by Mark Seem

"We must die as egos and be born
again in the swarm, not separate
and self-hypnotized, but individual
​and related."
- Henry Miller, Sexus  

​In order to carry out this ambitious undertaking, Anti-Oedipus makes joyously unorthodox use of many writers and thinkers, ​whose concepts flow together with all the other elements in the book in what might well be described as a carefully constructed and executed experiment in delirium.

While Deleuze and Guattari quote frequently from Marx and Freud, it would be an error to view Anti-Oedipus as yet another attempt at a Freud/Marx synthesis. For such an attempt always treats political economy (the flows of capital and interest) and the economy of the libido (the flows of desire) as two separate economies, even in the work of Reich, who went as far as possible in this direction. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, postulate one and the same economy, the economy of flows. The flows and productions of desire will simply be viewed as the unconscious of the social productions. Behind every investment of time and interest and capital, an investment of desire, and vice versa.

​In order to reach this conclusion a new confrontation was required. Not the standard confrontation between a bourgeois Freud and a revolutionary Marx, where Freud ends up the loser, but a more radical confrontation, between Marx the revolutionary and Nietzsche the madman. The result of this confrontation, as the authors demonstrate convincingly, is that Freud and psychoanalysis (and perhaps even Lacan, although they remain ambiguous on this point) become "impossible."

​"Why Marx and Nietzsche? Now that's really mixing things up!" one might protest at this point. But there is really no cause for alarm. Readers of Marx will be happy to learn that Marx fares quite well in this confrontation. One might even say he is trimmed down to bare essentials and improved upon from the point of view of use. Given Deleuze and Guattari's perspective, this confrontation was inevitable. If one wants to do an analysis of the flows of money and capital that circulate in society, nothing is more useful than Marx and the Marxist theory of money. But if one wishes also to analyze the flows of desire, the fears and the anxieties, the loves and the despairs that traverse the social field as intensive notes from the underground (i.e., libidinal economy), one must look elsewhere. Since psychoanalysis is of no help, reducing as it does every social manifestation of desire to the familial complex, where is one to turn? To Nietzsche, and the Nietzschean theory of affects and intensity, Anti-Oedipus suggests. For here, and especially in On the Genealogy of Morals, is a theory of desire and will, of the conscious and the unconscious forces, that relates desire directly to the social field and to a monetary system based on profit. What Nietzsche teaches, as a complement to Marx's theory of alienation, is how the history of mankind is the history of a becoming-reactive. And it is Nietzsche, ​Deleuze and Guattari stress, whose thought already pointed a way out for humanity, whereas Marx and Freud were too ingrained in the culture that they were working against. 

​One could not really view Anti-Oedipus as a purely Nietzschean undertaking, however, for the book would be nothing without the tension between Nietzsche and Marx, between philosophy and politics between thought and revolution; the tension, in short, between Deleuze the philosopher and Guattari the militant. This tension is quite novel, and leads to a combination of the artistic "machine," the revolutionary "machine," and the analytical "machine"; a combination of three modes of knowledge—the intuitive, the practical, and the reflective, which all become joined as bits and pieces of one and the same strategical machine whose target is the ego and the fascist in each of us. Extending thought to the point of madness and action to the point of revolution, theirs is indeed a politics of experience. The experience, however, is no longer that of man, but of what is nonhuman in man, his desires and his forces: a politics of desire directed against all that is egoic—and heroic—in man. 

In addition to Nietzsche they also found it necessary to listen to others: to Miller and Lawrence and Kafka and Beckett, to Proust and Reich and Foucault, to Burroughs and Ginsberg, each of whom had different insights concerning madness and dissension, politics and desire. They needed everything they could get their hands on and they took whatever they could find, in an eclectic fashion closer to Henry Miller than it is to Marx or Freud. More poetic, undoubtedly, but also more fun.

​While Deleuze and Guattari use many authors and concepts, this is never done in an academic fashion aimed at persuading the reader. Rather, they use these names and ideas as effects that traverse their analyses, generating ever new effects, as points of reference indeed, but also as points of intensity and signs pointing a way out: points-signs that offer a multiplicity of solutions and a variety of directions for a new style of politics. Such an approach carries much along with it, in the course of its flow, but it also leaves much behind. Chunks of Marx and Freud that cannot keep up with the fast current will be left behind, buried or forgotten, while everything in Marx and Freud that has to do with how things and people and desires actually flow will be kept, and added to the infernal machine evoked above. This political analysis of desire, this schizoanalysis, becomes a mighty tool where schizophrenia as a process—the schiz—serves as a point of departure as well as a point of destination. Like Laing, they encourage mankind to take a journey, the journey through ego-loss. They go much further than Laing on this ​point, however. They urge mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his transformations and mutations. The human and social sciences have accustomed us to see the figure of Man behind every social event, just as Christianity taught us to see the Eye of the Lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They blind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects. 

excerpt from the Introduction of the book: Anti-Oedipus (CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA) ​by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ​

