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design/almost
(24 nov 2024)
design/superabundance
(8 aug 2024)
The two of us wrote *Anti-Oedipus* together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an *assemblage.* A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity — but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a *body without organs,* which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a book? There are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered, their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on a “plane of consistency” assuring their selection. Here, as elsewhere, the units of measure are what is essential: *quantify writing.* There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc. — and an *abstract machine* that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine … (What if one became animal or plant *through* literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types, bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the plane of consistency, and in each case the units of measure. *Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence:* Not only do these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.
A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most “dialectical” way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four… Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as “advanced” as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical trees, which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much as to say that this system of thought has never reached an understanding of multiplicity: in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt possible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four, or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the pivotal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn’t get us very far. The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal relationships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no better understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates in the object, the other in the subject. Binary logic and biunivocal relationships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian interpretation of Schreber’s case), linguistics, structuralism, and even information science.
The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book, to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root, but the root’s unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality. Take William Burroughs’s cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus. Most modern methods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic, dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. The abortionists of unity are indeed angel makers, *doctores angelici,* because they affirm a properly angelic and superior unity. Joyce’s words, accurately described as having “multiple roots,” shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche’s aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dualism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth, it is not enough to say, “Long live the multiple,” difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple *must be made,* not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available — always *n* — 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at *n* — 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.
1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. *Collective assemblages of enunciation* function directly within *machinic assemblages;* it is not impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky’s grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy…). Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the *abstract machine* that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, “an essentially heterogeneous reality.”[27] There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.[28] It is always possible to break a language down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence.
Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, “multiplicity,” that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomulti-plicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or “return” in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: “Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that *its multiplicity* resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text. Granted; but the actor’s nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated… . The interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to the Fates or Norns.”[29] An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units *(unites)* of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of unity *(unite)* appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a set of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding).
The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak *of a plane of consistency* of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this “plane” increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject. The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. *Flat multiplicities of n dimensions* are asignifying and asubjective. They are designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives *(some* couchgrass, *some* of a rhizome…).
Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject — anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couchgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed.
How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterri-torialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata — a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying. Rimy Chauvin expresses it well: “the *aparallel evolution* of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”[30] More generally, evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent. Under certain conditions, a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit itself as the cellular gene of a complex species; moreover, it can take flight, move into the cells of an entirely different species, but not without bringing with it “genetic information” from the first host (for example, Benveniste and Todaro’s current research on a type C virus, with its double connection to baboon DNA and the DNA of certain kinds of domestic cats). Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another.[31] Once again, there is *aparallel evolution,* of the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or copies of each other (a becoming-baboon in the cat does not mean that the cat “plays” baboon). We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. As Francois Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures, fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous to those of “the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle Ages.”[32] Transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular, particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.
The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterri-torialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature. The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its “aparallel evolution” through to the end. The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else — with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.). “Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.” Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of *n* dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. “Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later… you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way.”[33] Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many “transformational multiplicities,” even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.[34]
5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure is more like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate constituents, while the unity of the product passes into another, transformational and subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a departure from the representative model of the tree, or root — pivotal taproot or fascicles (for example, Chomsky’s “tree” is associated with a base sequence and represents the process of its own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of *tracing.* All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.
The rhizome is altogether different, a *map and not a tracing.* Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.” Unlike psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic competence (which confines every desire and statement to a genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous tracings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure), schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it — divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic. (It is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of the cartography of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content to make ready-made tracings — Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad daddy, the bad mommy and the good mommy — while the child makes a desperate attempt to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues.)[35] Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political options for problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politically, in other words, with all the force of his or her desire.
Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a multiplicity have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications, mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attributions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual divergence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: *the tracing should always be put back on the map.* This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structurahzed the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the unconscious, and the latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies (it’s not surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics).
Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psychoanalysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents’ bed, they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). Freud explicitly takes Little Hans’s cartography into account, but always and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. And look what Melanie Klein did to Little Richard’s geopolitical maps: she developed photos from them, made tracings of them. Strike the pose or follow the axis, genetic stage or structural destiny — one way or the other, your rhizome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.
That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsymmetrical, operation. Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans, studying the unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.; how these lines are blocked, how the child is made to take root in the family, be photographed under the father, be traced onto the mother’s bed; then how Professor Freud’s intervention assures a power takeover by the signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible lines of flight. The same applies to the group map: show at what point in the rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership, fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only underground, continuing to make rhizome in the shadows. Deligny’s method: map the gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the same child, for several different children.[36] If it is true that it is of the essence of the map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausible that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assuming the necessary precautions are taken (once again, one must avoid any Manichaean dualism). For example, one will often be forced to take dead ends, to work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a foothold in formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse, rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections. Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing, rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialization. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or else it is a microscopic element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets rhizome production going. Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka novel. An intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenging the hegemony of the signifier. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the “tracing,” that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language — a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky’s syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhizome.[37] To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses. We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine. Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called “dendrites” do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (“the uncertain nervous system”). Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. “The axon and the dendrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns.”[38] The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, offbeat, in an “untimely” way, not instantaneously.
The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity. If we consider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of *opposed segment* for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this kind of segment is a “link dipole,” in contrast to the “unit dipoles” formed by spokes radiating from a single center.[39] Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplicities. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing “the imagery of command trees” (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note that “accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent structures privileged status…. The arborescent form admits of topological explanation…. In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior…. The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place” (signifiance and subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one — of what we call the radicle type — because its ostensibly nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An example is the famous *friendship theorem:* “If any two given individuals in a society have precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the friend of all the others.” (Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual friend is. Who is “the universal friend in this society of couples: the master, the confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the initial axioms.” Who is this friend of humankind? Is it the .pMosopher as he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity that makes itself felt only through its absence or subjectivity, saying all the while, I know nothing, I am nothing?) Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theorems. Such is indeed the principle of roots-trees, or their outcome: the radicle solution, the structure of Power.[40]
To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their *state* at a given moment — such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency. Transduction of intensive states replaces topology, and “the graph regulating the circulation of information is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical graph.… There is no reason for the graph to be a tree” (we have been calling this kind of graph a map). The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for *n* individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General is to be found in an acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of states with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a central order. The authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any centralizing or unifying automaton as an “asocial intrusion.”[41] Under these conditions, *n* is in fact always *n* — 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot emphasize that the opposition, centered-acentered, is valid less as a designation for things than as a mode of calculation applied to things. Trees may correspond to the rhizome, or they may burgeon into a rhizome. It is true that the same thing is generally susceptible to both modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but not without undergoing a change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an example again: it subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the phallus-tree — not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis’s margin of maneuverability is therefore very limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, always a leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic network of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely different state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics; Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an “acentered organization of a society of words.” For both statements and desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to *produce the unconscious,* and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious.
It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy…: the root-foundation, *Grund, racine, fondement.* The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation; the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agriculture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals derived from a wide range of “clones.” Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree? Andre Haudricourt even sees this as the basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of transcendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds).[42] Transcendence: a specifically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bodies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or the grass. Henry Miller: “China is the weed in the human cabbage patch.
… The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor…. Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most satisfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Sermons on the Mount…. Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventually things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out…. The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. *It grows between,* among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the poppy is maddening — but the weed is rank growth …: it points a moral.”[43] Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map?
America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American books are different from European books, even when the American sets off in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. *Leaves of Grass.* And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American “map” in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East.[44] (India is not the intermediary between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the canal…
Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still more)? Western bureaucracy: its agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and fields; trees and their role as frontiers; the great census of William the Conqueror; feudalism; the policies of the kings of France; making property the basis of the State; negotiating land through warfare, litigation, and marriages. The kings of France chose the lily because it is a plant with deep roots that clings to slopes. Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy to depict an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the Orient the State does not act following a schema of arborescence corresponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic power with “weak property,” in which the State engenders channeled and channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel’s work that have not been refuted).[45] The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead, which is still a point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting under a tree; Buddha’s tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao’s river and Louis’s tree. Has not America acted as an intermediary here as well? For it proceeds both by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only the Indians but also the farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration from the outside. The flow of capital produces an immense channel, a quantification of power with immediate “quanta,” where each person profits from the passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the reality-myth of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty again): in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them both — all for the worst.
At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we all seek — PLURALISM = — via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.
Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added *(n +* 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle *(milieu)* from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with *n* dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted *(n* — 1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. These lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality — but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial — that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of “becomings.”
A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word “plateau” to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. “Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax,” war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.[46] For example, a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a “plateau” any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic procedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a different dimension for an image-book. Technonarcissism. Typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when they no longer belong to the form of expression of a hidden unity, becoming themselves dimensions of the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of rare successes in this.[47] We ourselves were unable to do it. We just used words that in turn function for us as plateaus. RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = = . These words are concepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.). Nowhere do we claim for our concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar with scientif-icity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages. And the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation. No signifiance, no subjectification: writing to the «th power (all individuated enunciation remains trapped within the dominant significations, all signifying desire is associated with dominated subjects). An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world. A rhizome-book, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book. Never send down roots, or plant them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting to the old procedures. “Those things which occur to me, occur to me not from the root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let someone then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade of grass and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle.”[48] Why is this so difficult? The question is directly one of perceptual semiotics. It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes. It’s not easy to see the grass in things and in words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to be “ruminated”; never is a plateau separable from the cows that populate it, which are also the clouds in the sky).
History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history. There are rare successes in this also, for example, on the subject of the Children’s Crusades: Marcel Schwob’s book multiplies narratives like so many plateaus with variable numbers of dimensions. Then there is Andrzejewski’s book, *Les portes du paradis* (The gates of paradise), composed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of children; a flow of walking with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes; the semiotic flow of the confessions of all the children who go up to the old monk at the head of the procession to make their declarations; a flow of desire and sexuality, each child having left out of love and more or less directly led by the dark posthumous pederastic desire of the count of Vendome; all this with circles of convergence. What is important is not whether the flows are “One or multiple” — we’re past that point: there is a collective assemblage of enunciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more recent example is Armand Farrachi’s book on the Fourth Crusade, *La dislocation,* in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse, or else jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the typography begin to dance as the crusade grows more delirious.[49] These are models of nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war machine and lines of flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State apparatus. But why is a model still necessary? Aren’t these books still “images” of the Crusades? Don’t they still retain a unity, in Schwob’s case a pivotal unity, in Farrachi’s an aborted unity, and in the most beautiful example, *Les portes du paradis,* the unity of the funereal count? Is there a need for a more profound nomadism than that of the Crusades, a nomadism of true nomads, or of those who no longer even move or imitate anything? The nomadism of those who only assemble *(agencent).* How can the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce? The cultural book is necessarily a tracing: already a tracing of itself, a tracing of the previous book by the same author, a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endless tracing of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and future. Even the anticultural book may still be burdened by too heavy a cultural load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting instead of remembering, for underdevelopment instead of progress toward development, in nomadism rather than sedentarity, to make a map instead of a tracing. RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous. For science would go completely mad if left to its own devices. Look at mathematics: it’s not a science, it’s a monster slang, it’s nomadic. Even in the realm of theory, especially in the realm of theory, any precarious and pragmatic framework is better than tracing concepts, with their breaks and progress changing nothing. Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break. The nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus. History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never comprehended the outside. The State as the model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State’s pretension to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine’s relation to an outside is not another “model”; it is an assemblage that makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every mobile machine, a stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe). Write to the *nth* power, the *n* — 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line![50] Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don’t bring out the General in you! Don’t have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they say about old man river:
He don’t plant ‘tatos
The wolves, in a metastable state, have gone over to a large-scale social machin e But psychoanalysis has nothing to say about all of these points — except what Freud already said: it all leads back to daddy (what do you know, he was one of the leaders of the liberal party in Russia, but that’s hardly important; all that needs to be said is that the revolution “assuaged the patient’s feelings of guilt”). You’d think that the investments and counterinvestments of the libido had nothing to do with mass disturbances, pack movements, collective signs, and particles of desire.
Thus it does not suffice to attribute molar multiplicities and mass machines to the preconscious, reserving another kind of machine or multiplicity for the unconscious. For it is the assemblage of both of these that is the province of the unconscious, the way in which the former condition the latter, and the latter prepare the way for the former, or elude them or return to them: the libido suffuses everything. Keep everything in sight at the same time — that a social machine or an organized mass has a molecular unconscious that marks not only its tendency to decompose but also the current components of its very operation and organization; that any individual caught up in a mass has his/her own pack unconscious, which does not necessarily resemble the packs of the mass to which that individual belongs; that an individual or mass will live out in its unconscious the masses and packs of another mass or another individual. What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be *named,* receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus’s voice, a horde of wolves in somebody’s throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. Albertine is slowly extracted from a group of girls with its own number, organization, code, and hierarchy; and not only is this group or restricted mass suffused by an unconscious, but Albertine has her own multiplicities that the narrator, once he has isolated her, discovers on her body and in her lies — until the end of their love returns her to the indiscernible.
Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from the internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places — machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: “I love you” (or whatever). For Kafka, Felice is inseparable from a certain social machine, and, as a representative of the firm that manufactures them, from parlograph machines; how could she not belong to that organization in the eyes of Kafka, a man fascinated by commerce and bureaucracy? But at the same time, Felice’s teeth, her big carnivorous teeth, send her racing down other lines, into the molecular multiplicities of a becoming-dog, a becoming-jackal… Felice is inseparable from the sign of the modern social machines belonging to her, from those belonging to Kafka (not the same ones), and from the particles, the little molecular machines, the whole strange becoming or journey Kafka will make and have her make through his perverse writing apparatus.
There are no individual statements, only statement-producing ma-chinic assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally libidinal and unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment, we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal apparatuses *(yes, of course there are Oedipal statements, many of them);* and counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning. We will go into it later. We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage, the faceless figure of the libido. Each of us is caught up in an assemblage of this kind, and we reproduce its statements when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we speak in our own name when we produce its statement. And what bizarre statements they are; truly, the talk of lunatics. We mentioned Kafka, but we could just as well have said the Wolf-Man: a religious-military machine that Freud attributes to obsessional neurosis; an anal pack machine, an anal becoming-wolf or -wasp or -butterfly machine, which Freud attributes to the hysteric character; an Oedipal apparatus, which Freud considers the sole motor, the immobile motor that must be found everywhere; and a counter-Oedipal apparatus — incest with the sister, schizo-incest, or love with “people of inferior station”; and anality, homosexuality? — all that Freud sees only as Oedipal substitutes, regressions, and derivatives. In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing. He has no idea what a libidinal assemblage is, with all the machineries it brings into play, all the multiple loves.
Of course, there are Oedipal statements. For example, Kafka’s story, “Jackals and Arabs,” is easy to read in that way: you can always do it, you can’t lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing. The Arabs are clearly associated with the father and the jackals with the mother; between the two, there is a whole story of castration represented by the rusty scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs are an extensive, armed, organized mass stretching across the entire desert; and the jackals are an intense pack forever launching into the desert following lines of flight or deterritorialization (“they are madmen, veritable madmen”); between the two, at the edge, the Man of the North, the jackal-man. And aren’t those big scissors the Arab sign that guides or releases jackal-particles, both to accelerate their mad race by detaching them from the mass and to bring them back to the mass, to tame them and whip them, to bring them around? Dead camel: Oedipal food apparatus. Counter-Oedipal carrion apparatus: kill animals to eat, or eat to clean up carrion. The jackals formulate the problem well: it is not that of castration but of “cleanliness” *(proprete,* also “ownness”), the test of desert-desire. Which will prevail, mass territoriality or pack deterritorialization? The libido suffuses the entire desert, the body without organs on which the drama is played out.
There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take “collective agents” to mean not peoples or societies but multiplicities). The proper name *(nom propre)* does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity. What Proust said about the first name: when I said Gilberte’s name, I had the impression that I was holding her entire body naked in my mouth. The Wolf-Man, a true proper name, an intimate first name linked to the becomings, infinitives, and intensities of a multiplied and depersonalized individual. What does psychoanalysis know about multiplication? The desert hour when the dromedary becomes a thousand dromedaries snickering in the sky. The evening hour when a thousand holes appear on the surface of the earth. Castration! Castration! cries the psychoanalytic scarecrow, who never saw more than a hole, a father or a dog where wolves are, a domesticated individual where there are wild multiplicities. We are not just criticizing psychoanalysis for having selected Oedipal statements exclusively. For such statements are to a certain extent part of a machinic assemblage, for which they could serve as correctional indexes, as in a calculation of errors. We are criticizing psychoanalysis for having used Oedipal enunciation to make patients believe they would produce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own name. The trap was set from the start: never will the Wolf-Man speak. Talk as he might about wolves, howl as he might like a wolf, Freud does not even listen; he glances at his dog and answers, “It’s daddy.” For as long as that lasts, Freud calls it neurosis; when it cracks, it’s psychosis. The Wolf-Man will receive the psychoanalytic medal of honor for services rendered to the cause, and even disabled veterans’ benefits. He could have spoken in his own name only if the machinic assemblage that was producing particular statements in him had been brought to light. But there is no question of that in psychoanalysis: at the very moment the subject is persuaded that he or she will be uttering the most individual of statements, he or she is deprived of all basis for enunciation. Silence people, prevent them from speaking, and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven’t said a thing: the famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling: Six wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How’s that? Goats, you say? How interesting. Take away the goats and all you have left is a wolf, so it’s your father … That is why the Wolf-Man feels so fatigued: he’s left lying there with all his wolves in his throat, all those little holes on his nose, and all those libidinal values on his body without organs. The war will come, the wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will remain suffocated by all he had to say. All we will be told is that he became well behaved, polite, and resigned again, “honest and scrupulous.” In short, cured. He gets back by pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological vision: “Nothing can be more valuable for a young person than the love of nature and a comprehension of the natural sciences, in particular zoology.”[58]
The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his simian disposition. He explained that the Earth — the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule — is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles. That, however, was not the question at hand. For there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture, they are like “black holes” or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach.[59] They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized).
Challenger quoted a sentence he said he came across in a geology textbook. He said we needed to learn it by heart because we would only be in a position to understand it later on: “A surface of stratification is a more compact plane of consistency lying between two layers.” The layers are the strata. They come at least in pairs, one serving as *substratum* for the other. The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the strata. The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one side it faces the strata (in this direction, the assemblage is an *interstratum),* but the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of consistency (here, it is a *metastratum).* In effect, the body without organs is itself the plane of consistency, which becomes compact or thickens at the level of the strata.
God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of *double articulation.* Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures *(forms),* and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualized *(substances).* In a geological stratum, for example, the first articulation is the process of “sedimentation,” which deposits units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the “folding” that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from sediment to sedimentary rock.
It is clear that the distinction between the two articulations is not between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code *and* a territoriality; therefore each possesses both form and substance. For now, all we can say is that each articulation has a corresponding type of segmentarity or multiplicity: one type is supple, more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is more rigid, molar, and organized. Although the first articulation is not lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in particular that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenomena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization. Both articulations establish binary relations between their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far more complex laws. The word “structure” may be used to designate the sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth’s last word. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that the distinction between the two articulations is always that of the molecular and the molar.
He skipped over the immense diversity of the energetic, physico-chemical, and geological strata. He went straight to the organic strata, or the existence of a great organic stratification. The problem of the organism — *how to “make” the body an organism* — is once again a problem of articulation, of the articulatory relation. The Dogons, well known to the professor, formulate the problem as follows: an organism befalls the body of the smith, by virtue of a machine or machinic assemblage that stratifies it. “The shock of the hammer and the anvil broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that moment he had not possessed. In this way, he received the articulations specific to the new human form that was to spread across the earth, a form dedicated to work…. His arm became folded with a view to work.”[60] It is obviously only a manner of speaking to limit the articulatory relation to the bones. The entire organism must be considered in relation to a double articulation, and on different levels. 2 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS
First, on the level of morphogenesis: on the one hand, realities of the molecular type with aleatory relations are caught up in crowd phenomena or statistical aggregates determining an order (the protein fiber and its sequence or segmentarity); on the other hand, these aggregates themselves are taken up into stable structures that “elect” stereoscopic compounds, form organs, functions, and regulations, organize molar mechanisms, and even distribute centers capable of overflying crowds, overseeing mechanisms, utilizing and repairing tools, “overcoding” the aggregate (the folding back on itself of the fiber to form a compact structure; a second kind of segmentarity).[61] Sedimentation and folding, fiber and infolding.
On a different level, the cellular chemistry presiding over the constitution of proteins also operates by double articulation. This double articulation is internal to the molecular, it is the articulation between small and large molecules, a segmentarity by successive modifications and polymerization. “First, the elements taken from the medium are combined through a series of transformations.…All this activity involves hundreds of chemical reactions. But ultimately, it produces a limited number of small compounds, a few dozen at most. In the second stage of cellular chemistry, the small molecules are assembled to produce larger ones. It is the polymerization of units linked end-to-end that forms the characteristic chains of mac-romolecules…. The two stages of cellular chemistry, therefore, differ in their function, products and nature. The first carves out chemical motifs; the second assembles them. The first forms compounds that exist only temporarily, for they are intermediaries on the path of biosynthesis; the second constructs stable products. The first operates by a series of different reactions; the second by repeating the same reaction.”[62] There is, moreover, a third level, upon which cellular chemistry itself depends. It is the genetic code, which is in turn inseparable from a double segmentarity or a double articulation, this time between two types of independent molecules: the sequence of protein units and the sequence of nucleic units, with binary relations between units of the same type and biunivocal relationships between units of different types. Thus there are always two articulations, two segmentarities, two kinds of multiplicity, each of which brings into play both forms and substances. But the distribution of these two articulations is not constant, even within the same stratum.
The audience rather sulkily denounced the numerous misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and even misappropriations in the professor’s presentation, despite the authorities he had appealed to, calling them his “friends.” Even the Dogons … And things would presently get worse. The professor cynically congratulated himself on taking his pleasure from behind, but the offspring always turned out to be runts and wens, bits and pieces, if not stupid vulgarizations. Besides, the professor was not a geologist or a biologist, he was not even a linguist, ethnologist, or psychoanalyst; what his specialty had been was long since forgotten. In fact, Professor Challenger was double, articulated twice, and that did not make things any easier, people never knew which of him was present. He (?) claimed to have invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities. Yet no one clearly understood what the goals, method, or principles of this discipline were. Young Professor Alasca, Challenger’s pet student, tried hypocritically to defend him by explaining that on a given stratum the passage from one articulation to the other was easily verified because it was always accompanied by a loss of water, in genetics as in geology, and even in linguistics, where the importance of the “lost saliva” phenomenon is measured. Challenger took offense, preferring to cite his friend, as he called him, the Danish Spinozist geologist, Hjelmslev, that dark prince descended from Hamlet who also made language his concern, precisely in order to analyze its “stratification.” Hjelmslev was able to weave a net out of the notions *of matter, content* and *expression,form* and *substance.* These were the strata, said Hjelmslev. Now this net had the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality, since there was a form of content no less than a form of expression. Hjelmslev’s enemies saw this merely as a way of rebaptizing the discredited notions of the signified and signifier, but something quite different was actually going on. Despite what Hjelmslev himself may have said, the net is not linguistic in scope or origin (the same must be said of double articulation: if language has a specificity of its own, as it most certainly does, that specificity consists neither in double articulation nor in Hjelmslev’s net, which are general characteristics of strata).
He used the term *matter* for the plane of consistency or Body without Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities. He used the term *content* for formed matters, which would now have to be considered from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are “chosen,” and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order *(substance and form of content).* He used the term *expression* for functional structures, which would also have to be considered from two points of view: the organization of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds *(form and content of expression).* A stratum always has a dimension of the expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative invariance; for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a relatively invariant expression by means of which they determine the compounds, organs, and functions of the organism.[63] To express is always to sing the glory of God. Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on earth. *The first articulation concerns content, the second expression.* The distinction between the two articulations is not between forms and substances but between content and expression, expression having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides with the molecular and the molar, and sometimes not; this is because content and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and sometimes along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition. The distinction between content and expression is *always real,* in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them according to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real distinction. (On the other hand, there is no real distinction between form and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable, although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless forms.)
Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and expression are relative terms (“first” and “second” articulation should also be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is capable of invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and expression are two variables of a function of stratification. They not only vary from one stratum to another, but intermingle, and within the same stratum multiply and divide ad infinitum. Since every articulation is double, there is not an articulation of content *and* an articulation of expression — the articulation of content is double in its own right and constitutes a relative expression within content; the articulation of expression is also double and constitutes a relative content within expression. For this reason, there exist *intermediate states* between content and expression, expression and content: the levels, equilibriums, and exchanges through which a stratified system passes. In short, we find forms and substances of content that play the role of expression in relation to other forms and substances, and conversely for expression. These new distinctions do not, therefore, coincide with the distinction between forms and substances within each articulation; instead, they show that each articulation is already, or still, double. This can be seen on the organic stratum: proteins of content have two forms, one of which (the infolded fiber) plays the role of functional expression in relation to the other. The same goes for the nucleic acids of expression: double articulations cause certain formal and substantial elements to play the role of content in relation to others; not only does the half of the chain that is reproduced become a content, but the reconstituted chain itself becomes a content in relation to the “messenger.” There are double pincers everywhere on a stratum; everywhere and in all directions there are double binds and lobsters, a multiplicity of double articulations affecting both expression and content. Through all of this, Hjelmslev’s warning should not be forgotten: “The terms expression plane and content plane … are chosen in conformity with established notions and are quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no justification for calling one, and not the other, of these entities *expression,* or one, and not the other, *content.* They are defined only by their mutual solidarity, and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are defined only oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the same function.”[64] We must combine all the resources of real distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and general relativism.
The question we must ask is what on a given stratum varies and what does not. What accounts for the unity and diversity of a stratum? Matter, the pure matter of the plane of consistency (or inconsistency) lies outside the strata. The molecular materials borrowed from the substrata may be the same throughout a stratum, but that does not mean that the molecules will be the same. The substantial elements may be the same throughout the stratum without the substances being the same. The formal relations or bonds may be the same without the forms being the same. In biochemistry, there is a *unity of composition* of the organic stratum defined at the level of materials and energy, substantial elements or radicals, bonds and reactions. But there is a variety of different molecules, substances, and forms.
Should we not sing the praise of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire? For in the nineteenth century he developed a grandiose conception of stratification. He said that matter, considered from the standpoint of its greatest divisibility, consists in particles of decreasing size, flows or elastic fluids that “deploy themselves” by radiating through space. Combustion is the process of this escape or infinite division on the plane of consistency. Electrification is the opposite process, constitutive of strata; it is the process whereby similar particles group together to form atoms and molecules, similar molecules to form bigger molecules, and the biggest molecules to form molar aggregates: “the attraction of like by like,” as in a double pincer or double articulation. Thus there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum, matter is the same on all the strata. But the organic stratum does have a specific unity of composition, a single abstract Animal, a single machine embedded in the stratum, and presents everywhere the same molecular materials, the same elements or anatomical components of organs, the same formal connections. Organic forms are nevertheless different from one another, as are organs, compound substances, and molecules. It is of little or no importance that Geoffroy chose anatomical elements as the substantial units rather than protein and nucleic acid radicals. At any rate, he already invoked a whole interplay of molecules. The important thing is the principle of the simultaneous unity and variety of the stratum: isomorphism of forms but no correspondence; identity of elements or components but no identity of compound substances.
This is where the dialogue, or rather violent debate, with Cuvier came in. To keep the last of the audience from leaving, Challenger imagined a particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead, in puppet theater style. Geoffroy called forth Monsters, Cuvier laid out all the Fossils in order, Baer flourished flasks filled with embryos, Vialleton put on a tetrapod’s belt, Perrier mimed the dramatic battle between the Mouth and the Brain, and so on. *Geoffroy:* The proof that there is isomorphism is that you can always get from one form on the organic stratum to another, however different they may be, by means of “folding.” To go from the Vertebrate to the Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate’s backbone together, bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to the nape of its neck … *Cuvier* (angrily): That’s just not true! You go from an Elephant to a Medusa; I know, I tried. There are irreducible axes, types, branches. There are resemblances between organs and analogies between forms, nothing more. You’re a falsifier, a metaphysician. *Vialleton* (a disciple of Cuvier and Baer): Even if folding gave good results, who could endure it? It’s not by chance that Geoffroy only considers anatomical elements. No muscle or ligament would survive it. *Geoffroy.* I said that there was isomorphism but not correspondence. You have to bring “degrees of development or perfection” into the picture. It is not everywhere on a stratum that materials reach the degree at which they form a given aggregate. Anatomical elements may be arrested or inhibited in certain places by molecular clashes, the influence of the milieu, or pressure from neighbors to such an extent that they compose different organs. The same formal relations or connections are then effectuated in entirely different forms and arrangements. It is still the same abstract Animal that is realized throughout the stratum, only to varying degrees, in varying modes. Each time, it is as perfect as its surroundings or milieu allows it to be (it is obviously not yet a question of evolution: neither folding nor degrees imply descent or derivation, only autonomous realizations of the same abstract relations). This is where Geoffroy invoked Monsters: human monsters are embryos that were retarded at a certain degree of development, the human in them is only a straitjacket for inhuman forms and substances. Yes, the Heteradelph is a crustacean. *Baer* (an ally of Cuvier and contemporary of Darwin, about whom he had reservations, in addition to being an enemy of Geoffroy): That’s not true, you can’t confuse degrees of development with types of forms. A single type has several degrees, a single degree is found in several types, but never will you make types out of degrees. An embryo of one type cannot display another type; at most, it can be of the same degree as an embryo of the second type. *Vialleton* (a disciple of Baer’s who took both Darwin and Geoffroy one further): And then there are things that only an embryo can do or endure. It can do or endure these things precisely because of its type, not because it can go from one type to another according to degrees of development. Admire the Tortoise. Its neck requires that a certain number of protovertebrae change position, and its front limbs must slide 180 degrees in relation to that of a bird. You can never draw conclusions about phylogenesis on the basis of embryogenesis. Folding does not make it possible to go from one type to another; quite the contrary, the types testify to the irreducibility of the forms of folding … (Thus Vialleton presented two kinds of interconnected arguments in the service of the same cause, saying first that there are things no animal can do by reason of its substance, and then that there are things that only an embryo can do by reason of its form. Two strong arguments.)[65]
We’re a little lost now. There is so much going on in these retorts. So many endlessly proliferating distinctions. So much getting even, for episte-mology is not innocent. The sweet and subtle Geoffroy and the violent and serious Cuvier do battle around Napoleon. Cuvier, the rigid specialist, is pitted against Geoffroy, always ready to switch specialities. Cuvier hates Geoffroy, he can’t stomach Geoffroy’s lighthearted formulas, his humor (yes, Hens do indeed have teeth, the Lobster has skin on its bones, etc.). Cuvier is a man of Power and Terrain, and he won’t let Geoffroy forget it; Geoffroy, on the other hand, prefigures the nomadic man of speed. Cuvier reflects a Euclidean space, whereas Geoffroy thinks topologically. Today let us invoke the folds of the cortex with all their paradoxes. Strata are topological, and Geoffroy is a great artist of the fold, a formidable artist; as such, he already has a presentiment of a certain kind of animal rhizome with aberrant paths of communication — Monsters. Cuvier reacts in terms of discontinuous photographs, and casts of fossils. But we’re a little lost, because distinctions have proliferated in all directions.
We have not even taken Darwin, evolutionism, or neoevolutionism into account yet. This, however, is where a decisive phenomenon occurs: our puppet theater becomes more and more nebulous, in other words, collective and differential. Earlier, we invoked two factors, and their uncertain relations, in order to explain the diversity within a stratum — degrees of development or perfection and types of forms. They now undergo a profound transformation. There is a double tendency for types of forms to be understood increasingly in terms of populations, packs and colonies, collectivities or multiplicities; and degrees of development in terms of speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential relations. A double deepening. This, Darwinism’s fundamental contribution, implies a new coupling of individuals and milieus on the stratum.[66]
First, if we assume the presence of an elementary or even molecular population in a given milieu, the forms do not preexist the population, they are more like statistical results. The more a population assumes divergent forms, the more its multiplicity divides into multiplicities of different nature, the more its elements form distinct compounds or matters — the more efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or divides up the milieu. Thus the relationship between embryogenesis and phylogenesis is reversed: the embryo does not testify to an absolute form preestablished in a closed milieu; rather, the phylogenesis of populations has at its disposal, in an open milieu, an entire range of relative forms to choose from, none of which is preestablished. In embryogenesis, “It is possible to tell from the parents, anticipating the outcome of the process, whether a pigeon or a wolf is developing…. But here the points of reference themselves are in motion: there are only fixed points for convenience of expression. At the level of universal evolution, it is impossible to discern that kind of reference point…. Life on earth appears as a sum of relatively independent species of flora and fauna with sometimes shifting or porous boundaries between them. Geographical areas can only harbor a sort of chaos, or, at best, extrinsic harmonies of an ecological order, temporary equilibriums between populations.”[67]
Second, simultaneously and under the same conditions, the degrees are not degrees of preexistent development or perfection but are instead global and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of the advantage they give particular elements, then a particular multiplicity in the milieu, and as a function of a particular variation in the milieu. Degrees are no longer measured in terms of increasing perfection or a differentiation and increase in the complexity of the parts, but in terms of differential relations and coefficients such as selective pressure, catalytic action, speed of propagation, rate of growth, evolution, mutation, etc. Relative progress, then, can occur by formal and quantitative simplification rather than by complication, by a loss of components and syntheses rather than by acquisition (it is a question of speed, and speed is a differential). It is through populations that one is formed, assumes forms, and through loss that one progresses and picks up speed. Darwinism’s two fundamental contributions move in the direction of a science of multiplicities: the substitution of populations for types, and the substitution of rates or differential relations for degrees.[68] These are nomadic contributions with shifting boundaries determined by populations or variations of multiplicities, and with differential coefficients or variations of relations. Contemporary biochemistry, or “molecular Darwinism” as Monod calls it, confirms, on the level of a single statistical and global individual, or a simple sample, the decisive importance of molecular populations and microbiological rates (for example, the endlessness of the sequence composing a chain, and the chance variation of a single segment in the sequence).
Challenger admitted having digressed at length but added that there was no possible way to distinguish between the digressive and the nondigressive. The point was to arrive at several conclusions concerning the unity and diversity of a single stratum, in this case the organic stratum.
To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called *a* stratum: molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified, and come from “substrata.” But of course substrata should not be thought of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials furnished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stratum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial elements is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an augmentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an *exterior milieu* for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration, but they are not exterior *to* the stratum. The elements and compounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials constitute an exterior *of the* stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials. Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for the relation between them. For example, on a crystalline stratum, the amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal must move out to the system’s exterior, where the amorphous medium can crystallize (the aptitude to switch over to the other form of organization). To the point that the seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exterior and interior are interior to the stratum. The same applies to the organic stratum: the materials furnished by the substrata are an exterior medium constituting the famous prebiotic soup, and catalysts play the role of seed in the formation of interior substantial elements or even compounds. These elements and compounds both appropriate materials and exteriorize themselves through replication, even in the conditions of the primordial soup itself. Once again, interior and exterior exchange places, and both are interior to the organic stratum. The limit between them is the membrane that regulates the exchanges and transformation in organization (in other words, the distributions interior to the stratum) and that defines all of the stratum’s formal relations or traits (even though the situation and role of the limit vary widely depending on the stratum, for example, the limit of the crystal as compared to the cellular membrane). We may therefore use the term central layer, or central ring, for the following aggregate comprising the unity of composition of a stratum: exterior molecular materials, interior substantial elements, and the limit or membrane conveying the formal relations. There is a single *abstract machine* that is enveloped by the stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as opposed to the Planomenon of the plane of consistency.
It would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to isolate this unitary, central layer of the stratum, or to grasp it in itself, by regression. In the first place, a stratum necessarily goes from layer to layer, and from the very beginning. It already has several layers. It goes from a center to a periphery, at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward, then turn back. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate states, and this process is one of the local conditions of the central ring (different concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain threshold of identity). These intermediate states present new figures of milieus or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. They are intermediaries between the exterior milieu and the interior element, substantial elements and their compounds, compounds and substances, and between the different formed substances (substances of content and substances of expression). We will use the term *epistrata* for these intermediaries and superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels. Returning to our two examples, on the crystalline stratum there are many intermediaries between the exterior milieu or material and the interior seed: a multiplicity of perfectly discontinuous states of metastability constituting so many hierarchical degrees. Neither is the organic stratum separable from so-called interior milieus that are interior elements in relation to exterior materials but also exterior elements in relation to interior substances.[69] These internal organic milieus are known to regulate the degree of complexity or differentiation of the parts of an organism. A stratum, considered from the standpoint of its unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it down into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a periphery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center, and in turn gives forth discontinuous epistrata.
That is not all. In addition to this new or second-degree relativity of interior and exterior, there is a whole history on the level of the membrane or limit. To the extent that elements and compounds incorporate or appropriate materials, the corresponding organisms are forced to turn to other “more foreign and less convenient” materials that they take from still intact masses or other organisms. The milieu assumes a third figure here: it is no longer an interior or exterior milieu, even a relative one, nor an intermediate milieu, but instead an *annexed or associated milieu.* Associated milieus imply sources of energy different from alimentary materials. Before these sources are obtained, the organism can be said to nourish itself but not to breathe: it is in a state of suffocation.[70] Obtaining an energy source permits an increase in the number of materials that can be transformed into elements and compounds. The associated milieu is thus defined by the capture of energy sources (respiration in the most general sense), by the discernment of materials, the sensing of their presence or absence (perception), and by the fabrication or nonfabrication of the corresponding compounds (response, reaction). That there are molecular perceptions no less than molecular reactions can be seen in the economy of the cell and the property of regulatory agents to “recognize” only one or two kinds of chemicals in a very diverse milieu of exteriority. The development of the associated milieus culminates in the animal worlds described by von Uexkull, with all their active, perceptive, and energetic characteristics. The unforgettable associated world of the Tick, defined by its gravitational energy of falling, its olfactory characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its active characteristic of latching on: the tick climbs a branch and drops onto a passing mammal it has recognized by smell, then latches onto its skin (an associated world composed of three factors, and no more). Active and perceptive characteristics are themselves something of a double pincer, a double articulation.[71]
Here, the associated milieus are closely related to organic forms. An organic form is not a simple structure but a structuration, the constitution of an associated milieu. An animal milieu, such as the spider web, is no less “morphogenetic” than the form of the organism. One certainly cannot say that the milieu determines the form; but to complicate things, this does not make the relation between form and milieu any less decisive. Since the form depends on an autonomous code, it can only be constituted in an associated milieu that interlaces active, perceptive, and energetic characteristics in a complex fashion, in conformity with the code’s requirements; and the form can develop only through intermediary milieus that regulate the speeds and rates of its substances; and it can experience itself only in a milieu of exteriority that measures the comparative advantages of the associated milieus and the differential relations of the intermediary milieus. Milieus always act, through selection, on entire organisms, the forms of which depend on codes those milieus sanction indirectly. Associated milieus divide a single milieu of exteriority among themselves as a function of different forms, just as intermediate milieus divide a milieu of exteriority among themselves as a function of the rates or degrees of a single form. But the dividing is done differently in the two cases. In relation to the central belt of the stratum, the intermediate strata or milieus constitute “epistrata” piled one atop the other, and form new centers for the new peripheries. We will apply the term “parastrata” to the second way in which the central belt fragments into sides and “besides,” and the irreducible forms and milieus associated with them. This time, it is at the level of the limit or membrane of the central belt that the formal relations or traits common to all of the strata necessarily assume entirely different forms or types of forms corresponding to the parastrata. A stratum exists only in its epistrata and parastrata, so that in the final analysis these must be considered strata in their own right. The ideally continuous belt or ring of the stratum — the Ecumenon defined by the identity of molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations — exists only as shattered, fragmented into epistrata and parastrata that imply concrete machines and their respective indexes, and constitute different molecules, specific substances, and irreducible forms.[72]
We may now return to the two fundamental contributions of Darwinism and answer the question of why forms or types of forms in the parastrata must be understood in relation to populations, and degrees of development in the epistrata as rates or differential relations. First, parastrata envelop the very codes upon which the forms depend, and these codes necessarily apply to populations. There must already be an entire molecular population to be coded, and the effects of the code, or a change in the code, are evaluated in relation to a more or less molar population, depending on the code’s ability to propagate in the milieu or create for itself a new associated milieu within which the modification will be popularizable. Yes, we must always think in terms of packs and multiplicities: a code does or does not take hold because the coded individual belongs to a certain population, “the population inhabiting test tubes, a flask full of water, or a mammal’s intestine.” What does it mean to say that new forms and associated milieus potentially result from a change in the code, a modification of the code, or a variation in the parastratum? The change is obviously not due to a passage from one preestablished form to another, in other words, a translation from one code to another. As long as the problem was formulated in that fashion, it remained insoluble, and one would have to agree with Cuvier and Baer that established types of forms are irreducible and therefore do not admit of translation or transformation. But as soon as it is recognized that a code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it, the problem receives a new formulation. There is no genetics without “genetic drift.” The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential margin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we call surplus value of code, or side-communication.[73] We will have occasion to discuss this further, for it is essential to all becomings-animal. Every code is affected by a margin of decoding due to these supplements and surplus values — supplements in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in the order of a rhizome. Forms in the parastrata, the parastrata themselves, far from lying immobile and frozen upon the strata, are part of a machinic interlock: they relate to populations, populations imply codes, and codes fundamentally include phenomena of relative decoding that are all the more usable, composable, and addable by virtue of being relative, always “beside.”
Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epis-trata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements that constitute them as the parastrata are from their processes. Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new.[74] The organization of the epistrata moves in the direction of increasing deterritorialization. Physical particles and chemical substances cross thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum and between strata; these thresholds correspond to more or less stable intermediate states, to more or less transitory valences and existences, to engagements with this or that other body, to densities of proximity, to more or less localizable connections. Not only are physical particles characterized by speeds of deterritorialization — Joycean tachyons, particles-holes, and quarks recalling the fundamental idea of the “soup” — but a single chemical substance (sulfur or carbon, for example) has a number of more and less deterritorialized states. The more interior milieus an organism has on its own stratum, assuring its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be understood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterritorialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migration, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define complementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or intensive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterritorialization).[75]
As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into processes of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless have the same “subject” in a stratum: it is populations that are deterritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.
On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a certain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, construct or produce *territorial signs* (indexes). This is especially true of an animal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a double movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes necessary risks, a *line of flight* must be preserved to enable the animal to regain its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull’s line of flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).[76] A second kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an association with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore land, forced to “stand on its own legs,” now carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these movements that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continually moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup …), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accelerations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.
These relative movements should most assuredly not be confused with the possibility of absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight, absolute drift. The former are stratic or interstratic, whereas the latter concern the plane of consistency and its destratification (its “combustion,” as Geoffroy would say). There is no doubt that mad physical particles crash through the strata as they accelerate, leaving minimal trace of their passage, escaping spatiotemporal and even existential coordinates as they tend toward a state of absolute deterritorialization, the state of unformed matter on the plane of consistency. In a certain sense, the acceleration of relative deterritorializations reaches the sound barrier: if the particles bounce off this wall, or allow themselves to be captured by black holes, they fall back onto the strata, into the strata’s relations and milieus; but if they cross the barrier they reach the unformed, destratified element of the plane of consistency. *We may even say the the abstract machines that emit and combine particles have two very different modes of existence: the Ecumenon and the Planomenon.* Either the abstract machines remain prisoner to stratifications, are enveloped in a certain specific stratum whose program or unity of composition they define (the abstract Animal, the abstract chemical Body, Energy in itself) and whose movements of relative deterritorialization they regulate, Or, on the contrary, the abstract machine cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes, the same machine at work in astrophysics and in microphysics, in the natural and in the artificial, piloting flows of absolute deterritorialization (in no sense, of course, is unformed matter chaos of any kind). But this presentation is still too simplified.
First, one does not go from the relative to the absolute simply by acceleration, even though increases in speed tend to have this comparative and global result. Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant accelerator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possible to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay. Retarded development is an example. What qualifies a deterritorialization is not its speed (some are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes epistrata and parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the contrary, jumps from one singularity to another following a nondecom-posable, nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane of consistency. Second, under no circumstances must it be thought that absolute deterritorialization comes suddenly of afterward, is in excess or beyond. That would preclude any understanding of why the strata themselves are animated by movements of relative deterritorialization and decoding that are not like accidents occurring on them. In fact, what is primary is an absolute deterritorialization an absolute line of flight, however complex or multiple — that of the plane of consistency or body without organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This absolute deterritorialization becomes relative only after stratification occurs on that plane or body: It is the strata that are always residue, not the opposite. The question is not how something manages to leave the strata by how things get into them in the first place. There is a perpetual immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative deterritorialization; and the machinic assemblages between strata that regulate the differential relations and relative movements also have cutting edges of deterritorialization oriented toward the absolute. The plane of consistency is always immanent to the strata; the two states of the abstract machine always coexist as two different states of intensities.
