Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Mille Plateaux: 1, 2, 3
think (but this might only be my prejudice) social aggregation. How does
think they took a back seat to the primacy of desire, flight, and
did or not, one can imagine D&G learning them from him. D&G always
out in all directions, to the four winds. Here the point is to make
multiplicities are random or even anarchic. They are each organized but
organized differently. The rhizome vs the tree and the pack vs the mass
constitution. The difference between a rhizome and a tree (or a pack and
familiar with. When I arrive at chapter 3, however, I'm not so sure what
describes what is not what ought to be. That chapter tells us simply how
correlate to the very first point they made in AO, that we should make
distinction between the human, the natural, and the machinic. How are we
kinds of chapters makes we wonder about the relation between what is and
the earth. Is that what they mean by a geology of morals? Become like
the earth? Translate what ought to be to what is? Maybe I'm on the wrong
track here. Maybe I'm too distracted by Professor Challenger and the
biological issues that D&G engage. Maybe it's better to read chapter 3
beginning at the end with the polemics that D&G make explicit there. Let
me try this tack and see if it answers or diverts this first question.
First of all, through the second half of the chapter in their discussion
that is, the interpretative paradigm by which all regimes of signs are
model, but merely one regime of signs among many, one example of the
things; the relation between base and superstructure; and the division
between matter and mind. To elaborate the first of these challenges (on
the relation between words and things) they turn to Foucault and his
analysis of the prison in Discipline and Punish. The thing prison does
not refer primarily to the word "prison" as if the word "prison" were
the expression of the content, that is, the thing. The thing prison is
what D&G call a form of content that exists on a stratum with other
forms of content, such as the school, the barracks, the hospital, etc.
arising from the social field, a regime of signs. Mixing Foucault and
D&G, then, we could say that there are two multiplicities that intersect
precisely: "they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting ...
might remember was the Panopticon, which described not only the prison
hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (DP 228). It's not a surprise
still more complicated that this, because both content and expression
have not only form but also substance. Let's try to put this back in the
both form and substance. I understand easily how the prison, the
nondiscursive content, can have both form and substance: it has walls,
something like the materiality of language? I think it's more than that
practices and thus it's equally corporeal and noncorporeal. Perhaps the
that content and expression intersect in and imply the shared state of
assemblages put content and expression together to lead them toward the
prison and delinquency are really distinct but they intermingle due to
the functioning of machinic assembles such as the trial that put their
to try to explain some of these concepts but really I was laying out the
say that words and things do not correspond, but rather contents and
metaphor has it all wrong, D&G claim, because as in other strata here
that things simply don't work that way, society doesn't work that way.
economic and the social nor between content and expression. That does
abstract machine from which the two forms derive, and by machinic
the pyramidal image gives the economic base the characteristics of the
Astract (that is, I assume, its determinant role in the last instance).
This is something I think D&G wouldn't have said in AO. The abstract
fact derive from it. I want to highlight this claim because it shows D&G
primary. I think that saying that content and expression derive from the
part of what I see as D&G's effort in this book (in contrast to AO) to
social order? What remains for me an open question at this point is the
this notion of derivation that I quoted just a minute ago. I don't think
really that content and expression derive from abstract machines, and
this context. I think this is the kind of question, however, that has to
at the end of chapter 3: the correspondence between words and things and
matter, but I don't want to go into that. I want rather to look back now
at the first half of the chapter given the framework of these challenges
then what was the first half of the chapter doing? How was it supporting
would go like this. In the first part D&G establish within a framework
nature between the human and the nonhuman, between the biological and
the social, that all life (mineral, animal, vegetable) functions along
the same lines, then human society too must be organized according to
Sollen, what is and what ought to be. Chapter 3 is about what is not
what ought to be, or rather it brings what ought to be back to what is.
