1
On the Question of “Primordial Bureaucratic States”1
Since you have asked me to elaborate on my thoughts about stylites and other dendrites, I will take a stab at laying out some of the connections here. Mystics—Coptics, Syrians and other, express their desire to return to the roots, the roots of the primordial Empire: the Ur-State (there is a wordplay like this in the book by Lacarrière).2 In their own way, they’re championing the Asiatic State. The Egyptians and the sons of Trojan warriors never could take being fucked with and eliminated by barbarians and pirates like the Greeks, Alexander’s men, the Romans… (sort of Yankee upstarts!). At the bottom of their hearts, lay buried an… old fascistic foundation that could be reborn with the monophysicist and other versions of Christianity from before their adoption by the Roman Empire.
“The celestial Empire will come crashing down over your head! The advent of a celestial Jerusalem heralds the end of the world…” Everything on this Earth, everything made of flesh, is shit, and should be treated as such. Paranoid withdrawal, return to the roots of naturing nature, total dissent on the part of the order of ambient significations.
Only, the object of this Fascism is the piece of bread that you refuse to eat, the sleep you reject, the words you repress, the other you avoid, movements you forbid yourself…
(Note that there doesn’t seem to be any question of dirty jokes in all this. It’s as if infinitive retentiveness hadn’t arrived yet! Just oral retentiveness? The anchorites tell you “shit,” but they don’t devote themselves to shit. On the contrary, they love vermin, even if they’re not into dirt. This is more schizo than obsessive a position in terms of shit.)
Anyway, the Fascism of divine sign territoriality applies to bodies, scripture, etc.—cut off from the socius, it fights in favor of a break with the socius. You take Schnoudi’s orders literally.3 Your hand gets stuck in the oven, burnt, caught between two calls for soup, the one that forbids moving until the other one gives the sign for quiet assembly in the refectory [J. Lacarrière, Les Hommes ivres de Dieu, Paris, Arthaud, 1961]. The dice are cast, there will be much more where this came from…
The holy Catholic Church lacked no imagination as far as “innovation in matters of perversion” is concerned. The Reformation, in a way, was even subtler: [Saint Augustine’s reactonary politics] Puritans and the origin of English capitalism, moralizing American Fascism, etc.
Or, return to the roots, the Nazi Ring of Nibelung.4 Mao’s Confucianism… No need to despair for the future!
But, whoa there! There is no more archaic naivety in the bureaucratic States (Asiatic or otherwise).
Romans’ nostalgia when they visit “mysterious Egypt.” [Cf. Lacarrière, op. cit]
Now there are caste systems differentiable according to legalities internal to machinic assemblages. Whereas before, free men, “dependent” men, slaves, [Vidal-Naquet, Witfogel, 13 / K. Witfogel, Le Despotisme oriental, Paris, Minuit 1957] were roped, like cogs into the state machinery, the State, its meticulous and persnickety bureaucracy, the whole being dependent itself on a despot—a Priest-king in Mesopotamia and a God-King in Egypt—who answered to the axiom: “Maximum consumption for the sovereign. [Ibid., p. 11]
Everybody, free or dependent peasants, bureaucrats, the aristocracy, the army, is in a single filiation: that of the supreme despot (effusion over his sole ultimate term). This is how a machine, and only one machine, is constituted (perhaps leaving some vague rural “democracy” to subsist, and we would have to check if even that is true).
Obviously, what’s important is not knowing if the machine is hydraulic or whatever, but to figure out if it’s a machine that has concentrated all its production on a single surface of meaning, a single surface of jouissance, that of the despot and his court.
In this sense, Asiatic bureaucracy has to be differentiated absolutely from modern bureaucracy.5 Slaves, scribes are nothing in Mesopotamia or China. They have no rights. Whereas in the USSR or in the USA, technostructures more or less control power. But techno-bureaucrats depend on the sign’s territoriality and not on some random “representation” of sovereignty, capitalistic, monopolistic (Waldeck’s “power of the great monopolies”!),” popular or socialistic!
So, machines play a principal part. They are in a direct filiation to signs. The bureaucracy in power, like Stalinist, social-democratic, Maoist, etc., leaders, or the proletariat, are all in a relation of filiation to productive machines. (Liane Mozère has noted some fifty references testifying to Mao Zedong’s conviction that what counts is revolution for production’s sake.)
In a primordial bureaucratic State (or a primordial state machine), technical machine territoriality does not play an essential part. Manpower, human flesh, the human mass are pieces of the machine. There are no “persons” to respect; it’s only later that there is any overcoding (reification) of people, citizens, classes, “egos,” etc. The elements of the machine join together outside representative, anti-productive mediations. Suddenly, all alliance-based mediations are short-circuited. But they are rebuilt with, for example, segmentarity in Africa (e.g.: the Mandé7 empire), barbarian invasions, national priorities, colonialism, etc.
Until then it’s okay, you can live happily being a slave, not giving of yourself, but being given in the 4th person singular, for the eternal event, to the God-King. And being sacrificed at the Altar of Pharaonic construction. [Marx, Pleiade edition vol. I, p. 873 / CEuvres, Paris, Gallimard, 1965]. Being God’s bitch without having to be a pervert like Schreber. (In Visconti’s The Damned,8 the Nazis had a harder time giving themselves up to this kind of homosexuality, they had to make all kinds of excuses! They didn’t have the grace, the naturalness of the archaic Fascist societies!)
Technical machines are still always adjacent to desiring machines. All desiring machines are affiliated to supreme desire (the despot). Planes, laws, axiomatics, representation surfaces (for example, pyramids), technique, mathematics are not completely autonomized, they do not work for themselves yet. Signs still aren’t making love among themselves, under the voyeuristic gaze of “scientists.” Recourse to a technician’s surface [surface technicienne], writing, as “just enough” for central machines to find themselves in their own cogs. So, no autonomous territoriality for technical machines or signs.
It’s only with…
- ascetics, that desiring machines are adjacent to cosmic
machines. This is true for animists, but it is overcoded in terms of the fallen Empires: there is a sort of double paranoia among ascetics. -
classical Empires, that desiring machines are adjacent to people and parts, against a backdrop of an ever more threatening segmentarity.
-
feudalism, that desiring machines are articulated onto interpersonal dependence relations.
-
merchants, guilds, cities, that desiring machines are adjacent to monetary machines.
-
merchant-manufacturers, that desiring machines are adjacent to technical machines.
— Role of the state machine, as flow regulator (not sumptuary residual jouissance surface).
— Adjacency of desiring machines to scientific sign territorialities in an era of archaized disintegration (which is to say bolstering) of the State, and the universalization and imperialism of technoscientific machines.
Although before they were only adjacent to desire, technical machines are now its umbilicus. All forms of alliance are hystericized so that they can “pretend” to be affiliated to desire sign-machines.