Most of the audience had left (the first to go were the Marinetians with their double articulation, followed by the Hjelmslevians with their content and expression, and the biologists with their proteins and nucleic acids). The only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed to other follies, along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and scattered individuals. Challenger, moreover, had changed since the beginning of his talk. His voice had become hoarser, broken occasionally by an apish cough. His dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program for pure computers. Or else he was dreaming of an axiomatic, for axi-omatics deals essentially with stratification. Challenger was addressing himself to memory only. Now that we had discussed what was constant and what varied in a stratum from the standpoint of substances and forms, the question remaining to be answered was what varied between strata from the standpoint of content and expression. For if it is true that there is always a real distinction constitutive of double articulation, a reciprocal presupposition of content and expression, then what varies from one stratum to another is the nature of this real distinction, and the nature and respective positions of the terms distinguished. Let us start with a certain group of strata that can be characterized summarily as follows: on these strata, content (form and substance) is molecular, and expression (form and substance) is molar. The difference between the two is primarily one of order of magnitude or scale. Resonance, or the communication occurring between the two independent orders, is what institutes the stratified system. The molecular content of that system has its own form corresponding to the distribution of elemental masses and the action of one molecule upon another; similarly, expression has a form manifesting the statistical aggregate and state of equilibrium existing on the macroscopic level. Expression is like an “operation of amplifying structuration carrying the active properties of the originally microphysical discontinuity to the macrophysical level.”
We took as our point of departure cases of this kind on the geological stratum, the crystalline stratum, and physicochemical strata, wherever the molar can be said to express microscopic molecular interactions (“the crystal is the macroscopic expression of a microscopic structure”; the “crystalline form expresses certain atomic or molecular characteristics of the constituent chemical categories”). Of course, this still leaves numerous possibilities, depending on the number and nature of the intermediate states, and also on the impact of exterior forces on the formation of expression. There may be a greater or lesser number of intermediate states between the molecular and the molar; there may be a greater or lesser number of exterior forces or organizing centers participating in the molar form. Doubtless, these two factors are in an inverse relation to each other and indicate limit-cases. For example, the molar form of expression may be of the “mold” type, mobilizing a maximum of exterior forces; or it may be of the “modulation” type, bringing into play only a minimum number of them. Even in the case of the mold, however, there are nearly instantaneous, interior intermediate states between the molecular content that assumes its own specific forms and the determinate molar expression of the outside by the form of the mold. Conversely, even when the multiplication and temporalization of the intermediate states testify to the endogenous character of the molar form (as with crystals), a minimum of exterior forces still intervene in each of the stages.[77] We must therefore say that the relative independence of content and expression, the real distinction between molecular content and molar expression with their respective forms, has a special status enjoying a certain amount of latitude between the limit-cases.
Since strata are judgments of God, one should not hesitate to apply all the subtleties of medieval Scholasticism and theology. There is a real distinction between content and expression because the corresponding forms are effectively distinct in the “thing” itself, and not only in the mind of the observer. But this real distinction is quite special; it is only *formal* since the two forms compose or shape a single thing, a single stratified subject. Various examples of formal distinction can be cited: between scales or orders of magnitude (as between a map and its model; or, in a different fashion, between the microand macrophysical levels, as in the parable of Eddington’s two offices); between the various states or formal reasons through which a thing passes; between the thing in one form, and as affected by a possibly exterior causality giving it a different form; and so forth. (There is a proliferation of distinct forms because, in addition to content and expression each having its own forms, intermediate states introduce forms of expression proper to content and forms of content proper to expression.)
As diverse and real as formal distinctions are, on the organic stratum the very nature of the distinction changes. As a result, the entire distribution between content and expression is different. The organic stratum nevertheless preserves, and even amplifies, the relation between the molecular and the molar, with all kinds of intermediate states. We saw this in the case of morphogenesis, where double articulation is inseparable from a communication between two orders of magnitude. The same thing applies to cellular chemistry. But the organic stratum has a unique character that must account for the amplifications. In a preceding discussion, expression was dependent upon the expressed molecular content in all directions and in every dimension and had independence only to the extent that it appealed to a higher order of magnitude and to exterior forces: The real distinction was between forms, but forms belonging to the same aggregate, the same thing or subject. *Now, however, expression becomes independent in its own right, in other words, autonomous.* Before, the coding of a stratum was coextensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other hand, it takes place on an autonomous and independent line that detaches as much as possible from the second and third dimensions. Expression ceases to be voluminous or superficial, becoming linear, unidimensional (even in its segmentarity). The essential thing is *the linearity of the nucleic sequence.*[78] The real distinction between content and expression, therefore, is not simply formal. It is strictly speaking real, and passes into the molecular, without regard to order of magnitude. It is between two classes of molecules, nucleic acids of expression and proteins of content, nucleic elements or nucleotides and protein elements or amino acids. Both expression and content are now molecular *and* molar. The distinction no longer concerns a single aggregate or subject; linearity takes us further in the direction of flat multiplicities, rather than unity. Expression involves nucleotides and nucleic acids as well as molecules that, in their substance and form, are entirely independent not only of molecules of content but of any directed action in the exterior milieu. Thus invariance is a characteristic of certain molecules and is not found exclusively on the molar scale. Conversely, proteins, in their substance and form of content, are equally independent of nucleotides: the only thing univocally determined is that one amino acid rather than another corresponds to a sequence of three nucleotides.[79] What the linear form of expression determines is therefore a derivative form of expression, one that is relative to content and that, through a folding back upon itself of the protein sequence of the amino acids, finally yields the characteristic three-dimensional structures. In short, what is specific to the organic stratum is *this alignment of expression, this exhaustion or detachment of a line of expression,* this reduction of form and substance of expression to a unidimensional line, guaranteeing their reciprocal independence from content without having to account for orders of magnitude.
This has many consequences. The new configuration of expression and content conditions not only the organism’s power to reproduce but also its power to deterritorialize or accelerate deterritorialization. The alignment of the code or linearity of the nucleic sequence in fact marks a threshold of deterritorialization of the “sign” that gives it a new ability to be copied and makes the organism more deterritorialized than a crystal: only something deterritorialized is capable of reproducing itself. When content and expression are divided along the lines of the molecular and the molar, substances move from state to state, from the preceding state to the following state, or from layer to layer, from an already constituted layer to a layer in the process of forming, while forms install themselves at the limit between the last layer or last state and the exterior milieu. Thus the stratum develops into epistrata and parastrata; this is accomplished through a set of *inductions* from layer to layer and state to state, or at the limit. A crystal displays this process in its pure state, since its form expands in all directions, but always as a function of the surface layer of the substance, which can be emptied of most of its interior without interfering with the growth. It is the crystal’s subjugation to three-dimensionality, in other words its index of territoriality, that makes the structure incapable of formally reproducing and expressing itself; only the accessible surface can reproduce itself, since it is the only deterritorializable part. On the contrary, the detachment of a pure line of expression on the organic stratum makes it possible for the organism to attain a much higher threshold of deterritorialization, gives it a mechanism of reproduction covering all the details of its complex spatial structure, and enables it to put all of its interior layers “topologically in contact” with the exterior, or rather with the polarized limit (hence the special role of the living membrane). The development of the stratum into epistrata and parastrata occurs not through simple inductions but through *transductions* that account for the amplification of the resonance between the molecular and the molar, independently of order of magnitude; for the functional efficacy of the interior substances, independently of distance; and for the possibility of a proliferation and even interlacing of forms, independently of codes (surplus values of code or phenomena of transcoding or aparallel evolution).[80]
There is a third major grouping of strata, defined less by a human essence than, once again, by a new distribution of content and expression. Form of content becomes “alloplastic” rather than “homoplastic”; in other words, it brings about modifications in the external world. Form of expression becomes linguistic rather than genetic; in other words, it operates with symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable, and modifiable from outside. What some call the properties of human beings — technology and language, tool and symbol, free hand and supple larynx, “gesture and speech” — are in fact properties of this new distribution. It would be difficult to maintain that the emergence of human beings marked the absolute origin of this distribution. Leroi-Gourhan’s analyses give us an understanding of how contents came to be linked with the hand-tool couple and expressions with the face-language couple.[81] In this context, the hand must not be thought of simply as an organ but instead as a coding (the digital code), a dynamic structuration, a dynamic formation (the manual form, or manual formal traits). The hand as a general form of content is extended in tools, which are themselves active forms implying substances, or formed matters; finally, products are formed matters, or substances, which in turn serve as tools. Whereas manual formal traits constitute the unity of composition of the stratum, the forms and substances of tools and products are organized into parastrata and epistrata that themselves function as veritable strata and mark discontinuities, breakages, communications and diffusions, nomadisms and sedentarities, multiple thresholds and speeds of relative deterritorialization in human populations. For with the hand as a formal trait or general form of content a major threshold of deterritorialization is reached and opens, an accelerator that in itself permits a shifting interplay of comparative deterritorializations and reterritorial-izations — what makes this acceleration possible is, precisely, phenomena of “retarded development” in the organic substrata. Not only is the hand a deterritorialized front paw; the hand thus freed is itself deterritorialized in relation to the grasping and locomotive hand of the monkey. The synergistic deterritorializations of other organs (for example, the foot) must be taken into account. So must correlative deterritorializations of the milieu: the steppe as an associated milieu more deterritorialized than the forest, exerting a selective pressure of deterritorialization upon the body and technology (it was on the steppe, not in the forest, that the hand was able to appear as a free form, and fire as a technologically formable matter). Finally, complementary reterritorializations must be taken into account (the foot as a compensatory reterritorialization for the hand, also occurring on the steppe). Maps should be made of these things, organic, ecological, and technological maps one can lay out on the plane of consistency.
On the other hand, language becomes the new form of expression, or rather the set of formal traits defining the new expression in operation throughout the stratum. Just as manual traits exist only in forms and formed matters that shatter their continuity and determine the distribution of their effects, formal traits of expression exist only in a diversity of formal languages and imply one or several formable substances. The substance involved is fundamentally vocal substance, which brings into play various organic elements: not only the larynx, but the mouth and lips, and the overall motricity of the face. Once again, a whole intensive map must be accounted for: the mouth as a deterritorialization of the snout (the whole “conflict between the mouth and the brain,” as Perrier called it); the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips, in other words, an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human females have breasts, in other words, deterritorialized mammary glands: the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accompanied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, and the breasts on the lips). What a curious deterritorialization, filling one’s mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe, once more, seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the “supple larynx” is a development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one’s cries to be heard above the constant din of the forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly. Everyone knows that lumberjacks rarely talk.[82] Physiological, acoustic, and vocal substance are not the only things that undergo all these deterritorializations. The form of expression, as language, also crosses a threshold.
*Vocal signs have temporal linearity, and it is this superlinearity* that constitutes their specific deterritorialization and differentiates them from genetic linearity. Genetic linearity is above all spatial, even though its segments are constructed and reproduced in succession; thus at this level it does not require effective overcoding of any kind, only phenomena of end-to-end connection, local regulations, and partial interactions (overcoding takes place only at the level of integrations implying different orders of magnitude). That is why Jacob is reluctant to compare the genetic code to a language; in fact, the genetic code has neither emitter, receiver, comprehension, nor translation, only redundancies and surplus values.[83] The temporal linearity of language expression relates not only to a succession but to a formal synthesis of succession in which time constitutes a process of linear overcoding and engenders a phenomenon unknown on the other strata: *translation,* translatability, as opposed to the previous inductions and transductions. Translation should not be understood simply as the ability of one language to “represent” in some way the givens of another language, but beyond that as the ability of language, with its own givens on its own stratum, to represent all the other strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world. The scientific world *(Welt,* as opposed to the *Umwelt* of the animal) is the translation of all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other words, into an overcoding specific to language. This property of *overcoding* or *superlinearity* explains why, in language, not only is expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass from one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic code, for example, between RNA and DNA chains. We will see later on how this situation gives rise to certain imperialist pretentions on behalf of language, which are naively expressed in such formulas as: “Every semiology of a nonlinguistic system must use the medium of language… .Language is the interpreter of all the other systems, linguistic and nonlinguistic.” This amounts to defining an abstract character of language and then saying that the other strata can share in that character only by being spoken in language. That is stating the obvious. More positively, it must be noted that the immanence within language of universal translation means that its epistrata and parastrata, with respect to superpositions, diffusions, communications, and abutments, operate in an entirely different manner than those of other strata: all human movements, even the most violent, imply translations.
We have to hurry, Challenger said, we’re being rushed by the line of time on this third stratum. So we have a new organization of content and expression, each with its own forms and substances: technological content, semiotic or symbolic expression. Content should be understood not simply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that preexists them and constitutes states of force or formations of power. Expression should be understood not simply as the face and language, or individual languages, but as a semiotic collective machine that preexists them and constitutes regimes of signs. A formation of power is much more than a tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. Rather, they act as determining and selective agents, as much in the constitution of languages and tools as in their usages and mutual or respective diffusions and communications. The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are fully a part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their pincers out in all directions at all the other strata. *Is this not like an intermediate state between the two states of the abstract Machine?* — the state in which it remains enveloped in a corresponding stratum (ecumenon), and the state in which it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of consistency (planomenon). The abstract machine begins to unfold, to stand to full height, producing an illusion exceeding all strata, even though the machine itself still belongs to a determinate stratum. This is, obviously, the illusion constitutive of man (who does man think he is?). This illusion derives from the overcoding immanent to language itself. But what is not illusory are the new distributions between content and expression: technological content characterized by the hand-tool relation and, at a deeper level, tied to a social Machine and formations of power; symbolic expression characterized by face-language relations and, at a deeper level, tied to a semiotic Machine and regimes of signs. On both sides, the epistrata and parastrata, the superposed degrees and abutting forms, attain more than ever before the status of autonomous strata in their own right. In cases where we can discern two different regimes of signs or two different formations of power, we shall say that they are in fact two different strata in human populations. What precisely is the relation now between content and expression, and what type of distinction is there between them? It’s all in the head. Yet never was a distinction more real. What we are trying to say is that there is indeed one exterior milieu for the entire stratum, permeating the entire stratum: the cerebral-nervous milieu. It comes from the organic substratum, but of course that substratum does not merely play the role of a substratum or passive support. It is no less complex in organization. Rather, it constitutes the prehuman soup immersing us. Our hands and faces are immersed in it. The brain is a population, a set of tribes tending toward two poles. In Leroi-Gourhan’s analyses of the constitution of these two poles in the soup — one of which depends on the actions of the face, the other on the hand — their correlation or relativity does not preclude a real distinction between them; quite the contrary, it entails one, as the reciprocal presupposition of two articulations, the manual articulation of content and the facial articulation of expression. And the distinction is not simply real, as between molecules, things, or subjects; it has become *essential* (as they used to say in the Middle Ages), as between attributes, genres of being, or irreducible categories: things and words. Yet we find that the most general of movements, the one by which each of the distinct articulations is already double in its own right, carries over onto this level; certain formal elements of content play the role of expression in relation to content proper, and certain formal elements of expression play the role of content in relation to expression proper. In the first case, Leroi-Gourhan shows how the hand creates a whole world of symbols, a whole pluridimensional language, not to be confused with unilinear verbal language, which constitutes a radiating expression specific to content (he sees this as the origin of writing).[84] The second case is clearly displayed in the double articulation specific to language itself, since phonemes form a radiating content specific to the expression of monemes as linear significant segments (it is only under these conditions that double articulation as a general characteristic of strata has the linguistic meaning Martinet attributes to it). Our discussion of the relations between content and expression, the real distinction between them, and the variations of those relations and that distinction on the major types of strata, is now provisionally complete.
Challenger wanted to go faster and faster. No one was left, but he went on anyway. The change in his voice, and in his appearance, was growing more and more pronounced. Something animalistic in him had begun to speak when he started talking about human beings. You still couldn’t put your finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the spot. He still had three problems he wanted to discuss. The first seemed primarily terminological: Under what circumstances may we speak of signs? Should we say they are everywhere on all the strata and that there is a sign whenever there is a form of expression? We may summarily distinguish three kinds of signs: *indexes (territorial signs), symbols (deterritorialized signs), and icons (signs of reterritorialization).* Should we say that there are signs on all the strata, under the pretext that every stratum includes territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization? This kind of expansive method is very dangerous, because it lays the groundwork for or reinforces the imperialism of language, if only by relying on its function as universal translator or interpreter. It is obvious that there is no system of signs common to all strata, not even in the form of a semiotic “chora” theoretically prior to symbolization.[85] It would appear that we may accurately speak of signs only when there is a distinction between forms of expression and forms of content that is not only real but also categorical. Under these conditions, there is a semiotic system on the corresponding stratum because the abstract machine has precisely that fully erect posture that permits it to “write,” in other words, to treat language and extract a *regime* of signs from it. But before it reaches that point, in so-called natural codings, the abstract machine remains enveloped in the strata: It does not write in any way and has no margin of latitude allowing it to recognize something as a sign (except in the strictly territorial sense of animal signs). After that point, the abstract machine develops on the plane of consistency and no longer has any way of making a categorical distinction between signs and particles; for example, it writes, but flush with the real, it inscribes directly upon the plane of consistency. It therefore seems reasonable to reserve the word “sign” in the strict sense for the last group of strata. This terminological discussion would be entirely without interest if it did not bring us to yet another danger: not the imperialism of language affecting all of the strata, but the imperialism of the signifier affecting language itself, affecting all regimes of signs and the entire expanse of the strata upon which they are located. The question here is not whether there are signs on every stratum but whether all signs are signifiers, whether all signs are endowed with signifiance, whether the semiotic of signs is necessarily linked to a semiology of the signifier. Those who take this route may even be led to forgo the notion of the sign, for the primacy of the signifier over language guarantees the primacy of language over all of the strata even more effectively than the simple expansion of the sign in all directions. What we are saying is that the illusion specific to *this* posture of the abstract Machine, the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between one’s pincers, can be better secured through the erection of the signifier than through the extension of the sign (thanks to signifiance, language can claim to be in direct contact with the strata without having to go through the supposed signs on each one). But we’re still going in the same circle, we’re still spreading the same canker. The linguistic relation between the signifier and signified has, of course, been conceived in many different ways. It has been said that they are arbitrary; that they are as necessary to each other as the two sides of the same leaf; that they correspond term by term, or else globally; and that they are so ambivalent as to be indistinguishable. In any event, the signified is thought not to exist outside of its relationship with signifier, and the ultimate signified is the very existence of the signifier, extrapolated beyond the sign. There is only one thing that can be said about the signifier: it is Redundancy, it is the Redundant. Hence its incredible despotism, and its success. Theories of arbitrariness, necessity, term-by-term or global correspondence, and ambivalence serve the same cause: the reduction of expression to the signifier. Yet forms of content and forms of expression are highly relative, always in a state of reciprocal presupposition. The relations between their respective segments are biunivocal, exterior, and “deformed.” There is never conformity between the two, or from one to the other. There is always real independence and a real distinction; even to fit the forms together, and to determine the relations between them, requires a specific, variable assemblage. None of these characteristics applies to the signifier-signified relation, even though some seem to coincide with it partially and accidentally. Overall, these characteristics stand in radical opposition to the scenario of the signifier. A form of content is not a signified, any more than a form of expression is a signifier.[86] This is true for all the strata, including those on which language plays a role.
Signifier enthusiasts take an oversimplified situation as their implicit model: word and thing. From the word they extract the signifier, and from the thing a signified in conformity with the word, and therefore subjugated to the signifier. They operate in a sphere interior to and homogeneous with language. Let us follow Foucault in his exemplary analysis, which, though it seems not to be, is eminently concerned with linguistics. Take a thing like the prison: the prison is a form, the “prison-form”; it is a form of content on a stratum and is related to other forms of content (school, barracks, hospital, factory). This thing or form does not refer back to the word “prison” but to entirely different words and concepts, such as “delinquent” and “delinquency,” which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating, and even committing criminal acts. “Delinquency” is the form of expression in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content “prison.” Delinquency is in no way a signifier, even a juridical signifier, the signified of which would be the prison. That would flatten the entire analysis. Moreover, the form of expression is reducible not to words but to a set of statements arising in the social field considered as a stratum (that is what a regime of signs is). The form of content is reducible not to a thing but to a complex state of things as a formation of power (architecture, regimentation, etc.). We could say that there are two constantly intersecting multiplicities, “discursive multiplicities” of expression and “nondiscursive multiplicities” of content. It is even more complex than that because the prison as a form of content has a relative expression all its own; there are all kinds of statements specific to it that do not necessarily coincide with the statements of delinquency. Conversely, delinquency as a form of expression has an autonomous content all its own, since delinquency expresses not only a new way of evaluating crimes but a new way of committing them. Form of content and form of expression, prison and delinquency: each has its own history, microhistory, segments. At most, along with other contents and expressions, they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting not at all as a signifier but as a kind of diagram (a single abstract machine for the prison and the school and the barracks and the hospital and the factory …). Fitting the two types of forms together, segments of content and segments of expression, requires a whole double-pincered, or rather double-headed, concrete assemblage taking their real distinction into account. It requires a whole organization articulating formations of power and regimes of signs, and operating on the molecular level (societies characterized by what Foucault calls disciplinary power).[87] In short, we should never oppose words to things that supposedly correspond to them, nor signifiers to signifieds that are supposedly in conformity with them. What should be opposed are distinct formalizations, in a state of unstable equilibrium or reciprocal presupposition. “// *is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what wesay.”*[88] As in school: there is not just one writing lesson, that of the great redundant Signifier for any and all signifieds. There are two distinct formalizations in reciprocal presupposition and constituting a double-pincer: the formalization of expression in the reading and writing lesson (with its own relative contents), and the formalization of content in the lesson of things (with their own relative expressions). We are never signifier or signified. We are stratified.
The preferred method would be severely restrictive, as opposed to the expansive method that places signs on all strata or signifier in all signs (although at the limit it may forgo signs entirely). First, there exist forms of expression without signs (for example, the genetic code has nothing to do with a language). It is only under certain conditions that strata can be said to include signs; signs cannot be equated with language in general but are defined by regimes of statements that are so many real usages or functions of language. Then why retain the word *sign* for these regimes, which formalize an expression without designating or signifying the simultaneous contents, which are formalized in a different way? Signs are not signs of a thing; they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements, and it is for this reason that the word should be retained (as we have seen, this applies even to animal “signs”).
Next, if we consider regimes of signs using this restrictive definition, we see that they are not, or not necessarily, signifiers. Just as signs designate only a certain formalization of expression in a determinate group of strata, signifiance itself designates only one specific regime among a number of regimes existing in that particular formalization. Just as there are ase-miotic expressions, or expressions without signs, there are asemiological regimes of signs, asignifying signs, both on the strata and on the plane of consistency. The most that can be said of signifiance is that it characterizes *one* regime, which is not even the most interesting or modern or contemporary one, but is perhaps only more pernicious, cancerous, and despotic than the others, and more steeped in illusion than they.
In any case, content and expression are never reducible to signified-signifier. And (this is the second problem) neither are they reducible to base-superstructure. One can no more posit a primacy of content as the determining factor than a primacy of expression as a signifying system. Expression can never be made into a form reflecting content, even if one endows it with a “certain” amount of independence and a certain potential for reacting, if only because so-called economic content already has a form and even forms of expression that are specific to it. Form of content and form of expression involve two parallel formalizations in presupposition: it is obvious that their segments constantly intertwine, embed themselves in one another; but this is accomplished by the abstract machine from which the two forms derive, and by machinic assemblages that regulate their relations. If this parallelism is replaced by a pyramidal image, then content (including its form) becomes an economic base of production displaying all of the characteristics of the Abstract; the assemblages become the first story of a superstructure that, as such, is necessarily situated within a State apparatus; the regimes of signs and forms of expression become the second story of the superstructure, defined by ideology. It isn’t altogether clear where language should go, since the great Despot decided that it should be reserved a special place, as the common good of the nation and the vehicle for information. Thus one misconstrues the nature of language, which exists only in heterogeneous regimes of signs, and rather than circulating information distributes contradictory orders. It misconstrues the nature of regimes of signs, which express organizations of power or assemblages and have nothing to do with ideology as the supposed expression of a content (ideology is a most execrable concept obscuring all of the effectively operating social machines). It misconstrues the nature of organizations of power, which are in no way located within a State apparatus but rather are everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expression, the segments of which they intertwine. Finally, it misconstrues the nature of content, which is in no way economic “in the last instance,” since there are as many directly economic signs or expressions as there are noneconomic contents. Nor can the status of social formations be analyzed by throwing some signifier into the base, or vice versa, or a bit of phallus or castration into political economy, or a bit of economics or politics into psychoanalysis.
There is a third problem. It is difficult to elucidate the system of the strata without seeming to introduce a kind of cosmic or even spiritual evolution from one to the other, as if they were arranged in stages and ascended degrees of perfection. Nothing of the sort. The different figures of content and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by considering the strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the standpoint of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order can be reversed, with cultural or technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects … It’s even worse nowadays: you can’t even tell in advance which stratum is going to communicate with which other, or in what direction. Above all, there is no lesser, no higher or lower, organization; the substratum is an integral part of the stratum, is bound up with it as the milieu in which change occurs, and not an increase in organization.[89] Furthermore, if we consider the plane of consistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter… There is no “like” here, we are not saying “like an electron,” “like an interaction,” etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites, authentic sign sequences. It’s just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency possible. A silent dance. *The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and* formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the strata.
But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization? Eyes are black holes, but what are black holes and eyes outside their strata and territorialities? What it comes down to is that we cannot content ourselves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of deterritorialization; moreover, absolute deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spinoffs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always primary and always immanent. In addition, the plane of consistency is occupied, drawn by the abstract Machine; the abstract Machine exists *simultaneously* developed on the destratified plane it draws, and enveloped in each stratum whose unity of composition it defines, and even half-erected in certain strata whose form of prehension it defines. That which races or dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the aura of its stratum, an undulation, a memory or tension. The plane of consistency retains just enough of the strata to extract from them variables that operate in the plane of consistency as its own functions. The plane of consistency, or planomenon, is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed matters, but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every kind. It is true that on the plane of consistency there are no longer forms or substances, content or expression, respective and relative deterritorializations. But beneath the forms and substances of the strata the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) *constructs continuums of intensity:* it creates continuity for intensities that it extracts from distinct forms and substances. Beneath contents and expressions the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) *emits and combines particles-signs* that set the most asignifying of signs to functioning in the most deterritorialized of particles. Beneath relative movements the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) *performs conjunctions of flows of deterritorialization* that transform the respective indexes into absolute values. The only intensities known to the strata are discontinuous, bound up in forms and substances; the only particles are divided into particles of content and articles of expression; the only deterritorialized flows are disjointed and reterritorialized. Continuum of intensities, combined emission of particles or signs-particles, conjunction of deterritorialized flows: these are the three factors proper to the plane of consistency; they are brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of destratification. Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic white night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of “plan(n)ing,” of diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combinations, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.
A final distinction must now be noted. Not only does the abstract machine have different simultaneous states accounting for the complexity of what takes place on the plane of consistency, but the abstract machine should not be confused with what we call a concrete machinic assemblage. The *abstract machine* sometimes develops upon the plane of consistency, whose continuums, emissions, and conjugations it constructs, and sometimes remains enveloped in a stratum whose unity of composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines. The *machinic assemblage* is something entirely different from the abstract machine, even though it is very closely connected with it. First, on a stratum, it performs the coadaptations of content and expression, ensures biunivocal relationships between segments of content and segments of expression, and guides the division of the stratum into epistrata and parastrata. Next, between strata, it ensures the relation to whatever serves as a substratum and brings about the corresponding changes in organization. Finally, it is in touch with the plane of consistency because it necessarily effectuates the abstract machine on a particular stratum, between strata, and in the relation between the strata and the plane. An assemblage (for example, the smith’s anvil among the Dogons) is necessary for the articulations of the organic stratum to come about. An assemblage is necessary for the relation between two strata to come about. And an assemblage is necessary for organisms to be caught within and permeated by a social field that utilizes them: Must not the Amazons amputate a breast to adapt the organic stratum to a warlike technological stratum, as though at the behest of a fearsome woman-bow-steppe assemblage? Assemblages are necessary for states offeree and regimes of signs to intertwine their relations. Assemblages are necessary in order for the unity of composition enveloped in a stratum, the relations between a given stratum and the others, and the relation between these strata and the plane of consistency to be organized rather than random. In every respect, machinic assemblages *effectuate* the abstract machine insofar as it is developed on the plane of consistency or enveloped in a stratum. The most important problem of all: given a certain machinic assemblage, what is its relation of effectuation with the abstract machine? How does it effectuate it, with what adequation? Classify assemblages. What we call the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or between strata.
The system of the strata thus has nothing to do with signifier and signified, base and superstructure, mind and matter. All of these are ways of reducing the strata to a single stratum, or of closing the system in on itself by cutting it off from the plane of consistency as destratification. We had to summarize before we lost our voice. Challenger was finishing up. His voice had become unbearably shrill. He was suffocating. His hands were becoming elongated pincers that had become incapable of grasping anything but could still vaguely point to things. Some kind of matter seemed to be pouring out from the double mask, the two heads; it was impossible to tell whether it was getting thicker or more watery. Some of the audience had returned, but only shadows and prowlers. “You hear that? It’s an animal’s voice.” So the summary would have to be quick, the terminology would have to be set down as well as possible, for no good reason. There was a first group of notions: the Body without Organs or the destratified Plane of Consistency; the Matter of the Plane, that which occurs on the body or plane (singular, nonsegmented multiplicities composed of intensive continuums, emissions of particles-signs, conjunctions of flows); and the abstract Machine, or abstract Machines, insofar as they construct that body or draw that plane or “diagram” what occurs (lines of flight, or absolute deterritorializations).
Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emissions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In conjunctions, they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articulations animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with relations that are determinable in every case. Such are the *strata.* Each stratum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that place their segments in relation. What varies from stratum to stratum is the nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the nature of the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative movements. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude, with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the real-real distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of a linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a superlinearity of expression (translation).
Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stratum has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements, and formal traits (Ecumenon). But it divides into *parastrata* according to its irreducible forms and associated milieus, and into *epistrata* according to its layers of formed substances and intermediary milieus. Epistrata and parastrata must themselves be thought of as strata. A machinic assemblage is an *interstratum* insofar as it regulates the relations between strata, as well as the relations between contents and expressions on each stratum, in conformity with the preceding divisions. A single assemblage can borrow from different strata, and with a certain amount of apparent disorder; conversely, a stratum or element of a stratum can join others in functioning in a different assemblage. Finally, the machinic assemblage is a *metastratum* because it is also in touch with the plane of consistency and necessarily effectuates the abstract machine. The abstract machine exists enveloped in each stratum, whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it defines, and developed on the plane of consistency, whose destratification it performs (the Planomenon). Thus when the assemblages fit together the variables of a stratum as a function of its unity, they also bring about a specific effectuation of the abstract machine as it exists outside the strata. Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of the contents and expression on each stratum, and at the intersection of all of the strata with the plane of consistency. They rotate in all directions, like beacons.
It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning. The double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of olibanum and “hung with strangely figured arras.” Disarticulated, deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. He whispered something else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs proliferate. Panic is creation. A young woman cried out, her face “convulsed with a wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than they had seen on human countenance before.” No one had heard the summary, and no one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly hurried toward the *plane of consistency,* following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assemblage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: “The figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock The figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it…. The abnormal clicking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings”[90] — the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere.
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.”[180] 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.”[181] 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.”)[182] 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.”[183] 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.[184] 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 level of what passes or does not pass across it. You think you have made yourself a good BwO, that you chose the right Place, Power *(Puissance),* and Collectivity (there is always a collectivity, even when you are alone), and then nothing passes, nothing circulates, or something prevents things from moving. A paranoid point, a point of blockage, an outburst of delirium: it comes across clearly in *Speed,* by William Burroughs, Jr. Is it possible to locate this danger point, should the block be expelled, or should one instead “love, honor, and serve degeneracy wherever it surfaces”? To block, to be blocked, is that not still an intensity? In each case, we must define what comes to pass and what does not pass, what causes passage and prevents it. As in the meat circuit according to Lewin, something flows through channels whose sections are delimited by doors with gatekeepers, passers-on.[185] Door openers and trap closers, Malabars and Fierabras. The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels, each with a proper name: a peopling of the BwO, a Metropolis that has to be managed with a whip. What peoples it, what passes across it, what does the blocking?
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a *spatium* that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree — to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of *accessory forms* because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities.[186] The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradient. “No organ is constant as regards either function or position, … sex organs sprout anywhere,… rectums open, defecate and close,
… the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.”[187] The tantric egg.
After all, is not Spinoza’s *Ethics* the great book of the BwO? The attributes are types or genuses of BwO’s, substances, powers, zero intensities as matrices of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass: waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix. The masochist body as an attribute or genus of substance, with its production of intensities and pain modes based on its degree 0 of being sewn up. The drugged body as a different attribute, with its production of specific intensities based on absolute Cold = 0. (“Junkies always beef about *The Cold as* they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered necks … pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm, he wants to be cool-cooler-coLD. But he wants The Cold like he wants His Junk — NOT OUTSIDE where it does him no good but INSIDE so he can sit around with a spine like a frozen hydraulic jack… his metabolism approaching Absolute Zero.”)[188] Etc. The problem of whether there is a substance of all substances, a single substance for all attributes, becomes: *Is there a totality of all BwO’sl* If the BwO is already a limit, what must we say of the totality of all BwO’s? It is a problem not of the One and the Multiple but of a fusional multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one and the multiple. A formal multiplicity of substantial attributes that, as such, constitutes the ontological unity of substance. There is a continuum of all of the attributes or genuses of intensity under a single substance, and a continuum of the intensities of a certain genus under a single type or attribute. A continuum of all substances in intensity and of all intensities in substance. The uninterrupted continuum of the BwO. BwO, immanence, immanent limit. Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics, lovers — all BwO’s pay homage to Spinoza. The BwO is *the field of immanence* of desire, the *plane of consistency* specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it).
Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. Facing north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not lack what it desires?). The priest carried out the first sacrifice, named castration, and all the men and women of the north lined up behind him, crying in cadence, “Lack, lack, it’s the common law.” Then, facing south, the priest linked desire to pleasure. For there are hedonistic, even orgiastic, priests. Desire will be assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as discharge: the priest carries out the second sacrifice, named masturbation. Then, facing east, he exclaimed: *Jouissance* is impossible, but impossible *jouissance* is inscribed in desire. For that, in its very impossibility, is the Ideal, the “*manque-a-jouir* that is life.”[189] The priest carried out the third sacrifice, phantasy or the thousand and one nights, the one hundred twenty days, while the men of the East chanted: Yes, we will be your phantasy, your ideal and impossibility, yours and also our own. The priest did not turn to the west. He knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules, that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people. But that is where desire was lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions, rediscovered or deterritorialized.
The most recent figure of the priest is the psychoanalyst, with his or her three principles: Pleasure, Death, and Reality. Doubtless, psychoanalysis demonstrated that desire is not subordinated to procreation, or even to genitality. That was its modernism. But it retained the essentials; it even found new ways of inscribing in desire the negative law of lack, the external rule of pleasure, and the transcendent ideal of phantasy. Take the interpretation of masochism: when the ridiculous death instinct is not invoked, it is claimed that the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can only get it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to allay or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochist’s suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. In short, the masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways, other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them.
Take a masochist who did not undergo psychoanalysis: “PROGRAM … At night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the bath. Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The master will never approach her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should display impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the master will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing.”[190] What is this masochist doing? He seems to be imitating a horse, *Equus eroticus,* but that’s not it. Nor are the horse and the master-trainer or mistress images of the mother or father. Something entirely different is going on: a becoming-animal essential to masochism. It is a question of forces. The masochist presents it this way: *Training axiom* — *destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces.* In fact, it is less a destruction than an exchange and circulation (“what happens to a horse can also happen to me”). Horses are trained: humans impose upon the horse’s instinctive forces transmitted forces that regulate the former, select, dominate, overcode them. The masochist effects an inversion of signs: the horse transmits its transmitted forces to him, so that the masochist’s innate forces will in turn be tamed. There are two series, the horse’s (innate force, force transmitted by the human being), and the masochist’s (force transmitted by the horse, innate force of the human being). One series explodes into the other, forms a circuit with it: an increase in power or a circuit of intensities. The “master,” or rather the mistress-rider, the equestrian, ensures the conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. The masochist constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress. “Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all opposition is replaced by *a fusion* of my person with yours. … Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowledging it, I must feel fear. In this way, *it will no longer be women’s legs that have an effect on me,* and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never would have had it otherwise.”[191] Legs are still organs, but the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO.
Similarly, or actually in a different way, it would be an error to interpret courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies on the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks anything but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence. Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to “find themselves” in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself. Courtly love does not love the self, any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or religious way. It is a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, self and other — not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. The field of immanence is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in which they have fused. “Joy” in courtly love, the exchange of hearts, the test or “assay”: everything is allowed, as long as it is not external to desire or transcendent to its plane, or else internal to persons. The slightest caress may be as strong as an orgasm; orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle. Everything is allowed: all that counts is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself, Immanence, instead of a measure that interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms, namely, internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority.[192] If pleasure is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossible to fill but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity, in other words, the plane of consistency it draws in the course of its process.
A great Japanese compilation of Chinese Taoist treatises was made in 982–984. We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities between female and male energy, with the woman playing the role of the innate or instinctive force (Yin) stolen by or transmitted to the man in such a way that the transmitted force of the man (Yang) in turn becomes innate, all the more innate: an augmentation of powers.[193] The condition for this circulation and multiplication is that the man not ejaculate. It is not a question of experiencing desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to produce a kind of externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting an intensive body without organs, Tao, a field of immanence in which desire lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or transcendent criterion. It is true that the whole circuit can be channeled toward procreative ends (ejaculation when the energies are right); that is how Confucianism understood it. But this is true only for one side of the assemblage of desire, the side facing the strata, organisms, State, family… It is not true for the other side, the Tao side of destratification that draws a plane of consistency proper to desire. Is the Tao masochistic? Is courtly love Taoist? These questions are largely meaningless. The field of immanence or plane of consistency must be constructed. This can take place in very different social formations through very different assemblages (perverse, artistic, scientific, mystical, political) with different types of bodies without organs. It is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether the pieces can fit together, and at what price. Inevitably, there will be monstrous crossbreeds. The plane of consistency would be the totality of all BwO’s, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chinese, another American, another medieval, another petty perverse, but all in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he can, according to tastes she or he will have succeeded in abstracting from a Self *[Moi],* according to a politics or strategy successfully abstracted from a given formation, according to a given procedure abstracted from its origin.
We distinguish between: (1) BwO’s, which are different types, genuses, or substantial attributes. For example, the Cold of the drugged BwO, the Pain of the masochist BwO. Each has its degree 0 as its principle of production *(remissio).* (2) What happens on each type of BwO, in other words, the modes, the intensities that are produced, the waves that pass *(latitudo).* (3) The potential totality of all BwO’s, the plane of consistency *(Omnitudo,* sometimes called the BwO). There are a number of questions. Not only how to make oneself a BwO, and how to produce the corresponding intensities without which it would remain empty (not exactly the same question). But also how to reach the plane of consistency. How to sew up, cool down, and tie together all the BwO’s. If this is possible to do, it is only by conjugating the intensities produced on each BwO, by producing a continuum of all intensive continuities. Are not assemblages necessary to fabricate each BwO, is not a great abstract Machine necessary to construct the plane of consistency? Gregory Bateson uses the term *plateau* for continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build toward a climax; examples are certain sexual, or aggressive, processes in Balinese culture.[194] A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. The BwO is a component of passage.
A rereading of *H’eliogabale* and *Les Tarahumaras.* For Heliogabalus is Spinoza, and Spinoza is Heliogabalus revived. And the Tarahumaras are experimentation, peyote. Spinoza, Heliogabalus, and experimentation have the same formula: anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the multiple.[195] These two books by Artaud express the multiplicity of fusion, fusionability as infinite zero, the plane of consistency, Matter where no gods go; principles as forces, essences, substances, elements, remissions, productions; manners of being or modalities as produced intensities, vibrations, breaths, Numbers. Finally, the difficulty of reaching this world of crowned Anarchy if you go no farther than the organs (“the liver that turns the skin yellow, the brain wracked by syphilis, the intestines that expel filth”) and if you stay locked into the organism, or into a stratum that blocks the flows and anchors us in this, our world.
We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism. It is true that Artaud wages a struggle against the organs, but at the same time what he is going after, what he has it in for, is the organism: *The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.*[196] The BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its “true organs,” which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the organic organization of the organs. *The judgment of God,* the system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers. “Tie me up if you wish.” We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism — and also a signification and a subject — occur. For the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO; it is the BwO that undergoes it. It is in the BwO that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism. The BwO howls: “They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!” The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratification into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation. If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum. For many a stratum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God. A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the surfaces of stratification that block it or make it recoil.
Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectifi-cation. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body — otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted — otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement — otherwise you’re just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or *n* articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actually, dismantling the organism is no more difficult than dismantling the other two strata, signifiance and subjectification. Signifiance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body, and it is not easy to get rid of either. And how can we unhook ourselves from the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality? Tearing the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from signifiance and interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly no more or less difficult than tearing the body away from the organism. Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away from signifiance and subjection one courts falsehood, illusion and hallucination and psychic death. Artaud weighs and measures every word: the conscious “knows what is good for it and what is of no value to it: it knows which thoughts and feelings it can receive without danger and with profit, and which are harmful to the exercise of its freedom. Above all, it knows just how far its own being goes, and just how far it has not yet gone or does not have the right to go without sinking into the unreal, the illusory, the unmade, the unprepared … a *Plane* which normal consciousness does not reach but which *Ciguri* allows us to reach, and which is the very mystery of all poetry. But there is in human existence another plane, obscure and formless, where consciousness has not entered, and which surrounds it like an unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case may be. And which itself gives off adventurous sensations, perceptions. These are those shameless fantasies which affect an unhealthy conscious. … I too have had false sensations and perceptions and I have believed in them.”[197]
You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: *they* had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified — organized, signified, subjected — is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole “diagram,” as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines. Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a “place,” already a difficult operation, then to find “allies,” and then gradually to give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not “my” body without organs, instead the “me” (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds).
In the course of Castaneda’s books, the reader may begin to doubt the existence of the Indian Don Juan, and many other things besides. But that has no importance. So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather than an account of an initiation. The fourth book, *Tales of Power,* is about the living distinction between the “Tonal” and the “Nagual.” The *tonal* seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is organized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is memorizable in the form of something recalling something else; finally, it is the Self *(Moi),* the subject, the historical, social, or individual person, and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including God, the judgment of God, since it “makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world.”[198] Yet the tonal is only an island. For the *nagual* is also everything. And it is the same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems: it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata, the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The nagual, on the contrary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don’t ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is “your goddam mother” or something else entirely). There is no longer a Self *[Moi]* that feels, acts, and recalls; there is “a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist” that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.[199] The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: “The tonal must be protected at any cost.”[200]
We still have not answered the question of why there are so many dangers, and so many necessary precautions. It is not enough to set up an abstract opposition between the strata and the BwO. For the BwO already exists in the strata as well as on the destratified plane of consistency, but in a totally different manner. Take the organism as a stratum: there is indeed a BwO that opposes the organization of the organs we call the organism, but there is also a BwO of the organism that belongs to that stratum. *Cancerous tissue:* each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, proliferates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must resubmit it to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the “other” BwO on the plane of consistency. Take the stratum of signifiance: once again, there is a cancerous tissue, this time of signifiance, a burgeoning body of the despot that blocks any circulation of signs, as well as preventing the birth of the asignifying sign on the “other” BwO. Or take a stifling body of subjectification, which makes a freeing all the more unlikely by forbidding any remaining distinction between subjects. Even if we consider given social formations, or a given stratic apparatus within a formation, we must say that every one of them has a BwO ready to gnaw, proliferate, cover, and invade the entire social field, entering into relations of violence and rivalry as well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money (inflation), but also a BwO of the State, army, factory, city, Party, etc. If the strata are an affair of coagulation and sedimentation, all a stratum needs is a high sedimentation rate for it to lose its configuration and articulations, and to form its own specific kind of tumor, within itself or in a given formation or apparatus. The strata spawn their own BwO’s, totalitarian and fascist BwO’s, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency. It is not enough to make a distinction between full BwO’s on the plane of consistency and empty BwO’s on the debris of strata destroyed by a too-violent destratification. We must also take into account cancerous BwO’s in a stratum that has begun to proliferate. *The three-body problem.* Artaud said that outside the “plane” is another plane surrounding us with “an unillu-minated extension or a menace, as the case may be.” It is a struggle and as such is never sufficiently clear. How can we fabricate a BwO for ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How can we tell the three Bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this problem. The extraordinary composition of *To Be Done with the Judgment of God:* he begins by cursing the cancerous body of America, the body of war and money; he denounces the strata, which he calls “caca”; to the strata he opposes the true Plane, even if it is only peyote, the little trickle of the Tarahumaras; but he also knows about the dangers of a too-sudden, careless destratification. Artaud was constantly grappling with all of that, and flowed with it. *Letter to Hitler:* “Dear Sir, In 1932 in the Ider Cafe in Berlin, on one of the evenings when I made your acquaintance and shortly before you took power, I showed you roadblocks on *a map that was not just a map of geography,* roadblocks against me, an act of force aimed in a certain number of directions you indicated to me. Today Hitler I lift the roadblocks I set down! The Parisians need gas. Yours, A.A. — P.S. Be it understood, dear sir, that this is hardly an invitation, it is above all a warning.”[201] That map that is not only a map of geography is something like a BwO intensity map, where the roadblocks designate thresholds and the gas, waves or flows. Even if Artaud did not succeed for himself, it is certain that through him something has succeeded for us all.
