subjectivity breaks down in the face of an experience of teeming
multiplicity that comes from both without – and within (although this “within”
clearly has nothing to do with any supposed psychological interiority). In
moments of becoming – and “[w]ho has not know the violence of these animal
sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant” (TP 240) –
the “inside” is reconfigured as a multiplicity, which immediately conjoins with
a multiplicity “outside”. “We do not become animal without a fascination for
the pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the
multiplicity that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling
within us?” (TP 239-240)
Deleuze-Guattari then introduce what, for our purposes here, is
the crucial issue: the question of a non- or anti-sexual mode of propagation.
The issue is introduced via a critique of Borges, whom they censure because his
Manual de zoologia fantasticaI, they
say, leaves out of account two issues which are of prime importance: “the
problems of the pack and the corresponding becoming-animal of the human being”
(TP 241) Borges, they argue ,“is interested only in characteristics […] whereas
sorcerers know that werewolves are bands, and vampires too, and that bands
transform themselves into one another.” (TP 241) A “characteristic”, then, is a
typologically-determinate fixed feature, a property presumably belonging to
“beings” rather than becomings. The concept of the “band”, by contrast,
necessarily involves both heterogeneity and transformation – and is therefore
essentially a matter of becoming. Deleuze-Guattari then pose the central
question:
But what exactly does this mean, the animal as band or pack? Does a
band not imply a filiation, bringing us back to the reproduction of given
characteristics? How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming
that is without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity without the
unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everyone knows it, but it is
discussed only in secret. (TP 241)
It would perhaps be most profitable to begin to answer this
question by elaborating what is at stake in the models Deleuze-Guattari are opposing.
Fundamentally, these are models of reproduction[236]. “Filiation” and heredity are models
which imply the passing on of
“characteristics”; like Wiener’s God, it is always a matter of entities
being reproduced, after their own kind, in the “image” of their ancestors. This
is pure arborescence: the capturing of becoming into a hierarchically
organized, pre-determined and punctual system. By contrast with Baudrillard,
who, as we have seen, thinks that sexual coupling guarantees “otherness”, for
Deleuze-Guattari the dualistic sexual machinery of bio-reproduction screens out
heterogeneity by minimizing diversity in favour of “small modifications across
generations.” (TP 242) Of course, perfect reproduction remains a speculative
fantasy; indeed “filiation” itself – the account of the emergence of a new
generation by reference to “descent” or “ancestry”- is entirely illusory: “all filiation is imaginary” (TP 238)
Deleuze-Guattari go so far as to say.
Filiation is to opposed to alliance (and can ultimately be
subsumed under it, if what Deleuze-Guattari say about filiation being imaginary
is to be taken at face value). Even if it is the means by which filiation seems
to happen, the family structure – which, Deleuze-Guattari say, is always
haunted by the threat of “demonic
Alliance” – is ultimately itself only a case of alliance (filiation presupposes
alliance, but not vice versa). Alliance, like Anti-Oedipus’ sense of
production[237], is lateral and multilinear rather than
unidirectional and unilinear; a matter of rhizomatics rather than arborescence.
Whereas filiation implies an apparently necessary
set of relations (the sexed couple, for instance), there are no pre-set
criteria governing what can enter into alliance. As opposed to the binary
machine of sexuate reproduction, in propagative alliance “there as many sexes
as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements contributing
to a process of contagion.” (TP 242) Once again, contagion entails – as one of
its fundamental presuppositions – a heterogeneity of elements. “The difference
is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are necessarily heterogeneous:
for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a
microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig.” (TP
242) In addition, alliance does not
assume a patrogenic causality: the elements which combine into alliance are not
pre-determined by descent: “These combinations are neither genetic nor
structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations.” (TP 242) However, the “unnatural” is not to be
opposed to the “natural”; quite the contrary, in fact. Deleuze-Guattari
apprehend Nature not as an ordered regularity operating according to pre-formed
laws, but as something continually overcoming itself; it operates as a swarming
of alliances rather than as a set of filiative regularities. In other words,
nature, according to Deleuze-Guattari, is first and foremost unnatural. “Unnatural participations or
nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.” (TP 241) Whereas
filiation demands well-ordered social groupings, alliance happens when the
social breaks down, and other types of collectivity can emerge. “Bands, human
or animal , proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields and
catastrophes.” (TP 241)
(ii) The Anomalous. The second principle of Deleuze-Guattari’s
“becoming-animal” concerns “the exceptional individual.” “[W]herever there is a
multiplicity, you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that
individual that an alliance must be made.” (TP 243) The exceptional individual is
in no way the Oedipalized, or personalized, animal, it is the “Anomalous.” The
“anomal (‘anomalous’), an adjective
that has fallen into disuse in French, is very different from that of anormal (‘abnormal’): a-normal, a Latin adjective lacking a
noun in French, refers to that which is outside the rules or which goes against
the rules, whereas an-omalie, a Greek
noun that has lost its adjective, designates the unequal, the coarse, the rough
the cutting edge of deterritorialization.” (TP 243-4). The abnormal correlates
to a set of “characteristics” – a set of law-like norms, which it transgresses
(and therefore, by a dialectical logic, confirms and continues) - whereas the
anomalous belongs essentially to multiplicity, since it refuses the very notion
of the norm as such. The anomalous is not a special case, it is “neither an
individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither familiar or
subjectified feelings, nor specific of significant characteristics” (TP 244).
Typically, Deleuze-Guattari describe the anomalous in terms derived from
Lovecraft’s Horror fiction. “Lovecraft applies the term ‘outsider’ to this
thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is
linear yet multiple, ‘teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an
infectious disease, this nameless horror.” (TP 243) Ultimately, the anomalous
is to be understood, Deleuze-Guattari insist, in terms of the “phenomenon of
bordering.” Every “pack has a borderline, and an anomalous position, […] such
that it is impossible to tell whether the anomalous is still in the band,
already outside the band, or at the shifting boundary of the band.” (TP 245) So
the two – apparently contradictory -
principles of the pack and the exceptional individual resolve
themselves: the “exceptional individual” constitutes the “borderline” which is
a feature of every pack; the “borderline” presupposes a pack it borders, and
vice versa.
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Section 3.5 The Wasp Factory: Neuromancer >>
[234] It does not, though, support Iain Hamilton Grant’s rabid assault on becoming-animal as unleashed in his “At the Mountains of Madness”. Whilst concurring with Grant’s attack on “vitalism” (See Chapter 1 and Chapter 5), Gothic Materialism cannot agree that the simple inclusion of animal components in an assemblage constitutes a reterritorialization. Grant’s exclusive emphasis on technical machines, rather, could be said to constitute a “thanotropic” technical-machinic silicate-chauvinism which reinforces, rather than dissolves, the artificial-natural/mechanical-vital dichotomies which Grant, as much, presumably, as Deleuze-Guattari, is committed to dismantling.
[235]
A point of connection with Haraway’s cyborg, one of whose defining
characteristics is “the leaky distinction […] between animal-human and
machine.” (Simians, Cyborgs and Women,
152)
[236] Needless to say, these are not the “systems of reproduction” to which Butler refers. Indeed, it would be better to refer to Butler’s systems of reproduction, as we argued above, as systems of propagation, precisely because they necessarily involve heterogeneous elements.
[237]
It is worth qualifying the term production here, since, intriguingly, when
Deleuze-Guattari say what becoming is not
– in the section of A Thousand
Plateaus directly preceding the first “Memories of a Sorcerer”, they
include “produce” as one of the terms from which it is to be distinguished.
This might suggest a different emphasis on the role of production in the latter
text (which is certainly written much more explicitly under the sign of
becoming).