Obviously the break is absolute: the territoriality of human desire, its seven or nine holes, depending on how you count them, has nothing to do with the sign’s territoriality, no matter what our friend Leclaire says when he carries—and he’s right!—Lacan’s ambiguities on the letter and inscription, or body, of the insignia of the capital Other [Autre] to a point of absurdity.
2
Capitalism is a Kind of Humanism
Semiotic capital machines introduce the sovereignty of a decoded flow standard into all territoriality. They are machines made to enable the recognition and exchange of territoriality. They are identification machines. They work to recode and universalize recoding.
It’s not capitalist machines that decode, but the intrusion of scientific-technical machinism. This is because semiotic capital machines do what they can to recode porcelain [for example], to re-archaize [it].
Capitalist machines regulate the organization of lack through the market. They turn molecular lack into molar lack. But they don’t invent lack, they encounter it. This is machinism born from new needs. Starting with the machinism of travel, which creates a demand for spices and [other] exotic products.
Capital machines regulate machinic intrusions. In their own way, they humanize them. A merchant’s cruelty is not the same as a warrior’s.
In subsistence economies, surplus value extraction equilibria operated on a given territoriality, for example, a feudal segment. The extra-segmentary was a fault-line, or weak point and it was external anyway. With the primacy of capital machines (commercial capital), what is external is unified and universalized, rising with falls in tariff barriers, tolls, etc., and the more or less mythic horizon of free trade.
Only the part of work outside the territorialized subsistence process is taken into account. The organization of an economic stratum of capital exchange from outside flows serves as a benchmark and imposes its laws on territorialized work flows that eventually become residual.
But the semiotic commercial capital machine is in control. It is disjunctive, polarizing, expressive and subjectifying. You can take it or leave it as far as it’s concerned. Machinism passes or doesn’t pass depending on its structural requirements. Not everything is possible simultaneously: it organizes temporality, and a capitalist order.
This commercial capital machine doesn’t steal in the same way as industrial capitalism did at all—if it’s still in order to maintain this distinction.
For commercial capital, flows depend on deciphering territorialized lack. The great commercial cities like Venice were inscription surfaces for lack—mirage of an economic beyond taking over from the mirage of a religious beyond with its crusades.
There, people really got their money’s worth. An ethnologist who gives two-cent pearls in exchange for an Indian bow and a grass skirt isn’t stealing. He’s responding to the other’s desire on the other’s terms. The benchmark is still territorialized on desire.
Similarly, a painter isn’t “stealing” if you just consider the goods. The stealing category is irrelevant.
It’s different with the intrusion of industrialism. Lack is constructed right and left. It’s at the level of production that you’re cheated. Not consumption. Workers are caught in an artificial lack-producing machine. Produced merchandise replaces the objects of the territorialized market.
Machines compete unfairly with human labor. Their reproduction needs are less than human needs, for equal productivity.
That’s why Marx demands compensation for workers. In absolute terms, workers should receive the difference—collectively. It’s the rate of surplus value. Commercial surplus value is clearly connected to the territoriality of desire. While machinic surplus value is connected to the refusal of machinic deterritorialization. In the first case, lack is on Earth, among men. It’s strange. In the other, it’s a lack of lack. Desire for a return to the status quo ante. Lack in human society in the context of a machinic society that is, in essence, inhuman.
The coding of lack went from territorialized exteriority to machinic immanence.
Ultimately, the exchange the semiotic machine is operating is fair: it’s not stealing (Marx says this when he criticizes the steal-and-profit identity).
It’s machinism that does the robbing: it eats up human work. It dehumanizes it. Makes it accessory, useless. It insatiably roots out human work in all its various forms.
Humanist capitalism resists as much as it can until machines like the Leninist one fuck it up and give an even greater opening to machinism in different areas of human labor.
Marx assimilates machinic work to human work and decides that it’s the totality of standardized human work that has to be exchanged.
Workers should be entitled to payment for their human work and their machinic work.
Capitalists who possess the means of production want their part of machinic work. Variable capital is always decreasing in relative value. The capitalist ideal is the pure machine, with no human labor, capable of reproducing itself machinically.
But what is circulated in this ideal machine is a flow of simulacra that are exchanged for “hearty bread.” Human work in the sense of code surplus value is reduced to this simulacrum-production flow.
This cancerous standard devalues human production. The law of the market makes human production be taken into account only insofar as it is integrated into this exchange stratum.
Instead of describing a tendential law of the rate of profit you have to describe a tendential law of the devaluation of human work relative to machinic work. Work is paid in machinic values: this is an unequal exchange. Workers receive a monkey’s salary. They don’t get work value for their work but machine value that is always going the way of deterritorialization and devaluation. Capitalists compound mixed flows:
— human work flows
— machinic work flows.
What they return for the reproduction of human work contains an ever greater part of machinic work. They accumulate machinic surplus value and human work surplus value. But in contemporary society:
— in the center: they don’t accumulate surplus value anymore on the most machinic work (the work for which you have to be the most qualified). It’s the opposite, the social-democratized worker partially benefits from the exploitation of peripheral flows; he only accumulates machinic surplus value.
— at the periphery: they accumulate surplus value on human flow.
3
The Bourgeoisie Is the Overcoding Class
In the Urstaat, imperial power “came from far away,” it had its own face, its own genealogy. (It didn’t touch, or profoundly undermine, the Neolithic order.) But the bourgeoisie is internal rot.
The bourgeois city was born at the crossroads of commercial flows.
As long as the mercantile bourgeoisie was a sort of wandering Jew, it had no personality of its own.
It was the royal State that founded the autonomy of the bourgeois class State politics of segmentarity, founded on economic territoriality, needed these decoding agents, these economic scribes, that were the bourgeois.
In feudalism, there was a conservation of traditional segmentary relations of filiation and alliance. With bourgeois royalty, lineage entailed economic territoriality. It’s the bourgeoisie that incarnates this. The death of the king represents the triumph of economic segmentarity. The bourgeois became the economic class.
The peasant class, to some extent, constituted a rural bourgeois class.
But with the French revolution, an—old, but continually reborn—rift [clivage] emerged: the enemy is the urban bourgeois, the merchant, the tax collector, the man of law, the intellectual, the man of monetary flow.
This peasant class thwarts the development of economic revolution in the course of history and its extension into machinic revolution. The cases of the USA, that have no archaic peasantry, and Russia, with its over-archaic peasantry, are weak links. The opposition between town and country becomes the opposition between the urban machine and archaic territoriality.
But the bourgeoisie over-archaizes itself to found its own legitimacy, its order of economic filiation.
It is the a-cephalous subject of the capitalist semiotic machine.
This semiotic machine is, actually, in an exclusive disjunction with industrial machinism.
It is the capital machine, the stock exchange, the market, etc., that expropriate (or try to expropriate) the bourgeoisie from the urban machine.