​Content and expression are not attached to one another by virtue of the Holy Spirit. In the "beginning" of assemblages of enunciation, we find neither verb, nor subject, system, nor syntax ...; instead, there are components of semiotization, subjectification, conscientization, diagrammarism, and abstract machinisms. Whether on a synchronic or diachronic level, systems of correspondence and translation between states of language and states of culture are never self-evident. When they seem to partake in common sense it is because they have been treated in a way suitable for this purpose. Every mode of signification and semiotization must be related to its assemblages of enunciation. These assemblages depend on a degree of autonomy from the plane of content upon which they are inscribed and the readjustment of their angle of significance in relation to the local conditions of the semiological triangle, i.e. in the last analysis, their semiotic capacity of "holding'' a given subset of the world, setting in motion both the representation and the morphemes of the referent, all the while preserving their own functional cohesion within the framework of dominant syntaxes. Thus, the status of the subject does not rest upon a play of the signifier as structuralist psychoanalysis would have it; it is assembled by a set of heterogeneous components, the latter of which even semiotizes what l have called "dominant realities." The individuation of the process of enunciation and the process of semiotically discernibilizing oneself from another person are themselves inseparable from a certain mode of social organization. The split between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement is inseparable from the split between good and bad objects of the unconscious, in other words, the libidinal topics of the social field. The limit between the "received" ego, the semiologized ego, and the extracted ego is constantly manipulated by the socius.2 The disentanglement of the subject, the other, the law, and the plane of content always correspond to particular objects of power. Thus, content does not crystallize a universal world but a worldliness marked by contingent fields of force centralized around very precise systems of subjective resonance. Phallic redundancies, for example, do not concern a universal symbolic function but male dominance, authoritative institutions, and extremely particularized traits of repressive faciality.

​To bring the production of signification back to the concrete ground of micropolitics and matters of expression nevertheless does not assume that its access to deterritorialized systems is prohibited. It is not a question of extracting the assemblages of enunciation and the assemblages of desire on the side of the concrete and the "natural" in order to keep them safe from the abstract and the artificial! This is first of all because deterritorialized desire promotes capitalistic subjectification to a large extent (the ideal of a power essentially based upon semiological subjection and semiotic enslavement), but also because no "molecular revolution" could economize the implementation of deterritorialized assemblages of enunciation.' The contingent nature of enunciatory power formations does not at all imply that they "adhere" to the most material realities and abandon the most complex modes of semiotization.

An assemblage draws its greater or lesser degree of freedom from the formula of its machinic nucleus, but this formula is basically metastable. As such, the abstract machines that compose it do not have any "real" existential consistency; they do not have any "mass," their own "energy," or memory. They are only infinitesimal indications hyper-deterritorialized from the crystallization of a possible between states of affairs and States of signs. We could compare them to the particles of contemporary physics that are "virtualized" by a theory that only preserves their identity for a negligible time; this identity is nevertheless unnecessary to concretely demonstrate since the theoretical-experimental complex can function in a satisfactory way by simply presupposing their existence. It is this metaphor which has led me to coin, in regards to the diagrammatic effect, the expression signs-particles: abstract machines "charge" themselves with redundancies of resonance (signification) or redundancies of interaction ("real" existence) depending on whether they are fixed and rendered powerless in a semiological substance or whether they inscribe themselves upon a machinic phylum.

Until now, we have not focused on the criteria that would enable us to precisely define an assemblage in relation both to its components and the field in which it evolves. We will be able to clarify this question only on the condition that we better characterize: this concept of existential consistency. Indeed, the modalities of the existence of abstract machines are radically different from those of concrete assemblages. Existence as fundamental machinic coordinate concerns three general types of consistency:

​Here redundant elements are strongly crystallized and stratified, allowing flows of redundancies to develop: 

​1. effects of weak resonance (signifying effect, e.g.: puce formal translation); 
2. effects of weak interaction (surplus-value of stratified codes). Later we shall reconsider the fact that the molar/molecular

​opposition cannot be identified with a type of large/small or macro/micro spatial fitting but arises from an alternative of a micropolitical order, an alternative choice of consistency. {It exists, for example, in the microscopic refrains that follow molar or molecular politics independently of the fact that they function on the basis of redundancies of resonance or redundancies of interaction.) What characterizes the molar politics of stratification is the constitution of a world of stratified, identified, or hierarchized objects and subjects, singularities and abstract machines there being held by systems of coordinates that authorize only the minimum degree of freedom necessary for the survival of the assemblages. 

​The exercise of what will later be defined as generative schizoanalysis will remain circumscribed in this low level of molar consistencies. It will consist in operating displacements of consistency within the assemblages, reducing the effects of resonance on behalf of weak diagrammatic interaction. 