How should we understand the title, "The Geology of Morals" (as a play
is the logic of life, equally of the earth and society. And then what
does this have to do with morals? Perhaps morals are being brought back
D&G write in the preface to the book that the various chapters or
plateaus are relatively independent and can be read in any order, but I
think that is really misleading. It is true that this book does not
have the relentless linearity of AO where the results of each part were
but rather than saying that each plateau can be read on its own, I'm
This is I think how I got myself into trouble last week with
space for politics or pragmatics. I think now I was asked too much of
biology, but perhaps not in that chapter, perhaps not in year 10,000
bc. I have to find the political moment in other plateaus and read
body artists such as Stelarc who change their own bodies either
works. One then ought to ask how that is political, but that is a
Politics
terrain. I want to ask first of all in what way these sections are
really one of the bases for the arguments about linguistics and
some currents in structuralism would have it) but rather that the
example, the ancient history of the Jews around the period of the
122), the Jews the wandering people, but "on the other hand, it has an
not that this regime is also social (just as sociolinguists like Labov
other than this regime of signs. (Or I guess we would have to say that
from the sign system, but let's leave that question aside for the
40).
political here. Last week I talked rather vaguely about ethics in order
than ethics I should talk about pragmatics. This is the opening in these
would argue that the first thing one needs is criteria for political
action, and that is what D&G provide. You can recognize when D&G are
proposing criteria for political action when they start talking about
the minority usage that also poses a standard but a subordinated one, a
about Kafka.
We should also cast this difference on a larger plane, not just as two
society, two ways of living. The major or majority way of living refers
has nothing to do with numbers, because in fact the minorities are most
between the majority and the minority is a power difference, but D&G
or production among these three. The majority usage just repeats the
commandments or orders -- "You will do this, you will not do that" each
is not enough. "In the order-word life must answer the answer of
the major usage, the refusal of the standard, the norm, the law, but a
flight -- that would be negative and empty. Flight must be positive and
just mean the constitution of an new order, new norms, a new majority.
is to say that D&G are proposing not a new order nor a new standard,
but rather a new usage, or maybe a new way of life, a new mode of life.
So this is my answer to the question about what does politics means
flight.
woman.) The term is used here principally to illustrate the fact that
a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they
humankind, men and women both" (106). Men are the majority and women
the minority even if there are more women than men because the standard
should note that there have been several interesting debates about this
politics that arises from the passage I cited about becoming woman.
They said that this becoming-woman affects all of humankind, men and
women alike. D&G said from the beginning that major and minor do not
have to do with number, in the sense that the majority might refer to a
Abstraction
consider the abstract not ideal but virtual. The importance of this
shift for us now is that is the position of the two conceptions with
respect to reality. The ideal is opposed to the real but the virtual
real. (For those of you familiar with Marx, I think his discussion of
the "real abstraction" is very close to this.) But staying within the
better, what is not actuel in the sense of the French word as either
Proust: a memory is real but not actual. So, then, an abstract machine
or diagram is virtual and completely real even if it is not actual.
even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a
and contents" (142). The response, then, to the person who tells you you
productive. I'm still a bit unclear about this "piloting" role or about
in the project to make for yourself a body without organs. (There is,
without organs: how to do it, but first of all why do it? D&G answer
the why question in terms of desire. The body without organs is the
Foucault and his use of pleasure in the letter from a few weeks ago are
field where desire can produce freely without end. We might say also
that the BwO is the field where intensities can best appear and grow.
The BwO is itself of zero intensity but it is the proper medium for
really only focus on the second half, on the power to be affected, the
heightened intensities.
plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress" (156).
D&G then cite a case in which a masochist plans how he wants his
partner to ride and kick him with her boots in order to have an intense
on him to leave an imprint on his body. "Legs are still organs, but
Here the example of the masochist might not be sufficient, and I would
way to link this conception of making a BwO with the universality and
Mille Plateaux: 7, 8, 9
1. Faciality
coherent identity. As Sartre says, it's the anti-semite who creates the
that the subalterns in question (Jew, Africans, Orientals) did not exist
existed but the anti-semite created "the jew"; Africans existed but the
exclusion through the middle of the world. As Fanon says, the colonial
city is a world cut in two, between European Self and Native Other. The
The White European Self does not actually exist before this creative
encounter, this invention of the Other. The European Self is rather the
final result of the process. The White European Self is only arrived at
through its opposition to the Other, its difference from the Jew, the
Native, the Oriental. After the creation of the negative identity, the
Other, the Self arises as a negation of that negation, and hence the
Other because only through negation of that Other can it invent and
not a theory of racial Others. "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
distributed by the hole. the white man's claim has never operated by
the white screen and in the black holes -- including them and arranging
the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the
producing machine might end up being pretty accurate, but D&G take a
combination of a white wall or screen with black holes. The white screen
signification. The black holes, on the other hand, are the points of
relations to the mother's face, and sociologists on the role of the face
in mass media and advertising). The despot-god has never hidden his
face, far from it; he makes himself one or even several" (115). The face
maybe gives us a reason for calling this face. But clearly this doesn't
just have to do with what we normally call faces. This face in general
understand the face as close to what Debord called a spectacle. Like the
spectacle the face determines what can appear, what meanings and what
facial machine gives priority to the white wall and signification; while
the authoritarian facial machine gives priority to the black holes and
the face. "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" (188). Here I
think the difference between the face and the spectacle becomes more
projected for us, maybe at the limit on us. The faces, on the other
hand, are us. They constitute us, our black holes and white walls.
