Connective Machines
Last time we talked a bit about the idea that "all is machines". First and foremost I think its important to remember that Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze were concerned activists, who were deeply effected by the Paris Student Uprisings of 1968. They saw this as an opportunity, or an event if you will, that carried with it the possibility of radical social transformation. In an essay entitled, "Psychoanalysis and the Struggles of Desire" Guattari explains that it was the first time it could be conceived that students concerned about the conservative academy, workers fighting for socialism, gays fighting for equal rights, people affiliated with anti-psychiatry, people concerned about abolishing prisons, were all marching side by side. This was huge! This is one aspect of the "connective-machine" and the spirit of '68 that, in my opinion, is always in the background and at times explicitly expressed in Anti-Oedipus. This disgust over just how "fascism" seeps into everyone's daily lives. They are trying to build sympathy with causes based on radical transformation of society. All or nothing.
Ok, we've said this many times. BUT this is a new kind of machine that they are implying. One that is therapeutic. Asking, what would happen if you took the stuffy practices of psychoanalysis and moved them away from the austere couch, placing the schizophrenic on a walk, into a flow. This sort of revolution at the level of praxis, constructing a new praxis that is first a challenge to what is thinkable, what is possible, this is always interesting to D&G and is always in the background of AO. The book IS systematic while always challenging what it means to have a system at all. IT is not a willy-nilly collection of quotations, as it is often misunderstood.
Becoming is not always a human becoming, there is becoming animal, mineral, mountain, etc. to think for a moment as an animal, to get out of the stress of being a servile being... even if it is only a momentary glimpse of an other reality.
"Schizophrenia is like love"(p.5) it is in a sense indescribable, it happens it is an extreme state of mind, and when it happens it shakes you to your core. No amount of calculative logic or scientific explanations showing hormonal changes in the body can explain "love" or "schizophrenia", its an intense experience, more often than not it is inexplicable.
They then move into a Buddhist kind of understanding of the self, "Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility... Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life... ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine"(p.4)
Production as a process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle. Immanent (being-there) as opposed to transcendent (going beyond). it is not a thought of surpassing to build a better human-being, but living with what we are, as we are, what Antonio Negri would call "Potentia" or "the power to be" rather than "potenza" which is "power over another".
or even more sophisticated is "potestas" the "power of resistance" which happens, but is not a matter of raising consciousness as Marxists mistakenly believe. Antagonisms are always-already there, in existence.
Product/producing, "producing is always 'grafted onto" the product; desiring production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine" (p.6) foreshadowing its repetition on p.31 "Desiring-machines, on the contrary, continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly; the product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run"
This machine consumes itself. It is slightly different from the machine as a tool of capitalism, in capitalism the machine runs on what Marx called raw materials, coal, fuel, burning wood, etc. raw materials are like food for the body, they are an extra cost to the capitalist and create a higher price for commodities when the product comes into the market. This 'desiring-machine' is a bit different. It consumes itself, the material that propel it to work are internal to its becoming as a machine. Nothing need be added. It lacks nothing, it is productive. It is also a way of expressing a certain continuity between the factory, the life of a laborer, and their psyche as being subsumed by capitalism. Desire, as representative of the unconscious, is mechanized like factory.
There is a LOT there. A lot that I did not get too, but this is such a beautiful book!
Ok, we've said this many times. BUT this is a new kind of machine that they are implying. One that is therapeutic. Asking, what would happen if you took the stuffy practices of psychoanalysis and moved them away from the austere couch, placing the schizophrenic on a walk, into a flow. This sort of revolution at the level of praxis, constructing a new praxis that is first a challenge to what is thinkable, what is possible, this is always interesting to D&G and is always in the background of AO. The book IS systematic while always challenging what it means to have a system at all. IT is not a willy-nilly collection of quotations, as it is often misunderstood.
Becoming is not always a human becoming, there is becoming animal, mineral, mountain, etc. to think for a moment as an animal, to get out of the stress of being a servile being... even if it is only a momentary glimpse of an other reality.
"Schizophrenia is like love"(p.5) it is in a sense indescribable, it happens it is an extreme state of mind, and when it happens it shakes you to your core. No amount of calculative logic or scientific explanations showing hormonal changes in the body can explain "love" or "schizophrenia", its an intense experience, more often than not it is inexplicable.
They then move into a Buddhist kind of understanding of the self, "Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility... Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life... ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine"(p.4)
Production as a process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle. Immanent (being-there) as opposed to transcendent (going beyond). it is not a thought of surpassing to build a better human-being, but living with what we are, as we are, what Antonio Negri would call "Potentia" or "the power to be" rather than "potenza" which is "power over another".
or even more sophisticated is "potestas" the "power of resistance" which happens, but is not a matter of raising consciousness as Marxists mistakenly believe. Antagonisms are always-already there, in existence.
Product/producing, "producing is always 'grafted onto" the product; desiring production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine" (p.6) foreshadowing its repetition on p.31 "Desiring-machines, on the contrary, continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly; the product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run"
This machine consumes itself. It is slightly different from the machine as a tool of capitalism, in capitalism the machine runs on what Marx called raw materials, coal, fuel, burning wood, etc. raw materials are like food for the body, they are an extra cost to the capitalist and create a higher price for commodities when the product comes into the market. This 'desiring-machine' is a bit different. It consumes itself, the material that propel it to work are internal to its becoming as a machine. Nothing need be added. It lacks nothing, it is productive. It is also a way of expressing a certain continuity between the factory, the life of a laborer, and their psyche as being subsumed by capitalism. Desire, as representative of the unconscious, is mechanized like factory.
There is a LOT there. A lot that I did not get too, but this is such a beautiful book!