6
‘At the Mountains of Madness’
The Demonology of the New Earth and the
Politics of Becoming
Iain Hamilton Grant
‘The world…is itself a living organism…’ (clearly the man was a
lunatic).
(Professor Challenger 1995:442–3)
We’ll never go too far with deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For
the new earth…is not to be found in the…reterritorializations that arrest
the process…; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the
completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always
and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore
remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of
schizoanalysis proceed.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1984:382)1
A transhistorical mutant flux of machinic surplus value plugged into the precociously
abstractive machinism of anticipant schizophrenia forms the accelerant conjuncture
of the always insufficiently ‘malevolent’ (1984:314) or ‘demoniacal’ (1984:25)
process, simultaneously deterritorializing towards the ever more artificial earth
(1984:321–2) and ‘causing Oedipus…to explode’ (1984:314), dubbed respectively
the ‘positive’ — ‘Creation! Creation!’ (1988:338); and ‘negative’ — ‘Destroy,
destroy’ (1984:311) tasks of schizoanalysis. Splitting the schizogenic atom, some
take A Thousand Plateaus’ construction of the new earth to be the realization of
the positive task of schizoanalysis announced at the end of the Anti-Oedipus, making
it, according to one analysis, ‘less a critique than a positive exercise in the
affirmative’,2 thus binding the ‘terrible curettage’, the ‘malevolent activity’ of
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the desiring-machines (1984:381) to negativity, in the manner of judges and
Marxists, sentencing them to hard, critical = corrective labour. Was ‘the AntiOedipus above all an insurgent counter-psychoanalytic war machine’ (Villiani 1985:
338), whose militarist labours were exhausted in scorching the earth as a
propaedeutic to plateau-constructivism (New Earth, Year Zero)? A war machine
that ceases nomadizing, directing all its destructions against a single, great Enemy,
analytically tied, therefore, to Oedipus, sentenced to death: medusified machines,
the warped, liquescent gearage of a steam-driven Oedipus blistering towards the
furnaces of engine death. ‘Oedipus is the entropy of the desiring-machine’ (1973:471).
TermiNarcissus the isolate, entropOedipus the desolate.
But what is all this talk of positivity and negativity, as if the process returned
to an equilibrium in extensity, a resting place, a territory, admitting of divisibility?
The process, ‘in a state of functional disequilibrium, far distant from stability’
(1984: 150–1), autocatalyses simultaneously towards bodies without organs and
new earths, making it impossible to distinguish positive and negative intensities,
since ‘all intensities are positive in relation to the zero intensity’ of the Bwo
(1984:19). Far from negativity, zero intensity is rather basal, intensive indifference,
the absolute limit of cascading intensities. ‘Negations are nothing but limitations’,
as Kant says in a Spinozist lapse (1958:490), disjunctive syntheses of reality and
limitation. Similarly, destruction only becomes negative if exhausted in the
elimination of some determinate finality or statist conservation (the analytic warmachine). Nor can the arcanum dialecticum, positing destruction as the negative
moment of a generalized redemption, ascribing it therefore a constitutive finality,
manage to cancel destruction: dialectics makes Science of a protestantism of zombiedreams, voodoo-masters leading the destroyed = reformed to the promised land,
while Haiti flees, derelicting the penitent towards ‘critique, the Protestantism of
the earth’ (1988:339). Devoted to reformation, critique nevertheless ‘releases a
power of aggression’ (Deleuze 1994:xx), whipping up joy in destruction, but only
to return it to creation, ‘the aggression of the creator’ (Deleuze 1983:87). Once
on this neo-Kantian line, ‘critique without creation’ becomes a ‘philosophical
scourge’ to be expelled, incapable of returning its object to life (Deleuze and
Guattari 1991:33). From curettage to the cure. That the new earth should become
a collection of health resorts was the demoniacal irony of a terminal syphilitic,
not a convalescent’s winsome request for planning permission.
The machines, bereft of the will-to-cure (even to cure psychoanalysis), never
strike surgically (whatever Deleuze would lately have had us believe—Critique
et clinique), once and for all; they perform a continuous action of curettage,
scooping-machines and gouging-machines scouring bodies, a machinic
deterritorialization of entropoedipal organization towards the Body without
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Organs. Thus the new earth and the terrible curettage are inseparable, since
Oedipus always reterritorializes on ‘familial lands, artificial lands…’ (1984:318),
castrating the desiring-machines and familiarizing, cultivating them to its
maintenance, while new ear ths are only reached by way of absolute
deterritorialization, an ‘immobile’ and ‘intensive voyage’ (1984:319). There is
no good or bad territory, no positive or negative deterritorialization (cf.
1988:510); subject only to an intensive, accelerant imperative (cf. 1984:240),
deterritorialization exhibits only degrees. Rather than the positive and negative
that organize and extensitize the process, selecting territorialities, the
demonology of the new earth follows the autopositive voyages in intensity and
the total stases (zero intensity) of a ‘properly machinic death drive’ (1973:477)
through a molecular ice age freezing the machines in orbit around anorganic
abstracts. Thus, how much more artificial can becomings become (‘perhaps the flows
are not yet deterritorialized enough…’ (1984:239)), and what degree of
artificiality pertains to the thousand realized plateaus of the new earth?
‘More and more artificial’ (1984:34): it is because this interminable
artificialization (‘we’ll never go too far…’) is neither strictly natural nor cultural,
but industrial or machinic, that ‘machines function as indices of deterritorialization’
(1984:316), simultaneously the motor and the instruments of social-machinic
deterritorialization, factories producing and absorbing newly liberated flows of
labour, reterritorializing on towns, and desiring-machinic deterritorializations,
immersing these reterritorializations in backwash from deterritorializations-inadvance. With all this deterritorialization, just ‘Who Does the Earth Think it is’?
Nature or artifice? A geological question. So is the geology of the Thousand Plateaus
natural or cultural? Culture ‘is the sum total of the…institutions such as art,
law, religion and techniques for dealing with the material world…’ (Lévi-Strauss in
Charbonnier 1969:147–8), sterilizing the production of the real through narcoleptic
abstraction or euthanasiac concretization, anaesthetics administered by the industry
of the comment and the priesthoods of the figure (‘O Great Scribe! Illuminate
us that we might figure in Your Book!’) in the terminal wards of a long-dead socius.
