Reflections of the Machine

A Thousand Plateaus… I feel like I’ve read this book a thousand times. It can be a bit disorienting for a newcomer, so I’ve added this little intro to help you acclimate.

Deleuze and Guattari were a French and Italian intellectual team productive between the third and fourth quarters of the 20th century.  Deleuze was a lifelong and academically distinguished philosopher with a knack for ingesting information and spitting it out transformed, unrecognizable, and tinged with his style of mad genius.  His philosophical predecessor was Henri Bergson, perhaps most famous for his explication of the “élan vitale” or vital impetus, in addition to his examinations of time, consciousness, memory, and alternative forms of causality.  From Bergson, Deleuze adapted his concept of “multiplicity,” which describes an object incapable of being frozen in time (by the processes of mind) and sliced into finite parts.  The multiplicity is indivisible, it constitutes a state of becoming rather than a state of being (verb/action structure instead of noun/object structure), and can be most readily conceptualized by imagining yourself drawing an arc on a sheet of paper with a pen.  There is a continuous movement made by your body (your arm and wrist) that cannot be divided into smaller and smaller parts while still remaining sensible and faithful to the end product of the arc.  This is one of Deleuze’s deepest ideas, and it’s important because he begins to reveal examples where we’ve historically and intellectually treated indivisible entities as though they were deconstructible and reconstructible and fallen into dangerous error – for example, the human mind in Freudian psychoanalytic theory.  For Deleuze and Guattari, the system of thought espoused by a culture is inseparable from the culture itself, its politics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology.  Thus, if we retain this egregious error of attempting to divide indivisible entities with our thoughts, we incorporate it into our society where it has all kinds of tangible, material effects on the psychology and structure of the society.  Enter Guattari.

Guattari has been described as a “militant psychoanalyst” though I’m not sure what that means other than that he wholeheartedly rejects many of the norms in psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory of his time, most notably the Oedipal “daddy-mommy-me” triad that Freud embedded into Western thought and human governance.  Freud is sometimes regarded as an enemy to the natural human condition due to his rather superstitious and convoluted interpretations of his patients’ conditions.  Guattari found that the process of psychological “healing” in his time often left patients more neurotic than they started by plugging one set of malformed psychological structures into a second, overlapping set – Freud’s.  Guattari can be viewed as a materialist, meaning he thought psychological phenomena could be analyzed for disjointedness by physically mapping the mental workings of a patient to a sort of structural diagram – Schizoanalysis.  He thought the same structural rules that apply to physical materials also apply to abstract materials like thought, information, and psyche.

The general theory of Schizoanalysis is that capitalism as a societal economic structure works by always driving toward an upper limit (think limits in trigonometry and calculus) before fragmenting and carving off a space, and repeating the process on the newly segmented territory ad infinitum, down and down and down.  In this way it extracts maximum efficiency from every single subdivision of the whole, the system is always worked to its very limit from top to bottom, large to small.  If you remember what I said earlier about the thought structure of a society influencing it intimately and there being errors in dividing the indivisible, capitalism is a thought structure that works by ruthless subdivision all the way down to the entirely abstract form of capital itself, the dollar/coin.  Capitalism as a machine shapes the society in its own image and creates subdivisions where none in objective reality exist, subdivisions of labor, of value, of material, of exchange, of class and social hierarchy.  In turn, those born into a capitalist society bear its psychological hallmarks and begin to subdivide themselves internally in a quite similar manner and end up with a fragmented, subdivided thought process that operates at the upward limits of what it can achieve and still hold form.

Until, of course, the psyche can no longer hold its form and the individual’s psychology ruptures and destroys all subdivisions completely (the fabled long, dark night of the soul that haunts the early lives of most artists, while they figure out how to live themselves as part of this world), including those divisions that serve to separate the internal realm of thought from the external realm of experience.  The increasingly global saturation of capitalism into the quotidian of our lives is how Deleuze and Gauttari explain and rationalize the upward trend of schizophrenia and schizoid characteristics in modern society.  The afflicted individuals break as cohesive, coherent entities due to their attempts to impose the structure of capitalism onto the structure of their thoughts.  Another beautiful idea to be found, “the sublime sickness,” takes place when a schizoid individual ruptures the Oedipal structure of his cultural upbringing and lives himself completely.  “He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him.”  What society considers his mental illness has become his greatest boon, the inviolable aspects of his identity that will sustain, energize, and drive him.  It is his spark of life, of chaos.  When I’m feeling very down, I try to think about the sublime sickness and how to live my own “sickness” more fully.

Deleuze and Guattari speak of reality in terms of flows and valves.  Food is a flow of material that the valve of your mouth opens up to ingest while the valve of your anus opens to excrete a flow of shit (phrasings and subject matter lifted completely from A Thousand Plateaus).  Living creatures are then essentially flow controllers, selectively opening and closing various valves to stop or enable a flow.  Sometimes D&G like to think of flows as things that are constantly moving, perpetually in flux, and instead of us being selective flow controllers we are actually selective flow breakers.  Wherever we go a flow is stopped and diverted. The flow of shit would be nonstop if not for the selective opening and then closing action of the anus, just as the semen would flow endlessly if not for a similar valve, the ejaculatory duct, to break it and make room for a flow of urine, which would also flow endlessly if not for another bladder-related valve, and so on.

Finally, take this underlying metaphysics, of flows and valves, of multiplicities, of abstract rules governing all collective dynamism, of Schizoanalysis, and turn it outward on the body of human knowledge.  That is what A Thousand Plateaus is.  Did you know that geological strata provide both an excellent metaphor and a model for understanding history and the accumulation of information of all forms?  That wolves should be analyzed as a multiplicity, as a pack, because a lone wolf occurs rarely in nature?  So, too, we start to look at humanity.  Do we psychoanalyze the individual or the society, for the individual almost never occurs in isolation and as an end product develops and exists in relation to society?  I won’t even attempt to describe the “Body without Organs” in detail because I don’t even fully understand it yet, but it can be thought of as the least homogenous, most differentiated substrate possible, on which grow and operate tiny, abstract machines.  If you get anything out of A Thousand Plateaus it should be a concrete understanding of reality as an infinity of abstract machines plugged into an infinity of abstract machines (think flows and valves), all interlocking and functioning in parallel to create a massive supermachine (or multiplicity) out of their own asynchronous interactions. It’s a stunning book.  I’ve had moments of clarity like lightning strike through me, and I’ve spent hours with very little understanding.  The point of this book is patience.  What you bring to the table is exactly what you’ll get out of it, though D&G supplement your efforts with clever wordplay and concepts that will give you a nudge here and there when you need it.  Always remember – A Thousand Plateaus was written before the Internet and most of modern computer science, which makes its clarity and breadth all the more stunning.

A Thousand Plateaus is a revelatory work for its readers and for thought as a whole.  The next couple hundred years will be spent unfolding its questions and answering them, forming new questions on what still cannot be answered.  Without a doubt A Thousand Plateaus is one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy.  Its structure is in the form of a multiplicity – it is intended that the reader can start at any chapter, as one would sample a record, read them in any order, and still make sense of the larger idea.  Because of this structure, A Thousand Plateaus does not follow the typical discursive (linear) pattern of most literature and could be said to be recursive or even regressive in the sense that it continually loops back upon itself in ever larger circles.  Readers must not wait for D&G to spoon feed answers to them – D&G would have laughed at anyone who thought they could learn by simply being told answers.  Instead, the structure of the book forces the reader to engage with it on a very personal level and take a different path through the book every time depending on whimsy and current interest.