So the capital machine encounters the archaism front: corporation residues, the peasant class, the burgeoning working class, etc.
As the capital machine becomes affiliated to industrial, scientific, etc., machines, the bourgeois’s archaization is reinforced.
Archaization, in which the working class, connected into machinism, participates. Actually, the political history of the last hundred years is that of the three bourgeoisies:
— the (commercial) urban bourgeoisie
— the landowning bourgeoisie
— the bourgeois working class.
All three fighting against the intrusion of an industrial revolution that had no class basis and that never would. Only when class disappears altogether will machinism come to power. The class struggles of the nineteenth century were not antagonistic. They were anti-productive adjustments. The Paris Commune was ideologically and socially in the hands of the urban bourgeoisie: this was the struggle of archaic urban territoriality against national-cosmopolitanism in disarray.
In terms of archaization, in an imaginary—fascizing—Urstaatic perspective, there are not two classes but one: the bourgeoisie searching for universalizing legitimacy.
When Lenin, against the revisionists, wanted two polar opposite classes, it’s to try to exact social support for the machinic revolution. Confronted with the failure of the Second International in 1914, will to power, he artificially built a new International and a new international working class, just like he built an artificial
worker’s party out of students! He’s right!
The revolutionary class doesn’t exist, sociologically speaking. You have to construct it on the level of repetition, and not from a dialectic of opposites. Otherwise, the bourgeoisie recuperates whatever class is social-democratized right away. I.e. the machinic factor integrated into the working class, for example in the popular fronts, is immediately decoded by the bourgeois. Code surplus value. Knowledge capital,
machinic capital connected to capitalist machinic production (e.g.: after the Popular Front failed, all Spain could do was vegetate).
The bourgeoisie, the decoding class, is always threatened with being decoded itself: hence its overarchaization. The semiotic capital machine works [mostly] for itself, and partly for industrial machinism. [CF. the distinctions, in my letter from 01/22/1970 between: market value for work/market value/code value] E.g.: fixed capital is not commensurate with variable capital, including for the bourgeoisie that tends to expropriate itself in machinism. Which leads to the great antimachinic coalition of all pseudo-classes, class simulacra, including, on an international scale, the class of “socialist” bureaucrats.
4
The Workers’ Movement
The workers’ movement construed itself as an anti-production relation from the moment professional encasting—guilds, corporations, etc.—began to disintegrate, correlatively with the encasting of the Ancien Régime. Social relations started to “gain” ground in terms of deterritorialization. Transversality was marking points in the sense that work, science and matter were increasingly becoming intermixed. But the danger was for decoded manpower flows to escape this. And it was impossible to go back to the slavery of the Urstaat, because slave flows were “resting” on a “Neolithic” territorial social fabric still very much intact.
In the early days of capitalism, proletarian flows threatened to overwhelm everything. You had to reterritorialize.
The structuring of the workers’ movement on the model of integration coincided with the defeat of the Commune. It had already begun, but it would really take off on a large scale with the Second International.
So capitalism [The modern state is constituted as the reterritorialization, the body without organs, of the deterritorialized work-capital conjunction.] has a worker flow framework. It’s the break between the revolutionary political project and the project of unionization with all its demands that, little by little, marks the break between the movement’s ideology and its reality of reformism.
We could say that, as a rule, there was never any question of desire in debates internal to the Socialist movement. And yet, all the more or less marginal discussions on organization were about desire. That’s why Leninism came so close to liberating the desire of the masses. [Maoism was almost overwhelmed by the sort of Leftism that represented the beginning of the realization of the subject-group with the red guards; but that’s not what Maoism is: it’s the merging of people into a n icon: the-thought-of-Mao-Zedong. Castrism was an analytic machine that was recuperated; but repetition is impossible; Guevara wanted to do the same thing all over again without being caught in the singular conditions of the Bolivian militaries’ desire.]
Desire-organization. Why? Because what counts is knowing if a structure will go the way of recuperative anti-production or if a sufficiently artificial and deterritorialized revolutionary machine will be constructed to be joined with other deterritorialization processes.
The Leninist machine, weakened by Lenin and Trotsky’s dispute in April 1917, could be joined with the Mensheviks’ territorialities, revolutionary Socialism, and all the old social relations that got lost at lightening speed in the tsarist debacle.
In May 1968, the tiny “March 22nd” machine joined its deterritorialization process—its mockery, irreverence, guts—to the cracks secretly breaking up Gaullism on all sides.
From that point on, the principle enemy are the anti-productive secretions of the workers’ movement set up in advance to recuperate everything (a bit like at the start of a game of Go, you put a pawn down on territory that you will have to return to). But for
now, dear Gilles, the future principle enemies are the P. G. [Political Groups], because they are closer to the impending fault-line. They are the ones who will be the recuperation agents in the schize that will affect young workers. They are the serious guys who [illegible] a workerist remonstration trend in the factories where they are
located. Their whole ideology will distance them from real conjunctions with guys who like pop music and junk, who aren’t hostile to homosexuality, etc. [The classical argument is to say that this remonstration—of desire—doesn’t affect young workers, only the bourgeois. Workers are well-mannered. They’re not pigs with “base instincts.” I have fallen into that trap.]
It’s like this: there will always and everywhere be reformist antiproduction just as there will be oedipalism, if only for the sake of perversion. What’s important is to avoiding being stuck on that terrain for too long.
It’s too late to complain if you’ve already turned back: cf. Artaud’s cry against the Spanish anarchists.
Since you have to have a machine to make a revolution, then may there be a machine!
Instead of the “March 22nd” bombers [flasques]: the Tupamaros, the Weatherman… 9 I.e. hard, integrated analytic machines.
No wishy-washy communities. Only institutional objects as virulent as viruses.
Not in “nature.” But in cities, inside the cogs of production: units of desiring subversion. 10
Centralism:
Centralism is a technical necessity. It has no more oedipalizing problems, if what is centralized are revolutionary institutional objects.
It’s people, individuals who are fragilized and opened up to anti-production Fascism.
Desiring subversion units “treat” this fragilization from the inside: jealousy, pederasty, narcissistic fascination; all desiring machines are mobilized. There is nothing left for molar recuperation. Conjunction of basic machinisms, connected to desire and disjoined from modes of expression characteristic of the dominant ideology.
(I. G. P.’s [Information Groups on Prisons]11 Free Clinics, Clavel-type agencies, etc., but this is too external and still too mindful of individuality. We should be dealing with things like the UTB, but they’re too caught up in the reformism of the institutions. But that’s the direction things are going in: to each his own Free-Press, his own pop music, his own pad, etc. And in all that, centralism like we’ve never seen before. A true subversion machine against Marcellin12 and co. A revolutionary machine on the scale of the Fascism yet to come.)
5
Militant Incidences
Paradox of the groupuscles’ empty militant discourse.