The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension, Zero intensity as principle of production. There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryology and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. The BwO is not “before” the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child “before” the adult, or the mother “before” the child: it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud failed to understand about Weissmann: the child as the germinal contemporary of its parents. Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always *a* body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always a contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute themselves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradients. “A” stomach, “an” eye, “a” mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. The indefinite article is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a fragmented, splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a differen-tiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside an assemblage, and according to machinic connections operating on a BwO. *Logos spermaticos.* The error of psychoanalysis was to understand BwO phenomena as regressions, projections, phantasies, in terms of an *image* of the body. As a result, it only grasps the flipside of the BwO and immediately substitutes family photos, childhood memories, and part-objects for a worldwide intensity map. It understands nothing about the egg nor about indefinite articles nor about the contemporaneousness of a continually self-constructing milieu.
The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destra-tification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation or another. It is a problem not of ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cosmic matter. That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification, and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consistency (keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for the suicidal and the demented). The plane of consistency is not simply that which is constituted by the sum of all BwO’s. There are things it rejects; the BwO chooses, as a function of the abstract machine that draws it. Even within a BwO (the masochist body, the drugged body, etc.), we must distinguish what can be composed on the plane and what cannot. There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there also a possible use that would be in conformity with the plane of consistency? Even paranoia: Is there a possibility of using it that way in part? When we asked the question of the totality of all BwO’s, considered as substantial attributes of a single substance, it should have been understood, strictly speaking, to apply only to the plane. The plane is the totality of the full BwO’s that have been selected (there is no positive totality including the cancerous or empty bodies). What is the nature of this totality? Is it solely logical? Or must we say that each BwO, from a basis in its own genus, produces effects identical or analogous to the effects other BwO’s produce from a basis in their genera? Could what the drug user or masochist obtains also be obtained in a different fashion in the conditions of the plane, so it would even be possible to use drugs without using drugs, to get soused on pure water, as in Henry Miller’s experimentations? Or is it a question of a real passage of substances, an intensive continuum of all the BwO’s? Doubtless, anything is possible. All we are saying is that the identity of effects, the continuity of genera, the totality of all BwO’s, can be obtained on the plane of consistency only by means of an abstract machine capable of covering and even creating it, by assemblages capable of plugging into desire, of effectively taking charge of desires, of assuring their continuous connections and transversal tie-ins. Otherwise, the BwO’s of the plane will remain separated by genus, marginalized, reduced to means of bordering, while on the “other plane” the emptied or cancerous doubles will triumph.
Earlier, we encountered two axes, signifiance and subjectification. We saw that they were two very different semiotic systems, or even two strata. Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the *white wall/black hole* system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choices (“Hey, he seems angry …”; “He couldn’t say it…”; “You see my face when I’m talking to you …”; “look at me carefully…”). A child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to specific faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye.
Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that constitutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape *on* the white wall. It vaguely begins to appear *in* the black hole. In film, the close-up of the face can be said to have two poles: make the face reflect light or, on the contrary, emphasize its shadows to the point of engulfing it “in pitiless darkness.”[202] A psychologist once said that the face is a visual percept that crystallizes out of “different varieties of vague luminosity without form or dimension.” A suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures, a face. According to this account, the dimensionless black hole and formless white wall are already there to begin with. And there are already a number of possible combinations in the system: either black holes distribute themselves on the white wall, or the white wall unravels and moves toward a black hole combining all black holes, hurtling them together or making them “crest.” Sometimes faces appear on the wall, with their holes; sometimes they appear in the hole, with their linearized, rolled-up wall. A horror story, the face is a horror story. It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it needs all by itself; it is certain that subjectivity does not dig its hole all alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an *abstract machine of faciality (visageite),* which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces, or will produce.
The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance juncture when you are just falling asleep, or into a twilight state or hallucinating, or doing an amusing physics experiment … Kafka’s novella, “Blumfeld”:[203] the bachelor returns home in the evening to find two little ping-pong balls jumping around by themselves on the “wall” constituted by the floor. They bounce everywhere and even try to hit him in the face. They apparently contain other, still smaller, electric balls. Blumfeld finally manages to lock them up in the black hole of a wardrobe. The scene continues the next day when Blumfeld tries to give the balls to a small, feebleminded boy and two grimacing little girls, and then at the office, where he encounters his two grimacing and feebleminded assistants, who want to make off with a broom. In a wonderful ballet by Debussy and Nijinsky, a little tennis ball comes bouncing onto the stage at dusk, and at the end another ball appears in a similar fashion. This time, between the two balls, two girls and a boy who watches them develop passional dance and facial traits in vague luminosities (curiosity, spite, irony, ecstasy…).[204] There is nothing to explain, nothing to interpret. It is the pure abstract machine of a twilight state. White wall/black hole? But depending on the combinations, the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white. The balls can bounce off of a wall or spin into a black hole. Even upon impact they can have the relative role of a hole in relation to the wall, just as when they are rolling straight ahead they can have the relative role of a wall in relation to the hole they are heading for. They circulate in the white wall/black hole system. Nothing in all of this resembles a face, yet throughout the system faces are distributed and faciality traits organized. Nevertheless, the abstract machine can be effectuated in other things besides faces, but not in any order, and not without the necessary foundation *(raisons).*
The face has been a major concern of American psychology, in particular the relation between the mother and the child through eye-to-eye contact. Four-eye machine? Let us recall certain stages in the research: (1) Isakower’s studies on falling asleep, in which so-called proprioceptive sensations of a manual, buccal, cutaneous, or even vaguely visual nature recall the infantile mouth-breast relation. (2) Lewin’s discovery of a *white screen* of the dream, which is ordinarily covered by visual contents but remains white when the only dream contents are proprioceptive sensations (this screen or white wall, once again, is the breast as it approaches, getting larger and then pressing flat). (3) Spitz’s interpretation according to which the white screen, rather than being a representation of the breast itself as an object of tactile sensation or contact, is a visual percept implying a minimum of distance and upon which the mother’s face appears for the child to use as a guide in finding the breast. Thus there is a combination of two very different kinds of elements: manual, buccal, or cutaneous proprioceptive sensations; and the visual perception of the face seen from the front against the white screen, with the shape of the eyes drawn in for black holes. This visual perception very quickly assumes decisive importance for the act of eating, in relation to the breast as a volume and the mouth as a cavity, both experienced through touch.[205]
We can now propose the following distinction: the face is part of a surface-holes, holey surface, system. This system should under no circumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the (proprioceptive) body. The head is included in the body, but the face is not. The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps a volume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more than holes. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code — when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be *overcoded*‘by something we shall call the Face. This amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes, the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality. But the operation does not end there: if the head and its elements are facialized, the entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevitable process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An operation worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand, breast, stomach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized. Fetishism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these processes of facializa-tion. It is not at all a question of taking a part of the body and making it *resemble* a face, or making a dream-face dance in a cloud. No anthropomorphism here. Facialization operates not by resemblance but by an order of reasons. It is a much more unconscious and machinic operation that draws the entire body across the holey surface, and in which the role of the face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all of the decoded parts. Everything remains sexual; there is no sublimation, but there are new coordinates. *It is precisely because the face depends on an abstract machine that it is not content to cover the head,* but touches all other parts of the body, and even, if necessary, other objects without resemblance. *The question then becomes what circumstances trigger the machine* that produces the face and facialization. Although the head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face, the face is produced in humanity. But it is produced by a necessity that does not apply to human beings “in general.” The face is not animal, but neither is it human in general; there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face. It would be an error to proceed as though the face became inhuman only beyond a certain threshold: closeup, extreme magnification, recondite expression, etc. The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that *make faciality traits* themselves finally elude the organization of the face — freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities. “I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever. … I have broken the wall…. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling…. *Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.”*[206] BwO. Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective. But so far we have explained nothing of what we sense.
The move from the body-head system to the face system has nothing to do with an evolution or genetic stages. Nor with phenomenological positions. Nor with integrations of part-objects, or structural or structuring systems. Nor can there be any appeal to a preexisting subject, or one brought into existence, except by this machine specific to faciality. In the literature of the face, Sartre’s text on the look and Lacan’s on the mirror make the error of appealing to a form of subjectivity or humanity reflected in a phenomenological field or split in a structural field. *The gaze is but secondary in relation to thegazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality.* Neither will we speak of a genetic axis, or the integration of part-objects. Any approach based on stages in ontogenesis is arbitrary: it is thought that what is fastest is primary, or even serves as a foundation or springboard for what comes next. An approach based on part-objects is even worse; it is the approach of a demented experimenter who flays, slices, and anatomizes everything in sight, and then proceeds to sew things randomly back together again. You can make any list of part-objects you want: hand, breast, mouth, eyes… It’s still Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without organs, animated by various intensive movements that determine the nature and emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an organism, or even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part. It becomes apparent that the slowest of movements, or the last to occur or arrive, is not the least intense. And the fastest may already have converged with it, connected with it, in the disequilibrium of a nonsynchronic development of strata that have different speeds and lack a sequence of stages but are nevertheless simultaneous. The question of the body is not one of part-objects but of differential speeds.
These movements are movements of deterritorialization. They are what “make” the body an animal or human organism. For example, the prehensile hand implies a *relative* deterritorialization not only of the front paw but also of the locomotor hand. It has a correlate, the use-object or tool: the club is a deterritorialized branch. The breast of the woman, with her upright posture, indicates a deterritorialization of the animal’s mammary gland; the mouth of the child, adorned with lips by an outfolding of the mucous membranes, marks a deterritorialization of the snout and mouth of the animal. Lips-breast: each serves as a correlate of the other.[207] The human head implies a deterritorialization in relation to the animal and has as its correlate the organization of a world, in other words, a milieu that has itself been deterritorialized (the steppe is the first “world,” in contrast to the forest milieu). But the face represents a far more intense, if slower, deterritorialization. We could say that it is an *absolute* deterritorialization: it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as signi-fiance and subjectification. Now the face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized world. There are a number of face-landscape correlations, on this “higher” level. Christian education exerts spiritual control over both faciality and landscapity *(paysageit’e):* Compose them both, color them in, complete them, arrange them according to a complementarity linking landscapes to faces.[208] Face and landscape manuals formed a pedagogy, a strict discipline, and were an inspiration to the arts as much as the arts were an inspiration to them. Architecture positions its ensembles — houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories — to function like faces in the landscape they transform. Painting takes up the same movement but also reverses it, positioning a landscape as a face, treating one like the other: “treatise on the face and the landscape.” The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape; that is the definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen and camera. But the same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting, even the novel: close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations. So, is your mother a landscape or a face? A face or a factory? (Godard.) All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it, providing an unexpected complement for its lines and traits? Even when painting becomes abstract, all it does is rediscover the black hole and white wall, the great composition of the white canvas and black slash. Tearing, but also stretching of the canvas along an axis of escape *(fuite),* at a vanishing point *(point defuite),* along a diagonal, by a knife slice, slash, or hole: the machine is already in place that always functions to produce faces and landscapes, however abstract. Titian began his paintings in black and white, not to make outlines to fill in, but as the matrix for each of the colors to come.
The novel — *A flock of geese flew which the snow had dazzled. [Perceval] saw them and heard them, for they were going away noisily because of a falcon which came drawing after them at a great rate until he found abandoned one separated from the flock, and he struck it so and bruised it that he knockedit down to earth…. When Perceval saw the trampled snow on which the goose had lain, and the blood which appeared around, he leaned upon his lance and looked at that image, for the blood and the snow together seemed to him like the fresh color which was on the face of his friend, and he thinks until he forgets himself; for the vermilion seated on white was on her face just the same as these three drops of blood on the white snow…. We have seen a knight who is dozing on his charger.* Everything is there: the redundancy specific to the face and landscape, the snowy white wall of the landscape-face, the black hole of the falcon and the three drops distributed on the wall; and, simultaneously, the silvery line of the landscape-face spinning toward the black hole of the knight deep in catatonia. Cannot the knight, at certain times and under certain conditions, push the movement further still, crossing the black hole, breaking through the white wall, dismantling the face — even if the attempt may backfire?[209] All of this is in no way characteristic of the genre of the novel only at the end of its history; it is there from the beginning, it is an essential part of the genre. It is false to see Don Quixote as the end of the chivalric novel, invoking the hero’s hallucinations, harebrained ideas, and hypnotic or cataleptic states. It is false to see novels such as Beckett’s as the end of the novel in general, invoking the black holes, the characters’ line of deterritorialization, the schizophrenic promenades of Molloy or the Unnameable, their loss of their names, memory, or purpose. The novel does have an evolution, but that is surely not it. The novel has always been defined by the adventure of lost characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking for, or what they are doing, amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics. They differentiate the genre of the novel from the genres of epic or drama (when the dramatic or epic hero is stricken with folly or forgetting, etc., it is in an entirely different way). *La princesse de* Cleves is a novel precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the people of the time: the states of absence or “rest,” the sleep that overtakes the characters. There is always a Christian education in the novel. Molloy is the beginning of the genre of the novel. When the novel began, with Chretien de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would accompany it over the entire course of its history was already there: The knight of the novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing, what people say to him, he doesn’t know where he is going or to whom he is speaking, he is continually drawing a line of absolute deterritorialization, but also losing his way, stopping, and falling into black holes. “He awaits chivalry and adventure.” Open Chretien de Troyes to any page and you will find a catatonic knight seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting, seeing the face of his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to make him respond. Lancelot, in the presence of the queen’s white face, doesn’t notice his horse plunge into the river; or he gets into a passing cart and it turns out to be the cart of disgrace. There is a face-landscape aggregate proper to the novel, in which black holes sometimes distribute themselves on a white wall, and the white line of the horizon sometimes spins toward a black hole, or both simultaneously.
*** Theorems of Deterritorialization, or Machinic Propositions[210]
First theorem: One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each of the two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as well. Thus there is an entire system of horizontal and complementary reter-ritorializations, between hand and tool, mouth and breast, face and landscape. Second theorem: The fastest of two elements or movements of deterritorialization is not necessarily the most intense or most deterritorialized. Intensity of deterritorialization must not be confused with speed of movement or development. The fastest can even connect its intensity to the slowest, which, as an intensity, does not come after the fastest but is simultaneously at work on a different stratum or plane (for example, the way the breast-mouth relation is guided from the start by a plane of faciality). Third theorem: It can even be concluded from this that the least deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized. This is where the second system of reterritorializations comes in, the vertical system running from bottom to top. This is the sense in which not only the mouth but also the breast, hand, the entire body, even the tool, are “facialized.” As a general rule, relative deterritorializations (transcoding) reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in certain respects absolute (overcoding). We have seen that the deterritorialization of the head into a face is absolute but remains negative in that it passes from one stratum to another, from the stratum of the organism to those of signifiance and subjectification. The hand and breast reterritorialize on the face and in the landscape: they are facialized at the same time as they are landscapified. Even a use-object may come to be facialized: you might say that a house, utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc., is *watching me,* not because it resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall/black hole process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization. The close-up in film pertains as much to a knife, cup, clock, or kettle as to a face or facial element, for example, Griffith’s “the kettle is watching me.” Is it not fair to say, then, that there are close-ups in novels, as when Dickens writes the opening line of *The Cricket on the Hearth:* “The kettle began it…”,[211] and in painting, when a utensil becomes a face-landscape from within, or when a cup on a tablecloth or a teapot is facialized, in Bonnard, Vuillard? *Fourth theorem:* The abstract machine is therefore effectuated not only in the faces that produce it but also to varying degrees in body parts, clothes, and objects that it facializes following an order of reasons (rather than an organization of resemblances).
Yet the question remains: When does the abstract machine of faciality enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some simple examples: the maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons, and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of film operating through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of television. It is not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the ciphering it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible. This is an affair not of ideology but of economy and the organization of power *(pouvoir).* We are certainly not saying that the face, the power of the face *(la puissance du visage),* engenders and explains social power *(pouvoir). Certain assemblages of power (pouvoir) require the production of a face,* others do not. If we consider primitive societies, we see that there is very little that operates through the face: their semiotic is nonsignifying, nonsubjective, essentially collective, polyvocal, and corporeal, playing on very diverse forms and substances. This polyvocality operates through bodies, their volumes, their internal cavities, their variable exterior connections and coordinates (territorialities). A fragment from a manual semiotic, a manual sequence, may be coordinated, without subordination or unification, with an oral sequence, or a cutaneous one, or a rhythmic one, etc. Lizot, for example, shows how “the dissociation of duty, ritual and daily life is almost total… it is strange, inconceivable to us”: during mourning behavior, certain people make obscene jokes while others cry; or an Indian abruptly stops crying and begins to repair his flute; or everybody goes to sleep.[212] The same goes for incest. There is no incest prohibition; instead, there are sequences of incest that connect with sequences of prohibition following specific coordinates. Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the multidi-mensionality of bodies. Even masks ensure the head’s belonging to the body, rather than making it a face. Doubtless, there are profound movements of deterritorialization that shake up the coordinates of the body and outline particular assemblages of power; however, they connect the body not to faciality but to becomings-animal, in particular with the help of drugs. Of course, there is no less spirituality for that, for these becomings-animal involve an animal Spirit — a jaguar-spirit, bird-spirit, ocelot-spirit, toucan-spirit — that takes possession of the body’s interior, enters its cavities, and fills its volumes instead of making a face for it. Possession expresses a direct relation between Voices and the body rather than a relation to the face. Shaman, warrior, and hunter organizations of power, fragile and precarious, are all the more spiritual by virtue of the fact that they operate through corporeality, animality, and vegetality. When we said earlier that the human head still belongs to the stratum of the organism, we obviously were not denying the existence of culture and society among these peoples; we were merely saying that these cultures’ and societies’ codes pertain to bodies, to the belonging of heads to bodies, to the ability of the body-head system to *become* and receive souls, and to receive them as friends while repulsing enemy souls. “Primitives” may have the most human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but they have no face and need none.
The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European, what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth-century psychiatrists were right to say that erotomania, unlike nymphomania, often remains pure and chaste; this is because it operates through the face and facialization). Not a universal, but *fades totius universi.* Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function of biuni vocalization, or binarization. It has two aspects: the abstract machine of faciality, insofar as it is composed by a black hole/white wall system, functions in two ways, one of which concerns the units or elements, the other the choices. Under the first aspect, the black hole acts as a central computer, Christ, the third eye that moves across the wall or the white screen serving as general surface of reference. Regardless of the content one gives it, the machine constitutes a facial unit, an elementary face in biunivocal relation with another: it is a man *or* a woman, a rich person or a poor one, an adult or a child, a leader or a subject, “an x *or* a y.” The movement of the black hole across the screen, the trajectory of the third eye over the surface of reference, constitutes so many dichotomies or arborescences, like four-eye machines made of elementary faces linked together two by two. The face of a teacher and a student, father and son, worker and boss, cop and citizen, accused and judge (“the judge had a stern expression, his eyes were horizonless…”): concrete individualized faces are produced and transformed on the basis of these units, these combinations of units — like the face of a rich child in which a military calling is already discernible, that West Point chin. You don’t so much have a face as slide into one.
Under the second aspect, the abstract machine of faciality assumes a role of selective response, or choice: given a concrete face, the machine judges whether it passes or not, whether it goes or not, on the basis of the elementary facial units. This time, the binary relation is of the “yes-no” type. The empty eye or black hole absorbs or rejects, like a half-doddering despot who can still give a signal of acquiescence or refusal. The face of a given teacher is contorted by tics and bathed in an anxiety that makes it “no go.” A defendant, a subject, displays an overaffected submission that turns into insolence. Or someone is too polite to be honest. A given face is neither a man’s nor a woman’s. Or it is neither a poor person’s nor a rich person’s. Is it someone who lost his fortune? At every moment, the machine rejects faces that do not conform, or seem suspicious. But only at a given level of choice. For it is necessary to produce successive divergence-types of deviance for everything that eludes biunivocal relationships, and to establish binary relations between what is accepted on first choice and what is only tolerated on second, third choice, etc. The white wall is always expanding, and the black hole functions repeatedly. The teacher has gone mad, but madness is a face conforming to the «th choice (not the last, however, since there are mad faces that do not conform to what one assumes madness should be). A ha! It’s not a man and it’s not a woman, so it must be a trans-vestite: The binary relation is between the “no” of the first category and the “yes” of the following category, which under certain conditions may just as easily mark a tolerance as indicate an enemy to be mowed down at all costs. At any rate, you’ve been recognized, the abstract machine has you inscribed in its overall grid. It is clear that in its new role as deviance detector, the faciality machine does not restrict itself to individual cases but operates in just as general a fashion as it did in its first role, the computation of normalities. If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category. They are also inscribed on the wall, distributed by the hole. They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.”[213] Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic …). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naivete.
On the brighter side, painting has exploited all the resources of the Christ-face. Painting has taken the abstract white wall/black hole machine of faciality in all directions, using the face of Christ to produce every kind of facial unit and every degree of deviance. In this respect, there is an exultation in the painting of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, like an unbridled freedom. Not only did Christ preside over the facialization of the entire body (his own) and the landscapification of all milieus (his own), but he composed all of the elementary faces and had every divergence at his disposal: Christ-athlete at the fair, Christ-Mannerist queer, Christ-Negro, or at least a Black Virgin at the edge of the wall. The most prodigious strokes of madness appear on canvas under the auspices of the Catholic code. A single example chosen from many [Giotto, *The Life of St. Francis,* scene XII, *The Transfiguration* — Trans.]: against the white background of the landscape and the black-blue hole of the sky, the crucified Christ-turned-kite-machine sends stigmata to Saint Francis by rays; the stigmata effect the facialization of the body of the saint, in the image of the body of Christ; but the rays carrying the stigmata to the saint are also the strings Francis uses to pull the divine kite. It was under the sign of the cross that people learned to steer the face and processes of facialization in all directions.
Information theory takes as its point of departure a homogeneous set of ready-made *signifying* messages that are already functioning as elements in biunivocal relationships, or the elements of which are biunivocally organized between messages. Second, the picking of a combination depends on a certain number *of subjective* binary choices that increase proportionally to the number of elements. But the problem is that all of this biunivocalization and binarization (which is not just the result of an increase in calculating skills, as some say) assumes the deployment of a wall or screen, the installation of a central computing hole without which no message would be discernible and no choice could be implemented. The black hole/white wall system must already have gridded all of space and outlined its arborescences or dichotomies for those of signifier and subjectification even to be conceivable. The mixed semiotic of signifiance and subjectification has an exceptional need to be protected from any intrusion from the outside. In fact, there must not be any exterior: no nomad machine, no primitive poly vocality must spring up, with their combinations of heterogeneous substances of expression. Translatability of any kind requires a single substance of expression. One can constitute signifying chains operating with deterritorialized, digitalized, discrete elements only if there is a semiological screen available, a wall to protect them. One can make subjective choices between two chains or at each point in a chain only if no outside tempest sweeps away the chains and subjects. One can form a web of subjectivities only if one possesses a central eye, a black hole capturing everything that would exceed or transform either the assigned affects or the dominant significations. Moreover, it is absurd to believe that language as such can convey a message. A language is always embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast them in relation to the signifiers in progress and subjects concerned. Choices are guided by faces, elements are organized around faces: a common grammar is never separable from a facial education. The face is a veritable megaphone. Thus not only must the abstract machine of faciality provide a protective screen and a computing black hole; in addition, the faces it produces draw all kinds of arborescences and dichotomies without which the signifying and the subjective would not be able to make the arborescences and dichotomies function that fall within their purview in language. Doubtless, the binarities and biunivocalities of the face are not the same as those of language, of its elements and subjects. There is no resemblance between them. But the former subtend the latter. When the faciality machine translates formed contents of whatever kind into a single substance of expression, it already subjugates them to the exclusive form of signifying and subjective expression. It carries out the prior gridding that makes it possible for the signifying elements to become discernible, and for the subjective choices to be implemented. The faciality machine is not an annex to the signifier and the subject; rather, it is subjacent *(connexe)* to them and is their condition of possibility. Facial biunivocalities and bina-rities double the others; facial redundancies are in redundancy with signifying and subjective redundancies. It is precisely because the face depends on an abstract machine that it does not assume a preexistent subject or signifier; but it is subjacent to them and provides the substance necessary to them. What chooses the faces is not a subject, as in the Szondi test; it is faces that choose their subjects. What interprets the black blotch/white hole figure, or the white page/black hole, is not a signifier, as in the Rorschach test; it is that figure which programs the signifiers.
We have made some progress toward answering the question of what triggers the abstract machine of faciality, for it is not in operation all the time or in just any social formation. *Certain* social formations need face, and also landscape.[214] There is a whole history behind it. At very different dates, there occurred a generalized collapse of all of the heterogeneous, polyvocal, primitive semiotics in favor of a semiotic of signifiance and subjectification. Whatever the differences between signifiance and subjec-tification, whichever prevails over the other in this case or that, whatever the varying figures assumed by their de facto mixtures — they have it in common to crush all polyvocality, set up language as a form of exclusive expression, and operate by signifying biunivocalization and subjective binarization. The superlinearity proper to language is no longer coordinated with multidimensional figures: it now flattens out all volumes and subordinates all lines. Is it by chance that linguistics always, and very quickly, encounters the problem of homonymy, or ambiguous statements that it then subjects to a set of binary reductions? More generally, linguistics can tolerate no poly vocality or rhizome traits: a child who runs around, plays, dances, and draws cannot concentrate attention on language and writing, and will never be a good subject. In short, the new semiotic needs systematically to destroy the whole range of primitive semiotic systems, even if it retains some of their debris in well-defined enclosures.
However, there is more to the picture than semiotic systems waging war on one another armed only with their own weapons. *Very specific assemblages of power impose signifiance and subjectification* as their determinate form of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new contents: there is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects. It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian formations, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in other words, the means both to crush the other semiotics and protect itself against any threat from outside. A concerted effort is made to do away with the body and corporeal coordinates through which the multidimensional or polyvocal semiotics operated. Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dismantled, becomings-animal hounded out, deterritorialization pushed to a new threshold — a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of signifiance and subjectification. A single substance of expression is produced. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject. You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social production of face, because it performs the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus. The deterritorialization of the body implies a reterritorialization on the face; the decoding of the body implies an overcoding by the face; the collapse of corporeal coordinates or milieus implies the constitution of a landscape. The semiotic of the signifier and the subjective never operates through bodies. It is absurd to claim to relate the signifier to the body. At any rate it can be related only to a body that has already been entirely facialized. The difference between our uniforms and clothes and primitive paintings and garb is that the former effect a facialization of the body, with buttons for black holes against the white wall of the material. Even the mask assumes a new function here, the exact opposite of its old one. For there is no unitary function of the mask, except a negative one (in no case does the mask serve to dissimulate, to hide, even while showing or revealing). Either the mask assures the head’s belonging to the body, its becoming-animal, as was the case in primitive societies. Or, as is the case now, the mask assures the erection, the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the face. The inhumanity of the face. Never does the face assume a prior signifier or subject. The order is totally different: despotic and authoritarian concrete assemblage of power — triggering of the abstract machine of faciality, white wall/black hole — > installation of the new semiotic of signifiance and subjectification on that holey surface. That is why we have been addressing just two problems exclusively: the relation of the face to the abstract machine that produces it, and the relation of the face to the assemblages of power that require that social production. The face is a politics.
Of course, we have already seen that signifiance and subjectification are semiotic systems that are entirely distinct in their principles and have different regimes (circular irradiation versus segmentary linearity) and different apparatuses of power (despotic generalized slavery versus authoritarian contract-proceeding). Neither begins with Christ, or the White Man as Christian universal: there are Indian, African, and Asiatic despotic formations of signifiance; the authoritarian process of subjectification appears most purely in the destiny of the Jewish people. But however different these semiotics are, they still form a de facto *mix,* and it is at the level of this mixture that they assert their imperialism, in other words, their common endeavor to crush all other semiotics. There is no signifiance that does not harbor the seeds of subjectivity; there is no subjectification that does not drag with it remnants of signifier. If the signifier bounces above all off a wall, if subjectivity spins above all toward a hole, then we must say that the wall of the signifier already includes holes and the black hole of subjectivity already carries scraps of wall. The mix, therefore, has a solid foundation in the indissociable white wall/black hole machine, and the two semiotics intermingle through intersection, splicing, and the plugging of one into the other, as with the “Hebrew and the Pharaoh.” But there is more because the nature of the mixtures may vary greatly. If it is possible to assign the faciality machine a date — the year zero of Christ and the historical development of the White Man — it is because that is when the mixture ceased to be a splicing or an intertwining, becoming a total interpene-tration in which each element suffuses the other like drops of red-black wine in white water. Our semiotic of modern White Men, the semiotic of capitalism, has attained this state of mixture in which signifiance and subjectification effectively interpenetrate. Thus it is in this semiotic that faciality, or the white wall/black hole system, assumes its full scope. We must, however, assess the states of mixture and the varying proportions of the elements. Whether in the Christian or pre-Christian state, one element may dominate another, one may be more or less powerful than the other. We are thus led to define *limit-faces,* which are different from both the facial units and the degrees of facial divergence previously defined.
The black hole is on the white wall. It is not a unit, since the black hole is in constant movement on the wall and operates by binarization. Two black holes, four black holes, *n* black holes distribute themselves like eyes. Faciality is always a multiplicity. The landscape will be populated with eyes or black holes, as in an Ernst painting, or a drawing by Aloi’se or Wolfli. Circles are drawn around a hole on the white wall; an eye can be placed in each of the circles. We can even propose the following law: the more circles there are around a hole, the more the bordering effect acts to increase the surface over which the hole slides and to give that surface a force of capture. Perhaps the purest case is to be found in popular Ethiopian scrolls representing demons: on the white surface of the parchment, two black holes are drawn, or an outline of round or rectangular faces; but the black holes spread and reproduce, they enter into redundancy, and each time a secondary circle is drawn, a new black hole is constituted, an eye is put in it.[215] An effect of capturing a surface that becomes more enclosed the more it expands. This is the signifying despotic face and the multiplication proper to it, its proliferation, its redundancy of frequency. A multiplication of eyes. The despot or his representatives are everywhere. This is the face as seen from the front, by a subject who does not so much see as get snapped up by black holes. This is a figure of destiny, *terrestrial* destiny, objective signifying destiny. The close-up in film knows this figure well: the Griffith close-up of a face, an element of a face or a facialized object, which then assumes an anticipatory temporal value (the hands of the clock foreshadow something).
[[g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-a-thousand-plate-12.jpg][Terrestrial Signifying Despotic Face]]
Now, on the contrary, the white wall has unraveled, becoming a silver thread moving toward the black hole. One black hole “crests” all the other black holes, all of the eyes and faces, while the landscape becomes a thread whose far end coils around the hole. It is still a multiplicity but constitutes a different figure of destiny: reflexive, passional, subjective destiny. It is the *maritime* face or landscape: it follows the line separating the sky from the waters, or the land from the waters. This authoritarian face is in profile and spins toward the black hole. Or else there are two faces facing each other, but in profile to the observer, and their union is already marked by a limitless separation. Or else the faces turn away from each other, swept away by betrayal. Tristan, Isolde, Isolde, Tristan, in the boat carrying them to the black hole of betrayal and death. A faciality of consciousness and passion, a redundancy of resonance and coupling. This time, the effect of the close-up is no longer to expand a surface while simultaneously closing it off; its only function is to have an anticipatory temporal value. It marks the origin of a scale of intensity, or is part of that scale; the closer the faces get to the black hole as termination point, the more the close-up heats the line they follow. Eisenstein’s close-ups versus Griffith’s (the intensive heightening of shame, or anger, in the close-ups in *Potemkin).*[216] Here again, it is clear that any combination is possible between the two limit-figures of the face. In Pabst’s *Lulu,* the despotic face of the fallen Lulu is associated with the image of a bread knife, which has the anticipatory value of foreshadowing the murder; but the authoritarian face of Jack the Ripper also ascends a whole scale of intensities leading to the knife and Lulu’s murder.
More generally, we may note characteristics common to the two limit-figures. First, although the white wall, the broad cheeks, is the substantial element of the signifier, and the black hole the reflexive element of subjectivity, they always go together. But in one of two modes: either the black holes distribute themselves and multiply on the white wall, or the wall, reduced to its crest or horizon thread, hurtles toward a black hole that crests them all. There is no wall without black holes, and no black hole without a wall. Second, in both cases the black hole is necessarily surrounded by a border, or even bordered more than once: the effect of this border is either to expand the surface of the wall or to intensify the line. The black hole is never in the eyes (pupil); it is always inside the border, and the eyes are always inside the hole: dead eyes, which see all the better for being in a black hole.[217] These common characteristics do not preclude the existence of a limit-difference between the two figures of the face, and proportions according to which first one then the other dominates in the mixed semiotic. The terrestrial signifying despotic face, the maritime subjective passional authoritarian face (the desert can also be a sea of land). Two figures of destiny, two states of the faciality machine. Jean Paris has clearly shown how these poles operate in painting, the pole of the despotic Christ and that of the passional Christ: on the one hand, the face of Christ seen from the front, as in a Byzantine mosaic, with the black hole of the eyes against a gold background, all depth projected forward; and on the other hand, faces that cross glances and turned away from each other, seen half-turned or in profile, as in a quattrocento painting, their sidelong glances drawing multiple lines, integrating depth into the painting itself (arbitrary examples of transition and mixture can be cited, such a Duccio’s *Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew,* against the background of an aquatic landscape; the second formula has already overtaken Christ and the first fisherman, while the second fisherman remains within the Byzantine code).[218]
[[g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-a-thousand-plate-13.jpg][Maritime Subjective Authoritarian Face (after Tristan and Isolde)]]
Swann’s Love: Proust was able to make the face, landscape, painting, music, etc., resonate together. Three moments in the story of Swann and Odette. First, a whole signifying mechanism is set up. The face of Odette with her broad white or yellow cheeks, and her eyes as black hoes. But this face continually refers back to other things, also arrayed on the wall. That is Swann’s aetheticism, his amateurism: a thing must always recall something else, in a network of interpretations under the sign of the signifier. A face refers back to a landscape. A face must “recall” a painting, or a fragment of a painting. A piece of music must let fall a little phrase that connects with Odette’s face, to the point that the little phrase becomes only a signal. The white wall becomes populous, the black holes are arrayed. This entire mechanism of signifiance, with its referral of interpretations, prepares the way for the second, passional subjective, moment, during which Swann’s jealousy, querulous delusion, and erotomania develop. Now Odette’s face races down a line hurtling toward a single black hole, that of Swann’s Passion. The other lines, of landscapity, picturality, and musicality, also rush toward this catatonic hole and coil around it, bordering it several times.
But in the third moment, at the end of his long passion, Swann attends a reception where he sees the faces of the servants and guests *disaggregate* into autonomous aesthetic traits, as if the line of picturality regained its independence, both beyond the wall and outside the black hole. Then Vinteuil’s little phrase regains its transcendence and renews its connection with a still more intense, asignifying, and asubjective line of pure musicality. And Swann knows that he no longer loves Odette and, above all, that Odette will never again love him.
Was this salvation through art necessary? For neither Swann nor Proust was saved. Was it necessary to break through the wall and out of the hole in *this* way, by renouncing love? Was not that love rotten from the start, made of signifiance and jealousy? Was it possible to do anything else, considering Odette’s mediocrity and Swann’s aestheticism? In a way, the madeleine is the same story. The narrator munches his madeleine: redundancy, the black hole of involuntary memory. How can he get out of that? And it is, above all, something one has to get out of, escape from. Proust knows that quite well, even if his commentators do not. But the way he gets out is through art, uniquely through art.
How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How do you dismantle the face? Whatever genius there may be in the French novel, that is not its affair. It is too concerned with measuring the wall, or even with building it, with plumbing the depths of black holes and composing faces. The French novel is profoundly pessimistic and idealistic, “critical of life rather than creative of life.” It stuffs its characters down the hole and bounces them off the wall. It can only conceive of organized voyages, and of salvation only through art, a still Catholic salvation, in other words, salvation through eternity. It spends its time plotting points instead of drawing lines, active lines of flight or of positive deterritori-alization. The Anglo-American novel is totally different. “To get away. To get away, out!… To cross a horizon…”[219] From Hardy to Lawrence, from Melville to Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get out, break through, make a beeline, don’t get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, follow it or create it, to the point of treachery. That is why their relationship to other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and also to drugs and voyages in place, is entirely different from that of the French. They know how difficult it is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of consciousness and memory, of the couple and conjugality. How tempting it is to let yourself get caught, to lull yourself into it, to latch back onto *aface.* “[Being] locked away in the black hole… gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to reintegrate and repose for a few moments. … At first I mistook it for passion, for ecstasy. … I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I never thought I had found a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without aspect.”[220] A copperish glow like the face at the bottom of a black hole. The point is to get out of it, not in art, in other words, in spirit, but in life, in real life. *Don’t take away my power to love.* These English and American authors also know how hard it is to break through the wall of the signifier. Many people have tried since Christ, beginning with Christ. But Christ himself botched the crossing, the jump, he *bounced* off the wall. “As if by a great recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible” — the Face.[221] Cross the wall, the Chinese perhaps, but at what price? At the price of a *becoming-animal,* a *becoming-flower or rock,* and beyond that a strange *becoming-imperceptible,* a *becoming-hard now one with loving.*[222] It is a question of speed, even if the movement is in place. Is this also to dismantle the face, or as Miller says, no longer to look at or into the eyes but to swim through them, to close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light moving at ever-increasing speed? Of course, this requires all the resources of art, and art of the highest kind. It requires a whole line of writing, picturality, musicality… For it is through writing that you become animal, it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and imperceptible: in love. But art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only *in* art, and all of those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing *into* art, taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless. Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others’, their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant significations all at the same time? The organization of the face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole set of traits, *faciality traits,* which it subsumes and places at the service of signifiance and subjectification. What is a tic? It is precisely the continually refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its organization upon it. (There is a medical distinction between the clonic or convulsive tic and the tonic or spasmodic tic; perhaps we can say that in the first case the faciality trait that is trying to escape has the upper hand, whereas in the second case the facial organization that is trying to clamp back down or immobilize itself has the upper hand.) But if dismantling the face is a major affair, it is because it is not simply a question of tics, or an amateur’s or aesthete’s adventure. If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity. Here, the program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.[223]
It is time once again to multiply practical warnings. First, it is never a question of a return to … It is not a question of “returning” to the presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples. We will always be failures at playing African or Indian, even Chinese, and no voyage to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to cross the wall, get out of the hole, or lose our face. We will never succeed in making ourselves a new primitive head and body, human, spiritual, and faceless. It would only be taking more photos and bouncing off the wall again. We will always find ourselves reterritorialized again. O my little desert island, on you I am in the Closerie des Lilas again, O my deep ocean, you reflect the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, O little phrase of Vinteuil, you recall a sweet moment. These are Eastern physical and spiritual exercises, but for a couple, like a conjugal bed tucked with a Chinese sheet: you did do your exercises today, didn’t you? Lawrence has only one grudge against Melville: he knew better than anyone how to get across the face, the eyes and horizon, the wall and hole, but he mistook that crossing, that creative line, for an “impossible return,” a return to the savages in *Typee,* for a way of staying an artist and hating life, of maintaining a nostalgia for the Home Country. (“He ever pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had run away from as far as ships would carry him…. Melville came home to face out the rest of his life…. He refused life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, possible perfect love…. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.… Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist…. And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine. I say, let the old guns rot. *Get new ones, and shoot straight*.”)[224]
We can’t turn back. Only neurotics, or, as Lawrence says, “renegades,” deceivers, attempt a regression. The white wall of the signifier, the black hole of subjectivity, and the facial machine are impasses, the measure of our submissions and subjections; but we are born into them, and it is there we must stand battle. Not in the sense of a necessary stage, but in the sense of a tool for which a new use must be invented. Only across the wall of the signifier can you run lines of asignifiance that void all memory, all return, all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines. Only on your face and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to return to a primitive head, but to invent the combinations by which those traits connect with landscapity traits that have themselves been freed from the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also been freed from their respective codes. With what joy the painters used the face of Christ himself, taking it in every sense and direction; and it was not simply the joy of a desire to paint, but the joy of all desires. Is it possible to tell, when the knight of the courtly novel is in his catatonic state, whether he is deep in his black hole or already astride the particles that will carry him out of it to begin a new journey? Lawrence, who has been compared to Lancelot, writes: “To be alone, mindless and memoryless beside the sea… As alone and as absent and as present as an aboriginal dark on the sand in the sun … Far off, far off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man might after death… The landscape? — he cared not a thing about the landscape… . Humanity? — there was none. Thought? — fallen like a stone into the sea. The great, the glamorous past? — worn thin, frail, like a frail translucent film of shell thrown up on the shore.”[225] The uncertain moment at which the white wall/black hole, black point/white shore system, as on a Japanese print, itself becomes one with the act of leaving it, breaking away from and crossing through it.
We have seen that the abstract machine has two very different states: sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about deterritorial-izations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations that are absolute but remain negative; sometimes it is developed on a plane of consistency giving it a “diagrammatic” function, a positive value of deterritorial-ization, the ability to form new abstract machines. Sometimes the abstract machine, as the faciality machine, forces flows into signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of aborescence and holes of abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable “defacialization,” it frees something like *probe-heads (fetes chercheuses,* guidance devices) that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favor of veritable rhizomes, and steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorializaton or creative flight. There are no more concentrically organized strata, no more black holes around which lines coil to form borders, no more walls to which dichotomies, binarities, and bipolar values cling. There is no more face to be in redundancy with a landscape, painting, or little phrase of music, each perpetually bringing the other to mind, on the unified surface of the wall or the central swirl of the black hole. Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of landscapity, picturality, or musicality. This is not a collection of part-objects but a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits of a face enter a real multiplicity or diagram with a trait of an unknown landscape, a trait of painting or music that is thereby effectively produced, created, according to quanta of absolute, positive deterritori-alization — not evoked or recalled according to systems of reterritorializa-tion. A wasp trait and an orchid trait. Quanta marking so many mutations of abstract machines, each of which operates as a function of the other. Thus opens a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence.
The face, what a horror. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores, planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no need for a close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-up, and naturally inhuman, a monstrous hood. Necessarily so because it is produced by a machine and in order to meet the requirements of the special apparatus of power that triggers the machine and takes deterritorialization to the absolute while keeping it negative. Earlier, when we contrasted the primitive, spiritual, human head with the inhuman face, we were falling victim to a nostalgia for a return or regression. In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhumanity, has all the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged into becomings-spiritual/animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of “probe-heads”; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. *Face, my love,* you have finally become a probe-head… Year zen, year omega, year co… Must we leave it at that, three states, and no more: primitive heads, Christ-face, and probe-heads?
It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the “novella” as a literary genre: Everything is organized around the question, “What happened? Whatever could have happened?” The tale is the opposite of the novella, because it is an altogether different question that the reader asks with bated breath: What is going to happen? Something is always going to happen, come to pass. Something always happens in the novel also, but the novel integrates elements of the novella and the tale into the variation of its perpetual living present *(duration).* The detective novel is a particularly hybrid genre in this respect, since most often the something = Xthat has happened is on the order of a murder or theft, but exactly what it is that has happened remains to be discovered, and in the present determined by the model detective. Yet it would be an error to reduce these different aspects to the three dimensions of time. Something happened, something is going to happen, can designate a past so immediate, a future so near, that they are one (as Husserl would say) with retentions and protentions of the present itself. Nevertheless, the distinction is legitimate, in view of the different movements that animate the present, are contemporaneous with it: One moves with it, another already casts it into the past *from the moment* it is present (novella), while another *simultaneously* draws it into the future (tale). We are lucky to have treatments of the same subject by a tale writer and a novella writer: two lovers, one of whom dies suddenly in the other’s room. In Maupassant’s tale, “Une ruse” (An artifice), everything revolves around these questions: What is going to happen? How will the survivor extricate himself from the situation? What will the third party-savior, in this case a doctor, think of? In Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novella, “Le rideau cramoisi” (The crimson curtain), everything revolves around: Something happened, but what? That is the question, not only because it is really not known what the cold young woman just died from, but also because it will never be known why she gave herself to the petty officer, or how the third party-savior, here the colonel of the regiment, was able to arrange things.[226] It should not be thought that it is easier to leave things open-ended: for there to be something that has happened that we will never know about, or even several things in a row, requires no less minute attention and precision than the contrary case, when the author must invent the details of what will need to be known. You will never know what just happened, or you will always know what is going to happen: these are the reasons for the reader’s two bated breaths, in the novella and the tale, respectively, and they are two ways in which the living present is divided at every instant. In the novella, we do not wait for something to happen, we expect something to have just happened. The novella is a last novella, whereas the tale is a first tale. The “presence” of the tale writer is completely different from that of the novella writer (and both are different from that of the novelist). Let us not dwell too much on the dimensions of time: the novella has little to do with a memory of the past or an act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fundamental forgetting. It evolves in the element of “what happened” because it places us in a relation with something unknowable and imperceptible (and not the other way around: it is not because it speaks of a past about which it can no longer provide us knowledge). It may even be that nothing has happened, but it is precisely that nothing that makes us say, Whatever could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I mailed that letter, etc.? What little blood vessel in my brain could have ruptured? What is this nothing that makes something happen? The novella has a fundamental relation to *secrecy* (not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable), whereas the tale has a relation to *discovery* (the form of discovery, independent of what can be discovered). The novella also enacts *postures* of the body and mind that are like folds or envelopments, whereas the tale puts into play *attitudes or positions* that are like unfoldings and developments, however unexpected. Barbey has an evident fondness for body posture, in other words, states of the body when it is surprised by something that just happened. In the preface to the *Diaboliques,* Barbey even suggests that there is a diabolism of body postures, a sexuality, pornography, and scatol-ogy of postures quite different from those that also, and simultaneously, mark body attitudes or positions. Posture is like inverse suspense. Thus it is not a question of saying that the novella relates to the past and the tale to the future; what we should say instead is that the novella relates, in the present itself, to the formal dimension of something that has happened, even if that something is nothing or remains unknowable. Similarly, one should not try to make the distinction between the novella and the tale coincide with categories such as the fantastic, the fabulous, etc.; that is another problem, there is no reason why it should overlap. The links of the novella are: What happened? (the modality or expression), Secrecy (the form), Body Posture (the content).