​2) Molecular consistency

​Elements of redundancy are conveyed by substrates less stratified than the preceding, allowing flows of redundancy to develop:

​1) effects of strong resonance (the semantic field as a whole, the imaginary field, effects that are poetic, mystical, etc.); 
2) effects of strong interaction {components of passage, such as faciality, refrains ...). 

​It is impossible at the level of molecular interactions to tell the difference between what forms a part of a component, an assemblage, or a field. All machinic intentions count, all redundancies overlap, and all sign-particle trajectories cross. Here we are dealing with the actualized aspect of abstract machinisms. The assemblage, insofar as it represents the dimension of "foreign relation .. and the manifestation of abstract machinisms, coincides with its field effects. We are in the order of "degrees of reality" and "degrees of abstraction" without any noticeable absolute demarcation. This type of inter-assemblage, inter-component, and inter-field consistency is a fundamental micropolitical stake for schizoanalysis so that the degree of flexibility of the assemblages to give in to the various powers of subjection and enslavement-in other words, regarding everything that pertains to social power struggles and the molecular metabolisms of the machinic unconscious. 

​Here machinic elements escape systems of redundancy. (They are outside coordinates, being themselves in the foundation of systems of coordinates.) We will distinguish:

​- the consistency of capitalistic abstractions (Capital, Power, Music, etc ... ) as a cornerstone of signifying resonances and semantic fields, a sort of lethal level of abstract machinisms, but which does not model the universe of representation;

​- the consistency of signs-particles that specifically defines the irreducible nuclei of the abstract machinic possible. 

​Whichever possible is manifested by the consistency of molecular fields, this type of nucleus holds in reserve a "potential possible." This nucleus never dissolves into the universe of fields and components. This non-manifested possible is contained by the singular traits of matters of expression and "stored" in the abstract machines' general plane of consistency. (Example: given the politics of signifying overcoding, it is not inconsequential that it is implemented by a particular matter of expression. Thus, the fact that certain writing machines or certain computer machines are used as instruments of social control can radically change the modalities of the latter.)7 What will later be defined as transformational schizoanalysis is primarily located in these two extreme levels of strong molecular and abstract consistency. It will consist in performing displacements of consistency within the assemblages on behalf of the dissemination ​of components of passage and the launching of new machines of diagrammatic signs-particles to the detriment of semantic fields and capitalistic abstractions.

​The mechanic nucleus that specifies an assemblage is located at the crossing of two types of diagrammatic consistency:

- the fuzzy set of molecular consistencies component-assemblage-field);

​- the undecidable abstract machinic set of intrinsic abstract consistency. 

​Pairing the existential coordinates of consistency {molar-molecular abstract) and the coordinates of efficiency (redundancy of resonance-redundancy of interaction) thus leads to six general types of fields of consistency. 

​Let us underline the dissymmetrical nature of these six types of fields. indeed, if we have on one side the components of the assemblages and the 6dds that can "swell" in resonance to a point of total powerlessness, on the other side we never find pure nuclei of diagrammatic interaction. Asignifying components develop to some extent on the manure of signifying components; they proliferate like microscopic parasites on modes of subjectification and conscientization. Even in the case of a pure computer machinism, at the end of the chain somewhere there alway; remains some semiological terminals that are human. 

Before taking up the mixed semiotic (diagrammatic and semiological) assemblages, we shall return to some characteristics of the extreme cases that represent the transformation of abstract machines into signifying abstraction within the framework of assemblages of capitalistic power. 

​from the book: THE MACHINIC  UNCONSCIOUS (ESSAYS IN SCHIZOANALYSIS) by Felix  Guattari

​Translated by Taylor Adkins

Felix Guattari ​​

​If it is true chat abstract machines arise neither from the subject-object phenomenological couple, nor the set-subset logical couple, and consequently escape from the semiological triangle denotation representation-signification, then how do we conceive the possibility of saying anything about them? What will become of representation when there is no longer a subject to record it? These are a few of the difficulties that will lead us to call the status of the modes of sensitization and subjectification into question. The assemblages do not acknowledge--as of yet-objects and subjects: but that does not mean that their components do not have anything to do with something that is of the order of subjectivity and representation, but not in the traditional form of individual subjects and statements detached from their context. Other processes of encoding and "ensigning," independent of a deixis and an anthropocentric logic, will thus have to come to light. Universality will no longer have the discourse of a subject, incarnating itself in a word, a revealed text, or a divine or scientific law, as a compulsory reference. Logical propositions will be crafted according to machinic propositions. The singular features of a non-semiologically formed matter will be able to lay claim to universality. Conversely, the universality of a process of coding or a signifying redundancy will be able to "fall" into contingency. While conferring onto singularity points a particular power of crossing stratified fields, the signs-particles conveying quanta of possibles will only equip them for a limited number of universal capacities. Indeed, the assemblages that embody the singularity-abstract machine conjunctions remain prone to being undone for the purpose of opening up other possibles and contingencies. Universalist thought always conceals a reverential fear with respect to an established order-be it religious or natural. On the contrary, the thought of assemblages and molecular machinisms should continue connecting all sorts of practices situated in the perspective of the changes and transformations of the existing orders and the diminishing of their power. 