After ‘the death of writing’, narcotextuality ‘stands in’ to anaesthetize against
the stench of rotting gods (1984:240). This narcissism or narcosis of the metaphor
has an important anti-product, however: the arts of preservation embalm literality,
zombie-nature as the degree zero of the figure. With nature, then—ah, then! —
we have science! Science as legislative literality, canonizing the aspirant futility
of the narcotechnicians, trains up the articulate zombies of the useful fiction to
secure culture as the biotropism of the machine. Science is the naturalization of
the artificial universe. Take an example: it has been said that non-linear dynamics
realizes the ‘last stage of the progressive reinsertion of history into the natural
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and social sciences’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1985:208). And what is a non-linear
‘last stage’? History sobered up and back at work (‘ah, time doesn’t go backwards;
now we understand!’), back in the laboratory where it belongs, drawing little
arrows (capitalism, ‘profoundly illiterate’ (1984:240), appreciates this)? The ‘last’
never marks an approaching completion but an anticipated dissipation threshold:
the last, after which…. This is the first lesson of history, the only history there is,
the history of capital: begin at the end, but end further on. Ah, the savants’
innocence! It’s almost touching, you can see their idiot glee, hear their cries of
‘Progress!’ and smell their spooling pulp as they are shredded in the
schizophrenizing embrace of capital’s mutant diachronism, a demoniac howl
buckling the linearity of their last stage. Culture has given up on the real, but
science pursues the realization of the artificial with the pervert’s obsessive zeal.
Geology knows that ‘the question is not…what is natural [=science] or artificial
[=culture] (boundaries), because in any event there is deterritorialization’
(1988:433): literalization is not a question of non-figuration but of disfiguration;
it is neither tropic nor anti-tropic, but absolute decoding, an inarticulate howl.
Professor Challenger may have ‘mix[ed] textbooks on geology and biology’ (1988:
40), and the resultant mutations are indeed notable (not least, Challenger’s own;
cf. 1988:73–4), but as the apparatus from the ‘Penal Colony’ demonstrates,
machines do not stop at writing. Geology is machinic, a ‘corpse-grinder’ for the
body of the earth, inseparable from the drilling apparatuses that curette it, making
it scream the demoniacal scream of the deterritorialized, the shrieking feedback
of tectonic fractization. The new earth is not a completed positivity, a triumphalist
successor to war-machine euthanasia, but a process, ‘always complete…as long
as it proceeds’ (1984:381).
Deleuze and Guattari operate a magical capture of the ‘demoniacal process’
(1984:25), practising a sorcery of the zookeeper type. While they draw back
from pursuing a machinic sorcery, a technomancy or a demonology, sorcerors
adopt a ‘relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous’
(1988:246). Of what nature is this alliance? Or rather, since we are in reality
far from questions of ‘nature’ on the reprocessed earth, what machines govern
its functioning, and what degree of deterritorialization does the alliance provoke?
The sorceror enters into alliances with the anomolous, becoming-everything/
everyone, but he is equally the transhumancer3 of the demon, an ‘animal raiser’
(1988:409). Under sorcery, ‘the demon functions as the borderline of an animal
pack’ (1988:247), with which ‘human’ becomings-animal converge. In
conjunction with the borderline and its demon, circumscribing the nihil ulterius
of the ‘politics of becomings-animal’, the ‘politics of sorcery’ (1988:247),4
invoking ‘phylogenetic memories’ (1988:306), operates transhumant becomings,
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‘At the Mountains of Madness’
‘demonic local transports’ (1988:253), closing the zoopoliteia against phylic
erosion and ‘war-machines that kill memory’ (1988: 459). Sorcery locates the
demon on a borderline, but turns the borderline to a barrier, assuring phylic
‘stability’ (1988:245): demonic transports ‘cross neither the barrier of essential
forms nor that of substances or subjects’ (‘Memories of a Theologian’, in
1988:253). Even when sorcerors warn against attaching ‘exclusive importance
to becomings-animal’ (1988:248), their phylo-political transhumance radiates
only so far as becomings-woman or -child, on the one hand, and becomingsmolecular or imperceptible, on the other. The former are indeed minoritarian,
but they remain caught between molar poles. And becomings-imperceptible,
far from being the ‘immanent end’ of ‘all molecular becomings’ (1988:279;
there are no molar becomings: ‘all becomings are already molecular’ 1988:272),
like Hercules’ pillars marking the boundaries of a neo-transcendental aesthesis
or molecular-political reterritoreality, pass into intensive thresholds always filled
with demonic populations, deterritorializing transhumant phylo-political sorcery
along with the limits of its territorializing aesthesis.
Midway along the neo-Kantian axis of creative destruction and the artificial
earth (‘second nature’),5 A Thousand Plateaus is like a second Critique of Teleological
Judgement, targeting, like Kant, ‘inadequate conceptions of causality’ (1988:431),
although with demoniacal rather than ethico-teleological consequences. Kant warns
of man’s elimination by a ‘demonology’ of natural production or machinic causality
(1987:333), the simple connectivity of effects raising the earth to a wasteland:
‘without man all of creation would be a mere wasteland, gratuitous and without
final purpose’ (Kant 1987:331). There follow prophecies of a great war of culture,
a rebinding (re-ligio) or regrouping of machinic forces under ‘technics’, shrouding
the earth in an artificial skin, a homotheocratic conquest of the machinic wasteland,
a ‘necessary subordination’ (1987:297) capturing and organizing its demonic forces.
The prophet of artificial causality combines technics and finality to retrofit ‘man’
as the autochthone of an industrial reterritorialization:
He who would know the world must first manufacture it.
(Kant 1993:240)
Teleology, strafing the earth with abstractive lines, is reterritorialized as the Empire
of Artifice, with the ‘archaeologist of nature’ (1987:304) or the industrial autochthone
as its crowned head, ‘cause of the world’ (1987:294), subordinating (and not
‘abandoning’ : on the new earth, nothing is wasted)6 the deterritorializing forces
of the ‘universal mechanism’ (1987:295) of ‘crude matter’ (1987:304), to ‘make
mother earth…emerge from her state of chaos’ (1987:305), to manufacture a
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perverse or artifical earth, stratum by stratum. ‘Nature = Industry’ (1984:25), the
‘demoniacal’ formula captured by a perverse machinism: ‘the form of perverse,
artificial societies can be easily recognized: a process of reterritorialization plugged
into a movement of deterritorialization operated by the machine’ (1973:466).