Take Fitzgerald. He is a tale and novella writer of genius. He is a novella writer when he asks himself, *Whatever could have happened for things to have come to this? He* is the only one who has been able to carry this question to such a point of intensity. It is not a question of memory, reflection, old age, or fatigue, whereas the tale would deal with childhood, action, or impulse. Yet it is true that Fitzgerald only asks himself the question of the novella writer when he is personally worn-out, fatigued, sick, or even worse off. But once again, there is not necessarily a connection: it can also be a question of vigor, or love. It still is, even in desperate conditions. It is better to think of it as an affair of perception: you enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. Or you know that what is in the process of happening is happening for the last time, it’s already over with. You hear an “I love you” you know is the last one. Perceptual semiotics. God, whatever could have happened, even though everything is and remains imperceptible, and in order for everything to be and remain imperceptible forever?
Not only is there a specificity of the novella, but there is also a specific way in which the novella treats a universal matter. For we are made of lines. We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of writing conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are *between the lines* of writing. Perhaps the novella has its own way of giving rise to and combining these lines, which nonetheless belong to everyone and every genre. Vladimir Propp has said, with great solemnity, that the folktale must be defined in terms of external and internal *movements* that it qualifies, formalizes, and combines in its own specific way.[227] We would like to demonstrate that the novella is defined by living *lines,* flesh lines, about which it brings a special revelation. Marcel Arland is correct to say that the novella “is nothing but pure lines right down to the nuances, *and* nothing but the pure and conscious power of the word.”[228]
First Novella: “In the Cage,” Henry James
The heroine, a young telegrapher, leads a very clear-cut, calculated life proceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams she takes one after the other, day after day; the people to whom she sends the telegrams; their social class and the different ways they use telegraphy; the words to be counted. Moreover, her telegraphist’s cage is like a contiguous segment to the grocery store next door, where her fiance works. Contiguity of territories. And the fiance is constantly plotting out their future, work, vacations, house. Here, as for all of us, there is a line of rigid segmentarity on which everything seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the passage from one segment to another. Our lives are made like that: Not only are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations between people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or disperse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity. The fiance can say to the young woman, Even though there are differences between our segments, we have the same tastes and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conjugate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned territories. They have a future but no becoming. This is the first life line, the *molar or rigid line of segmentarity;* in no sense is it dead, for it occupies and pervades our life, and always seems to prevail in the end. It even includes much tenderness and love. It would be too easy to say, “This is a bad line,” for you find it everywhere, and in all the other lines.
A rich couple comes into the post office and reveals to the young woman, or at least confirms, the existence of another life: coded, multiple telegrams, signed with pseudonyms. It is hard to tell who is who anymore, or what anything means. Instead of a rigid line composed of well-determined segments, telegraphy now forms a supple flow marked by *quanta* that are like so many little segmentations-in-progress grasped at the moment of their birth, as on a moonbeam, or on an intensive scale. Thanks to her “prodigious talent for interpretation,” the young woman grasps that the man has a secret that has placed him in danger, deeper and deeper in danger, in a dangerous posture. It does not just have to do with his love relations with the woman. James has reached the stage in his work when it is no longer the matter of the secret that interests him, even if he has succeeded in rendering it entirely banal and unimportant. Now what counts is the form of the secret; the matter no longer even has to be discovered (we never find out, there are several possibilities, there is an objective indetermination, a kind of molecularization of the secret). In relation to this man, directly with him, the young telegraphist develops a strange passional complicity, a whole intense molecular life that does not even enter into rivalry with the life she leads with her fiance. What has happened, whatever could have happened? This life, however, is not in her head, it is not imaginary. Rather, we should say that there are *two politics* involved, as the young woman suggests in a remarkable conversation with her fiance: a macropohtics and a micropolitics that do not envision classes, sexes, people, or feelings in at all the same way. Or again, there are two very different types of relations: intrinsic relations of *couples* involving well-determined aggregates or elements (social classes, men and women, this or that particular person), and less localizable relations that are always external to themselves and instead concern flows and particles eluding those classes, sexes, and persons. Why are the latter relations *of doubles* rather than of couples? “She was literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she was afraid.”[229] In any case, this line is very different from the previous one; it is a *line of molecular or supple segmentation* the segments of which are like quanta of deterritorialization. It is on this line that a present is defined whose very form is the form of something that has already happened, however close you might be to it, since the ungraspable matter of that something is entirely molecularized, traveling at speeds beyond the ordinary thresholds of perception. Yet we will not say that it is necessarily better.
There is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering, reacting upon each other, introducing into each other either a current of suppleness or a point of rigidity. Nathalie Sarraute, in her essay on the novel, praises English novelists, not only for discovering (as did Proust and Dostoyevsky) the great movements, territories, and points of the unconscious that allow us to regain time or revive the past, but also for inopportunely following these molecular lines, simultaneously present and imperceptible. She shows that dialogue or conversation does indeed comply with the breaks of a fixed segmentarity, with vast movements of regulated distribution corresponding to the attitudes and positions of each of us; but also that they are run through and swept up by *micromovements,* fine segmentations distributed in an entirely different way, unfindable particles of an anonymous matter, tiny cracks and postures operating by different agencies even in the unconscious, secret lines of disorientation or deterritorialization: as she puts it, a whole subconversation within conversation, in other words, a micropolitics of conversation.[230]
Then James’s heroine reaches a sort of maximum quantum in her supple segmentarity or line of flow beyond which she cannot go (even if she wanted to, there is no going further). There is a danger that these vibrations traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance. What happened? The molecular relation between the telegraphist and the telegraph sender dissolved in the form of the secret — because nothing happened. Each of them is propelled toward a rigid segmentarity: he will marry the now-widowed lady, she will marry her fiance. And yet everything has changed. She has reached something like a new line, a third type, a kind of *line of flight* that is just as real as the others even if it occurs in place: this line no longer tolerates segments; rather, it is like an exploding of the two segmentary series. She has broken through the wall, she has gotten out of the black holes. She has attained a kind of absolute deterritorialization. “She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. *There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare.”*[231] You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James. The nature of the secret has changed once again. Undoubtedly, the secret always has to do with love, and sexuality. But previously it was either only a hidden matter given in the past (the better hidden the more ordinary it was), and we did not exactly know what form to give it: See, I am bending under the burden of my secret, see what mystery resides within me. It was a way of seeming interesting, what D. H. Lawrence called “the dirty little secret,” *my* Oedipus, in a way. Or else the secret became the form of something whose matter was molecularized, imperceptible, unassignable: not a given of the past but the ungivable “What happened?” But on this third line there is no longer even any form — nothing but a pure abstract line. It is because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be apprehended. To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. As Kierkegaard says, nothing distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bourgeois German going home or to the post office: he sends off no special telegraphic sign; he constantly produces or reproduces finite segments, yet he is already moving on a line no one even suspects.[232] In any case, the telegraphic line is not a symbol, and it is not simple. There are at least three of them: a line of rigid and clear-cut segmentarity; a line of molecular segmentarity; and an abstract line, a line of flight no less deadly and no less alive than the others. On the first line, there are many words and conversations, questions and answers, interminable explanations, precisions; the second is made of silences, allusions, and hasty innuendos inviting interpretation. But if the third line flashes, if the line of flight is like a train in motion, it is because one jumps linearly on it, one can finally speak “literally” of anything at all, a blade of grass, a catastrophe or sensation, calmly accepting that which occurs when it is no longer possible for anything to stand for anything else. The three lines, however, continually intermingle.
Second Novella: “The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
What happened? This is the question Fitzgerald keeps coming back to toward the end, having remarked that “of course all life is a process of breaking down.”[233] How should we understand this “of course”? We can say, first of all, that life is always drawn into an increasingly rigid and desiccated segmentarity. For the writer Fitzgerald, voyages, with their clear-cut segments, had lost their usefulness. There was also, from segment to segment, the depression, loss of wealth, fatigue and growing old, alcoholism, the failure of conjugality, the rise of the cinema, the advent of fascism and Stalinism, and the loss of success and talent — at the very moment Fitzgerald would find his genius. ” *The big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside”* (p. 69), and proceed by oversignificant *breaks,* moving us from one term to the other according to successive binary “choices”: rich/poor… Even when change runs in the other direction, there is nothing to compensate for the rigidification, the aging that overcodes everything that occurs. This is a line of rigid segmentarity bringing masses into play, even if it was supple to begin with.
But Fitzgerald says that there is another type of cracking, with an entirely different segmentarity. Instead of great breaks, these are micro-cracks, as in a dish; they are much more subtle and supple, and *occur when things are going well on the other side.* If there is aging on this line, it is not of the same kind: when you age on this line you don’t feel it on the other line, you don’t notice it on the other line until after “it” has already happened on this line. At such a moment, which does not correspond to any of the ages of the other line, you reach a degree, a quantum, an intensity beyond which you cannot go. (It’s a very delicate business, these intensities: the finest intensity becomes harmful if it overtaxes your strength at a given moment; you have to be able to take it, you have to be in shape.) But what exactly happened? In truth, nothing assignable or perceptible: molecular changes, redistributions of desire such that when something occurs, the self that awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived. This time, there are outbursts and crackings in the immanence of a rhizome, rather than great movements and breaks determined by the transcendence of a tree. The crack-up “happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed” (p. 69). This molecular line, more supple but no less disquieting, in fact, much more disquieting, is not simply internal or personal: it also brings everything into play, but on a different scale and in different forms, with segmentations of a different nature, rhizomatic instead of arborescent. A micropolitics.
There is, in addition, a third line, which is like a line of rupture or a “clean break” and marks the exploding of the other two, their shake-up… in favor of something else? “This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one” (p. 81). Here, Fitzgerald contrasts rupture with structural pseudobreaks in so-called signifying chains. But he also distinguishes it from more supple, more subterranean links or stems of the “voyage” type, or even from molecular conveyances. “The famous ‘Escape’ or ‘run away from it all’ is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist” (p. 81). Can it be that voyages are always a return to rigid segmentarity? Is it always your daddy and mommy that you meet when you travel, even as far away as the South Seas, like Melville? Hardened muscles? Must we say that supple segmentarity itself reconstructs the great figures it claimed to escape, but under the microscope, in miniature? Beckett’s unforgettable line is an indictment of all voyages: ” *We don’t travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we’re foolish, but not that foolish.”*
In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volitized; the form of what happened, of an imperceptible something that happened in a volatile matter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and clandestine in motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any longer. My territories are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite: because I am in the process of drawing them. Wars, big and little, are behind me. Voyages, always in tow to something else, are behind me. I no longer have any secrets, having lost my face, form, and matter. I am now no more than a line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the void. Absolute deterritorialization. One has become like everybody/the whole world *(tout le monde),* but in a way that can become like everybody/ the whole world. One has painted the world on oneself, not oneself on the world. It should not be said that the genius is an extraordinary person, *nor* that everybody has genius. The genius is someone who knows how to make everybody/the whole world a becoming (Ulysses, perhaps: Joyce’s failed ambition, Pound’s near-success). One has entered becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, and finally becomings-imperceptible. “I was off the dispensing end of the relief roll forever. The heady villainous feeling continued. … 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.”[234] Why such a despairing tone? Does not the line of rupture or true flight have its own danger, one worse than the others? Time to die. In any case, Fitzgerald proposes a distinction between the three lines traversing us and composing “a life” (after Maupassant). *Break line, crack line, rupture line.* The line of rigid segmentarity with molar breaks; the line of supple segmentation with molecular cracks; the line of flight or rupture, abstract, deadly and alive, nonsegmentary.
*** Third Novella: “The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass,” Pierrette Fleutiaux[235]
Some segments are more or less near, and others more or less distant. The segments seem to encircle an abyss, a kind of huge black hole. On each segment there are two kinds of lookouts, near-seers and far-seers. What they watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions, disturbances, and rebellions occurring in the abyss. But there is a major difference between the two types of lookouts. The near-seers have a simple spyglass. In the abyss, they see the outline of gigantic cells, great binary divisions, dichotomies, well-defined segments of the type “classroom, barracks, low-income housing project, or even countryside seen from an airplane.” They see branches, chains, rows, columns, dominoes, striae. Once in a while along the edges they discover a misshapen figure or a shaky contour. Then they bring out the terrible Ray Telescope. It is used not to see with but to cut with, to cut out shapes. This geometrical instrument, which emits a laser beam, assures the dominion of the great signifying break everywhere and restores the momentarily threatened molar order. The cutting telescope *overcodes* everything; it acts on flesh and blood, but itself is nothing but pure geometry, as a State affair, and the near-seers’ physics in the service of that machine. What is geometry, what is the State, and what are the near-seers? These are meaningless questions (“I am speaking literally”) because it is not so much a question of defining something as effectively drawing a line; not a line of writing but a line of rigid segmentarity along which everyone will be judged and rectified according to his or her contours, individual or collective.
Very different is the situation of those with long-distance vision, the far-seers, with all their ambiguities. There are very few of them, at most one per segment. Their telescopes are complex and refined. But they are in no way leaders. And what they see is entirely different from what the others see. They see a whole microsegmentarity, details of details, “a roller coaster of possibilities,” tiny movements that have not reached the edge, lines or vibrations that start to form long before there are outlined shapes, “segments that move by jerks.” A whole rhizome, a molecular segmentarity that does not permit itself to be overcoded by a signifier like the cutting machine, or even to be attributed to a given figure, a given aggregate or element. This second line is inseparable from the anonymous segmentation that produces it and challenges everything all the time, without goal or reason: “What happened?” The far-seers can divine the future, but always in the form of a becoming of something that has already happened in a molecular matter; unfindable particles. The situation is the same in biology: the great cellular divisions and dichotomies, with their contours, are accompanied by migrations, invaginations, displacements, and morphogenetic impulses whose segments are marked not by localizable points but by thresholds of intensity passing underneath, mitoses that scramble everything, and molecular lines that intersect each other within the large-scale cells and between their breaks. The situation is the same in a society: rigid segments and overcutting segments are crosscut underneath by segmentations of another nature. But this is neither one nor the other, neither biology nor a society; nor is it a resemblance between the two: “I am speaking literally,” I am drawing lines, lines of writing, and life passes between the lines. A line of supple segmentarity formed and became entangled with the other, but it was a very different kind of line, shakily drawn by the micro-politics of the far-seers. It is a political affair, as worldwide in scope as the other, but on a scale and in a form that is incommensurable, nonsuperpos-able. It is also a perceptual affair, for perception always goes hand in hand with semiotics, practice, politics, theory. One sees, speaks and thinks on a given scale, and according to a given line that may or may not conjugate with the other’s line, even if the other is still oneself. If it does not, then you should not insist, you should not argue; you should flee, flee, even saying as you go, “Okay, okay, you win.” It’s no use talking; you first have to change telescopes, mouths, and teeth, all of the segments. Not only does one speak literally, one also lives literally, in other words, following lines, whether connectable or not, even heterogeneous ones. Sometimes it doesn’t work when they are homogeneous.[236]
The ambiguity of the far-seers’ situation is that they are able to detect the slightest microinfraction in the abyss, things the others do not see; they also observe, beneath its apparent geometrical justice, the dreadful damage caused by the Cutting Telescope. They feel as though they foresee things and are ahead of the others because they see the smallest thing as already having happened; but they know that their warnings are to no avail because the cutting telescope will set everything straight without being warned, without the need for or possibility of prediction. At times they feel that they do indeed see something the others do not, but at other times that what they see differs only in degree and serves no purpose. Although they are collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest project of control, how could they not feel a vague sympathy for the subterranean activity revealed to them? An ambiguity in the molecular line, *as if it vacillated between two sides.* One day (what will have happened?), a far-seer will abandon his or her segment and start walking across a narrow overpass above the dark abyss, will break his or her telescope and depart on a line of flight to meet a blind Double approaching from the other side.
Individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesies, tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather, of bundles of lines, for each kind is multiple. We may be more interested in a certain line than in the others, and perhaps there is indeed one that is, not determining, but of greater importance … if it is there. For some of these lines are imposed on us from outside, at least in part. Others sprout up somewhat by chance, from a trifle, why we will never know. Others can be invented, drawn, without a model and without chance: we must invent our lines of flight, if we are able, and the only way we can invent them is by effectively drawing them, in our lives. Aren’t lines of flight the most difficult of all? Certain groups or people have none and never will. Certain groups or people lack a given kind of line, or have lost it. The painter Florence Julien has a special interest in lines of flight: she invented a procedure by which she extracts from photographs lines that are nearly abstract and formless. But once again, there is a bundle of very diverse lines: the line of flight of children leaving school at a run is different from that of demonstrators chased by the police, or of a prisoner breaking out. There are different animal lines of flight: each species, each individual, has its own. Fernand Deligny transcribes the lines and paths of autistic children by means of *maps:* he carefully distinguishes “lines of drift” and “customary lines.” This does not only apply to walking; he also makes maps of perceptions and maps of gestures (cooking or collecting wood) showing customary gestures and gestures of drift. The same goes for language, if it is present. Deligny opened his lines of writing to life lines. The lines are constantly crossing, intersecting for a moment, following one another. A line of drift intersects a customary line, and at that point the child does something not quite belonging to either one: he or she finds something he or she lost — what happened? — or jumps and claps his or her hands, a slight and rapid movement — and that gesture in turn emits several lines.[237] In short, *there is a line of flight, which is already complex since it has singularities; and there a customary or molar line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other.*
As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean nothing. It is an affair of cartography. They compose us, as they compose our map. They transform themselves and may even cross over into one another. Rhizome. It is certain that they have nothing to do with language; it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is writing that must take sustenance from them, *between* its own lines. It is certain that they have nothing to do with a signifier, the determination of a subject by the signifier; instead, the signifier arises at the most rigidified level of one of the lines, and the subject is spawned at the lowest level. It is certain that they have nothing to do with a structure, which is never occupied by anything more than points and positions, by arborescences, and which always forms a closed system, precisely in order to prevent escape. Deligny invokes a common Body upon which these lines are inscribed as so many segments, thresholds, or quanta, territorialities, deterritorializations, or reterritorializations. The lines are inscribed on a Body without Organs, upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of the BwO. *This body is the only practical object of schizoanalysis:* What is your body without organs? What are your lines? What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price, for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your BwO, merged with that line? Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are you deterritorializing? Which lines are you severing, and which are you extending or resuming? Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains only to *lineaments* running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does. Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new. Or rather, there is no problem of application: the lines it brings out could equally be the lines of a life, a work of literature or art, or a society, depending on which system of coordinates is chosen.
Line of molar or rigid segmentarity, line of molecular or supple segmentation, line of flight — many problems arise. The first concerns the *particular character of each line.* It might be thought that rigid segments are socially determined, predetermined, overcoded by the State; there may be a tendency to construe supple segmentarity as an interior activity, something imaginary or phantasmic. As for the line of flight, would it not be entirely personal, the way in which an individual escapes on his or her own account, escapes “responsibilities,” escapes the world, takes refuge in the desert, or else in art… ? False impression. Supple segmentarity has nothing to do with the imaginary, and micropolitics is no less extensive or real than macropolitics. Politics on the grand scale can never administer its molar segments without also dealing with the microinjections or infiltrations that work in its favor or present an obstacle to it; indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater the molecularization of the agencies they put into play. Lines of flight, for their part, never consist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic, about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans.[238] Even History is forced to take that route rather than proceeding by “signifying breaks.” What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State. “I may be running, but I’m looking for a gun as I go” (George Jackson). It was along lines of flight that the nomads swept away everything in their path and found new weapons, leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck. It is possible for a single group, or a single individual even, to exhibit all the lines we have been discussing simultaneously. But it is most frequently the case that a single group or individual functions as a line of flight; that group or individual creates the line rather than following it, is itself the living weapon it forges rather than stealing one. Lines of flight are realities; they are very dangerous for societies, although they can get by without them, and sometimes manage to keep them to a minimum.
The second problem concerns *the respective importance of the lines.* You can begin with the rigid segmentarity, it’s the easiest, it’s pregiven; and then you can look at how and to what extent it is crosscut by a supple segmentarity, a kind of rhizome surrounding its roots. Then you can look at how the line of flight enters in. And alliances and battles. But it is also possible to begin with the line of flight: perhaps this is the primary line, with its absolute deterritorialization. It is clear that the line of flight *does not come afterward;* it is there from the beginning, even if it awaits its hour, and waits for the others to explode. Supple segmentarity, then, is only a kind of compromise operating by relative deterritorializations and permitting reterritorializations that cause blockages and reversions to the rigid line. It is odd how supple segmentarity is caught between the two other lines, ready to tip to one side or the other; such is its ambiguity. It is also necessary to look at the various combinations: it is quite possible that one group or individual’s line of flight may not work to benefit that of another group or individual; it may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw it even deeper into rigid segmentarity. It can happen in love that one person’s creative line is the other’s imprisonment. The composition of the lines, of one line with another, is a problem, even of two lines of the same type. There is no assurance that two lines of flight will prove compatible, compossible. There is no assurance that the body without organs will be easy to compose. There is no assurance that a love, or a political approach, will withstand it.
Third problem: there is a *mutual immanence* of the lines. And it is not easy to sort them out. No one of them is transcendent, each is at work within the others. Immanence everywhere. Lines of flight are immanent to the social field. Supple segmentarity continually dismantles the concretions of rigid segmentarity, but everything that it dismantles it reassembles on its own level: micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power, microfascisms. The line of flight blasts the two segmentary series apart; but it is capable of the worst, of bouncing off the wall, falling into a black hole, taking the path of greatest regression, and in its vagaries reconstructing the most rigid of segments. Have you sown your wild oats? That is worse than not escaping at all: See Lawrence’s reproach to Melville.[239] Between the matter of a dirty little secret in rigid segmentarity, the empty form of “What happened?” in supple segmentarity, and clandestinity of what can no longer happen on the line of flight, how can we fail to see the upheavals caused by a monster force, the Secret, threatening to bring everything tumbling down? Between the Couple of the first kind of segmentarity, the Double of the second, and the Clandestine of the line of flight, there are so many possible mixtures and passages.
There is one last problem, the most anguishing one, concerning *the dangers specific to each line.* There is not much to say about the danger confronting the first, for the chances are slim that its rigidification will fail. There is not much to say about the ambiguity of the second. But why is the line of flight, even aside from the danger it runs of reverting to one of the other two lines, imbued with such singular despair in spite of its message of joy, as if at the very moment things are coming to a resolution its undertaking were threatened by something reaching down to its core, by a death, a demolition? Shestov said of Chekhov, a great creator of novellas: “There can be practically no doubt that Chekhov exerted himself, and something broke inside him. And the overstrain came not from hard and heavy labor; no mighty overpowering exploit broke him: he stumbled and fell, he slipped… The old Chekhov of gaiety and mirth is no more… Instead, a morose and overshadowed man, a ‘criminal.’ “[240] *What happened?* Once again, this is the question facing all of Chekhov’s characters. Is it not possible to exert oneself, and even break something, without falling into a black hole of bitterness and sand? But did Chekhov really fall? Is that not to judge him entirely from the outside? Was Chekhov not correct in saying that however grim his characters are, he still carries “a hundred pounds of love”? Of course, nothing is easy on the lines that compose us, and that constitute the essence of the Novella *(la Nouvelle),* and sometimes of Good News *(la Bonne Nouvelle).*
What are your couples, your doubles, your clandestines, and what are their mixes? When one person says to another, love the taste of whiskey on my lips like I love the gleam of madness in your eyes, what lines are they in the process of composing, or, on the contrary, making incompossible? Fitzgerald: “Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relations will tell you in good faith that it was my drinking that drove Zelda mad, and the other half would assure you that it was her madness that drove me to drink. Neither of these judgments means much of anything. These two groups of friends and relations would be unanimous in saying that each of us would have been much better off without the other. The irony is that we have never been more in love with each other in all of our lives. She loves the alcohol on my lips. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations.” “In the end, nothing really had much importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other.” Beautiful texts. All of the lines are there: the lines of family and friends, of all those who speak, explain, and psychoanalyze, assigning rights and wrongs, of the whole binary machine of the Couple, united or divided, in rigid seg-mentarity (50 percent). Then there is the line of supple segmentation, from which the alcoholic and the madwoman extract, as from a kiss on the lips and eyes, the multiplication of a double at the limit of what they can endure in their state and with the tacit understandings serving them as internal messages. Finally, there is a line of flight, all the more shared now that they are separated, or vice versa, each of them the clandestine of the other, a double all the more successful now that nothing has importance any longer, now that everything can begin anew, since they have been destroyed but not by each other. Nothing will enter memory, everything was on the lines, between the lines, in the AND that made one *and* the other imperceptible, without disjunction or conjunction but only a line of flight forever in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the opposite of renunciation or resignation — a new happiness?
We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially segmented. The house is segmented according to its rooms’ assigned purposes; streets, according to the order of the city; the factory, according to the nature of the work and operations performed in it. We are segmented in a *binary* fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men-women, adults-children, and so on. We are segmented in a *circular* fashion, in ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce’s “letter”: my affairs, my neighborhood’s affairs, my city’s, my country’s, the world’s… We are segmented in a *linear* fashion, along a straight line or a number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or “proceeding”: as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever proceduring or procedured, in the family, in school, in the army, on the job. School tells us, “You’re not at home anymore”; the army tells us, “You’re not in school anymore” ... Sometimes the various segments belong to different individuals or groups, and sometimes the same individual or group passes from one segment to another. But these figures of segmentarity, the binary, circular, and linear, are bound up with one another, even cross over into each other, changing according to the point of view. This is already evident among “savage” peoples: Lizot shows how the communal House is organized in circular fashion, going from interior to exterior in a series of coronas within which certain types of localizable activities take place (worship and ceremonies, followed by exchange of goods, followed by family life, followed by trash and excrement); at the same time “each of these coronas is itself trans-versally divided, each segment devolves upon a particular lineage and is subdivided among different kinship groups.”[241] In a more general context, Levi-Strauss shows that the dualist organization of primitive peoples has a circular form, and also takes a linear form encompassing “any number of groups” (at least three).[242]
Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists to account for so-called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central State apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institutions. In these societies, the social segments have a certain leeway, between the two extreme poles of fusion and scission, depending on the task and the situation; there is also considerable communicability between heterogeneous elements, so that one segment can fit with another in a number of different ways; and they have a local construction excluding the prior determination of a base domain (economic, political, juridical, artistic); they have extrinsic and situational properties, or relations irreducible to the intrinsic properties of a structure; activity is continuous, so segmentarity is not grasped as something separate from a segmentation-in-progress operating by outgrowths, detachments, and mergings. Primitive segmentarity is characterized by a polyvocal *code* based on lineages and their varying situations and relations, and an itinerant *territoriality* based on local, overlapping divisions. Codes and territories, clan lineages and tribal territorialities, form a fabric of relatively supple segmentarity.[243]
However, it seems to us difficult to maintain that State societies, even our modern States, are any less segmentary. The classical opposition between segmentarity and centralization hardly seems relevant.[244] Not only does the State exercise power over the segments it sustains or permits to survive, but it possesses, and imposes, its own segmentarity. Perhaps the opposition sociologists establish between the segmentary and the central is biological deep down: the ringed worm, and the central nervous system. But the central brain itself is a worm, even more segmented than the others, in spite of and including all of its vicarious actions. There is no opposition between the central and the segmentary. The modern political system is a global whole, unified and unifying, but is so because it implies a constellation of juxtaposed, imbricated, ordered subsystems; the analysis of decision making brings to light all kinds of compartmentalizations and partial processes that interconnect, but not without gaps and displacements. Technocracy operates by the segmentary division of labor (this applies to the international division of labor as well). Bureaucracy exists only in compartmentalized offices and functions only by “goal displacements” and the corresponding “dysfunctions.” Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the boss’s office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower. In short, we would say that modern life has not done away with segmentarity but has on the contrary made it exceptionally rigid.
Instead of setting up an opposition between the segmentary and the centralized, we should make a distinction between two types of segmentarity, one “primitive” and supple, the other “modern” and rigid. This distinction reframes each of the figures previously discussed.
Binary oppositions (men/women, those on top/those on the bottom, etc.) are very strong in primitive societies, but seem to be the result of machines and assemblages that are not in themselves binary. The social binarity between men and women in a group applies rules according to which both sexes must take their respective spouses from different groups (which is why there are at least three groups). Thus Levi-Strauss can demonstrate that dualist organization never stands on its own in this kind of society. On the contrary, it is a particularity of modern societies, or rather State societies, to bring into their own duality machines that function as such, and proceed simultaneously by biunivocal relationships and successively by binarized choices. Classes and sexes come in twos, and phenomena of tripartition result from a transposition of the dual, not the reverse. We have already encountered this, notably in the case of the Face machine, which differs in this respect from primitive head machines. It seems that modern societies elevated dual segmentarity to the level of a self-sufficient organization. The question, therefore, is not whether the status of women, or those on the bottom, is better or worse, but the type of organization from which that status results.
Similarly, we may note that in primitive societies circular segmentarity does not necessarily imply that the circles are concentric, or have the same center. In a supple regime, centers already act as so many *knots, eyes,* or *black holes;* but they do not all resonate together, they do not fall on the same point, they do not converge in the same black hole. There is a multiplicity of animist eyes, each of which is assigned, for example, a particular animal spirit (snake-spirit, woodpecker-spirit, cayman-spirit …). Each black hole is occupied by a different animal eye. Doubtless, we see operations of rigidification and centralization take shape here and there: all of the centers must collect on a single circle, which itself has a single center. The shaman draws lines between all the points or spirits, outlines a constellation, a radiating set of roots tied to a central tree. This is the birth of a centralized power with an arborescent system to discipline the outgrowths of the primitive rhizome.[245] Here, the tree simultaneously plays the role of a principle of dichotomy or binarity, and an axis of rotation. But the power of the shaman is still entirely localized, strictly dependent upon a particular segment, contingent upon drugs, and each point continues to emit independent sequences. The same cannot be said of modern societies, or even of States. Of course, the centralized is not opposed to the segmentary, and the circles remain distinct. But they become concentric, definitively arborified. The segmentarity becomes rigid, to the extent that all centers resonate in, and all black holes fall on, a single point of accumulation that is like a point of intersection somewhere behind the eyes. The face of the father, teacher, colonel, boss, enter into redundancy, refer back to a center of signifiance that moves across the various circles and passes back over all of the segments. The supple microheads with animal facializations are replaced by a macroface whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. There are no longer *n* eyes in the sky, or in becomings-animal and -vegetable, but a central computing eye scanning all of the radii. The central State is constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity but by a concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among centers. *There are already just as many power centers in primitive societies; or, if one prefers, there are still just as many in State societies.* The latter, however, behave as apparatuses of resonance; they organize resonance, whereas the former inhibit it.[246]
Finally, in the case of linear segmentarity, we would say that each segment is underscored, rectified, and homogenized in its own right, but also in relation to the others. Not only does each have its own unit of measure, but there is an equivalence and translatability between units. The central eye has as its correlate a space through which it moves, but it itself remains invariant in relation to its movements. With the Greek city-state and Cleisthenes’ reform, a homogeneous and isotopic space appears that overcodes the lineal segments, at the same time as distinct focal points begin to resonate in a center acting as their common denominator.[247] Paul Virilio shows that after the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire imposes a geometrical or *linear reason of State* including a general outline of camps and fortifications, a universal art of “marking boundaries by lines,” a laying-out of territories, a substitution of space for places and territorialities, and a transformation of the world into the city; in short, an increasingly rigid segmentarity.[248] The segments, once underscored or overcoded, seem to lose their ability to bud, they seem to lose their dynamic relation to segmentations-in-progress, or in the act of coming together or coming apart. If there exists a primitive “geometry” (a protogeometry), it is an operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affectations befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their segmentation: there is “roundness,” but no circle, “alignments,” but no straight line, etc. On the contrary, State geometry, or rather the bond between the State and geometry, manifests itself in the primacy of the theorem-element, which substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple morphological formations, properties for affects, predetermined segments for segmentations-in-progress. Geometry and arithmetic take on the power of the scalpel. Private property implies a space that has been overcoded and gridded by surveying. Not only does each line have its segments, but the segments of one line correspond to those of another; for example, the wage regime establishes a correspondence between monetary segments, production segments, and consumable-goods segments.
We may summarize the principal differences between rigid segmentarity and supple segmentarity. In the rigid mode, binary segmentarity stands on its own and is governed by great machines of direct binarization, whereas in the other mode, binarities result from “multiplicities of *n* dimensions.” Second, circular segmentarity tends to become concentric, in other words, causes all of its focal points to coincide in a single center that is in constant movement but remains invariant through its movements, and is part of a machine of resonance. Finally, linear segmentarity feeds into a machine of overcoding that constitutes *more geometrico* homogeneous space and extracts segments that are determinate as to their substance, form, and relations. It will be noted that this rigid segmentarity is always expressed by the Tree. The Tree is the knot of arborescence or principle of dichotomy; it is the axis of’rotation guaranteeing concentricity; it is the structure or network gridding the possible. This opposition between arborified and rhizomatic segmentarity is not just meant to indicate two states of a single process, but also to isolate two different processes. For primitive societies operate essentially by codes and territorialities. It is in fact the distinction between these two elements, the tribal system of territories and the clan system of lineages, that prevents resonance.[249] Modern, or State, societies, on the other hand, have replaced the declining codes with a univocal overcoding, and the lost territories with a specific reterritorialization (which takes place in an overcoded geometrical space). Segmentarity is always the result of an abstract machine, but different abstract machines operate in the rigid and the supple.
It is not enough, therefore, to oppose the centralized to the segmentary. Nor is it enough to oppose two kinds of segmentarity, one supple and primitive, the other modern and rigidified. There is indeed a distinction between the two, but they are inseparable, they overlap, they are entangled. Primitive societies have nuclei of rigidity or arborification that as much anticipate the State as ward it off. Conversely, our societies are still suffused by a supple fabric without which their rigid segments would not hold. Supple segmentarity cannot be restricted to primitive peoples. It is not the vestige of the savage within us but a perfectly contemporary function, inseparable from the other. Every society, and every individual, are thus plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other *molecular.* If they are distinct, it is because they do not have the same terms or the same relations or the same nature or even the same type of multiplicity. If they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into each other. The configurations differ, for example, between the primitives and us, but the two segmentarities are always in presupposition. In short, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a *macropolitics* and a *micropolitics.* Take aggregates of the perception or feeling type: their molar organization, their rigid segmentarity, does not preclude the existence of an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine segmentations that grasp or experience different things, are distributed and operate differently. There is a micropolitics of perception, affection, conversation, and so forth. If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes. And social classes themselves imply “masses” that do not have the same kind of movement, distribution, or objectives and do not wage the same kind of struggle. Attempts to distinguish mass from class effectively tend toward this limit: *the notion of mass is a molecular notion* operating according to a type of segmentation irreducible to the molar segmentarity of class. Yet classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they crystallize them. And masses are constantly flowing or leaking from classes. Their reciprocal presupposition, however, does not preclude a difference in viewpoint, nature, scale, and function (understood in this way, the notion of mass has entirely different connotations than Canetti’s “crowd”).
It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or on top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic segmentation, a suppleness of and communication between offices, a bureaucratic perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity practiced even against administrative regulations. If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy, it is because he shows how, at a certain level (but which one? it is not localizable), the barriers between offices cease to be “a definite dividing line” and are immersed in a molecular medium *(milieu)* that dissolves them and simultaneously makes the office manager proliferate into microfigures impossible to recognize or identify, discernible only when they are centralizable: another regime, coexistent with the separation *and* totalization of the rigid segments.[250] We would even say that fascism implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their centralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropohtical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, *before* beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s
fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.[251] There is fascism when a *war machine* is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the “masses.” Daniel Guerin is correct to say that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the German State administration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal microorganizations giving him “an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society,” in other words, a molecular and supple segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they “want” to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microforma-tions already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.
Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a little suppleness is enough to make things “better.” But microfascisms are what make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as harmful as the most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual and interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the other. Third, the two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coextensive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the qualitative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between the two, directly or inversely proportional.
In the first case, the stronger the molar organization is, the more it induces a molecularization of its own elements, relations, and elementary apparatuses. When the machine becomes planetary or cosmic, there is an increasing tendency for assemblages to miniaturize, to become micro-assemblages. Following Andre Gorz’s formula, the only remaining element of work left under world capitalism is the molecular, or molecularized, individual, in other words, the “mass” individual. The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micromanagement of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for a micropolitics of insecurity.[252] However, the second case is even more important: molecular movements do not complement but rather thwart and break through the great worldwide organization. That is what French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing was saying in his military and political geography lesson: the more balanced things are between East and West, in an overcoding and overarmed dualist machine, the more “destabilized” they become along the other, North-South, line. There is always a Palestinian or Basque or Corsican to bring about a “regional destabilization of security.”[253] The two great molar aggregates of the East and West are perpetually being undermined by a molecular segmentation causing a zigzag crack, making it difficult for them to keep their own segments in line. It is as if a line of flight, perhaps only a tiny trickle to begin with, leaked between the segments, escaping their centralization, eluding their totalization. The profound movements stirring in a society present themselves in this fashion, even if they are necessarily “represented” as a confrontation between molar segments. It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions. That is true only on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a “change in values,” the youth, women, the mad, etc. May 1968 in France was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the viewpoint of macropolitics. It happens that people who are very limited in outlook or are very old grasp the event better than the most advanced politicians, or politicians who consider themselves advanced from the viewpoint of organization. As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May ‘68: those who evaluated things in macropohtical terms understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping. The politicians, the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept repeating over and over again that “conditions” were not ripe. It was as though they had been temporarily deprived of the entire dualism machine that made them valid spokespeople. Bizarrely, de Gaulle, and even Pompidou, understood much more than the others. A molecular flow was escaping, minuscule at first, then swelling, without, however, ceasing to be unassignable. The reverse, however, is also true: molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes, and parties.
The issue is that the molar and the molecular are distinguished not by size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system of reference envisioned. Perhaps, then, the words “line” and “segment” should be reserved for molar organization, and other, more suitable, words should be sought for molecular composition. And in fact, whenever we can identify a well-defined *segmented line,* we notice that it continues in another form, as a *quantum flow.* And in every instance, we can locate a “power center” at the border between the two, defined not by an absolute exercise of power within its domain but by the relative adaptations and conversions it effects between the line and the flow. Take a monetary flow with segments. These segments can be defined from several points of view, for example, from the viewpoint of a corporate budget (real wages, net profit, management salaries, interest on assets, reserves, investments, etc.). Now this line of payment-money is linked to another aspect, namely, the flow of financing-money, which has, not segments, but rather poles, singularities, and quanta (the poles of the flow are the creation of money and its destruction; the singularities are nominal liquid assets; the quanta are inflation, deflation, stagflation, etc.). This has led some to speak of a “mutant, convulsive, creative and circulatory flow” tied to desire and always subjacent to the solid line and its segments determining interest rates and supply and demand.[254] In a balance of payment, we again encounter a binary segmentarity that distinguishes, for example, so-called autonomous operations from so-called compensatory operations. But movements of capital do not allow themselves to be segmented in this way; because they are *“the most thoroughly broken down,* according to their nature, duration, and the personality of the creditor or debtor,” one “no longer has any idea where to draw the line when dealing with these flows.”[255] Yet there is always a correlation between the two aspects since linearization and segmentation are where flows run dry, but are also their point of departure for a new creation. When we talk about banking power, concentrated most notably in the central banks, it is indeed a question of the relative power to regulate “as much as” possible the communication, conversion, and coadaptation of the two parts of the circuit. That is why power centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zone of power. In short, the molecular, or microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by the smallness of its elements but by the nature of its “mass” — the quantum flow as opposed to the molar segmented line.[256] The task of making the segments correspond to the quanta, of adjusting the segments to the quanta, implies hit-and-miss changes in rhythm and mode rather than any omnipotence; and something always escapes.
We could take other examples, such as the power of the Church. Church power has always been associated with a certain administration of sin possessing a strong segmentarity (the seven deadly sins), units of measure (how many times?), and rules of equivalence and atonement (confession, penance …). But there is also what might be called the molecular flow of sinfulness, something quite different yet complementary: it hugs close to the linear zone, as though negotiated through it, but itself has only poles (original sin-redemption or grace) and quanta (“that sin which is the default of consciousness of sin”; the sin of having a consciousness of sin; the sin of the consequence of having a consciousness of sin).[257] The same could be said of a flow of criminality, in contrast to the molar line of a legal code and its divisions. Or to take another example, discussions of military power, or the power of the army, consider a segmentable line broken down into types of war corresponding exactly to the States waging war and the political goals those States assign themselves (from “limited” war to “total” war). But following Clausewitz’s intuition, the war machine is very different; it is a flow of *absolute* war stretching between an offensive and a defensive pole, and is marked only by quanta (psychic and material forces that are like the nominal liquid assets of war). We may say of the pure flow that it is abstract yet real; ideal yet effective; absolute yet “differentiated.” It is true that the flow and its quanta can be grasped only by virtue of indexes on the segmented line, but conversely, that line and those indexes exist only by virtue of the flow suffusing them. In every case, it is evident that the segmented line (macropolitics) is immersed in and prolonged by quantum flows (micropolitics) that continually reshuffle and stir up its segments.
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In homage to Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904): his long-forgotton work has assumed new relevance with the influence of American sociology, in particular microsociology. It had been quashed by Durkheim and his school (in polemics similar to and as harsh as Cuvier’s against Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire). Durkheim’s preferred objects of study were the great collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and overcoded. Tarde countered that collective representations presuppose exactly what needs explaining, namely, “the similarity of millions of people.” That is why Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail, or of the infinitesimal: the little *imitations, oppositions,* and *inventions* constituting an entire realm of subrepresentative matter. Tarde’s best work was his analyses of a minuscule bureaucratic innovation, or a linguistic innovation, etc. The Durkheimians answered that what Tarde did was psychology or inter-psychology, not sociology. But that is true only in appearance, as a first approximation: a microimitation does seem to occur between two individuals. But at the same time, and at a deeper level, it has to do not with an individual but with a flow or a wave. *Imitation is the propagation of a flow; opposition is binarization, the making binary of flows; invention is a conjugation or connection of different flows.* What, according to Tarde, is a flow? It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage); a flow is always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every society, because they are flows and as such are “quantifiable”; they are veritable social Quantities, whereas sensations are qualitative and representations are simple resultants.[258] Infinitesimal imitation, opposition, and invention are therefore like flow quanta marking a propagation, binarization, or conjugation of beliefs and desires. Hence the importance of statistics, providing it concerns itself with the cutting edges and not only with the “stationary” zone of representations. For in the end, the difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual or collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which the distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective signifiers. Representations already define large-scale aggregates, or determine segments on a line; beliefs and desires, on the other hand, are flows marked by quanta, flows that are created, exhausted, or transformed, added to one another, subtracted or combined. Tarde invented microsociology and took it to its full breadth and scope, denouncing in advance the misinterpretations to which it would later fall victim.
This is how you tell the difference between the segmented line and the quantum flow. A mutant flow always implies something tending to elude or escape the codes; quanta are precisely signs or degrees of deterrito-rialization in the decoded flow. The rigid line, on the other hand, implies an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering codes; its segments are like reterritorializations on the overcoding or overcoded line. Let us return to the case of original sin: it is the very act of a flow marking a decoding in relation to creation (with just one last island preserved for the Virgin), and a deterritorialization in relation to the land of Adam; but it simultaneously performs an overcoding by binary organizations and resonance (Powers, Church, empires, rich-poor, men-women, etc.) and complementary reterritorializations (on the land of Cain, on work, on reproduction, on money…)• Now the two systems of reference are in inverse relation to each other, in the sense that the first eludes the second, or the second arrests the first, prevents it from flowing further; but at the same time, they are strictly complementary and coexistent, because one exists only as a function of the other; yet they are different and in direct relation to each other, although corresponding term by term, because the second only effectively arrests the first on a “plane” that is not the plane specific to the first, while the momentum of the first continues on its own plane.