​Linguistics and semiology occupy a privileged place in the field of the humanities and social sciences. Many problems that other disciplines in this field are unable to solve are reinvestigated by the linguists and semiologists who are supposed to know the real story. Benefiting from a favorable bias due to their achieving fashionable status, and credited with a high degree of "scientificity," linguistic and semiological theories are frequently used as an alibi for all sorts of pretexts. One refers to them as though they were dogma or holy texts. Several generations of psychoanalysts thus spouted forth an incredible amount of Saussurian "signifying" without any critical distance, and even, for most among them, without really knowing what they were talking about. The attitudes of linguists and semiologists have seemed in my view to coincide perfectly with that of psychoanalysts on an essential point: everyone agrees to avoid any overstepping of their respective. problematics regarding political, social, economic, and concrete technological domains which are in their common territory. The reflections and suggestions that I devote to questions of linguistics and semiotics at the beginning of this book will focus mainly on questioning of this shared problematic.

​In these essays we will successively approach:

- questions of a linguistic and semiotic nature whose examination, in my view, constitutes an essential precondition for any revision of the theory of the unconscious and in particular the manner in which the problem of pragmatics is posed today;

- questions relative to assemblages of enunciation and pragmatic fields considered from the angle of unconscious phenomena in the social field; 

- two fundamental categories of the redundancies of the machinic unconscious: faciality traits and refrains; 

​- the bases upon which a schizoanalytical pragmatics can be constructed that would be non-reductive with regard to political and micropolitical problems; 

​-in addition, a "machinic genealogy" of the set of semiotic entities proposed throughout this work which, in my view, seems to be able to function within the framework of pragmatics that would no longer be exclusively a matter for linguistics and semiotics. 

​A second essay will be devoted to the trajectory of faciality traits and refrains in the work of Marcel Proust. 

​In order to help the reader familiarize themselves with a few of the problems and terms that will constantly reappear during this essay, but which will be approached from partial angles, I here present a sort of synthetic glossary of some of the essential conclusions. 

​Against the model of the syntagmatic tree, analytical pragmatics and schizoanalysis will oppose something that is not a model, but a "rhizome" {or "lattice"). It will be defined by the following characteristics:

​- contrary to Chomskyan trees, which start at a point S and proceed by dichotomy, rhizomes may connect any point whatsoever to any other point;

​- each trait of the rhizome will not necessarily refer back to a linguistic trait. Every sort of semiotic chain will be connected to a wide variety of encoding modes: biological, political, economic chains, etc ... bringing into play not only all the sign regimes but also all the regulations of non-signs; 

​- relations existing between the levels of segmentarity within each semiotic Stratum will be able to differentiate inter-stratic relations and will function on the basis of the lines of Right of deterritorialization; 

​-under these conditions, the pragmatics of rhizomes will renounce any idea of underlying structure; unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, the machinic unconscious is nor a representational unconscious crystallized in codified complexes and repartitioned on a genetic axis; it is to be built like a map;

​- the map, as the last characteristic of the rhizome, will be detachable, connectable, reversible, and modifiable.

Within a rhizome, tree structures will be able to exist. Conversely, the branch of a tree could begin to send out buds in the form of a rhizome. We will classify the pragmatic components into two categories: 

​1. Interpretative components, which we shall indifferently call generic or generative transformations and which imply a primacy of semiologies of resonance and signification over non-interpretative semiotics. 

​They will also be divided into two general types of transformations: 

- analogical transformations depending, for example, on iconic semiologies,

​- signifying transformations concerning linguistic semiologies

​Each of these types of the component will only be able to occupy a dominant position within the framework of a particular mode of subjectification of the contents and formations of power: territorialized or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation for analogical transformations and individual assemblages of enunciation and capitalist subjectivity for signifying transformations. 

2. Non-interpretative components, which we shall generally refer to as transformational components due to the fact that the preceding components of formal resonance do not constitute anything other, as I already mentioned, than a particular or borderline case. They will also be divided into two general types of transformation: 

- symbolic transformations concerning "intensive" semiotics (on the level of perception, gesture, mimicry, etc ... but also on the various verbal and scriptural levels that escape from analogical redundancies); 

​- diagrammatic transformations concerning signifying semiotics that proceed through a deterritorialization relative both to the formalism of content and expression by setting into play mutant abstract machines (systems of signs-particles and quanta of possibles working simultaneously within the register of material and semiotic realities). 

At the semiotic level of coordinates of efficiency, we shall distinguish two modes of redundancy:

​- redundancies of resonance corresponding to the semiological components of subjectification and conscientialization (faciality, "refrains," etc ... ); 

​- machinic redundancies or redundancies of interaction corresponding to asignifying diagrammatic components (semiotic or not). 