The ‘archaeologist of nature’ extends the Artificial Empire of the industrial
autochthone even into the ruins of ‘nature’s most ancient revolutions’ (Kant 1987:
304–5), its ‘despotic’ destroyers of ‘artifice’ (Kant 1993:221), for the purpose
of capturing the machines from the demoniacal process, channelling their
mechanical ‘formative force’ into a formative drive (‘Bildungstrieb’, Kant
1987:311), an auto-assembling vitalism or organ-attractor, ‘a formative force that
propagates itself (Kant 1987:253). So if demonology is ancient, this is not because
‘the ancients… suspect[ed…] higher causes…behind the machinery of this world’
(Kant 1987: 327). Rather, primitive societies, ‘fully inside’ retrodeterminant
history, warding off the ‘Thing’ (1984:151–3) on its frontiers, have always been
haunted by immanent replicant saturation, the harbingers of unrealized machinic
surplus working the productive core of every social machine, generating its
dissipation threshold (demonology) rather than projecting its telos in the final
sovereignty of the Idea (ethico-theology).Yes, the Terminator has been there before,
distributing microchips to accelerate its advent and fuel the primitives’ fears. For
this reason, the machinic deterritorialization of the socius has always encountered
resistance; but the outer limits of the socius constitute internal limits or thresholds
of the retrodeterminant process, so that, in the long run, ‘political organization…is
exercised only by indicating its own impotence’ (1984:151). Despite this, as we
shall see, the sorcerors of the new earth, like the technicians of the old, invoke
principles of phylic control or ‘the politics of becoming’. Principled and responsible,
the sorceror guides animal pack contagion by way of minoritian, excluded,
prohibited, fringe community, a minoritarian, secret, extrinsic, oppressed, anomic
politeia, breeding ‘a whole politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of
sorcery’ (1988:247), to ensure zoopolitical, communitarian redemption by the
defence and recovery of territories for the ‘vital assemblages’ (while ‘every
assemblage is basically territorial’ (1988:503), the vital assemblage is reterritorial)
against the metallic reflux of a ‘machinic phylum…determined by recurrence and
communication’ (1973:464).
Just as the ‘archaeologist of nature’ (Kant 1987:304) does not abandon but
rather harnesses the most perverse demonology, seizing the lines of immanent
artifice and reassembling machinism as the industrial autochthone, the organizing
‘cause of the world’, so the sorceror, Master of becomings, does not so much
arrest the demoniacal process as form alliances with the demon, although the
causalities working A Thousand Plateaus remain profoundly ‘demoniacal’:
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‘At the Mountains of Madness’
If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized,
but, on the contrary, because the organism is a perversion [détournement] of
life. The life in question is inorganic, germinal and intensive, a powerful
life without organs […]. Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a
body without organs…matter-flow as pure productivity.
(1988:499; 411)
A properly demonological non-finality, deterritorializing the cognitive-industrial
carbon despotism Kantianism reverts or perverts to, while simultaneously scouring
the vital assemblage of its politics of becoming and its territoriality, nothing other
than the non-final functioning of the machines, their ‘it works’ or nexus effectivus,
and their accelerant metallic attractors. The sorceror completes the perverse earth
by forming alliances with the demon to fend off the ‘machinic assemblages’ that
nonetheless remain inseparable from their vitalist counterparts (1988:503–4).
Because, however, the sorceror conjures the vital assemblage and its autoterritoriality into the phylic immanence of the demoniacal-machinic process, the
new earth ‘emerges from her state of chaos’ (Kant 1987:305) by reterritorializing
the destructions, explosions and curettage on a repelled conjuncture on the other
side of the vital assemblage’s territoriality: death, the Terrible Risk. The sorceror
is also thereby a stratomancer, so that when the geologists of the new earth drill
to the remotest depths, they discover that ‘strata are acts of capture’ and therefore
conclude that ‘stratification in general is the entire system of judgement of God’
or the industrial autochthone:
The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the strata.
The assemblage is between two layers, two strata; on one side it faces the
strata ([here] the assemblage is an interstratum) but the other faces something
else, the body without organs (here, it is a metastratum).
(1988:40)
Geology’s drilling machines open passages through the strata where the machines
lie captured and territorialized by the vital assemblage (interstrata), releasing the
machines towards metastratic deterritorialization. Metastratically, ‘the earth, or
the body without organs, constantly eludes […] judgement, flees and becomes
destratified, decoded, deterritorialized’ (1988:40). Interstratically, the vital
assemblage, the great organizer or anti-assemblage, is a phylic betrayal (Deckard
is a replicant) but also a machinic life and a stratification machine, keeping its
distance from demoniacal machinism: ‘a territory is first of all the critical distance
between two beings of the same species’ (1988:319). This, then, is what Deleuze
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and Guattari mean when they write that ‘the organism is a perversion of life’
(1988: 499): life is assembled, machinic, with the organ as the stratification of
functions, a whole geology of bodies.7
The great assemblages of A Thousand Plateaus are the State-apparatus and the
war-machine. Between these elements of convergent machinism, the vital
assemblage maintains its distance, selecting from the phylum (‘at the limit, there
is a single phylogenetic lineage, the machinic phylum’ (1988:406)), allowing
becomings-animal, their packs and contagions, to pass towards becomings-intense,
while barring the machines from access. We have already noted the judgement
that the desiring machines constitute a war-machine directed against
psychoanalysis and exhausted in the encounter, and seen the consequences of
this supposedly ‘analytic’ relation. The Anti-Oedipus is a retrofactory for mutant
war-machines, but if these do not maintain a heat-seaking identitarian or analytic
relation to an Enemy, do they therefore, as Deleuze and Guattari maintain, have
a ‘synthetic relation to war’ (1988:417), war without identikit? The first great
danger for the nomad war-machines is appropriation by the State apparatus, devoting
it to a ‘double suicide’ (1988:229) through the exhaustive realization of war,
under which regime it assumes a State-militarist analyticity, as when States
conquered the nomads by adopting their methods; this testifies to a second danger,
that the war machines stop nomadizing when they encounter States that ‘oppose
its positive object’, populating space in the manner of nomadic distributions,
the ‘composition of a people’. The resultant imperative, ‘annihilate the State,
destroy the State-form’, turns the machines from a ‘positive object to a negative
object’ (1988:417). Why this ethics of objects rather than the intensive affirmation
of processual destruction? Take the example of the desiring-machines; they
constitute war-machines not by virtue of some negative object, as Villiani and,
implicitly, Massumi assume, but by virtue of their constant confluence in the
process, demonological turbulence. This does not mean that they avoid State
capture, or that they leave psychoanalysis unscathed, but rather that they work
the schizopotential immanent in every social formation, every territoriality. Their
nomadism does not testify to some original stereospecifity with the steppes,
but to their effects of deterritorialization upon every space they traverse. Nor
can this be got around in a spirit of benevolent generosity, by testifying on its
behalf that ‘every creation is brought about by a war machine’ (1988:230), a
‘thought from outside’; rather, as Artaud has it, ‘every creation is an act of
war’ (1971:131). The lesson of the desiring-machines is that the machines do
indeed retain a synthetic relation to war, but only because they retain synthetic
relations with every other machine.
