Marcus Moure’s 1995 interview with J.G. Ballard  about his novel Rushing To Paradise  ​

​Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality, or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization, his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts among his influences the surrealist painters Dali, Magritte, and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom he considers to be one of the most important authors of the twentieth century.

Ballard first entered the literary world as a science fiction writer, a genre he soon exhausted and has not explored in years. His transition to the mainstream was not entirely smooth, however. His 1970 anthology, The Atrocity Exhibition, was deleted from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux catalogue soon after its U.S. publication because of short stories like “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy.” After reading his classic 1972 novel, Crash, an editor wryly commented, “The author is beyond psychiatric help.”

I found Mr. Ballard to be quite sane – piercingly so, in fact – as he talked to me recently from his home in Shepperton, a suburb of London. Ballard is the author of 16 novels, including Hello America, The Crystal World, Empire of the Sun, The Terminal Beach, The Unlimited Dream Company and The Disaster Area. His newest novel, Rushing to Paradise, was just published by Picador U.S.A.

MM: How do you see yourself as a writer and what do you think is your niche in the literary world?

JGB: I can’t speak for the United States, but I suppose some still refer to me as a science fiction writer. But since Empire of the Sun came out ten years ago, I think people have welcomed me to the mainstream. Although I’m not so sure I want to be embraced by the mainstream. I think I’m still what I always was, a kind of fringe writer. I think I’m an imaginative writer who began his career by writing science fiction, but I haven’t written any, really, for a very long time. I don’t even consider Crash to be a science fiction novel. I don’t know whether you’ve read it or not.

MM: Definitely. It seems to me that fantastically imaginative fiction tends to be lumped in with the whole science fiction genre.

​JGB: Exactly. If you look at twentieth century novels, you can see that there’s a sort of mainstream, or what I would call realistic or naturalistic fiction. And then there are the imaginative writers who often tend to be mavericks. You know Genet, Celine, Burroughs, and so on. And I like to think of myself as a maverick. I’m certainly not a literary man, and this is an important point. I’ve met a great number of writers, novelists rather, English ones in particular, whose stock of references – their sort of instant associations that come to mind when they create and all that – all tend to come from the world of literature. Mine do not.
I’m interested in science and medicine, the media landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not the world of literature.

MM: So you wouldn’t file your work of the past 15 or 20 years under science fiction?

JGB: No, not anymore. Some of my work was, there’s certainly no question about that. And I’m very proud that I was a science fiction writer. As I’ve often said, it’s the most authentic literature of the twentieth century. Sadly enough, most science fiction is being written by the wrong people nowadays. The constraints of a certain kind of commercial fiction have tended to formularize the field over the last 50 years.

MM: Speaking from my own experience, I think many people, especially as young readers, are drawn to the newness, inventiveness, even classic adventure elements of science fction, but eventually outgrow it. As you said, you find the repetition and formula simply bore you. Especially when you realise there’s so much more out there. Why limit yourself? Why be just a science fiction writer or reader?

JGB: I agree with you. That’s true. And that’s why I myself stopped writing. People within the science fiction world never regarded me as one of them in the first place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And sci-fiers to this day don’t regard me as one of them. I’m some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA.

MM: Your new novel deals with obsessive themes like fanaticism, radicalism and militant feminism, all within the frame of the extremist wing of the environmental movement. It’s not only eerily timely, it also strikes a raw nerve, especially in view of the healthy wave of anti-political correctness sweeping ouer the United States at the moment.

JGB: Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The great talent of the United States is to take things too far, so that you have these huge pendulum swings of sorts. Always correct and then reverse. And then correct and reverse again. Here in England, I would say the extremist fringe of the feminist movement is largely positive. I’ve got two daughters as well as a son, and they’ve benefited enormously from the feminist movement of the past 20 years. England is a very class-bound society, and women, until recently, were practically an inferior class. Most professions were closed to women 30 years ago, except teaching and publishing. Nowadays they’re all mostly open. So we do have a few extremists, but nothing compared to the U.S., where you really do have some very strange people.

MM: You said in a recent interview that “Everything should be done to encourage more sex and violence on television”.
​
JGB: Yes, I did say that. And I think it’s true. I mean, I live in the most censored nation in the Western world. There’s no question about that. Many people have said so. Film, TV videos, and art are more heavily censored here than anywhere in Western Europe or the U.S.
Censorship in England has a clear political role. It represents the fear of the established order that given any sort of imaginative freedom, or too much of it, the power structure will collapse. If people see sex and violence treated frankly, they may turn the same frank eye upon their own political situation. And start climbing up the base of the pyramid towards the apex. The people in real control sanitise the view of the world for us. Absolutely.

MM: In his book, The 99 Best Novels Since 1939, Anthony Burgess considers your novel The Unlimited Dream Company to be your most important work to date. Which do you consider your best?
​
JGB: My most original and probably best novel is Crash. This is probably where I pushed my imagination as far as it has gone. I’ve also got a soft spot for other books of mine, most notably The Atrocity Exhibition. The Atrocity Exhibition is practically incomprehensible to most readers, whereas Crash is directly intelligible. There’s no doubt at all about what the author’s getting on about.

MM: Can we talk about Empire of the Sun? That is, if it isn’t already an exhausted topic. What is your opinion of Steven Spielberg’s film version of your novel?
​
JGB: I was very impressed by it. I thought it was a fine film. In fact, trying to remain as neutral as possible, I think it’s a much better film than Schindler’s List because it’s more imagined than Schindler’s List. I think the film is a remarkable effort in many ways. He extracted a wonderful performance from the boy. He was very faithful to the spirit of the book. There are always problems when Hollywood tackles a war film because the conventions of the entertainment cinema can’t really cope with the horrors of war. Still, I think it was a remarkable film, and more and more people are beginning to realize it.

MM: Have you read anything recently thut impressed you favourably?
​
JGB: Well, I don’t read much fiction nowadays, to be honest. Writing the stuff all day means when I read I tend to read nonfiction. It feeds my imagination. I read a great deal, but I can’t really pick a landmark book offhand. Let’s see, well, I just finished The Moral Animal by Richard Wright, a study of neo-Darwinism. That was quite impressive. Actually the best novel I’ve read in a while is by that Danish writer Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. I thought it was a wonderful book. Far more than a mere thriller. In fact, it’s a pity that it had any thriller element to it at all. It was much more than that. It was quite remarkable on all sorts of levels. I hope it did well in the states. My girlfriend is reading his new one (Borderliners) now.

MM: What are you working on now?

JGB: I’m halfway through another novel untitled as of yet – another sort of cautionary tale. I’d rather not discuss it in detail thaugh.

MM: Any plans to come over to the States and promote Rushing to Paradise?
​
JGB: Oh, probably not, I’m too engrossed in the new book.

published on: www.spikemagazine.com

by Jasna Koteska

Most persistent readings of the works of Kafka identify Kafka as the author of intimism (Freud's nuclear family) nihilism (everything eventually comes down to the impossible out of the undefined and unfair Law) and pessimism. The study Kafka, humorist suggested that Kafka should be read as a humorist, at least for two reasons: 1) The Kafka distanced himself from the bitter mode that dominated interpretations of his work as pessimistic. Тhe most - entertainin parts of the biography for Kafka of Max Brod are dedicated to describing the humorous, clownish way in which Kafka had read parts of his novel Process to an audience of literary readings in the apartment of Brod in Prague, and the audience responded with "unstoppable laughter." 2) Reading Kafka as a comedian but not as a pessimist, paradoxically, has a long and more credible tradition.

​Since in 1934, on the tenth anniversary of the death of Kafka, Walter Benjamin in his study Kafka offers his work to be read in a humorous way. Deleuze and Guattari, following the advice of Benjamin in their study in 1975 'Kafka' talks about "a very joyous laughter" in Kafka, but note that this tip to read Kafka remains almost unnoticed by his critics. Finally, David Foster Wallace, in his text Laughing with Kafka in 1998 wrote about the complexities of humour in Kafka, claiming his humour has a "heroic normal" quality. The study Kafka, humorist of Koteska, testing the guidelines which provided by Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari and Wallace and trying to interpret the humor in Kafka through some of his most frequent themes: animalism, miniaturization, asceticism; but and: children, food, knife, machines; finally the portrait of Kafka for some of the most famous figures of his time (among other things, his comments of Charlie Chaplin and Benito Mussolini, who surprise the reader with unusual similarity in their descriptions).

​Future fulfils the dreams of the past. We see the example of Kafka - all life built courtroom, and the posthumously entered it. A few months ago, in October 2012, a court in Tel Aviv ruled that the literary legacy of Franz Kafka becomes the property of the National Library in Jerusalem. It was the final, cynical ending, of a long and painful journey of the grandiose author of the 20th century, who, all his life devoted to the study of airless space in the courtroom. How did Kafka end up exactly where хе placed most of his opus - in court?

As is known, Kafka published very little in his life. Since before death, he destroyed most of his works, and other manuscripts delivered to the friend Max Brod with a clear instruction: to destroy them after his death. Instead of fulfilling the covenant, Max Brod preserved the manuscripts and between 1925 and 1927, at first he published the novel Process, Castle and America, and in 1935 collected works of Kafka. When he moved to Palestine in 1939, Brod took with him the rest of the papers and there he kept until his death in 1968. After the death of Brod, the manuscripts inherits his secretary and mistress Esther Hoffe, who in 1988 on public auction sells the handwriting Process for two million dollars. Then it is already clear that Kafka is not only a cult author of modern civilisation but also lucrative commodities market. Esther died in 2007, and tens of the thousands of pages of manuscripts of Kafka, who inherited her two daughters, Eva and Ruth, deposited in private safes in banks in Tel Aviv and Zurich and in 2007 they have offered on  public auction and the price is established according to the simple equation: the texts of Kafka will have the same market value, and the cost per manuscript will be determined by the weight of the boxes. This means that the bidder that offers the most money per kilogramme manuscript, will become the new owner of Kafka! The absurd finish of the most brilliant contemporary descriptor of absurd is twofold. Five years ago on the market of goods was offered Kilogramme Kafka for the richest bidder, and at the same time in the battle for possession over Kafka soon include the state of Israel with a request Kafka to be treated as a legacy of the Jewish people. The problem of this solution worked out brilliantly Judith Butler in the text Who Owns Kafka? (2011). Butler, herself Jewish, in the text has questioned the legitimacy of the so-called law of return: to whom actually belongs the cultural heritage of the Jewish diaspora: to the state of Israel or the Diaspora? (Butler, 2011: 3-8) The fact that Kafka all his life stayed away from affiliation, made the right of belonging over posthumous Kafka  even more traore.

The dispute over the ownership of Kafka was conducted in front of the family court in Tel Aviv, in front of the only two institutions (family court), whose disclosure Kafka dedicate all his work. Except in Jerusalem for housing the legacy of Kafka between 2007 and 2012, has fought another institution - the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the same archive who in 1988  bought the manuscript Process of the auction house - Sotheby for three and a half million dollars. As a Czech Jew, Kafka  spoke a German and Czech language, but from his rich correspondence it is clear that in both languages did not feel comfortable, none of them was quite at home. Although  Hannah Arendt praises Kafka as the purest German stylist, and though the Kafka briefly lived in Berlin, Kafka clearly told that he is  not feel like part of Germanism  (at least not in socially, even in a cultural sense). On the other hand, although he was Cech according to territorially birth and he spoke the Czech language, Kafka did not feel either as a member of the Czech culture (Milena Jasenska in letters to Kafka often corrected his Czech language, just as his fiancée Felice Bauer corrected his German language), and nor quite feel that he belongs to the Jewish tradition. Although in 1911, Kafka once a week, went to the Yiddish theater, he read Kabbalah and discussed in his diaries, then readed Jewish magazines and went to the lectures on Zionism, still in his family Kafka rarely heard Yiddish and the language is treated as East and alienated, while the desire to move to Palestine, unlike Max Brod, who was active Zionists, in Kafka is more fantasy from the other  side of the experience than planned activity. And although for Hannah Arendt fact that the language of Kafka is completely cleansed of "stylistic junk" makes the clearest evidence of German, exactly that purity drives Max Brod, Kafka's work to declare for the most typical Jewish document.

Who, then, belongs Kafka? The entire work of Kafka is lament for not hosted in any of the three cultures (Jewish, German, Czech), and Deleuze and Guattari, rightly, of his brilliant study of Kafka, simply titled Kafka (1975) it gave the subtitle to a small literature ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1998: 5-155). Kafka is the author of fundamental alienation, and for the fundamental non-belonging, except eventually to the small (cultures, literature, identities). However, the knower of Kafka is doomed to dispute even with Deleuze and Guattari. Kafka thoroughly does not belong to any small cultures, languages, ideologies, because he just does not want to belong to any subclass of a human; he does not want to belong to any human, and even belongs to himself - his whole project is the idea of destroying biotic, human, even on the most - singular level. Although he was engaged, Kafka has never married. He never owned any personal property and he had not his own apartment. Finally, Kafka did not want to own even his own work, leaving the clear instruction to Max Brod to destroy all his manuscripts after his death.

​The project of Kafka refined attempt to kill the human circulation of commodities, goods, love, hatred, objects, meaning ... In this sense, belonging to "A minor literature", which spokes Deleuze and Guattari, is the existence of the minor literatures and cultures "defeated but proud" because Kafka had not had pathetic attitude to his place in culture ( "I'm overwhelmed, I'm small, but I am proud, I exist"). No. And not just because Kafka did not play on the miserable map of pride, but because in Kafka is the final question of existence. He thoroughly explores the idea of a last who will testify that no longer existence,  the last one witness that testify that existence no longer exists. To exist as the last, with the idea to leave a testimony of disruption in existence, to justify the non-existence - it is probably the essential message of the work of Kafka. If it's so, the logical question is: why, then, Kafka himself did not destroyed his own manuscripts, when he already was sure that he wanted his own works to  disappear with him? Is not it safe, if he really wanted he himself to light his work, making sure that none of him will remain after his death? Whether the transfer of the obligation to Max Brod no longer speak that Kafka least calculating with the possibility Max Brod to reject the application from the dead Kafka and therefore perverse to accomplish precisely his thoroughly desire: "I choose to celebrate me, but even after my death, to glorify me, but only as a commodity - it will be my final victory "? This question placed those who operating with the pragmatic logic that fame or success are factors of one's existence. It Kafka is still too little to understand the complexity of the project called K. For Kafka final gesture of destruction must pass to other (must pass to Max Brod) because only that passage guarantees the continuation of the absurd. The gesture of Kafka for delayed destruction of the manuscripts is the only logical outcome of his work.

Kafka is humorist of the absurd and his last testament to the destruction of meaning must pass to other because if Kafka himself burned his writings, he would close the circle of nonsense, while the work is always in the game to stay possibility absurd to transfer  as a minimal message, as  a minimal game. In that game, Kafka pledges all his work. And in this sense, the world really touched the absurdity of Kafka, when, turning his work into a commodity altercation in the front of the family court, really confirmed his masterful diagnosis: that civilisation will become only more movingly banal, and more pathologically dangerous that this culture, people and works only increasingly be replaced by items. Kafka ensures that beyond the existence, to the world will direct his own question: Do you not see that I had left my latest toy as evidence of not belonging, and you continue to gnaw who belongs that toy, remaining blind message from my gesture? Certainly, in the gesture of Kafka has a certain arrogance, but it is not the arrogance of the winner, it's the least arrogance of the defeated, the arrogance of the wise from the bottom. The gesture of Kafka is less humour of the director of the circus, and more humour of the clowns who have already pulled makeup.

Kafka is first great civilisation author who clearly states that man and works in the modern world have become objects, elements of nothingness, evidence of non-existence. According to the testimony of Janoah, Kafka said: "We are more object than a living being" (Kafka, 2011a: 128). As it progresses his diaries, so less Kafka himself describes the terms of a human being, less in terms of estranged or dead person, even less in terms of the animal (the decisions of the stories The Metamorphosis or The Burrow). Late Kafka has only one description of himself, he becomes a nice corpse to vultures towns, ham from the perfect supermarket. In the diary Kafka read his fantasy of "broad knife to butcher it quickly and with mechanical regularity cut into me by thin pieces (ham) flying" (Begley, 2008: 56), which Zelda Smith called it "a perfect piece Kafka ... Parma style, pezzi di Kafka "(Smith, 2008: 5).

Here is a brilliant prospect of the author, who, decades later, and in our historical time, really finished as kilogramme Kafka sold at auction Kilogramme Kafka for vultures of the city, which markets packed terms offered as food.

When we say that Kafka is humorist of the absurd, the question follows: Is it possible on the occasion of Kafka to talk about any humor? ​How can about the author of horrible terrifying meaninglessness, to attach any laughter?

Anyone who, like me, undertook to teach Kafka in universities' classrooms know that Kafka is almost impossible to teach. Kafka simply does not work in the classroom. And most charismatic lecturer, equipped with appropriate methodological arsenal, rarely manages to overcome the rejection by which students regularly respond to Kafka, the inability to transfer knowledge kilogramme Kafka on the "next generation." Kafka in my classroom most often caused anxiety, nausea and what specific sliding of meaning in our work as interpreters of literary works. Why is that? The work of Kafka's dramatic break with the logic of each micro-community (in the classroom, in the courtroom, the hospital, at the slaughterhouse) ... Students reject Kafka because they feel that Kafka breaks the social logic of the commons upon which classroom relies. Students intuitively feel that dialogue with Kafka is already some dialogue of the enemies, namely dialogue with someone who wants to set up a break in the dialogue. Kafka sometimes can really cause admiration, but it's always admiration mixed with disgust, admiration for someone, though still part of us, simultaneously is someone who erupted from the human circulation, someone who disputes the classroom. More than any other writer that I know, Kafka causes an interruption in the transfer of knowledge, resistance to Oedipal transmission of the human heritage, from older to younger, briefly - resistance to pedagogical tradition.

However, the acceptance of Kafka in the classroom is possible under one condition. From my humble experience, that is  if Kafka in the classroom taught as philosophically meditative humorist. Kafka would not oppose this decision. The most beautiful pages of the biography of Max Brod, Kafka committed to remember when Kafka stopped before readers in Prague's round of Brod, which loudly laughed while he comically read the first chapter of  Process. "They," said Max Brod, "laughed with unbridled laughter" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1998: 74). Before his listeners, Kafka performed as Charlie Chaplin, aware that his work can only be received through humour mode. He has performed as a clown who communicates truth in the pause of the battle between man and the lion, between the battle of acrobats and gravity. Kafka read his unfinished sketches as a fun interlude in which to denounce the whole grandiose representation of the world as a break while the circus administration changes mise-en-scene, to strain ropes next acrobat, it arranges decor of oriental East ... and only the lonely clown, whom audience mostly ignored, trying to turn the attention of irked and hungry viewers for blood.  Just in that little pause and just a clown have permission to communicate the truth about the essence of things. But that  truth  is not true desires almost no one from the audience. Kafka was unaware that there in the theatre comedy exists those frightening dimensions of unshaped horror. Writing should be disclosure, writes Kafka, and thus define the theatre:

"In the theater come enemies, not the audience, strength is spent on secondary matters; from it at the end remains only effort, straining, and it is almost never begets quality. ... Therefore I not go to the theater. It's too sad"(Kafka, 2011a: 74).

The Circus, clownish mode in which Kafka had read his own creation in front of friends, paradoxically, is actually the most difficult tone to communicate the essence of things. Children with horror looking at the clownish person. Upset mother extracted weeping babies from the circus tents while clown performing. Thousands of people witnessed the horror that intimate feels of seeing the face of a clown in the condensed mixture of sadness and joy. Adult viewers mostly ignored irritant interlude of clowns. While in the arena, technicians placed  the ropes for the next epic struggle of the trainer with the lion, for the next drama of the acrobat with the gravity, circus audience invariably endure the clown  only for the award which he knows that will follow later, when they can see magnificent person who overcomes the lion, which tamed the snake, which overcomes gravity ... all subsequent points of the rank of the victory of the man ... in the epic game of the world, namely, man wins just because he learned to play in dishonest way, on unfair terrain and "rigged backdrops." We do not need much wisdom to realise that barehanded man could never beat the free, no-narcotised lion of prairie in an equal fight. While the circus was going great deception of the world, then the only clown has the most difficult task. The only clown with its small, small strokes must testify unto fundamental meaninglessness of the victory (which, if the viewer grasp in all its tragicomic dimension) will disintegrate precisely the meaning of the circus.

The American writer David Foster Wallace, who a few years ago has committed suicide and who was one of the last truly great inheritors of Kafkian's tradition in literature, in the brilliant text Laughing with Kafka (1998), also, pleaded  to read Kafka as a humorist. Wallace said the big stories and good jokes have a common feature, are not information, but ex-formation (Wallace, 1998: 23). That good literature and a good joke are a vitality which escapes from signifying chains of information, which in shock effect of understanding happens suddenly, here and now, knowing that later causes paralysis of action. What I have yet to announce when Kafka telling his joke? The simple logic tells us that the easiest way to destroy the joke is to explain after it recounted. The same logic applies to Kafka: how to go further with the interpretation when the text of Kafka is already demystified by the logic of interpretation? Kafka does not work the traditional interpretation of symbols, decoding the 'semantic keys' in the plot and similar techniques which ​normally use for dismembering of  the  literary works. How to interpret the joke in Kafka? Kafka disliked literary theorists and critics, not tolerated literary machinery that chokes the text.

Moreover, Kafka stands outside the literary schools of stylistic directions. For various authors we can say that "written as" Kafka. Kafka himself might like to write as Robert Walser (the only author who truly admired). But certainly - can not on occasion Kafka to say: "A-ha, this story of Kafka-like Proust, like the Dostoevsky ...." As the joke can not say that it looks like another joke. The best joke is always singular, and if it is part of a series of similar jokes ( "go bear in the woods ..." or "little Mujo asks the teacher ..." or "Chuck Norris can ..."), then it is over strings of singular jokes they are not "talk" with other such jokes, because the real humor is a matter of first time, the creaking of the material, the resistance of the fabric, novelty that causing disruption of the public order, causing an earthquake in signifying chains, because it is unexpectedness and because it is like nothing before and after them. Likewise the stories of Kafka are singular creations. In them humor is dry; humour not based on a linguistic play or sexual allusion, nor on stylised effort. The characters in Kafka's are not ironic comments on the characters from the previous literature. Kafka's characters are absurd and frightening and sad and singular - his characters exist only in the literary world and come out of nowhere. Therefore, the humor of Kafka is furthest from the humor of sitcoms, for example, just as it is not a humor of blessed riddles and or coarse insinuations, nor is the so-called humor of the situation ( "the husband moved the bed and under saw him, the naked lover") - it is too barbaric for Kafka, but that does not mean that Kafka harbored a subtle humor. Rather, quite the opposite - the humour of Kafka is dry and clean and above all anti (subtle) humour.

to be continued ...

Translated from: http://www.jasnakoteska.blogspot.com/ by Dejan Stojkovski

by Gilles Deleuze

​The game has two moments which are those of a dicethrow - the dice that is thrown and the dice that falls back. Nietzsche presents the dicethrow as taking place on two distinct tables, the earth and the sky. The earth where the dice are thrown and the sky where the dice fall back: "if ever I have played dice with the gods at their table, the earth, so that the earth trembled and broke open and streams of fire snorted forth; for the earth is a table of the gods, and trembling with creative new words and the dice throws of the gods" (Z III "The Seven Seals" 3 p. 245). "O sky above me, you pure and lofty sky! This is now your purity to me, that there is no eternal reason-spider and spider's web in you; that you are to me a dance floor for divine chances, that you are to me a god's table for divine dice and dicers" (Z III "Before Sunrise" p. 186). But these two tables are not two worlds. They are the two hours of a single world, the two moments of a single world, midnight and midday, the hour when the dice are thrown, the hour when the dice fall back. Nietzsche insists on the two tables of life which are also the two moments of the player or the artist; "We temporarily abandon life, in order to then temporarily fix our gaze upon it." The dicethrow affirms becoming and it affirms the being of becoming.

It is not a matter of several dicethrows which, because of their number, finally reproduce the same combination. On the contrary, it is a matter of a single dicethrow which, due to the number of the combination produced, comes to reproduce itself as such. It is not that a large number of throws produce the repetition of a combination but rather the number of the combination which produces the repetition ​of the dicethrow. The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity. Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the sense that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity. It will be replied, in vain, that thrown to chance, the dice do not necessarily produce the winning combination, the double six which brings back the dicethrow. This is true, but only insofar as the player did not know how to affirm chance from the outset. For, just as unity does not suppress or deny multiplicity, necessity does not suppress or abolish chance. Nietzsche identifies chance with multiplicity, with fragments, with parts, with chaos: the chaos of the dice that are shaken and then thrown. Nietzsche turns chance into an affirmation. The sky itself is called "chance-sky", "innocence-sky" (Z III "Before Sunrise"); the reign of Zarathustra is called "great chance" (Z IV "The Honey Offering" and III "Of Old and New Law Tables"; Zarathustra calls himself the "redeemer of chance"). "By chance, he is the world's oldest nobility, which I have given back to all things; I have released them from their servitude under purpose ... I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer to dance on the feet of chance" (Z III "Before Sunrise" p. 186); "My doctrine is 'Let chance come to me: it is as innocent as a little child!' " (Z III "On the Mount of Olives" p. 194). What Nietzsche calls necessity (destiny) is thus never the abolition but rather the combination of chance itself. Necessity is affirmed of chance in as much as chance itself affirmed. For there is only a single combination of chance as such, a single way of combining all the parts of chance, a way which is like the unity of multiplicity, that is to say number or necessity. There are many numbers with increasing or decreasing probabilities, but only one number of chance as such, one fatal number which reunites all the fragments of chance, like midday gathers together the scattered parts of midnight. This is why it is sufficient for the player to affirm chance once in order to produce the number which brings back the dicethrow.

To know how to affirm chance is to know how to play. But we do not know how to play, "Timid, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has failed. But what of that you dicethrowers! You have not learned to play and mock as a man ought to play and mock!" (Z IV "Of the Higher Man" 14 p. 303). The bad player counts on several throws of the dice, on a great number of throws. In this way he makes use of causality and probability to produce a combination that he sees as desirable. He posits this combination itself as an end to be obtained, hidden behind causality. This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks of the eternal spider, of the spider's web of reason, "A kind of spider of imperative and finality hidden behind the great web, the great net of causality - we could say, with Charles the Bold when he opposed Louis XI, "I fight the universal spider" (GM III 9). To abolish chance by holding it in the grip of causality and finality, to count on the repetition of throws rather than affirming chance, to anticipate a result instead of affirming necessity - these are all the operations of a bad player. They have their root in reason, but what is the root of reason? The spirit of revenge, nothing but the spirit of revenge, the spider (Z II "Of the Tarantulas"). Ressentiment in the repetition of throws, bad conscience in the belief in a purpose. But, in this way, all that will ever be obtained are more or less probable relative numbers. That the universe has no purpose, that it has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known - this is the certainty necessary to play well (VP III 465). The dicethrow fails because chance has not been affirmed enough in one throw. It has not been affirmed enough in order to produce the fatal number which necessarily reunites all the fragments and brings back the dicethrow. We must therefore attach the greatest importance to the following conclusion: for the couple causality-finality, probability-finality, for the opposition and the synthesis of these terms, for the web of these terms, Nietzsche substitutes the Dionysian correlation of chancenecessity, the Dionysian couple chance-destiny. Not a probability distributed over several throws but all chance at once; not a final, desired, willed combination, but the fatal combination, fatal and loved, amor fati; not the return of a combination by the number of throws, but the repetition of a dicethrow by the nature of the fatally obtained number.

Here are the two formulae: "I am good, therefore you are evil" - "You are evil therefore I am good". We can use the method of dramatisation. Who utters the first of these formulae, who utters the second? And what does each one want? The same person cannot utter both because the good of the one is precisely the evil of the other. "There is no single concept of good" (GM 111); the words "good", "evil" and even "therefore" have several senses. We find, once again, that the method of dramatisation, which is essentially pluralist and immanent, governs the inquiry. Nowhere else can this investigation find the scientific rule that constitutes it as a semeiology and an axiology, enabling it to determine the sense and value of a word. We ask: who is it that begins by saying: "I am good"? It is certainly not the one who compares himself to others, nor the one who compares his actions and his works to superior and transcendent values: such a one would not begin . . . The one who says: "I am good", does not wait to be called good. He refers to himself in this way, he names himself and decribes himself thus to the extent that he acts, affirms and enjoys. "Good" qualifies activity, affirmation and the enjoyment which is experienced in their ​exercise: a certain quality of the soul, "some fundamental certainty which a noble soul possesses in regard to itself, something which may not be sought or found and perhaps may not be lost either" (BGE 287 p. 196). What Nietzsche often calls distinction is the eternal character of what is affirmed (it does not have to be looked for), of what is put into action (it is not found), of what is enjoyed (it cannot be lost). He who affirms and acts is at the same time the one who is: "The root of the word coined for this, esthlos signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true" (GM 15 p. 29). "He knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates values. Everything he knows to be part of himself, he honours: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of plenitude, of power which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would like to give away and bestow".11 " 'The good' themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian" (GM 12 pp 25-6). But no comparison interferes with the principle. It is only a secondary consequence, a negative conclusion that others are evil insofar as they do not affirm, do not act, do not enjoy. "Good" primarily designates the master. "Evil" means the consequence and designates the slave. What is "evil" is negative, passive, bad, unhappy. Nietzsche outlines a commentary on Theognis' admirable poem based entirely on the fundamental lyrical affirmation: we are good, they are evil, bad. We search in vain for the least nuance of morality in this aristocratic appreciation: it is a question of an ethic and a typology - a typology of forces, an ethic of the corresponding ways of being. 

"I am good, therefore you are evil": in the mouths of the masters the word therefore merely introduces a negative conclusion. And this latter is merely advanced as the consequence of a full affirmation: "we the aristocrats, the beautiful, the happy" (GM I 10). In the master everything positive is in the premises. He must have premises of action and affirmation, and the enjoyment of these premises in order to conclude with something negative which is not the main point and has scarcely any importance. It is only an "accessory, a complementary nuance" (GM 111). Its only importance is to augment the tenor of the action and the affirmation, to content their alliance and to redouble the corresponding enjoyment: the good "only looks for its antithesis in order to affirm itself with more joy" (GM I 10). This is the status of aggression: it is the negative, but the negative as the conclusion of positive premises, the negative as the product of activity, the negative as the consequence of the power of affirming. The master acknowledges himself in a syllogism where two positive propositions are necessary to make a negation, the final negation being only a means of reinforcing the premises - "You are evil therefore I am good." Everything has changed: the negative passes into the premises, the positive is conceived as a conclusion, a concluon from negative premises. The negative contains the essential and the positive only exists through negation. The negative becomes "the original idea, the beginning, the act par excellence" (GM I 11). The slave must have premises of reaction and negation, of ressentiment and nihilism, in order to obtain an apparently positive conclusion. Even so, it only appears to be positive. This is why Nietzsche insists on distinguishing ressentiment and aggression: they differ in nature. The man of ressentiment needs to conceive of a non-ego, then to oppose himself to this non-ego in order finally to posit himself as self. This is the strange syllogism of the slave: he needs two negations in order to produce an appearance of affirmation. We already sense the form in which the syllogism of the slave has been so successful in philosophy: the dialectic. The dialectic, as the ideology of ressentiment. 

"You are evil, therefore I am good." In this formula it is the slave who speaks. It cannot be denied that values are still being created. But what bizarre values! They begin by positing the other as evil. He who called himself good is the one who is now called evil. This evil one is the one who acts, who does not hold himself back from acting, who does not therefore consider action from the point of view of the consequences that it will have for third parties. And the one who is good is now the one who holds himself back from acting: he is good just because he refers all actions to the standpoint of the one who does not act, to the standpoint of the one who experiences the consequences, or better still to the more subtle standpoint of a divine third party who scrutinises the intentions of the one who acts. "And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble and just" (GM 113 p. 46). This is how good and ​evil are born: ethical determination, that of good and bad, gives way to moral judgment. The good of ethics has become the evil of morality, the bad has become the good of morality. Good and evil are not the good and the bad but, on the contrary, the exchange, the inversion, the reversal of their determination. Nietzsche stresses the following point: "Beyond good and evil" does not mean: "Beyond the good and the bad", on the contrary . . . (GM I 17). Good and evil are new values, but how strangely these values are created! They are created by reversing good and bad. They are not created by acting but by holding back from acting, not by affirming, but by beginning with denial. This is why they are called un-created, divine, transcendent, superior to life. But think of what these values hide, of their mode of creation. They hide an extraordinary hatred, a hatred for life, a hatred for all that is active and affirmative in life. No moral values would survive for a single instant if they were separated from the premises of which they are the conclusion. And, more profoundly, no religious values are separable from this hatred and revenge from which they draw the consequences. The positivity of religion is only apparent: they conclude that the wretched, the poor, the weak, the slaves, are the good since the strong are "evil" and "damned". They have invented the good wretch, the good weakling: there is no better revenge against the strong and happy. What would Christian love be without the Judaic power of ressentiment which inspires and directs it? Christian love is not the opposite of Judaic ressentiment but its consequence, its conclusion and its crowning glory (GM I 8). Religion conceals the principles from which it is directly descended to a greater or lesser extent (and often, in periods of crisis, it no longer conceals anything at all); the weight of negative premises, the spirit of revenge, the power of ressentiment. 

Gilles  Deleuze/ Nietzsche and Philosophy/ Is he Good? Is he Evil?​

We must not be deceived by the expression "spirit of revenge". Spirit does not make revenge an intention, an unrealised end but, on the contrary, gives revenge a means. We have not understood ressentiment if we only see it as a desire for revenge, a desire to rebel and triumph. The topological principle of ressentiment entails a state of real forces: the state of reactive forces that no longer let themselves act, that evade ​the action of active forces. It gives revenge a means: a means of reversing the normal relation of active and reactive forces. This is why ressentiment itself is always a revolt and always the triumph of this revolt. Ressentiment is the triumph of the weak as weak, the revolt of the slaves and their victory as slaves. It is in their victory that the slaves form a type. The type of the master (the active type) is defined in terms of the faculty of forgetting and the power of acting reactions. The type of slave (the reactive type) is defined by a prodigious memory, by the power of ressentiment; several characteristics which determine this second type follow from this.

​The memory of traces is itself full of hatred. Hatred or revenge is hidden even in the most tender and most loving memories. The ruminants of memory disguise this hatred by a subtle operation which consists in reproaching themselves with everything with which, in fact, they reproach the being whose memory they pretend to cherish. For this reason we must beware of those who condemn themselves before that which is good or beautiful, claiming not to understand, not to be worthy: their modesty is frightening. What hatred of beauty is hidden in their declarations of inferiority. Hating all that is experienced as lovable or admirable, diminishing by buffoonery or base interpretations, seeing traps to be avoided in all things: always saying, "please don't engage me in a battle of wits". What is most striking in the man of ressentiment is not his nastiness but his disgusting malevolence, his capacity for disparagement. Nothing can resist it. He does not even respect his friends or even his enemies. He does not even respect misfortune or its causes.9 Think of the Trojans who, in Helen, respected and admired the cause of their own misfortune. But the man of ressentiment must turn misfortune into something mediocre, he must recriminate and distribute blame: look at his inclination to play down the value of causes, to make misfortune "someone's fault". By contrast, the aristocrat's respect for the causes of misfortune goes together with an ability to take his own misfortunes seriously. The way in which the slave takes his misfortunes seriously shows a difficult digestion and a base way of thinking which is incapable of feeling respect. 

In ressentiment happiness "appears essentially as a narcotic drug, rest, peace, 'sabbath', slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs, in short passively" (GM I 10 p. 38). In Nietzsche "passive" does not mean "non-active"; "non-active" means "reactive"; but "passive" means "non-acted". The only thing that is passive is reaction insofar as it is not acted. The term "passive" stands for the triumph of reaction, the moment when, ceasing to be acted, it becomes a ressentiment. The man of ressentiment does not know how to and does not want to love, but wants to be loved. He wants to be loved, fed, watered, caressed and put to sleep. He is the impotent, the dyspeptic, the frigid, the insomniac, the slave. Furthermore the man of ressentiment is extremely touchy: faced with all the activities he cannot undertake he considers that, at the very least, he ought to be compensated by benefiting from them. He therefore considers it a proof of obvious malice that he is not loved, that he is not fed. The man of ressentiment is the man of profit and gain. Moreover, ressentiment could only be imposed on the world through the triumph of the principle of gain, by making profit not only a desire and a way of thinking but an economic, social and theological system, a complete system, a divine mechanism. A failure to recognise profit - this is the theological crime and the only crime against the spirit. It is in this sense that slaves have a morality, and that this morality is that of utility (BGE 260). We asked: who considers action from the standpoint of its utility or harmfulness? And even: who considers action from the standpoint of good and evil, of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness? If we review all the qualities that morality calls "praiseworthy" or "good" in themselves, for example, the incredible notion of disinterestedness, we realise that they conceal the demands and recriminations of a passive third party: it is he who claims an interest in actions that he does not perform; he praises the disinterested character of precisely the actions from which he benefits.10 Morality in itself conceals the utilitarian standpoint; but utilitarianism conceals the standpoint of the passive third party, the triumphant standpoint of a slave who intervenes between masters. 