It’s ridiculous to be a Maoist in Becon-les-Bruyères, on a Sunday morning, at the train station, in front of a flower shop, selling a leftist newspaper announcing “victory at gun’s point” (as Mao says).
Transporting the text. Such an anachronism!
Okay! So it’s precisely this kind of boy-scoutism that produces something on the order of desire. The artificialism, of course, escapes the interested parties. But it’s what produces the break.
What follows is the literary machine. Artifice in Kafka: Stupid retard quarrels with his father… Process artificiality in Joyce, Roussel, etc. (not to mention Jung!), Borges and fiction…
The attempt to recast, from “beyond literature,” a mythic field that is neither true nor false, but a-truthful.
It’s just for the sake of doing fiction, novel-writing correlatively to the increasing sway of decoded flow economies.
An artificial body without organs is deployed: international bovaryism, (filiative, machinic) translatability of the novelistic…
As Lenin used to say (about Junius’ pamphlet): [Lenin, Oeuvres, vol. XXII, p. 328. / Lenin, ffuvres, vol. XXII, December 1915—July 1916, Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1960.] “the fundamental thesis of the Marxist dialectic is that all limits in nature and society are conventional and mobile, there is no phenomenon that cannot, in certain conditions, be transformed into its opposite.”
The piecemeal residue-sign is what breaks the chain without being itself divisible.
It’s the FLN [National Liberation Front], the ridiculous invasion of the “Gramma,” a whole pile of really stupid shit…
The sign says: “I don’t jive with your stuff, I don’t flow [je ne flue pas].”
Inhibition can’t be interpreted as resistance to flow, but as a manifestation of the sign.13
That’s where it’s really stupid that it’s for real! That’s where it doesn’t work to be there already (for there to be an unconscious subject manifested in a desiring sign, produced by a desiring machine). It’s where you don’t understand…
Taking pleasure [“jouir”l is finding an unhoped for, an unexpected, territory again. “Hmm, this is where the flow stops. And I’m here, damn! Not dead yet! Ah!!”
The organ, the sex recovers its jouissance, its being-there inasmuch as it is composed, and in a disjunctive synthesis, with the end of the deterritorializing filiation, to wit: the residual sign, the letter’s beyond, sense-nonsense.
To say with Lacan that the “a” is a “cause of desire” presupposes a space of causality that enables a passage from one order to another. All its quirky topology is there to preserve the economy of flow in its own way.
But: the “a” doesn’t cause anything! It’s the desiring organ that causes desire. Only, it doesn’t function except insofar as the noise of the world has petered off, in other words, become meaningful (from the redundancy of anti-production to the repetitiveness of machinic information). As long as significations come crashing down onto meaning-signs.
The organ, the sex—overcoded in its code surplus value relation to what is most artificial, most deterritorialized—receives—is allocated (“locare”)—artificial territoriality, and becomes suddenly free in its movement, articulating its connections wherever its perversion takes it, producing artificially “for itself.” No more division of labor (seriality, affiliation to capital, etc.)!
Perversion beyond paradigmatic perversion (of the socius of the second articulation). Perversion as the essence of desire—what Freud bypassed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with his pure repetition, death, narcissism, etc.
So you have to demarcate the body as a signifier (dissociate it, “fragment-it-put-it-back-together-again”). Re-cast it in its function as a sign producer [Artaud: theater, etc.] (producer of desire and subjectivity, a subject of the desiring machines—not a subject “of the signifier,” “writing,” etc., but a subject of desire, of the writing-less articulation of the third articulation, of the abolition of the second, of the perverse use of the first…).
That’s where there is an impasse.
The subject can’t be recuperated by desiring machines.
It’s machinic filiations in their “producing of the producing” [” produire du produire“] connections that “make like” subjects (like you “make like an idiot”).
Later on, I will abandon this idea and deny that there is any unconscious subject in desiring machines. Yet another result of a “paradigmatic reading” from the spirit of science to structuralism!
Seen from the point of view of alliance—a conjunction of series— there is a subject effect (= production of a sign as the ground for a conjunctive alliance). [Cf. p. 183 / of the present text]
Seen from the point of view of machinic production there is a disjunctive synthesis of—”unrelated”—heterogeneous series, production by code extension, code work, recording [sic] without representation. A “meaning effect.” But a “meaning effect” not exclusive to the human “subject.” It is “in nature” everywhere. In short: subject and meaning don’t go together!
Interlude
A pleasant example of code surplus value: perversion among orchids.
“We might be tempted to call […]” male wasps that copulate with
orchids ” ‘perversions‘” [Rémy Chauvin in his collective work, Entretien sur la sexualite Discourse on sexuality, 1965, Paris, Plon, p. 204]
Flowers that look like insects:
— Ophrys musco wasps
— Ophrys vespa flies
— Ophrys crabo hornets
Kullenberg’s studies:14 For each species: a species of en-feoffed (affiliated) wasps that plays an essential part in its reproduction.
No “interest flow”: plants don’t give away nectar! Only discernability.
If you cut off the tips of a flower’s calyxes which the wasp rests on to copulate: it doesn’t work anymore! The fantasy-simulacrum has to be complete.
So wasps fuck flowers! They sink their genital members into a flower’s calyx, the gluey pollen [pollinies] sticks to their members, to their abdomen, and when they go to another flower they transport the gluey pollen, which gets stuck on the pistil—that is “normally” beyond reach.
Wasps do this work just like that, for nothing, just for fun!
Some parts of the calyx present a special velvety substance [veloutél that secretes an odor which, according to Kullenberg, is identical to that of the female wasp!
Obviously ethologists find this hard to understand!
“[…] you would have to posit a parallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other and where—at least—one, the orchid, is apparently unable to live without the other.” [Ibid., p. 205. My underline for the “nothing to do” (with), no relation.]
All that stuff, fish that steer whales, etc., is the effect of code surplus value.
A code’s investment, its recording, don’t pay heed to species or to zoo-botanical classifications!
Wasps and flowers are coded correlatively, each individual, each organ is “flowed” into the general process, reassembled.
The event (the repetition), is the wasp that gets caught one day in the “call of the code,” the opening of the code of the vegetable machine.
Genetics doesn’t pay heed to what is visible, it straddles simple, heterotrophic and complex flows—in this case, wasp flows—, simultaneously; it codes contingent flows, “for itself”— it overcodes them.
The artificiality of the arrangement is clear and I think it’s not inappropriate to describe this as perversion; though there is no alliance as such, or contract, it’s a territoriality of pure luring [leurre], of pure machinic filiation—note that the males “pull out quickly,” [Ibid., p. 218.] and there is no sperm emission. Females are born a month late compared to males. And they’re the ones that are cloistered!
Chauvin also describes rank, caste among macaques. Their very strict hierarchy affects preferential alliances. [Ibid., p. 211.]