At the level of existential coordinates, we shall distinguish three levels of consistency: 

- the molar consistency of strata, significations, and realities such as the dominant (or dominated) phenomenology proposes (complete objects, subjects, individuals, etc ... ); 

- the molecular consistency that expresses the degree of manifestation or real machinic embodiment of an assemblage (but on this level we can neither distinguish assemblages from fields nor components); 

- the abstract consistency that specifies the "theoretical" degree of possibility of the two preceding consistencies. The intersection of these two frames of reference ends in six types of fields of resonance and fields of interaction: cf. table page 51. 

​from the book: THE MACHINIC  UNCONSCIOUS (ESSAYS IN SCHIZOANALYSIS) by Felix  Guattari

​Translated by Taylor Adkins

Does the unconscious still have something to say to us? We have saddled it with so much that it seems to have resolved to keep silent. For a long time it was believed to be possible to interpret its messages. A whole corporation of specialists worked away at this task. Nevertheless, the results were hardly worthwhile, for it seems likely they have all gone astray. Would the unconscious definitively speak an untranslatable language? It's quite possible. It would be necessary to start again from the beginning. First of all, what is this unconscious really? Is it a magical world hidden in who knows which fold of the brain? An internal mini-cinema specialized in child pornography or the projection of fixed archetypal plans? The new psychoanalysts have worked out more purified and better asepticized ideal models than the older ones: they now propose a structural unconscious emptied of all the old Freudian or Jungian folklore with its interpretative grids, psycho-sexual stages, and dramas copied from antiquity ... According to them, the unconscious would be "structured like a language." Yet, it goes without saying, not like everyday language, but like a mathematical language. For example, Jacques Lacan currently speaks about the "mathemes" of the unconscious ...

We have the unconscious we deserve! And I must acknowledge that the structuralist psychoanalyses are even less appropriate in my view than the Freudians, Jungians, or Reichians. I would see the unconscious instead as something that we drag around with ourselves both in our gestures and daily objects, as well as on TV, that is part of the zeitgeist, and even, and perhaps especially, in our day-to-day problems. (I am thinking, for example, of the question of "the society we choose to live in" that always resurfaces around the time of each electoral campaign.) Thus, the unconscious works inside individuals in their manner of perceiving the world and living their body, territory, and sex, as well as inside the couple, the family, school, neighborhood, factories, stadiums, and universities... In other words, not simply an unconscious of the specialists of the unconscious, not simply an unconscious crystallized in the past, congealed in an institutionalized discourse, but, on the contrary, an unconscious turned towards the future whose screen would be none other than the possible itself, the possible as hypersensitive to language, but also the possible hypersensitive to touch, hypersensitive to the socius, hypersensitive to the cosmos ... Then why stick this label of "machinic unconscious" onto it? Simply to stress that it is populated not only with images and words, but also with all kinds of machinisms that lead it to produce and reproduce these images and words.

We are accustomed to thinking of material and social facts in terms of genealogies, archaeological residues, and dialectical progress or in terms of decline, degeneration, and rising entropy ... Time goes on toward better days or plunges blindly toward unimaginable catastrophes; unless it simply stares to vegetate indefinitely. We can bypass these dilemmas by refusing any sort of causalist or finalist extrapolation and by strictly limiting the object of research to structural relations or systemic balances. But no matter how one goes about it, the past remains heavy, cooled down, and the future seems largely mortgaged by a present closing in on it from all sides. To think time against the grain, to imagine that what came "after" can modify what was "before" or that changing the past at the root can ​transform a current state of affairs: what madness! A return to magical thought! It is pure science fiction, and yet ... 

In my view, there is nothing absurd about attempting to explore these interactions, which I would also qualify as "machinic," without initially specifying their material and/or semiotic nature. Neither transcendent Platonic idea, nor Aristotelian form adjacent to an amorphous matter, these abstract deterritorialized interactions, or, more briefly, these abstract machines traverse various levels of reality and establish and demolish stratifications. Abstract machines cling not to a single universal time but to a trans-spacial and trans-temporal plant of consistency which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their "appearance" in reality can no longer claim to be given all in one piece: it is negotiated on the basis of quanta of possibles. The coordinates of existence function like so many space-time and subjective coordinates and are established on the basis of assemblages which are in constant interaction and incessantly engaged in processes of deterritorialization and singularization causing them to be decentralized in comparison to one another while assigning them "territories of replacement" in spaces of coding. This is why I shall oppose territories and lands to machinic territorialities. By distinguishing them from set logic, a "'machinism" of the assemblage will only recognize relative identities and trajectories. It is only on a "normal" human-scale-i.e. that which pertains neither to madness, childhood, nor art- that Being and Tune will seem to thicken and coagulate to a point of no return. Having considered things from the angle of machinic time and the plane of consistency, everything will take on a new light: causalities will no longer function in a single direction, and it will no longer be allowed for us to affirm that "everything is a foregone conclusion."