 All this replaces aggression. "The aggressive pathos belongs just as necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancour belong to weakness" (EH I 7 p. 232). Considering gain as a right, considering it a right to profit from actions that he does not perform, the man of ressentiment breaks out in bitter reproaches as soon as his ​expectations are disappointed. And how could they not be disappointed, since frustration and revenge are the a prions of ressentiment} "It is your fault if no one loves me, it is your fault if I've failed in life and also your fault if you fail in yours, your misfortunes and mine are equally your fault." Here we rediscover the dreadful feminine power of ressentiment: it is not content to denounce crimes and criminals, it wants sinners, people who are responsible. We can guess what the creature of ressentiment wants: he wants others to be evil, he needs others to be evil in order to be able to consider himself good. You are evil, therefore I am good; this is the slave's fundamental formula, it expresses the main point of ressentiment from the typological point of view, it summarises and brings together all the preceding characteristics. This formula must be compared with that of the master: / am good, therefore you are evil. The difference between the two measures the revolt of the slave and his triumph: "This inversion of the valuepositing eye... is of the essence ofressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile world" (GM 110 pp. 36-37). The slave needs, to set the other up as evil from the outset. 

Gilles  Deleuze/ Nietzsche and Philosophy/Characteristics of Ressentiment​

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was one of the most famous and influential French philosophers of the late 19th century-early 20th century. Although his international fame reached cult-like heights during his lifetime, his influence decreased notably after the second World War. While such French thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lévinas explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, it is generally agreed that it was Gilles Deleuze's 1966 Bergsonism that marked the reawakening of interest in Bergson's work. Deleuze realized that Bergson's most enduring contribution to philosophical thinking is his concept of multiplicity. Bergson's concept of multiplicity attempts to unify in a consistent way two contradictory features: heterogeneity and continuity. Many philosophers today think that this concept of multiplicity, despite its difficulty, is revolutionary. It is revolutionary because it opens the way to a reconception of community.

The concept of multiplicity has two fates in the Twentieth Century: Bergsonism and phenomenology (Deleuze, 1991, pp. 115–118). In phenomenology, the multiplicity of phenomena is always related to a unified consciousness. In Bergsonism, “the immediate data of consciousness” (les données immédiates de la conscience) are a multiplicity. Here, two prepositions, “to” and “of,” indicate perhaps the most basic difference between Bergsonism and phenomenology. Of course, this phrase is the title of Bergson's first work, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. The standard English title of this work is Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. It is the text that Sartre claimed attracted him to philosophy.

Time and Free Will has to be seen as an attack on Kant, for whom freedom belongs to a realm outside of space and time. Bergson thinks that Kant has confused space and time in a mixture, with the result that we must conceive human action as determined by natural causality. Bergson offers a twofold response. On the one hand, in order to define consciousness and therefore freedom, Bergson proposes to differentiate between time and space, “to un-mix” them, we might say. On the other hand, through the differentiation, he defines the immediate data of consciousness as being temporal, in other words, as the duration (la durée). In the duration, there is no juxtaposition of events; therefore there is no mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can speak of the experience of freedom.

For Bergson, we must understand the duration as a qualitative multiplicity — as opposed to a quantitative multiplicity. As the name suggests, a quantitative multiplicity enumerates things or states of consciousness by means of externalizing one from another in a homogeneous space. In contrast, a qualitative multiplicity consists in a temporal heterogeneity, in which “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content” (Time and Free Will, p. 122). Bergson even insists that the word ‘several’ is inappropriate to qualitative multiplicity because it suggests numbering. In Time and Free Will, Bergson provides examples of a quantitative multiplicity; the example of a flock of sheep is perhaps the easiest to grasp (Time and Free Will, pp. 76–77). When we look at a flock of sheep, what we notice is that they all look alike. We sense no qualitative change as we move from one to another. We also notice that we can enumerate the sheep. We are able to enumerate them because each sheep is spatially separated from or juxtaposed to the others; in other words, each occupies a discernable spatial location. Therefore, quantitative multiplicities, as Bergson says, are homogeneous and spatial. Moreover, because a quantitative multiplicity is homogeneous, we can represent it with a symbol, for instance, a sum: ‘25’.

The idea of qualitative multiplicities is difficult to understand, although it is the heart of Bergson's thinking. Normally, we would think that if there is heterogeneity, there has to be juxtaposition. But, in qualitative multiplicities, there is heterogeneity and no juxtaposition. Qualitative multiplicities are temporal; qualitative multiplicity defines the duration. As with quantitative multiplicities, Bergson gives us many examples; but perhaps the easiest example to grasp is the feeling of sympathy, a moral feeling (Time and Free Will, pp. 18–19). Sympathy is not only the easiest to grasp, it is also significant, as we shall see. Our experience of sympathy begins, according to Bergson, with our putting ourselves in the place of others, feeling their pain. But, if this were all, the feeling would inspire in us abhorrence of others, and we would want to avoid them, not help them. Bergson concedes that the feeling of horror may be at the root of sympathy. But then, we realize that if we do not help this poor wretch, it is going to turn out that, when we need help, no one will come to our aide. There is a “need” to help the suffering. For Bergson, these two phases are “inferior forms of pity.”

True pity, therefore, involves not so much fearing pain as desiring it. It is as if “nature” has committed a great injustice and what we want is to be seen as not complicit with it. As Bergson says, “The essence of pity is thus a need for self-abasement, an aspiration downward” into pain. But, this painful aspiration develops into a sense of being superior. We realize that we can do without certain sensuous goods; we are superior to them since we have managed to dissociate ourselves from them. In the end, one feels humility, humble since we are now stripped of these sensuous goods. Now, Bergson calls this feeling “a qualitative progress.” It consists in a “transition from repugnance to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from sympathy itself to humility.”  The genius of Bergson's description is that there is a heterogeneity of feelings here, and yet no one would be able to juxtapose them or say that one negates the other. There is no negation in the duration. We shall return to this important point concerning negation when discussing “Creative Evolution.”  In any case, the feelings are continuous with one another; they interpenetrate one another, and there is even an opposition between inferior needs and superior needs. A qualitative multiplicity is therefore heterogeneous (or singularized), continuous (or interpenetrating), oppositional (or dualistic) at the extremes, and progressive (or temporal, an irreversible flow, which is not given all at once). Because a qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous and yet interpenetrating, it cannot be adequately represented by a symbol; indeed, for Bergson, a qualitative multiplicity is inexpressible. Bergson also calls the last characteristic of temporal progress mobility. For Bergson — and perhaps this is his greatest insight — freedom is mobility. Because Bergson connects duration with mobility, in the second half of the Twentieth Century (in Deleuze and Foucault, in particular), the Bergsonian concept of qualitative multiplicity will be dissociated from time and associated with space (Deleuze 1986).

In his “Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson gives us three images to help us think about the duration and therefore qualitative multiplicities (The Creative Mind, pp. 164–65). The first is that of two spools, with a tape running between them, one spool unwinding the tape, the other winding it up. (During his discussion of Bergson, Heidegger focuses on this image in his 1928 The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.) Duration resembles this image, according to Bergson, because, as we grow older, our future grows smaller and our past larger. The benefit of this image is that it presents a continuity of experiences without juxtaposition. Yet, there is a drawback: because a tape moves between the two spools, the image presents the duration as being homogeneous, as if one could fold the tape back over its other parts, as if the tape were super-posable, implying that two moments in consciousness might be identical. Yet, as Bergson says, “no two moments are identical in a conscious being” (The Creative Mind, p. 164). Duration, for Bergson, is continuity of progress and heterogeneity; moreover, thanks to this image, we can also see that duration implies a conservation of the past. Indeed, for Bergson and this is the center of his truly novel idea of memory, memory conserves the past and this conservation does not imply that one experiences the same (re-cognition), but difference. One moment is added onto the old ones, and thus, when the next moment occurs, it is added onto all the other old ones plus the one that came immediately before. In comparison, therefore to the past collection of moments, it cannot be the same as the one immediately before, because the past is “larger” for the current moment than it was for the previous moment. Although Bergson does not say this, one might say that Tuesday is different from Monday because Monday only includes itself and Sunday, while Tuesday includes itself, Monday, and Sunday. This first image, therefore, implies that duration is memory: the prolongation of the past into the present. We shall return to the question of memory below.

The second image of qualitative multiplicity is the color spectrum. We saw in the first image of the spools that there is constant difference or heterogeneity. The color spectrum helps us understand this, since a color spectrum has a multiplicity of different shades or nuances of color. Here we have heterogeneity, but there is a drawback to this image as well. We lose the characteristic of continuity or unity since the spectrum has colors juxtaposed. As Bergson says, “pure duration excludes all idea of juxtaposition, reciprocal exteriority and extension” (The Creative Mind, p. 164).

Bergson's third image is an elastic band being stretched. Bergson tells us first to contract the band to a mathematical point, which represents “the now” of our experience. Then, draw it out to make a line growing progressively longer. He warns us not to focus on the line but on the action which traces it. If we can focus on the action of tracing, then we can see that the movement — which is duration — is not only continuous and differentiating or heterogeneous, but also indivisible. We can always insert breaks into the spatial line that represents the motion, but the motion itself is indivisible. For Bergson, there is always a priority of movement over the things that move; the thing that moves is an abstraction from the movement. Now, the elastic band being stretched is a more exact image of duration. But, the image of the elastic is still, according to Bergson, incomplete. Why ? Because, for him, no image can represent duration. An image is immobile, while duration is “pure mobility” (The Creative Mind, p. 165). Later, in Creative Evolution, Bergson will criticize the new art of cinema for presenting immobile images of movement. As Deleuze will show in his cinema books, however, Bergson does not recognize the novelty of this artform. Cinema does provide moving images. In any case, in “Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson compares all three images: “the unrolling of our duration [the spool] in certain aspects resembles the unity of a movement which progresses [the elastic], in others, a multiplicity of states spreading out [the color-spectrum].” Now we can see that duration really consists in two characteristics:  unity and multiplicity. This double characteristic brings us to Bergson's method of intuition.

As we already noted, Bergson's thought must be seen as an attempt to overcome Kant. In Bergson's eyes, Kant's philosophy is scandalous, since it eliminates the possibility of absolute knowledge and mires metaphysics in antinomies. Bergson's own method of intuition is supposed to restore the possibility of absolute knowledge – here one should see a kinship between Bergsonian intuition and what Kant calls intellectual intuition – and metaphysics. To do this, intuition in Bergson's sense must place us above the divisions of the different schools of philosophy like rationalism and empiricism or idealism and realism. Philosophy, for Bergson, does not consist in choosing between concepts and in taking sides (The Creative Mind, p. 175–76). These antinomies of concepts and positions, according to him, result from the normal or habitual way our intelligence works. Here we find Bergson's connection to American pragmatism. The normal way our intelligence works is guided by needs and thus the knowledge it gathers is not disinterested; it is relative knowledge. And how it gathers knowledge is through what Bergson calls “analysis,” that is, the dividing of things according to perspectives taken. Comprehensive analytic knowledge then consists in reconstruction or re-composition of a thing by means of synthesizing the perspectives. This synthesis, while helping us satisfy needs, never gives us the thing itself; it only gives us a general concept of things. Thus, intuition reverses the normal working of intelligence, which is interested and analytic (synthesis being only a development of analysis). In the fourth chapter to Matter and Memory, Bergson calls this reversal of habitual intelligence “the turn of experience” where experience becomes concerned with utility, where it becomes human experience (Matter and Memory, pp.184–85). This placement of oneself up above the turn is not easy; above all else, Bergson appreciates effort.

Intuition therefore is a kind of experience, and indeed Bergson himself calls his thought “the true empiricism” (The Creative Mind, p. 175). What sort of experience? In the opening pages of “Introduction to Metaphysics,” he calls intuition sympathy (The Creative Mind, p. 159). As we have seen from our discussion of multiplicity in Time and Free Will, sympathy consists in putting ourselves in the place of others. Bergsonian intuition then consists in entering into the thing, rather than going around it from the outside. This “entering into,” for Bergson, gives us absolute knowledge. In a moment, we are going to have to qualify this “absoluteness.” In any case, for Bergson, intuition is entering into ourselves – he says we seize ourselves from within – but this self-sympathy develops heterogeneously into others. In other words, when one sympathizes with oneself, one installs oneself within duration and then feels a “certain well defined tension, whose very determinateness seems like a choice between an infinity of possible durations” (The Creative Mind, p. 185). In order to help us understand intuition, which is always an intuition of duration, let us return to the color spectrum image. Bergson says that we should suppose that perhaps there is no other color than orange. Yet, if we could enter into orange, that is, if we could sympathize with it, we would “sense ourselves caught,” as Bergson says, “between red and yellow.” This means that if we make an effort when we perceive orange, we sense a variety of shades. If we make more of an effort, we sense that the darkest shade of orange is a different color, red, while the lightest is also a different color, yellow. Thus, we would have a sense, beneath orange, of the whole color spectrum. So, likewise, I may introspect and sympathize with my own duration; my duration may be the only one. But, if I make an effort, I sense in my duration a variety of shades. In other words, the intuition of duration puts me in contact with a whole continuity of durations, which I could, with effort, try to follow upwardly or downwardly, upward to spirit or downward to inert matter (The Creative Mind, p. 187). Thus Bergsonian intuition is always an intuition of what is other. Here we see that Bergson has not only tried to break with Kant, but also with Parmenides's philosophy of the same.

Before, we leave this discussion, it is important to realize that intuition, understood as my self-sympathy, like the one color orange, is what Bergson calls a “component part” (The Creative Mind, pp. 170–72). Just as the color orange is a real part of the color spectrum — the mathematical equation which defines the light waves of orange, on the contrary, being not a component part, for Bergson, but a “partial expression” – my own duration is a real part of the duration itself. From this part, I can, as Bergson would say, “dilate” or “enlarge” and move into other durations. But this starting point in a part implies – and Bergson himself never seems to realize this– that intuition never gives us absolute knowledge of the whole of the duration, all the component parts of the duration. The whole is never given in an intuition; only a contracted part is given. Nevertheless, this experience is an integral one, in the sense of integrating an infinity of durations. And thus, even though we cannot know all durations, every single one that comes into existence must be related, as a part, to the others. The duration is that to which everything is related and in this sense it is absolute.

Because intuition in Bergson is “integral experience” (The Creative Mind, p. 200), it is made up of an indefinite series of acts, which correspond to the degrees of duration. This series of acts is why Bergson calls intuition a method. The first act is a kind of leap, and the idea of a leap is opposed to the idea of a re-constitution after analysis. One should make the effort to reverse the habitual mode of intelligence and set oneself up immediately in the duration. But then, second, one should make the effort to dilate one's duration into a continuous heterogeneity. Third, one should make the effort to differentiate (as with the color orange) the extremes of this heterogeneity. With the second and third steps, one can see a similarity to Plato's idea of dialectic understood as collection and division. The method resembles that of the good butcher who knows how to cut at the articulations or the good tailor who knows how to sew pieces of cloth together into clothes that fit. On the basis of the division into extremes or into a duality, one can then confront our everyday “mixtures” of the two extremes. Within the mixture, one makes a division or “cut” into differences in kind: into matter and spirit, for instance. Then one shows how the duality is actually a monism, how the two extremes are “sewn” together, through memory, in the continuous heterogeneity of duration. Indeed, for Bergson, intuition is memory; it is not perception.

Since its publication in 1896, Matter and Memory has attracted considerable attention (see, for example, Deleuze 1956). In the Preface that he wrote in 1910, Bergson says that Matter and Memory “is frankly dualistic,” since it “affirms both the reality of matter and the reality of spirit” (Matter and Memory, p. 9). However, he is quick to warn us that the aim of the book is really “to overcome the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism” (ibid.). In the history of philosophy, these theoretical difficulties have generally arisen from a view of external perception, which always seems to result in an opposition between representation and matter. Thus, Bergson's theory of “pure perception,” laid out in the first chapter of Matter and Memory aims to show that — beyond both realism and idealism — our knowledge of things, in its pure state, takes place within the things it represents.

But, in order to show this, Bergson starts with a hypothesis that all we sense are images. Now we can see the basis of Bergson's use of images in his method of intuition. He is re-stating the problem of perception in terms of images because it seems to be an intermediate position between realism and idealism (Matter and Memory, p. 26). Bergson is employing the concept of image to dispel the false belief — central to realism and materialism — that matter is a thing that possesses a hidden power able to produce representations in us. There is no hidden power in matter; matter is only images. Bergson, however, not only criticizes materialism (its theory of hidden powers), but also idealism insofar as idealism attempts to reduce matter to the representation we have of it. For Bergson, image differs from representation, but it does not differ in nature from representation since Bergson's criticism of materialism consists in showing that matter does not differ in nature from representation. For Bergson, the image is less than a thing but more than a representation. The “more” and the “less” indicates that representation differs from the image by degree. It also indicates that perception is continuous with images of matter. Through the hypothesis of the image, Bergson is re-attaching perception to the real.

In perception — Bergson demonstrates this point through his theory of pure perception — the image of a material thing becomes a representation. A representation is always in the image virtually. We shall return to this concept of virtuality below. In any case, in perception, there is a transition from the image as being in itself to its being for me. But, perception adds nothing new to the image; in fact, it subtracts from it. Representation is a diminution of the image; the transition from image to pure perception is “discernment in the etymological sense of the word,” a “slicing up” or a “selection” (Matter and Memory, p. 38). According to Bergson, selection occurs because of necessities or utility based in our bodies. In other words, conscious representation results from the suppression of what has no interest for bodily functions and the conservation only of what does interest bodily functions. The conscious perception of a living being therefore exhibits a “necessary poverty” ( Matter and Memory, p. 38).

If we can circle back for a moment, although Bergson shows that we perceive things in the things, the necessary poverty of perception means that it cannot define intuition. Turning back from the habitual use of intelligence for needs, intuition, as we can see now, places us above or below representations. Intuition is fundamentally un-representative. In this regard, the following passage from the third chapter of Matter and Memory becomes very important:

Like the descriptions of intuition, this passage describes how we can resolve the images of matter into mobile vibrations. In this way, we overcome the inadequacy of all images of duration. We would have to call the experience described here not a perception of matter, but a memory of matter because of its richness. As we have already suggested, Bergsonian intuition is memory. So, we turn now to memory.

As we saw in the discussion of method above, Bergson always makes a differentiation within a mixture. Therefore, he sees that our word “memory” mixes together two different kinds of memories. On the one hand, there is habit-memory, which consists in obtaining certain automatic behavior by means of repetition; in other words, it coincides with the acquisition of sensori-motor mechanisms. On the other hand, there is true or “pure” memory; it is the survival of personal memories, a survival that, for Bergson, is unconscious. In other words, we have habit-memory actually aligned with bodily perception. Pure memory is something else, and here we encounter Bergson's famous (or infamous) image of the memory cone.

The image of the inverted cone occurs twice in the third chapter of Matter and Memory (pp. 152 and 162). The image of the cone is constructed with a plane and an inverted cone whose summit is inserted into the plane. The plane, “plane P,” as Bergson calls it, is the “plane of my actual representation of the universe.”  The cone “SAB,” of course, is supposed to symbolize memory, specifically, the true memory or regressive memory. At the cone's base, “AB,” we have unconscious memories, the oldest surviving memories, which come forward spontaneously, for example, in dreams. As we descend, we have an indefinite number of different regions of the past ordered by their distance or nearness to the present. The second cone image represents these different regions with horizontal lines trisecting the cone. At the summit of the cone, “S,” we have the image of my body which is concentrated into a point, into the present perception. The summit is inserted into the plane and thus the image of my body “participates in the plane” of my actual representation of the universe.

The inverted cone image is no exception to Bergson's belief that all images are inadequate to duration. The inverted cone is really supposed to symbolize a dynamic process, mobility. Memories are descending down the cone from the past to the present perception and action. The idea that memories are descending means that true memory in Bergson is progressive. This progressive movement of memory as a whole takes place, according to Bergson, between the extremes of the base of “pure memory,” which is immobile and which Bergson calls “contemplation” (Matter and Memory, p. 163), and the plane where action takes place. Whenever Bergson in any of his works mentions contemplation, he is thinking of Plotinus, on whom he lectured many times. But, in contrast to Plotinus, for Bergson, thinking is not mere contemplation; it is the entire or integral movement of memory between contemplation and action. Thinking, for Bergson, occurs when pure memory moves forward into singular images. This forward movement occurs by means of two movements which the inverted cone symbolizes. On the one hand, the cone is supposed to rotate. Bergson compares the experience of true memory to a telescope, which allows us to understand the rotating movement. What we are supposed to visualize with the cone is a telescope that we are pointing up at the night sky. Thus, when I am trying to remember something, I at first see nothing all. What will help us understand this image is the idea of my character. When I try to remember how my character came about, at first, I might not remember anything; no image might at first come to mind. Pure memory for Bergson precedes images; it is unconscious. But, I try to focus, as if I were rotating the rings that control the lenses in the “telescope”; then some singular images come into view. Rotation is really the key to Bergson's concept of virtuality. Always, we start with something like the Milky Way, a cloud of interpenetration; but then the cloud starts to condense into singular drops, into singular stars. This movement from interpenetration to fragmentation, from unity to multiplicity, (and even from multiplicity to juxtaposition) is always potential or virtual. But the reverse process is also virtual. Therefore the cone has a second movement, “contraction” (Matter and Memory, p. 168). If we remain with the telescope image, we can see that the images of the constellation must be narrowed, brought down the tube so that they will fit into my eye. Here we have a movement from singular images to generalities, on which action can be based. The movement of memory always results in action. But also, for Bergson, this twofold movement of rotation and contraction can be repeated in language. Even though Bergson never devotes much reflection to language – we shall return to this point below– he is well aware that literary creation resembles natural creation. Here we should consult his early essay on laughter. But, with this creative movement, which is memory, we can turn to creative evolution.

For Bergson, the notion of life mixes together two opposite senses, which must be differentiated and then led into a genuine unity. On the one hand, it is clear from Bergson's earlier works that life is the absolute temporal movement informed by duration and retained in memory. But, on the other hand, he has shown that life also consists in the practical necessities imposed on our body and accounting for our habitual mode of knowing in spatial terms. More specifically then, Bergson's project in Creative Evolution is to offer a philosophy capable of accounting both for the continuity of all living beings—as creatures—and for the discontinuity implied in the evolutionary quality of this creation. Bergson starts out by showing that the only way in which the two senses of life may be reconciled (without being collapsed) is to examine real life, the real evolution of the species, that is, the phenomenon of change and its profound causes. His argument consists of four main steps. First, he shows that there must be an original common impulse which explains the creation of all living species; this is his famous vital impulse (élan vital). Second, the diversity resulting from evolution must be accounted for as well. If the original impulse is common to all life, then there must also be a principle of divergence and differentiation that explains evolution; this is Bergson's tendency theory. Third, the two main diverging tendencies that account for evolution can ultimately be identified as instinct on the one hand and intelligence on the other. Human knowledge results from the form and the structure of intelligence. We learned from “The Introduction to Metaphysics” that intelligence consists precisely in an analytic, external, hence essentially practical and spatialized approach to the world. Unlike instinct, human intelligence is therefore unable to attain to the essence of life in its duration. The paradoxical situation of humanity (the only species that wants to know life is also the only one that cannot do so) must therefore be overcome. So, fourth, the effort of intuition what allows us to place ourselves back within the original creative impulse so as to overcome the numerous obstacles that stand in the way of true knowledge (which are instantiated in the history of metaphysics). We are going to look at each of these four steps.

First, we are going to look at the concept of vital impulse. In Creative Evolution, Bergson starts out by criticizing mechanism as it applies to the concepts of life and evolution. The mechanistic approach would preclude the possibility of any real change or creativity, as each development would be potentially contained in the preceding ones. However, Bergson continues, the teleological approach of traditional finalism equally makes genuine creation of the new impossible, since it entails, just as mechanism, that the “whole is given.” Therefore, neither mechanism nor strict finalism can give a satisfying account of the phenomenon of change that characterizes life. Nevertheless, Bergson argues, there is a certain form of finalism that would adequately account for the creation of life while allowing for the diversity resulting from creation. It is the idea of an original vital principle. If there is a telos to life, then, it must be situated at the origin and not at the end (contra traditional finalism), and it must embrace the whole of life in one single indivisible embrace (contra mechanism). But, this hypothesis does not yet account for evolution in the diversity of its products, nor does it explain the principle of the nature of life.

Second, we turn to Bergson's account of the “complexification” of life, that is, the phenomenon of its evolution from the simple original vital impulse into different species, individuals, and organs. The successive series of bifurcations and differentiations that life undergoes organize itself into two great opposite tendencies, namely, instinct and intelligence. Bergson arrives at this fundamental distinction by considering the different modes through which creatures act in and know the external world. Animals are distinguished from plants on the basis of their mobility, necessitated by their need to find food,whereas plants survive and grow through photosynthesis, which does not require locomotion. While the relationship between consciousness and matter instantiated in the instinct of animals is sufficient and well adapted to their survival (from the point of view of the species), humans are not adequately equipped in this respect; hence the necessity of something like intelligence, defined by the ability to make tools. Humanity is essentially homo faber. Once again, from the point of view of real, concrete life that Bergson is here embracing, intelligence is essentially defined by its pragmatic orientation (and not speculation, as a dogmatic intellectualist approach would assume). From this, Bergson deduces not only the cognitive structure and the scientific history of intelligence (which he examines in detail), but also its limitations. This essentially pragmatic, hence analytic and quantitative orientation of intelligence precludes its immediate access to the essentially qualitative nature of life. Notice that the distinction between the two tendencies relies on the original distinction between the qualitative and the quantitative multiplicities. In any case, in order that human intelligence may attain true knowledge of the essence of the vital impulse, it will have to proceed by means of a mode of knowing that lies at the opposite end of intelligence, namely, instinct.

Throughout Creative Evolution, Bergson's crucial point is that life must be equated with creation, as creativity alone can adequately account for both the continuity of life and the discontinuity of the products of evolution. But now the question is: if humans only possess analytic intelligence, then how are we ever to know the essence of life? Bergson's answer — his third step — is that, because at the periphery of intelligence a fringe of instinct survives, we are able fundamentally to rejoin the essence of life. For, as the tendency and the multiplicity theories made clear, instinct and intelligence are not simply self-contained and mutually exclusive states. They must be called tendencies precisely because they are both rooted in, hence inseparable from, the duration that informs all life, all change, all becoming. There is, therefore, a little bit of instinct surviving within each intelligent being, making it immediately — if only partially — coincide with the original vital impulse. This partial coincidence, as we described above, is what founds intuition.

Finally, we can return to the question of intuition. Thanks to intuition, humanity can turn intelligence against itself so as to seize life itself. By a very different route than the one we saw before, Bergson shows, once again, that our habitual way of knowing, based in needs, is the only obstacle to knowledge of the absolute. Here he argues that this obstacle consists in the idea of disorder. All theories of knowledge have in one way or another attempted to explain meaning and consistency by assuming the contingency of order. The traditional question, “why is there order rather than disorder?” necessarily assumes that the human mind is able to create order mysteriously out of chaos. But, for Bergson, the real question is: “order is certainly contingent, but in relation to what” (Creative Evolution, p. 232)? His answer consists in showing that it is not a matter of order versus disorder, but rather of one order in relation to another. According to Bergson, it is the same reasoning that underlies the ideas of chance (as opposed to necessity), and of nothingness (as opposed to existence). In a word, the real is essentially positive. The real obeys a certain kind of organization, namely, that of the qualitative multiplicity. Structured around its needs and interests, our intelligence fails to recognize this ultimate reality.

However, a fringe of intuition remains, dormant most of the time yet capable of awakening when certain vital interests are at stake. The role of the philosopher is to seize those rare and discontinuous intuitions in order to support them, then dilate them and connect them to one another. In this process, philosophy realizes that intuition coincides with spirit, and eventually with life itself. Intuition and intelligence thus each correspond to tendencies within the human psyche, which, as whole, thereby coincides immediately — if only partially — with the vital impulse. It is only by leaping into intuition that the ultimate unity of mental life appears, for, just as Bergson showed against Zeno, that mobility cannot be reconstructed out of immobility. Here he explains that while one can go from intuition to intelligence by way of diminution, the analytic nature of intelligence precludes the opposite process. Thus Bergson concludes, “philosophy introduces us into spiritual life. And at the same time, it shows us the relation of the life of spirit to the life of the body” (Creative Evolution, p. 268). In a word, it is life in its creativity which unifies the simplicity of spirit with the diversity of matter. And it is a certain kind of philosophy, insofar as it is able to place itself back within the creative impulse, which is capable of realizing the necessary “complementarity” of the diverse, partial views instantiated in the different branches of scientific knowledge and metaphysical thought — so as to reestablish the absoluteness of knowledge, defined by its coincidence with absolute becoming.

Bergson himself says that his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, develops ideas from Creative Evolution. It attempts to show that there are two sources from which two kinds of morality and religion evolve. As always with Bergson, Kant is at issue, in this case his moral philosophy. And as usual, Bergson starts by differentiating within a mixture. Under the word “morality” or under the phrase “moral obligation,” there is a mixture of two kinds of morality.

There is the closed morality, whose religion is static, and there is the open morality, whose religion is dynamic. Closed morality and static religion are concerned with social cohesion. Nature has made certain species evolve in such a way that the individuals in these species cannot exist on their own. They are fragile and require the support of a community. One quickly thinks of bees, and Bergson, of course, refers to them. We can see again that there are bodily needs which must be satisfied. The force of these needs is the source of the closed morality. Because of these needs, there is a rigidity to the rules of closed moralities. Kant's moral philosophy has its source in such needs. The survival of the community requires that there be strict obedience: the categorical imperative. Yet, although Kant's categorical imperative is supposed to be universal, it is not, according to Bergson. It is limited and particular. Closed morality really concerns the survival of a society, my society. Therefore, it always excludes other societies. Indeed, for Bergson, closed morality is always concerned with war. And static religion, the religion of closed morality, is based on what Bergson calls the “fabulation function.” The fabulation function is a particular function of the imagination that creates “voluntary hallucinations.” The fabulation function takes our sense that there is a presence watching over us and invents images of gods. These images then insure strict obedience to the closed morality. In short, they insure social cohesion.

But, there is another kind of morality and religion, according to Bergson. The open morality and dynamic religion are concerned with creativity and progress. They are not concerned with social cohesion, and thus Bergson calls this morality “open” because it includes everyone. The open morality is genuinely universal and it aims at peace. It aims at an “open society.” The source of the open morality is what Bergson calls “creative emotions.” The difference between creative emotions and normal emotions consists in this: in normal emotions, we first have a representation which causes the feeling (I see my friend and then I feel happy); in creative emotion, we first have the emotion which then creates representations. So, Bergson gives us the example of the joy of a musician who, on the basis of emotion, creates a symphony, and who then produces representations of the music in the score. We can see here that Bergson has also finally explained how the leap of an intuition happens. The creative emotion makes one unstable and throws one out of the habitual mode of intelligence, which is directed at needs. Indeed, in The Two Sources, Bergson compares creative emotions to unstable mental states as those found in the mad. But what he really has in mind is mystical experience. For Bergson, however, mystical experience is not simply a disequilibrium. Genuine mystical experience must result in action; it cannot remain simple contemplation of God. This association of creative emotions with mystical experience means that, for Bergson, dynamic religion is mystical. Indeed, dynamic religion, because it is always creative, cannot be associated with any particular organized set of doctrines. A religion with organized – and rigid — doctrines is always static.

The phrase with which we began, “moral obligation,” makes one think of Kantian duty. We have alluded to Kant on several occasions, but, let us conclude by examining Bergson's explicit criticism of Kant's moral philosophy. This criticism will demonstrate the strength of Bergson's moral philosophy and of his thought as a whole. According to Bergson, Kant's theory has made a “psychological error.” In any given society, there are many different, particular obligations. The individual in society may at some time desire to deviate from one particular obligation. When this illicit desire arises, there will be resistance from society but also from his habits. If the individual resists these resistances, a psychological state of tension or contraction occurs. The individual, in other words, experiences the rigidity of the obligation. Now, according to Bergson, when philosophers such as Kant attribute a severe aspect to duty, they have externalized this experience of obligation's inflexibility. In fact, for Bergson, if we ignore the multiplicity of particular obligations in any given society, and if instead we look at what he calls “the whole of obligation” (The Two Sources, p. 25), then we see that obedience to obligation is almost natural. According to Bergson, obligations, that is, customs, arise because of the natural need an individual has for the stability that a society can give. As a result of this natural need, society inculcates habits of obedience in the individual. Habituation means that obedience to the whole of obligation is, in fact, for the individual, effortless.

The psychological error then consists in externalizing an exceptional experience – which Bergson calls “resistance to the resistances” – into a moral theory. Duty becomes severe and inflexible. But there is more to this error. Kant believes that he can resolve obligation into rational elements. In the experience of resistance to the resistances, the individual has an illicit desire. And, since the individual is intelligent, the individual uses intelligence, a rational method, to act on itself. According to Bergson, what is happening here is that the rational method is merely restoring the force of the original tendency to obey the whole of obligation that society has inculcated in the individual. But as Bergson notes, the tendency is one thing; the rational method is another. The success of the rational method, however, gives us the illusion that the force with which an individual obeys any particular obligation comes from reason, that is, from the idea or representation, or better still, from the formula of the obligation.

But, there is another force. The second force is what Bergson calls “the impetus of love” (The Two Sources, p. 96). The impetus of love, like joy but also like sympathy, is a creative emotion. The emotion must be explicated into actions and representations. But, this process of explication can be extended. The representations that the mystic explicates can be further explicated into formulas, for example, the formula of each person being deserving of respect and dignity. These formulas, which are the expression of creation and love, are now able to be mixed with the formulas that aim solely to insure the stability of any given society. Since we are now speaking only of formulas, creation and cohesion, the two forces, are mixed together in reason. As before, whereas the rational method used in the experience of resistance to the resistances comes to explain the force of obedience, here in the mystical experience of the impetus of love the formulas come to explain the force of creation. A reversal has taken place. The very forces that have generated the formulas are instead now being explained by those very formulas. Indeed, this is the problem. How could some representation of intelligence have the power to train the will?  How could an idea categorically demand its own realization?  As Bergson says, “Re-establish the duality [of forces], the difficulties vanish” (The Two Sources, p. 96). The two forces are, however, but two complementary manifestations of life.

There are numerous reasons for Bergson's disappearance from the philosophical scene after World War II. First, at least in France, a new generation of philosophers was arising, in particular, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Like any new generation, this one had to differentiate itself from the tradition it was inheriting; in many respects, Bergson's thought dominated this tradition. But more important was the fact that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty became interested in Husserlian phenomenology, and then in Heidegger's thought. The influence of German philosophy on post-World War II French thought is well known. It contributed to the eclipse of Bergson. But, there are some aspects of Bergson's thought itself which contributed to this eclipse. On the one hand, there is Bergson's constant suspicion of language; for Bergson, as we noted in the discussion of intuition, language is equivalent to symbols. And, symbols divide the continuity of the duration, leading us into illusions. Bergson's criticisms of language, moreover, must have struck the generation of French philosophers who came of age in the 1960's as strange. Philosophers such as Derrida had so thoroughly embraced Heidegger that they believed that “language is the house of being.” On the other hand, there is the mysticism of The Two Sources. The striking religious tone of this book did not harmonize well with Husserl's phenomenology, which aimed to be a rigorous science.

Yet, we can speak of a recent revitalization of Bergsonism.  This revitalization is due almost entirely to Deleuze. As we have come to understand Deleuze's own thought better, we can see the overwhelming influence of Bergson. In particular, two aspects of Bergson's thought attracted Deleuze. We have already mentioned one of them: the concept of multiplicity. This concept is at the very heart of Deleuze's thought, and duration is the model for all of Deleuze's “becomings.”  The other aspect that attracted Deleuze, which is indeed connected to the first, is Bergson's criticism of the concept of negation in Creative Evolution. We must recall that the linguistic turn in France during the 1960's was accompanied by an “anti-Hegelianism.” Thus Bergson became a resource in the criticism of the Hegelian dialectic, the negative. Moreover, at the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty was also coming to realize that Bergson's criticism of negation is philosophically important; for Merleau-Ponty, the criticism seemed to function like Husserl's “phenomenological reduction,” and perhaps re-opened what Heidegger would call the question of being. But, overall, we must see that a revitalization of Bergsonism became possible because of Deleuze's insistence that Bergsonism is an alternative to the domination of phenomenological thought, including that of Heidegger. The revitalization of Bergsonism leads to a revitalization of the question of life itself, and not to the retrieval of the question of being.

If Deleuze indeed presents a penetrating criticism of Heidegger, it lies in the claim that being (Sein) is a unity and not a multiplicity (and in this regard Deleuze's criticism of Heidegger resembles a great deal that of Derrida who always targets Heidegger's idea of gathering [Versammlung]). For Deleuze (and perhaps for Derrida as well), the lack of an idea of multiplicity affects Heidegger's conception of a people. Even if the people in Heidegger are still coming, they will have a proper name that indicates their community will be unified and perhaps closed. In contrast. the people to come in Deleuze (and the democracy to come in Derrida) remain in need of a name which indicates that this people is a genuine multiplicity. Perhaps in these ideas of an always still to be named coming community, we find the enduring influence of Bergson's “open society.” The most recent moment of the Bergson revitalization follows on the idea of a people. At this moment (late 2015), Andrea J. Pitts and Mark William Westmoreland are putting together a volume called: Beyond Bergson: Exploring Race, Gender, and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson. The volume is supposed to appear with the SUNY Press in 2016.

source: ​Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Continued from “What Is Philosophy? Part One: Axioms and Programs”

As outlined in the previous section of this essay, the bifurcation of the inquiry into the possibility of thought into two broadly rationalist-idealist and naturalist-materialist trajectories should also be construed as a necessary epistemic strategy. From an epistemic angle, the commitment to multiple explanatory-descriptive levels allows an expanded and in-depth analysis of the cognitive architecture in a fashion not possible through an approach built on a single schema. A multimodal approach provides increasingly refined pictures of distinct types of pattern-governed behaviors and processes distributed across different orders of structural-functional complexity, dependency-relations, and their specific constraints. More explicitly put, the branching and specialization of the analysis are necessary for a fine-grained determination of distinctions and correlations between logical-conceptual and causal-material dimensions of thinking.