A social field is always animated by all kinds of movements of decoding and deterritorialization affecting “masses” and operating at different speeds and paces. These are not contradictions but escapes. At this level, everything is a question of *mass.* For example, from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries we see an acceleration of factors of decoding and deterritorialization: the masses of the last invaders swooping down from north, east, and south; military masses turned into pillaging bands; ecclesiastical masses confronted with infidels and heretics, and adopting increasingly deterritorialized objectives; peasant masses leaving the seigneurial domains; seigneurial masses forced to find means of exploitation less territorial than serfdom; urban masses breaking away from the backcountry and finding increasingly less territorialized social arrangements in the cities; women’s masses detaching themselves from the old passional and conjugal code; monetary masses that cease to be a hoard object and inject themselves into great commercial circuits.[259] We may cite the Crusades as effecting a connection of flows, each boosting and accelerating the others (even the flow of femininity in the “faraway Princess,” even the flow of children in the Crusades of the thirteenth century). But at the same time, and inseparably, there occur overcodings and reterritorializations. The Crusades were overcoded by the pope and assigned territorial objectives. The Holy Land, the Peace of God, a new type of abbey, new figures of money, new modes of exploitation of the peasant through leasehold and the wage system (or revivals of slavery), urban reterritorializations, etc., form a complex system. At this point, we must introduce a distinction between the two notions of *connection* and *conjugation* of flows. “Connection” indicates the way in which decoded and deterritorialized flows boost one another, accelerate their shared escape, and augment or stoke their quanta; the “conjugation” of these same flows, on the other hand, indicates their relative stoppage, like a point of accumulation that plugs or seals the lines of flight, performs a general reterritorialization, and brings the flows under the dominance of a single flow capable of overcoding them. But it is precisely the most deterritorialized flow, under the first aspect, that always brings about the accumulation or conjunction of the processes, determines the overcoding, and serves as the basis for reterritorialization under the second aspect (we have already encountered a theorem according to which it is always *on* the most deterritorialized element that reterritorialization takes place). For example, the merchant bourgeoisie of the cities conjugated or capitalized a domain of knowledge, a technology, assemblages and circuits into whose dependency the nobility, Church, artisans, and even peasants *would enter.* It is precisely because the bourgeoisie was a cutting edge of deterritorialization, a veritable particle accelerator, that it also performed an overall reterritorialization.
The task of the historian is to designate the “period” of coexistence or simultaneity of these two movements (decoding-deterritorialization and overcoding-reterritorialization). For the duration of this period, one distinguishes between the molecular aspect and the molar aspect: on the one hand, *masses or flows,* with their mutations, quanta of deterritorialization, connections, and accelerations; on the other hand, *classes or segments,* with their binary organization, resonance, conjunction or accumulation, and line of overcoding favoring one line over the others.[260] The difference between macrohistory and microhistory has nothing to do with the length of the durations envisioned, long or short, but rather concerns distinct systems of reference, depending on whether it is an overcoded segmented line that is under consideration or the mutant quantum flow. The rigid system does not bring the other system to a halt: the flow continues beneath the line, forever mutant, while the line totalizes. *Mass* and *class* do not have the same contours or the same dynamic, even though the same group can be assigned both signs. The bourgeoisie considered as a mass *and as* a class… The relations of a mass to other masses are not the same as the relations of the “corresponding” class to the other classes. Of course, there are just as many relations of force, and just as much violence, on one side as the other. The point is that the same struggle assumes two very different aspects, in relation to which the victories and defeats differ. Mass movements accelerate and feed into one another (or dim for a long while, enter long stupors), but jump from one class to another, undergo mutation, emanate or emit new quanta that then modify class relations, bring their overcoding and reterritorialization into question, and run new lines of flight in new directions. Beneath the self-reproduction of classes, there is always a variable map of masses. Politics operates by macrodecisions and binary choices, binarized interests; but the realm of the decidable remains very slim. Political decision making necessarily descends into a world of microdeterminations, attractions, and desires, which it must sound out or evaluate in a different fashion. Beneath linear conceptions and segmentary decisions, an evaluation of flows and their quanta. A curious passage by Michelet reproaches Francois I for having badly evaluated the flow of emigration bringing to France large numbers of people in struggle against the Church: Francois saw it only as an influx of potential soldiers, instead of perceiving a mass molecular flow which France could have used to its own advantage by leading a different Reformation than the one that occurred.[261] Problems are always like this. Good or bad, politics and its judgments are always molar, but it is the molecular and its assessment that makes it or breaks it.
Now we are in a better position to draw a map. If we return to a very general sense of the word “line,” we see that there are not just two kinds of lines but three. First, a relatively supple line of interlaced codes and territorialities; that is why we started with so-called *primitive* segmentarity, in which the social space is constituted by territorial and lineal segmentations. Second, a rigid line, which brings about a dualist organization of segments, a concentricity of circles in resonance, and generalized overcoding; here, the social space implies a *State apparatus.* This system is different from the primitive system precisely because overcoding is not a stronger code, but a specific procedure different from that of codes (similarly, reterrito-rialization is not an added territory, but takes place in a different space than that of territories, namely, overcoded geometrical space). Third, one or several lines of flight, marked by quanta and defined by decoding and deterritorialization (there is always something like a *war machine* functioning on these lines).
This way of presenting things still has the disadvantage of making it seem as though primitive societies came first. In truth, codes are never separable from the movement of decoding, nor are territories from the vectors of deterritorialization traversing them. And overcoding and reterrito-rialization do not come after. It would be more accurate to say that there is a space in which the three kinds of closely intermingled lines coexist, tribes, empires, and war machines. We could also put it this way: lines of flight are primary, *or* the already-rigid segments are, and supple segmentations swing between the two. Take a proposition like the following one by the historian Pirenne about barbarian tribes: “The Barbarians did not spontaneously hurl themselves upon the Empire. They were pushed forward by the flood of the Hunnish advance, which in this way caused the whole series of invasions.”[262] On one side, we have the rigid segmentarity of the Roman Empire, with its center of resonance and periphery, its State, its *pax romana,* its geometry, its camps, its *limes* (boundary lines). Then, on the horizon, there is an entirely different kind of line, the line of the nomads who come in off the steppes, venture a fluid and active escape, sow deterritorialization everywhere, launch flows whose quanta heat up and are swept along by a Stateless war machine. The migrant barbarians are indeed between the two: they come and go, cross and recross frontiers, pillage and ransom, but also integrate themselves and reterritorialize. At times they will subside into the empire, assigning themselves a segment of it, becoming mercenaries or confederates, settling down, occupying land or carving out their own State (the wise Visigoths). At other times, they will go over to the nomads, allying with them, becoming indiscernible (the brilliant Ostrogoths). Perhaps because they were constantly being defeated by the Huns and Visigoths, the Vandals (“zone-two Goths”) drew a line of flight that made them as strong as their masters; they were the only band or mass to cross the Mediterranean. But they were also the ones who produced the most startling reterritorialization: an empire in Africa.[263] Thus it seems that the three lines do not only coexist, but transform themselves into one another, cross over into one another. Again, we have taken a summary example in which the lines are illustrated by different groups. What we have said applies all the more to cases in which all of the lines are in a single group, a single individual.
In view of this, it would be better to talk about simultaneous states of the abstract Machine. There is on the one hand an *abstract machine of overcoding:* it defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity, because it produces or rather reproduces segments, opposing them two by two, making all the centers resonate, and laying out a divisible, homogeneous space striated in all directions. This kind of abstract machine is linked to the State apparatus. We do not, however, equate it with the State apparatus itself. The abstract machine may be defined, for example, *more geomet-rico,* or under other conditions by an “axiomatic”; but the State apparatus is neither geometry nor axiomatics: it is only the assemblage of reterritorialization effectuating the overcoding machine within given limits and under given conditions. The most we can say is that the State apparatus tends increasingly to identify with the abstract machine it effectuates. This is where the notion of the totalitarian State becomes meaningful: a State becomes totalitarian when, instead of effectuating, within its own limits, the worldwide overcoding machine, it identifies with it, creating the conditions for “autarky,” producing a reterritorialization by “closed vessel,” in the artifice of the void (this is never an ideological operation, but rather an economic and political one).[264]
On the other hand, at the other pole, there is an abstract machine of mutation, which operates by decoding and deterritorialization. It is what draws the lines of flight: it steers the quantum flows, assures the connection-creation of flows, and emits new quanta. It itself is in a state of flight, and erects war machines on its lines. If it constitutes another pole, it is because molar or rigid segments always seal, plug, block the lines of flight, whereas this machine is always making them flow, “between” the rigid segments and in another, submolecular, direction. But between the two poles there is also a whole realm of properly molecular negotiation, translation, and transduction in which at times molar lines are already undermined by fissures and cracks, and at other times lines of flight are already drawn toward black holes, flow connections are already replaced by limitative conjunctions, and quanta emissions are already converted into center-points. All of this happens at the same time. It is at the same time that lines of flight connect and continue their intensities, whip particles-signs out of black holes; and also retreat into the swirl of micro-black holes or molecular conjunctions that interrupt them; or again, enter overcoded, concentricized, binarized, stable segments arrayed around a central black hole.
What is a center or focal point of power? Answering this question will illustrate the entanglement of the lines. We speak of the power of the army, Church, and school, of public and private power … Power centers obviously involve rigid segments. Each molar segment has one or more centers. It might be objected that the segments themselves presuppose a power center, as what distinguishes and unites them, sets them in opposition and makes them resonate. But there is no contradiction between the segmentary parts and the centralized apparatus. On the one hand, the most rigid of segmentarities does not preclude centralization: this is because the common central point is not where all the other points melt together, but instead acts as a point of resonance on the horizon, behind all the other points. The State is not a point taking all the others upon itself, but a resonance chamber for them all. Even when the State is totalitarian, its function as resonator for distinct centers and segments remains unchanged: the only difference is that it takes place under closed-vessel conditions that increase its internal reach, or couples “resonance” with a “forced movement.” On the other hand, and conversely, the strictest of centralizations does not eradicate the distinctiveness of the centers, segments, and circles. When the overcoding line is drawn, it assures the prevalence of one segment, as such, over the other (in the case of binary segmentarity), gives a certain center a power of relative resonance over the others (in the case of circular segmentarity), and underscores the dominant segment through which it itself passes (in the case of linear segmentarity). Thus centralization is always hierarchical, but hierarchy is always segmentary.
Each power center is also molecular and exercises its power on a micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse, dispersed, geared down, miniaturized, perpetually displaced, acting by fine segmentation, working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault’s analysis of “disciplines” or micropowers (school, army, factory, hospital, etc.) testifies to these “focuses of instability” where groupings and accumulations confront each other, but also confront breakaways and escapes, and where inversions occur.[265] What we have is no longer The Schoolmaster but the monitor, the best student, the class dunce, the janitor, etc. No longer the general, but the junior officers, the noncommissioned officers, the soldier inside me, and also the malcontent: all have their own tendencies, poles, conflicts, and relations of force. Even the warrant officer and janitor are only invoked for explanatory purposes; for they have a molar side *and* a molecular side, and make us realize that the general or the landlord also had both sides all along. We would not say that the proper name loses its power when it enters these zones of indiscernibility, but that it takes on a new kind of power. To talk like Kafka, what we have is no longer the public official Klamm, but maybe his secretary Momus, or other molecular Klamms the differences between which, and with Klamm, are all the greater for no longer being assignable. (“[The officials] don’t always stick to the same book, yet it isn’t the books they change, but their places, and [they] have to squeeze past one another when they change places, because there’s so little room.” “This official is rarely very like Klamm, and if he were sitting in his own office at his own desk with his name on the door I would have no more doubt at all,”[266] says Barnabas, whose dream would be a uniquely molar segmen-tarity, no matter how rigid and horrendous, as the only guarantee of certainty and security. But he cannot but notice that the molar segments are necessarily immersed in the molecular soup that nourishes them and makes their outlines waver.) And every power center has this microtexture. The microtextures — not masochism — are what explain how the oppressed can take an active role in oppression: the workers of the rich nations actively participate in the exploitation of the Third World, the arming of dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.
This is not surprising since the texture lies between the line of overcoding with rigid segments and the ultimate quantum line. It continually swings between the two, now channeling the quantum line back into the segmented line, now causing flows and quanta to escape from the segmented line. This is the third aspect of power centers, or their limit. For the only purpose these centers have is to translate as best they can flow quanta into line segments (only segments are totalizable, in one way or another). But this is both the principle of their power and the basis of their impotence. Far from being opposites, power and impotence complement and reinforce each other in a kind of fascinating satisfaction that is found above all in the most mediocre Statesmen, and defines their “glory.” For they extract glory from their shortsightedness, and power from their impotence, because it confirms that there is no choice. The only “great” Statesmen are those who connect with flows, like pilot-signs or particles-signs, and who emit quanta that get out of the black holes: it is not by chance that these men encounter each other only on lines of flight, in the act of drawing them, sounding them out, following them, or forging ahead of them, even though they may make a mistake and take a fall (Moses the Hebrew, Genseric the Vandal, Genghis the Mongol, Mao the Chinese …). But there is no Power regulating the flows themselves. No one dominates the growth of the “monetary mass,” or money supply. If an image of the master or an idea of the State is projected outward to the limits of the universe, as if something had domination over flows as well as segments, and in the same manner, the result is a fictitious and ridiculous representation. The stock exchange gives a better image of flows and their quanta than does the State. Capitalists may be the masters of surplus value and its distribution, but they do not dominate the flows from which surplus value derives. Rather, power centers function at the points where flows are converted into segments: they are exchangers, converters, oscillators. Not that the segments themselves are governed by a decision-making power. We have seen, on the contrary, that segments (classes, for example) form at the conjunction of masses and deterritorialized flows and that the most deterritorialized flow determines the dominant segment; thus the dollar segment dominates currency, the bourgeoisie dominates capitalism, etc. Segments, then, are themselves governed by an abstract machine. But what power centers govern are the assemblages that effectuate that abstract machine, in other words, that continually adapt variations in mass and flow to the segments of the rigid line, as a function of a dominant segment and dominated segments. Much perverse invention can enter into the adaptations.
This is the sense in which we would speak, for example, of banking power (the World Bank, central banks, credit banks): if the flow of financing-money, or credit money, involves the mass of economic transactions, what banks govern is the conversion of the credit money that has been *created* into segmentary payment-money that is *appropriated,* in other words, coinage or State money for the purchase of goods that are themselves segmented (the importance of the interest rate in this respect). What banks govern is the conversion between the two kinds of money, and the conversion of the segments of the second kind into any given good.[267] The same could be said of every central power. Every central power has three aspects or zones: (1) its zone of power, relating to the segments of a solid rigid line; (2) its zone of indiscernibility, relating to its diffusion throughout a microphysical fabric; (3) its zone of impotence, relatingto the flows and quanta it can only convert without being able to control or define. It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity. Better to be a tiny quantum flow than a molar converter, oscillator, or distributor! Returning to the example of money, the first zone is represented by the public central banks; the second by the “indefinite series of private relations between banks and borrowers”; the third by the desiring flow of money, whose quanta are defined by the mass of economic transactions. It is true that the same problems are reformulated at the level of these very transactions, in relation to other power centers. But the first zone of the power center is always defined by the State apparatus, which is the assemblage that effectuates the abstract machine of molar overcoding; the second is defined in the molecular fabric immersing this assemblage; the third by the abstract machine of mutation, flows, and quanta.
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.[268] 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.”*[269] 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.”[270] 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.)[271]
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!”*[272] 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.).”[273] 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.
*** *AXIOM I.* The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.
*** *PROPOSITION I.* This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games.
Georges Dumezil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the “bond” and the “pact,” etc.[438] But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity. “At once antithetical and complementary, necessary to one another and consequently without hostility, lacking a mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically calls forth a homologous specification on another. The two together exhaust the field of the function.” They are the principal elements of a State apparatus that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a *stratum.*
It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. *Either* the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war — either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat — *or,* the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function.[439] As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere. *Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less than to Mitra?*[440] He can no more be reduced to one or the other than he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. *He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact.* He brings *a furor to* bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power *(puissance)* against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he unties bonds…).[441] He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of *becoming,* rather than implementing binary distributions between “states”: a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus.
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The *nomos* of Go against the State of chess, *nomos* against *polis.* The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…). Another justice, another movement, another space-time.
“They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext…” “In some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital. At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of them.”[442] Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator of public works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to the hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves. Mbidi’s son, a man of secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army. He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to build a new State.[443] “Between” the magical-despotic State and the juridical State containing a military institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriving from without.
From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumezil analyzes the three “sins” of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual transgression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State).[444] The warrior is in the position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, *or* of understanding nothing. It happens that historians, both bourgeois and Soviet, will follow this negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan understood nothing: he “didn’t understand” the phenomenon of the city. An easy thing to say. The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the State, at other times with the State’s military institution. For instance, the war machine invents speed and secrecy; but there is all the same a certain speed and a certain secrecy that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily. So there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles, with the power of war. Dumezil cites the lineage of the Roman kings: there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series, with variants and an alternation between these two types of equally legitimate rulers; but there is also a relation with an “evil king,” Tullus Hostilius, Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a disquieting and illegitimate character.[445] Shakespeare’s kings could also be invoked: even violence, murders, and perversion do not prevent the State lineage from producing “good” kings; but a disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announcing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, he claims a “secret close intent”[446] totally different from the conquest of State power, and another — an *other* — relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets muddled; the war machine can then be understood only through the categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State. But, returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin. One would have to say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other. But “between” the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility. *The State has no war machine of its own;* it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems. This explains the mistrust States have toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has a general sense of this situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States partially appropriate according to their political needs, and in relation to which they are more or less good “conductors.”
Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury, which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles, then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the modern State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles’ arms, only to convert them to other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State — not Ajax, who is condemned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned.[447] No one has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric and condemned, better than Kleist. In *Penthesilea,* Achilles is already separated from his power: the war machine has passed over to the Amazons, a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the Scythians, the Amazons spring forth like lightning, “between” the two States, the Greek and the Trojan. They sweep away everything in their path. Achilles is brought before his double, Penthesilea. And in his ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or from loving Penthesilea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time. Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek State that Penthesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional relation of war with him without herself betraying the collective law of her people, the law of the pack that prohibits “choosing” the enemy and entering into one-to-one relationships or binary distinctions.
Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start. Doubtless Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the imperial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and stands condemned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law of the State. As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything more than banditry. Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, *or to turn against itself,* to become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman? Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a monster, and Kleist has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that the most uncanny modernity lies with him? It is because the elements of his work are secrecy, speed, and affect.[448] And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to itself. Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a “subject,” to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects. And these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg’s, Pentheselea’s) are externalized, by a system of relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the war machine. Broken rings. This element of exteriority — which dominates everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to invent — will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic episodes or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is: “This affect is too strong for me,” and a flash is: “The power of this affect sweeps me away,” so that the Self *(Moi)* is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of death. Such is Kleist’s personal formula: a succession of flights of madness and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains. There is much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese fighter, interminably still, who then makes a move too quick to see. The Go player. Many things in modern art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?
*** *PROBLEM I.* Is there a way of warding off the formation of a State apparatus (or its equivalents in a group)?
*** *PROPOSITION II.* The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).
Primitive, segmentary societies have often been defined as societies without a State, in other words, societies in which distinct organs of power do not appear. But the conclusion has been that these societies did not reach the degree of economic development, or the level of political differentiation, that would make the formation of the State apparatus both possible and inevitable: the implication is that primitive people “don’t understand” so complex an apparatus. The prime interest in Pierre Clastres’s theories is that they break with this evolutionist postulate. Not only does he doubt that the State is the product of an ascribable economic development, but he asks if it is not a potential concern of primitive societies to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand. Warding off the formation of a State apparatus, making such a formation impossible, would be the objective of a certain number of primitive social mechanisms, even if they are not consciously understood as such. To be sure, primitive societies have *chiefs.* But the State is not defined by the existence of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power. The concern of the State is to conserve. Special institutions are thus necessary to enable a chief to become a man of State, but diffuse, collective mechanisms are just as necessary to prevent a chief from becoming one. Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms, are a part of chieftainship and keep an apparatus distinct from the social body from crystallizing. Clastres describes the situation of the chief, who has no instituted weapon other than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, no other rule than his sense of the group’s desires. The chief is more like a leader or a star than a man of power and is always in danger of being disavowed, abandoned by his people. But Clastres goes further, identifying *war* in primitive societies as the surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State: war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups, and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death.[449] Clastres can thus invoke natural Law while reversing its principal proposition: just as Hobbes saw clearly that *the State was against war, so war is against the State,* and makes it impossible. It should not be concluded that war is a state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state that wards off and prevents the State. Primitive war does not produce the State any more than it derives from it. And it is no better explained by exchange than by the State: far from deriving from exchange, even as a sanction for its failure, war is what limits exchanges, maintains them in the framework of “alliances”; it is what prevents them from becoming a State factor, from fusing groups.
The importance of this thesis is first of all to draw attention to collective mechanisms of inhibition. These mechanisms may be subtle, and function as micromechanisms. This is easily seen in certain band or pack phenomena. For example, in the case of gangs of street children in Bogota, Jacques Meunier cites three ways in which the leader is prevented from acquiring stable power: the members of the band meet and undertake their theft activity in common, with collective sharing of the loot, but they disperse to eat or sleep separately; also, and especially, each member of the band is paired off with one, two, or three other members, so if he has a disagreement with the leader, he will not leave alone but will take along his allies, whose combined departure will threaten to break up the entire gang; finally, there is a diffuse age limit, and at about age fifteen a member is inevitably induced to quit the gang.[450] These mechanisms cannot be understood without renouncing the evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs as a rudimentary, less organized, social form. Even in bands of animals, leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of immanent relations.[451] One could just as easily compare the form “high-society life” to the form “sociability” among the most highly evolved men and women: high-society groups are similar to gangs and operate by the diffusion of prestige rather than by reference to centers of power, as in social groupings (Proust clearly showed this noncorrespondence of high-society values and social values). Eugene Sue, a man of high society and a dandy, whom legitimists reproached for frequenting the Orleans family, used to say: “I’m not on the side of the family, I side with the pack.” Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type that centers around organs of power. That is why bands in general, even those engaged in banditry or high-society life, are metamorphoses of a war machine formally distinct from all State apparatuses or their equivalents, which are instead what structure centralized societies. We certainly would not say that discipline is what defines a war machine: discipline is the characteristic required of armies after the State has appropriated them. The war machine answers to other rules. We are not saying that they are better, of course, only that they animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State.
But why does this argument fail to convince us entirely? We follow Clastres when he demonstrates that the State is explained neither by a development of productive forces nor by a differentiation of political forces. It is the State, on the contrary, that makes possible the undertaking of large-scale projects, the constitution of surpluses, and the organization of the corresponding public functions. The State is what makes the distinction between governors and governed possible. We do not see how the State can be explained by what it presupposes, even with recourse to dialectics. The State seems to rise up in a single stroke, in an imperial form, and does not depend on progressive factors. Its on-the-spot emergence is like a stroke of genius, the birth of Athena. We also follow Clastres when he shows that the war machine is directed against the State, either against potential States whose formation it wards off in advance, or against actual States whose destruction it purposes. No doubt the war machine is realized more completely in the “barbaric” assemblages of nomadic warriors than in the “savage” assemblages of primitive societies. In any case, it is out of the question that the State could be the result of a war in which the conquerors imposed, by the very fact of their victory, a new law on the vanquished, because the organization of the war machine is directed against the State-form, actual or virtual. The State is no better accounted for as a result of war than by a progression of economic or political forces. This is where Clastres locates the break: between “primitive” counter-State societies and “monstrous” State societies whose formation it is no longer possible to explain. Clastres is fascinated by the problem of “voluntary servitude,” in the manner of La Boetie: In what way did people want or desire servitude, which most certainly did not come to them as the outcome of an involuntary and unfortunate war? They did, after all, have counter-State mechanisms at their disposal: So how and why the State? Why did the State triumph? The more deeply Clastres delved into the problem, the more he seemed to deprive himself of the means of resolving it.[452] He tended to make primitive societies hypostases, self-sufficient entities (he insisted heavily on this point). He made their formal exteriority into a real independence. Thus he remained an evolutionist, and posited a state of nature. Only this state of nature was, according to him, a fully social reality instead of a pure concept, and the evolution was a sudden mutation instead of a development. For on the one hand, the State rises up in a single stroke, fully formed; on the other, the counter-State societies use very specific mechanisms to ward it off, to prevent it from arising. We believe that these two propositions are valid but that their interlinkage is flawed. There is an old scenario: “from clans to empires,” or “from bands to kingdoms.” But nothing says that this constitutes an evolution, since bands and clans are no less organized than empire-kingdoms. We will never leave the evolution hypothesis behind by creating a break between the two terms, that is, by endowing bands with self-sufficiency and the State with an emergence all the more miraculous and monstrous. We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite perfect, quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more empires they uncover. The hypothesis of the *Urstaat* seems to be verified: “The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity.” It is hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact with imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas. But of greater importance is the inverse hypothesis: that the State itself has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that relationship. The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State societies *or* counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot be reduced to “foreign policy,” that is, to a set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire *ecumenon* at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the “multinational” type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power. The modern world can provide us today with particularly well developed images of these two directions: worldwide ecumenical machines, but also a neoprimitivism, a new tribal society as described by Marshall McLuhan. These directions are equally present in all social fields, in all periods. It even happens that they partially merge. For example, a commercial organization is also a band of pillage, or piracy, for part of its course and in many of its activities; or it is in bands that a religious formation begins to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less than worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine. It is a *nomos* very different from the “law.” The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition (there is no masked State). But the war machine’s form of exteriority is such that it exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State. It is in terms not of independence, but of coexistence and competition *in a perpetual field of interaction,* that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms, megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against States.
*** *PROPOSITION III.* The exteriority of the war ma chine is also attested to by epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a “nomad”or “minor science.”
There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very difficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are referring to are not “technologies” in the usual sense of the term. But neither are they “sciences” in the royal or legal sense established by history. According to a recent book by Michel Serres, both the atomic physics of Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked by it.[453] The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science would seem to be the following:
First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency.
The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a “paradox” to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary characteristic, a copy; in the *Timaeus,* Plato raises this possibility, but only in order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal science. By contrast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity, and of passage or becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the famed declination of the atom. The *clinamen,* as the minimum angle, has meaning only between a straight line and a curve, the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the original curvature of the movement of the atom. The clinamen is the smallest angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path.[454] It is a passage to the limit, an exhaustion, a paradoxical “exhaustive” model. The same applies to Archimedean geometry, in which the straight line, defined as “the shortest path between two points,” is just a way of defining the length of a curve in a predifferential calculus.
One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar or laminar flow,[455] but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest angle. From *turba* to *turbo:* in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to the great vortical organizations.[456] The model is a vortical one; it operates in an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things. It is the difference between a *smooth* (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a *striated* (metric) space: in the first case “space is occupied without being counted,” and in the second case “space is counted in order to be occupied.”[457]
Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures are considered only from the viewpoint of the *affections* that befall them: sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an “event” much more than an essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an “obstacle”; it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a pro-jection, in other words, a war machine. All of this movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the “problem-element” and subordinates it to the “theorem-element.”[458]
This Archimedean science, or this conception of science, is bound up in an essential way with the war machine: theproblemata are the war machine itself and are inseparable from inclined planes, passages to the limit, vortices, and projections. It would seem that the war machine is projected into an abstract knowledge formally different from the one that doubles the State apparatus. It would seem that a whole nomad science develops eccentrically, one that is very different from the royal or imperial sciences. Furthermore, this nomad science is continually “barred,” inhibited, or banned by the demands and conditions of State science. Archimedes, vanquished by the Roman State, becomes a symbol.[459] The fact is that the two kinds of science have different modes of formalization, and State science continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad science. State science retains of nomad science only what it can appropriate; it turns the rest into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it. It is as if the “savants” of nomad science were caught between a rock and a hard place, between the war machine that nourishes and inspires them and the State that imposes upon them an order of reasons. The figure of the *engineer* (in particular the military engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of this situation. Most significant are perhaps borderline phenomena in which nomad science exerts pressure on State science, and, conversely, State science appropriates and transforms the elements of nomad science. This is true of the art of encampments, “castrametation,” which has always mobilized projections and inclined planes: the State does not appropriate this dimension of the war machine without submitting it to civil and metric rules that strictly limit, control, localize nomad science, and without keeping it from having repercussions throughout the social field (in this respect, Vauban is like a repeat of Archimedes, and suffers an analogous defeat). It is true of descriptive and projective geometry, which royal science would like to turn into a mere practical dependency of analytic, or so-called higher, geometry (thus the ambiguous situation of Monge and Poncelet as “savants”).[460] It is also true of differential calculus. For a long time, it had only parascientific status and was labeled a “Gothic hypothesis”; royal science only accorded it the value of a convenient convention or a well-founded fiction. The great State mathematicians did their best to improve its status, but precisely on the condition that all the dynamic, nomadic notions — such as becoming, heterogeneity, infinitesimal, passage to the limit, continuous variation — be eliminated and civil, static, and ordinal rules be imposed upon it (Carnot’s ambiguous position in this respect). Finally, it is true of the hydraulic model, for it is certain that the State itself needs a hydraulic science (there is no going back on Wittfogel’s theses on the importance of large-scale waterworks for an empire). But it needs it in a very different form, because the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers. The hydraulic model of nomad science and the war machine, on the other hand, consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another.[461] Democritus, Menaechmus, Archimedes, Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, Carnot, Poncelet, Perronet, etc.: in each case a monograph would be necessary to take into account the special situation of these savants whom State science used only after restraining or disciplining them, after repressing their social or political conceptions.
The sea as a smooth space is a specific problem of the war machine. As Virilio shows, it is at sea that the problem of the *fleet in being* is posed, in other words, the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement that can rise up at any point. In this respect, the recent studies on rhythm, on the origin of that notion, do not seem entirely convincing. For we are told that rhythm has nothing to do with the movement of waves but rather that it designates “form” in general, and more specifically the form of a “measured, cadenced” movement.[462] However, rhythm is never the same as measure. And though the atomist Democritus is one of the authors who speak of rhythm in the sense of form, it should be borne in mind that he does so under very precise conditions of fluctuation and that the forms made by atoms are primarily large, nonmetric aggregates, smooth spaces such as the air, the sea, or even the earth *(magnae res).* There is indeed such a thing as measured, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river between its banks or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a rhythm without measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.
This opposition, or rather this tension-limit between the two kinds of science — nomad, war machine science and royal, State science — reappears at different moments, on different levels. The work of Anne Querrien enables us to identify two of these moments; one is the construction of Gothic cathedrals in the twelfth century, the other the construction of bridges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[463] Gothic architecture is indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer and taller than the Romanesque churches. Ever farther, ever higher … But this difference is not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative change: the static relation, form-matter, tends to fade into the background in favor of a dynamic relation, material-forces. It is the cutting of the stone that turns it into material capable of holding and coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing ever higher and longer vaults. The vault is no longer a form but the line of continuous variation of the stones. It is as if Gothic conquered a smooth space, while Romanesque remained partially within a striated space (in which the vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars). But stone cutting is inseparable from, on the one hand, a plane of projection at ground level, which functions as a plane limit, and, on the other hand, a series of successive approximations (squaring), or placings-in-variation of voluminous stones. Of course, one appealed to the theorematic science of Euclid in order to find a foundation for the enterprise: mathematical figures and equations were thought to be the intelligible form capable of organizing surfaces and volumes. But according to the legend, Bernard de Clairvaux quickly abandoned the effort as too “difficult,” appealing to the specificity of an operative, Archimedean geometry, a projective and descriptive geometry defined as a minor science, more a mathegraphy than a matheology. His journeyman, the monk-mason Garin de Troyes, speaks of an operative logic of movement enabling the “initiate” to draw, then hew the volumes “in penetration in space,” to make it so that “the cutting line propels the equation” *(le trait pousse le chiffre).*[464] One does not represent, one engenders and traverses. This science is characterized less by the absence of equations than by the very different role they play: instead of being good forms absolutely that organize matter, they are “generated” as “forces of thrust” *(poussees)* by the material, in a qualitative calculus of the optimum. This whole current of Archimedean geometry was taken to its highest expression, but was also brought to a temporary standstill, by the remarkable seventeenth-century mathematician Desargues. Like most of his kind, Desargues wrote little; he nevertheless exerted a great influence through his actions and left outlines, rough drafts, and projects, all centered on problem-events: “Lamentations,” “draft project for the cutting of stones,” “draft project for grappling with the events of the encounters of a cone and a plane,... Desargues, however, was condemned by the *parlement* of Paris, opposed by the king’s secretary; his practices of perspective were banned.[465] Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appropriates stone cutting by means of *templates* (the opposite of squaring), under conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form, mathematical figures, and measurement. Royal science only tolerates and appropriates perspective if it is static, subjected to a central black hole divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities. But the adventure, or event, of Desargues is the same one that had already occurred among the Gothic “journeymen” on a collective level. For not only did the Church, in its imperial form, feel the need to strictly control the movement of this nomad science (it entrusted the Templars with the responsibility of determining its locations and objects, governing the work sites, and regulating construction), but the secular State, in its royal form, turned against the Templars themselves, banning the guilds for a number of reasons, at least one of which was the prohibition of this operative or minor geometry.
Is Anne Querrien right to find yet another echo of the same story in the case of bridges in the eighteenth century? Doubtless, the conditions were very different, for the division of labor according to State norms was by then an accomplished fact. But the fact remains that in the government agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under a well-centralized administration while bridges were still the object of active, dynamic, and collective experimentation. Trudaine organized unusual, open “general assemblies” in his home. Perronet took as his inspiration a supple model originating in the Orient: The bridge should not choke or obstruct the river. To the heaviness of the bridge, to the striated space of thick and regular piles, he opposed a thinning and discontinuity of the piles, surbase, and vault, a lightness and continuous variation of the whole. But his attempt soon ran up against principled opposition; the State, in naming Perronet director of the school, followed a frequently used procedure that inhibited experimentation more than crowning its achievements. The whole history of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways) illustrates how this old, plebeian “corps” was subordinated to the Ecole des Mines, the Ecole des Travaux Publics, and the Ecole Polytechnique, at the same time as its activities were increasingly normalized.[466] We thus come to the question, What is a collective *bodyl* Undoubtedly, the great collective bodies of a State are differentiated and hierarchical organisms that on the one hand enjoy a monopoly over a power or function and on the other hand send out local representatives. They have a special relation to families, because they link the family model to the State model at both ends and regard themselves as “great families” of functionaries, clerks, intendants, or farmers. Yet it seems that in many of these collective bodies there is something else at work that does not fit into this schema. It is not just their obstinate defense of their privileges. It is also their aptitude — even caricatural or seriously deformed — to constitute themselves as a war machine, following other models, another dynamism, a nomadic ambition, over against the State. As an example, there is the very old problem of the *lobby,* a group with fluid contours, whose position is very ambiguous in relation to the State it wishes to “influence” and the war machine it wishes to promote, to whatever ends.[467]
A *body (corps)* is not reducible to an *organism,* any more than esprit de corps is reducible to the soul of an organism. Spirit is not better, but it is volatile, whereas the soul is weighted, a center of gravity. Must we invoke a military origin of the collective body and esprit de corps? “Military” is not the part that counts, but rather the distant nomadic origin. Ibn Khaldun defines the nomad war machine by: families or lineages PLUS esprit de corps. The war machine entertains a relation to families that is very different from its relation to the State. In the war machine, the family is a band vector instead of a fundamental cell; a genealogy is transferred from one family to another according to the aptitude of a given family at a given time to realize the maximum of “agnatic solidarity.” Here, it is not the public eminence of a family that determines its place in a State organism but the reverse; it is the secret power *(puissance),* or strength of solidarity, and the corresponding genealogical mobility that determine its eminence in a war body.[468] This has to do neither with the monopoly of an organic power *(pouvoir)* nor with local representation, but is related to the potential *(puissance)* of a vortical body in a nomad space. Of course, the great bodies of a modern State can hardly be thought of as Arab tribes. What we wish to say, rather, is that collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that reconstitute equivalents of the war machine — in sometimes quite unforeseen forms — in specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology
… A collective body of captains asserts its demands through the organization of the officers and the organism of the superior officers. There are always periods when the State as organism has problems with its own collective bodies, when these bodies, claiming certain privileges, are forced in spite of themselves to open onto something that exceeds them, a short revolutionary instant, an experimental surge. A confused situation: each time it occurs, it is necessary to analyze tendencies and poles, the nature of the movements. All of a sudden, it is as if the collective body of the notary publics were advancing like Arabs or Indians, then regrouping and reorganizing: a comic opera where you never know what is going to happen next (even the cry “The police are with us!” is sometimes heard).
Husserl speaks of a protogeometry that addresses *vague,* in other words, vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences. These essences are distinct from sensible things, as well as from ideal, royal, or imperial essences. Protogeometry, the science dealing with them, is itself vague, in the etymological sense of “vagabond”: it is neither inexact like sensible things nor exact like ideal essences, but *anexactyet rigorous* (“essentially and not accidentally inexact”). The circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but roundness is a vague and fluent essence, distinct both from the circle and things that are round (a vase, a wheel, the sun). A theorematic figure is a fixed essence, but its transformations, distortions, ablations, and augmentations, all of its variations, form problematic figures that are vague yet rigorous, “lens-shaped,” “umbelliform,” or “indented.” It could be said that vague essences extract from things a determination that is more than thinghood *(choseite),* which is that *of corporeality (corporeite),* and which perhaps even implies an esprit de corps.[469] But why does Husserl see this as a protogeometry, a kind of halfway point and not a pure science? Why does he make pure essences dependent upon a passage to the limit, when any passage to the limit belongs as such to the vague? What we have, rather, are two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science while nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal science loose. At the limit, all that counts is the constantly shifting borderline. In Husserl (and also in Kant, though in the opposite direction: roundness as the “schema” of the circle), we find a very accurate appreciation of the irreducibility of nomad science, but simultaneously the concern of a man of the State, or one who sides with the State, to maintain a legislative and constituent primacy for royal science. Whenever this primacy is taken for granted, nomad science is portrayed as a prescientific or parascientific or subscientific agency. And most important, it becomes impossible to understand the relations between science and technology, science and practice, because nomad science is not a simple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the problem of these relations is brought out and resolved in an entirely different way than from the point of view of royal science. The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round. Thus the specific characteristics of nomad science are what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction “containing” it.
Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science. Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough; it is different. We know of the problems States have always had with journeymen’s associations, or *compagnonnages,* the nomadic or itinerant bodies of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths, etc. Settling, seden-tarizing labor power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the spot (corvee) or among indigents (charity workshops) — this has always been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer both a *band vagabondage* and a *body nomadism.* Let us return to the example of Gothic architecture for a reminder of how extensively the journeymen traveled, building cathedrals near and far, scattering construction sites across the land, drawing on an active and passive power (mobility and the strike) that was far from convenient for the State. The State’s response was to take over management of the construction sites, merging all the divisions of labor in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the manual, the theoretical and the practical, modeled upon the difference between “governors” and “governed.” In the nomad sciences, as in the royal sciences, we find the existence of a “plane,” but not at all in the same way. The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman is opposed to the metric plane of the architect, which is on paper and off site. The plane of consistency or composition is opposed to another plane, that of organization or formation. Stone cutting by squaring is opposed to stone cutting using templates, which implies the erection of a model for reproduction. It can be said not only that there is no longer a need for skilled or qualified labor, but also that there is a need for unskilled or unqualified labor, for a dequalification of labor. The State does not give power *(pouvoir)* to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or implement of all of their power *(puissance).* This does not shield the State from more trouble, this time with the body of intellectuals it itself engendered, but which asserts new nomadic and political claims. In any case, if the State always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State. The difference is not extrinsic: the way in which a science, or a conception of science, participates in the organization of the social field, and in particular induces a division of labor, is part of that science itself. Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. What characterizes it is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression. It seems that nomad science is more immediately in tune with the connection between content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms encompassing both form and matter. Thus matter, in nomad science, is never prepared and therefore homogenized matter, but is essentially laden with singularities (which constitute a form of content). And neither is expression formal; it is inseparable from pertinent traits (which constitute a matter of expression). This is an entirely different schema, as we shall see. We can get a preliminary idea of this situation by recalling the most general characteristic of nomad art, in which a dynamic connection between support and ornament replaces the matter-form dialectic. From the point of view of nomad science, which presents itself as an art as much as a technique, the division of labor fully exists, but it does not employ the form-matter duality (even in the case of biunivocal correspondences). Rather, it *follows* the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of these connections, whether they be natural or forced.[470] This is another organization of work and of the social field through work.
It is instructive to contrast two models of science, after the manner of Plato in the *Timaeus.*[471] One could be called *Compars* and the other *Dispars.* The compars is the legal or legalist model employed by royal science. The search for laws consists in extracting constants, even if those constants are only relations between variables (equations). An invariable form for variables, a variable matter of the invariant: such is the foundation of the hylomorphic schema. But for the dispars as an element of nomad science the relevant distinction is material-forces rather than matter-form. Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables but of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation. If there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential equations irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible intuition of variation. They seize or determine singularities in the matter, instead of constituting a general form. They effect individuations through events or haecceities, not through the “object” as a compound of matter and form; vague essences are nothing other than haecceities. In all these respects, there is an opposition between the *logos* and the *nomos,* the law and the *nomos,* prompting the comment that the law still “savors of morality.”[472] This does not mean, however, that the legal model knows nothing of forces, the play of forces. That it does is evident in the homogeneous space corresponding to the compars. Homogeneous space is in no way a smooth space; on the contrary, it is the form of striated space. The space of *pillars.* It is striated by the fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity, the distribution of matter into parallel layers, the lamellar and laminar movement of flows. These parallel verticals have formed an independent dimension capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other dimensions, of striating all of space in all of its directions, so as to render it homogeneous. The vertical distance between two points provided the mode of comparison for the horizontal distance between two other points. Universal attraction became the law of all laws, in that it set the rule for the biunivocal correspondence between two bodies; and each time science discovered a new field, it sought to formalize it in the same mode as the field of gravity. Even chemistry became a royal science only by virtue of a whole theoretical elaboration of the notion of weight. Euclidean space is founded on the famous parallel postulate, but the parallels in question are in the first place gravitational parallels, and correspond to the forces exerted by gravity on all the elements of a body presumed to fill that space. It is the point of application of the resultant of all of these parallel forces that remains invariable when their common direction is changed or the body is rotated (the *center of gravity).* In short, it seems that the force of gravity lies at the basis of a laminar, striated, homogeneous, and centered space; it forms the foundation for those multiplicities termed metric, or arborescent, whose dimensions are independent of the situation and are expressed with the aid of units and points (movements from one point to another). It was not some metaphysical concern, but an effectively scientific one, that frequently led scientists in the nineteenth century to ask if all forces were not reducible to gravity, or rather to the form of attraction that gives gravity a universal value (a constant relation for all variables) and biunivocal scope (two bodies at a time, and no more). It is the form of interiority of all science.
The *nomos,* or the dispars, is altogether different. But this is not to say that the other forces refute gravity or contradict attraction. Although it is true that they do not go against them, they do not result from them either; they do not depend on them but testify to events that are always supplementary or of “variable affects.” Each time a new *field* opened up in science — under conditions making this a far more important notion than that of form or object — it proved irreducible to the field of attraction and the model of the gravitational forces, although not contradictory to them. It affirmed a “more” or an excess, and lodged itself in that excess, that deviation. When chemistry took a decisive step forward, it was always by adding to the force of weight bonds of another type (for example, electric) that transformed the nature of chemical equations.[473] But it will be noted that the simplest considerations of velocity immediately introduce the difference between vertical descent and curvilinear motion, or more generally between the straight line and the curve, in the differential form of the clinamen, or the smallest deviation, the minimum excess. Smooth space is precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogeneity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of proximities is effected independently of any determined path. It is a space of contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual space like Euclid’s striated space. Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without “counting” it and can “be explored only by legwork.” They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them; an example of this is the system of sounds, or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidean space.
When we oppose speed and slowness, the quick and the weighty, *Celeritas and Gravitas,* this must not be seen as a quantitative opposition, or as a mythological structure (although Dumezil has established the mythological importance of this opposition, precisely in relation to the State apparatus and its natural “gravity”). The opposition is both qualitative and scientific, in that speed is not merely an abstract characteristic of movement in general but is incarnated in a moving body that deviates, however slightly, from its line of descent or gravity. *Slow and rapid are not quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified movement,* whatever the speed of the former or the tardiness of the latter. Strictly speaking, it cannot be said that a body that is dropped has a speed, however fast it falls; rather it has an infinitely decreasing slowness in accordance with the law of falling bodies. Laminar movement that striates space, that goes from one point to another, is weighty; but rapidity, celerity, applies only to movement that deviates to the minimum extent and thereafter assumes a vortical motion, occupying a smooth space, actually drawing smooth space itself. In this space, matter-flow can no longer be cut into parallel layers, and movement no longer allows itself to be hemmed into biunivocal relations between points. In this sense, the role of the qualitative opposition gravity-celerity, heavy-light, slow-rapid is not that of a quantifiable scientific determination but of a condition that is coextensive to science and that regulates both the separation and the mixing of the two models, their possible interpenetration, the domination of one by the other, their alternative. And the best formulation, that of Michel Serres, is indeed couched in terms of an alternative, whatever mixes or compositions there may be: “Physics is reducible to two sciences, a general theory of routes and paths, and a global theory of waves.”[474]
A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific procedures: one consists in “reproducing,” the other in “following.” The first involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, involving itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences. Itineration is too readily reduced to a modality of technology, or of the application and verification of science. But this is not the case: *following is not at all the same thing as reproducing,* and one never follows in order to reproduce. The ideal of reproduction, deduction, or induction is part of royal science, at all times and in all places, and treats differences of time and place as so many variables, the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the law: for the same phenomena to recur in a gravitational and striated space it is sufficient for the same conditions to obtain, or for the same constant relation to hold between the differing conditions and the variable phenomena. Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of *view* that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the “singularities” of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form; when one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous variation of variables, instead of extracting constants from them, etc. And the meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. “Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later… you can extend the size of your territory.”[475] *There are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many “accidents”* (problems). For example, why is primitive metallurgy necessarily an ambulant science that confers upon smiths a quasi-nomadic status? It could be objected that in these examples it is still a question of going from one point to another (even if they are singular points) through the intermediary of channels, and that it is still possible to cut the flow into layers. But this is only true to the extent that ambulant procedures and processes are necessarily tied to a striated space — always formalized by royal science — which deprives them of their model, submits them to its own model, and allows them to exist only in the capacity of “technologies” or “applied science.” As a general rule, a smooth space, a vectorial field, a nonmetric multiplicity are always translatable, and necessarily translated, into a “compars”: a fundamental operation by which one repeatedly overlays upon each point of smooth space a tangent Euclidean space endowed with a sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction, instead of continuing to follow it in an “exploration by leg-work.”[476] This is the triumph of the *logos* or the law over the *nomos.* But the complexity of the operation testifies to the existence of resistances it must overcome. Whenever ambulant procedure and process are returned to their own model, the points regain their position as singularities that exclude all biunivocal relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and vortical motion that excludes any parallelism between vectors, and smooth space reconquers the properties of contact that prevent it from remaining homogeneous and striated. There is always a current preventing the ambulant or itinerant sciences from being completely internalized in the reproductive royal sciences. There is a type of ambulant scientist whom State scientists are forever fighting or integrating or allying with, even going so far as to propose a minor position for them within the legal system of science and technology.