Following Rene Thom, it even seems possible one can "take back one's throws," since, according to this author, the logos of the biological species would be able to operate a sort of "smoothing of time" in the direction of both the past and future. Due to the definition of this logoi and so long as "space-time figures, as well as their variations, conform to a principle excluding discontinuities and angles," the phenomena that refer to them would be able to influence their predecessors and their successors. Here as well, all in all, machines become independent of their immediate manifestations while "smoothing" a plane of consistency that authorizes every intersection possible! And yet, this logoi inspire only relative confidence in me. I fear that they merely have an irresistible inclination to escape from the physico-biological world in order to rejoin the mathematical universe of their origin! What particularly worries me is that they can only be f.tctored in, as Rene Thorn explains, so that the most abstract are arranged with the most elementary and the most concrete with the most complex. This simple fact seems to condemn them to definitively faU to maintain their hold on reality. The difference between Thorn's logoi and abstract machines, such as I conceive them, stems from the fact that the former are simply carrying abstraction, whereas the latter in addition convey singularity points "extracted" from the cosmos and history. Rather than abstract machines, perhaps it is preferable to speak of "machinic extracts" or deterritorialized and deterritorializing machines. In any event, I consider that they should not be comparable to entities attached once and for all to a universe of forms and general formulas. By preserving the expression "abstract machine" in spite of its ambiguity, it is the very idea of abstract universals that I aim to dispute. Abstraction can only result from machines and assemblages of concrete enunciations. And since there is no general assemblage that overhangs all of them, every time we encounter a universal enunciation, it will be necessary to determine the particular nature of its enunciative assemblage and analyze the operation of power that leads it to lay claim to such a universality.

The ideal of order-the systematic formalization of every mode of expression, the control over semiological flows, and the repression of the lines of flight and lines of dissidence-that dominates university research and the practical fields of the social sciences can never be completely attained, primarily because it is the stake of political and micro-political power struggles, but, perhaps more basically because, as we shall see, languages drift in all parts. Scientific formalization, fortunately, does not make an exception to this rule. The exhaustive dichotic analysis, binarism reduction, and radical "digitalization" of every semiotic practice, whose model has been elaborated by information theory, seems to function today {in league with behaviorism and Pavlovian theories, with which it also has certain affinities} as a sort of instrument of contention in the field of linguistics and the social sciences. We believe that such a method could in principle be applied to any type of social phenomenon. And if we manage to implement it through some sort of sleight of hand, we are then convinced to have grasped the essence of the phenomenon in question: we can stop and pass on to something else. Unless, while pushing things to the extreme, we come from that position to no longer consider any event except in terms of its probability of occurrence, and then, in the name of the sacrosanct second principle of thermodynamics, to proclaim that everything must tend towards a state of equilibrium or that every structural phenomenon must necessarily evolve towards a reduction of tensions and disorder. A few universal principles hangover contingencies and singularities, precisely with respect to probabilizing events on a diachronic axis and structuralizing them on a synchronic axis: this is what the ambition of the various structuralist schools is reduced too! In fact, I believe that this kind of operation always turns up in order to "sweep under the rug" the socio-machinic assemblages which are ultimately the only effective products of rupture and innovation in the semiotic fields that interest us here. Chance ​and structure are the two greatest enemies of freedom. They induce the same conservative ideal of the general axiomatization of the sciences that has invaded their field since the end of the 19th century. And since they have furthermore become inseparable from the philosophical tradition as a pure subject of knowledge inaccessible to historical transformations, they return us very quickly to the meddlesome and sclerotic discourse of epistemology. It is always the same juggling act: through the promotion of a transcendent order founded upon the allegedly universal nature of the signifying articulations of certain enunciations--the Cogito, mathematical and scientific laws, etc ... -one endeavor to guarantee certain types of formations of power, simultaneously consolidating the social status and the imaginary security of its pundits and scribes in the fields of ideology and science. 

​Two attitudes or two politics are possible with regard to form: a formalist position that begins with transcendent universal forms cut off from history and which are "embodied" in semiological substances, and a position that begins with social formations and material assemblages in order to extract some (to abstract some) of the semiotic components and abstract machines from the cosmic and human history that offers them. With this second path, certain "accidental" conjunctions between "natural" encodings and sign machines will affirm themselves, will "make the law," during a given period. However, it will be impossible to consider them independency of the assemblages that constitute the nucleus of their enunciation. It is not a question, as one could be tempted to say, of a re-enunciation. Indeed, there is no meta-language here. The collective assemblage of enunciation speaks "on the same level as states of affairs, states of facts. and subjective states. There is not, on the one hand, a subject that speaks in the "void" and, on the other hand, an object that would be spoken in the "plenum." The void and the plenum are "engineered" by the same deterritorialization effect. ​Connections are only possible at the point where abstract mechanizations and concrete, dated, and situated assemblages enable a connection to their deterritorialization. Also, assemblages arc not delivered randomly to the axiomatic of universals: the only "law" they uphold is a general movement of deterritorialization. The axiomatic returns to the assemblage more deterritorialized in order to solve the impasse of previous systems of enunciation and untie the stratifications of the machinic assemblages that correspond to them. Such a "law" does not imply a pre-established order, a necessary harmony, or a systemic universal of anything.