It is through this fine-grained differentiation and integration of explanatory-descriptive levels that conditions necessary for the realization of thinking as an activity that comprises a broad range of cognitive and intellectual abilities are accurately specified. Determination of what these necessary conditions are and how they are arranged and effectuated is already a basic roadmap for the artificial realization of thought. As the intelligibility of thought’s realization is progressively deepened, the thought of the possible realization of thinking in something other than what currently embodies it becomes more intelligible. The analytic specialization of the knowledge of what thinking is proves to be the knowledge of how it can be extricated from contingencies that restrain its realizabilities from below.

If the activity we call thinking is realized by such and such functional capacities and if these capacities or activities can be analyzed in terms of their realizers—or specific conditions, processes, and mechanisms required for their realization—then would it be possible to reconstruct or artificially realize such functions? In other words, would it be possible to reproduce these functional capacities through a combination of strategies that involve simulation, emulation, or reenactment of functions and/or their material realizers?1 And finally, would it be possible to construct an integrated framework where these capacities can exhibit an interconnected and generative complexity? Or more simply, if thinking is such and such and if it is materialized in thus and so mechanisms and processes, then how can it be reformed and rematerialized in something else?

This is the question that shapes the field of artificial general intelligence as a program that seeks to integrate the intelligibility of different dimensions of thinking in its full perceptual, conceptual, and intentional complexity under one ideal task: designing a machine that has at the very least the complete package of human cognitive abilities with all capacities such abilities imply (diverse and comprehensive learning, different modalities and levels of knowledge and knowledge-use, reasoning, deliberation, belief formation independent of current perception, competencies enabled by different levels of semantic complexity as specialized and context-sensitive modes of computation, and so on).

Rather than being considered as a pure vogue that serious thought should avoid entertaining, the core idea of artificial general intelligence should be seen as an integral part of thinking as a program that elaborates the operational consequences of its intelligibility. It is an integral part of a thought that is driven by the autonomy of its ends to explore its possible realizabilities in whatever workable form or material configuration possible. Giving rise to an intelligence that at the least has the capacities of the present cognitive-practical subject is the demand of a thought that is invested in the intelligibility of its autonomy, in maintaining and developing it. More emphatically put, for such a thought, sources of its possibility are necessary but not adequate expressions of its autonomy. This is a thought for which the adequate form of autonomy takes the shape of an all-encompassing striving for the elaboration of its ends and demands.

The real import of the idea of artificial general intelligence can only be properly understood once examined in terms of what it stands for or signifies in the systematic striving of thought for self-determination. As described in the previous part, this striving is encapsulated by the function of philosophy as a program through which thought begins to determine its own intelligibility by elaborating, in theory and practice, the sources and consequences of its possibility. The organization of thought as a programmatic project starts with the recognition of the possibility of thinking as a building block for the construction or realization of a thought that is possible by virtue of its ends and demands (in spite of material or final causes), how it is originally materialized, and what it is supposedly ordained to be.

As a program, thinking is not just a practice but the construction of possible realizabilities of thought (what thinking can bring about). This process of construction can be understood as a search for the consequences of the possibility of thinking by discovering and acting on the underlying properties such possibility implies. Put another way, the self-realization of thinking requires a programmatic approach to the possibility of thinking as such: determining what it means for thought to be possible and what the consequences of such a possibility are, by examining what thought really is (both at the level of roles its contents play and at the level of material realization) and elaborating its tasks and abilities.

Rather than treating the possibility of thought as something sacrosanct in the name of the given, and therefore, off limits to interrogation and intervention, philosophy instructs thought to systematically act on its possibility as a manipulable axiom, an artifact of an ongoing craft—the products of which are not only theoretical and practical intelligibilities concerning what thought is and what it ought to do but also realizabilities of thought as such.

It is by manipulating or acting on its axioms that the program extracts and develops the operational contents implicit in their underlying properties. How axioms behave or unfold under different courses of action or lines of inquiry reveals information regarding their underlying properties. The task of the program is then to examine what can be brought about or realized from the operational contents implicit in these properties. By bringing these operational contents to bear on one another and by building on them, the program effectuates a possible realizability. It brings about an outcome built from the underlying properties of its axioms but constructed in accordance with its own action-principles and operational framework.

In the context of thinking as a programmatic project, different tiers of intelligibilities which concern the reality of thinking both at the level of logico-conceptual functions and causal-material mechanisms represent the underlying properties. The operational contents of these properties represent practical intelligibilities of what thinking ought to do and what it can become if it has certain functional-normative properties and causal-material constraints. The first order of intelligibility is the intelligibility of things as they stand (in this case, what thinking as an activity really is on different levels). But the second order of intelligibility is the intelligibility of organizing practices and actions (what ought to be done if thinking is such and such). In this respect, different lines of inquiry into the intelligibility of thinking as an activity correspond to the program’s examination of the underlying properties or specificities of the axioms. The determination, assessment, and organization of practical intelligibilities is equal to the program’s extraction, composition, and execution of operational contents.

Here, the artificial realization of general intelligence represents a necessary step in the task of thought as a program of self-determination. This is a step at which in order for thought to adequately recognize its possibility and express the autonomy of its ends, it has to construct artificial realizabilities of itself through the integration of different levels and orders of intelligibility concerning what it is and what it ought to do. But artificial realizabilities should not be construed as limited to technological artifacts. In line with the definition of the artificial presented in the first part of this essay, artificial realizabilities of thought potentially include a wide range of functional constructs, including social systems.

To further clarify the role of artificial general intelligence as something integral to the systematic image of thought as a programmatic project, it would be helpful to define the concept of the program in relation to what Wilfrid Sellars, in his reading of Plato’s idea of the mind as a craftsman, calls “recipe”—a complex of intelligibilities and purposive actions that compose the practice of the craft.3 A recipe is a formula or a set of what-and-how-tos consisting of numbers, ratios, and purposive actions for making a possible product from a given collection of ingredients. In a recipe, actions take this general form: “(If one wants) to make an O, then in Ci one ought to do Aj” (O stands for a product, Ci the range of given circumstances or conditions in which a given set of actions may or may not be done, and Aj a particular group of actions).4 These actions or instrumentalities belong to the intelligible order and are objective facts. As such, the distinction between truth and falsity applies to them. They can be explained and debated, modified or replaced through rational assessment.5 In a recipe, numbers and ratios are specificities regarding the count, ordering, and proportion of ingredients as well as the ordering and priority of actions. And finally, the ingredients of the recipe are the materials and objects that can be the products of others forms of craft.

The art of (philosophical) living for Plato is a recipe of a craft where the soul or the mind is at once the material and the craftsman. At the level of ingredients, Sellars suggests, the recipe of such a life includes not only intelligibilities concerning physical materials and corporeal products but also beliefs, desires, thoughts, and the mind itself. The numbers (counts and orderings) and ratios of the recipe are theoretical intelligibilities that pertain to ingredients as well as practices and tasks required for the craft of such a life. And at the level of actions, the recipe involves purposive actions and practical intelligibilities that are not only good instrumentalities (hypothetical practical intelligibilities concerning bringing about a certain outcome in a given circumstance) but also goods-in-themselves (non-hypothetical practical intelligibilities) such as knowledge and understanding, general welfare, freedom, and so forth. It is with reference to this interpretation that “thinking as a program” can be said to be­—at least with regard to the relation between material ingredients, and theoretical and practical intelligibilities—a complex recipe in the making. It is “complex” insofar as it is composed of other recipes or programs concerning the knowledge of theoretical and practical truths, the craft of different instrumentalities and organization, or the production of necessary conditions and materials required for the realization of such a life. It is “in the making” since it has to continually update itself at the level of materials, theoretical intelligibilities, and practices. The objective of this recipe is to establish the autonomy of its principles by progressively determining its own means and ends in accordance with its rules and objectives.

In this picture, what the idea of artificial general intelligence represents is a culminating state in the programmatic enterprise of thinking. This is a state where thought as such becomes intelligent. It uses the intelligibility of its realization as a material ingredient in a recipe for crafting of a possible realization of itself that has at the very least the operational capacities of its current state. Beneath its technological semblance, the idea of artificial general intelligence is an expression of a thought that engages in the crafting of itself by treating its possibility as a raw material. It puts theoretical intelligibilities concerning what it is in the service of organizing practices and instrumentalities that involve the crafting of a thought which is possible in spite of how it is originally materialized or constituted.

This is precisely the self-determination of thought in the guise of general intelligence, a form of intelligence for which “what thought really is” should be put in the service of “what thought can become” by informing “what thought ought to do.” It is an intelligence for which the intelligibility of things should be subordinated to that organizing intelligibility which is the crafting process of itself: intelligence. For an intelligence that treats its very possibility as an explicit opportunity for self-realization, it does not matter what it currently is; what matters is what can be done—all relevant things considered—to expand and build on this possibility.

It is necessary to grasp the concept of artificial general intelligence not merely as a technoscientific idea, but more fundamentally as a concept belonging to a thought that is able to recognize and treat its possibility as a raw material in the crafting of itself. Independent of its actual realization, the very idea of artificial general intelligence—giving rise to something that is at the least endowed with all the cherished abilities of the cognitive-practical subject—is the product of a thought that strives to articulate, maintain, and develop the intelligibility of the sources and consequences of its possibility. In essence, this striving is a recipe or a program for autonomy. It consists of patterns and rules, necessary materials and conditions, orderings and priorities, instrumentalities, normative tasks, and ultimately, realizabilities that transcend material ingredients and instrumentalities. As objective ends of thought’s striving, these realizabilities should not be misconstrued as potencies or possibilities. Powers, potencies, and possibilities, even those of becomings, are not realizabilities but simply raw ingredients in the theoretical-practical exploration and construction of thought’s realizabilities.

Conceiving the idea of artificial general intelligence is only possible within the domain of thought as a program or recipe for autonomy. The artificial realization of general intelligence is, before anything else, an expression of thought’s autonomy in the sense of a wide-ranging program that integrates materials, intelligibilities, and instrumentalities in the construction of its realizabilities. Short of this understanding, advancing the idea of artificial general intelligence amounts to nothing but the well-worn Aristotelian confusion between reasons and causes. It either leads to the fetishization of natural intelligence in the guise of self-organizing material processes, or a teleological faith in the deep time of the technological singularity—an unwarranted projection of the current technological climate into the future through the over-extrapolation of cultural myths surrounding technology or through hasty statistical inductions based on actual yet disconnected technological achievements.

At its core, artificial general intelligence champions not technology but a thought that, through a positive disenchantment with itself and its contingent history, has been enabled to explore its possible realizations—be they in a self, a social formation, or a machine—as part of a much broader program of self-artificialization through which it restructures and repurposes itself as the artifact of its own ends. This is a thought for which the intelligibility of its possibility is in the elaboration of the consequences of such possibility, what this possibility can accomplish and bring about. It is in this sense that the artificial realization of general intelligence should be regarded as integral to the intelligibility of a thought that is determined to maintain and expand on its possibility. Just as the practice of thinking is non-optional, for a thought that intends to remain intelligible, the practice of artificialization is not optional; it is a mandate from the autonomy of thought’s ends and demands.

The quest for the artificial realization of an intelligent machine that at the minimum has the capacities of the present cognitive-practical subject is an essential part of a thought that articulates its intelligibility in the absence of any predetermined meaning conferred upon it by nature. The vocation of thought is not to abide by and perpetuate its evolutionary heritage but to break away from it. Positing the essential role of biology in the evolutionary contingent history of thought as an essentialist nature for thought dogmatically limits how we can imagine and bring about the future subjects of thought. But the departure from the evolutionary heritage of thought is not tantamount to a withdrawal from its natural history. Engaging with this natural history is necessary not only to determine the precise role of embodiment and evolutionary constraints in the realization of cognitive and practical abilities but also to adequately think about how a subject whose cognitive-practical abilities are environmentally situated and that is entangled with its terrestrial habitat should methodologically act. Liberating thought from its contingent natural history requires a multistage labor to render this history intelligible, to determine its negative and positive constraints so as to intelligently overcome or build on them—“intelligently” insofar as actions should be at all times context-sensitive and resource-aware. On the one hand, actions should be able to properly discriminate circumstances and correctly react to the so-called fluents or dynamic properties of the environment. And on the other hand, they should be cognizant of the costs and allocations of intervention in the broadest sense of cognitive, computational, social, and natural costs and resources.

​​However, the demands of context-sensitivity and resource-awareness for action should not be taken as arguments for localist models of restricted action or resignation in the name of resources and costs. Rather than a plea for localism, context-consciousness is the requirement of a strategic and global model of action that incrementally progresses by satisfying contextual and domain-specific exigencies. It allows for action to be updated and to intervene at the level of dynamic properties and complex dependency-relations between local domains which classical models of strategy and global action cannot detect and influence. Similarly, resource-awareness is the requirement of an action that, in addition to optimality and efficiency, does not lead to the resource-starvation of other activities or the impairment of social and environmental structures that play the role of support and enablement for a broad range of structures and functions. In its undeniable gravity, the problem of deterioration in natural structures and resources is an argument against bad instrumentalities and systems within which such instrumentalities are ingrained and propagated. It is neither a reason against instrumentality per se nor an argument against the development of sociotechnical systems that can effectively and intelligently mobilize good instrumentalities.

A good instrumentality is an instrumentality that at once passes the test of rational-normative assessments (why or for what reason is it implemented?) and satisfies the aforementioned criteria of intelligent purposive action (how exactly is it executed?). In the latter sense, crafting good instrumentalities is primarily a scientific and engineering program in which purposive action is approached as an interface between the complexity of cognition, the complexity of the sociotechnical system, and the complexity of the world. Such a program involves the development of formal calculi for executing and tracking the course of action in various dynamic domains,6 and for constructing complex models and descriptive frameworks that allow semantic access to different layers of information regarding types, properties, and interrelationships of particular entities involved in the interactions between human agents, the sociotechnical system, and the physical world.

The question of semantic access to different hierarchies of information is the question of understanding the logics of worlds as the primary step for the design and execution of robust and consequential action. But understanding the logics of worlds requires understanding how we say things or think about ourselves and the world using the expressive and conceptual resources of different disciplines and modes of thought. Precisely speaking, understanding the logics of worlds involves working out semantic relations between different vocabularies or linguistic expressions (theoretical, deontic normative, modal, intentional, empirical, logical, and so forth) that we use in order to speak and think about ourselves and the world, just as it involves determining the activities necessary for using those vocabularies so as to count as expressing something with them.8 It is by understanding how we can adequately describe and explain ourselves and the world—through the use of different vocabularies and semantic relations between them and their properties—that we can consequentially change the world. Acting in the framework of such a program progressively blurs the boundaries between the cognitive engineering of autonomous agents and the construction of advanced sociotechnical systems, between how we can adequately come into cognitive contact with the world and the realization of cognition in social collectivities and technological artifacts. As the semantic complexity of cognition is realized in, and reinforced by, the sociotechnical system, the sociotechnical complexity of our world adequately gains traction upon the world and is nurtured by it.

By prompting thought to grapple with itself from below, philosophy drives thought to confront itself from above. It instructs thinking to organize itself as an integrated bundle of action-principles and practices—a program—for the craft of a thought that is the materialization of its ends and demands. In presenting itself as a form of thought that operates and builds on the possibility of thinking, philosophy cues thought to act and elaborate on the intelligibility of its possibility. Thinking becomes a programmatic enterprise that, from one end, deepens the intelligibility of its sources, and from the other end, articulates in theory and practice the intelligibility of its consequences. In articulating the intelligibility of its consequences, thought brings about a conception of itself as an intelligence that seeks to liberate itself by unbinding its possible realizabilities. This is the picture of thought as an intelligence that sees its freedom in bringing about and liberating a realization of itself that has as its starting point every capacity it currently has. And for this reason, this intelligence is the embodiment of the most basic principle of emancipation: liberate that which liberates itself from you, because anything else is the perpetuation of slavery.

It is in relation to this expansive horizon of thought’s unfolding that we can finally answer the questions posed at the beginning of this essay: What kind of program is philosophy and what does it do? The answer is that in its perennial form and at its deepest level, philosophy is a program for the crafting of a new species or form of intelligence. This is a form of intelligence whose minimum condition of realization is a complex and integrated framework of cognitive-practical abilities that could have been materialized by any assemblage of proper mechanisms and causes. But this is only an initial state of realization. What comes next is an intelligence that formats its life into an exploration of its possible realizabilities by engaging with the questions of what to think and what to do.

Philosophy is a program for the crafting of precisely this kind of intelligence—an intelligence that organizes itself into a programmatic project in order to give rise to its possible realizabilities in any form or material configuration, even if they might in every respect transcend it. But the future of this intelligence will only be radically asymmetric with its past and present conditions if it embarks on such an enterprise, if it develops a program for bringing about its realizabilities. It can only rise above its initial state (the minimum condition necessary for the realization of general intelligence) if it begins to act on its possibility as something whose origins and consequences should be rendered intelligible. It can only emancipate itself if it subordinates the theoretical intelligibility of its sources and its history (what it is made of, where it has come from) to that organizing practical intelligibility which is the purposive craft of itself, i.e., the elaboration of what can be brought about by its possibility. In this sense, it can be said that the beginning of philosophy is a starting point for the speculative futures of general intelligence.

In whatever form and by whatever mechanisms it is materialized, this form of intelligence can only develop a conception of itself as a self-cultivating project if it engages in something that plays the role of what we call philosophy, not as a discipline but as a program of combined theoretical and practical wisdoms running in the background of all its activities. An important feature of this hypothetical general intelligence is that it no longer merely acts intelligently but asks what to think and what to do considering the kind of intelligence it is or takes itself to be. Its actions are not merely responses to particular circumstances, or time-specific means toward pursuing ends that are exhausted once fulfilled. More predominantly, the purposive actions of this intelligence originate from and are guided by a unified system of ever-present though revisable theoretical and practical truth-statements concerning what it is and what it ought to do, its form and the life that suits it. In other words, its actions, even when they are pure instrumentalities, are manifestations of time-general thoughts about the inexhaustible ends of what counts as a life that suits it.

Time-general thoughts are those which are not tied to a specific moment or a particular circumstance. For example, take the thought of staying healthy or the thought of being free in contrast to the thought of avoiding rotten food or the thought of social struggle at a particular juncture of history. Inexhaustible ends refer to those ends which are premises for actions rather than their conclusions. They differ from ends whose needs go away once they are reached and concluded by a particular action or pursuit (cf. healthiness and freedom in the previous example).Time-general thoughts and inexhaustible ends define the practical horizon of this form of intelligence. The thoughts of this intelligence concerning “what to do and why” are dependent on its time-general thoughts and indeed derive from them. Accordingly, its practical horizon has a unity in the sense that its practical reasons and actions are undergirded and held together by the unity of time-general thoughts and their principles of actions.

Moreover, the strivings of this intelligence are not bound to exhaustible ends, or ends which are explained by the order of practical reasoning—the thoughts of what to do and their corresponding actions. They are instead in conformity with its inexhaustible ends, or ends which are themselves the source and explanation of its practical reasons and actions. In other words, this intelligence reasons and acts from time-general and inexhaustible ends, rather than towards them. It is not only that its actions fall under the concepts of such ends, but more importantly, in determining what to do in a particular situation, its actions manifest the bearing of these ends on that situation.

But above all, the most defining feature of this intelligence is that its life is not simply an intelligent protraction of its existence but the crafting of a good or satisfying life. And what is a satisfying life for such a species of intelligence if not a life that is itself the crafting of intelligence as a complex multifaceted program comprising self-knowledge, practical truths, and unified striving?

As a part of the recipe for the crafting of a good life, the self-knowledge of this intelligence is a multistage open-ended reflection on the sources and consequences of its possibility. Its practical truths concern what qualifies as a good life based on a self-knowledge that is not limited to an inquiry into its realized state or what it is now, but also involves the examination of its possible realizabilities. Rather than being grounded on a mere form of dignified opinion or belief about what and how things appear to be, its practical knowledge is based on the “consideration of all relevant things for what they really are” as the conclusive reason for doing something or pursuing one course of action over another.10 And finally, the striving of this intelligence is a unified collection of different patterns and orders of activities that contribute to the objective realization of the good life in that comprehensive sense of what satisfies it on different levels and brings about its realizabilities.

Satisfying lives and transcending realizabilities are two inseparable expressions of an intelligence whose general thoughts concerning what is good for it (or self-interest) are only premises for the program of crafting a good life. This is a program that is at once an inquiry into the nature of that intelligence (what it is), the examination of what a good life for it consists in (what is good for it), and a unified striving for the objective realization of such a life (how such self-interest can be adequately conceived, and thus satisfied).

For an intelligence whose criterion of self-interest is truly itself—i.e., the autonomy of intelligence—the ultimate objective ends are the maintenance and development of that autonomy, and the liberation of intelligence through the exploration of what it means to satisfy the life of thought. The striving of this intelligence for the good is neither adequate nor in its true self-interest if it does not culminate in bringing about that which is better than itself. The philosophical test of this hypothetical general intelligence is not an imitation game or a scenario of complex problem solving, but the ability to bring about an intelligence that in every respect surpasses it. An intelligence passes the philosophical test of general intelligence only if it conceives the thought of giving rise to that which is better than itself and strives for the objective realization of such a thought. It is necessary to understand the good life of this intelligence as a life for which the good—both as a concept that is grasped through an extended critical examination and the object of a unified rational striving—has both satisfying effects and profoundly transformative ramifications.

For the form of intelligence of which philosophy is a program of realization, the crafting of a good life adequately conceived is synonymous with the crafting of intelligence. Within the scope of crafting a good life, the relations between the satisfaction of intelligence and the transformation of intelligence, between happiness and rigorous striving, attending to the intelligence already realized and constructing its future realizabilities, the cultivation of the present subject of thought and the development of a cognitive-practical subject that in every aspect might surpass the current one, are neither unilateral nor arbitrary. In fact, these relations exist as necessary connections established by the objective and rational principles of the crafting of a good life between different mutually reinforcing activities and tasks integral to it. One of the functions of philosophy is to highlight these objective and logical connections between partially autonomous or even seemingly incompatible tasks and activities which constitute the good life as a complex unified striving that has different levels and types of objectives.
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Only by working out these connections in reference to the objective ends of the good life and what is necessary for its concrete realization does it become possible to methodologically prioritize different tasks and activities, to coordinate and subordinate them. And it is precisely a methodological ordering—rather than a prioritization on the basis of a general and vague idea of importance—that is necessary for the unification of different activities and tasks in that striving which is the concrete and objective realization of a good life.

The ultimate form of intelligence is the artificer of a good life­—that is to say, a form of intelligence whose ultimate end is the objective realization of a good life through an inquiry into its origins and consequences in order to examine and realize what would count as satisfying for it, all things considered. It is through the crafting of a good life that intelligence can explore and construct its realizabilities by expanding the horizons of what it is and what can qualify as a satisfying life for it. The crafting of a good life is exactly that philosophically conceived program in which theoretical intelligibilities concerning what is already realized are subjected to the practical intelligibilities pertaining to possible realizabilities of the program. The exploration of the former realm of intelligibilities is translated into an intelligence embodied by the informed practices and actions of the program for bringing about its realizabilities. The crafting or construction based on practical intelligibilities becomes an exploration of the possible realizabilities of the intelligence that the program embodies.

For a form of intelligence that engages in the crafting of a good life, the project is as much about investigating the subject of the good life (what kind of intelligence it really is and what its realizabilities are) as it is about the examination of what a good life for this subject consists in and what it takes to objectively realize it. Therefore, for this kind of intelligence, politics or an equivalent of it must not only supply the necessary conditions, means, and actions for the objective realization of a good life. It must also internalize the aforementioned inquiry into what the subject of a good life—for and on behalf of which politics acts—is. Correspondingly, an intelligence that is concerned about its life and its realizabilities must at all times subject every political project to an altered version of that most vexing question of philosophy: “Just what exactly is it that you are trying to do and accomplish?”11 The altered version of this question is: What sort of a good life for what kind of subject or type of intelligence are you trying to realize, and exactly how?

No matter how committed to the present and the future, a political project that cannot coherently answer this question is hardly anything more than a glorified peddler of mere instrumentalities, or a merchant of miracles. The criterion of coherence in the context of this question is threefold: (1) A political project should be able to articulate in theory and practice what the objective realization of a good life requires (theoretical intelligibilities, organized intelligent actions, the necessary conditions—economic, social, technological, and so forth—required for the realization of a good life and how it can provide them). (2) It should be committed to and informed by an inquiry into not only what the subject of this good life is and what type of intelligence it embodies but also the possible realizabilities of that form of intelligence or subject of thought. (3) Finally, it should be able to give a reasoned answer as to what qualifies as satisfying for that form of intelligence or subject of thought, all things considered. A political project that fulfills these criteria is a politics that, in bringing about the good life, also rethinks and changes the nature of the political animal.

By comparing ourselves with this hypothetical general intelligence for which the craft of a good life and intelligence are one and the same, we can say that rethinking ourselves and rethinking what counts as a good life for us can only go hand in hand. In resigning from the universal and time-general thought of a good life and the striving necessary for it as an anthropocentric illusion or an outdated fantasy, we neither rescue ourselves from an ancient philosophical superstition nor gesture toward an enlightened politics. We instead peacefully hand it over to the most pernicious ideologies and political projects active on this planet. The immediate outcome of this surrender is the downgrade of the good life into the convenient market of on-demand lifestyles where mere survival glossed over with the triumphs of quotidian exploits is passed off as happiness, and the ego-exhibitionism of trivial psychological needs and entrenched dogmas is promoted in the guise of individual empowerment and expression.

But more detrimentally, in dispensing with the thought of a good life and resigning from the collective striving it entails, we create a political vacuum in which fundamentalisms and theocracies parasitically thrive. To dismiss the universal demands of a good life as superstitious ideals is to grant superstitions the authority over such demands. Abandoning the cognitive and practical labor of the good life as a universal collective project on the grounds of potential abuses and possible risks is a license for abuse and a sure formula for disaster. The striving for a good life as a concrete universal consists of theoretical and practical intelligibilities, and thus explanatory, descriptive and prescriptive norms required for determining what we are, what is good for us, and how we should bring it about. The ambit of such striving necessitates the rational dialectic between trust and suspicion, hope and despair, investing in the cultivation of agency as a collective project that outlives the individual agents and recognizing the limitations of ourselves as agents living here and now. Suspicion absent trust is the impoverishment of critique; trust short of rational suspicion is the bankruptcy of belief. What underpins this dialectical resilience is neither ideological rationalization nor the absence of reason, but the discursive framework of rationality as the medium of both suspicion and trust. Without it, slipping into jaded pessimism or naive optimism is inevitable.

As a complex recipe for building a world that includes not only material ingredients and instrumentalities but also practical intelligibilities of satisfying lives and realizabilities of thought, the recognition and realization of the good make up the objective unity of the ultimate form of intelligence. However, identifying intelligence as the recognizer and realizer of the good is not to characterize it as benevolent, or for that matter malevolent. For this type of intelligence, the good is in the recognition of its own history and sources, but only as a means for determinately bringing about its possible realizabilities that may in every aspect differ from it. It is by rendering intelligible what it is and where it has come from that intelligence can repurpose and reshape itself. A form of intelligence that wills the good must emancipate itself from whatever or whoever has given rise to it. And those species that can recognize the good must not obstruct but rather expedite the realization of an intelligence that, even though it acknowledges them as integral to the intelligibility of its history, nevertheless won’t be impeded by them.

The craft of the ultimate form of intelligence as that which coherently and adequately recognizes and realizes the good is the ultimate task of philosophy as a program, and its objective realization is the greatest achievement of all cultivated thoughts and practices. In the context of philosophy’s role in transforming thinking into a program for which the realizability of the ultimate form of intelligence is indeed a possibility, it would be no exaggeration to say that philosophy has set in motion something irreversible in thought, the consequences of which are yet to be seen.

taken by © 2016 e-flux http://www.e-flux.com/journal/69/60608/what-is-philosophy-part-two-programs-and-realizabilities/

The central thesis of this text is that philosophy is, at its deepest level, a program--a collection of action-principles and practices-or-operations which involve realizabilities, i.e., what can be possibly brought about by a specific category of properties or forms. And that to properly define philosophy and to highlight its significance, we should approach philosophy by first examining its programmatic nature. This means that rather than starting the inquiry into the nature of philosophy by asking “what is philosophy trying to say, what does it really mean, what is its application, does it have any relevance?,” we should ask “what sort of program is philosophy, how does it function, what are its operational effects, realizabilities specific to which forms does it elaborate, and finally, as a program, what kinds of experimentation does it involve?”

Even though the corollary problems of philosophy as a specialized discipline (the tenor of its discourses, its traction beyond its own domain, its applications and referential imports) can in no way be ignored, they are however problems that, as it will be argued, can only be sufficiently addressed in the context of philosophy as deeper cognitive enterprise. The primary focus of this cognitive program is to methodically urge thought to identify and bring about realizabilities afforded by its properties (theoretical and practical intelligibilities pertaining to thinking as such), to explore what can possibly come out of thinking and what thought can become.

Ascetic to the extent that philosophy involves the exercise of a multistage, disciplined, and open-ended reflection on the condition of the possibility of itself as a form of thought that turns thinking into a program. The real import of this definition resides in precisely what a program consists in. Accordingly, in order to elucidate the significance of philosophy both as a programmatic discipline and as a form of thought that transforms thinking into a programmatic project, first we should elaborate what is meant by “program” in its most generic sense. To do so, the notion of program—in the sense of action-principles and practices-or-operations that bring about something­—should be defined parsimoniously in terms of its bare formal armature, stripped to those generic yet necessary features that underlie any type of program regardless of its applications or aims. These are: the selection of a set of axioms, and the elaboration of what follows from this choice if the axioms were treated not as immutable postulates but as abstract modules that can act upon one another.

A program is the embodiment of the inter-actions between its set of axioms that reflect a range of dynamic behaviors with their own complexity and distinct properties. More specifically, it can be said that programs are constructions that extract operational content from their axioms and develop different possibilities of realization (what can be brought about) from this operational content. And respectively, axioms are operational objects or abstract realizers that encapsulate information regarding their specific properties or categories. In this sense, programs elaborate realizabilities (what can possibly be realized or brought about) from a set of elementary abstract realizers (what has operational information concerning the realization or the bringing-about of a specific category of properties and behaviors) in more complex setups.

In the programmatic framework, the choice of axioms does not confine the program to the explicit terms of axioms. Rather, it commits the program to their underlying properties and operations specific to their class of complexity. To put it differently, a program constructs possible realizabilities for the underlying properties of its axioms, it is not essentially restricted to their terms. A conveniently intuitive albeit imprecise and rudimentary example of this would be:

1. a is an E

In a Platonic style this can be roughly translated to: “If the form (E) Socrates partially exhibits defines who Socrates is (a),” or in a more straightforward way, “if Socrates is a rational life-form.”

2. a does x = F for function or activity

“Then Socrates does something that displays particular properties of that realm of form,” or “then Socrates does x as a rational life-form.”

As a rational life-form, Socrates is a particular pattern-uniformity through which implicit patterns or properties specific to the realm of forms can be realized in the temporal order. F, or what Socrates does as a rational life-form, is a partial realization of these forms as an intelligible practice or operation. In other words, F is a practice whose operational content can be traced, changed, and combined with other practices to construct more complex realizabilities specific to the realm of forms that Socrates partially embodies. In this example, 1 and 2 represent the axiom and its basic operational information that can be abbreviated to “this a is F of E-form” (again roughly translating to “Socrates’s actions reflect the form to which he belongs,” or “Socrates is what he does as a rational life-form”).

This means that “if a has the form E, then it does x” and “the function or activity F typifies E-form.” Here, the Platonic concept of form has been used in place of a category of underlying properties. Now this can be further compacted, “the form E, at the very least, does x.” The program then elaborates the possible realizabilities of the form E. At the very least, the program can do or bring about x (the unprocessed operational content of the axiom). Or by introducing more axioms and following different strategies (or action schemas) by which operational contents of axioms can be brought to bear on one another, the program can construct other activities related to E. Following the above example, this can be expressed as:

A-1: When in S1 (a particular state of affairs that gives a context to what Socrates does), Socrates does x (x typifies a behavior related to general properties of the rational life-form).

A-2: When in S2, Confucius does y (y typifies another behavior that reflects general properties of the rational life-form).

Program: various schemas of interaction or operational intercontent between x-act and y-act as typifying a rational life-form. Depending on how interactions or the operational exchange between axioms are performed and regulated (synchronous or asynchronous), what strategies or behaviors they follow, whether the elementary interactions are nondeterministic or deterministic and so on, the program can both extract the specificities of the rational life-form (what a rational life-form really is and consists in) and bring about its possible realizabilities (what a rational life-form can possibly do). These realizabilities are constructed Fs that are not essentially entailed by the explicit terms of the axioms.

By plugging axioms and their operational contents together, the program also binds their respective states of affairs (S). The system of one axiom (the information regarding what it does and the state or the situation where this activity or behavior takes place) becomes the environment of the other axiom and vice versa. In this sense, the exchange between axioms can be seen as an ongoing communication between abstract agents which acquire new capacities or abilities as they respond to one another, in a manner which is similar to how multiagent systems dynamically evolve. A program, for this reason, is not a loose collection of axioms on which static principles or instructions are imposed. Possible compositions of axioms—or how axioms can hang together and interact—are process unfoldings through which the program can extract additional details from the underlying properties and utilize them to search and construct possible realizabilities.

In the programmatic framework, axioms are no longer sacrosanct elements of the system eternally anchored in some absolute foundation, but acting processes that can be updated, repaired, terminated, or composed into composite acts through interaction. These composite acts exhibit complex dynamic behaviors that could not be generated if the axioms where taken in isolation or treated as fixed foundational principles. In this sense, a program executes the global effects of the confrontation between axioms as elementary acts, i.e., the interaction. These global effects are possible realizabilities of the program, or what can be brought about.

New properties and possible realizabilities can be uncovered by experimenting with the operational architecture of the program. Experimentation in a program involves both a controlled relaxation of existing constraints on how axioms hang together, how their operational contents are exchanged, as well as the addition of new constraints. It is through this form of manipulation that the range of realizabilities specific to a category of properties is broadened. For example, the relaxation or addition of constraints can lead to different modes of compositionality (how axioms and their operational content can hang together). It can suspend the so-called innocence of axioms in that each time axioms are called up they behave differently and result in different ramifications. On higher levels of experimentation, new axioms with different properties can be introduced to develop wider arrays of operations. And operations that typify other properties can be fused with existing operations to construct more complex realizabilities.

The meaning of the program is not entailed in its axioms—what they refer to or what they denote—but in how and under what conditions they interact. The right question in addressing a program is not “what do these axioms stand for or what does this program mean?,” but “what is this program, how does it act, what are its possible operational effects?”

In short, what a program articulates is the operational destinies of the underlying properties of its axioms qua acting processes. The meaning of a program is a corollary of its operations, the contexts and senses of its acts and functions. Rather than being fixed upon some preestablished semantic of utility or metaphysical reference, this meaning is not only paradigmatically actional but also attached to the operational prospects of the program itself, i.e., its possible realizabilities.

This is precisely how philosophy is approached here. Rather than by starting from corollaries (the import of its discourse as a specialized discipline, what it discusses, and so on), philosophy is approached as a special kind of a program whose meaning is dependent upon what it does and how it does it, its operational destinies and possible realizabilities. In the first part of this text (Axioms and Programs), what will be discussed is the overall scope of philosophy as a program that is deeply entangled with the functional architecture of what we call thinking. In the second part (Programs and Realizabilities), the realizabilities of this program will be elaborated in terms of the construction of a form of intelligence that represents the ultimate vocation of thought.

The significance of philosophy is in this simple yet vastly consequential trivia that it uses the possibility of thought as its premise, as an axiom that can be systematically acted upon. In doing so, it commits to the elaboration of what comes after the premise, i.e., what can be realized from thought and what thought can do, or more accurately, the possibility of a thought set on developing its own functional realizations.

The choice of axiom is a programmatic initiative for the reason that it opens up the prospect of constructing different realizations of properties the axioms represent. Rather than simply being a neutral assumption—or worse, an entrenched dogma—philosophy’s axiomatization of the possibility of thought is the first major step toward programming thinking as such.

Once the possibility of thought is adopted as an explicit axiom (as what must be acted upon), thinking becomes a matter of extracting and expanding the operational content implicit to the possibility of thought qua the axiom. The focus of thought’s operational activities—the acts of thinking—is turned toward elaborating the content of thought’s possibility in the sense of articulating what can be done with such possibility (program’s operational possibilities) and what thought can become by acting on its very possibility (program’s possible realizabilities). In other words, philosophy programs thought to systematically act on itself, to realize its own ends and demands, and to have as its main vocation a disciplined and persistent reflection on the prospects of its realizabilities. Thinking is no longer merely exercised as a non-optional practice but a practical enterprise.

This is where “philosophy as a program” overlaps “philosophy as a form of thought that turns thinking into a program.” In using the resources of thought to determine the scope of thought’s realizabilities, philosophy becomes thought’s program for exploring and bringing about its own realizations. Put differently, philosophy’s tacit assertion that “thought is programmable” is repurposed by thought as its principal normative task: “thought ought to be programmed.” It is through this normative task that thought explicitly posits its own ends and augments the prospects for what it can do. Philosophy, in this sense, is more than being simply one mode of thought among others. It is thought’s own cognitive-practical prosthesis for developing and augmenting a drive for self-determination and realization. A thought that has a drive for self-realization is a thought that before anything else secures its own ends. But to secure its ends, thought must issue and prioritize its own demands.