It is not that the ambulant sciences are more saturated with irrational procedures, with mystery and magic. They only get that way when they fall into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also surround themselves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what becomes apparent in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sciences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to have an autonomous development. They do not have the means for that because they subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of intuition and construction — *following* the flow of matter, *drawing and linking up* smooth space. Everything is situated in an objective zone of fluctuation that is coextensive with reality itself. However refined or rigorous, “approximate knowledge” is still dependent upon sensitive and sensible evaluations that pose more problems than they solve: problematics is still its only mode. In contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its theorematic or axiomatic power, is to isolate all operations from the conditions of intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or “categories.” That is precisely why deterritorialization, in this kind of science, implies a reterritorialization in the conceptual apparatus. Without this categorical, apodictic apparatus, the differential operations would be constrained to follow the evolution of a phenomenon; what is more, since the experimentation would be open-air, and the construction at ground level, the coordinates permitting them to be erected as stable models would never become available. Certain of these requirements are translated in terms of “safety”: the two cathedrals at Orleans and Beauvais collapsed at the end of the twelfth century, and control calculations are difficult to effect for the constructions of ambulant science. Although safety is a fundamental element in the theoretical norms of the State, and of the political ideal, there is also something else at issue as well. Due to all their procedures, the ambulant sciences quickly overstep the possibility of calculation: they inhabit that “more” that exceeds the space of reproduction and soon run into problems that are insurmountable from that point of view; they eventually resolve those problems by means of a real-life operation. The solutions are supposed to come from a set of activities that constitute them as nonautono-mous. Only royal science, in contrast, has at its disposal a metric power that can define a conceptual apparatus or an autonomy of science (including the autonomy of experimental science). That is why it is necessary to couple ambulant spaces with a space of homogeneity, without which the laws of physics would depend on particular points in space. But this is less a translation than a constitution: precisely that constitution the ambulant sciences did not undertake, and do not have the means to undertake. In the field of interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant sciences confine themselves to *inventing problems* whose solution is tied to a whole set of collective, nonscientific activities but whose *scientific solution* depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus and its organization of work. This is somewhat like intuition and intelligence in Bergson, where only intelligence has the scientific means to solve formally the problems posed by intuition, problems that intuition would be content to entrust to the qualitative activities of a humanity engaged in *following* matter.[477]
*** *PROBLEM II.* Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model? *PROPOSITION IV.* The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, finally, by noology.
Thought contents are sometimes criticized for being too conformist. But the primary question is that of form itself. Thought as such is already in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire *organon.* There is thus an image of thought covering all of thought; it is the special object of “noology” and is like the State-form developed in thought. This image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty: the *imperium* of true thinking operating by magical capture, seizure or binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation *(mythos);* a republic of free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground *(logos).* These two heads are in constant interference in the classical image of thought: a “republic of free spirits whose prince would be the idea of the Supreme Being.” And if these two heads are in interference, it is not only because there are many intermediaries and transitions between them, and because the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the first, but also because, antithetical and complementary, they are necessary to one another. It is not out of the question, however, that in order to pass from one to the other there must occur, “between” them, an event of an entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place outside.[478] But confining ourselves to the image, it appears that it is not simply a metaphor when we are told of an *imperium* of truth and a republic of spirits. It is the necessary condition for the constitution of thought as principle, or as a form of interiority, as a stratum.
It is easy to see what thought gains from this: a gravity it would never have on its own, a center that makes everything, including the State, appear to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction. But the State gains just as much. Indeed, by developing in thought in this way the State-form gains something essential: a whole consensus. Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of de jure universality. It is as if the sovereign were left alone in the world, spanned the entire ecumenon, and now dealt only with actual or potential subjects. It is no longer a question of powerful, extrinsic organizations, or of strange bands: the State becomes the sole principle separating rebel subjects, who are consigned to the state of nature, from consenting subjects, who rally to its form of their own accord. If it is advantageous for thought to prop itself up with the State, it is no less advantageous for the State to extend itself in thought, and to be sanctioned by it as the unique, universal form. The particularity of States becomes merely an accident of fact, as is their possible perversity, or their imperfection. For the modern State defines itself in principle as “the rational and reasonable organization of a community”: the only remaining particularity a community has is interior or moral *(the spirit of a people),* at the same time as the community is funneled by its organization toward the harmony of a universal *(absolute spirit).* The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that interiority a form of universality: “The goal of worldwide organization is the satisfaction of reasonable individuals within particular free States.” The exchange that takes place between the State and reason is a curious one; but that exchange is also an analytic proposition, because realized reason is identified with the de jure State, just as the State is the becoming of reason.[479] In so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or rational State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject. The State must realize the distinction between the legislator and the subject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptualize their identity. Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself… Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving the established powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto the organs of State power. Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at the center constituted by the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the absolute. This was most notably the great operation of the Kantian “critique,” renewed and developed by Hegelianism. Kant was constantly criticizing bad usages, the better to consecrate the function. It is not at all surprising that the philosopher has become a public professor or State functionary. It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of thought. With full reciprocity. Doubtless, the image itself assumes different contours in accordance with the variations on this form: it has not always delineated or designated the philosopher, and will not always delineate him. It is possible to pass from a magical function to a rational function. The poet in the archaic imperial State was able to play the role of image trainer.[480] In modern States, the sociologist succeeded in replacing the philosopher (as, for example, when Durkheim and his disciples set out to give the republic a secular model of thought). Even today, psychoanalysis lays claim to the role of *Cogitatio universalis* as the thought of the Law, in a magical return. And there are quite a few other competitors and pretenders. Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of images of thought, and their historicity. In a sense, it could be said that all this has no importance, that thought has never had anything but laughable gravity. But that is all it requires: for us not to take it seriously. Because that makes it all the easier for it to think for us, and to be forever engendering new functionaries. Because the less people take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing — to be a thinker?
But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is mobile in history. These are the acts of a “private thinker,” as opposed to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche’s *Schopenhauer as Educator* is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the image of thought and its relation to the State. “Private thinker,” however, is not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of *outside thought.*[481] To place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic State act or sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from a new external force, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize it). There is another reason why “private thinker” is not a good expression. Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here. “We are lacking that final force, in the absence of a people to bear us. We are looking for that popular support.” Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State. And this form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of interiority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between different poles or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought — the force that is always external to itself, or the final force, the «th power — is not at all *another image* in opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus. It is, rather, a force that destroys both the image *and* its copies, the model *and* its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.). A “method” is the striated space of the *cogitatio universalis* and draws a path that must be followed from one point to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences. Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model society. “Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But countless times it misses and is depressed at the fact…. The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike home at everybody — and even these few are not struck with the force with which the philosopher and artist launch their shot.”[482]
We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in them thought is truly a *pathos* (an *antilogos* and an *antimythos).* One is a
text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Riviere, explaining that thought operates on the basis of a *central breakdown,* that it lives solely by its own incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossible to interiorize. The other is the text by Kleist, “On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in Speech” (“Uber die allmachliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden”), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority of the concept as a means of control — the control of speech, of language, but also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this from thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dialogue, an antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before knowing while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says, is the thought of the *Gemut,* which proceeds like a general in a war machine should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. “I mix inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using appositions when they are unnecessary.” Gain some time, and then perhaps renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and “bring something incomprehensible into the world.” Such is the form of exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the becoming-woman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the *Gemut* that refuses to be controlled, that forms a war machine. A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of taking itself for a government ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a “thinker” shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or “aim”? Jacques Riviere does not hesitate to respond to Artaud: work at it, keep on working, things will come out all right, you will succeed in finding a method and in learning to express clearly what you think in essence *(cogitatio universalis).* Riviere is not a head of State, but he would not be the last in the *Nouvelle Revue Francaise* to mistake himself for the secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a State of right. Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of all men of letters a veritable man of the State. But that is not the worst of it: the worst is the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied — a model far more insidious than the others — for the artificial stammerings and innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal. The classical image of thought, and the striating of mental space it effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two “universals,” the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and the Subject as the principle that converts being into being-for-us.[483] *Im-perium* and republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a “universal method.” It is now easy for us to characterize the nomad thought that rejects this image and does things differently. It does not ally itself with a universal thinking subject but, on the contrary, with a singular race; and it does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or sea. An entirely different type of adequation is established here, between the race defined as “tribe” and smooth space defined as “milieu.” A tribe in the desert instead of a universal subject within the horizon of all-encompassing Being. Kenneth White recently stressed this dissymmetrical complementarity between a race-tribe (the Celts, those who feel they are Celts) and a milieu-space (the Orient, the Gobi desert…). White demonstrates that this strange composite, the marriage of the Celt and the Orient, inspires a properly nomad thought that sweeps up English literature and constitutes American literature.[484] We immediately see the dangers, the profound ambiguities accompanying in this enterprise, as if each effort and each creation faced a possible infamy. For what can be done to prevent the theme of a race from turning into a racism, a dominant and all-encompassing fascism, or into a sect and a folklore, microfascisms? And what can be done to prevent the oriental pole from becoming a phantasy that reactivates all the fascisms in a different way, and also all the folklores, yoga, Zen, and karate? It is certainly not enough to travel to escape phantasy, and it is certainly not by invoking a past, real or mythical, that one avoids racism. But here again, the criteria for making the distinction are simple, whatever the de facto mixes that obscure them at a given level, at a given moment. The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race. Rimbaud said it all on this point: only he or she can invoke race who says, “I have always been of an inferior race… I am of an inferior race for all eternity… There I am on the Breton shore … I am a beast, a nigger … I am of a distant race: my ancestors were Norsemen.”[485] In the same way that race is not something to be rediscovered, the Orient is not something to be imitated: it only exists in the construction of a smooth space, just as race only exists in the constitution of a tribe that peoples and traverses a smooth space. All of thought is a becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and the representation of a Whole.
*** *AXIOM II.* The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.
*** *PROPOSITION V.* Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war machine in space.
The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them.[486] The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their causes and conditions are no less distinct for that (for example, those who joined Mohammed at Medina had a choice between a nomadic or bedouin pledge, and a pledge of hegira or emigration).[487]
Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to *parcel out a closed space to people,* assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it *distributes people (or animals) in an open space,* one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. The *nomos* came to designate the law, but that was originally because it was distribution, a mode of distribution. It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into shares, in a space without borders or enclosure. The *nomos* is the consistency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law or the *polls,* as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around a city (“either nomos or polis”).[488] Therefore, and this is the third point, there is a significant difference between the spaces: sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary *he who does not move.* Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.[489] Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving (the Bedouin galloping, knees on the saddle, sitting on the soles of his upturned feet, “a feat of balance”). The nomad knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a “stationary process,” station as process — these traits of Kleist’s are eminently those of the nomad. It is thus necessary to make a distinction between *speed* and *movement:* a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement designates the relative character of a body considered as “one,” and which goes from point to point; *speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex,* with the possibility of springing up at any point. (It is therefore not surprising that reference has been made to spiritual voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity, in one place: these are part of nomadism.) In short, we will say by convention that only nomads have absolute movement, in other words, speed; vortical or swirling movement is an essential feature of their war machine.
It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land, even though they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon *something else* as with the sedentary (the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground *(sol)* or support. The earth does not become deterritorialized in its global and relative movement, but at specific locations, at the spot where the forest recedes, or where the steppe and the desert advance. Hubac is right to say that nomadism is explainable less by universal changes in climate (which relate instead to migrations) as by the “divagation of local climates.”[490] The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization. They add desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose orientation and direction endlessly vary.[491] The sand desert has not only oases, which are like fixed points, but also rhizomatic vegetation that is temporary and shifts location according to local rains, bringing changes in the direction of the crossings.[492] The same terms are used to describe ice deserts as sand deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather “haptic,” a sonorous much more than a visual space.[493] The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartography. The nomad, nomad space, is localized and not delimited. What is both limited and limiting is striated space, the *relative global:* it is limited in its parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation to one another, divisible by boundaries, and can interlink; what is limiting
(limes or wall, and no longer boundary) is this aggregate in relation to the smooth spaces it “contains,” whose growth it slows or prevents, and which it restricts or places outside. Even when the nomad sustains its effects, he does not belong to this relative global, where one passes from one point to another, from one region to another. Rather, he is in a local absolute, an absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local operations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice, sea.
Making the absolute appear in a particular place — is that not a very general characteristic of religion (recognizing that the nature of the appearance, and the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the images that reproduce it are open to debate)? But the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center that repels the obscure *nomos.* The absolute of religion is essentially a horizon that encompasses, and, if the absolute itself appears at a particular place, it does so in order to establish a solid and stable center for the global. The encompassing role of smooth spaces (desert, steppe, or ocean) in monotheism has been frequently noted. In short, religion converts the absolute. Religion is in this sense a piece in the State apparatus (in both of its forms, the “bond” and the “pact or alliance”), even if it has within itself the power to elevate this model to the level of the universal or to constitute an absolute *Imperium.* But for the nomad the terms of the question are totally different: locality is not delimited; the absolute, then, does not appear at a particular place but becomes a nonlimited locality; the coupling of the place and the absolute is achieved not in a centered, oriented globalization or universalization but in an infinite succession of local operations. Limiting ourselves to this opposition between points of view, it may be observed that nomads do not provide a favorable terrain for religion; the man of war is always committing an offense against the priest or the god. The nomads have a vague, literally vagabond “monotheism,” and content themselves with that, and with their ambulant fires. The nomads have a sense of the absolute, but a singularly atheistic one. The universalist religions that have had dealings with nomads — Moses, Mohammed, even Christianity with the Nestorian heresy — have always encountered problems in this regard, and have run up against what they have termed obstinate impiety. These religions are not, in effect, separable from a firm and constant orientation, from an imperial de jure State, even, and especially, in the absence of a de facto State; they have promoted an ideal of sedentari-zation and addressed themselves more to the migrant components than the nomadic ones. Even early Islam favored the theme of the hegira, or migration, over nomadism; rather, it was through certain schisms (such as the Kharijl movement) that it won over the Arab or Berber nomads.[494]
However, it does not exhaust the question to establish a simple opposition between two points of view, religion-nomadism. For monotheistic religion, at the deepest level of its tendency to project a universal or spiritual State over the entire ecumenon, is not without ambivalence or fringe areas; it goes beyond even the ideal limits of the State, even the imperial State, entering a more indistinct zone, an outside of States where it has the possibility of undergoing a singular mutation or adaptation. We are referring to religion as an element in a war machine and the idea of holy war as the motor of that machine. *The prophet,* as opposed to the state personality of the king and the religious personality of the priest, directs the movement by which a religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of such a machine. It has often been said that Islam, and the prophet Mohammed, performed such a conversion of religion and constituted a veritable esprit de corps: in the formula of Georges Bataille, “early Islam, a society reduced to the military enterprise.” This is what the West invokes in order to justify its antipathy toward Islam. Yet the Crusades were a properly Christian adventure of this type. The prophets may very well condemn nomad life; the war machine may very well favor the movement of migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in general may very well compensate for its specific deterritorialization with a spiritual and even physical reterritorialization, which in the case of the holy war assumes the well-directed character of a conquest of the holy lands as the center of the world. Despite all that, when religion sets itself up as a war machine, it mobilizes and liberates a formidable charge of nomadism or absolute deterritorialization; it doubles the migrant with an accompanying nomad, or with the potential nomad the migrant is in the process of becoming; and finally, it turns its dream of an absolute State back against the State-form.[495] And this turning-against is no less a part of the “essence” of religion than that dream. The history of the Crusades is marked by the most astonishing series of directional changes: the firm orientation toward the Holy Land as a center to reach often seems nothing more than a pretext. But it would be wrong to say that the play of self-interest, or economic, commercial, or political factors, diverted the crusade from its pure path. The idea of the crusade *in itself implies this variability of directions,* broken and changing, and intrinsically possesses all these factors or all these variables from the moment it turns religion into a war machine and simultaneously utilizes and gives rise to the corresponding nomadism.[496] The necessity of maintaining the most rigorous of distinctions between sedentaries, migrants, and nomads does not preclude de facto mixes; on the contrary, it makes them all the more necessary in turn. And it is impossible to think of the general process of sedentarization that vanquished the nomads without also envisioning the gusts of local nomadization that carried off sedentaries and doubled migrants (notably, to the benefit of religion).
Smooth or nomad space lies between two striated spaces: that of the forest, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with its grids and generalized parallels, its now independent arborescence, its art of extracting the tree and wood from the forest. But being “between” also means that smooth space is controlled by these two flanks, which limit it, oppose its development, and assign it as much as possible a communica-tional role; or, on the contrary, it means that it turns against them, gnawing away at the forest on one side, on the other side gaining ground on the cultivated lands, affirming a noncommunicating force or a force of *divergence* like a “wedge” digging in. The nomads turn first against the forest and the mountain dwellers, then descend upon the farmers. What we have here is something like the flipside or the outside of the State-form — but in what sense? This form, as a global and relative space, implies a certain number of components: forest-clearing of fields; agriculture-grid laying; animal raising subordinated to agricultural work and sedentary food production; commerce based on a constellation of town-country *(polis-nomos)* communications. When historians inquire into the reasons for the victory of the West over the Orient, they primarily mention the following characteristics, which put the Orient in general at a disadvantage: deforestation rather than clearing for planting, making it extremely difficult to extract or even to find wood; cultivation of the type “rice paddy and garden” rather than arborescence and field; animal raising for the most part outside the control of the sedentaries, with the result that they lacked animal power and meat foods; the low communication content of the town-country relation, making commerce far less flexible.[497] The conclusion is not that the State-form is absent in the Orient. Quite to the contrary, a more rigid agency becomes necessary in order to retain and reunite the various components plied by escape vectors. States always have the same composition; if there is even one truth in the political philosophy of Hegel, it is that every State carries within itself the essential moments of its existence. States are made up not only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals, and commodities. There is a unity of *composition* of all States, but States have neither the same *development* nor the same *organization.* In the Orient, the components are much more disconnected, disjointed, necessitating a great immutable Form to hold them together: “despotic formations,” Asian or African, are rocked by incessant revolts, by secessions and dynastic changes, which nevertheless do not affect the immutability of the form. In the West, on the other hand, the interconnectedness of the components makes possible transformations of the State-form through revolution. It is true that the idea of revolution itself is ambiguous; it is Western insofar as it relates to a transformation of the State, but Eastern insofar as it envisions the destruction, the abolition of the State.[498] The great empires of the Orient, Africa, and America run up against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their components (the *nomos* does not become countryside, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.): the oriental State is in direct confrontation with a nomad war machine. This war machine may fall back to the road of integration and proceed solely by revolt and dynastic change; nevertheless, it is the war machine, as nomad, that invents the abolitionist dream and reality. Western States are much more sheltered in their striated space and consequently have much more latitude in holding their components together; they confront the nomads only indirectly, through the intermediary of the migrations the nomads trigger or adopt as their stance.[499]
One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior,” over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects. That is why Paul Virilio’s thesis is important, when he shows that “the political power of the State is *polis,* police, that is, management of the public ways,” and that “the gates of the city, its levies and duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the penetration power of migratory packs,” people, animals, and goods.[500] Gravity, *gravitas,* such is the essence of the State. It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a “moved body” going from one point to another in a striated space. In this sense, the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed. The State as town surveyor, converter, or highway interchange: the role of the engineer from this point of view. Speed and absolute movement are not without their laws, but they are the laws of the *nomos,* of the smooth space that deploys it, of the war machine that populates it. If the nomads formed the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being “synonymous” with speed. And each time there is an operation against the State — insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act — it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth (Virilio discusses the impor-
tance of the riot or revolutionary theme of “holding the street”). It is in this sense that the response of the State against all that threatens to move beyond it is to striate space. The State does not appropriate the war machine without giving even it the form of relative movement: this was the case with the model of the *fortress* as a regulator of movement, which was precisely the obstacle the nomads came up against, the stumbling block and parry by which absolute vortical movement was broken. Conversely, when a State does not succeed in striating its interior or neighboring space, the flows traversing that State necessarily adopt the stance of a war machine directed against it, deployed in a hostile or rebellious smooth space (even if other States are able to slip their striations in). This was the adventure of China: toward the end of the fourteenth century, and in spite of its very high level of technology in ships and navigation, it turned its back on its huge maritime space, saw its commercial flows turn against it and ally themselves with piracy, and was unable to react except by a politics of immobility, of the massive restriction of commerce, which only reinforced the connection between commerce and the war machine.[501] The situation is much more complicated than we have let on. The sea is perhaps principal among smooth spaces, the hydraulic model par excellence. But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one attempts were made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed routes, constant directions, relative movements, a whole counterhydraulic of channels and conduits. One of the reasons for the hegemony of the West was the power of its State apparatuses to striate the sea by combining the technologies of the North and the Mediterranean and by annexing the Atlantic. But this undertaking had the most unexpected result: the multiplication of relative movements, the intensification of relative speeds in striated space, ended up reconstituting a smooth space or absolute movement. As Virilio emphasizes, the sea became the place of *the fleet in being,* where one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion. This modern strategy was communicated from the sea to the air, as the new smooth space, but also to the entire Earth considered as desert or sea. As converter and capturer, the State does not just relativize movement, it reimparts absolute movement. It does not just go from the smooth to the striated, it reconstitutes smooth space; it reimparts smooth in the wake of the striated. It is true that this new nomadism accompanies a worldwide war machine whose organization exceeds the State apparatuses and passes into energy, military-industrial, and multinational complexes. We say this as a reminder that smooth space and the form of exteriority do not have an irresistible revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exercise or establishment (for example, the way in which total war and popular war, and even guerrilla warfare, borrow one another’s methods).[502]
*** *PROPOSITION VI.* Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of a war machine.
Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe to assume the presence of a military organization. Is this not the way an army deterritorializes its soldiers? An army is composed of units, companies, and divisions. The Numbers may vary in function, in combination; they may enter into entirely different strategies; but there is always a connection between the Number and the war machine. It is a question not of quantity but of organization or composition. When the State creates armies, it always applies this principle of numerical organization; but all it does is adopt the principle, at the same time as it appropriates the war machine. For so peculiar an idea — the numerical organization of people — came from the nomads. It was the Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to Egypt; and when Moses applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the advice of his nomad father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite, and was done in such a way as to constitute a war machine, the elements of which are described in the biblical book of Numbers. The *nomos* is fundamentally numerical, arithmetic. When Greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab arithmetism, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable to the logos: not that the nomads “do” arithmetic or algebra, but because arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad influenced world.
Up to now we have known three major types of human organization: *lineal, territorial,* and *numerical.* Lineal organization allows us to define so-called primitive societies. Clan lineages are essentially segments in action; they meld and divide, and vary according to the ancestor considered, the tasks, and the circumstances. Of course, number plays an important role in the determination of lineage, or in the creation of new lineages — as does the earth, since a clan segmentarity is doubled by a tribal segmentarity. The earth is before all else the matter upon which the dynamic of lineages is inscribed, and the number, a means of inscription: the lineages write upon the earth and with the number, constituting a kind of “geodesy.” Everything changes with State societies: it is often said that the territorial principle becomes dominant. One could also speak of deterritorialization, since the earth becomes an object, instead of being an active material element in combination with lineage. Property is precisely the deterritorialized relation between the human being and the earth; this is so whether property constitutes a good belonging to the State, superposed upon continuing possession by a lineal community, or whether it itself becomes a good belonging to private individuals constituting a new community. In both cases (and according to the two poles of the State), something like an overcoding of the earth replaces geodesy. Of course, lineages remain very important, and numbers take on their own importance. But what moves to the forefront is a “territorial” organization, in the sense that all the segments, whether of lineage, land, or number, are taken up by *an astronomical space or a geometrical extension* that overcodes them — but certainly not in the same way in the archaic imperial State and in modern States. The archaic State envelops a *spatium* with a summit, a differentiated space with depth and levels, whereas modern States (beginning with the Greek city-state) develop a homogeneous *extensio* with an immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and reversible relations. Not only do the two models, the astronomical and the geometrical, enter into intimate mixes, but even when they are supposedly pure, both imply the subordination of lineages and numbers to this metric power, as it appears either in the *imperial spatium* or in the *political* extension.[503] Arithmetic, the number, has always had a decisive role in the State apparatus: this is so even as early as the imperial bureaucracy, with the three conjoined operations of the census, taxation, and election. It is even truer of modern forms of the State, which in developing utilized all the calculation techniques that were springing up at the border between mathematical science and social technology (there is a whole social calculus at the basis of political economy, demography, the organization of work, etc.). This arithmetic element of the State found its specific power in the treatment of all kinds of matter: primary matters (raw materials), the secondary matter of wrought objects, or the ultimate matter constituted by the human population. Thus the number has always served to gain mastery over matter, to control its variations and movements, in other words, to submit them to the spatiotemporal framework of the State — either the imperial spatium, or the modern extensio.[504] The State has a territorial principle, or a principle of deterritorialization, that links the number to metric magnitudes (taking into account the increasingly complex metrics effecting the overcoding). We do not believe that the conditions of independence or autonomy of the Number are to be found in the State, even though all the factors of its development are present.
The *Numbering Number,* in other words, autonomous arithmetic organization, implies neither a superior degree of abstraction nor very large quantities. It relates only to conditions of possibility constituted by nomadism and to conditions of effectuation constituted by the war machine. It is in State armies that the problem of the treatment of large quantities arises, in relation to other matters; but the war machine operates with small quantities that it treats using numbering numbers. These numbers appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject. The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied without itself being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself that moves through smooth space. There is undoubtedly a geometry of smooth space: but as we have seen, it is a minor, operative geometry, a geometry of the trait. The more independent space is from a metrics, the more independent the number is from space. Geometry as a royal science has little importance for the war machine (its only importance is in State armies, and for sedentary fortification, but it leads generals to serious defeats).[505] The number becomes a principle whenever it occupies a smooth space, and is deployed within it as subject, instead of measuring a striated space. The number is the mobile occupant, the movable *(meuble)* in smooth space, as opposed to the geometry of the immovable *(immeuble)* in striated space. The nomadic numerical unit is the ambulant fire, and not the tent, which is still too much of an immovable: “The fire takes precedence over the yurt.” The numbering number is no longer subordinated to metric determinations or geometrical dimensions, but has only a dynamic relation with geographical directions: it is a directional number, not a dimensional or metric one. Nomad organization is indissolubly arithmetic and directional; quantity is everywhere, tens, hundreds, direction is everywhere, left, right: the numerical chief is also the chief of the left or the right.[506] The numbering number is rhythmic, not harmonic. It is not related to cadence or measure: it is only in State armies, and for reasons of discipline and show, that one marches in cadence; but autonomous numerical organization finds its meaning elsewhere, whenever it is necessary to establish an *order of displacement* on the steppe, the desert — at the point where the lineages of the forest dwellers and the figures of the State lose their relevance. “He moved with the random walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in his passage would [indicate] that human flesh moved there. It was a way of walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn’t need to think about it. The feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their pacing.”[507] In the war machine and nomadic existence, the number is no longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher *(Chiffre),* and it is in this capacity that it constitutes the “esprit de corps” and invents the secret and its outgrowths (strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy, etc.).
A ciphered, rhythmic, directional, autonomous, movable, numbering number: the war machine is like the necessary consequence of nomadic organization (Moses experienced it, with all its consequences). Some people nowadays are too eager to criticize this numerical organization, denouncing it as a military or even concentration-camp society where people are no longer anything more than deterritorialized “numbers.” But that is false. Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people is certainly no cruder than the lineal or State organizations. Treating people like numbers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geometrical figures to shape and model. Moreover, the use of the number as a numeral, as a statistical element, is proper to the numbered number of the State, not to the numbering number. And the world of the concentration camp operates as much by lineages and territories as by numeration. The question is not one of good or bad but of specificity. The specificity of numerical organization rests on the nomadic mode of existence and the war machine function. The numbering number is distinct both from lineal codes and State overcoding. Arithmetic composition, on the one hand, selects, extracts from the lineages the elements that will enter into nomadism and the war machine and, on the other hand, directs them against the State apparatus, opposing a machine and an existence to the State apparatus, drawing a deterritorialization that cuts across both the lineal territorialities and the territory or deterritoriality of the State.
A first characteristic of the numbering, nomadic or war, number is that it is always complex, that is, articulated. A complex of numbers every time. It is exactly for this reason that it in no way implies large, homogenized quantities, like State numbers or the numbered number, but rather produces its effect of immensity by its fine articulation, in other words, by its distribution of heterogeneity in a free space. Even State armies do not do away with this principle when they deal with large numbers (despite the predominance of “base” 10). The Roman legion was a number made up of numbers, articulated in such a way that the segments became mobile, and the figures geometrical, changing, transformational. The complex or articulated number comprises not only men but necessarily weapons, animals, and vehicles. The arithmetic base unit is therefore a unit of assemblage, for example, man-horse-bow, lxl X 1, according to the formula that carried the Scythians to triumph; and the formula becomes more complicated to the extent that certain “weapons” assemble or articulate several men or animals, as in the case of the chariot with two horses and two men, one to drive and the other to throw, 2 X 1 X 2 = 1; or in the case of the famous two-handled shield of the hoplite reform, which soldered together human chains. However small the unit, it is articulated. The numbering number always has several bases at the same time. It is also necessary to take into account arithmetic relations that are external yet still contained in the number, expressing the proportion of combatants among the members of a lineage or tribe, the role of reserves and stocks, the upkeep of people, things, and animals. *Logistics* is the art of these external relations, which are no less a part of the war machine than the internal relations *of strategy,* in other words, the composition of combat units in relation to one another. The two together constitute the science of the articulation of numbers of war. Every assemblage has this strategic aspect and this logistical aspect.
But the numbering number has a second, more secret, characteristic. Everywhere, the war machine displays a curious process of arithmetic replication or doubling, as if it operated along two nonsymmetrical and nonequal series. *On the one hand,* the lineages are indeed organized and reshuffled numerically; a numerical composition is superimposed upon the lineages in order to bring the new principle into predominance. But *on the other hand,* men are simultaneously extracted from each lineage to form a special numerical body — as if the new numerical composition of the lineage-body could not succeed without the constitution of a body proper to it, itself numerical. We believe that this is not an accidental phenomenon but rather an essential constituent of the war machine, a necessary operation for the autonomy of the number: the number of the body must have as its correlate a body of the number; the number must be doubled according to two complementary operations. For the social body to be numerized, the number must form a special body. When Genghis Khan undertook his great composition of the steppe, he numerically organized the lineages, and the fighters in each lineage, placing them under a cipher and a chief (groups of ten with decurions, groups of one hundred with centurions, groups of one thousand with chiliarchs). He also extracted from each arithmetized lineage a small number of men who were to constitute his personal guard, in other words, a dynamic formation comprising a staff, commissars, messengers, and diplomats (“antrustions”).[508] One is never without the other: a double deterritorialization, the second of which is to a higher power. When Moses undertook his great composition of the desert — where the influence he felt from the nomads was necessarily stronger than that of Yahweh — he took a census of each tribe and organized them numerically; he also decreed a law according to which the firstborn of each tribe at that particular time belonged by right to Yahweh. As these firstborn were obviously still too young, their role in the Number was transferred to a special tribe, the Levites, who provided the body of the Number or the special guard of the ark; and as the Levites were less numerous than the new firstborn of the tribes taken together, the excess firstborn had to be bought back by the tribes in the form of taxes (bringing us back to a fundamental aspect of logistics). The war machine would be unable to function without this double series: it is necessary both that numerical composition replace lineal organization and that it conjure away the territorial organization of the State. Power in the war machine is defined according to this double series: power is no longer based on segments and centers, on the potential resonance of centers and overcoding of segments, but on these relations internal to the Number and independent of quantity. Tensions or power struggles are also a result of this: between Moses’ tribes and the Levites, between Genghis’s “noyans” and “antrustions.” This is not simply a protest on the part of lineages wishing to regain their former autonomy; nor is it the prefiguration of a struggle for control over a State apparatus. It is a tension inherent in the war machine, in its special power, and in the particular limitations placed on the power of the “chief.”
Thus numerical composition, or the numbering number, implies several operations: the arithmetization of the starting aggregates or sets (the lineages); the union of the extracted subsets (the constitution of groups often, one hundred, etc.); and the formation by substitution of another set in correspondence with the united set (the special body). It is this last operation that implies the most variety and originality in nomad existence. The same problem arises even in State armies, when the war machine is appropriated by the State. In effect, if the arithmetization of the social body has as its correlate the formation of a distinct special body, itself arithmetic, this special body may be constructed in several ways: (1) from a privileged lineage or tribe, the dominance of which subsequently takes on a new meaning (the case of Moses, with the Levites); (2) from representatives of each lineage, who subsequently serve also as hostages (the firstborn; this would actually be the Asian case, or the case of Genghis); (3) from a totally different element, one exterior to the base society, slaves, foreigners, or people of another religion (this was already the case as early as the Saxon regime, in which the king used Frankish slaves to compose his special body; but Islam is the prime example, even inspiring a specific sociological category, that of “military slavery”: the Mameluks of Egypt, slaves from the steppe or the Caucasus who were purchased at a very early age by the sultan; or the Ottoman Janissaries, who came from Christian communities).[509]
Is this not the origin of an important theme, “the nomads as child stealers”? It is clear, especially in the last example, how the special body is instituted as an element determinant of power in the war machine. The war machine and nomadic existence have to ward off two things simultaneously: a return of the lineal aristocracy and the formation of imperial functionaries. What complicates everything is that the State itself has often been determined in such a way as to use slaves as high functionaries. As we shall see, the reasons for this varied, and although the two currents converged in armies, they came from two distinct sources. For the power of slaves, foreigners, or captives in a war machine of nomadic origin is very different from the power of lineal aristocracies, as well as from that of State functionaries and bureaucrats. They are “commissars,” emissaries, diplomats, spies, strategists, and logisticians, sometimes smiths. They cannot be explained away as a “whim of the sultan.” On the contrary, it is the possibility of the war chief having whims that is explained by the objective existence and necessity of this special numerical body, this Cipher that has value only in relation to a *nomos.* There is both a deterritorialization and a becoming proper to the war machine; the special body, in particular the slave-infidel-foreigner, is the one who *becomes* a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State. You have to be born an infidel to become a believer; you have to be born a slave to become a soldier. Specific schools or institutions are needed for this purpose: the special body is an invention proper to the war machine, which States always utilize, adapting it so totally to their own ends that it becomes unrecognizable, or restituting it in bureaucratic staff form, or in the technocratic form of very special bodies, or in “esprit de corps” that serve the State as much as they resist it, or among the commissars who double the State as much as they serve it.
It is true that the nomads have no history; they only have a geography. And the defeat of the nomads was such, so complete, that history is one with the triumph of States. We have witnessed, as a result, a generalized critique dismissing the nomads as incapable of any innovation, whether technological or metallurgical, political or metaphysical. Historians, bourgeois or Soviet (Grousset or Vladimirtsov), consider the nomads a pitiable segment of humanity that understands nothing: not technology, to which it supposedly remained indifferent; not agriculture, not the cities and States it destroyed or conquered. It is difficult to see, however, how the nomads could have triumphed in war if they did not possess strong metallurgical capabilities (the idea that the nomads received their technical weapons and political counseling from renegades from an imperial State is highly improbable). It is difficult to see how the nomads could have undertaken to destroy cities and States, except in the name of a nomad organization and a war machine defined not by ignorance but by their positive characteristics, by their specific space, by a composition all their own that broke with lineages and warded off the State-form. History has always dismissed the nomads. Attempts have been made to apply a properly military category to the war machine (that of “military democracy”) and a properly sedentary category to nomadism (that of “feudalism”). But these two hypotheses presuppose a territorial principle: either that an imperial State appropriates the war machine, distributing land to warriors as a benefit of their position *(cleroi* and false fiefs), or that property, once it has become private, in itself posits relations of dependence among the property owners constituting the army (true fiefs and vassalage).[510] In both cases, the number is subordinated to an “immobile” fiscal organization, in order to establish which land can be or has been ceded, as well as to set the taxes owed by the beneficiaries themselves. There is no doubt that nomad organization and the war machine deal with these same problems, both the level of land and of taxation (in which the nomadic warriors were great innovators, despite what is said to the contrary). But they invent a territoriality and a “movable” fiscal organization that testify to the autonomy of a numerical principle: there can be a confusion or combination of the systems, but the specificity of the nomadic system remains the subordination of land to numbers that are displaced and deployed, and of taxation to relations internal to those numbers (already with Moses, for example, taxation played a role in the relation between the numerical bodies and the special body of the number). In short, military democracy and feudalism, far from explaining the numerical composition of the nomads, instead testify to what may survive of them in sedentary regimes.
PROPOSITION VII. *Nomad existence has for “affects” the weapons of a war machine.* A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the basis of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). But although this extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a technical object, it does not preclude a general convertibility between the two groups, to the extent that it seems very difficult to propose an intrinsic difference between weapons and tools. The types of percussion, as defined by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, are found on both sides. “For ages on end agricultural implements and weapons of war must have remained identical.”[511] Some have spoken of an “ecosystem,” not only situated at the origin, in which work tools and weapons of war exchange their determinations: it seems that the same *machinicphylum* traverses both. And yet we have the feeling that there are many internal differences, even if they are not intrinsic, in other words, logical or conceptual, and even if they remain approximate. As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon, and propulsion is its essential moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very notion of the “problem” is related to the war machine. The more mechanisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, potentially or simply metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compensating for the projective mechanisms they possess, or else they adapt them to other ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, whether projected or projecting, are only one kind among others; but even handheld weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts. The tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a distance exists in both cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in the other, centripetal. One could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or invented (the counterattack is in fact the precipitating and inventive factor in the war machine, to the extent that it is not simply reducible to a quantitative rivalry or defensive parade).
Second, weapons and tools do not “tendentially” (approximately) have the same relation to movement, to speed. It is yet another essential contribution of Paul Virilio to have stressed this weapon-speed complementarity: the weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed invents the weapon (the projective character of weapons is the result). The war machine releases a vector of speed so specific to it that it needs a special name; it is not only the power of destruction, but “dromocracy” (= *nomos).* Among other advantages, this idea articulates a new mode of distinction between the hunt and war. For it is certain not only that war does not derive from the hunt but also that the hunt does not promote weapons: either war evolved in the sphere of indistinction and convertibility between weapons and tools, or it used to its own advantage weapons already distinguished, already constituted. As Virilio says, war in no way appears when man applies to man the relation of the *hunter* to the animal, but on the contrary when he captures the force of the *hunted* animal and enters an entirely new relation to man, that of war (enemy, no longer prey). It is therefore not surprising that the war machine was the invention of the animal-raising nomads: animal breeding and training are not to be confused either with the primitive hunt or with sedentary domestication, but are in fact the discovery of a projecting and projectile system. Rather than operating by blow-by-blow violence, or constituting a violence “once and for all,” the war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an entire economy of violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable, even unlimited. “Bloodletting, immediate killing, run contrary to the unlimited usage of violence, that is, to its economy…. *The economy of violence is not that of the hunter in the animal raiser, but that of the hunted animal.* In horseback riding, one conserves the kinetic energy, the speed of the horse, and no longer its proteins (the motor, and no longer the flesh).… Whereas in the hunt the hunter’s aim was to arrest the movement of wild animality through systematic slaughter, the animal breeder [sets about] conserving it, and, by means of training, the rider joins with this movement, orienting it and provoking its acceleration.” The technological motor would develop this tendency further, but “horseback riding was the first projector of the warrior, his first system of arms.”[512] Whence becoming-animal in the war machine. Does this mean that the war machine did not exist before horseback riding and the cavalry? That is not the issue. The issue is that the war machine implies the release of a Speed vector that becomes a free or independent variable; this does not occur in the hunt, where speed is associated primarily with the hunted animal. It is possible for this race vector to be released in an infantry, without recourse to horseback riding; it is possible, moreover, for there to be horseback riding, but as a means of transportation or even of portage having nothing to do with the free vector. In any event, what the warrior borrows from the animal is more the idea of the motor than the model of the prey. He does not generalize the idea of the prey by applying it to the enemy; he abstracts the idea of the motor, applying it to himself.
Two objections immediately arise. According to the first, the war machine possesses as much weight and gravity as it does speed (the distinction between the heavy and the light, the dissymmetry between defense and attack, the opposition between rest and tension). But it would be easy to demonstrate that phenomena of “temporization,” and even of immobility and catatonia, so important in wars, relate in certain cases to a component of pure speed. And the rest of the time, they relate to the conditions under which State apparatuses appropriate the war machine, notably by arranging a striated space where opposing forces can come to an equilibrium. It can happen that speed is abstracted as the property of a projectile, a bullet or artillery shell, which condemns the weapon itself, and the soldier, to immobility (for example, immobility in the First World War). But an equilibrium of forces is a phenomenon of resistance, whereas the counterattack implies a rush or change of speed that breaks the equilibrium: it was the tank that regrouped all of the operations in the speed vector and recreated a smooth space for movement by uprooting men and arms.[513]
The opposite objection is more complex: it is that speed does indeed seem to be as much a part of the tool as of the weapon, and is no way specific to the war machine. The history of the motor is not only military. But perhaps there is too much of a tendency to think in terms of quantities of movement, instead of seeking qualitative models. The two ideal models of the motor are those of work and *free action.* Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next. Whatever its measure or degree, speed is relative in the first case, absolute in the second (the idea of a *perpetuum mobile).* In work, what counts is the point of application of a resultant force exerted by the weight of a body considered as “one” (gravity), and the relative displacement of this point of application. In free action, what counts is the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy absolutely a nonpunctuated space. Weapons and weapon handling seem to be linked to a free-action model, and tools to a work model. Linear displacement, from one point to another, constitutes the relative movement of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation of a space that constitutes the absolute movement of the weapon. It is as though the weapon were moving, self-propelling, while the tool is moved. This link between tools and work remains obscured unless work receives the motor, or real, definition we have just given it. The tool does not define work; just the opposite. The tool presupposes work. It must be added that weapons, also, obviously imply a renewal of the cause, an expending or even disappearance in the effect, the encountering of external resistances, a displacement of force, etc. It would be futile to credit weapons with a magical power in contrast to the constraints of tools: weapons and tools are subject to the same laws, which define, precisely, their common sphere. But the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an *assemblage* it presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.
It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the *phylum* selects, qualifies, and even invents the technical elements. Thus one cannot speak of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they presuppose and enter into. This is what we meant when we said that weapons and tools are not merely distinguished from one another in an extrinsic manner, and yet they have no distinctive intrinsic characteristics. They have internal (and not intrinsic) characteristics relating to the respective assemblages with which they are associated. What effectuates a free-action model is not the weapons in themselves and in their physical aspect but the “war machine” assemblage as formal cause of the weapons. And what effectuates the work model is not the tools but the “work machine” assemblage as formal cause of the tools. When we say that the weapon is inseparable from a speed vector, while the tool remains tied to conditions of gravity, we are claiming only to signal a difference between two types of assemblage, a distinction that holds even if in the assemblage proper to it the tool is abstractly “faster,” and the weapon abstractly “weightier.” The tool is essentially tied to a genesis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force whose laws reside in work, while the weapon concerns only the exercise or manifestation of force in space and time, in conformity with free action. The weapon does not fall from the sky, and obviously assumes production, displacement, expenditure, and resistance. But this aspect relates to the common sphere of the weapon and the tool, and does not yet concern the specificity of the weapon, which appears only when force is considered in itself, when it is no longer tied to anything but the number, movement, space, or time, or *when speed is added to displacement.*[514] Concretely, a weapon as such relates not to the Work model but to the Free-Action model, with the assumption that the conditions of work are fulfilled elsewhere. In short, from the point of view of force, the tool is tied to a gravity-displacement, weight-height system, and the weapon to a *speed-perpetuum mobile* system (it is in this sense that it can be said that speed in itself is a “weapons system”).