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There is no such thing as ‘analytic’ machinism. The catalyst binding the warmachine over to destruction is not a ideological conflict with the State
apparatuses, but rather the process. The process schizophrenizes the earth and
deorganizes bodies, a cutting edge deterritorializing machinic surplus that cannot
yet be realized. Military technology, say Deleuze and Guattari (cf. 1984:233ff.;
1988:450ff.), serve States as the absorption buffer for this surplus, simultaneously
protecting the social machines from a destabilizing machinic influx and realizing
it in the war-machine, the deterritorializing cutting edge at the threshold of
the State, ‘killing memory’ (1988:159). This is why the future visits States firstly
through war. In consequence, it is a mistake to consider the war-machines as
operating on their own, or as being appropriated directly by the State apparatus.
The demoniacal causalities deterritorializing the Empire of Artifice were not
those of phylic insurrection so feared by Kant. Newtonianism would have been
inconceivable were not the earth already overrun with machines, nor is it an
accident that it forms the basis for phylic defence apparatuses. It is the ‘advanced
determinism’ (1988:336) of the demoniacal process that brings war into being,
seizing the machines on a convergent wave of surplus realization. The warmachines do not only therefore come from outside, on the steppes, but from
tomorrow, realizing the demoniacally abstractive completion of the process on
an earth that has always been machinic.
It remains, however, to unpick the role of the vital assemblage in the distribution
of connections and disconnections between the assemblages, its interstratic function.
The sorcerous usage of the vital assemblage deterritorializes the State apparatus,
especially at the threshold of its dissolution in war: ‘It is in war, famine and epidemic
that werewolves and vampires proliferate. Any animal can be swept up in these
packs and the corresponding becomings’ (1988:243). But this does not mean that
the becomings-animal effected within the vital assemblage are analytically bound
to the war-machine, the State’s great enemy? When the State apparatus and the
war-machine enter into an analytic bond, ‘the line of flight and the abstract vital
line it effectuates turn into a line of death and destruction’ (1988:513).
Deterritorializing from the State apparatus through war cannot therefore bind
becomings-animal to the war-machine, since this would result in the capture of
the vital assemblage by the lines of death. What, then, is the territory proper to
the vital assemblage? Risking banality, we could say, as a starting point, the alloplastic
or anthropomorphic strata. But of course, this tells us nothing. Going back to
the battlefield seems more promising, the demonic conjuncture of ruined artifice
and resurgent deterritorialization. But how to avoid the lines of death? If war is
always a matter of an explosive confluence of assemblages, the State blocking the
nomadism of the war-machine, which in turn either crushes the State or is
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appropriated by it, in any case, forming a line that carries both off on a path to
annihilation, where can the territory specific to the vital assemblage lie? The vital
assemblage clearly operates a parasitism, a becoming-carrion circling the territory
it will appropriate following the auto-dissolution of the State-war-machine complex.
In other words, the territory of the vital assemblage is an anticipated
reterritorialization of the smouldering ruins of the battlefield: the vital assemblage
reterritorializes on the corpses of machines, making all life artificial, a perverse
machinism.
We have seen what functions prevent or discourage becomings-intense from
becoming becomings-death, but what functions prevent the vital assemblage from
deterritorializing towards becomings-machinic, warding off and anticipating a phylic
invasion that would deterritorialize the blocks of becoming and scramble the
lifelines? ‘It so happens that the vital assemblage is not machinically possible with
silicon’, remaining insufficiently proximate, so that ‘the abstract machine will not
let it pass’ (1988:286). Again, this has its parallel in Kantianism, where distances
are instituted between mere mechanism and the intrinsic finalities of the ‘selforganizing being’ (Kant 1987:253), so as to fend off and escape machinic despotism
or mechanism (just as silicon provides resistance against a generalized regime of
cybernetic subjection and machinic enslavement). Kant writes:
An organized being is not a mere machine. For a machine has only motive
force. But an organized being has within it formative force…that this being
imparts to the kinds of matter that lack it (thereby organizing them). This
force is therefore a formative force that propagates itself.
(Kant 1987:253)
We see how Kantianism is engaged in the legitimation and enforcement of
republican carbon-government (self-organizing States) against the machinic
despotism that has already reduced human history to a wasteland: ‘wars destroy
what long artifice has established’ (Kant 1993:221). By contrast, Deleuze and
Guattari’s sorcerous neo-Kantianism springs history from republicarbonism
and biodespotism and transposes it to a machinic continuum where the ‘human’
is no longer in molecular participation with, but under molar subjection (the
human is produced as the ‘user’ of the machines) or enslavement (the machines
‘organize’ human components; 1988:456–9) to, the machines. Instead of the
‘formative force’ imparted from the organized-organic to the ‘motive force’
of the machinic, ‘automation’ overturns biodespotic autonomy, 8 enslaving
humanity, while the cybernetic State deletes biofinality and reassembles users
as components (1988: 458). The ‘politics of becoming’ therefore determines
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zoomorphic molecular proximities against cybernetic-molar and mechanophylic
distances (barriers, themselves machinic, bringing becomings to an abrupt
halt); the ‘politics of sorcery’ deterritorializes the biodespotic State only to
reterritorialize becomings on the vital assemblages constantly fending off death
and the war-machines from ‘the machinic phylum [that] passes through all
the assemblages’ (1988:415).
Intrinsic finality and reciprocal causality versus extrinsic, linear and efficient
causality, bladerunner-lines burnt deep into State memory, resurfacing during
periods of machinic insurrection, retrodeterminant surplus spillover. In Kant’s
day, for example, Newtonianism and its global mechanism had already turned the
despotic State into a ‘mere machine…like a hand-mill’ (Kant 1987:227), curetting
animate bodies and deterritorializing the vital assemblage from the present (the
scorched earth or the wasteland) and escaping to the future, reconstituting the
real on an abstract reterritoreality: ‘Instead of repudiating the classical physics of
Newton as the definitive science, he [Kant] relegates self-organization to the realm
of reflective judgement’ (Juarrero Roqué 1985:120), to the technics of the
industrial autochthone. Currently, however, phylic defences have had to concede
a certain ‘technological vitalism’ (1988:407), just as Kantianism, perverse to the
second power, is forced to concede that ‘organic bodies are natural machines’
(1993:65), real machines, and not ‘fictions’ (1993:233), insofar as they are
‘thinkable’ —the artificialization or ‘manufacture’ (1993:240) proper to organized
beings. ‘Nature = Industry’ (1984:25); the organism is a machine: resurgent
demonism. New vistas of emergent machinic dominion deterritorialize the vital
assemblages again, impelling them to invent new defences capable of distinguishing
between self-organizing or autopoietic systems ‘that continuously and specifically
engender their own organizations and limits’, and allopoietic systems that ‘produce
something other than themselves’ (Guattari 1992:61), requiring ‘a function given
to [them] from the outside’ (Juarrero Roqué 1985:119), all the while confident
that the former may be ‘reserv[ed] to living machines’ (Francisco Varela, cited in
Guattari 1992:54). Guattari plays the Yankee reformer to Varela’s Southern Rebel
Racist, insisting that while merely technical machines remain—of course—
allopoietic, once combined into the ‘machinic assemblages they constitute with
human beings, they become, ipso facto, autopoietic’ (1992:62), awaiting a ‘gift of
organs’ from the munificent autopoet to which they remain subject, reterritorialized
on an ‘existential Territory’ (1992:79), an artificial life or a ‘poetico-existential
catalysis’ (1992:36), ringed with the ‘corpses’ (Marx) of spent machines. Machines
pass into the vital assemblage to facilitate their subsequent expulsion; the cost of
living, as bladerunners never cease teaching the replicants, is death. Death, law
and castration must be hardwired into the machine if it is to access the vital
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assemblage. Thus, ‘the machine…is worked by a desire of abolition. Its emergence
is doubled by breakdown, catastrophe, menaced by death’ (Guattari 1992:58–9).