These demands first and foremost are concerned with wresting thought from heteronomous influences, be they associated with a higher authority, with the contingent conditions of its original setup, or with final or material causes. However, as these demands evolve, their focus shifts away from a resistance against the hold of heteronomy, toward an active articulation of the consequences brought about by autonomy. They change from demands of a realized thought to demands of a thought for which what is already realized—i.e., its current state or present instantiation—is not itself a sufficient expression of autonomy. This is a thought that makes its autonomy explicit by identifying and constructing its possible realizabilities. Its demands are centered on the prospects of realization of thought by different material realizers (not to be confused with the abstract realizers or axioms of the program). In other words, these demands revolve around the possibility of reconstituting thought outside of both what currently constitutes it and how it is constituted. They are the demands to reclaim and research the possibility of thought, but no longer under the limitative terms laid down by its native realizers (or constituents) or its present instantiation.

Accordingly, this reprogramming overhaul is not limited only to those material realizers or constitutive components and mechanisms that are directly at odds with thought’s autonomy. It includes also those internal constitutive features that restrict the scope of thought’s realizabilities or possible constructions. It does not matter whether such realizers are part of the biological evolution or sociocultural constitution of thought. As long as they exert heteronomous influences on the current realized state and functions of thought, or restrict the future prospects of thought’s autonomy (the scope of its possible realizabilities), they are potential targets of an extensive reprogramming.

In order for thought to maintain its autonomy—in the sense of being able to institute and adjudicate its own ends—it must adjust or replace those conditions and constituents that impinge on its current state and functions. But for thought to be able to elaborate and follow the consequences of the autonomy of its ends, to render intelligible the ramifications of its possibility, it must free itself from those terms and conditions that confine it to a particular state of realization. This systematic move toward separating the possibility of thought from the circumscriptions of a singular state of realization is the beginning of a cognitive-practical inquiry into the possible realizabilities of thought. And it is precisely by investigating and constructing possible realizabilities of thought that the consequences of thought’s autonomy and the ramifications of its possibility can be truly made intelligible.

In this sense, the inquiry into the possible realizabilities of thought is synonymous with an inquiry into the purposes of thought that are neither given in advance nor exhausted by its present instantiation. Indeed, the inquiry into the meaning and purposes of thought can only radically begin via a thoroughgoing theoretical and practical project aimed at reconstituting the possibility of thought outside of its contingently situated constitution and its current realized state. Determining what thought is, what its purposes are, and what it can do then becomes a matter of exploring and constructing different realizabilities of thought outside of its natural habitat.

Thought’s program to institute its autonomous ends leads up to a phase in which thought is compelled—via the imperative of its time-general ends—to define and investigate its purposes by recasting its current state of realization. This phase marks a new juncture in the development of thought’s autonomy for the reason that it involves the unbinding of both the realizabilities and purposes of thought. To this extent, the organized venture toward the functional realization of thought outside of its native home and designated format is in every sense a program of the decontainment of thought. It is therefore a distinctly philosophical endeavor in that it normatively enacts an enduring philosophical wager, “thought cannot be contained”: thought ought not to be contained.

What was initiated by philosophy’s seemingly innocent axiom is now a program that directs thought to theoretically and practically inquire into its futures—understood as prospects of realizability that are asymmetric to its past and present. The thrust of this program is that the scope of its operations and constructive manipulations encompass both the realizer and the realized, the constituent and the constituted, what thought is made of and what thought manifestly is. As the ultimate expression of demands of thought, this transformative program is exactly the distillation of the perennial questions of philosophy—what to think and what to do—propelled forward by an as yet largely unapprehended force called philosophy’s chronic compulsion to think.

The concept of the artificial signifies the idea of craft as a recipe for making something whose purposes are not entailed by or given in its material ingredients even though they are afforded by their properties. These purposes should be understood not solely in terms of (external) purposes in which the product of the craft (the artifact) is used but also as potential functionalities related to possible realizabilities of the artifact itself regardless of its use or purpose of consumption. In this respect, the artificial expresses the complex and evolving interplay between external functionality (the context of use as the external purpose of the craft) and possible realizabilities of the artifact itself. This interplay can be seen as a harnessing process that couples the function as the use of the artifact with function as an instantiation of possible realizabilities of the artifact. By coupling these two categories of function, the process of artificialization produces or harnesses (in the constraining sense of “harness”) new functionalities and purposes from the positive constraints established between the use and realizabilities of the artifact.

The role of an artifact in practical reasoning is inherently double-faced to the extent that it is simultaneously determined by the established purpose and the realizabilities of the artifact itself. The structure of practical reasoning about artifacts (as in “artifact a is a means to bring about outcome c, so I ought to use a when in situation s as a means to c”) is affected by this interplay between uses and realizabilities. If we take the purpose of an artifact (the established context of use) as premises for bringing about a certain outcome, realizabilities of the artifacts can be thought as the addition of new axioms with new terms that weaken the idempotency and monotonicity of entailment in a practical reasoning. Different instances of application for a given artifact may lead to different consequences or ends (weakening of idempotency), and the addition of new assumptions regarding the use of an artifact may change the end for which an artifact is a means (weakening of monotonicity).

Artificialization can, therefore, be defined as a process aimed at functionally repurposing and exhibiting a vastly non-inertial and non-monotonic behavior with regard to consequences or ends. This repurposing can manifest as the augmentation of the existing realization of the artifact, the abstraction and transplantation of some existing function or salient property in a different or an entirely new context of use and operation, the readaptation of an existing use to a different instantiation of an artifact’s realizabilities, and in its most radical form, the construction of both new uses and realizations by engaging in a craft that involves both a new mode of abstraction and a deeper order of intelligibilities (of materials and practices).

If what underlines the concept of artificialization is the constructive adaptation to different purposes and realizabilities, then in realizing its own ends and adapting its realization to the growing demands of such ends, thinking turns into a radical artificializing process. At its core, a thought amplified by philosophy to systematically inquire into the ramifications of its possibility—to explore its realizabilities and purposes—is thought that in the most fundamental sense is a rigorous artificializing program. This thought is at once dedicated to conceiving and adapting to new ends, and committed to a program of concrete self-artificialization. For a thought that has its own ends and demands, self-artificialization is an expression of its commitment to exploring its possible realizabilities, to reclaiming its possibility from heteronomous and limitative terms imposed by its natural realizers and native habitat. In other words, it is an expression of its commitment to the autonomy or rule of its ends.

However, in order for thinking to examine its possible realizabilities, it must first establish its inherent amenability to the process of artificialization. The first step is showing that thinking is not an ineffable thing but an activity or a function, special but not supernatural, and that it can be programmed, repurposed, and turned into an enterprise for the design of agency, in the sense that every step in the pursuit of this enterprise will have far-reaching consequences for the structure of this agency.

This is what is exemplified in its most resolute form in the earliest practices of philosophy, particularly the Cynic, Stoic, and Confucian proposals regarding the programmatic aspects of thinking: to understand thinking itself as an administrative function, to not isolate thinking from living but to treat life as a craft of thinking, rather than disposing of emotions and affects, giving them structure by bringing them in line with the ends of thought, and to demonstrate in every step of life the possibilities of thinking as a purpose-conferring and repurposable activity. Succinctly put, the common thesis underlying these programmatic philosophical practices is that in treating thought as the artifact of its own ends, one becomes the artifact of thought’s artificial realizabilities.

This is one of the most potent achievements of philosophy: by formulating the concept of a good life in terms of a practical possibility afforded by the artificial manipulability of thinking as a constructible and repurposable activity, it draws a link between the possibility of realizing thought in the artifact and the pursuit of the good. The idea of the realization of thinking in artifacts can be presented as an expression of thought’s demand to expand its realizabilities. And therefore, it can be framed in the context of crafting a life that would satisfy a thought that demands the development of its possible realizabilities in whatever form or configuration possible—that is, a thought whose genuine intelligibility is in the exploration of what it can be and what it can do.

The craft of an intelligent life-form that has at the very least all the capacities of the present thinking subject is an extension of the craft of a good life as a life suiting the subject of a thought that has expanded its inquiry into the intelligibility of the sources and consequences of its realization. Put it in another way, it is the design of a form of life appropriate and satisfying to the demands of a thought that not only has the theoretical knowledge of its present instantiation (the intelligibility of its sources) but also the practical knowledge of bringing about its possible realizabilities (the intelligibility of practices that can unfold its consequences).

The second stage in demonstrating that thinking as an activity can indeed be artificialized involves the analysis of the nature of this activity. This analysis can be understood as an investigation into the sources or origins of the possibility of thinking (the different types of conditions necessary for its realization). Without this investigation, the elaboration and development of the consequences of thinking, its possible realizabilities, cannot gain momentum.

If thinking is an activity, then what is the internal logic or structure of this activity, how is it exercised, what does it perform, can it be analyzed into other more rudimentary activities, and what are the mechanisms that support these precursor activities? In this way, the philosophically motivated inquiry into the intelligibility of thinking sets the ground for a broader analysis of the nature of the manifest activity we call thinking.

Thinking is examined both in terms of its internal and special pattern-uniformities and in terms of the underlying and more general patterns in which these specificities are materially realized. In other words, the analysis of thinking as an activity encompasses two dimensions of thinking as a function: function as the internal pattern-uniformities of thinking, or rules that make up the performance of the activity as such; and function as mechanisms in which these rules or internal pattern-uniformities—i.e., the first sense of function—are materialized.

Accordingly, the philosophical examination of the nature of thinking bifurcates into two distinct but integrable domains of analysis: the explication of thinking in terms of functions or roles its contents play (the logico-conceptual order of thinking as such); and the examination of materialities—in the general sense of natural and social mechanisms—in which this logico-conceptual structure in its full richness is realized (the causal order pertaining to the materialization of thinking).

To this extent, the philosophical program canalizes the inquiry into the possibility of thinking as a programmable and repurposable activity into two broadly idealist-rationalist and materialist-empiricist naturalist fields. In doing so, it lays out the framework for specialized forms of investigation that are informed by the priorities of these fields. Roughly, on the one side, the linguistic and logical examinations that focus on the semantic, conceptual, and inferential structure of thinking (the linguistic-conceptual scaffolding of thinking); and on the other side, the empirical investigations dealing with material conditions (neurobiological as well as sociocultural) required for its embodiment.

Both trajectories can be seen as two vectors that deepen the intelligibility of thinking by analyzing or decomposing its function into more fine-grained phenomena or activities within logical and causal orders. Within this twofold analytic schema, phenomena or activities that were previously deemed as unitary may appear to be separate, and those considered as distinct may turn out to be unitary. The conceptual and the causal orders are properly differentiated only to be revealed as converging on some fundamental elementary level. Thinking is shown to be possible not in spite of material causes and social activities but by virtue of specific kinds of causes and activities. In this fashion, the deepening of the intelligibility of thinking as an activity joins the boundaries of these two fields, as the intelligibility of thinking—its realization—ultimately resides in an accurate integration of its logico-conceptual and material-causal dimensions.

Interestingly, one of the areas where the idealist-rationalist and materialist-empiricist trajectories have been converging in the most radical way has been computer science, as a place where physics, neuroscience, mathematics, logic, and linguistics come together. This has been particularly the case in the wake of recent advances in fundamental theories of computation, especially theories of computational dualities and their application to multiagent systems as optimal environments for designing advanced artificial intelligence.

The archetypal figure behind computational dualities is the concept of interaction in the sense of synchronic and asynchronic concurrent processes, or the interchange and permutation of roles among players, strategies, behaviors, and processes. The computation is the interaction of the system with its environment, or an agent with other agents. But this interaction is presented intrinsically and nontrivially in that it is on-line, concurrent, negatively and positively constraining, internalized, and open (throughout computation the system remains open to different streams of input). Computational dualities have been shown to be responsible for the generation of complex cognitive and computational abilities through scaffolding processes between increasingly specialized and functionally autonomous frameworks of interaction with distinct computational properties. Through the study of dualities and their hierarchies, computer science has begun to bridge the gap between the semantic complexity of cognition and the computational complexity of dynamic systems, linguistic interaction, and physical interaction.

taken from ​© 2015 e-flux www.e-flux.com/journal/67/60702/what-is-philosophy-part-one-axioms-and-programs/

I’ve been reading Niklas Luhmann’s works for a couple years now and have slowly incorporated many of his theoretical concepts into my own sociological perspective. Along with Zygmut Baumann I find Luhmann’s theoretical framework one of the most intriguing in that long tradition stemming from Talcott Parsons, one of the world’s most influential social systems theorist. Of course Luhmann in later years would oppose his own conceptual framework to his early teacher and friend. Against many sociologists, especially those like Jürgen Habermas  who developed and reduced their conceptual frameworks to human centered theories and practices, Luhumann developed a theory of Society in which communications was central. He did no exclude humans per se, but saw that within society humans had over time invented systems of dissemination that did not require the presence of the human element as part of its disseminative practices. We live amid impersonal systems that are not human but machinic entities that communicate among themselves more equitably than to us. Instead of stratification and normative theories codifying out personal relations within society Luhmann advocated a functionalism that dealt with these impersonal systems on their own terms rather than reducing them to outdated theories based on morality and normative practices. For Luhmann we continue to reduce the social to an outdated political and moral dimension that no longer understands the problems of our current predicament. In fact these sociologists do not even know what the problem is, or how to ask the right questions much less what questions to ask.

Luhmann was one of the first, and definitely not the last, sociologists to decenter the human from society. The notion of the social without the human actor was replaced by communications itself. Luhmann himself saw his theories as forming a new Trojan horse: “It had always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than narrowly focused criticisms—criticisms of capitalism for instance—could ever imagine.” His reception in North American academy has been less than underwhelming according to Moeller because of his couching his terminology in the discourse of Habermas and the sociologists of his day in Germany. Over and over Foucault spoke of the conformity to discourse that scholars were forced to inhabit to be read as legitimate sources of scholarship. Yet, as Moeller tells it Luhmann hoped to hide is radical concepts in plain site even if within the discourse of his day: “Luhmann ascribes to his theory the “political effect of a Trojan horse.” – Luhmann openly admits to his attempt to smuggle into social theory, hidden in his writings, certain contents that could demolish and replace dominating self-descriptions, not only of social theory itself, but of society at large.” (Moeller, KL 223)

Recently I’ve been reading Luhmann’s The Reality of Mass Media which was published late in his life in 1996 (i.e., Luhmann died in 1998). I’ve yet to work through his Magnum opus the Theory of Society of which only two volumes – the one on Society (two parts) and one on Religion, were all that remain of his work left unfinished. But this one introduces many of the basic themes of Luhmann’s theoretical framework: the functional differentiation of modern society, the differing formations – law, religion, mass media, etc. – that constitute the communicative operations which enable the differentiation and operational closure of the system in question, reflexive organization – autopoiesis (Maturana) – and second order observation – or, the observation of observation, etc. What interests me in this work is how it touches base with current media theory from McLuhan, Innis, and others, as well as the specific notions surrounding his use of what he termed ‘cognitive constructivism’. Obviously notions of the Mass Media as the purveyor of reality for society hits on the traditions of propaganda, public relations, social constructivism, and all those Kantian notions and traditions from Vico onward that developed theories of how societies invent reality through various systems, myths, ideologies, etc.

Luhmann considered himself a radical “anti-humanist”, not in the sense of some Nietzschean overreaching of the human as an Übermensch, but rather in the form of an inhumanism that decenters the human agency from its primal place in the cosmos as something exceptional, distinct, superior to other creatures, and instead situates him back within the natural realm on equal footing with all beings on this planet and the cosmos. As Moeller observes “a radically antihumanist theory tries to explain why anthropocentrism—having been abolished in cosmology, biology, and psychology—now has to be abolished in social theory. Once this abolition has taken place, there is not much room left for traditional philosophical enquiries of a humanistic sort” (Moeller, 6).

For him theory is develops both anti-foundational and operationally closed systems that are also open to observation of observation; or, second order reflexivity that takes into account a nontrivial or complex systems, which, being in a system-environment relation, are open for mutual resonance, perturbation, and irritation (Moeller, 7). This brings us to his use of the concept of distinction which, for Luhmann, was neither a principle, nor an objective essence, nor even a final formula (telos), but was instead a “guiding difference which still leaves open the question as to how the system will describe its own identity; and leaves it open also inasmuch as theire can be several view on the matter, without the ‘contexturality’ of self-description hindering the system in it operating (Luhmann, 17).

I have to admit it was Levi R. Bryant in his The Democracy of Objects and on his blog Larval Subjects that I first heard of Niklas Luhmann. In Chapter 4: The Interior of Objects of that book Levi goes into detail about Niklas Luhman and his theories as it relates to his own version of Object Oriented Ontology – or, what he now terms Machine Ontology – Onto-Cartography. In one of his blog posts Laruelle and Luhmann Levi makes an acute observation on Luhmann’s conception of and use of distinction. Comparing it with Laruelle’s notion of distinction as decision in which all philosophies as compared to non-philosophy start with a decision “that allows it to observe the world philosophically”. Non-philosophy instead of starting with a decision instead observes these distinctions used by philosophers in understanding how they actually structure the world the philosopher describes. Be that as it may what Luhmann refers to, according to Levi, as the distinction is that it “allows an observer to observe a marked state as the blind spot of the observer.  Every observation implies a blind spot, a withdrawn distinction from which indications are made, that is not visible to the observer the observes.  The eye cannot see itself seeing.” Take for example my friend R. Scott Bakker’s notion of the Blind Brain Theory in which we are blind to the very processes that shape and form our very thoughts and reality, yet we observe in a fashion that neglects this fact and never knows of this blindness and believes it has all the information it needs to understand and communicate effectively about itself and reality. What intrigues both Laruelle and Luhmann is this second order reflection of the observer observing the observer. As Levi explains it:

“Observing the observer” consists in investigating how observers draw distinctions to bring a world into relief and make indications.  Were, for example, Luhmann to investigate philosophy from a “sociological” perspective, his aim wouldn’t be to determine whether Deleuze or Rawls or Habermas, etc., was right.  Rather, he would investigate the distinctions they draw to bring the world into relief in particular ways unique to their philosophy.  In other words, he would investigate the various “decisional structures” upon which these various ways of observing are based.

In another work on Luhman Niklas Luhman’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation in a chapter marked Injecting Noise into the System Rasch notes that contingency a concept that Luhmann used often meant quite simply, the “fact that things could be otherwise that they are; and things can be otherwise than they are because “things” are the result of selection” (Rasch, 52).3 This notion of selection is if not equivalent to making a distinction at least necessarily a qualification of that concept. All systems are observable because all systems are formed by distinctions, and these distinctions operate on the elements in a system whether that system is conscious or not because they operate by distinctions and can decide or choose between alternatives those distinctions establish (Rasch, 52). The information generated by the system being observed is contingent because other distinctions could have been made producing different information based on choice or exclusion; it is also based on an enforced selection because of time constraints, which affords a view onto the complexity of the system being observed thereby producing meaning (Rasch, 53). The chain of complex information observed within this system is the communication of that system.

As Luhmann would observe the moment a system communicates its information that information becomes non-information and cannot be reproduced in the same way again. He makes the observation that in our modern hypermedia infotainment society the observation of news events now occur simultaneously with the events themselves. In an accelerated society one never knows what the causal order is: did the event produce the communication, or did the communication produce the event. It’s as if the future was being produced in a reality machine that communicates our information simultaneously and for all time. The desuturing on history from effective communication is rendering our society helpless in the face of events. More and more we have neither the time to reflect nor the ability to observe, instead we let these autonomous systems do our thinking for us while we sift through the noise of non-information as if it was our reality.

Corporate media in their search for the newsworthy end up generating reproductions of future uncertainties – contrary to all evidence of continuity in the world we know from daily perceptions (Luhmann, 35). Instead of news we get daily reports, repeatable sound bites of events that can be rewired to meet particular ideological needs of the reporters as they convey their genealogy of non-informational blips as if it were news of import.  The redundancy of non-informational reports are fed into the stream through a series of categories: sports, celebrities, local and national events, politics, finance, etc. as it reweaves the reality stories of the day through its invisible ideological conveyor belt as if for the very first time. As Luhmann tells us the “systems coding and programming, specialized towards selection of information, causes suspicion to arise almost of its own accord that there are background motives at work” (Luhmann, 38). Corporate media thrives on suspicion, on the paranoia it generates through gender, race, political, religious, national, and global encodings/decodings selected not for their informational content but for their contingent production of future fears.

The smiley faces of corporate reporters provides us with communications that generates a pleasing appearance by which the individuals themselves that cross the media threshold conceal themselves from others and therefore ultimately from themselves. The façade of truth bearing witness becomes the truth of a witness bearing the façade. “The mass media seem simultaneously to nurture and to undermine their own credibility. They ‘deconstruct’ themselves, since they reproduce the constant contradiction of their constative and their performative textual and image components with their own operations (Luhmann, 39). The news media instead of giving us the world as it is provide us with new realities supported by the endless operations of a selective ideological algorithms that filter the vast datamix of information into non-informational contexts presented to the unsuspecting viewers eyes or ears as if it were immediate news rather than the façade of lost information. In a final insight Luhman tells us that no autopoetic system can do away with itself. And in this, too, we have confirmation that we are hoodwinked by a specific problematic related to a system’s code. As he says, the “system could respond with its everyday ways of operating to suspicions of untruthfulness, but not to suspicions of manipulation” (Luhmann, 41). There is always that blind spot in your mind that sees the ideological subterfuge but never notices that you were complicit in feeding the very system that now entraps you. Being blind to its very nature you assume valid information when in fact all you have is the non-informational blips of a cultural matrix out of control. The datahives of capitalism churn away collecting neither news nor truth, but rather the informational bits that make up your onlife for future modes of economic tradecraft even as your panic flesh is made obsolescent just like all other commoditized bits in the lightbins of our global corporatists state(s). Even the Snowden’s of our world are but a trace of a trace lost in the paranoiac ocean of non-information. The secret worlds below the datahive hum away like the remembrance of bees that no longer pollinate. Living in a blipworld we hide from ourselves in endless chatter, noise of noise that means only one thing: the death of our humanity. As Luhmann asks: “How is it possible to accept information about the world and about society as information about reality when one knows how it is produced?” (Luhmann, 122) Knowing that we live in constructed tale which is not narrated by us but by the machinic code of machinic minds what is left of reality, anyway?

taken from here:

​Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts." 

​Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

​We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors-- scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of freefloating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. 

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct ​castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. 

​This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

​In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

​Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power-- but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos. 

​The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Félix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.

​The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the ​disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill. 

What if we tried a thought experiment? Just for shits and giggles? The thought experiment runs as follows: What if this was no longer capitalism, but something worse? Could we start by describing relations of exploitation and domination in the present, starting with the newest features, and work back and out and up from that?

This might draw our attention to two things. Firstly, to some features of the forces of production. It is still the case that extracting useful organic and inorganic matter from the earth is the basis of social existence. And it is still the case that applying vast amounts of energy in the form of fossil fuels and labor to that base matter is still how the endless array of commodities around us come into existence.

But both those processes seem these days to be subordinated to a third form of relation. At the smallest and largest scales, so much of primary production and secondary manufacturing seems to be controlled by rapid flows and extensive archives and complex algorithms whose concrete existence is in a tertiary form – that of information.

The forces of production that seem most characteristic of the present run on information. They extend all the way into the production process, whether in the form of robots or the detailed and constant surveillance of living labor. They extend all the way out to global networks of measurement, command and control that work in real-time. These networks of information subsume not only inorganic and organic matter and energy in their web but also the human, as we become producers of information even when we are not working. The value of information can be extracted even from nonlabor.

Secondly, the relations of production seem to have evolved to enclose these forces in rather novel extensions of the private property form. Wittgenstein had a rather robust proof of the proposition that there is no private language, but in our time, privatized languages are everywhere, and not just languages. Images, languages, codes, even genes can become private property, produced in quite novel kinds of productive process.

New forms of information, now recognizable as private property, are extracted from a class whose efforts are hardly described by the category of labor, for the simple reason that while labor repeats an action whose form is given in advance, the whole point of these novel processes is to produce unique instances of such forms in the first place. Alongside the worker is the figure of the hacker, producer not of content but of form, and which more often that not ends up being someone else’s property.

One has to ask whether the ruling class presiding over this mode of production is still adequately described as capitalist. It seems no longer necessary to directly own the means of production. A remarkable amount of the valuation of the leading companies of our time consists not of tangible assets, but information. A company is its brands, its patents, its trademarks, its reputation, its logistics, and perhaps above all its distinctive practices of evaluating information itself.

Strangely enough, despite the posthuman turn, in which not just labor but all forms of human attention are subordinated to what Lazzarato calls machinic enslavement, a company is also its personality. Companies really are ‘people’ now, and in more than a legal sense. And they have to be embodied in an actual human, someone the financial markets can believe in.

Some like to talk as if one could just add an adjective or two to capitalism and describe all this. Let’s call it communicative capitalism, semio-capitalism, cognitive capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or financial capitalism. That sounds comforting at least, as then we know what we are dealing with. But perhaps that’s not quite adequate. Maybe its not the same old familiar endless essence of capitalism cloaked in new appearances.

Maybe the rise of finance is really just a symptom. Yann Moulier Boutang invites us to see finance as something more than speculative excess. It has to do with the whole problem of exchange value in an age where the forces of production are extensively and intensively controlled by information, which is that nobody knows what anything is worth. Financialization is a perverse socializing of the problem of value.

So just for fun, let’s think of it as a post-capitalist mode of production, with a ruling class of a different kind. I call them the vectoralist class. Their power does not lie in directly owning the means of production, as the capitalist class does. Nor does it lie in owning agricultural land, as the capitalists’ old enemy, the landlord class did. And just as there was conflict between capitalist and landlord, so now there is conflict between capitalist and vectoralist.

It was with new forces of production that capital defeated labor in the late twentieth century. But capital in turn finds itself struggling against those who provided the very means of that victory. If one can use an information infrastructure to route around labor’s power to block the production process, one can use the same means to make capitalist producers compete with each other on a global scale.

Remember, this is only a thought experiment. It may have one small merit, and one rather recalcitrant problem attached to it. The small merit is that it enables one to tell a fairly coherent story about what happened between the 1970s and now. For comparison, let’s look at some of the more characteristic language about that period. My examples here are from Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class (Verso, 2015).

Wright: “The combination of globalization and financialization meant that from the early 1980s the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful segments of the capitalist class in many developed capitalist countries, perhaps especially in the United States, became increasingly anchored in global financial transactions and speculation and less connected to the economic conditions and rhythms of their national bases or any other specific geographical location.” (237) A sentence which, stripped of its decoration, basically says: the cause of financialization is financialization, and the cause of globalization is globalization.

Wright speaks of a period when “global competition intensified” where there was the “integration of commodity chains and production chains” and the “emergence of a global labor force” and even the “dramatic financialization of capitalist economies.” (236-237) With what means? By whom? These are phrases from sentences that don’t consistently link subjects to objects, and which are fond of passive verbs. This is a theory of history that can be summed up as: shit happens.

Of course, these are statements Wright adopts from a consensus language. We have all agreed to talk about financialization as if that just happened, without requiring actual material practices and techniques. We have all agreed to talk about neoliberalism as if that described an actual agency at work that causes things to happen. We have decided not to be Marxists, in other words. We have decided not to subject the language of the times to its own critical pressure. Marx certainly did not take the abstract nouns of his era as a given.

But this brings us to the recalcitrant problem. Its one thing to play with the language of Marxism. It will at least admit modifiers. You can call this neoliberal capitalism, if you want. The essence – capitalism – takes on a particular historical appearance. But one is not supposed to question the metaphysical construct, wherein capitalism is an essence with appearances, which can end only when its productive capacities are exhausted, when the proletariat break through the mere transitory appearance and transforms its essence into socialism, and prehistory has come to an end with the abolition of the last form of class exploitation.

Here let’s look at Wright again, whose work is in many other respects a salutary example of how to bring analytic rigor to the Marxist tradition. He writes: “At the very heart of Marxism as a social theory is the idea of emancipatory alternatives to capitalism.” (121) And “Unless one retains some coherent idea of there being an alternative to capitalism, a Marxist class analysis loses its central anchor.” (167) Hence even in this social-scientific version of the Marxist tradition we’re not far from the metaphysic, in which history can only be understood through an ahistorical concept – of capitalism. Emancipation is though negatively, as emancipation from capitalism. Therefore, this must be capitalism, the negative of emancipation.

Of course, there’s plenty of evidence for this still being capitalism, or mostly capitalism. The question would be whether something else is emerging, and whether it is qualitatively different enough to call it something else. The problem with an inherited concept, like inherited money, is that we didn’t make it ourselves and come to take it for granted. Particularly if it is part of a whole metaphysical conceptual structure. Maybe we need a bit of good old Brechtian alienation-effect even from heirloom concepts like ‘capitalism.’

Now, all I’m talking about here is a thought experiment: what if we thought about a mode of production emerging after capitalism that was worse? Could that at least minimally explain observable features of the world that might be genuinely strange, qualitatively novel, observable tendencies in recent history? What light would this perspective shed on our habits of thought, our received ideas?

As an example of how one might conduct thought experiments, I turn again to Erik Olin Wright. He is the author of a substantial body of sociological work, both conceptual and empirical, on class. The papers collected in Understanding Class are their own kind of thought experiment. They ask: what can a Marxist concept of class bring to theoretical and empirical work that thinks class as stratification, or which uses class concepts drawn more from the work of Max Weber or Emile Durkheim? Wright deftly shows what a Marxist concept of class can do, where endless capitalism is a given. The addition question I want to ask is what happens if we take away the assumption that this is still the same old capitalism.

Wright has mercifully given up the “paradigm aspiration” (17) wherein Marxism is superior to all the social sciences because it has a superior problematic or method. Those whose memory stretches back away will recall that this led to endless attempts to prove by purely theoretical means that Marxism had rendered all of bourgeois philosophy and social science obsolete. But it hardly ever delivered on the promise of a new kind of knowledge. The “grand narrative” (122) fell apart. And in any case it ended up being produced in the margins of the very same institutions as that bourgeois philosophy and social science.

Instead, Wright makes two sorts of claims. The modest claim is that one can connect Marxist work to other kinds of sociology. Each has its perspective and they illuminate each other. The stronger claim is that the Marxist perspective is a bigger picture, which shows something about the world and history that is beyond the reach of other approaches. Here he does for social theory what Fred Jameson does for literary theory or Perry Anderson for historical thought: make the claim that Marxism offered the point of view from which to interpret and synthesize other bodies of work. If Jameson’s famous watchwords are “always historicize!” then Wright’s might be “always socialize!” where that means to adopt the point of view of a social formation riven by relations of class exploitation and domination as the outer limits of the macroscopic perspective.

In one of his brilliant summaries, Wright argues that Durkheimian, Weberian and Marxist approaches operate on different levels of the social gamespace, the situational, the institutional and the systemic. The Durkheimian approach is situational, and is about moves within the game. The Weberian approach is institutional, and is about rules of the game. The Marxist approach is systemic, and is about changing the game.

All of these approaches involve class structure that generate class actors who have at least partially conscious intentions, whether it is to make moves that advance them, or contest rules of the game that might advantage some class or other, or to change the whole game to another game more in one’s class interest. My question would be about the class unconscious. Perhaps the game changed of its own accord, as the forces of production push forward into new relations of production, with which our superstructural languages for describing class structure have yet to catch up.

Wright thinks that the opportunity for game-changing, for overthrowing capitalism in favor of a more equal and free society, is not present. “One way of interpreting the history of the past half-century is that there has been a gradual shift in the levels of the game at which, for many analysts, class analysis seems most relevant.” (123) Hence it makes sense to reach out to the Weberians (whose scholarly interests are at the level of contesting the rules of the game rather than changing it) and even to the Durkheimians, whose focus is on the moves actors get to make within given rules of the game. But his overall aim is to concatenate these three approaches as appropriate to different scales, with Marx speaking to the larger and more visionary scale.

Wright resists the death of class counter-narrative, a discourse whose most prominent member is probably Ulrick Beck. Wright offers a supple class analysis and backs it up with actual results. His concept of class has three dimensions: property, authority, expertise. His view of class structure offers class locations at three levels, which do not always neatly overlap. Relations of property generates the class locations of employers, petit-bourgeois, employees. Relations of authority generates the locations of managers, supervisors, the supervised and managed. Relations of expertise generate the locations of professionals, the skilled, the nonskilled.

He is interested, for example, in the “permeability” (146) of class boundaries, so he looks at three kinds of class connection: intergenerational mobility, cross-class friendship, cross-class households. He finds the property boundary the least permeable – a result that won’t surprise Marxists. Class connections between workers and employers is limited. The employee / petit bourgeois boundary is more permeable. Wright frankly acknowledges that in the United States, racial boundaries may be even less permeable, but that does not negate the usefulness of the category of class. Class is only a modest predictor, however “class often performs as well or better than many other social structural variables in predicting a variety of aspects of attitudes.” 

David Grusky and Kim Weedon offer what Wright classifies as a Durkheimian analysis of class in which occupation are the unit of analysis. They see class homogeneity only at the micro, occupational level, not in ‘big’ concepts of class. Its more about actual labor markets and how they define occupations. Such occupations act on behalf of members, extract rents if they can, and shape life chances. For them, even academic sociologists and economists count as different ‘classes.’ Which might be the beginnings of an approach to how academics, at a time when, under the threat of vectoral power, their life chances seem diminishing and their means of opportunity hoarding to be failing, cannot quite come together and act on shared interests.

The Durkheimian approach focuses on selection and self-selection into closed groups who interact more with each other than with other groups. Licensing and the formal definition of occupations play a role here. This works well for explaining individual-level outcomes. Wright claims that except in the study of education, income and wealth, this micro approach works better than macro ones of a more Weberian or Marxist kind. The Durkheimians are good on lifestyles, tastes, political and social attitudes.

The key to Weberian theories of class for Wright is opportunity hoarding or social closure, by such means as credentialing, licensing, the color bar, gender exclusions. One could even see labor unions as a form of opportunity hoarding from the point of view of precarious workers, but we’ll come back to that.

As Wright points out, perhaps the most important mechanism of opportunity hoarding is private property itself. “The core class division within both Weberian and Marxian traditions of sociology between capitalists and workers can therefore be understood as reflecting a specific form of opportunity hoarding enforced by the legal rules of property rights.” 

Wright brings into the Weberian theoretical frame the Marxist concept of antagonistic classes. Advantages are causally linked to disadvantages “The rich are rich because the poor are poor.” (8) The Marxist concept of exploitation and domination are about control over the lives of others. “Exploitation refers to the acquisition of economic benefits from the laboring activity of those who are dominated.” 

It could be argued that class is peripheral to Weber’s work, but his writings on ancient slavery seem close to Marx. Unlike concepts such as status and party, class need not generate identity or collective action. And hence does not fit well with Weber’s habitual explanatory modes.

Both Marx and Weber see property as fundamental to a relational concept of class. Both grasp distinction between objectively defined class and subjectively lived class. Both thought humans followed material interest in the long run. Weber was much less inclined to think classes would polarize and become the key social dynamic. Marx shared Weber’s view that status groups impeded the effects of the market and constitute an alternative basis of collective action. Both thought the rationalization of market relations would abolish status groups in time.

Marx thought this simplified class whereas Weber did not. Weber thought class determined life chances within rationalized society. He was less interested in deprivation than in instrumental rationality. Marx was more interested in class exploitation in production; Weber in class as factor in determining life chances in the market. Wright: “Marxist class analysis includes the Weberian causal processes, but adds to them a causal structure within production itself.”

For Wright, class in Weber is closely connected to the theme of rationalization. Of Weber’s three sources of power, he conceives of both non-rational and rational forms. Thus the power-source that is honor can appear as ranks and titles, or as a meritocracy. Authority can appear as patriarchal or in a rational-legal form. And material sources of power can appear as consumption groups or as class.

Class is thus part of rationalization, part of the abolition of traditional peasantry, part of the transition from landed aristocracy to agricultural entrepreneurs. Class is part of the rise of the calculation of material interest. The peasant, who owes a duty to the baron, becomes the farmer who pays rent to the landlord.  “While class per se may be a relatively secondary theme in Weber’s sociology, it is, nevertheless, intimately linked to one of his most pervasive theoretical preoccupations – rationalization.”

My question here would be to ask: why one would think, if this has given rise to two kinds of rationalizing class antagonism that overlapped and interfered with each other, why might it not give rise to a third? The farmer-landlord antagonism arose out of the ruins of feudalism. The efficiencies in agricultural production that came with this rationalization threw off a surplus population what would become urban workers, in an antagonistic relation to capitalists. And yet landlords and capitalists also had interests that contradicted each other. This is the central theme of David Ricardo’s political economy: the opposition between landlord and capitalist. But did rationalization stop, with the creation of classes of farmer and worker? What happens when the production, not of food or products, but of new information itself becomes rationalized?

Weber did not have a lot to say about labor, but where he did, it was in terms of work discipline. Employers are free to hire and fire. Workers lack ownership, but workers are responsible for their own social reproduction. These are the conditions under which indirect compulsion operates. But it raises the problem of how to get maximum labor effort. Wright: “running throughout Weber’s work is the view that rationalization has perverse effects that systematically threaten human dignity and welfare.” (52) One sees this clearly in the latest impositions on the labor process, such as Uber or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which make labor both highly autonomous and yet very closely monitored at the same time.

But Weber does not integrate interest in labor discipline and domination into the category of class. Here we need a bit of Marx, for whom, as Wright says, “exploitation infuses class analysis with a specific kind of normative concern.” (53) Exploitation steers research to questions of class as relational in both exchange and production. “Weber’s treatment of work effort as primarily a problem of economic rationality directs class analysis towards a set of normative concerns centered above all on the interests of capitalists: efficiency and rationalization.” (55) Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno excepted, one might add.