Bird calls: correlation between the call and sexual development. [Ibid., p. 212.]
Incest taboo among geese. [Ibid., p. 214.]
As if in echo of the Gourmantché15 fairy tale. “Among certain species of octopi it’s the male arm that goes off to search for a partner and, having collected sperm in a sort of spoon, separates itself from the body and goes off to find a female.” The female’s genital orifice opens up of its own accord before this arm… And, some asshole ethologist has to say: “It’s a very elementary kind of tropism!”
[…] My sense is that it would be useful to distinguish between […] meaning and signification, and under the species distinction, to make a distinction between sign and letter.
- Signification, for example, is love, the feeling of love in a given socio-historical context. It is a collective organic investment either 1) on a group—a local filiation group—or on a person against a backdrop of “pre”-oedipal trinity (in the sense that will lead us to land smack onto schizophrenia) against a backdrop of general love of humanity, or 2) on a body, schizo narcissistic love against a backdrop of dissociated bodies without organs—fantasy with a signifier-like corporeity—, so organic investment “signifies” something; it is located, consumed, anti-produced.
But this “reading” of the socius is really an effect, an epiphenomenon, an ideological superstructure, but whatever! On that ground, all structuralism is valid.
But that’s not the point.
- Desire—desiring machines—have a specific relation to meaning: a production relation (whereas the socius made “reading effects” out of (amorous) signification).
Machines make signs.
Like you shit in the potty!
They sign.
You have to distinguish between machinic information and signifying information.
With machines, no diachronism, no referent, no paradigm…
Desiring machines work coded—intracoded—flows. No need for a subject—”a signifier for another signifier”—or a signifier.
The visual flow of a parade.
The flow of smells.
Cries.
Everything is inscription, code surplus value. There is no surplus
value for flow accumulation, no remainders, no transfinite fields, no
reading, no cross-check, no “deductions,” no truthfulness [Cf the interlude: perversion among orchids.]…
A sign is a singular effect on a surface—a singular range (actually the term surface is too abstract). Signs are engulfed in jouissance. They are repetition. They have no diachronic identity. They are not distinctive, but discernabilized.
When we read the “signs” of “nature” like a “great book,” we’re reading all our own stupid idiocies, whose peaks were attained in structuralism. Reading readings!
Not that the question of reading to the nth degree shouldn’t be posed. It’s just that it shouldn’t be posed in terms of structure. It should be posed in terms of pure unconscious machinic filiation. The question of reading isn’t: what a Structuralist reads, but what machinic filiations read, for example: a genetic code that “marries” a wasp and an orchid.
Genetic codes work with intra-coded flows, unlike those pseudo-math-head structuralists! Genetic codes work. Their reading is work (and actually psychoanalysts’ work should be similar, if it is at all meaningful!: reading and working (= putting codes together) are one).
Structuralist pseudo-readings from a-historical decoded flows, are (as M. Serres says in spite of himself) pure wandering [errance], i.e. controlled screwing around—not “free association” at all (which would imply recourse to recoded flows).
Where were we:
— Collective organic investment is filiation, filiative machines “informed” by coded flows; they work according to a mode of pure connection—absolute unconsciousness, beyond all repression. It’s the “producing of the producing.”
— Alliances are what is produced. There is a conjunction between at least two series. What does the producing isn’t the unconscious connection of coded flows, but a sign. Sign detachment, not from a signifying chain like I may have suggested earlier—this is
the result of retroactive reading—but the production of a detached object (emission of singularity), a detached sign that makes the signifying chain vibrate, cuts it up (being indivisible itself, here the phoneme = the moneme = minimal unit), this is like the object, the small elephant that passes its head through a chain of letters… But that’s another story!
This detached sign is specific to conjunctive production.
It’s:
— the sign of alliance,
— the arch of alliance,
— the initiatory blunder,
— the schizo’s wet de-crusted bread,
— Mommy’s “poopoo-present,”
— Lacan’s “a,” his first formula.
From this point on, we have two options: either an anti-productive reading of the pan-oedipal socius; or a desiring machinic reading.
— A pan-oedipal reading takes the sign and overcodes it diachronically: this is the intrusion of the second articulation. The series resound. Oedipus is the sound box, the resonance hub. Letter-signs take on a certain echo, signification (understanding in the sense of Jaspers’16—Einfühlung, etc.)
— But a machinic reading, now that’s a different story! Signs work “for themselves.” What is deployed is not the “A,” a general code field, but absolute machinic filiation. The absolute mythic conjunction of all coded flow.
The body without organs of the oedipal reading is the alphabet, math, etc.
The body without organs of a “machinic reading” is the conjunction of all cosmic, biological, historical, esthetic, flows, all flows coded from this and that to have some “meaning effect” (groupuscles, shantytowns, the lumpen, the maison du facteur Cheval).17
The ultimate meaning of structuralism is binary alternation.
The ultimate meaning of machinic filiation is a sort of surrealism, residues, detritus, witness to the impossibility of “reducing” desiring machines’ coded flows (singular infinitives). The genetic code “saw” a really funny thing: a wasp and an orchid coupling. It didn’t ask itself mathematical or abstract chemical questions. It saw this thing. And “seeing” it, here, is not a question of contemplation, it’s code surplus value, passage to the act, perversion. It’s silly, and monstrous, coupling. Not math!
The filiative horizon, machinic filiation, are a fantastic machinic Luna Park. All the most improbable assemblages. No recuperation possible for the structuralists!
Jerome Bosch’s Hell, next to all this, a joke!
Reading “on the machine’s side,” that is disjunctive synthesis.
Code doesn’t “touch” anything, it isn’t working. It’s playing. It. doesn’t give a shit about anybody. It overcodes. It kills off a species! Starts up another! It doesn’t give a shit! It makes Stalinism, to replace Leninism! Or Fascism! Such fun, you know!
The machine’s “seeing” is desire in its essence. Desiring disjunction. “Being-for-the machine,” that is desire. Not being-for-the-other in general. What an idea! Nothing to get off on! Being for the artificial thing profiled by code surplus value.
There is desire only if it is desire for the machine.
In that sense, it’s the most radical disjunctive synthesis between:
— death deferred: infinite machinic detour
— death expressed: the repetition of abolition to the closest, to the most deterritorialized, degree possible.
The intrusion of machinic desire is the fact that a new rupture in already existing alliances, new treason, are continually being produced.
“Hmm, if only there were some stupid code surplus value… some totally new alliance…” And so meaning ar-rives [ad–vient] at conjunctive signification. But it’s not “its fault.” Or the machine’s. Ah, humor!
And so the conjunctive subjectivity of the second articulation is continually being threatened by the monstrous copulation between the first and third.
