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.