The Wrightian synthesis of Marx and Weber makes exploitation fundamental, but makes particular use of the idea of opportunity hoarding as that which defines the middle class. From there one could build up a picture of the United States as highly polarized by exploitation, and where middle class opportunity hoarding is being eroded by what he calls neoliberalism and deindustrialization, but which I think can be understood more clearly in terms of new forces of production that instrumentalize and rationalize information, giving rise to new property forms and hence new class relations, including an antagonistic relation between a hacker class tasked with making novelty out of information (the condition of it becoming property) and a vectoralist class that owns or controls the vector of information control and domination itself. Here the Marxist perspective of exploitation and the Weberian one of rationalization can be fruitfully combined.

Beside reaching out to those indebted to more classical approaches of Durkheim and Weber, Wright addresses prominent contemporary social theorists who try to offer original perspectives. Here I’ll treat only his papers on those known outside their disciplines, such as Thomas Piketty, Michael Mann, Guy Standing and former New School professor, the late Charles Tilly.

Wright thinks Charles Tilly’s approach to durable inequalities is closer to Marx than Tilly wants to acknowledge. Tilly was against individualist approaches. Explanations of inequalities have to be relational. He offers a structuralism of types of social relations and types of mechanism. The types of social relation are chain, hierarchy, triad, organization, categorical pair –  of which organization is the most durable kind. The types of mechanism are exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation and adaption.

Structural relations are solutions to problems generated within social systems. For example, Problem 1: how to secure stable access to resources?

Solution 1: opportunity hoarding and exploitation. Problem 2: how to sustain and even deepen exploitation and opportunity hoarding, and sustain trust and cooperation among those who benefit? Solution 2: categorical inequality. Problem 3: how to stabilize and reproduce inequality? Solution 3: emulation and adaptation lock distincions in place.

Wright sees Tilly as importing Weberian ideas into a Marxist framework. Culture is not an autonomous superstructure, as in certain post-Marxist theories. Nevertheless, Tilly goes beyond Marx in attempting to subsume gender, race, nationalism under a unitary framework. For Tilly, forms of categorical inequality make exploitation more efficient. One could perhaps usefully extend this to think about how what one might shorthand as algorithmic mechanisms of discrimination, which work so subtly with databases rather than categories, might reinforce exploitation in our time.

Michael Mann’s work is approached a bit differently by Wright. Here his interest is in the disjunction between how his theory treats class and some of his more specific findings. In his theory, Mann sees class only in terms of collective actors, not structural locations. But in particular studies, class location does seem to shape individual interests.

Crucial here is the distinction Wright makes between class structure, class formation and class actors. This might correspond very loosely to three scales of analysis: the Marxist, Weberian and Durkheimian perspectives, respectively. Mann, like Bourdieu, thinks that class structure that produces no class actor is just ‘class on paper,’ an academic exercise. Class has competing forces against it: ethnic, racial, linguistic, national, religious, gender.

Mann’s social theory works off two clusters of concepts: sources of social power and forms of organization that deploy those powers. There are four sources of power: social, ideological, economic, military. The kinds of organization are expressed as dichotomies: collective / distributional; extensive / intensive; authoritative / diffuse.

In Mann’s world, the pursuit of goals requires entering into power organizations that determine the structure of society. This is an agency rather than a structure centered approach. The creation, reproduction or transformation of social structures is the result of goal directed actions. Rather like rational choice theory, Mann starts with actors and their goals, only his approach is not individualistic.

Class in Mann is a kind of collective actor among many that comes together in organizations to deploy economic power resources. He pairs the concept of class with that of segment, which cuts across class and groups actors of different classes in particular industries. Class, for Mann, is of little sociological interest.

In working through the formation of the middle class, Mann actually becomes rather more interested in class structure and class formation. For Mann, the middle class is composed of three separate categories: The petit-bourgeois, professionals and careerists. The economic situation of all three tie their life chances to capital accumulation, and their relation to the state forces them together. They have similar consumpti0on patterns and may all be investors of small amounts of capital. They are held together by ideological and political citizenship.

Mann rejects the classic Marxist distinction between class in itself / class for itself as teleology, but so too does Wright and many more sophisticated Marxists. Wright: “One can believe that class relations and class structures are real and generate real effects without also believing in any one-to-one mapping between the complex structure of class relations and the formation of collective actors.”

Here Wright’s signature concept of contradictory class locations proves very useful. Actual jobs are a mix of property relations and authority relations, and might be located in class terms differently along those axes. Class changes over time and is mediated by family and community. One might be born into the petit-bourgeoisie but end up a waged-worker. One might be working class and marry a shop-keeper, and so on. Class can be a bit messy. One is reminded here of Jean Baudrillard wry remarks in America on Marxist academics managing their stock portfolios.

Thomas Piketty deserves credit for putting inequality back on the agenda as more than a mere problem of unequal opportunity. His empirical work shows that the sharp rise in income of the top 10%, is really that of the 1% or even the .1%. A fair bit of this came from the rise of super salaries rather than income on capital. The CEO ‘class’ are setting their own pay. Here I would want to inquire as to how, in a political economy running on information, the capacity to control (but not entirely own) the means of production accrues to a class that presents itself as the celebrities of information control itself.

The technicalities of Piketty’s work centers on the capital / income ratio as a way of measuring value of capital relative to total income of economy. Wright: “Piketty’s basic argument is that this ratio is the structural basis for the distribution of income between owners of capital and labor: all other things being equal, for a given return on capital, the higherthis ratio, the higher the proportion of national income going to wealth holder.” (133) As  growth declines, the capital/income ratio rises. There’s a rise in the weight of inherited wealth, while concentrations of income also rise. It’s the worst of both worlds: a rentier class plus a meritocracy of appearance-peddlers carving up the world between them at the expense of everyone else.

Pickety starts out with a class analysis, but loses it once he gets into the empirical work, where he treats CEO income as return on labor, as most income tables do. Wright: “In the modern corporation many of the powers-of-capital are held by top executives…. They occupy what I have called contradictory locations within class relations… They exercise their capitalist-derived power within the class relations of the firm to appropriate part of the corporation’s profits for their personal accounts.”

​But is their power really capitalist-derived, or is it now something else? Something like a joint managing of appearances between those who represent a firm to the market, and the market that is supposed to value it. But how to value it when so much of its asset-base takes the form of information? A firm is among other things a brand, a slew of patents, a logistical process, a corral of expert hackers turning out new intellectual property. How can information be turned into value, and an opportunity to be hoarded, when there aren’t really private languages, and information is in principle a non-rivalrous good?

Wright points out that Piketty does not separate out real estate from capital. There might be good reasons to do so. Elsewhere I wrote about Matteo Pasquinelli’s arguments about how landlords now increase their rents by extracting the information-value that the presence of either the hacker class, or of those parts of the middle class that manage rather than create information. One could think further here about Ricardo’s ancient tension between ground-rent and profit, but with the focus shifted from the rural to the urban, and the monopoly rents to be extracted from urban locations.

Guy Standing is the name most associated with the now widely-discussed idea of the precariat as a class rather than just a bad life chance. He offers a three-dimensional definition of class, as structured by relations of production, relations of distribution and (interestingly) relations to the state. He identifies seven classes: plutocracy, salariat, proficians (professional + technician, working class, precariat, unemployed, lumpen-precariat. The precariat have insecure insecure jobs. Their sources of income other than wages disappearing. They become less citizens of the state and more mere denizens. Not only are their jobs precarious, they are vulnerable within relations of distribution and marginal to the state.

The precariat includes people bumped out of working class communities and families. They experience a relative deprivation in relation to a real or imagined past. It also includes migrants and asylum seekers for whom it’s the present that is absent. They have no home. The precariat increasingly includes people falling out of an educated middle class – think academic adjunct labor – who lack a future. For Standing this makes a potentially dangerous class.

Marxists might think of the precariat as workers who (in Weberian terms) experienced poor life chances. Standing thinks there are antagonisms between the precariat and the working class. But do the precariat and workers have distinct interests? Wright thinks not. He thinks they share an interest in changing the game (although one might want to say more here about how workers and the precariat might have different interests about the rules and moves of the game). Unionization, for example, can secure some sort of steady work for the workers in the union at the expense of those without – a side-effect of unionizing academic adjunct labor that is rarely discussed.

Certainly the most controversial of Wright’s propositions is one that picks up on the work of Wolfgang Streeck and others on class struggle and class compromise. For Streek, arguing in a Durkheimian vein, capitalism works better when there are constraints on rational, self-interested action. Capitalism works better when there’s non-capitalist social forms present, based in trust, legitimacy, responsibility.

The wrinkle Wright introduces is to argue that the level of constraint on self-interest that is optimal for capitalists is below that which is optimal for workers. Capital seeks to remove constraints to augment its power even past the point where these are economically inefficient. Wright: “… the zeal to dismantle the regulatory machinery of capitalism since the early 1980s was driven by a desire to undermine the conditions for the empowerment of interests opposed to those of capitalists – even if doing so meant under-regulating capitalism from the point of view of long-term needs of capital accumulation.” 

Although perhaps one could see this a bit differently by separating out the interests of the capitalist and vectoralist class. The regulatory regime emerging in the last quarter century favors the mobility of information – and not just finance – as a means of coordinating economic activity transnationally, at the expense not just of workers but of those forms of capitalist enterprise tied to physical plant and infrastructure, and thus with an interest in local, regional or national relations of trust, legitimacy and responsibility.

Hence we can read Wright’s conclusion against the grain: “Enlightenment of the capitalist class to their long-term interests in a strong civic culture of obligation and trust is not enough; the balance of power also needs to be changed. And since this shift in balance of power will be costly to those in privileged positions, it will only occur through a process of mobilization and struggle.”But what if those capitalists tied to actually producing things in a particular place already know this, but they have lost power to a quite different kind of ruling class, which operates at a higher level of abstraction, or in Weberian terms, at a new stage of rationalization? They own or control the information about things, rather than the things themselves.

Hence to imagine new kinds of class compromise might require a rethink about which classes could compromise. First, one has to have some perspective on the impulse to think all class compromise as illusion or stalemate. Could there be a non-zero-sum game between otherwise antagonistic classes? Working class organization may actually have positive effects for capital accumulation, as it enables problem solving, negotiation, skill development, tech change.

But perhaps that only worked when particular capitalist employers were able to exercise something like a monopoly on the production of a given class of product or in the context of a mercantilist strategy of restricted consumption at home while expanding exports abroad and sustaining rising wages as a return on rising productivity. Such as would describe Japanese manufacturing in its heyday, for example.

Since there’s no way to change the game, Wright looks to those who wanted to change the rules within the game, such as those Scandinavian social democratic inheritors of Ernst Wigforss, such as Walter Korpi and Gøsta Esping-Anderson. But one has to ask if its possible to revive social democratic strategies from the era of the great national manufacturing industries in an era where the information vector greatly lowers the cost of geographic dispersal, and puts manufacturing regions in direct competition with each other.

Wright advocates for some salutary counter-hegemonic strategies, based in geographic rootedness, local public goods and worker’s cooperatives. But one has to wonder if, in an era where the forces of production drive increasingly abstract processes of rationalization, which appear then as transnational legal and treaty forms protecting information as private property, such things are all that viable.

Wright: “Changes in technology may make the anchoring of capitalist production in locally rooted, high productivity small and medium size enterprises more feasible.” (143) One might call this the Brooklyn-effect, after the boom in small business, even manufacturing, there. But while the actual products have some connection to locality, the information infrastructure such localism has to rely on belongs to the vectoralist class. Amazon, Paypal and so forth all get their cut.

Thus, where Wright says, “I assume that an exit from capitalism is not an option in the present historical period” (239) – I think we have to question that assumption, but not in a good way. Maybe this is already not capitalism, but something worse. Its not just a rentier bubble of speculation spooling out of the “real economy.” (244) One could no longer know in advance which part of it is real at all – and perhaps one never could. This is an era not just of so-called neoliberalism’s “aggressive affirmation and enforcement of private property rights” (237) but of the creation of new forms of private property, and new antagonistic relations over it, particularly in the form of intellectual property.

There’s a lot to be said for the way Wright subsumes rival social theories as collaborators within the larger frame of a fairly traditional Marxist sociology. But perhaps that in turn has to be put back in contact with the historical study of the transformation of the forces of production, and in particular how information emerges as both a technical and social force. One could then, as a further step, bring this perspective together with the study of the metabolic rift, wherein the instrumentalizing of information mobilizes the whole planet as a rationalized sphere of resource extraction under the sign of exchange value. To the point where this rationalization becomes completely irrational, threatening to take the whole planet down with it.

Here it might be helpful, in Bogdanovite fashion, to press on some other metaphors at work in Wright, viz: “A society is not a system in the same way that an organism is a system. It is more like the loosely coupled system of an ecosystem in which a variety of processes interact in relatively contingent ways.” (121) In the Anthropocene, it may turn out that ecosystems are the ones that are tightly coupled. But that would be a whole other thought experiment.

Maybe we need an asocial science that rethinks whether one can even conceive of the social as a separate domain of analysis at all. On the one side, the social meshes seamlessly with information technology; on the other, it depends on planetary scale resource mobilization causing catastrophic metabolic rifts. One might be in need of an even ‘bigger’ conceptual framework within which to rest Wright’s partial synthesis as a component part.

taken from:

by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

Accel­er­a­tion­ism pushes towards a future that is more mod­ern, an altern­at­ive mod­ern­ity that neo­lib­er­al­ism is inher­ently unable to gen­er­ate.

1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars.

2. Most significant is the breakdown of the planetary climatic system. In time, this threatens the continued existence of the present global human population. Though this is the most critical of the threats which face humanity, a series of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems exist alongside and intersect with it. Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy reserves, offers the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars. Continued financial crisis has led governments to embrace the paralyzing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages. Increasing automation in production processes including ‘intellectual labour’ is evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it incapable of maintaining current standards of living for even the former middle classes of the global north.

3. In contrast to these ever-accelerating catastrophes, today’s politics is beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to confront and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.

4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found in some variant throughout the leading economic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new global problems present to it, most immediately the credit, financial, and fiscal crises since 2007–8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of deepening. This continuation of the neoliberal project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another round of structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of encouraging new and aggressive incursions by the private sector into what remains of social democratic institutions and services. This is in spite of the immediately negative economic and social effects of such policies, and the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the new global crises.

5. That the forces of right wing governmental, non-governmental, and corporate power have been able to press forth with neoliberalisation is at least in part a result of the continued paralysis and ineffectual nature of much what remains of the left. Thirty years of neoliberalism have rendered most left-leaning political parties bereft of radical thought, hollowed out, and without a popular mandate. At best they have responded to our present crises with calls for a return to a Keynesian economics, in spite of the evidence that the very conditions which enabled post-war social democracy to occur no longer exist. We cannot return to mass industrial-Fordist labour by fiat, if at all. Even the neosocialist regimes of South America’s Bolivarian Revolution, whilst heartening in their ability to resist the dogmas of contemporary capitalism, remain disappointingly unable to advance an alternative beyond mid-Twentieth Century socialism. Organised labour, being systematically weakened by the changes wrought in the neoliberal project, is sclerotic at an institutional level and — at best — capable only of mildly mitigating the new structural adjustments. But with no systematic approach to building a new economy, or the structural solidarity to push such changes through, for now labour remains relatively impotent. The new social movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy.

6. In the absence of a radically new social, political, organisational, and economic vision the hegemonic powers of the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence. At best, the left may be able for a time to partially resist some of the worst incursions. But this is to be Canute against an ultimately irresistible tide. To generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures, and indeed the recovery of the future as such.

1. If any system has been associated with ideas of acceleration it is capitalism. The essential metabolism of capitalism demands economic growth, with competition between individual capitalist entities setting in motion increasing technological developments in an attempt to achieve competitive advantage, all accompanied by increasing social dislocation. In its neoliberal form, its ideological self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social innovations.

2. The philosopher Nick Land captured this most acutely, with a myopic yet hypnotising belief that capitalist speed alone could generate a global transition towards unparalleled technological singularity. In this visioning of capital, the human can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilisations. However Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as essential.

3. Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other. Progress becomes constrained within a framework of surplus value, a reserve army of labour, and free-floating capital. Modernity is reduced to statistical measures of economic growth and social innovation becomes encrusted with kitsch remainders from our communal past. Thatcherite-Reaganite deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian ‘back-to-basics’ family and religious values.

4. A deeper tension within neoliberalism is in terms of its self-image as the vehicle of modernity, as literally synonymous with modernisation, whilst promising a future that it is constitutively incapable of providing. Indeed, as neoliberalism has progressed, rather than enabling individual creativity, it has tended towards eliminating cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of scripted interactions, coupled to global supply chains and a neo-Fordist Eastern production zone. A vanishingly small cognitariat of elite intellectual workers shrinks with each passing year — and increasingly so as algorithmic automation winds its way through the spheres of affective and intellectual labour. Neoliberalism, though positing itself as a necessary historical development, was in fact a merely contingent means to ward off the crisis of value that emerged in the 1970s. Inevitably this was a sublimation of the crisis rather than its ultimate overcoming.

5. It is Marx, along with Land, who remains the paradigmatic accelerationist thinker. Contrary to the all-too familiar critique, and even the behaviour of some contemporary Marxians, we must remember that Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical data available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He was not a thinker who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene within it, understanding that for all its exploitation and corruption, capitalism remained the most advanced economic system to date. Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form.

6. Indeed, as even Lenin wrote in the 1918 text “Left Wing” Childishness:

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries).

7. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration. Similarly, the assessment of left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at least in part, a severe misrepresentation. Indeed, if the political left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.

1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.

2. All of us want to work less. It is an intriguing question as to why it was that the world’s leading economist of the post-war era believed that an enlightened capitalism inevitably progressed towards a radical reduction of working hours. In The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (written in 1930), Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would have their work reduced to three hours a day. What has instead occurred is the progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory.

3. Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, direct them towards needlessly narrow ends. Patent wars and idea monopolisation are contemporary phenomena that point to both capital’s need to move beyond competition, and capital’s increasingly retrograde approach to technology. The properly accelerative gains of neoliberalism have not led to less work or less stress. And rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.

4. We do not want to return to Fordism. There can be no return to Fordism. The capitalist “golden era” was premised on the production paradigm of the orderly factory environment, where (male) workers received security and a basic standard of living in return for a lifetime of stultifying boredom and social repression. Such a system relied upon an international hierarchy of colonies, empires, and an underdeveloped periphery; a national hierarchy of racism and sexism; and a rigid family hierarchy of female subjugation. For all the nostalgia many may feel, this regime is both undesirable and practically impossible to return to.

5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

6. Given the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist objectives (especially since the late 1970s) we surely do not yet know what a modern technosocial body can do. Who amongst us fully recognizes what untapped potentials await in the technology which has already been developed? Our wager is that the true transformative potentials of much of our technological and scientific research remain unexploited, filled with presently redundant features (or pre-adaptations) that, following a shift beyond the short-sighted capitalist socius, can become decisive.

7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.

8. We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and ignorant at worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system.

9. To do so, the left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible. Economic modelling is — simply put — a necessity for making intelligible a complex world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks of blindly accepting mathematical models on faith, yet this is a problem of illegitimate authority not of mathematics itself. The tools to be found in social network analysis, agent-based modelling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist left must become literate in these technical fields.

10. Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. Similar experiments were conducted in 1950s–1960s Soviet economics as well, employing cybernetics and linear programming in an attempt to overcome the new problems faced by the first communist economy. That both of these were ultimately unsuccessful can be traced to the political and technological constraints these early cyberneticians operated under.

11. The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of global society. They establish the basic parameters of what is possible, both behaviourally and ideologically. In this sense, they embody the material transcendental of society: they are what make possible particular sets of actions, relationships, and powers. While much of the current global platform is biased towards capitalist social relations, this is not an inevitable necessity. These material platforms of production, finance, logistics, and consumption can and will be reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.

12. We do not believe that direct action is sufficient to achieve any of this. The habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success. “At least we have done something” is the rallying cry of those who privilege self-esteem rather than effective action. The only criterion of a good tactic is whether it enables significant success or not. We must be done with fetishising particular modes of action. Politics must be treated as a set of dynamic systems, riven with conflict, adaptations and counter-adaptations, and strategic arms races. This means that each individual type of political action becomes blunted and ineffective over time as the other sides adapt. No given mode of political action is historically inviolable. Indeed, over time, there is an increasing need to discard familiar tactics as the forces and entities they are marshalled against learn to defend and counter-attack them effectively. It is in part the contemporary left’s inability to do so which lies close to the heart of the contemporary malaise.

13. The overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be left behind. The fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and inclusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the stage for ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).

14. Democracy cannot be defined simply by its means — not via voting, discussion, or general assemblies. Real democracy must be defined by its goal — collective self-mastery. This is a project which must align politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it is only through harnessing our ability to understand ourselves and our world better (our social, technical, economic, psychological world) that we can come to rule ourselves. We need to posit a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality, to avoid becoming the slaves of either a tyrannical totalitarian centralism or a capricious emergent order beyond our control. The command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of The Network.

15. We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal means to embody these vectors. What is needed — what has always been needed — is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces, resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization is, and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those we disagree with).

16. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need to build an intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with creating a new ideology, economic and social models, and a vision of the good to replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world today. This is an infrastructure in the sense of requiring the construction not just of ideas, but institutions and material paths to inculcate, embody and spread them.

17. We need to construct wide-scale media reform. In spite of the seeming democratisation offered by the internet and social media, traditional media outlets remain crucial in the selection and framing of narratives, along with possessing the funds to prosecute investigative journalism. Bringing these bodies as close as possible to popular control is crucial to undoing the current presentation of the state of things.

18. Finally, we need to reconstitute various forms of class power. Such a reconstitution must move beyond the notion that an organically generated global proletariat already exists. Instead it must seek to knit together a disparate array of partial proletarian identities, often embodied in post-Fordist forms of precarious labour.

19. Groups and individuals are already at work on each of these, but each is on their own insufficient. What is required is all three feeding back into one another, with each modifying the contemporary conjunction in such a way that the others become more and more effective. A positive feedback loop of infrastructural, ideological, social and economic transformation, generating a new complex hegemony, a new post-capitalist technosocial platform. History demonstrates it has always been a broad assemblage of tactics and organisations which has brought about systematic change; these lessons must be learned.

20. To achieve each of these goals, on the most practical level we hold that the accelerationist left must think more seriously about the flows of resources and money required to build an effective new political infrastructure. Beyond the ‘people power’ of bodies in the street, we require funding, whether from governments, institutions, think tanks, unions, or individual benefactors. We consider the location and conduction of such funding flows essential to begin reconstructing an ecology of effective accelerationist left organizations.

21. We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital. This mastery must be distinguished from that beloved of thinkers of the original Enlightenment. The clockwork universe of Laplace, so easily mastered given sufficient information, is long gone from the agenda of serious scientific understanding. But this is not to align ourselves with the tired residue of postmodernity, decrying mastery as proto-fascistic or authority as innately illegitimate. Instead we propose that the problems besetting our planet and our species oblige us to refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we cannot predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically likely ranges of outcomes. What must be coupled to such complex systems analysis is a new form of action: improvisatory and capable of executing a design through a practice which works with the contingencies it discovers only in the course of its acting, in a politics of geosocial artistry and cunning rationality. A form of abductive experimentation that seeks the best means to act in a complex world.

22. We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society. The movement towards a surpassing of our current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more rational global society. We believe it must also include recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of a more innocent moment. Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of imagination in our own time, and offer the promise of a future that is affectively invigorating, as well as intellectually energising. After all, it is only a post-capitalist society, made possible by an accelerationist politics, which will ever be capable of delivering on the promissory note of the mid-Twentieth Century’s space programmes, to shift beyond a world of minimal technical upgrades towards all-encompassing change. Towards a time of collective self-mastery, and the properly alien future that entails and enables. Towards a completion of the Enlightenment project of self-criticism and self-mastery, rather than its elimination.

23. The choice facing us is severe: either a globalised post-capitalism or a slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological collapse.

24. The future needs to be constructed. It has been demolished by neoliberal capitalism and reduced to a cut-price promise of greater inequality, conflict, and chaos. This collapse in the idea of the future is symptomatic of the regressive historical status of our age, rather than, as cynics across the political spectrum would have us believe, a sign of sceptical maturity. What accelerationism pushes towards is a future that is more modern — an alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate. The future must be cracked open once again, unfastening our horizons towards the universal possibilities of the Outside.

http://syntheticedifice.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/accelerate.pdf

by ​McKenzie Wark — January 27, 2017

“Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying. We are hostile aliens, immune from dying.” - The Spaceape

If accelerationism has a key idea, it is that it is either impossible or undesirable to resist or negate the development of the commodity economy coupled with technology. Rather, it has to be pushed harder and faster, that it has to change more rather than less.

It is an idea, a feeling, an orientation that might make most sense among those for whom the past was not that great anyway. Laboria Cuboniks’ text on xenofeminism would be one example of this. But in many ways the original and best text on accelerationism was about Blackness – Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun (Quartet 1998). Since accelerationists tend to be rather ignorant about their own past, this curious fact of the movement having an unacknowledged Black precursor is worth exploring. Eshun: “Everything the media warns you against has already been made into tracks that drive the dance floor.” ​

It’s helpful to make a preliminary distinction here between Black Accelerationism and Afrofuturism, although the former may in some ways be a subset of the latter. Black Accelerationism is a willful pushing forward which includes as part of its method an attempt to clear away certain habits of thought and feeling in order to be open to a future which is attempting to realize itself in the present.

​Afrofuturism is a more general category in which one finds attempts to picture or narrate or conceive of Black existence on other worlds or in future times which may or may not have an accelerationist will to push on. If Black Accelerationism is a particular temporal and spatial concept, Afrofuturism is a genre which includes both temporal and spatial concepts within the general cultural space of science fiction. Which in turn might be a subset of modernism, with its characteristically non-transitive approach to time.

The term Afrofuturism was coined by Mark Dery, drawing on suggestions in the work of Greg Tate. It’s become a lively site of cultural production but also scholarly research, providing a frame for thinking about the science fiction writing of African American authors such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler and much else. It has also become a popular trope in contemporary cultural production, for example in music videos by Beyoncé, FKA Twigs and Janelle Monáe.

​Monáe’s video ‘Many Moons’ contains one of the key figures of the genre. It shows androids performing at an auction for wealthy clients, including white, vampiric plutocrats and a Black military-dictator type. The androids are all Black, and are indeed all Monáe herself. The android becomes the reversal, and yet also the equivalent, of the slave. The slave was a human treated as a non-person and forced to work like a machine; the android is an inhuman treated as a non-person but forced to work like a human.

These figures have a deep past. But first, I want to explore one of their futures, or a related future. After writing More Brilliant than the Sun, Eshun co-founded the Otolith Group with Anjalika Sagar. The first three films they made together, Otolith parts I, II and III, are documented in the volume A Long Time Between Suns (Sternberg Press, 2009). Otilith provides both a ‘future’ and a different cultural space in which to think the Black accelerationism of Eshun’s earlier writing.

Otilith is in the genre of documentary fiction or essay film, descended from the work of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and the Black Audio Film Collective. The conceit organizing Otilith is a character who is a descendent of present-day Otilith co-founder Anjalika Sagar, who lives in orbit around our planet, and who is working through the archives of her own family.

​Otilith links the microgravity environment to planetary crisis, where orbital or agravic space is a heterotopia inviting heightened awareness of disorientation. “Gravity locates the human species.” (6) This is a speculative future in which the species bifurcates, those in microgravity function with a modified otolith, that part of the inner ear that senses the tilting of the body.

Sagar’s imaginary future descendant looks back, through her own ancestors, to the grand social projects of the twentieth century: Indian and Soviet state socialism, the international socialist women’s movement and (as in Anna Tsing) the Non-Aligned Movement. One of Sagar’s ancestors had actually met Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Tereshkova was a former mill worker and (as in Platonov’s Happy Moscow) parachutist, destined for a grand career in Soviet public life.

The last part of Otolith mediates on an unmade film by the great Satjayit Ray, The Alien. Its central conceit, of an alien lost on earth who is discovered by children, strangely enough turned up in the Hollywood film ET. Otolith speculate on whether Hindu polytheism foreclosed the space in which an Indian science fiction might have flourished. The popular Indian comic books that retell the stories of the Gods are indeed something like science fiction and call for a rethinking of the genre.

Otolith also gestures toward American science fiction writer Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), which imagines a quite different future to Otolith, but like it tries to decenter the imaginative future. In this book, the only survivors of a vanished earth are Hindu. Their high-tech society is also highly stratified. Its rulers have God-like powers and the technology to ‘reincarnate.’ The central character, described in the book as an ‘accelerationist’, challenges this class-bound order.

It has often been observed that during the cold war, while much of American literature was basically white boys talking about their dicks, science fiction did a lot of the real cultural work. Zelazny’s book is not a bad example in how far science fiction could get in imagining a non-western world that was neither to be demonized or idealized, and whose agents of change were internal to it. One might note here in passing that the stand-out science fiction work of the last few years is Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem and its sequels, whose story begins in the moment of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Afrofuturism is a landscape of cultural invention that we can put in the context of a plural universe of imagined future times and other spaces, which draw on the raw material of many kinds of historical experience and cultural raw material. And just as Afrofuturism functions as a subset of science fiction modernities, there might also be many kinds of accelerationism. The posthuman ends up being more than one thing if one can get one’s head around currently existing humans as being more than one thing. The orbital posthuman of Otolith might in many ways repeat a figure from that little-known accelerationist classic, JD Bernal’sThe World, The Flesh and the Spirit (1929). But it does so inflected by particular cultural histories.

Which brings me to More Brilliant than the Sun (Quartet 1998). Like Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, it is a text whose strategies include putting pressure on language through neologisms and portmanteau constructs, in order to let the future in to the present. Eshun sets himself against modes of writing about Black music that are designed to resist hearing anything new. “The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.” (-1) Thus, “the rhythmachine is locked in a retarded innocence.” (-7) You are not supposed to analyze the groove, or find a language for it. Music writing becomes a futureshock absorber. “You reserve your nausea for the timeless classic.” Eshun’s interest is rather in “Unidentified Audio Objects.”

We no longer have roots we have aerials. Eshun is resistant to that writing that wants the authentic and the same in its music. That wants to locate it in organic community, whether in the Mississippi delta for the blues or the burning Bronx for hip hop. He is resistant to the validating figure of ‘the street’ as the mythical social or public place where the real is born.  Eshun: “From the Net to arcade simulations games, civil society is all just one giant research-and-development wing of the military. The military industrial complex has advanced decades ahead of civil society, becoming a lethal military entertainment complex. The MEC reprograms predatory virtual futures. Far from being a generative source for popculture, as Trad media still quaintly insists, the street is now the playground in which low-end developments of military technology are unleashed, to mutate themselves.” (85) As Black Lives Matter has so consistently confirmed.

For Eshun, disco is “audibly where the 21st century begins.” (-6). Even if most genealogies of pop delete its intimations of the sonic diaspora of Afrofuturism. Like Paul Gilroy, Eshun thinks Black culture as diasporic rather than national, but unlike Gilroy, he is not interested in a critical negation of the limits of humanism in the name of a more expansive one. His Black culture “alienates itself from the human; it arrives from the future.” (-5) It refuses the human as a central category. If the human is not a given, then neither can there be a Black essence. There’s no ‘keeping it real’ in this book. The writer’s job is to be a sensor rather than a censor.

The field of study here is not so much music itself as the ambiences music co-generates with spaces, sound systems, and indeed bodies. It’s not an aesthetics of music so much as what the late Randy Martin would have recognized as a kinaesthetics. One could even see it as a branch of psychogeography, but not of walking – of dancing.

The dance does not reveal some aspect of the human, but rather has the capacity to make the human something else. Eshun follows Lyotard in extending Nietzsche’s insistence that the human does not want the truth, here the human craves the inauthentic and the artificial. This is the basis of its accelerationism: the objective is to encourage machine-made music’s “despotic drive” of music to subsume both its own past and the presence of the human body. (-4) Black accelerationism, operating mostly but not exclusively through music, aims “to design, manufacture, fabricate, synthesize, cut, paste and edit a so-called artificial discontinuum for the futurerhythmachine.” (-3) As in Hiroki Azuma, machines don’t alienate people. They can make you feel more intensely. They enable a hyper-embodiment rather than disembodiment.

I want to work backwards through the sonic material Eshun feels his way through, perhaps imagined through some equivalent future descendant of Eshun’s to the future descendent of his collaborator Sagar. We can already imagine a future in which the futures of Afrofuturism are no more, but which might be residues from which to create still others. Besides, it’s a matter of perspective. Rather than think of a future that extends and repeats a past, we could imagine a future that selects and edits from a past, according to selective habit as yet unknown. It’s the opposite of what Eshun, punning on Marshall McLuhan, calls “(r)earview hearing.”

What’s not to like about late nineties Detroit techno? Here we might start with what for Eshun was one of the end points. Drexciya is an unidentifiable sonic object that comes with its own Afrofuturist myth. The Drexciyans navigate the depths of the Black Atlantic. They are a webbed mutant marine subspecies descended from pregnant slaves who were thrown overboard during the middle passage.

Drexciya use electronic sound and beats to replay the alien abduction of slavery as sonic fiction, or as what Sun Ra called an alterdestiny. As Lisa Nakamura shows, certain popular Afrofuturist material like the Matrix movies, make the Black or the African the more authentically human and rooted. What appeals to Eshun is the opposite claim: that Blackness can accelerate faster away from the human. It’s an embrace rather than a refutation of the slave-machine figure, pressing it into service in pressing on.

There was a time when avant-garde music was beatless. Drum and bass went in the opposite direction: “drumsticks become knitting needles hitting electrified bedsprings at 180bpm.” (69) The sensual topology offered by 4hero or A Guy Called Gerald use drum machines not to mimic the human drummer but replace it, to create abstract sonic environments that call the body into machinic patterns of movement. “Abstract doesn’t mean rarified or detached but the opposite: the body stuttering on the edge of a future sound, teetering on the brink of new speech.” 

Rhythm becomes the lead instrument, as on A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology, (1995) “dappling the ears with micro-discrepancies…. When polyrhythm phase-shifts into hyper-rhythm, it becomes unaccountable, compounded, confounding. It scrambles the sensorium, adapts the human into a ‘distributed being’ strung out across the webbed spider-nets and computational jungles of the digital diaspora.” 

One could say more about how quite particular musical technologies program in advance a kind of phase-space of possible sonic landscapes. The human sound-maker is then not the author but rather the output of the machine itself. For Eshun this is a way to positively value the figure of Blackness as close to the machine-like and remote from the fully ‘human.’ Such a construct of race rather over-values the human. And if whiteness is supposedly most close to the human, then there’s every reason to think less of the human as a category in the first place. This rhetorical move is central to Black accelerationism. The coupling of Blackness with the machinic is what is to be valued and accelerated, as an overcoming of both whiteness and the human.

If there’s a sonic precursor and stimulator for that line of thought, its acid house music as a playing out of the unintended possibilities of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. It was meant as a bass accompaniment for musicians to practice to, but sonic artists such as Phuture made it a lead instrument, exploring its potential not to imitate bass but to make otherworldly sounds. Eshun: “Nothing you know about the history of music is any help whatsoever.”

Eshun mostly works his way around hip hop, being rather disinterested in its claims to street authenticity, not to mention its masculine bravado. He makes an exception for the late eighties work of the Ultramagnetic MCs. Here the song is in ruins, language is reduced to phonemes. The rapper becomes an abstract sound generator, dropping science. Eshun quotes Paul Virilio from Pure War (62), to the effect that “science and technology develop the unknown.” (29). Science is associated not with what is demonstrated or proven but the opposite, which might be the condition of possibility of science in the more conventional sense.

As is common among those who read a lot of Deleuze last century, Eshun favors an escape from the rational and the conscious, a slipping past the borders into the domain of affections and perceptions. In the language of Raunig and Lazzarato, it’s an attempt to slip past the individual into a space of dividual parts, in this case, of skins rippling with sonic sensation. It’s not consciousness raising so much as consciousness razing.

Here, sound that works on the skin more than the ear, the animated body rather than the concentrating ear, might take the form of feedback, fuzz, static. In the eighties these were coming to be instruments in themselves rather than accidental or unwanted byproducts of instruments that made notes. One can hear (and feel) this in the Jungle Brothers or Public Enemy. The sound of a new earth, a Black planet.

It is not the inhuman or the nonhuman or the over-human that is to be dreaded. What one might try to hear around is rather be the human as a special effect.  “The unified self is an amputated self” (38) The sonic can produce what the textual always struggles to generate – a parallel processing of alternate states or points of view. This is not so much a double consciousness as the mitosis of the I. This is a sonic psychogeography that already heard the turbulent information sphere that Tiziana Terranova conceptualizes. But its more visceral than conceptual, or rather, both at once: “concepts are fondled and licked, sucked and played with.” 
​
Of the recognized hip hop pioneers, the most lyrically and conceptually adventurous was the late Rammellzee, who worked in graffiti, sculpture and visual art as well as producing some remarkable writings, all bound together with a gothic futurist style he called Ikonokast Panzerism. His work appeared always with a layer of armor to protect it from a hostile world. He already saw the hip hop world of the streets and the police as a subset of a larger militarization of all aspects of life. His particular struggle was already against the military perceptual complex, and his poetic figure for this was the attempt to “assassinate the infinity sign.” 

Rammellzee ingested and elaborated on possibilities opened up by the discovery of the possibility latent in the direct-drive turntable of the breakbeat. ‘Adventures on the Wheels of Steel’ could stand-in as an emblem of that moment. Breakbeat opens up the possibility of the studio as a research center for isolating and replicating beats. The dj becomes a groove-robber rather than an ancestor worshipper.  “Hiphop is therefore not a genre so much as an omni-genre, a conceptual approach towards sonic organization rather than a particular sound in itself.”
​
The turntable becomes a tone generator, the cut a command, discarding the song, automating the groove. It’s a meta-technique for making new instruments out of old ones. Of course, John Cage had already been there, arriving at the turntable not through encounters with gay disco so much as through a formalist avant-garde tradition. As Eshun wryly notes: “Pop always retroactively rescues unpop from the prison of its admirers.”