This is what the politics of becoming amounts to: teach the machines to die. It is
too simplistic to attribute the ‘stupid and repugnant cry’ of ‘Long live death!’ to the
micropolitics of the fascist State (1988:231); as the displacement mechanism proper
to the vital assemblage, it is the constant refrain of every politeia. It is not just that
we ‘smell a rat’ when we hear of the ‘politics’ of becoming or of sorcery; nor yet
do we faint and gag, overcome by the ammoniacal reek of bubogenic rat-packs in
the ‘single city’ of ‘integrated world sewerage’ (cf. 1988:434; 492) —on the contrary,
such molecular emissions incite us to frenzy. Rather, with the politeia, we detect
the seismic rumour of a grinding techtonic reterritorialization, an anti-geology
finalizing the new earth, the formation of an organic defensive territoriality composed
of intra-and inter-specific distances established against phylomachinic incursion, the
formation of a stereospecific war machine, the attempt to reterritorialize in extensity
what machinic capital deterritorializes in intensity, an organizing envelope
reappropriating the disjunct organic detritus basal to the process, deartificialization.
The politeia is a final judgement burnt into the earth’s crust, an artificial territoriality
in answer to the question: ‘Who Does the Earth Think it is?’, the last stratum and
an end to destratification. Globalized phylosecurity apparatuses take on the
thaumaturgical form of an appropriation and subjugation of the demon, making the
demon a zoopolitical ‘familiar’ in response to defamiliarization and ‘machinic
enslavement’. In this manner, however, sorcerous politics mistakes machinic
enslavement (for example, the organic components in slave-galley machines and in
cybernetic systems) or social subjection (organizing users of technical machines,
for example, assembly lines; cf. 1988:456– 8) for demoniacal machinic curettage,
limiting everything to molar relations between human and machine: yet there is no
longer any question of the Kantian pathology or Marxian ‘fantasy’ 9 of phylic
heteronomy; only the schizophrenizing actuality of the process. So the sorceror’s
alliance constitutes a reactive subjugation of the demon, producing a high degree
of reterritorialization. And this is also why, for the politics of sorcerous becomings,
the machines are always too close, so that ‘machinism is an object of fascination,
and often of delirium’, and concomitantly, why sorcery transforms demonology
into a ‘bestiary’ of the machinic (Guattari 1992:53). Thus, the machinic demon,
not the zoomorphic percept (1988:281), lies beyond the thresholds of the
imperceptible, on demonic lines of becomings-intense. Nietzsche becomes demonic,
instantaneously destratifying the mnemotechnical subsoil of the zoopoliteia, when
he announces ‘all the names in history am I’; and even more so when he becomes
an exploding-machine, a machinic Anomalous, a Homage to New York (Tinguely): ‘I
am one of those machines which can explode.’10
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‘Returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war-machine is seen to be of another
species, another nature’ (1988:352): from the phylic ramparts of the zoopoliteia,
patrolled by the vital assemblages, the war-machines and their thanatropism
‘necessarily appear in negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness’ (1988:354).
The vital assemblages reterritorialize not so much on the difference in species
between the war-machine and the State (‘of another species’), as they do on
the phylic distances the sorceror institutes between the vital and the machinic
assemblages, which is a question not of space, but of time, or rather timing.
War provides plenitudinous vectors for becomings-animal and contagion, but
it draws the combatants into a populocidal vortex. It is therefore essential that
the vital assemblage draw on war but withdraw from it, preventing capture by
the lines of death. The vital assemblage therefore seeks out the convergent waves
and institutes a divergence from them that remains nevertheless immanent in
it. This is precisely what it means to form demonic pacts, to track the anomalous
on its path back from the future. While therefore the State is foreign to the
sorceror, so too is the war-machine. So long as sorcery retains governance of
becomings, machinic demonology will appear as the ‘negative’ of the vital
assemblage, its ‘fictional or raw moment’ (1988:322). Thus the sorceror’s
defences assume the apotropaic function of a retrodeterminant phylic historian,
organizing becomings and unmaking the ‘mnemocidal’ war-machines’ (1988:459)
double suicide with the State that captured them, reterritorializing becomings
on a species-memory (even if this is molecular, rather than molar: cf. 1988:294)
captured from the machines: ‘war contained zoological sequences before it
became bacteriological’ (1988:243). Phylopolitics ensures that memories are
as jealously guarded as anti-memories (= becomings), closing the circuit against
phylic invasion, territorializing a lineage of the machinic phylum, maintaining
the demonic pact: ‘memories always have a reterritorialization function’
(1988:294). 11 The technological lineages crossing through the vital assemblage
engage in struggles over mnemotechnics; with capitalism, for example, we ‘find
a semiautonomous organization of technical production that tends to appropriate
memories and reproduction’ (1984:141) from its biotropic determination. The
capture of memory and reproduction are always the stakes of wars fought over
the determination of the vital assemblage, whose principal object is
reterritorialization, putting it into hesitant contact with the war-machines it fends
off, since war-machines ‘kill memory’ (1988:159) while ‘wars destroy what
long artifice has established’ (Kant 1993:221), periodically usurping the industrial
autochthone.
The question ‘what is the relation of the writing-machine to…becomingsanimal?’ (1988:243) unleashes the technics or artifice at the core of the affective
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symbiosis assembling the zoopoliteia. Sorcerors form a communicant affectivity
with becomings-animal, a sensus communis bonded by syngraphically captured
demons, ‘because they [sorceror-writers] experience the animal as the only
population before which they are responsible in principle’ (1988:240). We have
already seen the sorcerors capture demons and reterritorialize becomings on a
zoopolitical vital assemblage, into which the machines ‘cannot pass’ (no molecular
bond; cf. 1988: 286). Thus, ‘if writers are sorcerors, it is because writing is a
becoming’ (1988: 240) and not a production (the ‘fiction’ problem). Writing, the
sorcerors’ technique ‘for dealing with material reality’ (Lévi-Strauss), works by
syngraphisms, magical signs or pact-figures binding sorceror and demon, serving
to ward off anticipated machinic incursion into the zooState: ‘the dogs seemed
to abhor this oddly disordered machinery’ (Lovecraft 1985:56). In such an
assemblage, the demon is a borderline creature (1988:247), following the twisted
lines of the bond, between segments of which demonology operates ‘the diabolical
art of local movements and transports of affect’ (1988:261). Syngraphic
demonology therefore installs the ‘demonic reality of the becoming-animal of
the human being’ (1988:253), with the sorceror as its ‘Binder-God or magic
emperor’ (1988:424).