Meaning passes over the signifier’s head and “inhabits” monemes, hysterical symptoms, the masses… It doesn’t need to “go anywhere” to transfer itself whatever Serres says and no doubt Freud too (no need for a highway, a nervous system, transfer…). It’s already there. It always, already, was there. Code surplus value doesn’t produce anything (from the point of view of the machinic series; it’s from the point of view of the alliance—of the human subject of the second articulation—that there is ever “anything new” ⇒ Marx’s formula for labor: sole producer of value).
The code’s horizon integrates all possible surplus values. It’s the Aiôn, the discovery of tomorrow today.
So, ultimate alliance between the most decoded flow and residual intracoded flows.18
Bios cycle. Decoded flow, at the end of the deterritorialization process, returns, restores the imprisoned girl, the sleeping beauty, as if nothing ever happened.
The intra-coded marries the hyper-decoded. The virgin and the pervert. [Cf. Sade, Justine.] Beauty and the beast. [Faust, etc.]
The sign of desire—the phallus—can be a “messenger” for what is most decoded as much as for coded flow residue. It’s the sign of this monstrous alliance (second version of the Lacanian “a” = the “a” ‘s logical function).19
At the same time (the Aiôn) it is both the same and the other, differentiating between different orders. But the different systems’ “logics” do not correspond, [They’re not “responsible” for each other.] they don’t “understand” each other, they have no topological homologies to go on.
Signification is inside our heads with our systems of re-presentation and double articulation. But logic doesn’t give a shit! It goes straight to recording. To the sign, and not the so-called signifier. It encodes “right onto” flow, without representation. It detaches objects, proceeds with inscriptions. Meaning, signs, desire are ultimately what make us participate in the productive process “of nature,” not because of but in spite of the second articulation’s meditations. Subjective manifestation is “superfluous,” [Sartre] it is inherent in the signifying chains connected to double articulation (return to: science as the history of the return of signification—the return of letters—to a-subjective semiotics); so the objet “a,” as the cause of desire, has nothing to do with the signifier. The signifier, the socius, get caught in its spokes (for lack of a collective, territorialized and pleasure-taking [jouissance] organic investment).
Watch out with the accusations!
So Lacan created a theory of the subject of the second articulation, the subject that talks under the constraint of writing, economies of flow, the despotic referent (resonant double articulation—the Oedipus—and reasoning—signification). But not of the subject of the unconscious: for the very good reason that there is no subject of the unconscious (return to Descartes? Freud? Husserl?), and the unconscious doesn’t speak, or discuss things. It works in its own way, it fools around, doodles. It doesn’t give a shit! The unconscious is not “structured like a language.” It’s annoying, but it’s true!20 [What Lacan described is not the unconscious, but the unconscious introjection of social repression (superego-ego ideal).]
The unconscious doubly doesn’t give a shit about structure or language (except for the “language of flowers” when it’s a question of jokes about wasps! But whatever!).
No unconscious subjectivity!
No reference structures!
No “code treasury.” Codes aren’t hoarded, they aren’t organized. There is no “A.” What a mess! It’s very nice to try to straighten this all up, but it’s useless! The sign assigns itself singular chains, singular territories.
The further you go, from the dwarf star, to life, to modern forms of [Audiovisual] representation, the worse it gets!
Things are made for being seen.
This has nothing to do with anything.
But it always works.
It’s on the condition that you reduce re-presentation that man, through science, can find some efficiency in producing the producing (either scientific reduction or schizo reduction).
Ritual representation among “primitives” systematically lacks [They were doing it on purpose] objects (“subjectivizes” them, “confuses sign and signifier,” as a certain Jean Poirier writes in his Problems of Economic Ethnology). It lacks them to locate, situate, territorialize and inscribe its own jouissance ranges, the site of its collective organic investment.
Collective investment was “planetarized” with science. The emergence of a schizo subjectivity—that levels the signifier, “unearths” signs—restores desire, why not!
6
Icons and Class Struggle
For the Orientals, like for Saint Paul, icons (morphs) were filiation. [Cf. Mgr. R. Coffy’s declaration in Le Monde, April 6, 1971. icon = the manifestation of a presence. In Saint John, 14. 9: “Philip, who saw me, saw Our Father.” Christ is God’s image. Divine nature is manifest in him, as image = iconic filiation. With the deterritorialization of the sign, we have passed from iconic filiation to diagrammic (atic?) filiation.] In opposition to that is the alliance symbol, the arch of alliance.
If sign-images are about effusion, sign-symbols are about discernment. Images are about identification through repetition—repetition inhabited by a substance continuum, the counterpart’s substance. Signs are difference. Difference that manifests the identity of a signified. A break in planes of signification. Spheres of interest, etc.
With icons—in the sense of Ch. S. Peirce—you have a continuous passage from the signifier to the signified. Passage in the nature of things. Real passage. The image of the bee is not a symbolic representation, but a real inscription in the orchid’s machinic code.
With the symbol—and index—in Peirce, you get the institution, convention, arbitrariness, artifice of a break between the signifier and the signified. You have the constitution of impotent images (= Hjelmslev’s figures). The break between the imaginary and the symbolic. The powerlessness of the imaginary over the real. Deathly power unstuck from symbolism.
— Iconic filiation works in code surplus value (it’s the encoding of codes) from power signs, inasmuch as the deterritorialization of the image, Peirce’s diagrammization, connects it to the machinic sign-point’s code.
— Symbolic alliance founds bi-univocalizing anti-productive signifying chains.
Iconoclasts work against the impotent images of the dominant ideology and fight for a new more deterritorialized filiation.
(Akhenaton destroys the images of Amon and co and promotes filiation connected directly onto the sun: Aton. Leon III and Constantine V condemned icons. For the latter, this amounted to the Nestorian heresies and monophysicism. “According to Constantine V, images of Christ had to be declared Nestorian or monophysicist, since Nestorianism contended that the human Jesus was the envelope of the divine Christ, and monophysicism, while denying the humanity of the Lord, granted Divinity a human form. Possessing images of Christ could not be considered orthodox since it’s impossible to represent Divinity. The holy Eucharist was the only proper representation of the lord.”) [W. R. Cannon, Histoire du christianisme (History of Christianity), Payot, p. 107 / Histoire du christianisme au Moyen Age. De la chute de Rome a la chute de Constantinople, Paris, Payot, 19611.]
So you have to choose between a partial object deterritorializing the Eucharist—a diagrammatization of the icon, or a richly territorialized image. But the clever John Damascene` finds this iconoclastic position amusing: at that rate, he retorts, you also have to get rid of the cross, the Bible, and the human nature of the son of God, which are also images. [Ibid., p. 105.] And he’s right! There is no reason for cutting the deterritorialization of the image short…
In his vision of the Party, Lenin diagrammized class struggle. The working class had to give up its images and its idiosyncrasies.