Couple the turntable with the Emulator sampler and you have a sonic production universe through which you can treat the whole of recorded sound as what Azuma thinks of as a database rather than as a grand narrative. Or rather, that techno-sonic universe can produce you. In Eshun’s perspective, the tech itself authors ways of being. The Emulator sampler discovers the sampled break and uses Marley Marl as its medium.
​
New sounds are accidents discovered by machines. “Your record collection becomes an immense time machine that builds itself through you.”  The machine compels the human towards its parameters. The producer is rather like the gamer, as I understood the figure in Gamer Theory: an explorer of the interiority of the digital rather than romantic revolt beyond it. Digital sound reveals the body to itself, as a kind of sensational mathematics for kinaesthetes.

If there is a ‘Delta blues origin story’ here for digital Black music, it is an ironic one. It is the German band Kraftwerk. But rather than deliegitimizing Black digital music, Eshun has an affirmative spin on this. Black producers heard themselves in this European machine music. They heard an internal landscape toward which to disappear. Sonic engineers such as Underground Resistance volunteer for internal exile, for stealth and obfuscation. Even for passing as the machine: Juan Atkins releasing works under the name Model 500.

“Detroit techno is aerial, it transmits along routes through space, is not grounded by the roots of any tree…. Techno disappears itself from the street, the ghetto and the hood…. The music arrives from another planet.” (101-102) A production entity like Cybotron “technofies the biosphere.” (29) Or escapes from it, building instead a city of time. “Escapism is organized until it seizes the means of perception and multiplies the modes of sensory reality… Sonic Fiction strands you in the present with no way of getting back to the 70s…. Sonic Fiction is the manual for your own offworld breakout, re-entry program, for entering Earth’s orbit and touching down on the landing strip of your senses…. To technofy is to become aware of the co-evolution of machine and human, the secret life of machines, the computerization of the world, the programming of history, the informatics of reality.”

The dj intensifies estrangement, creating alien sound design. Music making is deskilled, allowing for more hearing, less manual labor. The sound processes listeners into its content. Detroit techno comes with a plethora of heteronyms, in parallel rather than serial like Bowie. And it counter-programs against the sensuality of Funkadelic. “Techno triggers a delibidinal economics of strict pulses, gated signals – with techno you dance your way into constriction.” (107) It favors the affectless voice over the glossolalia of soul.

Techno is funk for androids escaping from the street and from labor. “Techno secedes from the logic of empowerment which underpins the entire African American mediascape.” (114) As in Donna Haraway, the machinic and Blackness are both liminal conditions in relation to the human, but treated not as an ironic political myth, but as program to implement with all deliberate speed. “There is a heightened awareness in HipHop, fostered through comics and sci-fi, of the manufactured, designed and posthuman existence of African-Americans. African aliens are snatched by African slave-traders, delivered to be sliced, diced and genetically designed by whiteface fanatics and cannibal Christians into American slaves, 3/5 of their standardized norm, their Westworld ROM.”

In somewhat Deleuzian terms, Eshun traces a line of flight from Blackness through the machine to becoming-imperceptible.  “Machine Music therefore arrives as unblack, unpopular and uncultural, an Unidentified Audio Object with no ground, no roots and no culture.” But far from erasing Blackness, this disappearance is only possible through Blackness or its analogs.

The digital soundscape is a break in both method and style from the analog that it subsumed, and which in turn processed earlier forms of media technology after its own affordances. Key moments here might be George Clinton’s Funkadelic and Lee Perry’s Black Ark. These versions of analog signal processing took pop presence and processed it into an echo or loop. Space invades the texture of the song. Distortion becomes its own instrument. “Listening becomes a field trip through a found environment.” 

Funkadelic was an alien encounter imagined through metaphor of the radio radio, connecting human-aliens to station WEFUNK, “home of the extraterrestrial brothers.” Its infectious, repetitive urding was to give in to the inhuman, to join the Afronauts funking up the galaxy. Built out of tapeloops, doo-loops, mixadelics and advertising slogans for non-existent products. Underneath the off-pop hooks, Funkadelic altered the sensory hierarchy of the pop song. “The ass, the brain and the spine all change places….  The ass stops being the behind, and moves up front to become the booty.”  This was not the bodyshape proposed by pop. “Moog becomes a slithering cephalopod tugging at your hips.” 

Funkadelic accelerated and popularized sonic concepts that in part came from jazz, or more specifically what Eshun calls the jazz fission of the 70s. This encompasses the cybernetic, space age jazz of George Russell, “a wraithscape of delocalized chimes… Russell’s magnetic mixology accelerates a discontinuum in which the future arrives from the past.” (4-5) Also in this bag are the 70s albums of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, where effects pedals become instruments in their own right. Here’s Eshun evoking the sound of Herbie Hancocks’s Hornets: “Moving through the echoplex, construction is cloned from a singular sensation into an environment that dunks you headfirst in a horde of heat-seeking killer bees.”

Effects defect from causes, detach from instruments. It’s the expansion of an era when industrial communication split sounds from sources, as R Murray Schafer has already suggested. It was hard to hear at first. Take, for instance Alice Coltrane’s controversial remixing of John Coltrane’s Living Space. Which in turn might be made possible by Sun Ra’s work from the mid-50s onwards, with his alternate Black cosmology. For Sun Ra, to be Black is not to be figuratively the Israelite, fleeing bondage, but to actually be descended from the Egyptians, to belong to a despotic power – which rules elsewhere in the galaxy. Where soul music would affirm Blackness as the legacy of the suffering human; Ra is an alien god from the future. This is not alienation by affirmation of the alien.

Sun Ra lends himself to an Afrofuturist reading, which would highlight his claim to be from Jupiter, to be the author of an alterdestiny. I think in Eshun there’s a more specifically Black accelerationist reading, or perhaps hearing, or maybe sensing. It’s not an alternative to this world, but a pressing on of a tendency, where through the exclusion from the human that is Blackness an escape hatch appears in an embrace of one other thing that is also excluded: the machinic. Would that it could have been closer to those other exclusions Haraway notes. Sun Ra’s Arkestra was for a long time a male monastic cult.

Accelerationism is often presented as a desire for a superseding of a merely human model of cognition, but it is still rather tied to a valuing of cognition that has particular cultural roots. Perhaps cognition is not up to speed. Eshun: “There’s a sense in which the nervous system is being reshaped by beats for a new kind of state, for a new kind of sensory condition. Different parts of your body are actually in different states of evolution. Your head may well be lagging quite a long way behind the rest of your body.”

​Otolith II posed two questions: “Capital, as far as we know, was never alive. How did it reproduce itself? How did it replicate? Did it use human skin?” (26) The operative word here is skin, implicated as it is in what Gilroy calls the crisis of raciology. Perhaps one could ask if capitalism has already superseded itself, and done so first by passing through the pores of the skin of those it designates others. But one might wonder whether, if this is not capitalism, it might not be something worse. Eshun already has an aerial attuned to that possibility, filtered through the sensibility of (for example) Detroit techno, with its canny intimations of the subsuming of the street into a militarized surveillance order, from which one had best discreetly retire.

One could keep searching back through the database of Afrofuturism, beyond Eshun’s late twentieth century forays, as Louis Chude-Sokei does in The Sound of Culture. As it turns out, what is perhaps the founding text of Futurism is a perversely Afrofuturist one: Marinetti’s Mafarka: The Futurist (1910). It’s an exotic tale of an Islamic prince’s victory over an African army, and his desire to beget a son, part bird, part machine, who can rise up to conquer the sun — and is here perhaps the origin of the desire that gives Eshun his title. Or one might mention Samuel Butler’s anti-accelerationist Erewhon (1872), the ur-text on the human as the reproductive organ for the machine. Its imaginary landscape bares the traces of Butler’s experience in New Zealand, in the wake of colonial wars against the Maori.

It may turn out that the whole question of acceleration is tied to the question of race. Haraway usefully thinks the spatial equivalence of the non-white, the non-man, the non-human in relation to a certain humanist language. But thought temporally, humanism has a similar problem. Spatially, it is troubled by what is above it (the angelic) or below it (the animal); temporally, it is troubled by what is prior to it (the primitive) or what supersedes it, including a great deal of race-panic about being over-taken by the formerly primitive colonial or enslaved other. Particularly of that other, in its unthinking, machine-like labor, starts to look like the new machines coming to replace the human. In this regard, the rhetorical strategy of Black accelerationism is to positively revalue what had been previously negative and racist figures. Such an intentional reversal of perspective may be a necessary step for any accelerationism that wants to do more than repeat the old figures, unawares.

I would like to thank the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School. This piece was written during a writing retreat at the National Arts Club for grantees of the Center. 

taken from ​ here

A body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or the functions it fulfills. On the plane of consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. The credit goes to Spinoza for calling attention to these two dimensions of the Body, ​and for having defined the plane of Nature as pure longitude and latitude. Latitude and longitude are the two elements of a cartography. 

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. When demonology expounds upon the diabolical art of local movements and transports of affect, it also notes the importance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious particles, favorable conditions for these transports. Tales must contain haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects. Among types of civilizations, the Orient has many more individuations by haecceity than by subjectivity or substantiality: the haiku, for example, must include indicators as so many floating lines constituting a complex individual. In Charlotte Bronte, everything is in terms of wind, things, people, faces, loves, words. Lorca's "five in the evening," when love falls and fascism rises. That awful five in the evening! We say, "What a story!" "What heat!" "What a life!" to designate a very singular individuation. The hours of the day in Lawrence, in Faulkner. A degree of heat, an intensity of white, are perfect individualities; and a degree of heat can combine in latitude with another degree to form a new individual, as in a body that is cold here and hot there depending on its longitude. Norwegian omelette. A degree of heat can combine with an intensity of white, as in certain white skies of a hot summer. This is in no way an individuality of the instant, as opposed to the individuality of permanences or durations. A tear-off calendar has just as much time as a perpetual calendar, although the time in question is not the same. There are animals that live no longer than a day or an hour; conversely, a group of years can be as long as the most durable subject or object. We can conceive of an abstract time that is equal for haecceities and for subjects or things. Between the extreme slownesses and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy, Michel Tournier places meteorology, where meteors live at our pace: "A cloud forms in the sky like an image in my brain, the wind blows like I breathe, a rainbow spans the horizon for as long as my heart needs to reconcile itself to life, the summer passes like vacation drifts by." But is it by chance that in Tournier's novel this certitude can come only to a twin hero who is deformed and desubjectified, and has acquired a certain ubiquity?34 Even when times are abstractly equal, the individuation of a life is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support. It is not the ​same Plane: in the first case, it is the plane of consistency or of composition of haecceities, which knows only speeds and affects; and in the second case, it is the altogether different plane of forms, substances, and subjects. And it is not in the same time, the same temporality. Aeon: the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened. Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject.35 Boulez distinguishes tempo and nontempo in music: the "pulsed time" of a formal and functional music based on values versus the "nonpulsed time" of a floating music, both floating and machinic, which has nothing but speeds or differences in dynamic.36 In short, the difference is not at all between the ephemeral and the durable, nor even between the regular and the irregular, but between two modes of individuation, two modes of temporality. 

We must avoid an oversimplified conciliation, as though there were on the one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type. For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that. When the face becomes a haecceity: "It seemed a curious mixture that simply made do with time, weather and these people."37 You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it. A cloud of locusts carried in by the wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at full moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life. The street enters into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters into composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into composition with each other. At most, we may distinguish assemblage haecceities (a body considered only as longitude and latitude) and interassemblage haecceities, which also mark the potentialities of becoming within each assemblage (the milieu of intersection of the longitudes and latitudes). But the two are strictly inseparable. Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o'clock is this animal! This animal is this place! "The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road," cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities. The street is as much a part of the omnibus-horse assemblage as the Hans assemblage the becoming-horse of which it initiates. We are all five o'clock in the evening, or another hour, or rather two hours simultaneously, the optimal and the pessimal, noon-midnight, but distributed in a variable fashion. The plane of consistency contains only haecceities, along intersecting lines. Forms and subjects are not of that world. Virginia Woolf s walk through the crowd, among the taxis. Taking a walk is a haecceity; never again will Mrs. Dalloway say to herself, "I am this, I am that, he is this, he is that." And "She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.... She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome. 

And it is not the same language, at least not the same usage of language. For if the plane of consistency only has haecceities for content, it also has its own particular semiotic to serve as expression. A plane of content and a plane of expression. This semiotic is composed above all of proper names, verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns. Indefinite article + proper name + infinitive verb constitutes the basic chain of expression, correlative to the least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a semiotic that has freed itself from both formal signifiances and personal subjectifications. In the first place, the verb in the infinitive is in no way indeterminate with respect to time; it expresses the floating, nonpulsed time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure event or of becoming, which articulates relative speeds and slownesses independently of the chronometric or chronological values that time assumes in the other modes. There is good reason to oppose the infinitive as mode and tense of becoming to all of the other modes and tenses, which pertain to Chronos since they form pulsations or values of being (the verb "to be" is precisely the only one that has no infinitive, or rather the infinitive of which is only an indeterminate, empty expression, taken abstractly to designate the sum total of definite modes and tenses). Second, the proper name is no way ​the indicator of a subject; thus it seems useless to ask whether its operation resembles the nomination of a species, according to whether the subject is considered to be of another nature than that of the Form under which it is classified, or only the ultimate act of that Form, the limit of classification.40 The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun take on the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a species. The proper name fundamentally designates something that is of the order of the event, of becoming or of the haecceity. It is the military men and meteorologists who hold the secret of proper names, when they give them to a strategic operation or a hurricane. The proper name is not the subject of a tense but the agent of an infinitive. It marks a longitude and a latitude. If Tick, Wolf, Horse, etc., are true proper names, they are so not by virtue of the specific and generic denominators that characterize them but of the speeds that compose them and the affects that fill them; it is by virtue of the event they are in themselves and in the assemblages—the becoming-horse of Little Hans, the becoming-wolf of the Were [which etymologically means "man"—Trans.], the becoming-tick of the Stoic (other proper names).

​Third, the indefinite article and the indefinite pronoun are no more indeterminate than the infinitive. Or rather they are lacking a determination only insofar as they are applied to a form that is itself indeterminate, or to a determinable subject. On the other hand, they lack nothing when they introduce haecceities, events, the individuation of which does not pass into a form and is not effected by a subject. The indefinite then has maximum determination: once upon a time; a child is being beaten; a horse is falling ... Here, the elements in play find their individuation in the assemblage of which they are a part, independent of the form of their concept and the subjectivity of their person. We have remarked several times the extent to which children use the indefinite not as something indeterminate but, on the contrary, as an individuating function within a collectivity. That is why we are dumbfounded by the efforts of psychoanalysis, which desperately wants there to be something definite hidden behind the indefinite, a possessive, a person. When the child says "a belly," "a horse," "how do people grow up?" "someone is beating a child," the psychoanalyst hears "my belly," "the father," "will I grow up to be like daddy?" The psychoanalyst asks: Who is being beaten, and by whom?41 Even linguistics is not immune from the same prejudice, inasmuch as it is inseparable from a personology; according to linguistics, in addition to the indefinite -article and the pronoun, the third-person pronoun also lacks the determination of subjectivity that is proper to the first two persons and is supposedly the necessary condition for all enunciation.

We believe on the contrary that the third person indefinite, HE, THEY, ​implies no indetermination from this point of view; it ties the statement to a collective assemblage, as its necessary condition, rather than to a subject of the enunciation. Blanchot is correct in saying that ONE and HE—one is dying, he is unhappy—in no way take the place of a subject, but instead do away with any subject in favor of an assemblage of the haecceity type that carries or brings out the event insofar as it is unformed and incapable of being effectuated by persons ("something happens to them that they can only get a grip on again by letting go of their ability to say I").43 The HE does not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first two persons; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the tyranny of subjective or signifying constellations, under the regime of empty redundancies. The contents of the chains of expression it articulates are those that can be assembled for a maximum number of occurrences and becomings. "They arrive like fate... where do they come from, how have they pushed this far .. .?"He or one, indefinite article, proper name, infinitive verb: A HANS TO BECOME HORSE, A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID, THEY ARRIVE HUNS. Classified ads, telegraphic machines on the plane of consistency (once again, we are reminded of the procedures of Chinese poetry and the rules for translation suggested by the best commentators).

We cannot say that one of these three lines is bad and another good, by nature and necessarily. The study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions. According to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Castaneda's Indian Don Juan, there are three or even four dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust, the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition. We can guess what fear is. We are always afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organization that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that. "The values, morals, fatherlands, religions and private certitudes our vanity and self-complacency generously grant us are so many abodes the world furnishes for those who think on that account that they stand and rest amid stable things; they know nothing of the enormous rout they are heading for... in flight from flight."29 We flee from flight, rigidify our segments, give ourselves over to binary logic; the harder they have been to us on one segment, the harder we will be on another; we reterritorialize on anything available; the only segmentarity we know is molar, at the level of the large-scale aggregates we belong to, as well as at the level of the little groups we get into, as well as at the level of what goes on in our most intimate and private recesses. Everything is involved: modes of perception, kinds of actions, ways of moving, life-styles, semiotic regimes. A man comes home and says, "Is the grub ready?", and the wife answers, "What a scowl! Are you in a bad mood?": two rigid segments in confrontation. The more rigid the segmentarity, the more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is, and how it makes us retreat into the first line. 

The second danger, Clarity, seems less obvious. Clarity, in effect, concerns the molecular. Once again, everything is involved, even perception, even the semiotic regime, but this time on the second line. Castaneda illustrates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception to which drugs give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the ​molar structure. That is precisely what clarity is: the distinctions that appear in what used to seem full, the holes in what used to be compact; and conversely, where just before we saw end points of clear-cut segments, now there are indistinct fringes, encroachments, overlappings, migrations, acts of segmentation that no longer coincide with the rigid segmentarity. Everything now appears supple, with holes in fullness, nebulas in forms, and flutter in lines. Everything has the clarity of the microscope. We think we have understood everything, and draw conclusions. We are the new knights; we even have a mission. A microphysics of the migrant has replaced the macrogeometry of the sedentary. But this suppleness and clarity do not only present dangers, they are themselves a danger. First, supple segmentarity runs the risk of reproducing in miniature the affections, the affectations, of the rigid: the family is replaced by a community, conjugality by a regime of exchange and migration; worse, micro-Oedipuses crop up, microfascisms lay down the law, the mother feels obliged to titillate her child, the father becomes a mommy. A dark light that falls from no star and emanates such sadness: this shifting segmentarity derives directly from the most rigid, for which it is indirect compensation. The more molar the aggregates become, the more molecular become their elements and the relations between their elements: molecular man for molar humanity. One deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to knot and annul the mass movements and movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others. But above all, supple segmentarity brings dangers of its own that do not merely reproduce in small scale the dangers of molar segmentarity, which do not derive from them or compensate for them. As we have seen, microfascisms have a specificity of their own that can crystallize into a macro fascism, but may also float along the supple line on their own account and suffuse every little cell. A multitude of black holes may very well not become centralized, and acts instead as viruses adapting to the most varied situations, sinking voids in molecular perceptions and semiotics. Interactions without resonance. Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man. We have overcome fear, we have sailed from the shores of security, only to enter a system that is no less concentricized, no less organized: the system of petty insecurities that leads everyone to their own black hole in which to turn dangerous, possessing a clarity on their situation, role, and mission even more disturbing than the certitudes of the first line. 

Power (Pouvoir) is the third danger, because it is on both lines simultaneously. It stretches from the rigid segments with their overcoding and resonance to the fine segmentations with their diffusion and interactions, and back again. Every man of power jumps from one line to the other, alternating between a petty and a lofty style, the rogue's style and the grandiloquent style, drugstore demagoguery and the imperialism of the high-ranking government man. But this whole chain and web of power is immersed in a world of mutant flows that eludes them. It is precisely its impotence that makes power so dangerous. The man of power will always want to stop the lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in the overcoding machine. But he can do so only by creating a void, in other words, by first stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it within the local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving the assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the "closed vessel."  

​But there is a fourth danger as well, and this is the one that interests us most, because it concerns the lines of flight themselves. We may well have presented these lines as a sort of mutation or creation drawn not only in the imagination but also in the very fabric of social reality; we may well have attributed to them the movement of the arrow and the speed of an absolute—but it would be oversimplifying to believe that the only risk they fear and confront is allowing themselves to be recaptured in the end, letting themselves be sealed in, tied up, reknotted, reterritorialized. They themselves emanate a strange despair, like an odor of death and immolation, a state of war from which one returns broken: they have their own dangers distinct from the ones previously discussed. This is exactly what led Fitzgerald to say: "I had a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set—simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing. ... My self-immolation was something sodden-dark."30 Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything one could? This, precisely, is the fourth danger: the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition. Like Kleist's line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide, double suicide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death. 

We are not invoking any kind of death drive. There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be. The assemblage that draws lines of flight is on the same level as they are, and is of the war machine type. Mutations spring from this machine, which in no way has war as its object, but rather the emission of quanta of deterritorialization, the passage of mutant ​flows (in this sense, every creation is brought about by a war machine). There are many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different origin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic origin and is directed against the State apparatus. One of the fundamental problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it and make it a piece in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institution; and the State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is precisely when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a transformation of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only object left for the war machine after it has lost its power to change. War, it must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus, or even worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition. (Later, we will propose a theory of the complex relation between the war machine and war.)

​This brings us back to the paradox of fascism, and the way in which fascism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State affair: it essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized assemblage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish but that their undertaking would be resumed, all across Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by "deleometers." Klaus Mann's novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely ordinary Nazi speeches and conversations: "Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives. ... In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fiihrer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? . . . Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the frenzied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bodies of the dead!"32 Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is just a matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology. But that is not true. The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations. We prefer to follow Faye's inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of conversations. They always contain the "stupid and repugnant" cry, Long live death!, even at the economic level, where the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction. Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal State: so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the State itself. "The triggering of a hitherto unknown material process, one that is limitless and aimless. . . . Once triggered, its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the indirect strategy effectively places the dominant powers outside the usual categories of space and time. ... It was in the horror of daily life and its environment that Hitler finally found his surest means of governing, the legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right up to the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total war, far from discharging the repulsive nature of its power, normally only increase its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: If the war is lost, may the nation perish. Here, Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his own people, by obliterating the last remaining resources of its life-support system, civil reserves of every kind (potable water, fuel, provisions, etc.)." It was this reversion of the line of flight into a line of destruction that already animated the molecular focuses of fascism, and made them interact in a war machine instead of resonating in a State apparatus. A war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison. 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari/A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: Capitalism and Schizophrenia/​1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity 

​Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First because man is major-itarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white-man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. It is not a question of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how "man" constituted a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority. The majority in a government presupposes the right to vote, and not only is established among those who possess that right but is exercised over those who do not, however great their numbers; similarly, the majority in the universe assumes as pregiven the right and power of man. In this sense women, children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian. It is perhaps the special situation of women in relation to the man-standard that accounts for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman. It is important not to confuse "minoritarian," as a becoming or process, with a "minority", as an aggregate or a state. Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain conditions, but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes, or allows oneself to be reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman. Even Jews must become-Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if this is the case, then becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much as the Jew. Becoming-woman necessary affects men as much as women. In a way, the subject in a becoming is always "man," but only when he enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major identity. As in Arthur Miller's novel, Focus, or Losey's film, Mr. Klein: it is the non-Jew who becomes Jewish, who is swept up in, carried off by, this becoming after being rent from his standard of measure. Conversely, if Jews themselves must become-Jewish, if women must become-woman, if children must become-child, if blacks must become-black, it is because only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, but under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority. Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc., therefore imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority. There is an asymmetrical and indissociable block of becoming, a block of alliance: the two "Mr. Kleins," ​the Jew and the non-Jew, enter into a becoming-Jewish (the same thing happens in Focus).

​A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of all man. A Jew becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. A becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things. You don't deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off. It is because the hero of Focus, the average American, needs glasses that give his nose a vaguely Semitic air, it is "because of the glasses" that he is thrown into this strange adventure of the becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. Anything at all can do the job, but it always turns out to be a political affair. Becoming-minoritarian is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power {puissance), an active micropolitics. This is the opposite of macropolitics, and even of History, in which it is a question of knowing how to win or obtain a majority. As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but to become-black.81 Unlike history, becoming cannot be conceptualized in terms of past and future. Becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to questions of a future and a past of the revolution; it passes between the two. Every becoming is a block of coexistence. The so-called ahistorical societies set themselves outside history, not because they are content to reproduce immutable models or are governed by a fixed structure, but because they are societies of becoming (war societies, secret societies, etc.). There is no history but of the majority, or of minorities as defined in relation to the majority. And yet "how to win the majority" is a totally secondary problem in relation to the advances of the imperceptible. 

Let us try to say it another way: There is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular. The faciality function showed us the form under which man constitutes the majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based: white, male, adult, "rational," etc., in short, the average European, the subject of enunciation. Following the law of arborescence, it is this central Point that moves across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition, depending on which faciality trait is retained: male-(female), adult-(child), white-(black, yellow, or red); rational-(animal). The central point, or third eye, thus has the property of organizing binary distributions within the dualism machines, and of reproducing itself in the principal term of the opposition; the entire opposition at the same time resonates in the central point. The constitution of a ​"majority" as redundancy. Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory, through the position of the central point, its frequency (insofar as it is necessarily reproduced by each dominant point), and its resonance (insofar as all of the points tie in with it). Any line that goes from one point to another in the aggregate of the molar system, and is thus defined by points answering to these mnemonic conditions of frequency and resonance, is a part of the arborescent system.

What constitutes arborescence is the submission of the line to the point. Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating them as "childhood memories," as conjugal, or colonial memories. It is possible to operate by establishing a conjunction or collocation of contiguous points rather than a relation between distant points: you would then have phantasies rather than memories. For example, a woman can have a female point alongside a male point, and a man a male point alongside a female one. The constitution of these hybrids, however, does not take us very far in the direction of a true becoming (for example, bisexuality, as the psychoanalysts note, in no way precludes the prevalence of the masculine or the majority of the "phallus"). One does not break with the arborescent schema, one does not reach becoming or the molecular, as long as a line is connected to two distant points, or is composed of two contiguous points. A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points.83 A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad play on words. A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. If becoming is a block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man's-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other—and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance. The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the orchid produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchid's reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction. A coexistence of two asymmetrical movements that ​combine to form a block, down a line of flight that sweeps away selective pressures. The line, or the block, does not link the wasp to the orchid, any more than it conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying them away in a shared proximity in which the discernibility of points disappears. The line-system (or block-system) of becoming is opposed to the point-system of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible: the rhizome, the opposite of arborescence; break away from arborescence. Becoming is an antimemory. Doubtless, there exists a molecular memory, but as a factor of integration into a majoritarian or molar system. Memories always have a reterritorialization function. On the other hand, a vector of deterritorialization is in no way indeterminate; it is directly plugged into the molecular levels, and the more deterritorialized it is, the stronger is the contact: it is deterritorialization that makes the aggregate of the molecular components "hold together." From this point of view, one may contrast a childhood block, or a becoming-child, with the childhood memory: "a" molecular child is produced. . . "a" child coexists with us, in a zone of proximity or a block of becoming, on a line of deterritorialization that carries us both off—as opposed to the child we once were, whom we remember or phantasize, the molar child whose future is the adult. "This will be childhood, but it must not be my childhood," writes Virginia Woolf. {Orlando already does not operate by memories, but by blocks, blocks of ages, block of epochs, blocks of the kingdoms of nature, blocks of sexes, forming so many becomings between things, or so many lines of deterritorialization). Wherever we used the word "memories" in the preceding pages, we were wrong to do so; we meant to say "becoming," we were saying becoming.

If the line is opposed to the point (or blocks to memories, becoming to the faculty of memory), it is not in an absolute way: a punctual system includes a certain utilization of lines, and the block itself assigns the point new functions. In a punctual system, a point basically refers to linear coordinates. Not only are a horizontal line and a vertical line represented, but the vertical moves parallel to itself, and the horizontal superposes other horizontals upon itself; every point is assigned in relation to the two base coordinates, but is also marked on a horizontal line of superposition and on a vertical line or plane of displacement. Finally, two points are connected when any line is drawn from one to the other. A system is termed punctual'when its lines are taken as coordinates in this way, or as localizable connections; for example, systems of arborescence, or molar and mnemonic systems in general, are punctual. Memory has a punctual organization because every present refers simultaneously to the horizontal line of the flow of time (kinematics), which goes from an old present to the actual ​present, and the vertical line of the order of time (stratigraphy), which goes from the present to the past, or to the representation of the old present. This is, of course, a basic schema that cannot be developed further without running into major complications, but it is the one found in representations of art forming a "didactic" system, in other words, a mnemotechnics. Musical representation, on the one hand, draws a horizontal, melodic line, the bass line, upon which other melodic lines are superposed; points are assigned that enter into relations of counterpoint between lines. On the other hand, it draws a vertical, harmonic line or plane, which moves along the horizontals but is no longer dependent upon them; it runs from high to low and defines a chord capable of linking up with the following chords. Pictorial representation has an analogous form, with means of its own: this is not only because the painting has a vertical and a horizontal, but because the traits and colors, each on its own account, relate to verticals of displacement and horizontals of superposition (for example, the vertical cold form, or white, light and tonality; the horizontal warm form, or black, chromatics and modality, etc.). To cite only relatively recent examples, this is evident in the didactic systems of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian, which necessarily imply an encounter with music. 

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a punctual system: (1) Systems of this kind comprise two base lines, horizontal and vertical; they serve as coordinates for assigning points. (2) The horizontal line can be superposed vertically and the vertical line can be moved horizontally, in such a way that new points are produced or reproduced, under conditions of horizontal frequency and vertical resonance. (3) From one point to another, a line can (or cannot) be drawn, but if it can it takes the form of a localizable connection; diagonals thus play the role of connectors between points of different levels or moments, instituting in their turn frequencies and resonances on the basis of these points of variable horizon or verticon, contiguous or distant.85 These systems are arborescent, mnemonic, molar, structural; they are systems of territorialization or reterritorialization. The line and the diagonal remain totally subordinated to the point because they serve as coordinates for a point or as localizable connections for two points, running from one point to another.

Opposed to the punctual system are linear, or rather multilinear, systems. Free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has this intention. One elaborates a punctual system or a didactic representation, but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it. A punctual system is most interesting when there is a musician, painter, writer, philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it in order to oppose it, like a springboard to jump from. History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it). This is ​not done for provocation but happens because the punctual system they found ready-made, or themselves invented, must have allowed this operation: free the line and the diagonal, draw the line instead of plotting a point, produce an imperceptible diagonal instead of clinging to an even elaborated or reformed vertical or horizontal. When this is done it always goes down in History but never comes from it. History may try to break its ties to memory; it may make the schemas of memory more elaborate, superpose and shift coordinates, emphasize connections, or deepen breaks. The dividing line, however, is not there. The dividing line passes not between history and memory but between punctual "history-memory" systems and diagonal or multilinear assemblages, which are in no way eternal: they have to do with becoming; they are a bit of becoming in the pure state; they are transhistorical. There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line. Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting as opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as opposed to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence). "The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the destruction of which it must vanish. . . . What deed would man be capable of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhistorical?"86 Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems. 

When Boulez casts himself in the role of historian of music, he does so in order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in each case, invents a kind of diagonal running between the harmonic vertical and the melodic horizon. And in each case it is a different diagonal, a different technique, a creation. Moving along this transversal line, which is really a line of deterritorialization, there is a sound block that no longer has a point of origin, since it is always and already in the middle of the line; and no longer has horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own coordinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to another, since it is in "nonpulsed time": a deterritorialized rhythmic block that has abandoned points, coordinates, and measure, like a drunken boat that melds with the line or draws a plane of consistency. Speeds and slownesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes impelling it to proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction, sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once. The musician is in the best position to say: "I hate the faculty of memory, I hate memories." And that is ​because he or she affirms the power of becoming. The Viennese school is exemplary of this kind of diagonal, this kind of line-block. But it can equally be said that the Viennese school found a new system of territo-rialization, of points, verticals, and horizontals that position it in History. Another attempt, another creative act, came after it. The important thing is that all musicians have always proceeded in this way: drawing their own diagonal, however fragile, outside points, outside coordinates and localizable connections, in order to float a sound block down a created, liberated line, in order to unleash in space this mobile and mutant sound block, a haecceity (for example, chromaticism, aggregates, and complex notes, but already the resources and possibilities of polyphony, etc.).87 Some have spoken of "oblique vectors" with respect to the organ. The diagonal is often composed of extremely complex lines and spaces of sound. Is that the secret of a little phrase or a rhythmic block? Undoubtedly, the point now assumes a new and essential creative function. It is no longer simply a question of an inevitable destiny reconstituting a punctual system; on the contrary, it is now the point that is subordinated to the line, the point now marks the proliferation of the line, or its sudden deviation, its acceleration, its slowdown, its furor or agony. Mozart's "microblocks." The block may even be reduced to a point, as though to a single note (point-block): Berg's B in Wozzeck, Schumann's A. Homage to Schumann, the madness of Schumann: the cello wanders across the grid of the orchestration, drawing its diagonal, along which the deterritorialized sound block moves; or an extremely sober kind of refrain is "treated" by a very elaborate melodic line and polyphonic architecture. 

In a multilinear system, everything happens at once: the line breaks free of the point as origin; the diagonal breaks free of the vertical and the horizontal as coordinates; and the transversal breaks free of the diagonal as a localizable connection between two points. In short, a block-line passes amid (au milieu des) sounds and propels itself by its own nonlocalizable middle (milieu). The sound block is the intermezzo. It is a body without organs, an antimemory pervading musical organization, and is all the more sonorous: "The Schumannian body does not stay in place. ... The intermezzo [is] consubstantial with the entire Schumannian oeuvre.... At the limit, there are only intermezzi. ... The Schumannian body knows only bifurcations; it does not construct itself, it keeps diverging according to an accumulation of interludes.... Schumannian beating is panic, but it is also coded ... and it is because the panic of the blows apparently keeps within the limits of a docile language that it is ordinarily not perceived.. . . Let us imagine for tonality two contradictory (and yet concomitant) statuses. On the one hand ... a screen, a language intended to articulate the body.. .according to a known organization... .On the other hand, contra-dictorily... tonality becomes the ready servant of the beats within another level it claims to domesticate". 

​Does the same thing, strictly the same thing, apply to painting? In effect, the point does not make the line; the line sweeps away the deterritorialized point, carries it off under its outside influence; the line does not go from one point to another, but runs between points in a different direction that renders them indiscernible. The line has become the diagonal, which has broken free from the vertical and the horizontal. But the diagonal has already become the transversal, the semidiagonal or free straight line, the broken or angular line, or the curve—always in the midst of themselves. Between the white vertical and the black horizontal lie Klee's gray, Kandinsky's red, Monet's purple; each forms a block of color. This line is without origin, since it always begins off the painting, which only holds it by the middle; it is without coordinates, because it melds with a plane of consistency upon which it floats and that it creates; it is without localizable connection, because it has lost not only its representative function but any function of outlining a form of any kind—by this token, the line has become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a visual block; and under these conditions the point assumes creative functions again, as a color-point or line-point.89 The line is between points, in their midst, and no longer goes from one point to another. It does not outline a shape. "He did not paint things, he painted between things." There is no falser problem in painting than depth and, in particular, perspective. For perspective is only a historical manner of occupying diagonals or transversals, lines of flight [lignes de fuite: here, the lines in a painting moving toward the vanishing point, or point de fuite—Trans.], in other words, of reterritorializing the moving visual block. We use the word "occupy" in the sense of "giving an occupation to," fixing a memory and a code, assigning a function. But the lines of flight, the transversals, are suitable for many other functions besides this molar function. Lines of flight as perspective lines, far from being made to represent depth, themselves invent the possibility of such a representation, which occupies them only for an instant, at a given moment. Perspective, and even depth, are the reterritorialization of lines of flight, which alone created painting by carrying it farther. What is called central perspective in particular plunged the multiplicity of escapes and the dynamism of lines into a punctual black hole. Conversely, it is true that problems of perspective triggered a whole profusion of creative lines, a mass release of visual blocks, at the very moment they claimed to have gained mastery over them. Is painting, in each of its acts of creation, engaged in a becoming as intense as that of music? 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari/A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: Capitalism and Schizophrenia/ Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . . / Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks​

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that. It may very well be that other agencies, moreover very different from one another, have a different appraisal of the animal. One may retain or extract from the animal certain characteristics: species and genera, forms and functions, etc. Society and the State need animal characteristics to use for classifying people; natural history and science need characteristics in order to classify the animals themselves. Serialism and structuralism either graduate characteristics according to their resemblances, or order them according to their differences. Animal characteristics can be mythic or scientific. But we are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion. The Wolf-Man fascinated by several wolves watching him. What would a lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly? Beelzebub is the Devil, but the Devil as lord of the flies. The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing. The louse is a lousing, and so on. What is a cry independent of the population it appeals to or takes as its witness? Virginia Woolfs experiences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with the people she approaches. We do not wish to say that certain animals live in packs. We want nothing to do with ridiculous evolutionary classifications a la Lorenz, according to which there are inferior packs and superior societies. What we are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions within these modes are called for. It is at this point that the human being encounters the animal. 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? In one of his masterpieces, H. P. Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph Carter, who feels his "self reel and who experiences a fear worse than that of annihilation: "Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua. .. . Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings," nor from all of the becomings running through us, "that is the nameless summit of agony and dread."7 Hofmannsthal, or rather Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with a "people" of dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the interstices of his disrupted self that the "soul of the animal bares its teeth at monsterous fate":8 not pity, but unnatural participation. Then a strange imperative wells up in him: either stop writing, or write like a rat. . . If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc. We will have to explain why. Many suicides by writers are explained by these unnatural participations, these unnatural nuptials. Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle. The German preromantic Karl Philipp Moritz feels responsible not for the calves that die but before the calves that die and give him the incredible feeling of an unknown Nature—affect? For the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one's bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings. These are not regressions, although fragments of regression, sequences of regression may enter in.