We have no choice but to start out from our faces on our lines of
flight.
2. Love
This question of dismantling the face and the lines of flight involved
doesn't help that). D&G insist that this dismantling involves real
I tried to call last week constituent flight. But that positive aspect
gears from the politics of the face to love. D&G do presents several
what D&G are saying. Here D&G are talking about dismantling the face and
saying we have to begin with the face we have (its white wall and black
holes) and move from there. "Only in the black hole of subjective
consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated,
which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without
like broken lines" (p. 188). Living love here is opposed to the dead
through its white wall and escaping from its black holes. That's the
first step of this love, flight from the face, or really abandon. "I
have become capable of loving (...) by abandoning love and self" (199).
The lines of flight that operate the dismantling the face are here the
abandonment of the self, evacuating the self and the love associated
with it. This evacuation of the self is what I would call exposure. But
this exposure is not somehow revealing the hidden secret, the real me
the face, evacuating the self, exposure -- these are the conditions of
love. That, however, is only the first step, the pre-condition. The
first step of loving is flight, abandoning the Self, but the second is
which the lines are composed together like broken lines." So in love the
elements that escaped the organization of the face come into contact.
Rather this encounter of lines and spaces that have escaped the face and
the Self have the potential to give rise to new compositions, new
the lines of flight. (Here is where D&G have to make good on the claim
Here, as always, there are dangers or risks, but I think that the
dangers help clarify what the process itself is. "It can happen in love
two lines of the same type. There is no assurance that two lines of
flight have to meet and in the encounter have to compose together a new
relationship. This encounter and this composition are not given (there
comes with or after the lines of flight operates through love, or rather
That's obviously a leap that has to be worked out further (from love to
politics) but that path is the strategy I see D&G taking in the Three
Novellas plateaux.
3. State
legislature, the court, and the executive. The concept of the State
imagines the unity of these bodies or functions. Marx & Engels, who
famous passage from the Manifesto as the executive committee that sees
point that abstracts from and brings together a diverse array of ruling
unity and this relation to serving the ruling class, revolution could be
The primary concerns and debates of Marxist State theory in the 20th
century have centered around two questions: first the question of the
relation of the State to the ruling class (in what sense or by what
ruling class) and second the question of the unity or centrality of the
State and State power. The second one of these is what I consider the
necessary background for D&G's concept of the State, and I think they
office that commands directly all the actions of the State: the center
effect, Althusser doesn't want to talk about the State as such, the
central point, but rather he wants to focus only on the various State
analysis as locuses of power rather than the unitary abstract point that
might lay behind or above them. In other words, look not to the State as
locuses. And these multiple sites, the apparatusses, are both public and
private, repressive and ideological, from the army to the school and the
church. Foucault takes this move one step further claiming that there is
presides over its rationality" (HS 95), not even the multiple centers of
the institutions; the centers of power in Foucault are its every point
Foucault would say that the State exists, he does claim that it is not
the appropriate object for the study of power. In this context, D&G's
problematic, in that once again the State is the object of the analysis
centralized power of the State in D&G we have to start first with their
between the segmentary and the centralized; the segmentary and the
centralized both exist and work together in the modern State. The
be a centralized power but that does not mean that it commands directly
over the various segments of power throughout society, that does not
the State was already conceived as virtual. They always formulate the
centralized power of the State acting "as if" -- the State acts as if it
it. D&G have a way of conceiving the simultaneous reality and virtuality
rigid, to the extent that all centers resonate in, and all the black
intersection somewhere behind the eyes. The face of the father, teacher,
signifiance that moves across the various circles and passes back over
different from Foucault. You might remember a line from Discipline and
Punish that I cited a few weeks ago in which Foucault writes, is it any
surprise that the school resembles the barracks which resembles the
virtual centrality is what D&G are calling the State. And D&G claim that
school, the army) and the centralized apparatus. "The State is not a
point taking all the others upon itself, but a resonance chamber for
them all" (224). The next step to explain is the difference between the
State and the war machine, and between the totalitarian State and the
fascist State.