​Rene Thorn, who knew how to denounce the "dream of information theory" with humor, or rather the dream of those whose hopes depend upon a set of formal systems and morpho-genesis,' perhaps did not come to the end of his intuition. Does he not lend himself to the brunt of his own criticism when he sets out in search of a system of algorithms that would be able to give an account of every morphogenetic change, of every "catastrophe" capable of affecting an assemblage? 

He rightly considers that the "abstract logoi," immigrants of the physical and biological world, never stop "invading" the cerebral world. But there are many other continents from which such "invasions" develop, beginning with the world of socio-economic assemblages and that of the mass media. According to him, every interaction is brought back to the phenomena of formal resonance in the last analysis (page [200]). On the contrary, I will start with the idea that assemblages of flows and codes arc first compared in relation to differentiation of form and structure, object and subject, and that the phenomena of formal interaction constitute only a particular case, that of a borderline case, within the machinic processes that work upon the assemblages before the substance-form coupling.

​Abstract machines do not function like a coding system stacked on from the "outside" on the existing stratifications. Within the framework of the general movement of deterritorialization that I evoked earlier, they constitute a sort of transformational matter, what I call an "optional subject" -composed of the crystals of the possible which catalyze connections, destratifications, and reterritorializations both in the living and inanimate world. In short, abstract mechanisms emphasize the fact that deterritorialization in all its forms "precedes" the existence of the strata and the territories. Nor being "realizable" in a purely logical space but only through contingent machinic manifestations, they never involve simple combinations; they always imply an assemblage of components irreducible to a formal description. "Descending" from the pragmatic fields to the assemblages, from the assemblages to the components, and then from the components to the matters of expression, we shall see that we will not necessarily pass from the complex to the simple. We will never be able to establish a final systemic hierarchy between the elementary and the compound. Under certain conditions, the elementary can always make new potentialities emerge or make them proliferate and include the remainders within the assemblages to which it is related. Also, rather than starting with the elementary, which is likely to be merely a lure, the analysis will attempt to never simplify or reduce what seems preferable to call a molecular level. Machinic molecules may carry the keys of encoding that lead to the most differentiated assemblages. Moreover, the scope of the "most complex" generally seems to depend upon the fact that these molecular machinisms are more deterritorialized and more abstract. 

​​from the book: THE MACHINIC  UNCONSCIOUS (ESSAYS IN SCHIZOANALYSIS) by Felix  Guattari

​Translated by Taylor Adkins

to be continued

​An Interview with Paul Virilio by ​Bertrand Richard

Bertrand Richard: The propaganda of progress raises the question of the propagandists. Who are the people behind this propaganda? And if there are no propagandists, how are we to understand it?

Paul Virilio: There is a destiny connected to the considerable event that has speed dominate light. Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave the objects of the world their shapes. In the light speed of electromagnetic waves that create this instant interactivity, speed has taken power. In a way, waves and not rays illuminate reality; it is a major phenomenon that I would not hesitate to call illuminist. What we are living through now has taken the shape of a religion; it is not unlike a return to sun worship where speed has replaced light. We are experiencing the return of a major myth supported by the propaganda of progress. ​There is nothing behind it, no deus ex machina or pope. We are no longer in the Enlightenment: we are in the century of light speed.

​The question of fear is clearly polysemic and covers all three of the notions that you j ust mentioned. Fear is very resourceful and can use anything at hand, but it has a very concrete explanation. It comes at a time in history when three major fears (the balance of terror with the atomic bomb, the imbalance of terrorism with informational bombs and the great ecological fear with the fear of the explosion of a genetic bomb) have displayed their incredible conditioning power. Gunther Anders, whose broad theoretical reach we have already mentioned, affirmed in his work The Outdatedness of Human Beings (1956): "The power of an ideology is not only measured by the answers it can provide but by the questions that it is able to suppress." In the propaganda of progress as I defined it, the question of speed and its violence (unsanctioned violence) has been purely and simply suppressed. There was a missed connection ​at the origin in the history of ideas, but afterwards the ideology of progress prevented the development of the political question of relativity and the question of its violence. We have conscientiously established an ideology of speed, with all of the fear and terror that comes with it. As the philosopher of war Sun Tzu aptly noted: "Speed is the essence of war." And if time is money, speed is power, the essence of power. How could you not be afraid of the power, ubiquity, and instantaneousness that, very significantly, were first the attributes of the gods? 