The very general primacy of the collective and machinic assemblage over the technical element applies generally, for tools as for weapons. Weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences. It has often been remarked that a weapon is nothing outside of the combat organization it is bound up with. For example, “hoplite” weapons existed only by virtue of the phalanx as a mutation of the war machine: the only new weapon at the time, the two-handled shield, was created by this assemblage; the other weapons were preexistent, but in other combinations where they had a different function, a different nature.[515] It is always the assemblage that constitutes the weapons system. The lance and the sword came into being in the Bronze Age only by virtue of the man-horse assemblage, which caused a lengthening of the dagger and pike, and made the first infantry weapons, the morning star and the battle-ax, obsolete. The stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new figure of the man-horse assemblage, entailing a new type of lance and new weapons; and this man-horse-stirrup constellation is itself variable, and has different effects depending on whether it is bound up with the general conditions of nomadism, or later readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism. The situation is exactly the same for the tool: once again, everything depends on an organization of work, and variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing. Thus the heavy plow exists as a specific tool only in a constellation where “long open fields” predominate, where the horse tends to replace the ox as draft animal, where the land begins to undergo triennial rotation, and where the economy becomes communal. Beforehand, the heavy plow may well have existed, but on the margins of other assemblages that did not bring out its specificity, that left unexploited its differential character with the scratch plow.[516]
Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the efficiency, of an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them. Detienne has shown that the Greek phalanx was inseparable from a whole reversal of values, and from a passional mutation that drastically changed the relations between desire and the war machine. It is a case of man dismounting from the horse, and of the man-animal relation being replaced by a relation between men in an infantry assemblage that paves the way for the advent of the peasant-soldier, the citizen-soldier: the entire Eros of war changes, a group homosexual Eros tends to replace the zoosexual Eros of the horseman. Undoubtedly, whenever a State appropriates the war machine, it tends to assimilate the education of the citizen to the training of the worker to the apprenticeship of the soldier. But if it is true that all assemblages are assemblages of desire, the question is whether the assemblages of war and work, considered in themselves, do not fundamentally mobilize passions of different orders. Passions are effectuations of desire that differ according to the assemblage: it is not the same justice or the same cruelty, the same pity, etc. The work regime is inseparable from an organization and a development of Form, corresponding to which is the formation of the subject. This is the passional regime of feeling as “the form of the worker.” Feeling implies an evaluation of matter and its resistances, a direction *(sens,* also “meaning”) to form and its developments, an economy of force and its displacements, an entire gravity. But the regime of the war machine is on the contrary that *of affects,* which relate only to the moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among elements. Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools. There is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in mythology but also in the *chanson degeste,* and the chivalric novel or novel of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons. From this standpoint, the most absolute immobility, pure catatonia, is a part of the speed vector, is carried by this vector, which links the petrification of the act to the precipitation of movement. The knight sleeps on his mount, then departs like an arrow. Kleist is the author who best integrated these sudden catatonic fits, swoons, suspenses, with the utmost speeds of a war machine. He presents us with a becoming-weapon of the technical element simultaneous to a becoming-affect of the passional element (the Penthesilea equation). The martial arts have always subordinated weapons to speed, and above all to mental (absolute) speed; for this reason, they are also the arts of suspense and immobility. The affect passes through both extremes. Thus the martial arts do not adhere to a *code,* as an affair of the State, but follow *ways,* which are so many paths of the affect; upon these ways, one learns to “unuse” weapons as much as one learns to use them, as if the power and cultivation of the affect were the true goal of the assemblage, the weapon being only a provisory means. Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the “not-doing” of the warrior, the undoing of the subject. A movement of decoding runs through the war machine, while overcoding solders the tool to an organization of work and of the State (the tool is never unlearned; one can only compensate for its absence). It is true that the martial arts continually invoke the center of gravity and the rules for its displacement. That is because these ways are not the ultimate ones. However far they go, they are still in the domain of Being, and only translate absolute movements of another nature into the common space — those effectuated in the Void, not in nothingness, but in the smooth of the void where there is no longer any goal: attacks, counterattacks, and headlong plunges.[517]
Still from the standpoint of the assemblage, there is an essential relation between tools and signs. That is because the work model that defines the tool belongs to the State apparatus. It has often been said that people in primitive societies do not, strictly speaking, work, even if their activities are very constrained and regulated; and the man of war, in his capacity as a man of war, does not work either (the “labors” of Hercules assume submission to a king). The technical element becomes a tool when it is abstracted from the territory and is applied to the earth as an object; but at the same time, the sign ceases to be inscribed upon the body and is written upon an immobile, objective matter. For there to be work, there must be a capture of activity by the State apparatus, and a semiotization of activity by writing. Hence the affinity between the assemblages signs-tools, and signs of writing-organization of work. Entirely different is the case of the weapon, which is in an essential relation with jewelry. Jewelry has undergone so many secondary adaptations that we no longer have a clear understanding of what it is. But something lights up in our mind when we are told that metalworking was the “barbarian,” or nomad, art par excellence, and when we see these masterpieces of minor art. These fibulas, these gold or silver plaques, these pieces of jewelry, are attached to small movable objects; they are not only easy to transport, but pertain to the object only as object in motion. These plaques constitute traits of expression of pure speed, carried on objects that are themselves mobile and moving. The relation between them is not that of form-matter but of motif-support, where the earth is no longer anything more than ground *(sol),* where there is no longer even any ground at all because the support is as mobile as the motif. They lend colors the speed of light, turning gold to red and silver to white light. They are attached to the horse’s harness, the sheath of the sword, the warrior’s garments, the handle of the weapon; they even decorate things used only once, such as arrowheads. Regardless of the effort or toil they imply, they are of the order of free action, related to pure mobility, and not of the order of work with its conditions of gravity, resistance, and expenditure. The ambulant smith links metalworking to the weapon, and vice versa. Gold and silver have taken on many other functions but cannot be understood apart from this nomadic contribution made by the war machine, in which they are not matters but traits of expression appropriate to weapons (the whole mythology of war not only subsists in money but is the active factor in it). Jewels are the affects corresponding to weapons, that are swept up by the same speed vector.
Metalworking, jewelry making, ornamentation, even decoration, do not form a writing, even though they have a power of abstraction that is in every way equal to that of writing. But this power is assembled differently. In the case of writing, the nomads had no need to create their own system; they borrowed that of their sedentary imperial neighbors, who even furnished them with a phonetic transcription of their languages.[518] “The goldsmith’s and silversmith’s is the barbarian art par excellence; filigree and gold and silver plating… . Scythian art, tied as it was to a nomadic and warlike economy that both used and repudiated a commerce reserved for foreigners, now moved toward this luxurious and decorative type of work. The barbarians… did not need to possess or create a precise code, such as for instance an elementary picto-ideographic one — still less a syllabic writing of their own, which would indeed have had to compete with the ones in use among their more advanced neighbors. Toward the fourth and third centuries B.C. the Scythian art of the Black Sea region thus tends naturally toward a graphic schematization of its forms, which makes them more of a linear ornamentation than a proto-writing.”[519] Of course, one may write on jewelry, metal plaques, or even weapons, but only in the sense that one applies a preexisting writing system to these matters. The case *of runic writing* is more troubling because its origins seem exclusively tied to jewelry, fibulas, elements of metalworking, small movable objects. The point is that in its early period runic writing had only a weak communication value and a very restricted public function. Its secret character has led many to interpret it as magical writing. Rather, it is an affective semiotic, comprising in particular: (1) signatures, as marks of possession or fabrication, and
(2) short war or love messages. It constitutes a text that is “ornamental” rather than scriptural, “an invention with little utility, half-aborted,” a substitute writing. It only takes on the value of writing during a second period, when monumental inscriptions appear, with the Danish reform of the ninth century A.D., in connection with the State and work.[520]
It may be objected that tools, weapons, signs, and jewelry in fact occur everywhere, in a common sphere. But that is not the problem, any more than it is to seek an origin in each case. It is a question of assigning assemblages, in other words, of determining the *differential traits* according to which an element formally belongs to one assemblage rather than to another. It could also be said that architecture and cooking have an apparent affinity with the State, whereas music and drugs have differential traits that place them on the side of the nomadic war machine.[521] *It is therefore a differential method that establishes the distinction between weapons and tools,* from at least five points of view: the direction *(sens)* (projection-introception), the vector (speed-gravity), the model (free action-work), the expression (jewelry-signs), and the passional or desiring tonality (affect-feeling). Doubtless the State apparatus tends to bring uniformity to the regimes, by disciplining its armies, by making work a fundamental unit, in other words, by imposing its own traits. But it is not impossible for weapons and tools, if they are taken up by new assemblages of metamorphosis, to enter other relations of alliance. The man of war may at times form peasant or worker alliances, but it is more frequent for a worker, industrial or agricultural, to reinvent a war machine. Peasants made an important contribution to the history of artillery during the Hussite wars, when Zizka armed mobile fortresses made from oxcarts with portable cannons. A worker-soldier, weapon-tool, sentiment-affect affinity marks the right time, however fleeting, for revolutions and popular wars. There is a schizophrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and toward free action, a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace, for obtaining peace. A counterattack and a resistance simultaneously. Everything is ambiguous. But we do not believe that Ernst Junger’s analyses are disqualified by this ambiguity when he portrays the “Rebel” as a transhistorical figure drawing the Worker, on the one hand, and the Soldier, on the other, down a shared line of flight where one says simultaneously “I seek a weapon” and “I am looking for a tool”: Draw the line, or what amounts to the same thing, cross the line, pass over the line, for the line is only drawn by surpassing the line of separation.[522] Undoubtedly, nothing is more outmoded than the man of war: he has long since been transformed into an entirely different character, the military man. And the worker himself has undergone so many misadventures … And yet men of war reappear, with many ambiguities: they are all those who know the use-lessness of violence but who are adjacent to a war machine to be recreated, one of active, revolutionary counterattacks. Workers also reappear who do not believe in work but who are adjacent to a work machine to be recreated, one of active resistance and technological liberation. They do not resuscitate old myths or archaic figures; they are the new figures of a transhistorical assemblage (neither historical nor eternal, but untimely): the nomad warrior and the ambulant worker. A somber caricature already precedes them, the mercenary or mobile military adviser, and the technocrat or transhumant analyst, CIA and IBM. But transhistorical figures must defend themselves as much against old myths as against preestablished, anticipatory disfigurations. “One does not go back to reconquer the myth, one encounters it anew, when time quakes at its foundations under the empire of extreme danger.” Martial arts and state-of-the-art technologies have value only because they create the possibility of bringing together worker and warrior masses of a new type. The shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility, a mutation. There arise subterranean, aerial, submarine technicians who belong more or less to the world order, but who involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowledge and action that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for new assemblages. The borrowings between warfare and the military apparatus, work and free action, always run in both directions, for a struggle that is all the more varied.
*** *PROBLEM VII.* How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?
*** *PROPOSITION VIII.* Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism.
The political, economic, and social regime of the peoples of the steppe are less well known than their innovations in war, in the areas of offensive and defensive weapons, composition or strategy, and technological elements (the saddle, stirrup, horseshoe, harness, etc.). History contests each innovation but cannot succeed in effacing the nomad traces. What the nomads invented was the man-animal-weapon, man-horse-bow assemblage. Through this assemblage of speed, the ages of metal are marked by innovation. The socketed bronze battle-ax of the Hyksos and the iron sword of the Hittites have been compared to miniature atomic bombs. It has been possible to establish a rather precise periodization of the weapons of the steppe, showing the alternation between heavy and light armament (the Scythian type and the Sarmatian type), and their mixed forms. The cast steel saber, often short and curved, a weapon for side attack with the edge of the blade, envelops a different dynamic space than the forged iron sword used for frontal attack with the point: it was the Scythians who brought it to India and Persia, where the Arabs would later acquire it. It is commonly agreed that the nomads lost their role as innovators with the advent of firearms, in particular the cannon (“gunpowder overtook them”). But it was not necessarily because they did not know how to use them. Not only did armies like the Turkish army, whose nomadic traditions remained strong, develop extensive firepower, a new space, but additionally, and even more characteristically, light artillery was thoroughly integrated into mobile formations of wagons, pirate ships, etc. If the cannon marks a limit for the nomads, it is on the contrary because it implies an economic investment that only a State apparatus can make (even commercial cities do not suffice). The fact remains that for weapons other than firearms, and even for the cannon, there is always a nomad on the horizon of a given *technological lineage*.[523]
Obviously, each case is controversial, as demonstrated by the debates on the stirrup.[524] The problem is that it is generally difficult to distinguish between what comes from the nomads as such, and what they receive from the empire they communicate with, conquer, or integrate with. There are so many gray areas, intermediaries, and combinations between an imperial army and a nomad war machine that it is often the case that things originate in the empire. The example of the saber is typical, and unlike the stirrup, there is no longer any doubt. Although it is true that the Scythians were the propagators of the saber, introducing it to the Hindus, Persians, and Arabs, they were also its first victims, they started off on the receiving end; it was invented by the Chinese empire of the Ch’in and Han dynasties, the exclusive master of steel casting or crucible steel.[525] This is a good example to illustrate the difficulties facing modern archaeologists and historians. Even archaeologists are not immune from a certain hatred or contempt for the nomads. In the case of the saber, where the facts already speak sufficiently in favor of an imperial origin, the best of the commentators finds it fitting to add that the Scythians could not have invented it at any rate — poor nomads that they were — and that crucible steel necessarily came from a sedentary milieu. But why follow the very old, official Chinese version according to which deserters from the imperial army revealed the secrets to the Scythians? And what can “revealing the secret” mean if the Scythians were incapable of putting it to use, and understood nothing of all that? Blame the deserters, why don’t you. You don’t make an atomic bomb with a secret, any more than you make a saber if you are incapable of reproducing it, and of integrating it under different conditions, of transferring it to other assemblages. Propagation and diffusion are fully a part of the line of innovation; they mark a bend in it. On top of that, why say that crucible steel is necessarily the property of sedentaries or imperial subjects, when it is first of all the invention of metallurgists? It is assumed that these metallurgists were necessarily controlled by a State apparatus; but they also had to enjoy a certain technological autonomy, and social clandestinity, so that, even controlled, they did not belong to the State any more than they were themselves nomads. There were no deserters who betrayed the secret, but rather metallurgists who communicated it and made its adaptation and propagation possible: an entirely different kind of “betrayal.” In the last analysis, what makes the discussions so difficult (both in the controversial case of the stirrup and in the definite case of the saber) are not only the prejudices about the nomads but also the absence of a sufficiently elaborated concept of the technological lineage (what defines a *technological line or continuum,* and its variable extension, from a given standpoint?).
It would be useless to say that metallurgy is a science because it discovers constant laws, for example, the melting point of a metal at all times and in all places. For metallurgy is inseparable from several lines of variation: variation between meteorites and indigenous metals; variation between ores and proportions of metal; variation between alloys, natural and artificial; variation between the operations performed upon a metal; variation between the qualities that make a given operation possible, or that result from a given operation (for example, twelve varieties of copper identified and inventoried at Sumer by place of origin and degree of refinement).[526] All of these variables can be grouped under two overall rubrics: *singularities or spatiotemporal haecceities* of different orders, and the operations associated with them as processes of deformation or transformation; *affective qualities or traits ofexpression* of different levels, corresponding to these singularities and operations (hardness, weight, color, etc.). Let us return to the example of the saber, or rather of crucible steel. It implies the actualization of a first singularity, namely, the melting of the iron at high temperature; then a second singularity, the successive decarbonations; corresponding to these singularities are traits of expression — not only the hardness, sharpness, and finish, but also the undulations or designs traced by the crystallization and resulting from the internal structure of the cast steel. The iron sword is associated with entirely different singularities because it is forged and not cast or molded, quenched and not air cooled, produced by the piece and not in number; its traits of expression are necessarily very different because it pierces rather than hews, attacks from the front rather than from the side; even the expressive designs are obtained in an entirely different way, by inlay.[527] We may speak of a *machinic phylum,* or technological lineage, wherever we find *a constellation of singularities, prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression.* If the singularities or operations diverge, in different materials or in the same material, we must distinguish two different phyla: this is precisely the case for the iron sword, descended from the dagger, and the steel saber, descended from the knife. Each phylum has its own singularities and operations, its own qualities and traits, which determine the relation of desire to the technical element (the affects the saber “has” are not the same as those of the sword). But it is always possible to situate the analysis on the level of singularities that are prolongable from one phylum to another, and to tie the two phyla together. At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as natural: it is like the unity of human beings and Nature. But at the same time, it is not realized in the here and now without dividing, differentiating. We will call an *assemblage* every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow — selected, organized, stratified — in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense, is a veritable invention. Assemblages may group themselves into extremely vast constellations constituting “cultures,” or even “ages”; within these constellations, the assemblages still differentiate the phyla or the flow, dividing it into so many different phylas, of a given order, on a given level, and introducing selective discontinuities in the ideal continuity of matter-movement. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct, differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts across them all, taking leave of one to pick up again in another, or making them coexist. A certain singularity embedded in the flanks of the phylum, for example, the chemistry of carbon, will be brought up to the surface by a given assemblage that selects, organizes, invents it, and through which all or part of the phylum passes, at a given place at a given time. We may distinguish in every case a number of very different lines. Some of them, phylogenetic lines, travel long distances between assemblages of various ages and cultures (from the blowgun to the cannon? from the prayer wheel to the propeller? from the pot to the motor?); others, ontogenetic lines, are internal to one assemblage and link up its various elements or else cause one element to pass, often after a delay, into another assemblage of a different nature but of the same culture or age (for example, the horseshoe, which spread through agricultural assemblages). It is thus necessary to take into account the selective action of the assemblages upon the phylum, and the evolutionary reaction of the phylum as the subterranean thread that passes from one assemblage to another, or quits an assemblage, draws it forward and opens it up. *Vital impulse!* Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as the model for technical evolution: a *Universal Tendency,* laden with all of the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents.[528] There is indeed a machinic phylum in variation that creates the technical assemblages, whereas the assemblages invent the various phyla. A technological lineage changes significantly according to whether one draws it upon the phylum or inscribes it in the assemblages; but the two are inseparable.
So how are we to define this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this matter-flow, this matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them? It is a destratified, deterritorialized matter. It seems to us that Husserl brought thought a decisive step forward when he discovered a region of *vague and material* essences (in other words, essences that are vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed, metric and formal, essences. We have seen that these vague essences are as distinct from formed things as they are from formal essences. They constitute fuzzy aggregates. They relate to a *corporeality* (materiality) that is not to be confused either with an intelligible, formal essentiality or a sensible, formed and perceived, thinghood. This corporeality has two characteristics: on the one hand, it is inseparable from passages to the limit as changes of state, from processes of deformation or transformation that operate in a space-time itself anexact and that act in the manner of events (ablation, adjunction, projection …); on the other hand, it is inseparable from expressive or intensive qualities, which can be higher or lower in degree, and are produced in the manner of variable affects (resistance, hardness, weight, color …)• There is thus an ambulant coupling, *events-affects,* which constitutes the vague corporeal essence and is distinct from the sedentary linkage, “fixed essence-properties of the thing deriving from the essence,” “formal essence-formed thing.” Doubtless Husserl had a tendency to make the vague essence a kind of intermediary between the essence and the sensible, between the thing and the concept, a little like the Kantian schema. Is not roundness a schematic or vague essence, intermediary between rounded sensible things and the conceptual essence of the circle? In effect, roundness exists only as a threshold-affect (neither flat nor pointed) and as a limit-process (becoming rounded), through sensible things and technical agents, millstone, lathe, wheel, spinning wheel socket, etc. But it is only “intermediary” to the extent that what is intermediary is autonomous, initially stretching *itself* between things, and between thoughts, to establish a whole new relation between thoughts and things, a *vague* identity between the two.
Certain distinctions proposed by Simondon can be compared to those of Husserl. For Simondon exposes the technological insufficiency of the matter-form model, in that it assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed homogeneous. It is the idea of the law that assures the model’s coherence, since laws are what submit matter to this or that form, and conversely, realize in matter a given property deduced from the form. But Simondon demonstrates that the *hylomorphic* model leaves many things, active and affective, by the wayside. On the one hand, to the formed or formable matter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying *singularities* or *haecceities* that are already like implicit forms that are topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of deformation: for example, the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. On the other hand, to the essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must add *variable intensive affects,* now resulting from the operation, now on the contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous, more or less elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a *nomos.* One addresses less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter than material traits of expression constituting affects. Of course, it is always possible to ” translate” into a model that which escapes the model; thus, one may link the materiality’s power of variation to laws adapting a fixed form and a constant matter to one another. But this cannot be done without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables form the state of continuous variation, in order to extract from them fixed points and constant relations. Thus one throws the variables off, even changing the nature of the equations, which cease to be immanent to matter-movement (inequations, adequations). The question is not whether such a translation is conceptually legitimate — it is — but what intuition gets lost in it. In short, what Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model for is taking form and matter to be two terms defined separately, like the ends of two half-chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of molding behind which there is a perpetually variable, continuous modulation that it is no longer possible to grasp.[529] The critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on “the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension,” of energetic, molecular dimension — a space unto itself that deploys its materiality through matter, a number unto itself that propels its traits through form.
We always get back to this definition: the *machinic phylum* is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only *he followed.* Doubtless, the operation that consists in following can be carried out in one place: an artisan who planes follows the wood, the fibers of the wood, without changing location. But this way of following is only one particular sequence in a more general process. For artisans are obliged to follow in another way as well, in other words, to go find the wood where it lies, and to find the wood with the right kind of fibers. Otherwise, they must have it brought to them: it is only because merchants take care of one segment of the journey in reverse that the artisans can avoid making the trip themselves. But artisans are complete only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to make “workers” of them. We will therefore define the artisan as one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, a *machinic phylum.* The artisan is *the itinerant, the ambulant.* To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action. Of course, there are second-order itinerancies where it is no longer a flow of matter that one prospects and follows, but, for example, a market. Nevertheless, it is always a flow that is followed, even if the flow is not always that of matter. And, above all, there are secondary itinerancies, which derive from another “condition,” even if they are necessarily entailed by it. For example, a *transhumant,* whether a farmer or an animal raiser, changes land after it is worn out, or else seasonally; but transhumants only secondarily follow a land flow, because they undertake a rotation meant from the start to return them to the point from which they left, after the forest has regenerated, the land has rested, the weather has changed. Transhumants do not follow a flow, they draw a circuit; they only follow the part of the flow that enters into the circuit, even an ever-widening one. Transhumants are therefore itinerant only consequentially, or become itinerant only when their circuit of land or pasture has been exhausted, or when the rotation has become so wide that the flows escape the circuit. Even the merchant is a transhumant, to the extent that mercantile flows are subordinated to the rotation between a point of departure and a point of arrival (go get-bring back, import-export, buy-sell). Whatever the reciprocal implications, there are considerable differences between a flow and a circuit. The *migrant,* we have seen, is something else again. And the *nomad* is not primarily defined as an *itinerant* or as a *transhumant,* nor as a *migrant,* even though nomads become these consequentially. The primary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold a smooth space: it is this aspect that determines them as nomad (essence). On their own account, they will be transhumants, or itinerants, only by virtue of the imperatives imposed by the smooth spaces. In short, whatever the de facto mixes between nomadism, itinerancy, and transhumance, the primary concept is different in the three cases (smooth space, matter-flow, rotation). It is only on the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judgment on the mix — on when it is produced, on the form in which it is produced, and on the order in which it is produced.
But in the course of the preceding discussion, we have wandered from the question: Why is the *machinic phylum,* the flow of matter, essentially metallic or metallurgical? Here again, it is only the distinct concept that can give us an answer, in that it shows that there is a special, primary relation between itinerance and metallurgy (deterritorialization). However, the examples we took from Husserl and Simondon concerned wood and clay as well as metals. Besides, are there not flows of grass, water, herds, which form so many phyla or matters in movement? It is easier for us to answer these questions now. For it is as if metal and metallurgy imposed upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried in the other matters and operations. The difference is that elsewhere the operations occur between two thresholds, one of which constitutes the matter prepared for the operation, and the other the form to be incarnated (for example, the clay and the mold). The hylomorphic model derives its general value from this, since the incarnated form that marks the end of an operation can serve as the matter for a new operation, but in a fixed order marking a succession of thresholds. In metallurgy, on the other hand, the operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deformation or transformation overspills the form.[530] For example, quenching follows forging and takes place after the form has been fixed. Or, to take another example, in molding, the metallurgist in a sense works inside the mold. Or again, steel that is melted and molded later undergoes a series of successive decarbonations. Finally, metallurgy has the option of melting down and reusing a matter to which it gives an *ingot-form:* the history of metal is inseparable from this very particular form, which is not to be confused with either a stock or a commodity; monetary value derives from it. More generally, the metallurgical idea of the “reducer” expresses this double liberation of a materiality in relation to a prepared matter, and of a transformation in relation to the form to be incarnated. Matter and form have never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous variation. If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy; the musical smith was the first “transformer.”[531] In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter. The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device. And thought is born more from metal than from stone: metallurgy is minor science in person, “vague” science or the phenomenology of matter. The prodigious idea *of Nonorganic Life* — the very same idea Worringer considered the barbarian idea par excellence[532] — was the invention, the intuition of metallurgy. Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a *body* without organs. The “Northern, or Gothic, line” is above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body. The relation between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it.
The first and primary itinerant is the artisan. But artisans are neither hunters, farmers, nor animal raisers. Neither are they winnowers or potters, who only secondarily take up craft activity. Rather, artisans are those who follow the matter-flow as pure productivity: therefore in mineral form, and not in vegetable or animal form. They are not of the land, or of the soil, but of the subsoil. Because metal is the pure productivity of matter, those who follow metal are producers of objects par excellence. As demonstrated by V. Gordon Childe, the metallurgist is the first specialized artisan, and in this respect forms a collective *body* (secret societies, guilds, journeymen’s associations). Artisans-metallurgists are itinerants because they follow the matter-flow of the subsoil. Of course metallurgists have relations with “the others,” those of the soil, land, and sky. They have relations with the farmers of the sedentary communities, and with the celestial functionaries of the empire who overcode those communities; in fact, they need them to survive, they depend on an imperial agricultural stockpile for their very sustenance.[533] But in their work, they have relations with the forest dwellers, and partially depend on them: they must establish their workshops near the forest in order to obtain the necessary charcoal. In their space, they have relations with the nomads, since the subsoil unites the ground *(sol)* of smooth space and the land of striated space: there are no mines in the alluvial valleys of the empire-dominated farmers; it is necessary to cross deserts, approach the mountains; and the question of control over the mines always involves nomadic peoples. *Every mine is a line of flight* that is in communication with smooth spaces — there are parallels today in the problems with oil.
Archaeology and history remain strangely silent on this question of the control over the mines. There have been empires with a strong metallurgical organization that had no mines; the Near East lacked tin, so necessary for the fabrication of bronze. Large quantities of metal arrived in ingot form, and from very far away (for instance, tin from Spain or even from Cornwall). So complex a situation implies not only a strong imperial bureaucracy and elaborate long-distance commercial circuits; it also implies a shifting politics, in which States confront an outside, in which very different peoples confront one another, or else reach some accommodation on particular aspects of the control of mines (extraction, charcoal, workshops, transportation). It is not enough to say that there are wars and mining expeditions; or to invoke “a Eurasian synthesis of the nomadic workshops from the approaches of China to the tip of Britanny,” and remark that “the nomadic populations had been in contact with the principal metallurgical centers of the ancient world since prehistoric times.”[534] What is needed is a better knowledge of the nomads’ relations with these centers, with the smiths they themselves employed or frequented, with properly metallurgical peoples or groups who were their neighbors. What was the situation in the Caucasus and in the Altai? In Spain and North Africa? Mines are a source of flow, mixture, and escape with few equivalents in history. Even when they are well controlled by an empire that owns them (as in the Chinese and Roman empires), there is a major movement of clandestine exploitation, and of miners’ alliances either with nomad and barbarian incursions or peasant revolts. The study of myths, and even ethnographic considerations on the status of smiths, divert us from these political questions. Mythology and ethnology do not have the right method in this regard. It is too often asked how *the others* “react” to the smith, and as a result, one succumbs to the usual platitudes about the ambivalence of *feelings;* it is said that the smith is simultaneously honored, feared, and scorned — more or less scorned among the nomads, more or less honored among the sedentaries.[535] But this loses sight of the reasons for this situation, of the specificity of the smiths themselves, of the nonsymmetrical relation they entertain with the nomads and the sedentaries, the type of *affects* they invent (metallic affect). Before looking at the feelings of others toward smiths, it is necessary to evaluate the smiths themselves as Other; as such, they have different affective relations with the sedentaries and the nomads.
There are no nomadic or sedentary smiths. Smiths are ambulant, itinerant. Particularly important in this respect is the way in which smiths live: their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth space of the nomad. Smiths may have a tent, they may have a house; they inhabit them in the manner of an “ore bed” (gite, shelter, home, mineral deposit), like metal itself, in the manner of a cave or a hole, a hut half or all underground. They are cave dwellers not by nature but by artistry and need.[536] A splendid text by Elie Faure evokes the infernal progress of the itinerant peoples of India as they bore holes in space and create the fantastic forms corresponding to these breakthroughs, the vital forms of nonorganic life: “There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain, they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite; in its shadows they lived, loved, worked, died, were born, and, three or four centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hollowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or charming figures.… Here man confesses unresistingly his strength and his nothingness. He does not exact the affirmation of a determined ideal from form…. He extracts it rough from formlessness, according to the dictates of the formless. He utilizes the indentations and accidents of the rock.”[537] Metallurgical India. Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the earth into swiss cheese. An image from the film *Strike* [by Eisenstein] presents a holey space where a disturbing group of people are rising, each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field mined in all directions. The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign of the subsoil, passing through both the striated land of sedentary space and the nomadic ground *(sot)* of smooth space without stopping at either one, the vagabond sign of itinerancy, the double theft and double betrayal of the metallurgist, who shuns agriculture at the same time as animal raising. Must we reserve the name Cainite for these metallurgical peoples who haunt the depths of History? Prehistoric Europe was crisscrossed by the *battle-ax people,* who came in off the steppes like a detached metallic branch of the nomads, and the people known for their bell-shaped pottery, the *beaker people,* originating in Andalusia, a detached branch of mega-lithic agriculture.[538] Strange peoples, dolicocephalics and brachycephalics who mix and spread across all of Europe. Are they the ones who kept up the mines, boring holes in European space from every direction, constituting our European space?
[[g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-a-thousand-plate-21.jpg][Holey Space]]
Smiths are not nomadic among the nomads and sedentary among the sedentaries, nor half-nomadic among the nomads, half-sedentary among sedentaries. Their relation to others results from their internal itinerancy, from their vague essence, and not the reverse. It is in their specificity, it is by virtue of their itinerancy, by virtue of their inventing a holey space, that they necessarily communicate with the sedentaries *and* with the nomads (and with others besides, with the transhumant forest dwellers). They are in themselves double: a hybrid, an alloy, a twin formation. As Griaule says, Dogon smiths are not “impure” but “mixed,” and it is because they are mixed that they are *endogamous,* that they do not intermarry with the pure, who have a simplified progeny while they reconstitute a twin progeny.[539] Childe demonstrates that metallurgists are necessarily doubled, that they exist two times, once as captured by and maintained within the apparatus of the oriental empire, again in the Aegean world, where they were much more mobile and much freer. *But the two segments cannot be separated,* simply by relating each of them to their particular context. The metallurgist belonging to an empire, the worker, presupposes a metallurgist-prospector, however far away; and the prospector ties in with a merchant, who brings the metal to the first metallurgist. In addition, the metal is worked on by each segment, and the ingot-form is common to them all: we must imagine less separate segments than a chain of mobile workshops constituting, from hole to hole, a line of variation, a gallery. Thus the metallurgists’ relation to the nomads and the sedentaries also passes through the relations they have with other metallurgists.[540] This hybrid metallurgist, a weaponand toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries *and* with the nomads at the same time. Holey space itself communicates with smooth space and striated space. In effect, the machinic phylum or the metallic line passes through all of the assemblages: nothing is more deterritorialized than matter-movement. But it is not at all in the same way, and the two communications are not symmetrical. Worringer, in the domain of aesthetics, said that the abstract line took on two quite different expressions, one in barbarian Gothic art, the other in the organic classical art. Here, we would say that the phylum simultaneously has two different modes of liaison: it is always *connected* to nomad space, whereas it *conjugates* with sedentary space. On the side of the nomadic assemblages and war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the sedentary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate together, plug the lines of flight, subordinate the technological operation to the work model, impose upon the connections a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions.
*** *AXIOM III.* The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content. *Content*
Expression
Substance
Holey space (machinic phylum or matter-flow)
Smooth space
Form
Itinerant metallurgy
Nomad war machine
*** *PROPOSITION IX.* War does not necessarily have the battle as its object, and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result (under certain conditions).
We now come to three successive problems. First, is the battle the “object” of war? But also, is war the “object” of the war machine? And finally, to what extent is the war machine the “object” of the State apparatus? The ambiguity of the first two problems is certainly due to the term “object,” but implies their dependency on the third. We must nevertheless approach these problems gradually, even if we are reduced to multiplying examples. The first question, that of the battle, requires an immediate distinction to be made between two cases: when a battle is sought, and when it is essentially avoided by the war machine. These two cases in no way coincide with the offensive and the defensive. But war in the strict sense (according to a conception of it that culminated in Foch) does seem to have the battle as its object, whereas guerrilla warfare explicitly aims for the *nonbattle.* However, the development of war into the war of movement, and into total war, also places the notion of the battle in question, as much from the offensive as the defensive points of view: the concept of the nonbattle seems capable of expressing the speed of a flash attack, and the counterspeed of an immediate response.[541] Conversely, the development of guerilla warfare implies a moment when, and forms under which, a battle must be effectively sought, in connection with exterior and interior “support points.” And it is true that guerrilla warfare and war proper are constantly borrowing each other’s methods and that the borrowings run equally in both directions (for example, stress has often been laid on the inspirations land-based guerrilla warfare received from maritime war). All we can say is that the battle and the nonbattle are the double object of war, according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare.
That is why we push the question further back, asking if war itself is the object of the war machine. It is not at all obvious. To the extent that war (with or without the battle) aims for the annihilation or capitulation of enemy forces, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object (for example, the *raid can* be seen as another object, rather than as a particular form of war). But more generally, we have seen that the war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement within this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its sole and veritable positive object *(nomos).* Make the desert, the steppe, grow; do not depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it is because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of stri-ation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form. The Attila, or Genghis Khan, adventure clearly illustrates this progression from the positive object to the negative object. Speaking like Aristotle, we would say that war is neither the condition nor the object of the war machine, but necessarily accompanies or completes it; speaking like Derrida, we would say that war is the “supplement” of the war machine. It may even happen that this supplementarity is comprehended through a progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation. Such, for example, was the adventure of Moses: leaving the Egyptian State behind, launching into the desert, he begins by forming a war machine, on the inspiration of the old past of the nomadic Hebrews and on the advice of his father-in-law, who came from the nomads. This is the machine of the Just, already a war machine, but one that does not yet have war as its object. Moses realizes, little by little, in stages, that war is the necessary supplement of that machine, because it encounters or must cross cities and States, because it must send ahead spies *(armed observation),* then perhaps take things to extremes *(war of annihilation).* Then the Jewish people experience doubt, and fear that they are not strong enough; but Moses also doubts, he shrinks before the revelation of this supplement. And it will be Joshua, not Moses, who is charged with waging war. Finally, speaking like Kant, we would say that the relation between war and the war machine is necessary but “synthetic” (Yahweh is necessary for the synthesis).
The question of war, in turn, is pushed further back and is subordinated to the relations between the war machine and the State apparatus. States were not the first to make war: war, of course, is not a phenomenon one finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence. But war is not the object of States, quite the contrary. The most archaic States do not even seem to have had a war machine, and their domination, as we will see, was based on other agencies (comprising, rather, the police and prisons). It is safe to assume that the intervention of an extrinsic or nomad war machine that counterattacked and destroyed the archaic but powerful States was one of the mysterious reasons for their sudden annihilation. But the State learns fast. One of the biggest questions from the point of view of universal history is: How will the State *appropriate* the war machine, that is, constitute one for itself, in conformity with its size, its domination, and its aims? And with what risks? (What we call a military institution, or army, is not at all the war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by the State.) In order to grasp the paradoxical character of such an undertaking, we must recapitulate the hypothesis in its entirety. (1) The war machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its primary object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the sense that it is determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and city-form with which it collides. (2) When the State appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it. (3) It is precisely after the war machine has been appropriated by the State in this way that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its “analytic” object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object). In short, it is at one and the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war machine, that the war machine takes war as its object, and that war becomes subordinated to the aims of the State.
This question of appropriation is so varied historically that it is necessary to distinguish between several kinds of problems. The first concerns the possibility of the operation: it is precisely because war is only the supplementary or synthetic object of the nomad war machine that it experiences the hesitation that proves fatal to it, and that the State apparatus for its part is able to lay hold of war and thus turn the war machine back against the nomads. The hesitation of the nomad is legendary: What is to be done with the lands conquered and crossed? Return them to the desert, to the steppe, to open pastureland? Or let a State apparatus survive that is capable of exploiting them directly, at the risk of becoming, sooner or later, simply a new dynasty of that apparatus: sooner or later because Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated. That was their genius, the *Pax Mongolica.* It remains the case that the integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one of the most powerful factors of appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus: the inevitable danger to which the nomads succumbed. But there is another danger as well, the one threatening the State when it appropriates the war machine (all States have felt the weight of this danger, as well as the risks this appropriation represents for them). Tamerlane is the extreme example. He was not Genghis Khan’s successor but his exact opposite: it was Tamerlane who constructed a fantastic war machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine.[542] Turning the war machine back against the nomads may constitute for the State a danger as great as that presented by nomads directing the war machine against States.
A second type of problem concerns the concrete forms the appropriation of the war machine takes: Mercenary or territorial? A professional army or a conscripted army? A special body or national recruiting? Not only are these formulas not equivalent, but there are all the possible mixes between them. Perhaps the most relevant distinction to make, or the most general one, would be: Is there merely “encastment” of the war machine, or “appropriation” proper? The capture of the war machine by the State apparatus took place following two paths, by encasting a society of warriors (who arrived from without or arose from within), or on the contrary by constituting it in accordance with rules corresponding to civil society as a whole. Once again, there is passage and transition from one formula to another. Last, the third type of problem concerns the means of appropriation. We must consider from this standpoint the various data pertaining to the fundamental aspects of the State apparatus: *territoriality, work or public works, taxation.* The constitution of a military institution or an army necessarily implies a territorialization of the war machine, in other words, the granting of land (“colonial” or domestic), which can take very diverse forms. But at the same time, fiscal regimes determine both the nature of the services and taxes owed by the beneficiary warriors, and especially the kind of civil tax to which all or part of society is subject for the maintenance of the army. And the State enterprise of public works must be reorganized along the lines of a “laying out of the territory” in which the army plays a determining role, not only in the case of fortresses and fortified cities, but also in strategic communication, the logistical structure, the industrial infrastructure, etc. (the role and function of the Engineer in this form of appropriation).[543]
Let us compare this hypothesis as a whole with Clausewitz’s formula: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” As we know, this formula is itself extracted from a theoretical and practical, historic and transhistoric, aggregate whose parts are interconnected. (1) There is a pure concept of war as absolute, unconditioned war, an Idea not given in experience (bring down or “upset” the enemy, who is assumed to have no other determination, with no political, economic, or social considerations entering in). (2) What is given are real wars as submitted to State aims; States are better or worse “conductors” in relation to absolute war, and in any case condition its realization in experience. (3) Real wars swing between two poles, both subject to State politics: the war of annihilation, which can escalate to total war (depending on the objectives of the annihilation) and tends to approach the unconditioned concept via an ascent to extremes; and limited war, which is no “less” a war, but one that effects a descent toward limiting conditions, and can de-escalate to mere “armed observation.”[544]
In the first place, the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real wars seems to us to be of great importance, but only if a different criterion than that of Clausewitz is applied. The pure Idea is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine *that does not have war as its object* and that only entertains a potential or supplementary synthetic relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to us to be one case of real war among others, as in Clausewitz, but on the contrary the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and composition of the *nomos.* Nevertheless it is still an Idea, and it is necessary to retain the concept of the pure Idea, even though this war machine was realized by the nomads. It is the nomads, rather, who remain an abstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual, and for several reasons: first, because the elements of nomadism, as we have seen, enter into de facto mixes with elements of migration, itinerancy, and transhumance; this does not affect the purity of the concept, but introduces always mixed objects, or combinations of space and composition, which react back upon the war machine from the beginning. Second, even in the purity of its concept, the nomad war machine necessarily effectuates its synthetic relation with war as supplement, uncovered and developed in opposition to the State-form, the destruction of which is at issue. But that is exactly it; it does not effectuate this supplementary object or this synthetic relation without the State, for its part, finding the opportunity to appropriate the war machine, and the means of making war the direct object of this turned-around machine (thus the integration of the nomad into the State is a vector traversing nomadism from the very beginning, from the first act of war against the State).
The question is therefore less the realization of war than the appropriation of the war machine. It is at the same time that the State apparatus *appropriates* the war machine, subordinates it to its “political” *aims,* and gives it war as its direct *object.* And it is one and the same historical tendency that causes State to evolve from a triple point of view: going from figures of encastment to forms of appropriation proper, going from limited war to so-called total war, and transforming the relation between aim and object. The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital in equipment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capital in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of war).[545] Total war is not only a war of annihilation but arises when annihilation takes as its “center” not only the enemy army, or the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy. The fact that this double investment can be made only under prior conditions of limited war illustrates the irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to develop total war.[546] It is therefore true that total war remains subordinated to State political aims and merely realizes the *maximal conditions* of the appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus. But it is also true that when total war becomes the object of the appropriated war machine, then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the aim enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction. This explains Clausewitz’s vacillation when he asserts at one point that total war remains a war conditioned by the political aim of States, and at another that it tends to effectuate the Idea of unconditioned war. In effect, the aim remains essentially political and determined as such by the State, but the object itself has become unlimited. We could say that the appropriation has changed direction, or rather that States tend to unleash, reconstitute, an immense war machine of which they are no longer anything more than the opposable or apposed parts. This worldwide war machine, which in a way “reissues” from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itself is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the point at which Clausewitz’s formula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say that politics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invert the order of the words as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is necessary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the States, having appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates the States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions.[547] Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the “unspecified enemy”; we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place, so that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice. Yet the very conditions that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines. The definition of the Unspecified Enemy testifies to this: “multiform, maneuvering and omnipresent… of the moral, political, subversive or economic order, etc.,” the unassignable material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms.[548] The first theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings, and this is *precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable relation to war itself.* The war machine is not uniformly defined, and comprises something other than increasing quantities of force. We have tried to define two poles of the war machine: *at one pole,* it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here — limited war, total war, worldwide organization — war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war machine but only, whatever the machine’s power, either the set of conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of which the States themselves are now only parts. *The other pole* seemed to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.
We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that the war machine as such was invented, even if it displayed from the beginning all of the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition with the other pole, and swing toward it from the start. However, in conformity with the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an “ideological,” scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to *aphylum,* a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who defines this constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine. If guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the more necessary for being merely “supplementary”: *they can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else,* if only new nonorganic social relations. The difference between the two poles is great, even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that creates, *or* turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency that constitutes itself, even piece by piece, *or* turns into a plan(e) of organization and domination. We are constantly reminded that there is communication between these two lines or planes, that each takes nourishment from the other, borrows from the other: the worst of the world war machines reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth. The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of the quantities that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles. War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.
Smooth space and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space — the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus — are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously. But the de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between the two spaces. That there is such a distinction is what accounts for the fact that the two spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way: it is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de facto mix and the direction or meaning of the mix (is a smooth space captured, enveloped by a striated space, or does a striated space dissolve into a smooth space, allow a smooth space to develop?). This raises a number of simultaneous questions: the simple oppositions between the two spaces; the complex differences; the de facto mixes, and the passages from one to another; the principles of the mixture, which are not at all symmetrical, sometimes causing a passage from the smooth to the striated, sometimes from the striated to the smooth, according to entirely different movements. We must therefore envision a certain number of models, which would be like various aspects of the two spaces and the relations between them.
(= 2). Similar results can be obtained by making holes, by cutting, “windows” into a circle, instead of adding “points” to a triangle; likewise, a cube into which holes are drilled according to the principle of similarity becomes less than a volume but more than a surface (this is the mathematical presentation of the affinity between a free space and a holey space). In still other forms, Brownian motion, turbulence, and the sky are “fractals” of this kind.[636] Perhaps this provides us with another way of defining *fuzzy aggregates.* But the main thing is that it provides a general determination for smooth space that takes into account its differences from and relations to striated space: (1) we shall call striated or metric any aggregate with a whole number of dimensions, and for which it is possible to assign constant directions; (2) nonmetric smooth space is constituted by the construction of a line with a fractional number of dimensions greater than one, or of a surface with a fractional number of dimensions greater than two; (3) a fractional number of dimensions is the index of a properly directional space (with continuous variation in direction, and without tangent); (4) what defines smooth space, then, is that it does not have a dimension higher than that which moves through it or is inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity, for example, a line that fills a plane without ceasing to be a line; (5) space and that which occupies space tend to become identified, to have the same power, in the anexact yet rigorous form of the numbering or nonwhole number (occupy without counting); (6) a smooth, amorphous space of this kind is constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumulation defines a *zone of indiscernibility* proper to “becoming” (more than a line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface).
[[g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-a-thousand-plate-24.jpg][Von Koch’s curve: more than a line, less than a surface. The middle third of segment AE (1) is removed and replaced with the traingle BCD (2). In (3), this operation is repeated separately for each of the segments/l/?, AC, CD, and DE. This yields an angled line of equal segments (4), and so on, ad infinitum. The end result is a “curve” composed of an infinite number of angled points that preclude any tangent being drawn to any of their points. The length of the curve is infinite and its dimension is higher than one: it represents a space of 1.261859 dimensions (log 4/log 3 exactly).]]