Everything had to be on the side of the Leninist Eucharist. You’re on one side or the other, “centrism” is not a an option (the craziness of all this became apparent during the C. I.’s “third stage”). Stalin had to re-archaize the movement, with a return to patriotism, the family, etc.
With his conception of the working class, Marx diagrammized the history of capitalism. Or anyway, he described the inexorable diagrammization that gained the upper hand on production relations in capitalism. Really, in Marx, there are only two classes. Polarization. This represents a potential revolutionary praxis. Sociological and historical descriptions are secondary compared to this polarization.
Marx and Lenin are iconoclasts. They express capitalist interest in its tendency toward diagrammization, toward a struggle against the masses’ desiring polyvocality. They are captivated, fascinated by capitalism’s super-machinic filiation. I.e. class struggle “interests” can be separated into two categories:
— molar, deterritorialized interests, the deathly unsticking of the death drive, the expropriation of the desiring machines’ full bodies without organs. Vertigo of the abolition of history in revolution (the “grand soir,”22 the third stage, the proletariat’s army on the march, revolutionary messianism);
— re-territorialization; re-iconization; plane symmetry in Stalinism and Fascism (cf: their secret filiations), Popular Front politics, antirevolutionary alliances between social strata with divergent interests.
On both sides, the politics of desire is betrayed. On one side, deterritorialization lacks desiring machine assemblages. On the other, re-territorialization alienates, oedipalizes and archaizes them.
The only re-territorialization compatible with the revolutionary project is the one that occurs on subjective surfaces of consistency “self-managed” through the singular exercise of desiring machines (communities, new families, etc.). I.e. something that can artificially stick lull bodies without organs back together again. Collective agents of enunciation use coding elements on the body without organ., destined to be abolished in the economy dominated by flow, and this through code surplus value transcursion. Flows don’t need full bodies without organs. They are classified into coordinates, broken planes, structures. They respond to the general law of exchange value, which requires all things to have equi-valents.
They only care about the translatability of mercantile things. Which means that they only care about things’ capacity to be represented in detached signifying grids. I.e. to have recourse to disempowered signs. Through figure-sign flow. These signs are neutralized, incapable of code surplus value. Goods only refer to goods, just as Saussure’s impotent sign only refers to the sign. They have lost all transductivity, transcursivity and polyvocality.
With collective agents of enunciation, a plane of consistency is deployed: this is the site of the possible effectuation of code surplus value. Sign-points are brought into play. These signs conjoin the singular and the universal, the icon and the symbol, the image and the diagram. Flows refer to code capital. Representation dissolves before encoding. This is a real operation in which things’ intrinsic qualities are brought into play. While in individual statements, all that is brought into play are their formal qualities: exchange value, duration, extent, quantity of social labor, quantity of “oedipal” reproduction, etc.
So what is called into question is a politics of the total sign, the power sign, that is in touch with the real. The unsticking and resticking of the full body without organs is connected to the historical process of the sign’s deterritorialization. In tribal economies, in Neolithic towns, the body without organs was always territorialized. It’s with the social division of labor machine, the semiotic machine, the Urstaat, that the body without organs is disconnected from its territoriality and becomes an individuated body without organs, affiliated to the object of Urstaatic heights: the King, the Party, the State, etc. (In an impotent partner-swapping [échangiste] alliance with structure.)
From then on, there is a schize between:
- an archaic and impotent corporeization of castes, professional corps, orders, classes, etc., i.e. merchandise-images, image consumption prototypes,
-
and a detached operator, a set of signs as the exclusive site of symbolic efficiency (the Emperor of China makes the Earth go around, the rain fall, etc.).
And that’s fine, because economic code surplus value, “planning,” are not the Prince’s prerogative anymore, even when his “services” perform code work. (Hence, residually, the birth of writing systems that are practical, perverse conjunctive uses of writing as such.)
So, on the one hand: an individuated image-body, and on the other, a detached Urstaatic object, a code operator. On the one hand, archaization, on the other, diagrammization.
Code work on impotent sign systems becomes specialized. Hence the dualism of the impotence of representation and the forces of nature. Workers are the unconscious collective agents of practical synthesis. I.e. the worker is the total sign (icon + index +
symbol) whose substance is indifferent to object or signification. The worker is the power sign of capitalism. [The working class is the class of deterritorialization, the bourgeoisie is the class of overcoding. / Cf. the previous texts: “The Bourgeoisie is the Overcoding Class” and “The Workers’ Movement…” Deleuze underlines this.]
The whole point is for this power sign to stop being diagrammatized on imperialist signifying chains. I.e. for it to stop being disempowered on imaginary bodies: classes, classes of words belonging to classes, class interests… How can a worker, as a power sign, simultaneously avoid:
- the schizo full body without organs,
-
and the impotent dualist class body?
It comes down to this: how is the worker, as the sole collective agent of transduction:
- transformed into an abstract work flow, translatable into exchange values,
-
and allied to subjectified family, work, class, etc., structures?
As an agent of transduction, all he does is to produce in binarized assemblages of capitalist machines that only take differential flows into account.
The power sign-worker is transformed into a discrete figure of the composition of binarized flow. The power sign-worker is therefore alienated both:
- in his work, that stops being transductive, transcursive and polyvocal
-
and in his disempowered, oedipalized, encasted and “classed” image.
Classes tendentially become dualistic; there is class deterritorialization. You’re only dealing with symbolic classes and imaginary class consciousness. But, with capitalism, the break in the symbolic and imaginary orders is such that:
— Classes, as symbolic classes, work for capitalism (indispensable factor of its diagrammization), against the collective agents of the masses’ desire and against the emergence of subjective surfaces of consistency.
— The imaginary is archaized, used by anti-production, consumer society, etc.
They get: 1. individuality, and 2. an imaginary model.
The symbolic operators of State Monopoly Capitalism need the abstract factor in their equation to dynamize and energize class struggle. It’s a fundamental factor in the industrial takeoff, the emergence from under-development, etc. It’s subjectification at the most abstract level of the economy of flow. (It’s the motor of the capitalist working class which is the agent of colonialism, etc.) [We shouldn’t say working class anymore, but working machine, as opposed to bourgeois capitalist structure.]
Class interests insofar as the classes are divided are the interests of the structure. They counter-produce alienating, fantastical caste images and other artificial archaisms of “modern” society.
The problem of the separation between preconscious interest investments and unconscious libidinal investments in the social field can be posed only against a backdrop of revolutionary practice that sheds light on a possible resolution. You find yourself before two distinct deterritorialization processes. The point is to know if the two processes can merge, join in a unique revolutionary transduction and code surplus value.
— On the one hand: the deterritorialization process of desire, inscribing itself on a full, always too full, body of abolition-process organs and de-oedipalization.
— On the other: the deterritorialization process of machinic signs, organized through science, technique, the arts, etc.