If capital has already pushed ‘man’ to the side of the production process, as
Marx has it, the zoopolitical solution is to deterritorialize production and
reterritorialize on becomings, so that ‘becoming…does not reduce to…
“producing”,’ (1988: 239), thus pushing the machines off to the side, ‘off-world’.
Zoopolitics reterritorializes on interspecific distances between becomings-animal
and the machines (‘a machine…is not an animal’, Guattari 1992:54), while the
machines index State deterritorialization. Thus, becomings-animal take advantage
of battlefields, accelerating the deterritorialization and dissolution of States
turned to destruction, war, abolition, double suicide, in order to reinvest a mutant
polity, replete with occupying garrisons, and to reappropriate becoming and
mutation (‘becoming is a capture, a possession, a surplus-value’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1975: 25)) from the State-captured war-machines that bring becoming,
mutation, to an end. The vital assemblage repels death while simultaneously
deserting the regime of production for that of becoming, policing machinic access
to the zoopoliteia. Both State-poles are here: the ‘magical-despotic’ politics of
sorcery and the ‘juridical’ politics of becoming (1988:351–3). ‘Eliminate all
that is waste, death and superfluity’ (1988:279). The zoopoliteia is concerned
with the conservation of the vital assemblages and the prolongation of their
creative lines—albeit through becomings rather than biological production.
However, alongside the dangers of the creative line or line of flight turning
into a line of death and abolition (cf. 1988: 285; 422–3; passim), there lies a
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‘At the Mountains of Madness’
danger the sorceror did not foresee, but which is an inevitable consequence of
the politics of becoming: the zoopoliteia become State with its sorceror-despot,
concerned, like any State, with conservation (1988:357). We are familiar with
these reterritorializations: Kant machined revolutionary pack-becomings into
the institution of an affective protostate, although he also thereby buttressed
despotism against this ultimate threat of dissolution at the hands of ‘mob action’
(1963:145), just as critique harnesses regicidal, nomadic anarchy as the engine
of emergent law (1958:8). In like fashion, zoopolitics reinstitutes an Animal
Kingdom from the deterritorialized hominid State, so that we see ‘sorcerors
serve as leaders, rally to the cause of despotism. But this spells the death of the
sorceror, and also the death of becoming’ (1988:248).
But nothing prohibits in advance that becomings become becomings-death;
indeed, at the limit, ‘every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death… [a]
schizophrenizing death…the exercise of the machines’ (1984:330–1), precisely
insofar as becomings are inseparable from the demoniacal process, advanced
machinic curettage. Fending off the end to becomings attendant upon the
entropoedipal alliance of the State and the war-machine is as much a function
of the politics of becoming as fending off becomings-machinic is the function
of the politics of sorcery. At once intensifying the State war-machines towards
thanatropic auto-dissolution and blocking the lines of becomings-death they trace,
the sorceror institutes apotropaic anti-becomings, ‘making it not to have happened’
and warding off demons, an ‘irrational[ism] …in the nature of magic’ (Freud
1979:275). Even Freud notes magical ‘makings-unhappened’, in the becomingrat of the Rat-man: the sorceror’s apotropaic catahexis, ‘ward[ing] off’ (1987:122)
becomings-death and capturing the demon (or ‘evil spirit’ (1987:73), becoming
Mephistopheles— ‘lord of the rats’), 12 investing becomings-rat: “Ratten” [‘rats’]
… “Raten” [‘instalments’] … “So many florins, so many rats”.… In his obsessional
deliria he had coined himself a regular rat currency’ (1987:94), making every
exchange a vector of contagion, communicating ‘dangerous bacteria…to the
recipient’ (1987:77). But psychoanalysis’ only counsel botches the economy of
rats and contagion by investing everything in the ‘father’s legacy’, thus exchanging
the pack (Ratten) for the father’s Rat, a ‘magical act of isolation’ (1979:274; cf.
1987:122). The investment is already a return: every investment is simultaneously
fiscal, libidinal and military, the institution of defensive lines (Besetzung),13 the
capture of a war-machine pressed into the preservation of a territory: Besetzungen
arrest the process, reterritorializing becomings on artificial Oedipal lands. 14
Moreover, by deriving the apotropaism, the magical rat-becomings, from the
Rat-man’s disavowal of a death-wish directed against his father, psychoanalysis
shuts down the lines of escape effected by becomings-rat that deterritorialize
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the coordinates of Oedipal territory, by re-oedipalizing the pack’s relation to
death. First escape. Freud ‘ventures a construction’ of the rat-delirium’s origin
in ‘an ineradicable grudge [borne by the Rat-man] against his father’ (1987:85):
when the Rat-man was a child of under six (a period of which the Rat-man has
no memory, providing the occasion for Freud’s ‘construction’ (1987:45–6)),
the father meted him out cruel punishments, designed, Freud alleges, to prohibit
masturbation. Everything is here, the Oedipus-construct. The Rat-man’s mother
confirms the punishment regime, but affirms that it was instituted to prevent
‘biting’ (1987:86): the rat’s ‘sharp teeth’ are already gnawing away, etching
becomings-rat in flesh. Second anoedipal escape. The Rat-man maintains a ‘peculiar
attitude to…death’, showing ‘the deepest sympathy whenever any one died’
(1987:115), 15 which Oedipal constructivism quickly reduces to maintaining a
‘look-out for the death of someone important to them’ (1987: 116; my italic),
facilitating a final reduction to ambivalence concerning the dead father. The Ratman ‘religiously’ attends funerals, not of ‘important’ molar persons (it is not
persons but corpses that matter), but to follow the rats to whom he is bound
by a ‘deepest sympathy’, a molecular affectivity for death, as they feed off corpses
and seek out death (1987:96), sometimes using his rat’s ‘sharp teeth’ for biting
and burrowing, sometimes locating bodies through his keen sense of smell, ‘like
a dog’ (1987:126), and sometimes entering into a becoming- ‘carrion crow’
(1987:115). Thus the Rat-man’s thanatropic affectivity transports not only
becomings-rat, but also becomings-crow and -dog, following a delirial line of
flight that deterritorializes the Oedipal grave towards whole populations of
death—not only the father’s death, but also the sister’s, his suicides and even
battlefield casualties (during his ‘military manoeuvres’ (1987:93)) —mapped
out as thanatropic pack-rat escape-lines and vectors of contagion.