[[g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-a-thousand-plate-25.jpg][Sierpensky’s sponge: more than a surface, less than a volume. The law according to which this cube was hollowed can be understood intuitively at a glance. Each square hole is surrounded by eight holes a third its size. These holes are in turn surrounded by eight holes, also a third their size. And so on, endlessly. The illustrator could not represent the infinity of holes of decreasing size beyond the fourth degree, but it is plain to see that this cube is in the end infinitely hollow. Its total volume approaches zero, while the total lateral surface of the hollowings infinitely grows. This space has a dimension of 2.7268. It therefore lies between a surface (with a dimension of 2) and a volume (with a dimension of 3). “Sierpinsky’s rug” is one face of this cube; the hollowings are then squares and the dimension of the “surface” is 1.2618. From Studies in Geometry by Leonard M. Blu-menthal and Karl Menger. Copyright © 1970 W. H. Freeman and Company. Reprinted with permission.]]
*** Strata, stratification
The strata are phenomena of thickening on the Body of the earth, simultaneously molecular and molar: accumulations, coagulations, sedimentations, foldings. They are Belts, Pincers, or Articulations. Summarily and traditionally, we distinguish three major strata: physicochemical, organic, and anthropomorphic (or “alloplastic”). Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus and formed substances. *Forms and substances, codes and milieus* are not really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.
A stratum obviously presents very diverse forms and substances, a variety of codes and milieus. It thus possesses both different formal Types of organization and different substantial Modes of development, which divide it into *parastrata and epistrata,* for example, the divisions of the organic stratum. The epistrata and parastrata subdividing a stratum can be considered strata themselves (so that the list is never exhaustive). A given stratum retains a unity of composition in spite of the diversity in its organization and development. The unity of composition relates to formal traits common to all of the forms or codes of a stratum, and to substantial elements, materials common to all of the stratum’s substances or milieus.
The strata are extremely mobile. One stratum is always capable of serving as the *substratum* of another, or of colliding with another, independently of any evolutionary order. Above all, between two strata or between two stratic divisions, there are *inter-stratic* phenomena: transcodings and passages between milieus, intermixings. Rhythms pertain to these interstratic movements, which are also acts of stratification. Stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation. And the strata constitute the Judgment of God. Classical artists are like God, they make the world by organizing forms and substances, codes and milieus, and rhythms.
Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is *a content and an expression.* Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, content and expression are. Hjelmslev’s net is applicable to the strata: articulation of content and articulation of expression, with content and expression each possessing its own form and substance. Between them, between content and expression, there is neither a correspondence nor a cause-effect relation nor a signified-signifier relation: there is real distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and only isomorphy. But content and expression are not distinguished from each other in the same fashion on each stratum: the distribution of content and expression is not the same on the three major strata (there is, for example, a “linearization” of expression on the organic stratum, and a “superlinearity” of the anthropomorphic strata). That is why the molar and the molecular have very different combinations depending on the stratum considered.
What movement, what impulse, sweeps us outside the strata and *(metastrata)”]* Of course, there is no reason to think that all matter is confined to the physicochemical strata: there exists a submolecular, unformed Matter. Similarly, not all Life is confined to the organic strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against itself in order to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more powerful for being anorganic. There are also nonhuman Becomings of human beings that overspill the anthropomorphic strata in all directions. But how can we reach this “plane,” or rather how can we construct it, and how can we draw the “line” leading us there? For outside the strata or in the absence of strata we no longer have forms or sub stances, organization or development, content or expression. We are disarticulated; we no longer even seem to be sustained by rhythms. How could unformed matter, anorganic life, nonhuman becoming be anything but chaos pure and simple? Every undertaking of destratification (for example, going beyond the organism, plunging into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete rules of extreme caution: a too-sudden destratification may be suicidal, or turn cancerous. In other words, it will sometimes end in chaos, the void and destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which become more rigid still, losing their degrees of diversity, differentiation, and mobility.
A
*** Assemblages
Assemblages are already different from strata. They are produced in 11 the strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded: they begin by extracting a *territory* from the milieus. Every assemblage is basically territorial. The first concrete rule for assemblages is to discover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one: in their trash can or on their bench, Beckett’s characters stake out a territory. Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or animal: “home.” The territory is made of decoded fragments of all kinds, which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of “properties”: even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains). The territory makes the assemblage. The territory is more than the organism and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the assemblage goes beyond mere “behavior” (hence the importance of the relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu animals).
Inasmuch as they are territorial, assemblages still belong to the strata. At least they pertain to them in one of their aspects, and it is under this aspect that we distinguish in every assemblage content 4 from expression. It is necessary to ascertain the content and the expression of each assemblage, to evaluate their real distinction, their reciprocal presupposition, their piecemeal insertions. The reason that the assemblage is not confined to the strata is that expression in it becomes a *semiotic system,* a regime of signs, and content becomes a *pragmatic system,* actions and passions. This is the double articulation face-hand, gesture-word, and the reciprocal presupposition between the two. This is the first division of every assemblage: it is simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation. In each case, it is necessary to ascertain both what is said and what is done. There is a new relation between content and expression that was not yet present in the strata: the statements or expressions express *incorporeal transformations* that are “attributed” as such (properties) to bodies or contents. In the strata, expressions do not form signs, nor contents *pragmata,* so this autonomous zone of incorporeal transformations expressed by the former and attributed to the latter does not appear. Of course, regimes of signs develop only in the alloplastic or anthropomorphic strata (including territorialized animals). But this does not mean that they do not permeate all of the strata, and overspill each of them. Assemblages belong to the strata to the extent that the distinction between content and expression still holds for them. We may also think of regimes of signs and pragmatic systems as strata in their own right, in the broad sense previously mentioned. But because the content-expression distinction assumes a new figure, we are already in a different element than that of the strata in the narrow sense.
The assemblage is also divided along another axis. Its territoriality (content and expression included) is only a first aspect; the other aspect is constituted by *lines of deterritorialization* that cut across it and carry it away. These lines are very diverse: some open the territorial assemblage onto other assemblages (for example, the territorial refrain of the animal becomes a courtship or group refrain). Others operate directly upon the territoriality of the assemblage, and open it onto a land that is eccentric, immemorial, or yet to come (for example, the game of territory and the earth in the lied, or in the romantic 11 artist in general). Still others open assemblages onto abstract and cosmic machines that they effectuate. The territoriality of the assemblage originates in a certain decoding of milieus, and is just as necessarily extended by lines of deterritorialization. The territory is just as inseparable from deterritorialization as the code from decoding. Following these lines, the assemblage no longer presents an expression distinct from content, only unformed matters, destratified forces, and functions. The concrete rules of assemblage thus operate along these two axes: On the one hand, what is the territoriality of the assemblage, what is the regime of signs and the pragmatic system? On the other hand, what are the cutting edges of deterritorialization, and what abstract machines do they effectuate? The assemblage is tetravalent: (1) content and expression; (2) territoriality and deterritorialization. That is why there were four aspects in the privileged example of Kafka’s assemblages.
R
*** Rhizome
Not only strata, assemblages are complexes of lines. We can identify a first state of the line, or a first kind of line: the line is subordinated to the point; the diagonal is subordinated to the horizontal and vertical; the line forms a contour, whether figurative or not; the space it constitutes is one of striation; the countable multiplicity it constitutes remains subordinated to the One in an always superior or supplementary dimension. Lines of this type are molar, and form a segmentary, circular, binary, arborescent system.
The second kind is very different, molecular and of the “rhizome” type. The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer forms a contour, and instead passes *between* things, *between* points. It belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more dimensions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it constitutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency 2 of its own. These are multiplicities of masses or packs, not of classes; 10anomalous and nomadic multiplicities, not normal or legal ones; 12 multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities, not countable elements and ordered relations; fuzzy, not exact aggregates, etc. At the level *of pathos,* these multiplicities are expressed by psychosis and especially schizophrenia. At the level of pragmatics, they are utilized by sorcery. At the level of theory, the status of multiplicities is correlative to that of spaces, and vice versa: smooth spaces of the type desert, steppe, or sea are not without people; they are not depopulated but rather are populated by multiplicities of this second kind (mathematics and music have gone quite far in the elaboration of this theory of multiplicities).
It is not enough, however, to replace the opposition between the One and the multiple with a distinction between types of multiplicities. For the distinction between the two types does not preclude their immanence to each other, each “issuing” from the other after its fashion. It is not so much that some multiplicities are arborescent and others not, but that there is an arborification of multiplicities. That is what happens when the black holes scattered along a rhizome begin to resonate together, or when the stems form segments that striate space in all directions, rendering it comparable, divisible, homogeneous (as we saw in particular in the case of the Face). That is also what happens when “mass” movements or molecular flows conjugate at points of accumulation or stoppage that segment and rectify them. But conversely, and without symmetry, the stems of the rhizome are always taking leave of the trees, the masses and flows are constantly escaping, inventing connections that jump from tree to tree and uproot them: a whole smoothing of space, which in turn reacts back upon striated space. Even, and especially, territories are perturbed by these deep movements. Or language: the trees of language are shaken by buddings and rhizomes. So that rhizome lines oscillate between tree lines that segment and even stratify them, and lines of flight or and rupture that carry them away.
We are therefore made of three lines, but each kind of line has its dangers. Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose upon us the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally the lines of flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative poten tialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a line of destruction pure and simple (fascism).
C
*** *Plane of Consistency, Body without Organs*
The plane of consistency or of composition (planomenon) is opposed to the plane of organization and development. Organization and development concern form and substance: at once the development of form and the formation of substance or a subject. But the plane of consistency knows nothing of substance and form: haecceities, which are inscribed on this plane, are precisely modes of individuation proceeding neither by form nor by the subject. The plane consists abstractly, but really, in relations of speed and slowness between unformed elements, and in compositions of corresponding intensive affects (the “longitude” and “latitude” of the plane). In another sense, consistency concretely ties together heterogeneous, disparate elements as such: it assures the consolidation of fuzzy aggregates, in other words, multiplicities of the rhizome type. In effect, consistency, proceeding by consolidation, acts necessarily in the middle, by the middle, and stands opposed to all planes of principle or finality. Spinoza, Holderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche are the surveyors of such a plane of consistency. Never unifications, never totalizations, but rather consistencies or consolidations.
Inscribed on the plane of consistency are *haecceities,* events, incorporeal transformations that are apprehended in themselves; *nomadic essences,* vague yet rigorous; *continuums of intensities* or continuous variations, which go beyond constants and variables; *becomings,* which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed from within striated space. We will say that a body without organs, or bodies without organs (plateaus) comes into play in individuation by and haecceity, in the production of intensities beginning at a degree zero, 10 in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming or transformation, and in the smoothing of space. A powerful nonorganic life that escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy.
Does the plane of consistency constitute the body without organs, or does the body without organs compose the plane? Are the Body without Organs and the Plane the same thing? In any event, composer and composed have the same power: the line does not have a dimension superior to that of the point, nor the surface to that of the line, nor the volume to that of the surface, but always an anexact, fractional number of dimensions that constantly increase or decrease with the number of its parts. The plane sections multiplicities of variable dimensions. The question is, therefore, the mode of connection between the different parts of the plane: To what extent do the bodies without organs interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity extended? What is the order of the transformational series? What are these alogical linkages always effected in the middle, through which the plane is constructed piece by piece in ascending or descending fractional order? The plane is like a row of doors. And the concrete rules for the construction of the plane obtain to the extent that they exercise a selective role. It is the plane, in other words, the mode of connection, that provides the means of eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs, of rejecting the homogeneous surfaces that overlay smooth space, and neutralizing the lines of death and destruction that divert the line of flight. What is retained and preserved, therefore created, what consists, is only *that which increases the number of connections* at each level of division or composition, thus in descending as well as ascending order (that which is cannot be divided without changing in nature, or enter into a larger composition without requiring a new criterion of comparison…).
D
*** Deterritorialization
The function of deterritorialization: D is the movement by which 5 “one” leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight. There are very different cases. D may be overlaid by a compensatory reterritorialization obstructing the line of flight: D is then said to be *negative.* Anything can serve as a reterritorialization, in other words, “stand for” the lost territory; one can reterritorialize on a being, an object, a book, an apparatus or system… For example, it is inaccurate to say that the State apparatus is territorial: it in fact performs a D, but one immediately overlaid by reterritorializations on property, work, and money (clearly, that landowner ship, public or private, is not territorial but reterritorializing). Among regimes of signs, the *signifying regime* certainly attains a high level of D; but because it simultaneously sets up a whole system of reterritorializations on the signified, and on the signifier itself, it blocks the line of flight, allowing only a negative D to persist. Another case is when D becomes positive — in other words, when it prevails over the reterritorializations, which play only a secondary role — but nevertheless remains *relative* because the line of flight it draws is segmented, is divided into successive “proceedings,” sinks into black holes, or even ends up in a generalized black hole (catastrophe). This is the case of the *regime of subjective signs,* with its passional and consciousness-related D, which is positive but only in a relative sense. It will be noted immediately that these two major forms of D are not in a simple evolutionary relation to each other: the second may break away from the first, or it may lead into it (notably when the segmentations of converging lines of flight bring an overall reterritorialization or one benefiting a particular segment, thus arresting the movement of escape). There are all kinds of mixed figures, assuming highly varied forms of D.
Is there *absolute* D, and what does “absolute” mean? We must first have a better understanding of the relations between D, the territory, reterritorialization, and the earth. To begin with, the territory itself is inseparable from vectors of deterritorialization working it from within: either because the territoriality is supple and and “marginal,” in other words, itinerant, or because the territorial assemblage itself opens onto and is carried off by other types of 11 assemblages. Second, D is in turn inseparable from correlative reterritorializations. D is never simple, but always multiple and composite: not only because it participates in various forms at the same time, but also because it converges distinct speeds and movements on the basis of which one may assign at a given moment a “deterritorialized element” and a “deterritorializing element.” Now, reterritorialization as an original operation does not express a return to the territory, but rather these differential relations internal to D itself, this multiplicity internal to the line of flight (cf. “Theorems of D”). Finally, the earth is not at all the opposite of D: This can already be seen in the mystery of the “natal,” in which the earth as ardent, eccentric, or intense focal point is outside the territory and exists only in the movement of D. More than that, the earth, the glacial, is Deterritorialization par excellence: that is why it belongs to the Cosmos, and presents itself as the material through which human beings tap cosmic forces. We could say that the earth, as deterritorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that D can be called the creator of the earth — of a new land, a universe, not just a reterritorialization.
This is the meaning of “absolute.” The absolute expresses nothing transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement. A movement is absolute when, whatever its quantity and speed, it relates “a” body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it and occupies in the manner of a vortex. A movement is relative, whatever its quantity and speed, when it relates a body considered as *One* to a striated space through which it moves, and which it measures with straight lines, if only virtual. D is negative or relative (yet already effective) when it conforms to the second case and operates either by principal reterritorializations that obstruct the lines of flight, or by secondary reterritorializations that segment and work to curtail them. D is absolute when it conforms to the first case and brings about the creation of a new earth, in other words, when it connects lines of flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line, or draws a plane of consistency. Now what complicates everything is that this absolute D necessarily proceeds by way of relative D, precisely because it is not transcendent. Conversely, relative or negative D itself requires an absolute for its operation: it makes the absolute something “encompassing,” something totalizing that overcodes the earth and then conjugates lines of flight in order to stop them, destroy them — rather than connecting them in order to create (it is in this sense that we have opposed *conjunction* to *connection,* although we have often treated them as synonyms from a very general point of view). Thus there is a limitative absolute already at work in properly negative, or even relative, D’s. Above all, at this turning point the and lines of flight are not only obstructed or segmented but turn into lines 14 of destruction or death. For the stakes here are indeed the negative and the positive in the absolute: the earth girded, encompassed, overcoded, conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal organization surrounding it on all sides, *or* the earth consolidated, connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines of creation that cut across it as so many becomings (Nietzsche’s expression: Let the earth become lightness …). There are thus at least four forms of D that confront and combine, and must be distinguished from one another following concrete rules.
M
*** Abstract Machines (Diagram and Phylum)
There is no abstract machine, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate within concrete assemblages: They are defined by the fourth aspect of assemblages, in other words, the cutting edges of decoding and 11 deterritorialization. They draw these cutting edges. Therefore they make the territorial assemblage open onto something else, assemblages of another type, the molecular, the cosmic; they constitute becomings. Thus they are always singular and immanent. Contrary to the strata, and the assemblages considered under their other aspects, abstract machines know nothing of forms and substances. This is what makes them abstract, and also defines the concept of the machine in the strict sense. They surpass any kind of mechanics. They are opposed to the abstract in the ordinary sense. Abstract machines consist of *unformed matters and nonformal functions.* Every abstract machine is a consolidated aggregate of matters-5 functions *(phylum* and *diagram).* This is evident on a technological “plane”: such a plane is not made up simply of formed substances (aluminum, plastic, electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms (program, prototypes, etc.), but of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting only degrees of intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay, induction, transduction… ) and diagrammatic functions exhibiting only differential equations or, more generally, “tensors.” Of course, within the dimensions of the assemblage, the abstract machine, or machines, is effectuated in forms and substances, in varying states of freedom. But the abstract machine must first have composed itself, and have simultaneously composed a plane of consistency. Abstract, singular, and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated — that is why abstract machines are dated and named (the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven, etc.). Not that they refer to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and dates that refer to the singularities of the machines, and to what they effectuate.
But if abstract machines know nothing of form and substance, what happens to the other determination of strata, or even of assemblages — content and expression? In a certain sense, it could be said that this distinction is also irrelevant to the abstract machine, precisely because it no longer has the forms and substances the distinction requires. The plane of consistency is a plane of continuous variation; each abstract machine can be considered a “plateau” of variation that places variables of content and expression in continuity. Content and expression thus attain their highest level of relativity, becoming “functives of one and the same function” or materials of a single matter [see 4, “November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics,” note 21 — Trans.]. But in another sense, it could be said that the distinction subsists, and is even recreated, on the level *oi traits:* there and are traits of content (unformed matters or intensities) and traits of expression (nonformal functions or tensors). Here, the distinction has become entirely displaced, or even a different distinction, since it now concerns cutting edges of deterritorialization. Absolute deterritorialization implies a “deterritorializing element” and a “deterritorialized element,” one of which in each case is allocated to expression, the other to content, *or vice versa,* but always in such a way as to convey a relative distinction between the two. Thus both content and expression are necessarily affected by continuous variation, but it still assigns them two dissymmetrical roles as elements of a single becoming, or as quanta of a single flow. That is why it is impossible to define a continuous variation that would not take in both the content and the expression, rendering them indiscernible, while simultaneously proceeding by one *or* the other, determining the two mobile and relative poles of that which has become indiscernible. For this reason, one must define both traits or intensities of content and traits or tensors of expression *(indefinite article, proper name, infinitive, and date),* which take turns leading one another across the plane of consistency. Unformed matter, the phylum, is not dead, brute, homogeneous matter, but a matter-movement bearing singularities or haecceities, qualities, and even operations (itinerant technological lineages); and the nonformal function, the diagram, is not an inexpressive metalanguage lacking a syntax, but an expressivity-movement always bearing a foreign tongue within each language and 4 nonlinguistic categories within language as a whole (nomad poetic lineages). One writes, then, on the same level as the real of an unformed matter, at the same time as that matter traverses and extends all of nonformal language: a becoming-animal like Kafka’s mouse [p. 243], Hofmannsthal’s rats [p. 240], Moritz’s calves [p. 240]? A revolutionary machine, all the more abstract for being real. A regime that no longer operates by the signifier or the subjective.
That covers singular and immanent abstract machines. What we have said does not preclude the possibility of “the” abstract machine serving as a transcendent model, under very particular conditions. This time the concrete assemblages are related to an abstract idea of the Machine and, depending on how they effectuate it, are assigned coefficients taking into account their potentialities, their creativity. The coefficients that “quantify” assemblages bear on the varying assemblage components (territory, deterritorialization, reterritori-alization, earth, Cosmos), the various entangled lines constituting the “map” of an assemblage (molar lines, molecular lines, lines of flight), and the different relations-between the assemblage and the plane of consistency (phylum and diagram). For example, the “grass stem” component may have different coefficients in assemblages of animal species that are nevertheless closely related [p. 324–25]. As a general rule, an assemblage is all the closer to the abstract machine the more lines without contour passing between things it has, and the 4 more it enjoys a power of metamorphosis (transformation and trans-and substantiation) corresponding to the matter-function: cf. *The Waves* 10 machine [p. 252].
We have considered in particular two great alloplastic and anthropomorphic assemblages, *the war machine and the State apparatus.* These two assemblages not only differ in nature but are quantifiable in relation to “the” abstract machine in different ways. They do not have the same relation to the phylum, the diagram; they do not have the same lines, or the same components. This analysis of the two assemblages and their coefficients demonstrates *that the war machine does not in itself have war for its object,* but necessarily adopts it 13 as its object when it allows itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus. At this very precise point, the line of flight and the abstract vital line it effectuates turn into a line of death and destruction. Hence the name war “machine,” which is much closer to the abstract machine than is the State apparatus, which divests the war machine of its power of metamorphosis. Writing and music can be war machines. The more an assemblage opens and multiplies connections and draws a plane of consistency with its quantifiers of intensities and of consolidation, the closer it is to the living abstract machine. But it strays 5, 9 from it to the extent that it replaces creative connections with conjunctions causing blockages *(axiomatics),* organizations forming and strata *(stratometers),* reterritorializations forming black holes *(segmentometers),* and conversions into lines of death *(deleometers).* Thus there is a whole process of selection of assemblages according to their ability to draw a plane of consistency with an increasing number of connections. Schizoanalysis is not only a qualitative analysis of abstract machines in relation to the assemblages, but also a quantita tive analysis of the assemblages in relation to a presumably pure abstract machine.
There is one last point of view, that of typological analysis. For there exist general types of abstract machines. The abstract machine or machines of the plane of consistency do not exhaust or dominate the entirety of the operations that constitute the strata and even the assemblages. The strata “take” on the plane of consistency itself, forming areas of thickening, coagulations, and belts organized and developing along the axes of another plane (substance-form, content-3 expression). This means that each stratum has a unity of consistency or of composition relating above all to substantial elements and formal traits, and testifying to the existence of a properly stratic abstract machine presiding over this other plane. And there is a third type: on the alloplastic strata, which are particularly propitious for the assemblages, there arise abstract machines that compensate for deterritorializations with reterritorializations, and especially for decodings with overcodings or overcoding equivalents. We have seen in particular that if abstract machines open assemblages they also close them. An order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine and overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real machinic effects. We can no longer place the assemblages on a quantitative scale measuring how close or far they are from the plane of consistency. There are different types of abstract machines that overlap in their operations and qualify the assemblages: *abstract machines of consistency,* singular and mutant, with multiplied connections; *abstract machines of stratification* that surround the plane 5 of consistency with another plane; and *axiomatic or overcoding* and *abstract machines* that perform totalizations, homogenizations, conjunctions of closure. Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic — perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic — but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.
Concerning Benoit Mandelbrot’s “Fractals”
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The Physical Model. The various models confirm a certain idea of stria-tion: two series of parallels that intersect perpendicularly, some of which, the verticals, are more in the role of fixed elements or constants, whereas the others, the horizontals, are more in the role of variables. This is roughly the case for the warp and the woof, harmony and melody, longitude and latitude. The more regular the intersection, the tighter the striation, the more homogeneous the space tends to become; it is for this reason that from the beginning homogeneity did not seem to us to be a characteristic of smooth space, but on the contrary, the extreme result of striation, or the limit-form of a space striated everywhere and in all directions. If the smooth and the homogeneous seem to communicate, it is only because when the striated attains its ideal of perfect homogeneity, it is apt to reimpart smooth space, by a movement that superposes itself upon that of the homogeneous but remains entirely different from it. In each model, the smooth actually seemed to pertain to a fundamental heterogeneity: felt or patchwork rather than weaving, rhythmic values rather than harmony-melody, Riemannian space rather than Euclidean space — a continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between two points, the formation of a plane that does not proceed by parallel and perpendicular lines.
The link between the homogeneous and the striated can be expressed in terms of an imaginary, elementary physics. (1) You begin by striating space with parallel *gravitational* verticals. (2) The resultant of these parallels or forces is applied to a point inside the body occupying the space *(center of* gravity). (3) The position of this point does not change when the direction of the parallel forces is changed, when they become perpendicular to their original direction. (4) You discover that gravity is a particular case of a universal attraction following straight lines or biunivocal relations between two bodies. (5) You define a general notion of workas a force-displacement relation in a certain direction. (6) You then have the physical basis for an increasingly perfect striated space, running not only vertically and horizontally, but in every direction subordinated to points.
It is not even necessary to invoke this Newtonian pseudophysics. The Greeks already went from a space striated vertically, top to bottom, to a centered space with reversible and symmetrical relations in all directions, in other words, striated in every direction in such a way as to constitute a homogeneity. There is no question that these are like two models of the State apparatus, the vertical apparatus of the empire and the isotropic apparatus of the city-state.[637] Geometry lies at the crossroads of a physics problem and an affair of the State.
It is obvious that the striation thus constituted has its limits: they are reached not only when the infinite (either infinitely large or small) is brought in, but also when more than two bodies are considered (“the three-body problem”). Let us try to understand in the simplest terms how space escapes the limits of its striation. At one pole, it escapes them by *declination,* in other words, by the smallest deviation, by the infinitely small deviation between a gravitational vertical and the arc of a circle to which the vertical is tangent. At the other pole, it escapes them by the *spiral or vortex,* in other words, a figure in which all the points of space are simultaneously occupied according to laws of frequency or of accumulation, distribution; these laws are distinct from the so-called laminar distribution corresponding to the striation of parallels. From the smallest deviation to the vortex there is a valid and necessary relation of consequence: what stretches between them is precisely a smooth space whose element is declination and which is peopled by a spiral. Smooth space is constituted by the minimum angle, which deviates from the vertical, and by the vortex, which overspills striation. The strength of Michel Serres’s book is that it demonstrates this link between the *clinamen* as a generative differential element, and the formation of vortices and turbulences insofar as they occupy an engendered smooth space; in fact, the atom of the ancients, from Democritus to Lucretius, was always inseparable from a hydraulics, or a generalized theory of swells and flows. The ancient atom is entirely misunderstood if it is overlooked that its essence is to course and flow. The theory of atomism is the basis for a strict correlation between Archimedean geometry (very different from the striated and homogeneous space of Euclid) and Democritean physics (very different from solid or lamellar matter).[638] The same coincidence means that this aggregate is no longer tied in any way to a State apparatus, but rather to a war machine: a physics of packs, turbulences, “catastrophes,” and epidemics corresponding to a geometry of war, of the art of war and its machines. Serres states what he considers to be Lucretius’s deepest goal: to go from Mars to Venus, to place the war machine in the service of peace.[639] But this operation is not accomplished through the State apparatus; it expresses, on the contrary, an ultimate metamorphosis of the war machine, and occurs in smooth space.
Earlier we encountered a distinction between “free action” in smooth space and “work” in striated space. During the nineteenth century a twofold elaboration was undertaken: of a physicoscientific concept of Work (weight-height, force-displacement), and of a socioeconomic concept of labor-power or abstract labor (a homogeneous abstract quantity applicable to all work, and susceptible to multiplication and division). There was a profound link between physics and sociology: society furnished an economic standard of measure for work, and physics a “mechanical currency” for it. The wage regime had as its correlate a mechanics of force. Physics had never been more social, for in both cases it was a question of defining the constant mean value of a force of lift and pull exerted in the most uniform way possible by a standard-man. Impose the Work-model upon every activity, translate every act into possible or virtual work, discipline free action, or else (which amounts to the same thing) relegate it to “leisure,” which exists only by reference to work. We now understand why the Work-model, in both its physical and social aspects, is a fundamental part of the State apparatus. Standard-man began as the man of public works.[640] It was not in relation to pin manufacturing that the problems of abstract labor, the multiplication of its results, and the division of its operations were first formulated; it was in public construction and in the organization of armies (not only the disciplining of men, but also the industrial production of weapons). Nothing more normal. The war machine in itself did not imply this normalization. But the State apparatus, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found a new way of appropriating the war machine: by subjugating it before all else to the Work-model of the construction site and factory, which were in the process of developing elsewhere, but more slowly. The war machine was perhaps the first thing to be striated, to produce an abstract labor-time whose results could be multiplied and operations divided. That is where free action in smooth space must have been conquered. The physicosocial model of Work pertains to the State apparatus, it is one of its inventions, and for two reasons. First, because labor appears only with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labor that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labor (in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labor. Second, labor performs a generalized operation of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise of the State, namely, its conquest of the war machine.
Counterdemonstration: where there is no State and no surplus labor, there is no Work-model either. Instead, there is the continuous variation of free action, passing from speech to action, from a given action to another, from action to song, from song to speech, from speech to enterprise, all in a strange chromaticism with intense but rare peak moments or moments of effort that the outside observer can only “translate” in terms of work. It is true that it has been said of blacks through the ages that “they don’t work, they don’t know what work is.” It is true that they were forced to work, and to work more than anyone else, in terms of abstract quantity. It also seems to be true that the Indians had no understanding of, and were unsuited for, any organization of work, even slavery: the Americans apparently imported so many blacks only because they could not use the Indians, who would rather die. Certain outstanding ethnologists have raised an essential question. They have turned the problem around: so-called primitive societies are not societies of shortage or subsistence due to an absence of work, but on the contrary are societies of free action and smooth space that have no use for a work-factor, anymore than they constitute a stock.[641] They are not societies of sloth, even though their differences with work may be expressed in the form of a “right to laziness.” They are not without laws, even though their differences with the law may be expressed in the guise of “anarchy.” What they have instead is a law of the nomos regulating a continuous variation of activity with a rigor and cruelty all its own (get rid of whatever cannot be transported, the old, children …).
If work constitutes a striated space-time corresponding to the State apparatus, is this not especially true of its archaic or ancient forms? For it is there that surplus labor is isolated, distinguished, in the form of tribute or corvee. Consequently, it is there that the concept of labor appears at its clearest, for example, in the large-scale works of the empires, the urban, agricultural, or hydraulic works by which a “laminar” flow in supposedly parallel layers (striation) is imposed upon the waters. It seems on the contrary that in the capitalist regime, surplus labor becomes less and less distinguishable from labor “strictly speaking,” and totally impregnates it. Modern public works have a different status from that of large-scale imperial works. How could one possibly distinguish between the time necessary for reproduction and “extorted” time, when they are no longer separated in time? This remark certainly does not contradict the Marxist theory of surplus value, for Marx shows precisely that surplus value *ceases to be localizable* in the capitalist regime. That is even his fundamental contribution. It gave him a sense that machines would themselves become productive of surplus value and that the circulation of capital would challenge the distinction between variable and constant capital. In these new conditions, it remains true that all labor involves surplus labor; but surplus labor no longer requires labor. Surplus labor, capitalist organization in its entirety, operates less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding to the physicosocial concept of work. Rather, it is as though human alienation through surplus labor were replaced by a generalized “machinic enslavement,” such that one may furnish surplus-value without doing any work (children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc.). Not only does the user as such tend to become an employee, but capitalism operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling — every semiotic system. It is as though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was able to carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital necessarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooth space in which the destiny of human beings is recast. Striation, of course, survives in the most perfect and severest of forms (it is not only vertical but operates in all directions); however, it relates primarily to the state pole of capitalism, in other words, to the role of the modern State apparatuses in the organization of capital. On the other hand, at the complementary and dominant level of *integrated (or rather integrating) world capitalism,* a new smooth space is produced in which capital reaches its “absolute” speed, based on machinic components rather than the human component of labor. The multinationals fabricate a kind of deterritorialized smooth space in which points of occupation as well as poles of exchange become quite independent of the classical paths to striation. What is really new are always the new forms of turnover. The present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making the distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and circulating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is instead the distinction between *striated capital* and *smooth capital,* and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across territories and States, and even the different types of States.
The Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art. Several notions, both practical and theoretical, are suitable for defining nomad art and its successors (barbarian, Gothic, and modern). First, “close-range” vision, as distinguished from long-distance vision; second, “tactile,” or rather “haptic” space, as distinguished from optical space. “Haptic” is a better word than “tactile” since it does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical function. It was Alois Riegl who, in some marvelous pages, gave fundamental aesthetic status to the couple, *close vision-haptic space.* But for the moment we should set aside the criteria proposed by Riegl (then by Wilhelm Worringer, and more recently by Henri Maldiney), and take some risks ourselves, making free use of these notions.[642] It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space — although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity. Once again, as always, this analysis must be corrected by a coefficient of transformation according to which passages between the striated and the smooth are at once necessary and uncertain, and all the more disruptive. The law of the painting is that it be done at close range, even if it is viewed from relatively far away. One can back away from a thing, but it is a bad painter who backs away from the painting he or she is working on. Or from the “thing” for that matter: Cezanne spoke of the need to *no longer see* the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space. Afterward, striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, “stubborn geometry,” the “measure of the world,” “geological foundations,” “everything falls straight down” … The striated itself may in turn disappear in a “catastrophe,” opening the way for a new smooth space, and another striated space…
A painting is done at close range, even if it is seen from a distance. Similarly, it is said that composers do not hear: they have close-range hearing, whereas listeners hear from a distance. Even writers write with short-term memory, whereas readers are assumed to be endowed with long-term memory. The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local spaces of pure connection. Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a distance; one is never “in front of,” any more than one is “in” (one is “on” …). Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as “monads” but are instead *nomads* entertaining tactile relations among themselves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invariant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.[643] These questions of orientation, location, and linkage enter into play in the most famous works of nomad art: the twisted animals have no land beneath them; the ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the paws point in the opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the body is turned upside down; the “monadological” points of view can be interlinked only on a nomad space; the whole and the parts give the eye that beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an animality that can be seen only by touching it with one’s mind, but without the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye. (In a much cruder fashion, the kaleidoscope has exactly the same function: to give the eye a digital function.) Striated space, on the contrary, is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, in variance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective. It is less easy to evaluate the creative potentialities of striated space, and how it can simultaneously emerge from the smooth and give everything a whole new impetus.
The opposition between the striated and the smooth is not simply that of the global and the local. For in one case, the global is still relative, whereas in the other the local is already absolute. Where there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermediary. Like Eskimo space.[644] In a totally different way, in a totally different context, Arab architecture constitutes a space that begins very near and low, placing the light and the airy below and the solid and heavy above. This reversal of the laws of gravity turns *lack of direction* and negation of volume into constructive forces. There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage, which in nomad art merges with its manifestation. Here the absolute is local, precisely because place is not delimited. If we now turn to the striated and optical space of long-distance vision, we see that the relative global that characterizes that space also requires the absolute, but in an entirely different way. The absolute is now the horizon or background, in other words, the Encompassing Element without which nothing would be global or englobed. It is against this background that the relative outline or form appears. The absolute itself can appear in the Encompassed, but only in a privileged place well delimited as a center, which then functions to repel beyond the limits anything that menaces the global integration. We can see clearly here how smooth space subsists, but only to give rise to the striated. The desert, sky, or sea, the Ocean, the Unlimited, first plays the role of an encompassing element, and tends to become a horizon: the earth is thus surrounded, globalized, “grounded” by this element, which holds it in immobile equilibrium and makes Form possible. Then to the extent that the encompassing element itself appears at the center of the earth, it assumes a second role, that of casting into the loathesome deep, the abode of the dead, anything smooth or nonmeasured that may have remained.[645] The striation of the earth implies as its necessary condition this double treatment of the smooth: on the one hand, it is carried or reduced to the absolute state of an encompassing horizon, and on the other it is expelled from the relative encompassed element. Thus the great imperial religions need a smooth space like the desert, but only in order to give it a law that is opposed to the *nomos* in every way, and converts the absolute.
This perhaps explains for us the ambiguity of the excellent analyses by Riegl, Worringer, and Maldiney. They approach haptic space under the imperial conditions of Egyptian art. They define it as the presence of a horizon-background; the reduction of space to the plane (vertical and horizontal, height and width); and the rectilinear outline enclosing individuality and withdrawing it from change. Like the pyramid-form, every side a plane surface, against the background of the immobile desert. On the other hand, they show how in Greek art (then in Byzantine art, and up to the Renaissance), an optical space was differentiated from haptic space, one merging background with form, setting up an interference between the planes, conquering depth, working with cubic or voluminous extension, organizing perspective, and playing on relief and shadow, light and color. Thus at the very beginning they encounter the haptic at a point of mutation, in conditions under which it already serves to striate space. The optical makes that striation tighter and more perfect, or rather tight and perfect in a different way (it is not associated with the same “artistic will”). Everything occurs in a striated space that goes from empires to city-states, or evolved empires. It is not by chance that Riegl tends to eliminate the specific factors of nomad or even barbarian art; or that Worringer, when he introduces the idea of Gothic art in the broadest sense, relates it on the one hand to the Germanic and Celtic migrations of the North, and on the other to the empires of the East. But between the two were the nomads, who are reducible neither to empires they confronted nor the migrations they triggered. The Goths themselves were nomads of the steppe, and with the Sarmatians and Huns were an essential vector of communication between the East and the North, a factor irreducible to either of these two dimensions.[646] On one side, Egypt had its Hyksos, Asia Minor its Hittites, China its Turco-Mongols; and on the other, the Hebrews had their Habiru, the Germans, Celts, and Romans their Goths, the Arabs their Bedouins. The nomads have a specificity that is too hastily reduced to its consequences, by including them in the empires or counting them among the migrants, assimilating them to one or the other, denying them their own “will” to art. Again, there is a refusal to accept that the intermediary between the East and the North had its own absolute specificity, that the intermediary, the interval, played exactly this substantial role. Moreover, it does not have that role in the guise of a “will”; it only has a becoming, it invents a “becoming-artist.”
When we invoke a primordial duality between the smooth and the striated, it is in order to subordinate the differences between “haptic” and “optic,” “close vision” and “distant vision” to this distinction. Hence we will not define the haptic by the immobile background, by the plane and the contour, because these have to do with an already mixed state in which the haptic serves to striate, and uses its smooth components only in order to convert them to another kind of space. The haptic function and close vision presuppose the smooth, which has no background, plane, or contour, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between parts. Conversely, the developed optical function is not content to take striation to a new level of perfection, endowing it with an imaginary universal value and scope; it is also capable of reinstating the smooth, liberating light and modulating color, restoring a kind of aerial haptic space that constitutes the unlimited site of intersection of the planes.[647] In short, the smooth and the striated must be defined in themselves before the relative distinctions between haptic and optical, near and distant, can be derived.
This is where a third couple enters in: “abstract line-concrete line” (in addition to “haptic-optical,” “close-distant”). It is Worringer who accorded fundamental importance to the abstract line, seeing it as the very beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will. Art as abstract machine. Once again, it will doubtless be our inclination to voice in advance the same objections: for Worringer, the abstract line seems to make its first appearance in the crystalline or geometrical imperial Egyptian form, the most rectilinear of forms possible. It is only afterward that it assumes a particular avatar, constituting the “Gothic or Northern line” understood very broadly.[648] For us, on the other hand, the abstract line is fundamentally “Gothic,” or rather, nomadic, not rectilinear. Consequently, we do not understand the aesthetic motivation for the abstract line in the same way, or its identity with the beginning of art. Whereas the rectilinear (or “regularly” rounded) Egyptian line is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, and erects the constancy and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is abstract in an entirely different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientation and passes *between* points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated by the smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to ward off anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation. Furthermore, although it is true that art begins only with the abstract line, the reason is not, as Worringer says, that the rectilinear is the first means of breaking with the nonaesthetic imitation of nature upon which the prehistoric, savage, and childish supposedly depend, lacking, as he thinks they do, a “will to art.” On the contrary, if prehistoric art is fully art it is precisely because it manipulates the abstract, though nonrectilinear, line: “Primitive art begins with the abstract, and even the prefigurative…. Art is abstract from the outset, and at its origin could not have been otherwise.”[649] In effect, the line is all the more abstract when writing is absent, either because it has yet to develop or only exists outside or alongside. When writing takes charge of abstraction, as it does in empires, the line, already downgraded, necessarily tends to become concrete, even figurative. Children forget how to draw. But in the absence of writing, or when peoples have no need for a writing system of their own because theirs is borrowed from more or less nearby empires (as was the case for the nomads), the line is necessarily abstract; it is necessarily invested with all the power of abstraction, which finds no other outlet. That is why we believe that the different major types of imperial lines — the Egyptian rectilinear line, the Assyrian (or Greek) organic line, the supraphenomenal, encompassing Chinese line — convert the abstract line, rend it from its smooth space, and accord it concrete values. Still, it can be argued that these imperial lines are contemporaneous with the abstract line; the abstract line is no less at the “beginning,” inasmuch as it is a pole always presupposed by any line capable of constituting another pole. The abstract line is at the beginning as much because of its historical abstraction as its prehistoric dating. It is therefore a part of the originality or irreducibility of nomad art, even when there is reciprocal interaction, influence, and confrontation with the imperial lines of sedentary art.
The abstract is not directly opposed to the figurative. The figurative as such is not inherent to any “will to art.” In fact, we may oppose a figurative line in art to one that is not. The figurative, or imitation and representation, is a consequence, a result of certain characteristics of the line when it assumes a given form. We must therefore define those characteristics first. Take a system in which transversals are subordinated to diagonals, diagonals to horizontals and verticals, and horizontals and verticals to points (even when there are virtual). A system of this kind, which is rectilinear or unilinear regardless of the number of lines, expresses the formal conditions under which a space is striated and the line describes a contour. Such a line is inherently, formally, representative in itself, even if it does not represent anything. On the other hand, *a line that delimits nothing, that describes no* *contour,* that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes between points, that is always declining from the horizontal and the vertical and deviating from the diagonal, that is constantly changing direction, a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or background, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation — such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes a smooth space. It is not inexpressive. Yet is true that it does not constitute a stable and symmetrical *form of expression* grounded in a resonance of points and a conjunction of lines. It is nevertheless accompanied by *material traits of expression,* the effects of which multiply step by step. This is what Worringer means when he says that the Gothic line (for us, the nomadic line invested with abstraction) has the power of expression and not of form, that it has repetition as a power, not symmetry as form. Indeed, it is through symmetry that rectilinear systems limit repetition, preventing infinite progression and maintaining the *organic* domination of a central point with radiating lines, as in reflected or star-shaped figures. It is free action, however, which by its essence unleashes the power of repetition as a *machinic* force that multiplies its effect and pursues an infinite movement. Free action proceeds by disjunction and decentering, or at least by peripheral movement: disjointed polythetism instead of symmetrical antithetism.[650] Traits of expression describing a smooth space and connecting with a matter-flow thus should not be confused with striae that convert space and make it a form of expression that grids and organizes matter.
Worringer’s finest pages are those in which he contrasts the abstract with the organic. The organic does not designate something represented, but above all the form of representation, and even the feeling that unites representation with a subject *(Einfuhlung,* “empathy”). “Formal processes occur within the work of art which correspond to the natural organic tendencies in man.”[651] But the rectilinear, the geometrical, cannot be opposed to the organic in this sense. The Greek organic line, which subordinates volume and spatiality, takes over from the Egyptian geometrical line, which reduced them to the plane. The organic, with its symmetry and contours inside and outside, still refers to the rectilinear coordinates of a striated space. The organic body is prolonged by straight lines that attach it to what lies in the distance. Hence the primacy of human beings, or of the face: We are this form of expression itself, simultaneously the supreme organism and the relation of all organisms to metric space in general. The abstract, on the contrary, begins only with what Worringer presents as the “Gothic” avatar. It is this nomadic line that he says is mechanical, but in free action and swirling; it is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for being inorganic. It is distinguished both from the geometrical and the organic. It raises “mechanical” relations to the level of *intuition.* Heads (even a human being’s when it is not a face) unravel and coil into ribbons in a continuous process; mouths curl in spirals. Hair, clothes… This streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a power of life that human beings had rectified and organisms had confined, and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it. If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs, everything that passes *between* organisms (“once the natural barriers of organic movement have been overthrown, there are no more limits”).[652] Many authors have wished to establish a kind of duality in nomad art between the ornamental abstract line and animal motifs, or more subtly, between the speed with which the line integrates and carries expressive traits, and the slowness or fixity of the animal matter traversed, between a line of flight without beginning or end and an almost immobile swirling. But in the end everyone agrees that it is a question of a single will, or a single becoming.[653] This is not because the abstract engenders organic motifs, by chance or by association. Rather, it is precisely because pure animality is experienced as inorganic, or supraorganic, that it can combine so well with abstraction, and even combine the slowness or heaviness of a matter with the extreme speed of a line that has become entirely spiritual. The slowness belongs to the same world as the extreme speed: relations of speed and slowness between elements, which surpass in every way the movement of an organic form and the determination of organs. The line escapes geometry by a fugitive mobility at the same time as life tears itself free from the organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind. This vital force specific to the Abstraction is what draws smooth space. The abstract line is the affect of smooth space, just as organic representation was the feeling presiding over striated space. The haptic-optical, near-distant distinctions must be subordinated to the distinction between the abstract line and the organic line; they must find their principle in a general confrontation of spaces. The abstract line cannot be defined as geometrical and rectilinear. What then should be termed *abstract* in modern art? A line of variable direction that describes no contour and delimits no form...,[654]
Do not multiply models. We are well aware that there are many others: a ludic model, which would compare games according to their type of space and found game theory on different principles (for example, the smooth space of Go versus the striated space of chess); and a noological model concerned not with thought contents (ideology) but with the form, manner or mode, and function of thought, according to the mental space it draws and from the point of view of a general theory of thought, a thinking of thought. And so on. Moreover, there are still other kinds of space that should be taken into account, for example, holey space and the way it communicates with the smooth and the striated in different ways. What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.