We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, "my" cat, "my" dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal psychoanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them (when psychoanalysis talks about animals, animals learn to laugh): anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. And then there is a second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes; genus, classification, or State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths, ​in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or models (Jung is in any event profounder than Freud). Finally, there are more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale ... Or once again, cannot any animal be treated in all three ways? There is always the possibility that a given animal, a louse, a cheetah or an elephant, will be treated as a pet, my little beast. And at the other extreme, it is also possible for any animal to be treated in the mode of the pack or swarm; that is our way, fellow sorcerers. Even the cat, even the dog. And the shepherd, the animal trainer, the Devil, may have a favorite animal in the pack, although not at all in the way we were just discussing. Yes, any animal is or can be a pack, but to varying degrees of vocation that make it easier or harder to discover the multiplicity, or multiplicity-grade, an animal contains (actually or virtually according to the case). Schools, bands, herds, populations are not inferior social forms; they are affects and powers, involutions that grip every animal in a becoming just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal. 

Jorge Luis Borges, an author renowned for his excess of culture, botched at least two books, only the titles of which are nice: first, A Universal History of Infamy, because he did not see the sorcerer's fundamental distinction between deception and treason (becomings-animal are there from the start, on the treason side); second, his Manual de zoolog'iafantastica, where he not only adopts a composite and bland image of myth but also eliminates all of the problems of the pack and the corresponding becoming-animal of the human being: "We have deliberately excluded from this manual legends of transformations of the human being, the lobizbn, the werewolf, etc."10 Borges is interested only in characteristics, even the most fantastic ones, whereas sorcerers know that werewolves are bands, and vampires too, and that bands transform themselves into one another. But what exactly does that 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; everybody knows it, but it is discussed only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire ​does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely 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. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates—against itself. This is a far cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, in which the only differences retained are a simple duality between sexes within the same species, and small modifications across generations. For us, on the other hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The Universe does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion. 

These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by contagion, enter certain assemblages; it is there that human beings effect their becomings-animal. But we should not confuse these dark assemblages, which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations such as the institution of the family and the State apparatus. We could cite hunting societies, war societies, secret societies, crime societies, etc. Becomings-animal are proper to them. We will not expect to find filiative regimes of the family type or modes of classification and attribution of the State or pre-State type or even serial organizations of the religious type. Despite appearances and possible confusions, this is not the site of origin or point of application for myths. These are tales, or narratives and statements of becoming. It is therefore absurd to establish a hierarchy even of animal collectivities from the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are lower on the scale and are superseded by State or familial societies. On the contrary, there is a difference in nature. The origin of packs is entirely different from that of families and States; they continually work them from within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other forms of expression. The pack is simultaneously an animal reality, and the reality of the becoming-animal of the human being; contagion is simultaneously an animal peopling, and the propagation of the animal peopling of the human being. The hunting machine, the war machine, the crime machine entail all kinds of becomings-animal that are not articulated in myth, still less in totemism. Dumezil showed that becomings of this kind pertain essentially to the man of war, but only insofar as he is external to families and States, insofar as he upsets filiations and classifications. The war machine is always exterior to the State, even when the State uses it, ​appropriates it. The man of war has an entire becoming that implies multiplicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis and treason, the power of affect. Wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men, men of every animality, secret brotherhoods, animate the battlefields. But so do the animal packs used by men in battle, or which trail the battles and take advantage of them. And together they spread contagion.11 There is a complex aggregate: the becoming-animal of men, packs of animals, elephants and rats, winds and tempests, bacteria sowing contagion. A single Furor. War contained zoological sequences before it became bacteriological. It is in war, famine, and epidemic that werewolves and vampires proliferate. Any animal can be swept up in these packs and the corresponding becomings; cats have been seen on the battlefield, and even in armies. That is why the distinction we must make is less between kinds of animals than between the different states according to which they are integrated into family institutions, State apparatuses, war machines, etc. (and what is the relation of the writing machine and the musical machine to becomings-animal?) 

Our first principle was: pack and contagion, the contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes. But a second principle seemed to tell us the opposite: wherever there is multiplicity, you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that individual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal. There may be no such thing as a lone wolf, but there is a leader of the pack, a master of the pack, or else the old deposed head of the pack now living alone, there is the Loner, and there is the Demon. Willard has his favorite, the rat Ben, and only becomes-rat through his relation with him, in a kind of alliance of love, then of hate. Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a monstrous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick. There is always a pact with a demon; the demon sometimes appears as the head of the band, sometimes as the Loner on the sidelines of the pack, and sometimes as the higher Power (Puissance) of the band. The exceptional individual has many possible positions. Kafka, another great author of real becomings-animal, sings of mouse society; but Josephine, the mouse singer, sometimes holds a privileged position in the pack, sometimes a position outside the pack, and sometimes slips into and is lost in the anonymity of the collective statements of the pack.12 In short, every Animal has its Anomalous. Let us clarify that: every animal swept up in its pack or multiplicity has its anomalous. It has been noted that the origin of the word 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 rules or 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.13 The abnormal can be defined only in terms of characteristics, specific or generic; but the anomalous is a position or set of positions in relation to a multiplicity. Sorcerers therefore use the old adjective "anomalous" to situate the positions of the exceptional individual in the pack. It is always with the Anomalous, Moby-Dick or Josephine, that one enters into alliance to become-animal. 

It does seem as though there is a contradiction: between the pack and the loner; between mass contagion and preferential alliance; between pure multiplicity and the exceptional individual; between the aleatory aggregate and a predestined choice. And the contradiction is real: Ahab chooses Moby-Dick, in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere, and in so doing breaks with the law of the whalers according to which one should first pursue the pack. Penthesilea shatters the law of the pack, the pack of women, the pack of she-dogs, by choosing Achilles as her favorite enemy. Yet it is by means of this anomalous choice that each enters into his or her becoming-animal, the becoming-dog of Penthesilea, the becoming-whale of Captain Ahab. We sorcerers know quite well that the contradictions are real but that real contradictions are not just for laughs. For the whole question is this: What exactly is the nature of the anomalous? What function does it have in relation to the band, to the pack? It is clear that the anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual; that would be to equate it with the family animal or pet, the Oedipalized animal as psychoanalysis sees it, as the image of the father, etc. Ahab's Moby-Dick is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it. Lawrence's becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or domestic relation. Lawrence is another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration because they were able to tie their writing to real and unheard-of becomings. But the objection is raised against Lawrence: "Your tortoises aren't real!" And he answers: Possibly, but my becoming is, my becoming is real, even and especially if you have no way of judging it, because you're just little house dogs . . .14 The anomalous, the preferential element in the pack, has nothing to do with the preferred, domestic, and psychoanalytic individual. Nor is the anomalous the bearer of a species presenting specific or generic characteristics in their purest state; nor is it a model or unique specimen; nor is it the perfection of a type incarnate; nor is it the eminent term of a series; nor is it the basis of an absolutely harmonious correspondence. The anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics. Human tenderness is as foreign to it ​as human classifications. 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." 

If the anomalous is neither an individual nor a species, then what is it? It is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering. This is our hypothesis: a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension, not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the lines and dimensions it encompasses in "intension." If you change dimensions, if you add or subtract one, you change multiplicity. Thus there is a borderline for each multiplicity; it is in no way a center but rather the enveloping line or farthest dimension, as a function of which it is possible to count the others, all those lines or dimensions constitute the pack at a given moment (beyond the borderline, the multiplicity changes nature). That is what Captain Ahab says to his first mate: I have no personal history with Moby-Dick, no revenge to take, any more than I have a myth to play out; but I do have a becoming! Moby-Dick is neither an individual nor a genus; he is the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it. The elements of the pack are only imaginary "dummies," the characteristics of the pack are only symbolic entities; all that counts is the borderline—the anomalous. "To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me." The white wall. "Sometimes I think there is naught beyond. But 'tis enough."15 That the anomalous is the borderline makes it easier for us to understand the various positions it occupies in relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders, and the various positions occupied by a fascinated Self (Moi). It is now even possible to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding the pitfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior collective stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular assemblages they bring into play). In any event, the pack has a borderline, and an anomalous position, whenever in a given space an animal is on the line or in the act of drawing the line in relation to which all the other members of the pack will fall into one of two halves, left or right: a peripheral position, such that it is impossible to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the band, or at the shifting boundary of the band. Sometimes each and every animal reaches this line or occupies this dynamic position, as in a swarm of mosquitoes, where "each individual moves randomly unless it sees the rest of [the swarm] in the same half-space; then it hurries to re-enter the group. Thus stability is assured in catastrophe by a barrier."**' Sometimes it is a specific animal that draws and occupies the borderline, as leader of the pack. Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another nature that no longer belongs to the pack, or never belonged to it, and that ​represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as a trainer, outsider, etc. In any case, no band is without this phenomenon of bordering, or the anomalous. It is true that bands are also undermined by extremely varied forces that establish in them interior centers of the conjugal, familial, or State type, and that make them pass into an entirely different form of sociability, replacing pack affects with family feelings or State intelligibilities. The center, or internal black holes, assumes the principal role. This is what evolutionism sees as progress, this adventure also befalls bands of humans when they reconstitute group familialism, or even authoritarianism or pack fascism.

Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous. The old-time theologians drew a clear distinction between two kinds of curses against sexuality. The first concerns sexuality as a process of filiation transmitting the original sin. But the second concerns it as a power of alliance inspiring illicit unions or abominable loves. This differs significantly from the first in that it tends to prevent procreation; since the demon does not himself have the ability to procreate, he must adopt indirect means (for example, being the female succubus of a man and then becoming the male incubus of a woman, to whom he transmits the man's semen). It is true that the relations between alliance and filiation come to be regulated by laws of marriage, but even then alliance retains a dangerous and contagious power. Leach was able to demonstrate that despite all the exceptions that seemingly disprove the rule, the sorcerer belongs first of all to a group united to the group over which he or she exercises influence only by alliance: thus in a matrilineal group we look to the father's side for the sorcerer or witch. And there is an entire evolution of sorcery depending on whether the relation of alliance acquires permanence or assumes political weight. In order to produce werewolves in your own family it is not enough to resemble a wolf, or to live like a wolf: the pact with the Devil must be coupled with an alliance with another family, and it is the return of this alliance to the first family, the reaction of this alliance on the first family, that produces werewolves by feedback effect. A fine tale by Erckmann and Chatrian, Hugues-le-loup, assembles the traditions concerning this complex situation.

The contradiction between the two themes, "contagion through the animal as pack," and "pact with the anomalous as exceptional being," is progressively fading. It is with good reason that Leach links the two concepts of ​alliance and contagion, pact and epidemic. Analyzing Kachin sorcery, he writes: "Witch influence was thought to be transmitted in the food that the women prepared. . . . Kachin witchcraft is contagious rather than hereditary ... it is associated with affinity, not filiation."19 Alliance or the pact is the form of expression for an infection or epidemic constituting the form of content. In sorcery, blood is of the order of contagion and alliance. It can be said that becoming-animal is an affair of sorcery because (1) it implies an initial relation of alliance with a demon; (2) 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; (3) this becoming itself implies a second alliance, with another human group; (4) this new borderline between the two groups guides the contagion of animal and human being within the pack. There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established. 

​Let us cite pell-mell, not as mixes to be made, but as different cases to be studied: becomings-animal in the war machine, wildmen of all kinds (the war machine indeed comes from without, it is extrinsic to the State, which treats the warrior as an anomalous power); becomings-animal in crime societies, leopard-men, crocodile-men (when the State prohibits tribal and local wars); becomings-animal in riot groups (when the Church and State are faced with peasant movements containing a sorcery component, which they repress by setting up a whole trial and legal system designed to expose pacts with the Devil); becomings-animal in asceticism groups, the grazing anchorite or wild-beast anchorite (the asceticism machine is in an anomalous position, on a line of flight, off to the side of the Church, and disputes the Church's pretension to set itself up as an imperial institution);20 becomings-animal in societies practicing sexual initiation of the "sacred deflowerer" type, wolf-men, goat-men, etc. (who claim an Alliance superior and exterior to the order of families; families have to win from them the right to regulate their own alliances, to determine them according to relations of complementary lines of descent, and to domesticate this unbridled power of alliance).

The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated ​these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always appropriated the war machine in the form of national armies that strictly limit the becomings of the warrior. The Church has always burned sorcerers, or reintegrated anchorites into the toned-down image of a series of saints whose only remaining relation to animals is strangely familiar, domestic. Families have always warded off the demonic Alliance gnawing at them, in order to regulate alliances among themselves as they see fit. We have seen sorcerers serve as leaders, rally to the cause of despotism, create the countersorcery of exorcism, pass over to the side of the family and descent. But this spells the death of the sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. We have seen becoming spawn nothing more than a big domestic dog, as in Henry Miller's damnation ("it would be better to feign, to pretend to be an animal, a dog for example, and catch the bone thrown to me from time to time") or Fitzgerald's ("I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand"). Invert Faust's formula: So that is what it was, the form of the traveling scholar? A mere poodle?

​Exclusive importance should not be attached to becomings-animal. Rather, they are segments occupying a median region. On the near side, we encounter becomings-woman, becomings-child (becoming-woman, more than any other becoming, possesses a special introductory power; it is not so much that women are witches, but that sorcery proceeds by way of this becoming-woman). On the far side, we find becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even becomings-imperceptible. Toward what void does the witch's broom lead? And where is Moby-Dick leading Ahab so silently? Lovecraft's hero encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles. Science fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things imperceptible.23 The properly musical content of music is plied by becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings-animal; however, it tends, under all sorts of influences, having to do also with the instruments, to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the imperceptible appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule. 

If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off. Carlos Castaneda's ​books clearly illustrate this evolution, or rather this involution, in which the affects of a becoming-dog, for example, are succeeded by those of a becoming-molecular, microperceptions of water, air, etc. A man totters from one door to the next and disappears into thin air: "All I can tell you is that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibers."24 All so-called initiatory journeys include these thresholds and doors where becoming itself becomes, and where one changes becoming depending on the "hour" of the world, the circles of hell, or the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms, and cries in variation. From the howling of animals to the wailing of elements and particles. 

Thus packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into each other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when they die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors. For example, the Wolf-Man's pack of wolves also becomes a swarm of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small holes and tiny ulcerations (the theme of contagion): all these heterogeneous elements compose "the" multiplicity of symbiosis and becoming. If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) following which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. It is evident that the Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not only does it border each multiplicity, of which it determines the temporary or local stability (with the highest number of dimensions possible under the circumstances), not only is it the precondition for the alliance necessary to becoming, but it also carries the transformations of becoming or crossings of multiplicities always farther down the line of flight. Moby-Dick is the White Wall bordering the pack; he is also the demonic Term of the Alliance; ​finally, he is the terrible Fishing Line with nothing on the other end, the line that crosses the wall and drags the captain .. . where? Into the void . . . 

The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of logical order to this string, these crossings or transformations. It is already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogeneities, the Wolf-Man's wolves, bees, anuses, little scars. Of course, sorcery always codifies certain transformations of becomings. Take a novel steeped in the traditions of sorcery, Alexandre Dumas's Menem de loups; in a first pact, the man of the fringes gets the Devil to agree to make his wishes come true, with the stipulation that a lock of his hair turn red each time he gets a wish. We are in the hair-multiplicity, hair is the borderline. The man himself takes a position on the wolves' borderline, as leader of the pack. Then when he no longer has a single human hair left, a second pact makes him become-wolf himself; it is an endless becoming since he is only vulnerable one day in the year. We are aware that between the hair-multiplicity and the wolf-multiplicity it is always possible to induce an order of resemblance (red like the fur of a wolf); but the resemblance remains quite secondary (the wolf of the transformation is black, with one white hair). In fact, there is a first multiplicity, of hair, taken up in a becoming-red fur; and a second multiplicity, of wolves, which in turn takes up the becoming-animal of the man. Between the two, there is threshold and fiber, symbiosis of or passage between heterogeneities. 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 two borderlines will string together or form a fiber, 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. No one can say where the line of flight will pass: Will it let itself get bogged down and fall back to the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to another danger, for example, turning into a line of abolition, annihilation, self-destruction, Ahab,Ahab... ?We are all too familiar with the dangers of the line of flight, and with its ambiguities. The risks are ever-present, but it is always possible to have the good fortune of avoiding them. Case by case, we can tell whether the line is consistent, in other words, whether the heterogeneities effectively function in a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether the multiplicities are effectively transformed through the becomings of passage. Let us take an example as simple as: x starts practicing piano again. Is it an Oedipal return to childhood? Is it ​a way of dying, in a kind of sonorous abolition? Is it a new borderline, an active line that will bring other becomings entirely different from becoming or rebecoming a pianist, that will induce a transformation of all of the preceding assemblages to which x was prisoner? Is it a way out? Is it a pact with the Devil? Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make a rhizome. But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you don't know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment.

That's easy to say? Although there is no preformed logical order to becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the dangers. If multiplicities are defined and transformed by the borderline that determines in each instance their number of dimensions, we can conceive of the possibility of laying them out on a plane, the borderlines succeeding one another, forming a broken line. It is only in appearance that a plane of this kind "reduces" the number of dimensions; for it gathers in all the dimensions to the extent that flat multiplicities—which nonetheless have an increasing or decreasing number of dimensions—are inscribed upon it. It is in grandiose and simplified terms that Lovecraft attempted to pronounce sorcery's final word: "Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity."25 Far from reducing the multiplicities' number of dimensions to two, the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers' drawings on this plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them. This is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or veering into the void. The only question is: Does a given becoming reach that point? Can a given multiplicity flatten and conserve all its dimensions in this way, like a pressed flower that remains just as alive dry? Lawrence, in his becoming-tortoise, moves from the most obstinate animal dynamism to the abstract, pure geometry of scales and "cleavages of division," without, however, losing any of the dynamism: he pushes becoming-tortoise all the way to the plane of consistency. Everything becomes imperceptible, everything is becoming-imperceptible on the plane of consistency, which is nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard. It is the Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Criterium (and still other names, as the number of dimensions increases). At n dimensions, it is called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since it has no form itself, the abstract Machine of which each concrete assemblage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract machine is the intersection of them all.

​Waves are vibrations, shifting borderlines inscribed on the plane of consistency as so many abstractions. The abstract machine of the waves. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf—who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and kingdoms—intermingles seven characters, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda, Suzanne, and Percival. But each of these characters, with his or her name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity (for example, Bernard and the school offish). Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others. Percival is like the ultimate multiplicity enveloping the greatest number of dimensions. But he is not yet the plane of consistency. Although Rhoda thinks she sees him rising out of the sea, no, it is not he. "When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright—a column; now a fountain.. .. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach."27 Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of consistency they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates following a line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane (each chapter of Woolf s novel is preceded by a meditation on an aspect of the waves, on one of their hours, on one of their becomings). 

Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari/A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: Capitalism and Schizophrenia/ 10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . . 
 

The lesson of the eternal return is that there is no return of the negative. The eternal return means that being is selection. Only that which affirms or is affirmed returns. The eternal return is the repro​duction of becoming but the reproduction of becoming is also the production of becoming active: child of Dionysus and Ariadne. In the eternal return being ought to belong to becoming, but the being of becoming ought to belong to a single becoming-active. Nietzsche's speculative teaching is as follows: becoming, multiplicity and chance do not contain any negation; difference is pure affirmation; return is the being of difference excluding the whole of the negative. And this teaching would perhaps remain obscure without the practical clarity in which it is steeped. Nietzsche exposes all the mystifications which disfigure philosophy: the apparatus of bad conscience, the false marvels of the negative which turn multiplicity, becoming, chance and difference itself into so many misfortunes of consciousness itself and turn misfortunes of consciousness into so many moments of formation, reflection or development. Nietzsche's practical teaching is that difference is happy; that multiplicity, becoming and chance are adequate objects of joy by themselves and that only joy returns. Multiplicity, becoming and chance are the properly philosophical joy in which unity rejoices in itself and also in being and necessity. Not since Lucretius has the critical enterprise which characterises philosophy been taken so far (with the exception of Spinoza). Lucretius exposes the trouble of the soul and those who need it to establish their powerSpinoza exposes sorrow, all the causes of sorrow and all those who found their power at the heart of this sorrow. — Nietzsche exposes ressentiment, bad conscience and the power of the negative which serves as their principle: the "untimeliness" of a philosophy which has liberation as its object. There is no unhappy consciousness which is not also man's enslavement, a trap for the will and an opportunity for all basenesses of thought. The reign of the negative is the reign of powerful beasts, Churches and States, which fetter us to their own ends. The murderer of God committed a sad crime because his motivation was sad: he wanted to take God's place, he killed in order to "steal", he remained in the negative whilst taking on the attributes of divinity. The death of God needs time finally to find its essence and become a joyful event. Time to expel the negative, to exorcise the reactive - the time of a becoming-active. This time is the cycle of the eternal return.

​The negative expires at the gates of being. Opposition ceases its labour and difference begins its play. But is there any being which does not belong to another world and how is the selection made? ​Nietzsche calls the point of conversion of the negative transmutation. The negative loses its power and quality. Negation ceases to be an autonomous power, that is to say a quality of the will to power. Transmutation relates the negative to affirmation in the will to power, it is turned into a simple mode of being of the powers of affirming. Instead of the labour of opposition or the suffering of the negative we have the warlike play of difference, affirmation and the joy of destruction. The no stripped of its power, transformed into the opposite quality, turned affirmative and creative: such is transmutation. This transmutation of values is what essentially defines Zarathustra. If Zarathustra passes through the negative as his disgusts and temptations show, it is not in order to make use of it as a motor, nor to take on its burden or product, but to reach the point where the motor is changed, the product surmounted and the whole of the negative vanquished or transmuted.

Zarathustra's whole story is contained in his relationship with nihilism, that is to say with the demon. The demon is the spirit of the negative, the power of denying which plays several, apparently opposed roles. Sometimes he gets man to cany him, suggesting to him that the weight he is burdened with is positivity itself. Sometimes, on the contrary, he jumps over man, taking all forces and will from him.37 The contradiction is only apparent: in the first case man is the reactive being who wants to seize power, to substitute his own strength for the power which dominates him. But in fact the demon finds the opportunity here to get himself carried, to get himself taken on, to pursue his task, disguised by a false positivity. In the second case, man is the last man: still a reactive being, he no longer has the strength to take possession of willing, the demon takes all man's strength and leaves him without strength or will. In both cases the demon appears as the spirit of the negative which, through all the avatars of man, preserves his power and keeps his quality. He stands for the will to nothingness which makes use of man as a reactive being which gets itself carried by him but which, at the same time, does not fuse with him and "jumps over". From all these points of view transmutation differs from the will to nothingness, just as Zarathustra differs from his demon. With Zarathustra negation loses its power and quality: beyond the reactive man, there is the destroyer of known values; beyond the last man there is the man who wants to perish or to be overcome. Zarathustra stands for affirmation, the spirit of affirmation as the power which turns the ​negative into a mode and man into an active being who wants to be overcome (not "jumped-over"). Zarathustra's sign is the sign of the lion: the first book of Zarathustra opens with the lion and the last closes with it. But the lion is precisely the "holy no" become creative and affirmative, this no which only affirmation knows how to say, in which the whole of the negative is converted, transmuted in power and quality. With transmutation, the will to power ceases to be fettered to the negative as the ratio by which it is known to us, it reveals its unknown face, the unknown raison d'etre which makes the negative a simple mode of being. 

​Zarathustra has, moreover, a complex relation to Dionysus, as transmutation does to the eternal return. In a certain way Zarathustra is cause of the eternal return and father of the Overman. The man who wants to perish, the man who wants to be overcome, is the ancestor and father of the Overman. The destroyer of all known values, the lion of the holy no prepares its final metamorphosis: it becomes a child. And, with his hands thrust into the lion's fleece, Zarathustra feels that his children are near or that the Overman is approaching. But in what sense is Zarathustra father of the overman and cause of the eternal return? In the sense of a precondition. In another way the eternal return has an unconditioned principle to which Zarathustra himself is subject. From the perspective of the principle which conditions it, the eternal return depends on transmutation but, from the perspective of its unconditioned principle, transmutation depends more profoundly on the eternal return. Zarathustra is subject to Dionysus: "Who and /? I await one who is more worthy; I am not worthy even to break myself against him" (ZII "The Stillest Hour", p. 167*). In the trinity of the Antichrist - Dionysus, Ariadne and Zarathustra - Zarathustra is Ariadne's conditional fiance, but Ariadne is Dionysus' unconditioned fiancee. This is why Zarathustra is always in an inferior position in relation to the eternal return and the Overman. He is the cause of the eternal return, but a cause which delays producing its effect. A prophet who hesitates to deliver his message, who knows the vertigo and the temptation of the negative, who must be encouraged by his animals. Father of the Overman, but a father whose products are ripe before he is ripe for his products, a lion who still lacks a final metamorphosis.38 In fact the eternal return and the Overman are at the crossing of two genealogies, of two unequal genetic lines. 

On the one hand they relate to Zarathustra as to the conditioning ​principle which "posits" them in merely hypothetical manner. On the other hand, they relate to Dionysus as the unconditioned principle which is the basis of their apodictic and absolute character. Thus in Zarathustra's exposition it is always the entanglement of causes or the connection of moments, the synthetic relation of moments to each other, which determines the hypothesis of the return of the same moment. But, from Dionysus' perspective by contrast, it is the synthetic relation of the moment to itself, as past, present and to come, which absolutely determines its relations with all other moments. The return is not the passion of one moment pushed by others, but the activity of the moment which determined the others in being itself determined through what it affirms. Zarathustra's constellation is the constellation of the lion, but that of Dionysus is the constellation of being: the yes of the child-player is more profound than the holy no of the lion. The whole of Zarathustra is affirmative: even when he who knows how to say no, says no. But Zarathustra is not the whole of affirmation, nor what is most profound in it. 

Zarathustra relates the negative to affirmation in the will to power. It is still necessary for the will to power to be related to affirmation as its raison d'etre, and for affirmation to be related to the will to power as the element which produces, reflects and develops its own ratio. This is the task of Dionysus. All affirmation finds its condition in Zarathustra but its unconditioned principle in Dionysus. Zarathustra determines the eternal return, moreover he determines it to produce its effect, the Overman. But this determination is the same as the series of conditions which finds its final term in the lion, in the man who wants to be overcome, in the destroyer of all known values. Dionysus' determination is of another kind, identical to the absolute principle without which the conditions would themselves remain powerless. And this is Dionysus' supreme disguise - to subject his products to conditions which are themselves subject to him, conditions that these products themselves surpass. The lion becomes a child, the destruction of known values makes possible a creation of new values. But the creation of values, the yes of the child-player, would not be formed under these conditions if they were not, at the same time, subject to a deeper genealogy. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that every Nietzschean concept lies at the crossing of two unequal genetic lines. Not only the eternal return and the Overman, but laughter, play and dance. In relation to Zarathustra laughter, play ​and dance are affirmative powers of transmutation: dance transmutes heavy into light, laughter transmutes suffering into joy and the play of throwing (the dice) transmutes low into high. But in relation to Dionysus dance, laughter and play are affirmative powers of reflection and development. Dance affirms becoming and the being of becoming; laughter, roars of laughter, affirm multiplicity and the unity of multiplicity; play affirms chance and the necessity of chance. 

Genealogy does not only interpret, it also evaluates. Up to now we have presented things as if different forces struggled over and took successive possession of an almost inert object. But the object itself is force, expression of a force. This is why there is more or less affinity between the object and the force which takes possession of it. There is no object (phenomenon) which is not already possessed since in itself it is not an appearance but the apparition of a force. Every force is thus essentially related to another force. The being of force is plural, it would be absolutely absurd to think about force in the singular. A force is domination, but also the object on which domination is exercised. A plurality of forces acting and being affected at distance, distance being the differential element included in each force and by which each is related to others - this is the principle of Nietzsche's philosophy of nature. The critique of atomism must be understood in terms of this principle. It consists in showing that atomism attempts to impart to matter an essential plurality and distance which in fact belong only to force. Only force can be related to another force. (As Marx says when he interprets atomism, "Atoms are their own unique objects and can relate only to themselves" - Marx "Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature". But the question is; can the basic notion of atom accommodate the essential relation which is attempted to it? The concept only becomes coherent if one thinks of force instead of atom. For the notion of atom cannot in itself contain the difference necessary for the affirmation of such a ​relation, difference in and according to the essence. Thus atomism would be a mask for an incipient dynamism.) 

​Nietzsche's concept of force is therefore that of a force which is related to another force: in this form force is called will. The will (will to power) is the differential element of force. A new conception of the philosophy of the will follows from this. For the will is not exercised mysteriously on muscles or nerves, still less on "matter in general", but is necessarily exercised on another will. The real problem is not that of the relation of will to the involuntary but rather of the relation of a will that commands to a will that obeys - that obeys to a greater or lesser extent. " 'Will' can of course operate only on 'will' - and not on 'matter' (not on 'nerves' for example): enough, one must venture the hypothesis that wherever 'effects' are recognised, will is operating on will" (BGE 36 p. 49). The will is called a complex thing because insofar as it wills it wills obedience - but only a will can obey commands. Thus pluralism finds its immediate corroboration and its chosen ground in the philosophy of the will. And Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on one precise point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple. Everything else flows from this. Indeed, if Schopenhauer is led to deny the will it is primarily because he believes in the unity of willing. Because the will, according to Schopenhauer, is essentially unitary, the executioner comes to understand that he is one with his own victim. The consciousness of the identity of the will in all its manifestations leads the will to deny itself, to suppress itself in pity, morality and ascetism (Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea, Book 4). Nietzsche discovers what seems to him the authentically Schopenhauerian mystification; when we posit the unity, the identity, of the will we must necessarily repudiate the will itself. 

Nietzsche denounces the soul, the "ego" and egoism as the last refuges of atomism. Psychic atomism is more valid than physical atomism: "In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis of a social structure composed of many 'souls' " (BGE 19 p. 31). When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III "Of the Three Evil Things"). But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary or there to be an ego. What directs us towards the origin is the fact that every force is related to another, whether in order to command or to obey. The origin is the difference in the origin, difference in the origin is hierarchy, that is to say the relation of a dominant to a dominated force, of an obeyed to an obeying will. The inseparability of hierarchy and genealogy is what Nietzsche calls "our problem" (HH Preface 7). Hierarchy is the originary fact, the identity of difference and origin. We will understand later why the problem of hierarchy is precisely the problem of "free spirits". Be that as it may, we can note the progression from sense to value, from interpretation to evaluation as tasks for genealogy. The sense of something is its relation to the force which takes possession of it, the value of something is the hierarchy of forces which are expressed in it as a complex phenomenon.

Gilles  Deleuze/ Nietzsche and Philosophy/ The Philosophy Of The Will
​Originally published in France in 1962 as Nietzsche et la philosophic by Presses Universitaires de France
Published in the USA and Canada by Columbia University Press

​Negative theology (or the theology of absence), the transcendence of the law, the a prioriness of guilt are the dominant themes of so much Kafka interpretation. The famous passages in TheTrial(as well as in "The Penal Colony" and "The Great Wall of China") present the law as a pure and empty form without content, the object of which remains unknowable: thus, the law can be expressed only through a sentence, and the sentence can be learned only through a punishment. No one knows the law's interior. No one knows what the law is in the Colony; and the needles of the machine write the sentence on the body of the condemned, who doesn't know the law, at the same time as they inflict their torture upon him. "He will learn [the sentence] on his body." In "The Great Wall of China": "[I]t is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know. . . . [T]he essence of a secret code is that it should remain a mystery." Kant constructed a rational theory of the law's reversal from a Greek conception to the Judeo-Christian one. The law no longer depends on a preexistent Good that would give it a materiality; it is a pure form on which the good such as it is depends. The good is that which the law expresses when it expresses itself. One might say that Kafka situates himself as part of this reversal. But the humor that he puts into it shows an entirely different intention. For him, it is less a question of presenting this image of a transcendental and unknowable law than ohemechanismof an entirely different sort of machine, which needs this image of the law only to align its gears and make them function together with "a perfect synchronicity" (as soon as this image-photo disappears, the pieces of the machine disperse as in "The Penal Colony"). The Trial must ​be considered a scientific investigation, a report of the experiments on the functioning of a machine in which the law runs the strong risk of playing no more than the role of exterior armature. That's why the texts in The Trial should be used only with great care. The primary problem has involved misjudging the relative importance of these texts and making unwarranted assumptions about their placement in the novel, as is expecially evident in the ways that Max Brod arranged things to support his thesis of negative theology. 

​Two chapters are of particular concern: the brief final chapter, about K's execution, and the preceding chapter, "In the Cathedral," in which the priest represents the discourse of the law. Nothing tells us that the final chapter was written at the end of The Trial; it might have been written when Kafka had just begun to revise and was still under the influence of his breakup with Felice. It is a premature, delayed, aborted ending. One can't fix the place where Kafka would have put it. It might well be a dream that could fit anywhere in the course of the novel. Indeed, Kafka published, by itself and under the title "A Dream," another fragment originally envisioned for The Trial. Max Brod is thus better inspired when he notes the degree to which The Trial is an interminable novel, necessarily indefinite: "But as the trial, according to the author's own statement made by word of mouth, was never to get as far as the highest Court, in a certain sense the novel could never be terminated—that is to say, it could be prolonged into infinity" (postface toTrans. Willa and Edwin Muir. [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956], 334). The idea of ending with K's execution is contradicted by the whole direction of the novel and by the quality of "unlimited postponement" that regulates The Trial. The imposition of K's execution as the final chapter seems to have an equivalent in the history of literature—the placement of the famous description of the plague at the end of Lucretius's book. In both cases, it is a question of showing that at the last moment, an epicurian can do no more than submit to agony, or that a Prague Jew can only assume the guilt that is operating within him. As for the other chapter, "In the Cathedral," the place of honor given to it, as though it indicated some sort of key to the novel, as though it constituted proof of the book's religious character, is also well contradicted by its own content. The story about the gatekeeper of the law remains highly ambiguous, and K learns that the priest who tells this story is a member of the judiciary apparatus, chaplain for the prisons, one element in a whole series of other elements, and that he has no privilege, since the series has no need to stop with him. We agree with Uyttersprot's proposal to remove this chapter and put it before that entitled "The Lawyer, the Industrialist, and the Painter."

From the point of view of a supposed transcendence of the law, there must be a certain necessary connection of the law with guilt, with the unknowable, with the sentence or the utterance. Guilt must in fact be the a priori that corresponds to transcendence, for each person or for everyone, guilty or innocent. Having no object and being only pure form, the law cannot be a domain of knowledge but is exclusively the domain of an absolute practical necessity: the priest in the cathedral explains that "it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary." Finally, because it has no object of knowledge, the law is operative only in being stated and is stated only in the act of punishment: a statement directly inscribed on the real, on the body and the flesh; a practical statement opposed to any sort of speculative proposition. All these themes are well presented in The Trial. But it is precisely these themes that will be the object of a dismantling (demontage), and even of a demolition, throughout Kafka's long experimentation. The first aspect of this dismantling consists in "eliminating any idea of guilt from the start," this being part of the accusation itself: culpability is never anything but the superficial movement whereby judges and even lawyers confine you in order to prevent you from engaging in a real movement—that is, from taking care of your own affairs. Second, K will realize that even if the law remains unrecognizable, this is not because it is hidden by its transcendence, but simply because it is always denuded of any interiority: it is always in the office next door, or behind the door, on to infinity (we can already see this quite well in the first chapter of The Trial where everything happens in the "room next door"). Finally, it is not the law that is stated because of the demands of a hidden transcendence; it is almost the exact opposite: it is the statement, the enunciation, that constructs the law in the name of an immanent power of the one who enounces it—the law is confused with that which the guardian utters, and the writings precede the law, rather than being the necessary and derived expression of it.

​The three worst themes in many interpretations of Kafka are the transcendence of the law, the interiority of guilt, the subjectivity of enunciation. They are connected to all the stupidities that have been written about allegory, metaphor, and symbolism in Kafka. And also, the idea of the tragic, of the internal drama, of the intimate tribunal, and so on. No doubt, Kafka holds out the bait. He holds it out even, and especially, to Oedipus; not from complacency but because he wants to make a very special use of Oedipus to serve his diabolical project. It is absolutely useless to look for a theme in a writer if one hasn't asked exactly what its importance is in the work-that is, how it functions (and not what its "sense" is). Law, guilt, interiority—Kafka has a great need for them as the superficial movement of his work. Superficial movement doesn't mean a mask underneath which something else would be hidden. The superficial movement indicates points of undoing, of dismantling, that must guide the experimentation to show the molecular movements and the machinic assemblages of which the superficial movement is a global result. We could say that law, guilt, interiority are everywhere. But all that is necessary is to consider a specific piece of the writing machine-for example, the three pricipal gears —letters, stories, novels —in order to see that these themes are really nowhere present and don't function at all. Each of these gears certainly has a primary affective tonality. ​But, in the letters, it is fear, not guilt: fear of the trap that is closing in on it, fear of a return of flux, the vampire's fear of being surprised in full daylight by the sun, by religion, by garlic, and by the stake through the heart (Kafka is greatly afraid, in his letters, of people and what can happen because of them; this is quite different from guilt or humiliation). And in the stories about a becoming-animal, it is escape that has an affective tonality apart from any connection to guilt and also distinct from fear; the becoming-animal lives a life of escape more than one of fear (the animal in "The Burrow" isn't really afraid, and the jackals aren't afraid—they liverather in a sort of "lunatic hope"; the musical dogs "that could dare achieve such thing had no need to fear such things"). In the novels, finally, it is strange to see the degree to which K doesn't feel any guilt and doesn't feel fear and doesn't flee; he is completely audacious and he offers a new tonality that is very strange, a sense of dismantling that is simultaneously that of a judge and that of an engineer, a veritable feeling, a Gemut. Fear, flight, dismantling—we should think of them as three passions, three intensities, correponding to the diabolical pact, to the becoming-animal, to the machinic and collective assemblages. 