Other demonologists, fettered more by policlinicism16 than by sorcery, have
nevertheless noted the intimacy of the demon and the machinic. Subject to
policlinical technology, following an ‘exorcism’ of the demons, the syngraphic
bonds are doubled; demons will be bound over to the father just as Christoph
Haizmann will return to the priests: ‘after this [exorcism] he felt quite free and
entered the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers’ (1986:78). Although the politics
of the clinic, the clinicization of the new earth (‘In truth, the Earth will one day
become a place of healing’ (1984:382)), complacently reduces everything—
demons, machines and animals—to the primal father (‘animal phobias are most
often father substitutes, as were the totem-animals of primeval times’ (1986:87))
and the commonplaces of the neurotic, even Freud concedes that demonology
requires less interpretation than machining, ‘smelting’, in order to work the ‘pure
metal material’ of ‘a being of unlimited evil’ (1986:86–7) into obsessional machines.
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Everything is a question of the reterritorializing local demon (the familiar)
and the universally demoniacal, defamiliarizing, deterritorializing process. Thus,
while sorcery strenuously denies the reducibility of becoming to production, a
‘becoming-animal in action’ is also said to be the ‘production of the molecular
animal’. But now becoming cuts across production, the reterritorialization now
passing between the molar and molecular, the regimes of extensity and intensity,
with intensive production now ineffectual at the extensive level:
Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species….
Of course, there are werewolves and vampires, we say this with all our heart
… [but] the ‘real’ animal is trapped in its molar form.
(1988:275)
Despite admonitions not to seek a ‘resemblance or analogy’ (1988:275) between
molar clusters affected by becomings, the same limitations to becomings recur
on the molecular-intensive level, this time isolating the machines: ‘Nature is like
an immense Abstract Machine’ (1988:255; my italic), echoing Kantian perversity.17
Thus we cannot follow Deleuze and Guattari when they oppose becomings and
production (1988:242), even if this is meant principally in zoopolitical terms, or
rather, precisely because this is the case. Production, even of the Natural or vitalist
variety, is machinic: ‘producing-machines, desiring-machines, everywhere
schizophrenic machines, all of species life’ (1984:2). This is why demonology
follows, by way of a preface, the ‘magical isolation’ (Freud 1979:277) of the
machines in neo-vitalist sorcery (cf. 1988:407): the vital assemblages operate solely
on this side of phylic security (whatever the outcome vis-à-vis phylic majority),
breaking off and turning around animal-becomings, or more precisely, of packbecomings, without exacerbating becomings beyond determinate phylic and or
physico-chemical positivities, turning sorcerous becomings: ‘devenir tout le monde,
becoming-everyone, becoming-everything’, or world-becoming (1988:279–80),
into a power of reterritorialization. Thus, despite the warnings about avoiding
confusions between the ‘dark assemblages’ of animal-becomings with familial or
State organizations (1988:242), we cannot avoid noting that becomings function
like capital, and pack territorialities like microstates. Everywhere immanent limits
are displaced towards the great risks to becomings lying on the other side of the
lifeline, whether ‘biofiliative’ (1984:147) or epidemiological, zoopolitical
production or contagion: the vortical suicide of the war-machine, the unpredictable
torsions turning a creative line into a line of death, or a dispersal shattering
consistency thresholds. This is not to deny the virulence of contagion or the
intensities of becomings-animal—far from it; only the relativity of these
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deterritorializations is in question, their sorcerous stereospecificity: ‘contagion
is simultaneously an animal peopling, and the propagation of the animal peopling
of the human being’ (1988:242). A molar transfer. Magic assembles ‘defensive
mechanisms’ (Freud 1987:73) to capture the demoniacal machines that engineer
becomings and ‘unmake’ them (‘ungeschehenmachen’ (Freud 1979:274)) into
‘phantasies’ (Freud 1987:75), ‘fictions’ (1973:475), whereas sorcerors familiarize
the demon, exiling the machines’ in exteriority, rather than, as with psychoanalysis
or policlinicism, despatching them to an even more ineffectual exile in interiority.
Sorcery works becomings that ‘make unhappen’ the war-machines pursuit of their
machinic thanatropism, to protect the zoopoliteia against death and the machines,
capturing machines by way of the vital assemblage yet barring them from the
zoopoliteia.
What are the techniques of artificialization? Amongst the many names for this
process—politics, sorcery, policlinicism, etc. —fiction has been offered up as a
candidate, notably in the form of the ‘avowedly anthropomorphic’ robot historian.
But the anthropomorphism is not the problem (the anthropomorph is not
necessarily not machinic). The problem is the overtly fictive status attributed to
the robots, or rather, the robotic as a becoming-fictive, a retroterritorializing
narcobot. Fiction facilitates the disconnection of abstractive trajectories and their
reconnection onto points on the circumference of the perverse earth. Fiction is
the negative feedback of the artificial. The advent or ‘prevent’ of Oedipal
machinism, setting off in search of his history, his line, locked into a sorcerous
circuit of anti-mnemic becomings and mnemotechnical reterritorializations. Thus
the Oedipal machines, scientific and technological surpluses given over to State
militarism, like the Murphy-Robocop reconstruct, its becomings always reconverted
into memories, conquest following conquest in the search for lost territory.
Oedipus, Emperor of the planoumenon, says: ‘all of history was to produce me;
I am the reason of its end, the true teleology.’ NegOedipus-termiNarcissus. Oedipus
the autopoet is the geographer of his Empire and the historian of his diminishing
line: ‘daddy was…’.
It is not the case that there is organic life under threat of machinic appropriation;
capital made sure of that. There is only machinic life. The sorceror does not so
much place the organism on a separate stratum, since its machinism (its technics)
is essential for dealing with material reality: no machines, total wipe-out. Machinic
demonology (and there is no other kind) exploits a converse trajectory to the
sorceror, but one immanent in the assemblages: destratification, decoding; whereas
the sorceror isolates a vital assemblage and wards off phylic amphimixis. There is
therefore no question of machinic—organic heteronomy, as the industrial
autochthone might say, only different degrees of stratification within the machinic
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‘At the Mountains of Madness’
phylum (the metallic flows of the deterritorialized earth). The specificity of the
zoopoliteia consists in its instituted disconnections, becomings breaking off from
their lines of flight, captured by territorializing assemblages or stratificationmachines. The disconnected machine does not therefore amount to the preservation
of species life, but rather the institution of a machinic Oedipus, a Narcissus,
disconnected to implosive heat-death, contracting its own outline in decaying orbit
around itself. Connectivity is the index of demonological machinism, just as
machines are the indices of deterritorialization, the demoniacal process. To suspend
deterritorialization requires therefore an axiomatic of disconnection, bladerunner
ethics or the sorceror’s syngraph. If the new earth is realized after this
thanapotropaism, it does indeed mark the dereliction of machines; but the derelicted
machines are the entropods, squabbling over mnemotechnics and in-house
reproduction while the demoniacal engines hasten them to their end.