What difference does it make to be human? I'm still struggling with the
biology? Or I would post the question like this: why should we treat
differently on the one hand passages that deal with the assemblages and
organization and flight, and on the other hand passages that deal with
human nature are the very laws of nature as a whole. Let me quote
"Most of those who have written about the Affects, and human's way of
living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common
laws of nature, but of things which are outside nature. Indeed they seem
must recognize that "the laws and rules of nature, according to which
all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and
of whatever kind, must also be the same .... (...) Therefore ... I shall
(humans, cells, rocks, birds, trees) acts according to the same laws,
Since the laws of nature, as Spinoza says, are always and everywhere the
work, and even what alternatives exists among them. If you want to
privilege the human. I read the text (at least at times) as not only an
society. Rocks and plants may have desires, may have alternatives of
Jon pointed out well in his email response to Rick I think, part of what
however, the text does not and more generally we cannot speak to them.
other words, D&G do not preach to the sparrows, they do not try to argue
with the birds that they should prefer one type of multiplicity over
another; they do not try to tell a tree that it should become like the
leaves of grass. Humans are the only ones who we can engage in these
of the world but with our own limitations, but those limitations are
not a statement about the world but about our limitation.) So I'm trying
about discussions dealing with biology or geology and those dealing with
human society and organization (such as fascism). We should treat them
difference to be human.
Anti-mimesis
metaphor that D&G have conducted since the first page of AO. I
generally, and in this regard we might see this argument, this anti-
reverse Platonism (but that will be more clear in the aesthetic theory
functions will relate to each other by analogy: the gills of the fish
are like the lungs of the mammal. (They pose Jungian archetypes as an
terms.) The other principle way the relation among animals has been
toward the divine higher term they all imitate by graduated resemblance,
as the model for and principel behind the series; or in the form of a
35). The general argument here is that the dominant vein of the natural
argue rather that nature is not organized and does not function through
rather a kind or style of movement. Becoming- rat, for example, does not
part of the rat pack. Rats too pursue a becoming-rat. I take becoming,
then, as D&G's answer to the naturalist's question, how are animals and
plants related among themselves and how do they evolve. They are related
minoritarian in the sense that they are always departures for the
majority or the standard. In other words, the paradigm has been shifted
considering specifically human becomings, then, we can see why D&G say
becomings (even when they involve women) take off from the point of man
the primary becoming. That is how I make sense out a statement such as
the following: "A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of
all man" (292). For men and women alike, the standard man is the
human society. Becomings are primary in this analysis because they (and
the same as the way it operates in natural history and human society,
feels rather different. This is where we can clearly see D&G's anti-
becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is
in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color"
(304). Art, then, is not at all about reproduction. Thinking of it as
in art, mistakes the dynamic character of both nature and art. The
mandate against metaphors. The painted bird is not like the bird, it is
becoming bird of the bird, or its becoming color and line. They are both
rendering visible.
For a few weeks now I've been saying that the primary objective of MP is
to address the question of society, how society exists rather than not.
