I Am Legion

Perhaps it is a personal preoccupation with the history of magik and the macabre that draws me so to the chapter BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING ANIMAL. Particularly evocative and exciting was D+G’s discussion of the anaomalous. There is a strong connection with the concept of the anomalous with the early modern English conception of the familiar. The word familiar derives from the latin FAMILIARIS, or “household servant,” and is used in a hierarchical sense when it is found in early modern English magik texts. Generally the familiar is a type of servant, a way into another word. The familiar is the go between for the sorcerer and the beyond. The familiar acts as a channel through which ones desires are funneled through, whether those desires be to contact the dead, or to cast black enchantments, the familiar spirit (generally taking the form of an animal), acts as a guide and a medium. Leviticus 19:31; 20:6, 27; and Deuteronomy 18:9-14 speak of “mediums and familiar spirits” and forbid all involvement with them, seeing in such spirits an affront to God. The familiar is cast in the bible as a false spiritual guide. A ritual that was previously metnoymistic, with ones familiar standing in for the power of all spirits of a similar type (all cat spirits, goat spirits etc), was seen as a corruption of gods will. The familiar, according to scripture, cannot be trusted. One thinks one is combining with, or, reaping the power of a natural spiritual/animal subsect, yet in reality these spirits are only demons, doing satans bidding, perverting the actions of all who invoke them. Deuteronomy 18:10-12: “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in [a] fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD” Demons, in modern parlance, are not familiars. Familiars are bridges, they are mediums through which psychic spiritual energy is channeled. Too often  shamanistic seed-magik is conflated with dark prohibited ritual. Obviously this is intentional. There is a reason that transcendental meditation, divination, prophecy, visualization and necromancy are outlawed in scripture, but what is more interesting is that the scriptual understanding of the familiar is so off base. D+G tell us in BECOMING ANIMAL that “Becoming is certainty not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation of producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equaling,” or “producing.” (p.239) The description here of becoming is more akin to how we should understand the familiar than one would think. The familiar (though perhaps hopelessly hierarchical in man’s mastery over it), is fundamentally about ACCESS. It is about the proliferation and amplification of psychic energy. D+G write that “…we are not interested in characteristics, what interests us are MODES OF EXPANSION, PROPAGATION, OCCUPATION, CONTAGION, PEOPLING. I AM LEGION.” (p.239) The familiar is a mode of expansion that is is not a social-form but rather an extremely powerful affectual involution. Familiar magik is a strange becoming, an unnatural nuptual. It is the harnessing of energies, energies of the pack, of the mass, into oneself for a certain desired end. If the familiar differs from the anomalous it is in this assertion of an end instead of treating the means (or the mode of expansion, as D+G write) as its own end. While one could argue that the familiar is goal oriented in a way the anomalous is not, it is important to remember that contact with/exploitation of the anomalous is not considered an end in itself. We are told on p.243 that the monstrous alliance with the anomalous is a necessary precondition for the set goal of BECOMING ANIMAL. The anomalous, like the familiar has a subservient structural role to play in the means-ends equation of becoming.The anomalous, like ones interface with the familiar is concentrated on its dispersion of affects. The anomalous is all AFFECT. In this it is a phenomena of bordering insofar as it is a tension between the wall of the pack and its center. The anomalous is a door into the pack, a door into possibility, into the affectual power of the entire pack. In this sense it is precisely like the familiar, who acts as a bridge to the power of all that share its form, a form that is a means, and a means that always seeks an end.

Virtual,Intense, Actual

Especially commendable in A Thousand Plateaus is the insistence of the authors on real living actors proliferating experience ever outward. Against the reductive currents of psychoanalysis and state philosophy that seek to hem us in, D+G develop a model of individual potentiality that is not focused on form but on intensity. We do not speak of subjectivities, we instead speak of intersections. We name the individual as a “haecceity” (261), and in so doing recognize a mode of speaking about “individuation” as something distinct, “not of subject, thing, or substance.” (261) The recognition by D+G that there is a way to speak of the individual not as a ‘thing’ subject to enslavement but rather as a line on a plane, as “the sum total of material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude)” is immensely important to understanding how they are able to conceive of the virtual as they do. There is a long and regrettable critical tradition of ignoring the productive power of the virtual, in particular with virtual technologies. Instead of analyzing technologies critically and interrogating them with an eye towards understanding them, we dismiss technologies of distance and virtual representation as inadequate world-screens filtering out the ‘real’ elements from our consciousness, leaving only its traces. The virtual is always defined downwardly in public critical discourse, as if it were a mechanism only capable of representing and mimetically producing, a mechanism utterly incapable of creating. D+G rightly recognize that nothing could actually be farther from the mark than this perspective.