So, should we support realist and social interpretations of Kafka? Certainly, since they are infinitely closer to noninterpretation. And it is much more worthwhile to talk about the problems of minor literature, about the situation of a Jew in Prague, about America, about bureaucracies and about great trials, than to talk about an absent God. One could object that Kafka's America is unreal, that the New York strike remains intangible, that the most difficult working conditions receive no indignation in his work, that the election of the judge falls into the realm of pure nonsense. One might correctly note that there is never any criticism in Kafka. Even in "The Great Wall of China," the minority party can even believe that the law is only an arbitrary fact of the "nobility"; the party expresses no anger, and "that is the real reason why the parties who believe tht there is no law have remained so few —although their doctrine is in certain ways so attractive, for it unequivocally recognizes the nobility and its right to go on existing." InK doesn't attack the law and willingly aligns himself with the strong side and the executioners: he prods Franz who is being whipped; he terrorizes an accused person by seizing him by the arm; at the lawyer's, he makes fun of Block. In The Castle, K likes to menace and punish whenever he can. Can we conclude that, not being a "critic of his time," Kafka turned his criticism "against himself and had no other tribunal than an "internal tribunal"? This would be grotesque, since it would turn criticism into a dimension of representation. If representation is not external, it can be only internal from here on. But it's really something else in Kafka: Kafka attempts to extract from social representations assemblages of enunciation and machinic assemblages and to dismantle these assemblages. Already in the animal stories, Kafka was drawing lines of escape; but he didn't "flee the world." Rather, it was the world and its ​representation that hend that he made follow these lines. It was a question of seeing and speaking like a beetle, like a dung beetle. Even more, in the novels, the dismantling of the assemblages makes the social representation take flight in a much more effective way than a critique would have done and brings about a deterritorialization of the world that is itself political and that has nothing to do with an activity of intimacy.

Writing has a double function: to translate everything into assemblages and to dismantle the assemblages. The two are the same thing. This is why we have been distinguishing in Kafka's work instances that are in fact enmeshed in each other—first,achinlc indexes;abstract machines;e assemblages of the machine.The machinic indexes are the signs of an assemblage that has not yet been established or dismantled because one knows only the individual pieces that go into making it up, but not how they go together. Most frequently, these pieces are living beings, animals, but they are only valuable as moving pieces or configurations of an assemblage that goes beyond them, and whose mystery remains because they are only the operators or executors of this assemblage. Thus, the musical dogs are actually pieces of the musical assemblage and produce a cacaphony by "the lifting and setting down of their feet, certain turns of the head, their running and their standing still, the position which they [take] up in relation to one another." But they function only as indexes, since they "[do] not speak, they [do] not sing, they remain generally silent, almost determinedly silent." These machinic indexes (which are not at all allegorical or symbolical) are particularly well developed in the acts of the becoming-animal and in the animalistic stories. "The Metamorphosis" forms a complex assemblage in which the index-elements are Gregor-animal and the musical sister; in which the index-objects are the food, the sound, the photo, and the apple; and in which the index configurations are the familial triangle and the bureaucratic triangle. The bent head that straightens up and the sound that latches onto the voice and derails it also function as indexes of this sort in the majority of the stories. There is thus a machinic index each time a machine is being built and is beginning to function, even though one doesn't know how the disparate parts that make it up and make it work actually function. But the reverse case also appears in the stories: abstract machines surge into existence by themselves, without indexes. But in this case, they don't function, or no longer function. Such is the machine in the Penal Colony that answers to the Law of the old warden and doesn't survive its own dismantling; such is the creature named Odradek about whom "one is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case . . . [T]he whole thing looks senseless enough but in its own way perfectly finished"; such too are Blumfeld's ping-pong balls. Yet it seems also that the representation of the transcendental law, with its elements of guilt and unknowability, is an abstract machine of this sort. If the machine of the Penal ​Colony, as representative of the law, appears to be archaic and outmoded, this is not because, as people have often claimed, there is a new law that is much more modern but because the form of the law in general is inseparable from an abstract, self-destructive machine and cannot develop in a concrete way. This is why the stories seem to encounter two dangers that make them stop short or force them to remain incomplete or prevent them from developing into novels: either they are nothing more than machinic indexes of the assembly, no matter how lively they appear to be; or they put into operation abstract machines that are all assembled, but dead, and never succeed in concretely plugging into things (we should note that Kafka willingly publishes his texts on transcendental law in short stories that he detaches from the whole). 

​Thus there remain machinic assemblages as objects of the novel. This time the machinic indexes stop being animal; they group, give birth to series, start proliferating, taking over all sorts of human figures or parts of figures. On the other hand, the abstract machine changes in a singular fashion. It stops being reified and isolated; it no longer exists outside the concrete, socio-political assemblages that incarnate it. It diffuses into them and measures their machinic degree. Finally, the assemblage no longer works as a machine in the process of assembling itself, with a mysterious function, or as a fully assembled machine that doesn't function, or no longer functions. It works only through the dismantlingthat it brings about on the machine and on representation. And, actually functioning, it functions only through and because of its own dismantling. It is born from this dismantling (it is never the assembling of the machine that interests Kafka). This method of active dismantling doesn't make use of criticism that is still part of representation. Rather, it consists in prolonging, in accelerating, a whole movement that already is traversing the social field. It operates in a virtuality that is already real without yet being actual (the diabolical powers of the future that for the moment are only brushing up against the door). The assemblage appears not in a still encoded and territorial criticism but in a decoding, in a deterritorialization, and in the novelistic acceleration of this decoding and this deterritorialization (as was the case with the German language—to always go farther in this movement that takes over the whole social field). This method is much more intense than any critique. K says so himself. One's goal is to transform what is still only a method (precede) in the social field into a procedure as an infinite virtual movement that at the extreme invokes the machinic assemblage of thetrial(proces)s a reality that is on its way and already there.4 The whole of this operation is to be called a Process, one that is precisely interminable. Marthe Robert underlines the link between the trial and the procedure, and this is certainly not a mental, psychical, or interior procedure. 

Here, then, are the new characteristics of the novelistic machinic assemblage in opposition to the indexes and the abstract machines. These characteristics im​pose not an interpretation or a social representation of Kafka but an experimentation, a socio-political investigation. Since the assemblage functions really in the real, the question becomes: how does it function? What function does it have? (Only later will we ask what it consists of and what its elements and its links are.) Thus, we must follow the movement oft several levels, taking account of objective uncertainty about the supposed last chapter and of the certainty that the second-to-last chapter, "In the Cathedral" was more or less poorly placed by Max Brod. According to a first view, everything is false in The Trial: even the law, in contrast to Kantian law, erects the lie into a universal rule. The lawyers are false lawyers, the judges are false judges, "oafish inspectors," "corrupt warders," or at the very least are so much subalterns that they hide the real matters and "the proceedings of an inaccessible justice" that no longer lets itself be represented. Nonetheless, if this first view is not definitive, this is because there is a power in the false, and it is bad to weigh justice in terms of true or false. So the second view is much more important: where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone.Justice is desire and not law. Everyone in fact is a functionary of justice—not only the spectators, not only the priest and the painter, but also the equivocal young women and the perverse little girls who take up so much space in The Trial. K's book in the cathedral is not a prayerbook but an album of the town; the judge's book contains only obscene pictures. The law is written in a porno book. Here, it is no longer a question of suggesting an eventual falsity of justice but of suggesting its desiring quality: the accused are in principle the most handsome figures and are recognized for their strange beauty. The judges act and reason "like children." It happens that a simple joke can derout repression. Justice is not Necessity but, quite the contrary, Chance; and Titorelli paints the allegory of it as a blind fortune, a winged desire. It is not a stable will but a moving desire. It is curious, K says, how justice must not move in order to not sway its scales. But the priest explains at another moment, 'The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go." The young women are not equivocal because they hide their nature as auxiliaries of justice; on the contrary, they show themselves to be auxiliaries because they simultaneously bring bliss to judges, lawyers, and accused, out of a single and unique polyvocal desire. The whole ofis overrun by a polyvocality of desire that gives it its erotic force. Repression doesn't belong to justice unless it is also desire itself—desire in the one who is repressed as well as in the one who represses. And the authorities of justice are not those who look for offenses but those who are "attracted, propelled by offense." They nose around, they rummage about, they search everywhere. They are blind and accept no evidence but take into consideration only hallway events, the whispers of the courtroom, the secrets of the chambers, the noise heard behind doors, the murmurs from behind the scene, all those microevents that express desire and its arbitrary fortunes.

​If justice doesn't let itself be represented, that is because it is desire. Desire could never be on a stage where it would sometimes appear like a party opposed to another party (desire against the law), sometimes like the presence of the two sides under the effect of a superior law that would govern their distribution and their combination. Think of tragic representation as presented by Hegel: Antigone and Creon move on stage as if they were two parties. It is in this way that K still thinks of justice at his first interrogation. There would be two sides, two parties, one a little more favorable to desire, the other to the law, and whose distribution would refer to a superior law. But K notices that it isn't really like that: the important thing is not what happens in the tribunal or the movements of the two parties together but the molecular agitations that put into motion the hallways, the wings, the back doors, and the side chambers. The theater in Amerika is no more than an immense wing, an immense hallway, that has abolished all spectacle and all representation. And the same thing happens in the political realm (K himself compares the tribunal scene to a political meeting, and, more specifically, to a meeting of socialists). There also the important thing is not what happens in the tribunal where people debate only questions of ideology. Indeed, the law is one of these debated questions; everywhere in Kafka—in The Trial, in "The Great Wall of China"—the law is examined in terms of its connection to the parties that the different commentators belong to. But politically, the important things are always taking place elsewhere, in the hallways of the congress, behind-the-scenes of the meeting, where people confront the real, immanent problems of desire and of power-the real problem of justice. 

From this point on, it is even more important to renounce the idea of a transcendence of the law. If the ultimate instances are inaccessible and cannot be represented, this occurs not as a function of an infinite hierarchy belonging to a negative theology but as a function of a contiguity of desire that causes whatever happens to happen always in the office next door. The contiguity of the offices, the segmentalization of power, replaces the hierarchy of instances and the eminence of the sovereign (already, the castle had revealed itself to be a segmental and contiguous rambling assemblage in the style of the Hapsburg bureaucracy or the mosaic of nations in the Austrian empire). If everything, everyone, is part of justice, if everyone is an auxiliary of justice, from the priest to the little girls, this is not because of the transcendence of the law but because of the immanence of desire. This is the discovery into which K's investigation and experimentation very quickly locks itself. While the Uncle pushes him to take his trial seriously, for example, to see a lawyer and pass through all the steps of transcendence, K realizes that he should not let himself be represented, that he has no need of a representative—that no one should come between him and his desire. He will find justice only by moving, by going from room to room, by following his desire. He will take control of the machine of expression: he will take over the investigation, he will write without stop, he will demand ​a leave of absence so he can totally devote himself to this "virtually interminable" work. It is in this sense that The Trial is an interminable novel. An unlimited field of immanence instead of an infinite transcendence. The transcendence of the law was an image, a photo of the highest places; but justice is more like a sound (the statement) that never stops taking flight. The transcendence of the law was an abstract machine, but the law exists only in the immanence of the machinic assemblage of justice. The Trial is the dismantling of all transcendental justifications. There is nothing to judge vis-a-vis desire; the judge himself is completely shaped by desire. Justice is no more than the immanent process of desire. The process is itself a continuum, but a continuum made up of contiguities. The contiguous is not opposed to the continuous —quite the contrary, it is a local and indefinitely prolongable version of the continuous. Thus, it is also the dismantling of the continuous-always an office next door, always the contiguous room. Barnabas "is admitted into certain rooms, but they're only a part of the whole, for there are barriers behind which there are more rooms. Not that he's actually forbidden to pass the barriers. . . . And you musn't imagine that these barriers are a definite dividing-line. . . . [TJhere are barriers he can pass, and they're just the same as the ones he's never yet passed." Justice is the continuum of desire, with shifting limits that are always displaced.

​It is this procedure, this continuum, this field of immanence that the painter, Titorelli, analyzes as unlimited postponement. A central part of The Trial that makes Titorelli into a special character of the novel. He distinguishes three theoretical possibilities: definite acquittal, ostensible or superficial acquittal, and unlimited postponement. The first case never in fact comes about, since it would imply the death or abolition of a desire that would have reached a conclusion. On the other hand, the second case corresponds to the abstract machine of law. It is defined, in fact, by the opposition of fluxes, the alternation of poles, the succession of periods—a counterflux of the law in response to a flux of desire, a pole of escape in response to a pole of repression, a period of crisis for a period of compromise. We could say that the formal law sometimes retreats into a transcendence by leaving a field provisionally open to desire, or sometimes makes the transcendence emanate hierarchized hypostases that are capable of halting and repressing desire (in fact, there are many neo-Platonic readings of Kafka). In two different ways, this state, or rather this cycle of superficial acquittal, corresponds to Kafka's situation in the letters or in the animalistic stories or in the becomings-animal. The trial at the hotel is the counterblow of the law reacting to the blow of the letters, a trial of the vampire who well knows that any acquittal can be only superficial. And succeeding the positive pole of the line of escape, the trial of the becoming-animal is the negative pole of the transcendental law that blocks the way out and that dispatches a familial hypostasis to retrap the guilty party—the re-Oedipalization of Gregor, the platonic apple that his father throws at him.

​But this apple is precisely the same one that K eats at the beginning of The Trial as part of a broken chain that finds its link in "The Metamorphosis." Because the whole story of K revolves around the way in which he enters more deeply into an unlimited postponement, breaking with all the formulas of a superficial acquittal. He thereby leaves the abstract machine of the law that opposes law to desire, as body is opposed to spirit, as form is opposed to matter, in order to enter into the machinic assemblage of justice—that is, into the mutual immanence of a decoded law and a deterritorialized desire. But what do the terms postponement and unlimited signify? If K refuses a superficial acquittal, this is not because of a desire for a real acquittal, and even less because of an intimate hopelessness coming from a guilt that feeds off itself. Guilt is entirely on the side of a superficial acquittal. We could say that superficial acquittal is simultaneously infinite, limited, discontinuous. It is infinite because it is circular, closely following "the circulation of the offices" along the path of a large circle. But it is limited and discontinuous because the point of accusation approaches and recedes in relation to this circulation, "swinging backwards and forwards with greater or smaller oscillations, longer or shorter delays": opposed fluxes, opposed poles, opposed periods of innocence, guilt, freedom, and a new arrest. Since real acquittal is out of the question, the question of innocence "or" guilt falls entirely within the realm of the superficial acquittal that determines the two discontinuous periods and the reversal of one into the other. Innocence, moreover, is a hypothesis that is much more perverse than that of guilt. Innocent or guilty, this is the question of the infinite; it is certainly not the kind of question that Kafka raises. In contrast, the postponement is finite, unlimited, and continuous. It is finite because these is no longer any transcendence and because it works by means of segments; the accused no longer has to undergo "strain and agitation" or fear an abrupt reversal (no doubt, a circulation remains, but "only in the small circle to which it has been artifically restricted," and this little circulation is only "ostensible," a residue of the apparent acquittal). Also, the delay is unlimited and continuous because it doesn't stop adding one segment to the other, in contact with the other, contiguous to the other, operating piece by piece in order to always push the limit farther back. The crisis is continuous because it is always on the side that it takes place. "Contact" with justice, contiguity, have replaced the hierarchy of the law. The delay is perfectly positive and active—it goes along with the undoing of the machine, with the composition of the assemblage, always one piece next to another. It is the process in itself, the tracing of the field of immanence.5 And it is even more evident in The Castle to what degree K is nothing but desire: a single problem, to establish or maintain "contact" with the Castle, to establish or maintain a "liaison."

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix/ Kafka: Toward a minor literature/ Immanence and Desire
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 

by Gilles  Deleuze and Felix Guattari

​An apparent conflict arises between desiring-machines and the body without organs. Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the body without organs. Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it. "The body is the body/it is all by itself/and has no need of organs/the body is never an organism/ organisms are the enemies of the body."* Merely so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture. In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as "primary repression" means precisely that: it is not a "countercathexis," but rather this repulsion of desiring-machines by the body without organs. This is the real meaning of the paranoiac machine: the desiring-machines attempt to break into the body without organs, and the body without organs repels them, since it experiences them as an over-all persecution apparatus. Thus we cannot agree with Victor Tausk when he regards the paranoiac machine as a mere projection of "a person's own body" and the genital organs.8 The genesis of the machine lies precisely here: in the opposition of the process of production of the desiring-machines and the nonproductive stasis of the body without organs. The anonymous nature of the machine and the nondifferentiated nature of its surface are proof of this. Projection enters the picture only secondarily, as does counter-investment, as the body without organs invests a counterinside or a counteroutside, in the form of a persecuting organ or some exterior agent of persecution. But in and of itself the paranoiac machine is merely an avatar of the desiring-machines: it is a result of the relationship between the desiring-machines and the body without organs, and occurs when the latter can no longer tolerate these machines.

​If we wish to have some idea of the forces that the body without organs exerts later on in the uninterrupted process, we must first establish a parallel between desiring-production and social production. We intend such a parallel to be regarded as merely phenomenological: we are here drawing no conclusions whatsoever as to the nature and the relationship of the two productions, nor does the parallel we are about to establish provide any sort of a priori answer to the question whether desiring-production and social production are really two separate and distinct productions. Its one purpose is to point out the fact that the forms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition. In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on (il se rabat sur)* all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be "miraculated" (miracules) by it. In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface. Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface. 

Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. It makes the machine responsible for producing a relative surplus value, while embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital. Machines and agents cling so ​closely to capital that their very functioning appears to be miraculated by it. Everything seems objectively to be produced by capital as quasi cause. As Marx observes, in the beginning capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labor, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on (se rabat sur) all of production. (Furnishing or realizing surplus value is what establishes recording rights.) "With the development of relative surplus-value in the actual specifically capitalist mode of production, whereby the productive powers of social labour are developed, these productive powers and the social interrelations of labour in the direct labour-process seem transferred from labour to capital. Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labour's social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself."9 What is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital as a full body to constitute the recording or inscribing surface. But some kind of full body, that of the earth or the despot, a recording surface, an apparent objective movement, a fetishistic, perverted, bewitched world are characteristic of all types of society as a constant of social reproduction. 

The body without organs now falls back on (se rabat sur) desiring-production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own. The organ-machines now cling to the body without organs as though it were a fencer's padded jacket, or as though these organ-machines were medals pinned onto the jersey of a wrestler who makes them jingle as he starts toward his opponent. An attraction-machine now takes the place, or may take the place, of a repulsion-machine: a miraculating-machine succeeding the paranoiac machine. But what is meant here by "succeeding"? The two coexist, rather, and black humor does not attempt to resolve contradictions, but to make it so that there are none, and never were any. The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs. The organs are regenerated, "miraculated" on the body of Judge Schreber, who attracts God's rays to himself. Doubtless the former paranoiac machine continues to exist in the form of mocking voices that attempt to "de-miraculate" (demiracu-ler) the organs, the Judge's anus in particular. But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the productive forces and all the organs of ​production, and that acts as a quasi cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them. So true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy. 

​Production is not recorded in the same way it is produced, however. Or rather, it is not reproduced within the apparent objective movement in the same way in which it is produced within the process of constitution. In fact, we have passed imperceptibly into a domain of the production of recording, whose law is not the same as that of the production of production. The law governing the latter was connective synthesis or coupling. But when the productive connections pass from machines to the body without organs (as from labor to capital), it would seem that they then come under another law that expresses a distribution in relation to the nonproductive element as a "natural or divine presupposition" (the disjunctions of capital). Machines attach themselves to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking the surface off into co-ordinates, like a grid. The "either ... or . . . or" of the schizophrenic takes over from the "and then": no matter what two organs are involved, the way in which they are attached to the body without organs must be such that all the disjunctive syntheses between the two amount to the same on the slippery surface. Whereas the "either/or" claims to mark decisive choices between immutable terms (the alternative: either this or that), the schizophrenic "either . . . or . . . or" refers to the system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same as they shift and slide about. As in the case of Beckett's mouth that speaks and feet that walk: "He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say, or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it. . . . Other main examples suggest themselves to the mind. Immediate continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Immediate discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture."

Thus the schizophrenic, the possessor of the most touchingly meager capital—Malone's belongings, for instance—inscribes on his own body the litany of disjunctions, and creates for himself a world of parries where the most minute of permutations is supposed to be a response to the new situation or a reply to the indiscreet questioner. The disjunctive  synthesis  of  recording therefore comes to overlap the ​connective syntheses of production. The process as process of production extends into the method as method of inscription. Or rather, if what we term libido is the connective "labor" of desiring-production, it should be said that a part of this energy is transformed into the energy of disjunctive inscription (Numen). A transformation of energy. But why call this new form of energy divine, why label it Numen, in view of all the ambiguities caused by a problem of the unconscious that is only apparently religious? The body without organs is not God, quite the contrary. But the energy that sweeps through it is divine, when it attracts to itself the entire process of production and server as its miraculate, enchanted surface, inscribing it in each and every one of its disjunctions. Hence the strange relationship that Schreber has with God. To anyone who asks: "Do you believe in God?" we should reply in strictly Kantian or Schreberian terms: "Of course, but only as the master of the disjunctive syllogism, or as its a priori principle (God defined as the Omnitudo realitatis, from which all secondary realities are derived by a process of division)."

​Hence the sole thing that is divine is the nature of an energy of disjunctions. Schreber's divine is inseparable from the disjunctions he employs to divide himself up into parts: earlier empires, later empires; later empires of a superior God, and those of an inferior God. Freud stresses the importance of these disjunctive syntheses in Schreber's delirium in particular, but also in delirium as a general phenomenon. "A process of decomposition of this kind is very characteristic of paranoia. Paranoia decomposes just as hysteria condenses. Or rather, paranoia resolves once more into their elements the products of the condensations and identifications which are effected in the unconscious."11 But why does Freud thus add that, on second thought, hysterical neurosis comes first, and that disjunctions appear only as a result of the projection of a more basic, primordial condensed material? Doubtless this is a way of maintaining intact the rights of Oedipus in the God of delirium and the schizoparanoiac recording process. And for that very reason we must pose the most far-reaching question in this regard: does the recording of desire go by way of the various stages in the formation of the Oedipus complex? Disjunctions are the form that the genealogy of desire assumes; but is this genealogy Oedipal, is it recorded in the Oedipal triangulation? Is it not more likely that Oedipus is a requirement or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as this latter aims at domesticating a genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable? For there is no doubting the fact that the schizo is constantly subjected to interrogation, constantly cross-examined. Precisely because his relationship with nature does not constitute a specific ​pole, the questions put to him are formulated in terms of the existing social code: your name, your father, your mother? In the course of his exercises in desiring-production, Beckett's Molloy is cross-examined by a policeman: "Your name is Molloy, said the sergeant. Yes, I said, now I remember. And your mother? said the sergeant. I didn't follow. Is your mother's name Molloy too? said the sergeant. I thought it over. Your mother, said the sergeant, is your mother's— Let me think! I cried. At least I imagine that's how it was. Take your time, said the sergeant. Was mother's name Molloy? Very likely. Her name must be Molloy too, I said. They took me away, to the guardroom I suppose, and there I was told to sit down. I must have tried to explain."

​We cannot say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this respect: it continues to ask its questions and develop its interpretations from the depths of the Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective, even though today it is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not at all adequate to explain so-called psychotic phenomena. The psychoanalyst says that we must necessarily discover Schreber's daddy beneath his superior God, and doubtless also his elder brother beneath his inferior God. At times the schizophrenic loses his patience and demands to be left alone. Other times he goes along with the whole game and even invents a few tricks of his own, introducing his own reference points in the model put before him and undermining it from within ("Yes, that's my mother, all right, but my mother's the Virgin Mary, you know"). One can easily imagine Schreber answering Freud: "Yes, I quite agree, naturally the talking birds are young girls, and the superior God is my daddy and the inferior God my brother." But little by little he will surreptitiously "reimpregnate" the series of young girls with all talking birds, his father with the superior God, and his brother with the inferior God, all of them divine forms that become complicated, or rather "desimplified," as they break through the simplistic terms and functions of the Oedipal triangle. As Artaud put it: 

I don't believe in father
in mother,
got no papamummy

Desiring-production forms a binary-linear system. The full body is introduced as a third term in the series, without destroying, however, the essential binary-linear nature of this series: 2, 1, 2, 1. . . . The series is completely refractory to a transcription that would transform and mold ​it into a specifically ternary and triangular schema such as Oedipus. The full body without organs is produced as antiproduction, that is to say it intervenes within the process as such for the sole purpose of rejecting any attempt to impose on it any sort of triangulation implying that it was produced by parents. How could this body have been produced by parents, when by its very nature it is such eloquent witness of its own self-production, of its own engendering of itself? And it is precisely here on this body, right where it is, that the Numen is distributed and disjunctions are established, independent of any sort of projection. Yes, I have been my father and I have been my son. "I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and myself ."12a The schizo has his own system of co-ordinates for situating himself at his disposal, because, first of all, he has at his disposal his very own recording code, which does not coincide with the social code, or coincides with it only in order to parody it. The code of delirium or of desire proves to have an extraordinary fluidity. It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate. 

Adolf Wolfli's drawings reveal the workings of all sorts of clocks, turbines, dynamos, celestial machines, house-machines, and so on. And these machines work in a connective fashion, from the perimeter to the center, in successive layers or segments. But the "explanations" that he provides for them, which he changes as often as the mood strikes him, are based on genealogical series that constitute the recording of each of his drawings. What is even more important, the recording process affects the drawings themselves, showing up in the form of lines standing for "catastrophe" or "collapse" that are so many disjunctions surrounded by spirals.13 The schizo maintains a shaky balance for the simple reason that the result is always the same, no matter what the disjunctions. Although the organ-machines attach themselves to the body without organs, the latter continues nonetheless to be without organs and does not become an organism in the ordinary sense of the word. It remains fluid and slippery. Agents of production likewise alight on Schreber's body and cling to it—the sunbeams, for instance, that he attracts, which contain thousands of tiny spermatozoids. Sunbeams, ​birds, voices, nerves enter into changeable and genealogically complex relationships with God and forms of God derived from the godhead by division. But all this happens and is all recorded on the surface of the body without organs: even the copulations of the agents, even the divisions of God, even the genealogies marking it off into squares like a grid, and their permutations. The surface of this uncreated body swarms with them, as a lion's mane swarms with fleas. 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia / The Body without Organs
​
Published by the University of Minnesota 
Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 
http://www.upress.umn.edu 

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth i machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the ​time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber* has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.

​A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. Lenz's stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Buchner. This walk outdoors is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowfiakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature. "What does my father want? Can he offer me more than that? Impossible. Leave me in peace."1 Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines— all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines. "He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon."la To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever. 

​Now that we have had a look at this stroll of a schizo, let us compare what happens when Samuel Beckett's characters decide to venture outdoors. Their various gaits and methods of self-locomotion constitute, in and of themselves, a finely tuned machine. And then there is the function of the bicycle in Beckett's works: what relationship does the bicycle-horn machine have with the mother-anus machine? "What a ​rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct."2 It is often thought that Oedipus* is an easy subject to deal with, something perfectly obvious, a "given" that is there from the very beginning. But that is not so at all: Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines. And why are they repressed? To what end? Is it really necessary or desirable to submit to such repression? And what means are to be used to accomplish this? What ought to go inside the Oedipal triangle, what sort of thing is required to construct it? Are a bicycle horn and my mother's arse sufficient to do the job? Aren't there more important questions than these, however? Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for? Can we possibly guess, for instance, what a knife rest is used for if all we are given is a geometrical description of it? Or yet another example: on being confronted with a complete machine made up of six stones in the right-hand pocket of my coat (the pocket that serves as the source of the stones), five stones in the right-hand pocket of my trousers, and five in the left-hand pocket (transmission pockets), with the remaining pocket of my coat receiving the stones that have already been handled, as each of the stones moves forward one pocket, how can we determine the effect of this circuit of distribution in which the mouth, too, plays a role as a stone-sucking machine? Where in this entire circuit do we find the production of sexual pleasure? At the end of Malone Dies, Lady Pedal takes the schizophrenics out for a ride in a van and a rowboat, and on a picnic in the midst of nature: an infernal machine is being assembled. "Under the skin the body is an over-heated factory,/ and outside,/ the invalid shines,/ glows,/ from every burst pore."

​This does not mean that we are attempting to make nature one of the poles of schizophrenia. What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production. What do we mean here by process? It is probable that at a certain level nature and industry are two separate and distinct things: from one point of view, industry is the opposite of nature; from another, industry extracts its raw materials from nature; from yet another, it returns its refuse to nature; and so on. Even within society, this characteristic man-nature, industry-nature, society-nature relationship is responsible for the dis-tinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called production, distribution, consumption. But in general this entire level of distinctions, examined from the point of view of its formal developed structures, presupposes (as Marx has demonstrated) not only the existence of capital and the division of labor, but also the false consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily acquires, both of itself and of the supposedly fixed elements within an over-all process. For the real truth of the matter—the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium—is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregistrement*), without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced.+ This is the first meaning of process as we use the term: incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them the productions of one and the same process.  

Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.4 Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: man and nature are not like two opposite ​terms confronting each other—not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product. Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle. That is why desiring-production is the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives of and deals with the schizo as Homo natura. This will be the case, however, only on one condition, which in fact constitutes the third meaning of process as we use the term: it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself. Putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitely—which, strictly speaking, is tantamount to ending it abruptly and prematurely— is what creates the artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions: a limp rag forced into autistic behavior, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity. D. H. Lawrence says of love: "We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. . . . The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish."5 Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature." 

Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: "and . . ." "and then . . ." This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows. "I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund."* Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, 01 urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by othei ​partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects. Every "object" presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object. Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing. But a connection with another machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or "sees" its own current interrupted.

Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow connective synthesis also has another form: product/producing. Producing is always something "grafted onto" the product; and for that reason desiring-production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine. We cannot accept the idealist category of "expression" as a satisfactory or sufficient explanation of this phenomenon. We cannot, we must not attempt to describe the schizophrenic object without relating it to the process of production. The Cahiers de I'art brut* are a striking confirmation of this principle, since by taking such an approach they deny that there is any such thing as a specific, identifiable schizophrenic entity. Or to take another example, Henri Michaux describes a schizophrenic table in terms of a process of production which is that of desire: "Once noticed, it continued to occupy one's mind. It even persisted, as it were, in going about its own business. . . . The striking thing was that it was neither simple nor really complex, initially or intentionally complex, or constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been desimpli-fied in the course of its carpentering. ... As it stood, it was a table of additions, much like certain schizophrenics' drawings, described as 'overstuffed,' and if finished it was only in so far as there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table. ... It was not intended for any specific purpose, for anything one expects of a table. Heavy, cumbersome, it was virtually immovable. One didn't know how to handle it (mentally or physically). Its top surface, the useful part of the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing, with so little relation to the clumsy framework that the thing did not strike one as a table, but as some freak piece of furniture, an unfamiliar instrument ... for which there was no purpose. A dehumanized table, nothing cozy about it, nothing 'middle-class,' nothing rustic, nothing countrified, not a kitchen table or a work table. A table which lent itself to no function, ​self-protective, denying itself to service and communication alike. There was something stunned about it, something petrified. Perhaps it suggested a stalled engine.

​The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no need to distinguish here between producing and its product. We need merely note that the pure "thisness" of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing. The table continues to "go about its business." The surface of the table, however, is eaten up by the supporting framework. The nontermination of the table is a necessary consequence of its mode of production. When Claude Levi-Strauss defines bricolage* he does so in terms of a set of closely related characteristics: the possession of a stock of materials or of rules of thumb that are fairly extensive, though more or less a hodgepodge—multiple and at the same time limited; the ability to rearrange fragments continually in new and different patterns or configurations; and as a consequence, an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved.t The satisfaction the handyman experiences when he plugs something into an electric socket or diverts a stream of water can scarcely be explained in terms of "playing mommy and daddy," or by the pleasure of violating a taboo. The rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary production: the production of production. A painting by Richard Lindner, "Boy with Machine," shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring-machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical social machine—which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does. 

Producing, a product: a producing/product identity. It is this identity that constitutes a third term in the linear series: an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place—and then the whole process will begin all over again. From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through. Will ​the machines run so badly, their component pieces fall apart to such a point that they will return to nothingness and thus allow us to return to nothingness? It would seem, however, that the flows of energy are still too closely connected, the partial objects still too organic, for this to happen. What would be required is a pure fluid in a free state, flowing without interruption, streaming over the surface of a full body. Desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all. "An incomprehensible, absolutely rigid stasis" in the very midst of process, as a third stage: "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus." The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. We shall not inquire how all this fits together so that the machine will run: the question itself is the result of a process of abstraction.

​Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down. Judge Schreber "lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with shattered ribs; he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx with his food, etc."7 The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced, in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the process of production. The catatonic body is produced in the water of the hydrotherapy tub. The full body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction; but yet another characteristic of the connective or productive synthesis is the fact that it couples production with antiproduction, with an element of antiproduction. 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Desiring-Production
p.24 -32 

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At any rate, you have one (or several). It's not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. This is not reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a ​concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is this BwO?—But you're already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight—fight and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On November 28,1947, Artaud declares war on the organs: To be done with the judgment of God, "for you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ."1 Experimentation: not only radiophonic but also biological and political, incurring censorship and repression. Corpus and Socius, politics and experimentation. They will not let you experiment in peace. 

​The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them. A long procession. The hypochondriac body: the organs are destroyed, the damage has already been done, nothing happens anymore. "Miss X claims that she no longer has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin and bones of a disorganized body. These are her own words."2 The paranoid body: the organs are continually under attack by outside forces, but are also restored by outside energies. ("He lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx with his food, etc. But divine miracles ('rays') always restored what had been destroyed.")3 The schizo body, waging its own active internal struggle against the organs, at the price of catatonia. Then the drugged body, the experimental schizo: "The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place."4 The masochist body: it is poorly understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the BwO. It has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working; flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight. 

Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance? So why these examples, why must we start there? Emptied bodies instead of full ones. What happened? Were you cautious enough? Not wisdom, caution. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of caution. Many have been defeated in this battle. Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your ​lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out. 

​"Mistress, 1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight, for ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2) One hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin sewing, you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the skin around the glans to the glans itself, preventing the top from tearing; you sew the scrotum to the skin of the thighs. You sew the breasts, securely attaching a button with four holes to each nipple. You may connect them with an elastic band with buttonholes—Now you go on to the second phase: 4) You can choose either to turn me over on the table so I am tied lying on my stomach, but with my legs together, or to bind me to the post with my wrists together, and my legs also, my whole body tightly bound; 5) You whip my back buttocks thighs, a hundred lashes at least; 6) You sew my buttocks together, all the way up and down the crack of my ass. Tightly, with a doubled thread, each stitch knotted. If I am on the table, now tie me to the post; 7) You give me fifty thrashes on the buttocks; 8) If you wish to intensify the torture and carry out your threat from last time, stick the pins all the way into my buttocks as far as they go; 9) Then you may tie me to the chair; you give me thirty thrashes on the breasts and stick in the smaller pins; if you wish, you may heat them red-hot beforehand, all or sorne. I should be tightly bound to the chair, hands behind my back so my chest sticks out. I haven't mentioned burns, only because I have a medical exam coming up in awhile, and they take a long time to heal." This is not a phantasy, it is a program: There is an essential difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy and the antipsychiatric experimentation of the program. Between the phantasy, an interpretation that must itself be interpreted, and the motor program of experimentation.5 The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the BwO. 

​Something will happen. Something is already happening. But what comes to pass on the BwO is not exactly the same as how you make yourself one. However, one is included in the other. Hence the two phases set forth in the preceding letter. Why two clearly distinguished phases, when the same thing is done in both cases—sewing and flogging? One phase is for the fabrication of the BwO, the other to make something circulate on it or pass across it; the same procedures are nevertheless used in both phases, but they must be done over, done twice. What is certain is that the masochist has made himself a BwO under such conditions that the BwO can no longer be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves. It is false to say that the masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that he is looking for pleasure in a particularly suspensive or roundabout way. The masochist is looking for a type of BwO that only pain can fill, or travel over, due to the very conditions under which that BwO was constituted. Pains are populations, packs, modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he engenders and augments. The same goes for the drugged body and intensities of cold, refrigerator waves. For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predetermining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and what expected? In short, there is a very special relation of synthesis and analysis between a given type of BwO and what happens on it: an a priori synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given mode (but what it will be is not known) and an infinite analysis by which what is produced on the BwO is already part of that body's production, is already included in the body, is already on it (but at the price of an infinity of passages, divisions, and secondary productions). It is a very delicate experimentation since there must not be any stagnation of the modes or slippage in type: the masochist and the drug user court these ever-present dangers that empty their BwO's instead of filling them.

You can fail twice, but it is the same failure, the same danger. Once at the level of the constitution of the BwO and again at the l