fuzzy set, a discrete set that later takes on consistency" (323). Now
the word consistency suggests something rather passive to me, and the
think it's correct to say that at one end of this process of composition
is the haecceities; they are more or less the raw material, the
the term haecceity comes from the work of Duns Scotus, the Scottish
"thisness" or to the "here and now" are often used to understand Duns
latitude (powers of affect). (I have no idea why the words longitude and
latitude are used.) This definition of haecceities as longitude and
longitude part). And on the other hand, (and now in terms of latitude),
the affects of each body, including both its power to act and its power
do with the Spinoza line Deleuze likes so much: we still don't know what
a body can do. What it can do indicates how it can be composed. "We know
nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what
its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with
other affects, with the affects of other bodies, either to destroy that
axes, longitude and latitude, is that they begin to identify how the
process of composition can take place. Now, I would like to extend this
refrain as a process of composition that deal with time. As D&G say, the
between the State and the war machine, or as D&G say, the exteriority of
the war machine to the State. A second group of propositions (four more,
the second half of nomadology) focus on the relation of the war machine
deal with the means whereby the war machine is appropriated or capture
The State and the war machine are defined in contrast to each other, but
let's start first with the State itself. "The State is sovereignty"
(360). And political sovereignty itself has two poles, the despot on one
hand and the legislator on the other, or rather, power (or might) on one
hand and right (or law) on the other. This is the two headed image of
the State we get in the section on noology: "The image has two heads,
Normally these two poles of sovereignty, the empire and its power and
the republic and its right (or juridical formation) are conceived as
double articulation of empire and republic, power and right. This double
articulation is what makes the State apparatus into a stratum. The space
Now, we should remember the definition of the State that we got earlier
in the micropolitics and segmentarity plateau. There the State was
social powers or segments would reverberate. The State itself was thus a
various social institutions -- the school, the prison, the barracks, the
is finally how D&G define the State, with three elements: "Each State is
You might ask: What are these striae that run through social space and
the sens that they organize and direct social flows. Finally, I'm
understanding sovereignty as an instance of power separate from the
sovereignty, then, insofar as the striae are raised up above the surface
these striae, are transcendent above the social field. (The height of
the walls is their transcendence.) Putting all that together, then, the
that resonate in the central (if virtual) chamber of the State. The war
plateau. "... the war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it
opposed to the striated space of the State. It seems then that "war
do with war; it should rather I would think be called the smooth machine
or the nomad machine. In any case, when we start from this definition it
is obvious that, as D&G insist several times, the war machine does not
have war as its object. "If war necessarily results, it is because the
war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (or striation)
opposing its positive object .... It is at this point that the war
machine becomes war" (417). The war machine only develops a relation to
contact with striated space, that is, with the State. Although the war
always already. State violence, not the violence of the warrior but the
violence of the cop and the jailer, is difficult to pinpoint, D&G say,
from every kind of direct violence" (448). The paradigm that D&G point
what Marx calls primitive accumulation, whereby the two classes are
would say, and I think this is consist with D&G, that the striation
prison and the school are a violence that combines power and right, that
So, paradoxical as it may seem, the State (and its striation) has an
essential relation to violence and the war machine (and its smooth
runs into striation. If the State and the war machine are so different,
if they are so exterior to each other as D&G say, how are they related
and how do they come to be integrated? Well, from the point of view of
the war machine they can't become integrated, because when the war
machine comes into contact with the State or with any striated space it
only objective is to destroy it. The war machine has no use for the
State. In contrast, when the State comes into contact with the war
control migrations .... If it can help it, the State does not dissociate
does not simply want to destroy smooth space, to striate it, it wants
migrations that serve its power. The State operates by the capture of
defined paths. It seems to me that the State could not exist without
smooth space and nomadism subordinated to it. The striae of the State
are themselves static and isolated; the movement and communication among
the striae only comes from the smooth space that lies between them,
subordinated to them. (Perhaps in the same vein one could say that
D&G present three apparatuses of capture: one that derives rent from
land, another that derives profit from labor, and a third that derives
do with the creation of a stock. The landlord gains rent through a stock
stock not really as something static. In other words, it's not that the
flow has been halted, but rather it has been channeled, the way for
labor in the fourth section of AO, which I think is more or less taken
up again and repeated here with different terms. In that part of AO, D&G
302). Desire and labor are thus if not the same thing at least
isomorphic; they are both defined by flows. And moreover, they are
Clearly the labor being refered to in AO is not wage labor -- that would
be its reigned in form. This labor (which D&G say corresponds to desire)
into the dead labor of capital, or really, undead labor, zombie labor.