When we interface with new technologies we are experiencing the world(the ‘real’ world) through the use of a virtual prosthesis in a NEW WAY, a way that was previously impossible for us. When we do this, we establish a new and distinct connection to the world of things through a virtual medium. This is not mere word play, it is about whether or not we give value to the technological potential to experience and become. One couldn’t see a photograph of oneself standing in a field before the camera was invented. When one views said photograph one is experiencing the virtual: an always potential relation, but a NEW one between the various elements in play. The very experience of being able to see a photograph of oneself is virtual. It is a play of intensities, it is a realm of NEW experience opened up technology. Traversing the virtual gulf. D+G are useful for media critics and for those concerned about thinking seriously about technology because they take seriously the transformative potential of the virtual in ways Virilio and Baudrillard do not allow for. Virilio for example constantly makes broad general statements about the nature of technological vision in his War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, seeing all aerial reconnaissance vision technologies as equilibrate to one another. Close analysis shows that this is not the case. Some technological systems produce certain affectual orientations, different intensities in their operators than others do. The bomber plane where you drop a bomb and leave before you see the carnage it causes is not the same as the drone, from which you may survey at a safe distance the havoc your weapon has wrought. The cinema screen is not the moving surface of a photograph. The technologies are distinct and distinctly VIRTUAL. Technologies of the virtual are irreducible to one another and each demands its own rigirous analysis. Susan Buck-Morss her essay The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception writes that,
what fascinated the first filmmakers was precisely the fact that it could be a matter of indifference whether what is perceived [on the cinema screen] is real or not. On the screen the moving images have a present meaning despite the absence of corporeal bodies, which thereby becomes a matter of indifference. What counts is     the simulacrum, not the corporeal object behind it. In the prosthetic cognition of the cinema, the difference between documentary and fiction is thus effaced…they inhabit the surface of the screen as cognitive equivalents. Both the real event and the staged event are absent…In Baudrillard’s terms, the code takes over and dominates the meaning: “the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective ‘reality’ but to its own logic.” …once the simulated imminence of the  reduced cinema object is the source of meaning, then a certain kind of violence becomes possible…I am speaking of the violence of the prosthetic perception itself (50-51)

Critics arguing against the productive/intersectional capacity of virtual technologies make an argument similar to this. They set a technology of interaction on a plane of equivalency with the cinema screen. Such a theoretical move is reductive and materialist in its critical thrust as it sets up a ‘screenification’ of the world, seeing equivalencies between two visual forms appearing on screens and goes no further than that. When a critic such as Baudrillard bemoans the ethical perils of reducing the world to a ‘screen’ unresponsive to ethical norms, he does not realize that by ignoring the actual technological aspects that differ between a cinema screen and a screen of another technological apparatus that he makes his argument a self-fulfilling prophecy. In refusing to actualy engage the ever changing factors the virtual holds in flux, he misses the rhizomatic productive capacity of the virtual entirely.

Demos, Uncertainty, Plurality

A Thousand Plateaus is an eminently practical book. It is a stirring defense of plurality and democracy against state,corporate, and technological fascism, though without ever being overtly so. ATP above all is about possibility. In her Human Condition and Origins of Totalitarianism, the great political theorist Hannah Arendt argues for a renewed focus on plurality. Plurality, Arendt argues, is the fundamental bulwark of any non Totalitarian society. It is only from pluralism that action and the potential to act is born. Totalitarian and fascist systems are completely overdetermined in Arendt’s formulae, and it is only the UNCERTAINTY that is born of pluralism that allows for acts (something closer to the greek sense of the term for Arendt, major acts, public, political acts) to occur. Arendt writes in the Human Condition that:”Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object. If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common society can prevent the destruction of the common world…it may happen under conditions of mass society…the end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect…one perspective.” (57-58) Representational equality for Arendt is equilibrate with conformism. If everyone is given access to the public in equal measure the value of the public realm will be destroyed. Equality in the public makes men behave instead of act. If all are represented equally in our media spaces, on our screens, and are given ample and equal time, even this ridiculous hypothetical scenario will not produce freedom but will instead only produce slavery. Arendt is absolutely committed to inequality.

Pluralism, Arendt (I believe rightly,) notes, is always inequality, but it is REAL. It is actual. It is not overdetermined. We all do not have the same possibility to act because of our differences, but it is also because we are different that some are able to act at all, even though we never truly know what we are doing. Uncertainty for Arendt, much like for D+G is at the heart of life. In fact, the way Arendt defines action is so similar to the way D+G define the PLAN(E) that it bears mentioning. D+G write, “The Plan(e) is infinite, you can start it in a thousand different ways; you will always find something that comes too late or too early, forcing you to recompose all of your relations of speed and slowness, all of your affects and to rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite undertaking.” (259) Becoming for D+G, like action for Arendt, is always uncertain and ALWAYS RELIANT ON PLURALITY. In Arendt, you never quite know what you are doing. You write a book, you release it into the public sphere, you think it is clearly written, yet it is really only a prism reflecting and refracting bits of other things, interacting with them to create affectual orientations you did not anticipate were possible to create. Actors are catalysts for events they cannot control and cannot anticipate. Reality (for D+G) and action (in Arendt) are symptoms of momentary affectual orientation or intensity. D+G write in Becoming Intense Becoming Animal that “the reality of becoming-animal” is that it is “affect in itself” that drives a person but that this affect “represents nothing” outside of its own presence (259). Acts in Arendt do not signify either, they present. They are PRESENT, but can merely herald the arrival of a chain of EVENTS (not representations) to come. Acts for Arendt are almost potential in the sense proposed by ATP, always avenir, always uncertainly becoming. 

