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Dave Harris [The translator says this is particularly formidable in terms of its jargon, although he attempts to justify the use of this jargon. If you have played your way into Guattari, say with Machinic Unconscious, or Psychoanalysis and Transversality, the jargon is not too bad, at first, but then it gets really baffling and bullshitty, when it gets on to detail The increasing use of the terminology of popular cosmology {including 'chaos theory'} could either hint at the real ontology here (as DeLanda suggests ), a bridge with modern science -- or be classic 'fashionable nonsense'. There are some really irritating diagrams and figures, most of which I have ignored here. The subheadings give some idea of the irritating neologisms and general bafflement. They seem part of the obsessive classifications and endless purely formal possibilities that haunt bits of the earlier writing. If Guattari draws a diagram with four boxes he has to fill all 4 -- and then if one is subdivided, so must be the others. The clarification of the differences is then required. Then further categories to explain any remaining contradictions -- and so on. It is simply out of hand, and can only be a sudden onset of academic neurosis affecting a person admirably interested in real politics elsewhere. This was written after ATP. It explains lots of the emphases in Anti-Oedipus I have struggled manfully to make some sort of sense out of this, no doubt at great cost to the subtlety of the original. Irritatingly, there are some insights here, so you can't just bin the whole thing. But Jesus did he need a decent copy-editor! Did the translator survive?] Preliminary Classical thought often operated in dualisms, between soul and matter, subjects and bodies, or bases and superstructures. However it is obvious that modern subjectivity has been produced, by machinic systems, including databases and mass media. Even those who believe in subjectivity as some sort of essence are beginning to doubt. While access to data has been democratizing the opportunity to elaborate this data has been closed down; planetary access to different cultures has also produced particularism and racism. There is no point in lamenting this situation and returning to something premodern and transcendental. Machines can indeed articulate statements and record facts at great speed, but they are not diabolical: they are 'hyper developed and hyper concentrated forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity' (2). New alliances between human and machine will develop, as machines are able to not just represent but contribute to new assemblages of enunciation, and as machinic systems in all domains support 'protosubjective processes'—'modular subjectivity'. We can see much earlier social formations as machines affecting subjectivity, such as 'monastic machines', or the machine at the centre of the court at Versailles which had produced a particular 'aristocratic subjectivity' in a way which submitted much more to royal power. Neither history nor sociology is adequate to explain these processes. We should pursue the French homophone which joins the notion of a path and of enunciation, and see these apparatuses as producing subjectivity through a series of voices or pathways— (1) of power, including direct coercion, 'panoptic hold' (p.3), and domination of the imaginary; (2) of knowledge linking subjectivity to 'techno scientific and economic pragmatics'; (3) forms of self-reference and 'processual subjectivity' [related to the notion of group subjects]. These voices mix together. They require a schizoanalytic form of elucidation, rather than anything structuralist or even genealogical, because there is no universal model, and all models are valid to some extent. What they do is to map out existential territories. This means that 'there is nothing shameful about this relativism', because whatever regularities in stable configurations that arise do so from particular modeling systems, voices and pathways [especially the self referential ones which underpinned theory and philosophy]. Logical discourse is only a distant relation of these 'discursive chains-- of expression and of content'. [NB 'discursive', meaning structured like a discourse, is finally defined formally on p.172, {well, non-discursive is --substitute 'without' for 'with' in what follows: }-- '[with] extrinsically circumscribed reference...