In MP, however, D&G shift their terms to describe this same capture of
labor in capitalism. Now "free activity" takes the place of living labor
and "labor" takes that of waged labor. And now the process that was
stockpiling: "by virtue of the stock ... activities of the 'free action'
makes free activity into the activity of the living-dead. That is why
D&G claim that the myth of the zombie is the myth of labor, the movement
of the living dead (425). You might also say here that free activity has
been striated in the sense that its unrestricted flow has been channeled
by the striae of wage labor. The capture of the worker by the State is
nomadization" and capital has to block or direct its flows. "Even Marx
through the clearing of the peasants from the land, the creation of a
heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did many anarchists
invoke nomadic themese orignating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above
city haunted by nomads" (558 n. 61). So, in the first place free
appropriation of the war machine by the State and thus the striation of
smooth space (or rather the use of smooth space between striae). This
reject right away the possibility that there is emerging some sort of
decisions" (461). The various States are thus superceded by what I would
call a smooth global Empire. "The war machine reforms a smooth space
that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war
war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States
are now no more than objects or means of that war machine. (...) [The
enemy is] no longer another State, or even another regime, but the
the text do D&G move from the State continually getting the upper hand
over the war machine to this situation where the war machine has
subordinated States to its order? And how is it that now the war machine
and its free space that used to be associated with creation and free
activity now has taken only global order for its object? Or the question
specifically as residing in the striae of the State space, then how can
space) is sovereign? How can a war machine rule? I think the answer has
D&G say, the relationship between axiomatics and politics becomes more
this is an axiomatic that better describes the post Cold War world ever
terms, yeilding different solutions. The global war machine doesn't need
the global war machine is not capital, then at least we can say that it
throughout the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and that one
might even pose the first mandate of the project to discover the plane
belief in this world (as Deleuze says in the second cinema book). Or in
immanence of desire over the transcendence of the Subject and the Ego,
and perhaps most clearly the immanence of social assemblages over the
not so simple and neither can our evaluation of it, our affirmation of
a very brief and dense piece, Deleuze returned again to the problematic
summarize the argument for you. The article begins not directly with
Deleuze can question immanence itself. Immanence does not refer to being
LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but immanence that
here) that is this pure immanence? Should we associate this with the
point of death. At that moment those caring for him find a sympathy for
him and do everything they can to save him, but when he recovers they
recognize again why they despised him. At that moment of death, Deleuze
claims, the character was revealed as only a life. "The life of the
that releases a pure event liberated from the accidents of interior and
beyond good and evil because only the subject that incarnated it among
and yields to the singular immanent life of a man that no longer has a
life ...." Now, the example of Dickens's dying scoundrel may not be a
good one here because this singular immanence, a life, is not at all
the moments experienced by this or that living subject and this or that
sum of the actually existing things and subjects. On the contrary, pure
field, in that both are distinct from the experience of subjects and
event. Finally, and this is the third moment of the elaboration, this
of productivity.
Immanence of Society
domain. In modern philosophy, at least since Hobbes, the State has been
the structural homology between the transcendence of the State over the
social plane and the transcendence of God over the plane of nature is
certainly no accident. The transcendent sovereign occupies the same
"a power apparently standing above society" (The Origin of the Family,
that is, insofar as they stand above society. The first stage of a
society between the immanent and the transcendent. This is where I see
the political importance of the D&G discussion of the smooth and the
social field itself, that structure the social field. The smooth plane
that channel flows. The straie, which I would like to link to the
various social institutions such as the prison, the school, the family,
within these striae and within the straie one cannot exist except as
subject. Finally, and this is the third element of the elaboration, the
contest D&G claim that smooth space is the productive motor that fuels
and the various correlated elements are valued over transcendence and
striation because, once again, they are the source of creativity, prior
in terms of production. The State and the striae are merely products.
Axiomatics
in every instance value immanence over transcendence (in line with the
want to leave fascism aside here. The question in any case is, Is
open in the sense that new axioms can continually be added. (So to
counter the axiom of the tendential fall of the rate of profit, another
say heavy industry, to the periphery.) The openness and plural character
best way to understand what D&G mean when they say the capitalism
That is what really means by abstract here: whichever, labor, the labor
of the tailor, the weaver, the carpenter, whichever. The variables are
what make the axiomatic smooth and immanent. Really there are no
of immanence poses capitalism in conflict with the State and with all
the correlated forces of striation. Now I think this is true but it does
not mean that capitalism does not at times converge with State
rule beyond the State. (These phases are perhaps more my invention than
theirs.) You can see the relationship of the first phase in D&G's
smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is the essential enterprise
of the State, namely, its conquest of the war machine" (490- 91). It's
factory and the coding of its spaces (with the tasks along the assembly
line for instance) and time in the divisions of the day into work and
leisure and then the elaborate coding of the times of the work day. This
capitalism, and striated capital is not the only form of capital. There
of capitalism and we are moving today from the striated phase to the
are making the distinction between constant and variable capital, and
capital, and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter ..."
(492). The former gives way to the latter, the striated gives way to the
realization of its smooth essence. Now the form of rule of this realized
global war machine. The global war machine rules over a smooth space
with a peace more terrifying than any war -- and most important for my
this section is simply that this global war machine and not any State is
capitalism and the global war machine raises is, does the axiomatic's
back, diverted?