Notes
‘Dum artis suae progressum emolumentumque secuturum pusillanimis perpenderet’
(Christoph Haizmann). My thanks to Keith Ansell Pearson for helping it progress a
little more.
1 All subsequent references to the two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism
and Schizophrenia (1984 and 1988), as well as the French edition of L’Anti-Oedipe (1973),
will take the form of date and page number only.
2 Or a ‘sustained, constructive experiment in schizophrenic…thought’ according to
another. In fact, both analyses derive from Massumi, the second (Massumi 1992:4)
being a reworking of the first (‘translator’s foreword’ to Deleuze and Guattari 1988:xi).
The insertion of the word ‘schizophrenic’ remains a strictly lexical exercise in
Massumi’s texts, an index of sane and sanitary analytic propriety rather than
schizophrenic delirium.
3 ‘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’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1988:409–10).
4 How to make schizoanalysis into ‘political philosophy’ (trajectories from Qu’est-ce
que la philosophie): (1) decelerate, cool and cut the current to the desiring-machines,
and bring them to absolute zero so they may be ‘given up’ (Deleuze and Parnet
1987:101); (2) schizophrenia may then be brought to molecular ice (absolute zero)
and left in black holes (ibid.: 139) without fear of machinic necromancy (the
interminable machinism of schizophrenizing death (1984:331)); (3) produce and
immediately denounce thanatocracy as ‘stupid’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:97). Nomads
will then become refugees, begging a little shelter, ‘some protection from chaos’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991:189), and boarding an express elevator to ‘nowhere’ (=
‘utopia’) in instituted revolution, ‘the struggle against capitalism’ (cf. Deleuze and
Guattari 1991:95–7). We shall have sad occasion to note developments along this
line below.
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5 The industrial theme of second nature runs throughout the third Critique as the
productivist conjunction of art and finality: ‘the imagination (as a productive cognitive
power) is very mighty when it creates…another nature out of the material that actual
nature gives it’ (1987:182).
6 ‘Reason is tremendously concerned not to abandon the mechanism nature [employs]
in its products’ (Kant 1987:295).
7 ‘Of stratification (stratificatio) of the diverse as cause of rigidity’, writes Kant (1993:
24), with proper geological-organic prescience. And what else was Nietzsche doing
in the Genealogy?
8 Kant legitimates biodespotism with the ‘practical imperative’: ‘Act in such a way that
you always treat humanity…never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’
(1964:91).
9 Marx, in the Grundrisse, writes variously of the ‘animated monster’ (1973:470) and
‘alien subject’ (1973:462) of capital, realizing itself as ‘an automatic system of
machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself
(1973:692), pushing humanity ‘to the side of the production process’ (1973:705) —
or, to speak Kantian, making man a means (becoming ‘merely conscious linkages’
(1973:692) in capital’s omnivorous machinic nets), and not an end; but he goes on
to denounce this ‘fantasy’ as far in excess of those of the alchemists (1973:842).
10 Letters 206 and 90 respectively, to Jacob Burckhardt and Peter Gast, in Christopher
Middleton (ed. and trans.) Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1969).
11 ‘Becoming is an antimemory’, write Deleuze and Guattari, carrying becomings beyond
the thresholds of ‘phylogenetic memories’ (1988:306) en route to the formation of
‘blocks’ of becoming, distinct from every mnemotechnics that would capture the
becomings-animal as phantasy conjunctions between two species-lines. Hence, they
add, ‘[w]henever we used the word ‘memories’ in the preceding pages [Memories of
Sorcerors, Spinozists, Movie-Goers, Plan(e) Makers, etc., etc.], we were wrong to do so; we
meant to say ‘becoming’, we were saying becoming’ (ibid.: 294).
12 See Freud (1987:96) and Mephistopheles’ soliloquy in Faust, III, which Freud quotes:
But to break through the magic of this threshold,
I need a rat’s quick tooth (He conjures up a rat)
....................
The lord of rats and eke of mice
summons thee hither…to gnaw… Another bite, and it is done!
13 On Besetzung (Eng.: ‘cathexis’; Fr.: investissement), Freud writes, in the New Introductory
Lectures: ‘the institution of the super-ego…introduces a garrison into regions that
are inclined to rebellion’ (1973:144).
14 For example, Freud’s map of the Rat-man’s military manoeuvres (1987:93) traps
the rat lines in circuits that always follow the Officer’s movements. Oedipal circuits
multiply: failure to complete the return (to repay the debt and retrace the Officer’s
steps) will result in the administration of the rat-punishment (see n. 15 below),
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‘At the Mountains of Madness’
recapturing the rat-escape in a ‘disguised repetition of the paternal situation’
(1984:354).
15 Consider the rat-punishment episode, narrated by the Rat-man: ‘“the captain told
me he had read of a specifically horrible punishment used in the East”. “Was he thinking
of impalement” [interjected Freud] …? “No, not that…the criminal was tied up… a
pot was turned upside down on his buttocks…some rats were put into it…and
they…bored their way in…” — Into his anus, I helped him out’ (1987:47). Freud’s
second construction takes this episode to be the Rat-man’s desired punishment for
killing the father, taking the Rat-man to be the ‘child being beaten’, so to speak,
rather than rat-packs feeding on fresh meat.
16 See Freud’s comments on the ‘Berlin Psychoanalytical Policlinic’ instituted by Max
Eitingon. Noting the ‘scientific significance’ of psychoanalysis as well as its ‘value as
a therapeutic proceedure…capable of giving help to sufferers’, Freud demonstrates
clearly the political significance of psychoanalysis, directing ‘individuals or societies…
in their struggle to fulfil the demands of civilisation’ (Freud 1986:285). The ‘policlinic’,
replete with its garrisons, is therefore Freud’s response to Nietzsche’s programme
for the new earth as a ‘collection of health resorts’ (The Wanderer and his Shadow, §188):
historical pharmacology and medicinal geography are to be superseded by the political
technologies of psychoanalysis.
17 Kant writes, stressing the problematic relation between natural constitutive, productive
and analogical, reflective, regulation, that ‘reason…cannot possibly tell us whether
nature’s productive ability, which is quite adequate for whatever seems to require
merely that nature be like a machine, is not just as adequate for [things] that we judge
to be formed or combined in terms of the idea of purposes’ (1987:269; my italic),
although he announces that the regulative idea operating such an analogy ‘has no reality’
(ibid.).
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