 D+G, though they would never say so, are as committed to inequality as Arendt is. I do not mean this in the negative political sense, but rather in a more virtual-vitalistic one. We are only an amalgamation of intensities at any given moment, a vibrating chain of differential speeds and affects. We are at all moments plural and unequal within that plurality. We are not all things at once, nor are we all of these things in equal measure. For D+G IT IS ONLY BECAUSE WE ARE PLURAL THAT WE ARE. Plurality is the essence of any democratic and free society in political theory and it goes hand in hand with the uncomfortable specter of inequality. But let us not forget, it is better to be unequal (in intensity/affect for D+G and access to the public sphere for Arendt) that to be UNREAL. Dematerialized by a totalitarian power (for D+G this could be the state of the pincers of god) that has made pure potential (to act, to become) an impossibility.

Heidegger Reaches Escape Velocity

Much of A Thousand Plateaus is a shell game devoted precisely to developing a linguistic frame from which its authors can appropriately discuss things too large and amorphous for words. Each time we believe we have localized the correct linguistic framework from which to discuss potential we realize the cup hides nothing underneath it. There are few lapses in the book into Heideggerian language, but where they exist they are particularly notable. “The rat and the man are in no way the same thing, but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a language that is no longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms, in an affectabilty that is no longer that of subjects. Unnatural participation.” (258) A rat that is not rat, a man that is not man, language beyond language, matter beyond form. There is violence being done here to the idea of order and yet D+G take recourse to a Heideggerian ‘Being’ to describe the meta-state encompassing all of these hacceties, the question is why? For writers so obsessed with populating their world with vocabulary all their own the question is not an idle one. The ghost of Heidegger lingers heavily over much of the proceedings in the book to an extent quite surprising. The summoning of Heidegger’s ‘Being’ is due to an obsession D+G develop with the notion of ‘ground.’ Instead of inquiring into what thought is grounded IN, D+G ask more practically “how do we get off the ground?”-a more practical question, to be sure. It is also a more incantatory point, a ritualism, a magik. The modern age, as we are told, is “of course, the age of the cosmic.” (342) The cosmic is about propulsion, it “tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable in themselves.” (342) The cosmic is about the way in which we get ourselves OFF THE GROUND. It is the way we propel ourselves through different states of becoming. Tellingly D+G remind us that the cosmic is all about technique, or techné (“It should be, a question of technique, exclusively a question concerning technique. The essential relation is no longer matters-forms…neither is it the continuous development of form and the continuous variation of matter.” (342)).

D+G, even while punning on oppositionals are waging a war between Techne and Episteme in the margins. Michel Foucault talks about the episteme thusly,: “I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.” (Power p.197). In introducing techne the critical project of the book is further distanced from the Heidgerrian epistemic forensic-investigative programme and reintroduces it squarely back into the cosmic Nietzschean model of rupture. What is so hilarious is that even while debasing Heidegger D+G are appropriating him! They are making Heidegger work for them, using his language as an incantation that CREATES a ground rather than vainly searching in the dark for it. Amazingly, and with a deft and subtle move, D+G are instrumentalizing Heidegger to their own ends, appropriating his episteme and making it a techne. Techne is about art in the sense of doing things, creating things in the world. It is dynamic and productive. It is about means, not about ends. It is about the ‘here and now’ as opposed to an epistemic ‘enduring truth.’ Techne is about what can be made out of something else: it is about what can become something else. Heidegger is MADE INTO an incantation, his epistemic words are morphed into words of freedom, words spoken into clay. Heidegger reaches escape velocity. He is instrumentalized, he becomes a technique for our cosmic propulsion away from the ground of being, away from any sort of ground at all. In fact, Heidegger, in becoming, literally, a technique, becomes our new ground for the period of time that we engage with him. His language, is turned against him and he merely becomes a technique through which we fabricate a new linguistic ground to speak of a meta-state of existence. This is cosmos philosophy, appropriation, and magik. This is technique, MAKING things out of other things. This is overflow, this is effusion.

D+G give life to dead words. By removing the ground of his words, by changing the notion of an epistemic ground into an incantatory spell that seeks to propel (through techne), D+G perform their analysis through their methodology. Furthermore, when D+G later in OF THE REFRAIN go on to speak of the Nomos as “customary unwritten law” being “inseprable from a distribution of space, a distribution in space.” They go on to note that “by that token, it is ethos, but ethos is also Abode.” Punning again, they use ethos in the sense of the musical nome, to critique Heidegger in a doubly removed thrust, as the musical nome ‘ethos’ is often also called THE GROUND. D+G deftly instrumentalize the abode concept to remove it of its epistemic semblance, making the NOMOS the seat of the ethical (a complete Heideggerian reversal) while also making musical structure equilibrate with chaotic intersections of intensity.