Desiring-Production, Stratification, and the Body
An Analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s Cartographic Ontology of Desiring-Machines
“Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally… For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ.”
- Antonin Artaud
“The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.”
- Georges Bataille
“Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings… is the nameless summit of agony and dread.”
- H.P. Lovecraft
“From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through. Will the machines run so badly, their component pieces fall apart to such a point that they will return to nothingness and thus allow us to return to nothingness?”
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
I. Against Teleology and Tracing, Towards Cartographic Materialism
To examine Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “desiring-production,” (the closest analog in their work to the typical Western metaphysical notion of vitalism) we must first dispense with two notions: teleology and “non-cartographic” materialism. By overcoming these restrictive notions, the cartographic ontology of “desiring-machines” which undergirds the work of these two philosophers can be more precisely understood.
Deleuze and Guattari’s work contends with “teleology” as a mechanism of overcoding -- it is a discursive formation which channels and constricts desire towards certain ends. In its most grotesque political manifestation, Fascism, all the mechanisms of the state, socius, and production are captured by a certain telos of the war-machine and mobilized in a suicidal acceleration towards death, as a “whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination.” Anti-Oedipus, one of their key joint texts, contends largely with the usurpation of systems of overcoding in both psychoanalysis and political action, both of which tend towards a rigidification of desire along predetermined channels.
In Freudian (and consequently post-Freudian) psychoanalysis, this enunciative method of capture lies in the Oedipal triangle, by which the psychoanalyst engages in an “endless, dreary process of discovery,” of the Oedipal forms: lack, castration, drives, etc. The psychoanalyst, in the same manner as a priest or schoolmaster, captures the multiplicity of intensities that permeate the designated “individual,” and channel it into specific commands, identities, and structures, “imposing on [the subject] semiotic coordinates.” As Guattari stated in his notes for Anti-Oedipus, “Producing morality, family, science or goods is all the same.” Teleology functions in this manner -- it produces a semiotic mesh of capture, molding the plastic matter of reality into in(dividuals). Desiring-production is not teleological, but purely ontological -- reality without purpose, the Real without signification and overcoding.
The second notion which recurs throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work is philosophy-as-cartography, rather than a philosophy-as-discovery (of the Real). According to their critique, the practice of philosophy has vitrified coordinates (produced by philosophical discourse) as a substitution for the Real, asserting their conceptual systems as discoveries. This is often true for self-identified “materialists,” who reify their ideal systems as tracings of the Real, for “there is no very great difference between false materialism and typical forms of idealism.” Instead, Deleuze and Guattari approach philosophy as “the discipline that involves creating concepts.” When they engage in their innumerable ontological articulations, it is important to retain this framework of concept-production as the basis of philosophy; they make no claim to represent the Real, or even to produce a transcendent substitute. They instead take up the role of cartographers, who produce conceptual mappings “oriented towards and experimentation in contact with the real.” A map is not a substitute for the Real, but a tool with which to navigate it. Never reifying a supposed “tracing” the contours of the Real, they instead produce conceptual tools for navigating the (material) Real. “False materialists” do as the empire in Borges tale: taking the map as the reality, causing the Real to crumble under the tracing’s strictures.
II. The Individual Subject within the Infinitesimal and Infinite Body
What, then, is the “Real” for Deleuze and Guattari? It is unitary, infinitely divisible, both the full and the void. It is the material base of everything -- the full body of the universe which is expressed in various compactions, stratifications, and molar bodies that enunciate themselves through the accumulation of molecular machinic production. Nature and God, unified in the tradition of the Spinoza: “The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself.” They presume the (purely theoretical) possibility of the “objective” universal body in a state of absolute fluidity, as an “an enormous undifferentiated object” without expression. This is the monad of total fluidity, a theoretical state by which our experience of the Real can be contrasted -- what Foucault calls the “zero point” of “undifferentiated experience”
The Real, however, is not at this zero point of absolute flow, for its distinctions are phenomenologically accessible. The flow of light particles into our eyes, the flow of air (sound waves) into our ears, the flow of water into our mouths, the flow of feces out of our anuses, etc., provide us with differentiation of intensities, flows, connections/disjunctions, allowing the constitution (through the iteration of sensory flows/inputs) of a virtual identity (both for ourselves and other objects) -- the particulate aggregates of material that condense in discernible stratum with recognizable code and organization. In this sense, “stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation.” As Deleuze and Guattari describe: “Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy which flows through it: the eye interprets everything… in terms of seeing.” In simpler terms, the material condensation of interpretative organs is not distinct from the universe, but rather is a specifically coded knot of matter which can interpret distinctions within a universal subject through receiving flows.