​My task, as you know, is to focus on the fear that is hidden by the ideology of progress. The hothouse effect of the siege mentality, the claustrophobia of masses of individuals under siege are the phenomena that draw and require my attention. During the Second World War, an American journalist entered the Warsaw Ghetto and noticed that the windows ​were open in the middle of winter even though the inhabitants were burning their furniture to keep warm. When he expressed his surprise, people there replied: "You wouldn't want us to have to close our windows too." This is the siege mentality: foreclosure. The growing atmospheric pressure caused by global warming is joined by dromospheric pressure, the tension created by speed in our daily lives and work. At the intersection between the environment and our ways of life, we can find fears that are related to socio-economic contexts. On this topic, how can we not think of the wave of suicides that swept France Telecom at the beginning of winter in 2009-20 1 0? And the scale! How can we not see that fear has been administered, in the strict meaning of the term, by instant interactivity, in particular in the functions that relate to real-time communications? The acceleration of reality has had a considerable impact on social rhythms and has started to wreak havoc. The notion of arrhythmia that I also mentioned earlier is obvious in the slogan "Time to move," the management program implemented within France Telecom to ensure the permanent mobility among its executives. The rhythms of the past were tied to seasons, the liturgical calendar, Sunday holidays, the Sabbath; they have been pushed aside in favor of 24/7. "For what reason should we stop people from working on Sunday? 

The world is changing," is the refrain we now hear. With the rural exodus in the 1 9th century and the urban exodus that is beginning (since a number of Western cities have seen a decline in the net migration rate) , with the change from an artisanal rhythm to an industrial rhythm to a postindustrial rhythm characterized by logics of synchronization, we are now experiencing firsthand the loss of the sociopolitical rhythmology that has always governed human beings.
​
Temporal compression, as it is technically called, is an event that concretely modifies everyone's daily life at the same time. In the face of this acceleration of daily life, fear has become an environment, even in a time of peace. We are living in the accident of the globe, the accident of instantaneousness, simultaneity and interactivity that have now gained the upper hand over ordinary activities. 

​The word "environment" is an Anglicism in French. The key word to remember here is "habitat" or the place of our habits. But there is almost no space left, because of both spatiotemporal compression and the ruin of ecosystems. This contraction has made a fusion possible between the sanitary ideology of ecological Great Health and the security ideology of the search for Lebensraum. This ​hybridization can lead to biopolitics, as Giorgio Agamben has denounced it, and to meteorologicalpolitics. Seasons and their rhythms no longer condition and shape our social temporalities; it is now a meteorological-politics w.\iere weather patterns threaten to replace the geopolitical chronicles of History.

Biopolitics is the contemporary extension of the Great Health government announced by Nietzsche, a utopia proclaiming the death of God. It was taken up and perverted by the Nazis with their creation of Lebensborn, centers for the birth of pure, Aryan children. They turned it into something other than the aristocratic morality of Nietzsche; it became a "raciality'' "scientifically" developed through racism. Fear has become an environment in the sense of the fusion of security (video surveillance, movement control, etc.) and health; it is extremely problematic and traceability has replaced any real identity.

The fusion of these ideologies has also led to the return of strictly individual existence. "Strictly" because we are very much a society of individuals, yet it is a society of mass individualism. As filmmaker Joseph Losey observed, "It is too late to do anything in private life." The communism of affects is the privatization of communism. In this way, communism has not disappeared from History; it has been privatized, creating a community of ​synchronized emotions. Something happened with progress and its propaganda to make us constantly preoccupied with progress and perpetually occupied by it. We are now in a situation of occupation in both the temporal and martial meanings of the word: we are under the pressure of permanent occupation. This occupation places us under surveillance, watching us, scanning us and evaluating us, revealing us and it is increasingly present, increasingly accepted as a fate, a destiny. Promoting progress means that we are always behind: on high-speed internet, on our Facebook profile, on our email inbox. There are always updates to be made; we are the objects of daily masochism and under constant tension. 

The room is the box: the high-speed terminal and its container. The container is an architectural figure of the box. It becomes an interconnected locus solus. I don't want to be cast as the eternal Cassandra of technology, but it must be said that ​we are encountering a phenomenon that is not at all secular. This ideology of progress, which is not progress, can be seen in certain practices. The notions of resistance and collaboration as I described them at the beginning of this conversation come to mind. But we no longer feel occupied, we feel free, and even increasingly free, delivered. And in fact we are freed from the space-time of duration. The question is whether it is good to be free of it, unless the ideal of liberation becomes freedom without content, intransitive secession. And we notice with this pressure that performance and its demands place us under constantly renewed evaluation, which is the source of enormous stress. Stress: the "mot-valise" that translates the dromospheric pressure I mentioned before. Terror is therefore the accomplishment of the law of movement. When suicide itself becomes a workplace accident (and we are on the verge of official recognition of suicide as a workplace accident), the administration of fear is again at work, albeit now in peacetime. It is a movement from Freudian psychopathy to the sociopathy of the Suicidal State. It is no longer a particular psychological state, it is a common sociological state. 

from the book:  The Administration Of Fear by Paul Virilio