These processes are disjoined in capitalism:
- by the molar and separated forms of statements—referred to individuated subjects of the statements—, and breaks between signified and signifier, etc.
-
by castration-suppression, which represses the emergence of collective agents of enunciation that, in a-consciousness, work right onto the code, whether scientific, real, physico-chemical, genetic, etc.
The scientific community is an example of one of these aconscious agents that continually passes from one plane of consistency to another, from math to theoretical physics, to technology, to training, etc.
The moment the two deterritorialization processes go as far as possible, attain a common threshold, liberate themselves from archaism, binarize their codes as far as they can, the question of the subject becomes a question of technical machinism and of the so-called human agent of the enunciation.
Who knows that there is a problem? Is it the IBM machine or the programmer that collects answers? False problem! There is a collective assemblage that lies outside all individuated consciousness raising [conscientisation].
In that sense, we can say that like Oedipus, class consciousness is the last stage before the desiring revolutionary passage to the act. It’s the retentive way capitalism articulates and calculates its challenge. It’s only in the a-consciousness of the struggle that the imaginary class face-off is overcome.
Subjectification only goes through those sites of reterritorialization that have some praxical, code surplus-value, efficiency.
Power sign-workers can reinscribe themselves on a polyvocalizing surface and take stock of history outside all class and value flows and all deathly coordinates…
7
Class Interests and Group Desire
Impossible to put an end to molar strata. Schizo-analysis will never replace organizations.
There is no going back, there is no anarchism. The problem is to rid class interest investment structures of their deathly fascizing substance.
Schizo-analytical interventions traverse class struggle through and through.
The capitalism and integration of the worker’s movement stratum is that of the blocking of decoded surplus values on reterritorialized individuation.
The Urstaat is reconstituted from its explosion into a million pieces. You have to restick the disjunctive mirror back together again.
Going in the direction of what is most deterritorialized, in the trail of machinic indexes, engaging in Odyssees that have no Ithaca, is making these Urstaatic fragments explode further and further away: the ideal of the economic ego, etc.
The ultimate Urstaatic horizon becomes the horizon of desire as the desire of abolition (taking into account the implication, reimplication, and transductivity of remainders re-empowered by code conjunction). Desire goes to the edges of machinic constructivism (purulent molecularization of referentiation).
The power of abolition ensures the definitive non finality of all systems. It is the ethical guarantee of all transduction as alpha and omega. Desire is [dispars] disparate at heart. But this disparateness, insofar as it is also the void, is mythical.
What is really disparate is so from repetition. Constructed, machinic. You have to guarantee disparateness in the ethics of repetition against the dialectics of normative spheres of interest and identification.
Basic revolutionary organizations are transversalist.
First a lifestyle unit, an artificial “family,” then they re-assemble capitalistic flows in an economy that is no longer disjunctive but conjunctive, following the lines of greatest deterritorialization.
Their basic militancy is re-adopting and reconnecting desiring machines into the group (totalitarian benefit-granting commune of material interests and of the emergence of desire).
Units of desiring subversion.
At the molar level, their subversion is a counter-effect of their molecular subversion. There is no “politics of desire” on a macrosocial scale (or on a microsocial scale!).
All we can say is that the effect of generalized schizo-analytic subversion (and it is generalized at the speed of code surplus value) is to change the givens of political and social problems.
— de-centering objectives
— the disinvestment of hierarchies
— functional and interrecurrent polycentrism
— polyvocality of intervention, even duplicity…
Like Marx, we can consider that it’s not our prerogative to define what a schizo-analytic order should be, not any more than we can define Communism! The point is to promote it.
It’s a question of method: the anti-program. Even if there is still a “program” for the revolutionary struggle! We’ll deal with that! But first we’ll inject a supplementary axiom of desire as “deprogrammer.”
Notes
1.Deleuze crosses out “Asiatic production.” He adds: “The monks remade the Asiatic
empire, but on a private level. The Asiatic state haunts the Greeks and the Romans (Lacarrière pp. 48-49).” Cf. L’Anti-CEdipe pp. 229-235 [Anti-Oedipus pp. 194-200].
2.J. Lacarrière, Les Hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris: Arthaud, 1961). Cf L’Anti-CEdipe p. 263, n. 72 [Anti-oedipus p. 222n].
3.Schnoudi was the spiritual master of a community of monks in Egypt in the 4th and 5th centuries. He died in 452 at the ripe old age of 118. Lacarriere describes this as the “Schnoudi era.”
4.Der Ring des Nibelung, opera by Richard Wagner composed in four parts between
1848 and 1874.-Trans.
5.Deleuze notes: “difference between the two bureaucracies.”
6.Waldeck Rochet, the secretary general of the French Communist Party, attacked the
May ’68 leftists in his presentation of the Central Committee Manifesto at Champigny-sur-Marne, December 5-6,1968.
7.The Mandé empire was founded in the 11th century. It extended from the Atlantic ocean to present-day Nigeria.
8.La Caduta degli dei [The Damned] (1969), dir. Luchino Visconti. A dark film about
the moral collapse of a wealthy German industrialist family during the Third Reich.-
Trans.
9.The Tupamaros national liberation movement was an Uruguayan political and military organization active between 1966 and 1972. The Weathermen was a radical leftist movement in the United States in the 1970s, that mobilized against the Vietnam war and racism. It ultimately merged with the Black Panther movement. The name Weathermen was from a song by Bob Dylan: “No need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”-Trans.
10.Cf. L’Anti-CEdipe, p. 91 [Anti-Oedipus, p. 77].
11.Group founded in 1971 by M. Foucault, J.-M. Domenach and P. Vidal-Nacquet,
among others.
12.Raymond Marcellin, French Minister of the Interior.
13.Underlined three times by Deleuze.
14.Dr. Bertil Kullenberg, Swedish biologist, who in the 1960s studied the importance of mimesis among insects to the reproduction of orchids.
15.Nigerian ethnic group. Cf. L’Anti-CEdipe, p. 223 [Anti-oedipus, pp. 188-189].
16.Karl Theodor Jaspers (1883-1969), German philosopher and psychiatrist.-Trans.
17.An extraordinarily elaborate mansion built in the 1920s by Ferdinand Cheval, a
mailman who decided to build an ideal home, and collected pieces of rocks and other materials during his daily rounds, producing, over 33 years, a disorderly, fantastical structure whose facades are filled with exotic scenes from postcards, travels, and his imagination. This structure, which measures 12 by 26 by 14 meters, struck the fancy of Breton, Gauclf, and others, serving as a sort of architectural counterpart to the French Surrealist movement.-Trans.
18.This last section is titled “Ambiguity of the despot” by Deleuze.
19.Underlined by Deleuze.
20.Deleuze notes: “the unconscious = pure desire… (no law).”
21.Saint John Damascen (776-880).
22.Described sometimes as a secular version of the Second Coming of Christ.-
Trans.
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) 