It is this process of stratification (overcoding and territorializing molecular sediment) that produces the subject. The partial objects of the body (head, hand, mouth, etc.,) are organized into a cohesive virtual form which appears to the newly constituted subject as transcendent -- this stage of development, described by Lacan as the “Mirror Stage,” is when the subject is produced and segmented away from the “oceanic” perception of early childhood. “What I see in the mirror is me, and I am more than my body: I am a Self, separate from the Other.” This is the point where the undifferentiated experience becomes the “divided experience of division itself,” in which the virtual separation of object-subject is reified. This division is a slicing off, an apportioning, of the subject from the rest of the universe, producing a maddeningly solipsistic state; as Bataille says, “[the individual] suffers from the mental darkness” induced by that fact that “he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.”
If there is an imperative dimension to Deleuze and Guattari’s project, it is to find the lines of escape from the overcoding processes of subjectivity and calcification of the particulate organs as the Self. Describing the mechanisms which produce these stratifications of apparent singularities out of the multiple is the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s “experimentation in contact with the Real” in the form of desiring-production.
III. Machines, Assemblages, Networks, and Flows
The cartographic ontology of Deleuze and Guattari starts at a basic unit of this division from the whole: the desiring-machine. Let us begin in the abstract: a desiring-machine is an encoded unit of matter which ceaselessly establishes relations of itself and other desiring-machines. The abstract desiring-machine determines the other machines to which it connects, the rates of flow between them, the point at which new connections are made and prior ones are severed. Each machine can be broken down into its own internal flows, which define its relations to external ones. Desiring-machines are a map of the basic operation at the level of the Real, constituting relations to form, deform, and dissemble “assemblages”: (a collective enunciation of machines which themselves act as machines). It is these machinic relations of desire (which connects machines to other machines) that form observable distinction within the unified mass of reality, as guided by codes of connection.
Let us solidify this notion through a concrete and familiar example: the human body, a machinic assemblage par excellence -- in the words of Samual Beckett, “Under the skin is an overheated factory.” A certain portion of matter is designated within the whole to designate the material bounds of the human body: “These are my hands, my eyes, my eyes, my heart, etc.” From multiple organs, an assemblage is produced, acting in relation to each other through internal flows along encoded channels: blood through the veins, electric impulses through neurons, urine through the kidneys. The organs also act in relation to those machines which are outside their assemblage: intaking food and oxygen through the mouth, expelling air through the nose, ejaculating through the urethra, defecating through the anus. Each of these organs is the mediator of certain flows, operating on codes that themselves are subject to flux.
The machinic-assemblage of the human body is itself connected to larger assemblages in which it is but an organ of a social body (the socius). Just as the lungs are an organ of the human body that receives and pumps air, the human is an organ in a socius that receives and expels various flows in relation to other human bodies (labor, resources, capital, semiotics, semen, etc). Every “body” exists solely in the virtual, but it is a direct product of the Real. These virtual constitutions of society, the human, nature, etc., -- that is, material zones which are distinguished from a singular totality -- cannot emerge without the basic machinic action of flow and interruption that is the total becoming of the universe. No singular machine exists in isolation of another, as “every machine is connected to another machine;” this framework allows Deleuze and Guattari to conceive of the Real as a connective network of ever-shifting flows between machines of variously microscopic and macroscopic scales. The infinite and the infinitesimal converge on each other to produce a singularity which is nothing but difference -- the very notions of fullness and emptiness are driven to extinction at this point of convergence. As Deleuze and Guattari put it:
“Each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations.”
As previously stated, this immanent plane of consistency is not in a state of absolute flow without interruption. Across this universal body, like fleas on a dog’s fur, the mechanics of desiring-production form organs that recombine infinitely into bodies, subjects, planets, solar systems -- the totality of Nature itself. The condensation of particles into a strata is not only the “judgment of God,” but also God’s own self-judgment.
Becoming-human is a process of stratification -- a portion of God’s self-judgment “squeeze[s] the movement” that organizes the body. As much as any socius, the body is a stratum, compressed into what Artaud called “the infinitesimal within… / Where one need only squeeze / the spleen, / the tongue, / the anus / or the glans.” Within the vast network of desire that constitutes the totality, a designated molecular swarm of material is organized in a zone of determinacy: this is a body. Man is cut off in the prison of the Ego, segmented by a symbolic exclusion from the Other by the stratifying judgment of God. Like a wave, Man is a fluctuating singularity drawn from an oceanic totality; this singularity is itself extinguished and returned to the ocean at the point of death, as the wave breaks against the shore.
Works Referenced:
Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God
Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus
H.P Lovecraft, quoted in A Thousand Plateaus
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Samuel Beckett, quoted in Anti-Oedipus