[with] part-part or part-whole relation[s]' . The non-discursive is the opposite, with a different series of 'internal' connections]. Stabilization can be provided by any ideology or cult as long as it generates existential materials. Expressive chains do not just signify, denoting external states, but rather enact 'existential crystallizations' (4). Some of these then claimed to be based in classical reason and its categories, including the individual, causality and so on. These may in turn help self referential subjectivity, but they have been produced by 'radically heterogeneous...elements, lived experience, particular refrains, transitional objects, even fetishes. What has happened is that some of these regions and modes have become singularities, 'existential stamps' that collect contingently associated states of fact and assemblages of enunciation. The process of singularizing also implies transversal consistency, but with a local persistence. Traditional forms of discursive knowledge can never grasp this. We need to think about it in terms of affects, although on a global scale. The 'ordinary moorings of sense' now include 'virtual, incorporeal universes' (4), in the most contingent way, including a whole areas of uncertainty, probability, the aleatory. Classic rationalism attempts to systematize these processes, but only by ignoring major elements of them, in the form of a 'quasi militant ignorance'. We can see this with anthropology claiming to have found categories that were prelogical, but which were really 'metalogical, paralogical', working to stabilize particular assemblages of subjectivity. We can see these processes of work on a continuum, from children's games, through social rituals, to the efforts to consolidate the world of the schizophrenic. The processes obviously affect theology and philosophy as well [where they appear as undiscussed foundations or mechanisms]. For investigating subjectivity, there is particular need to see how the self referential voice relates to the other powers and knowledges: it is the key to producing human realities, and it is also the most singular and contingent, and the one that displays maximum transversality. It is not universal, but the best one able to process different 'universes of virtuality' (5). Voices of power and knowledge had an external referent that grounded them and limited their sense [the Earth {ie territories} and Capital are cited here]. In contrast, the body without organs [hooray!] lacks any organs of self reference developed in this bounded way, and is thus the source of 'continuous emergence of every form of creativity'. We can use this three part approach heuristically, to criticize the emergence of ideologies like neoliberalism, but also to begin sketching a cartography of subjectification. There is no claim to identify universal structure or foundation: apart from anything else, these voices have not always existed and may not exist in the future, but are localized in flows of history, emerging because they possess a particular level of consistency. Clearly, their persistence also depends on mechanisms to store data and knowledge into memory and construct particular technical and scientific orders. This in turn requires both apparatuses and new materials, new machines, and even new biological technologies. Again these should not be seen as material infrastructures, but more a list of components that are necessary. The current configurations emerged in 'three zones of historical fracture' (6): the age of European Christianity which involve new notions of the relations between human powers and the earth; capitalist deterritorialization of knowledge and technique, developing 'generalized equivalence'; global computerization, which might generate a new 'creative processuality'. The latter remains only a possibility, but if subjectivity is to achieve its full capacity, it will only happen through this particular voice/pathway. Innovative social practices are also required obviously, and together we might finally achieve a more permanent form of subjectivity, unlike the 'crazy and ephemeral spontaneous effervescences' of the past [including Spartacus and the French Commune!]. A new alignment of human beings and their machinic and natural environments could be possible. The age of European Christianity A new figure of subjectivity was produced in Western Europe [post-Rome], featuring a 'double articulation'(6), towards both autonomous territorial entities, like nations and ethnic territories, and a particular deterritorialized notion of subjective power. Unlike Islam, Christianity wanted to develop not an organic unity between the two but rather a ' deterritorialized Christ' (7). The two produced a new 'metastable equilibrium' which included a certain partial autonomy for the particular spheres of feudalism. The result was both aesthetic creativity and the development of technology and commerce. Specifically, a subtle kind of monotheism was developed capable of adapting to particular subjective positions, including even barbarians and slaves. A flexible ideology like this seems to be necessary at all stages of capitalist subjectivity, leading to the consolidation of the religious stance combined with 'the predisposition to the free circulation'(8) of knowledge, money, technology and so on. Secondly a new religious machine based on parish schools; thirdly bodies of crafts skill and monasteries and acting as Data Banks for the management of subjectivity; the development of forms of natural energy leading to artisanal and urban mentalities', nested within the bigger assemblages; the emergence of particular machines such as clocks and religious music; the selection of animal and vegetable species permitting growth. Threats came from Arab imperialism and from barbarians and nomads, but Christian culture was relatively stable developing 'three fundamental poles of aristocratic, religious and peasants subjectification'. It both encouraged and held back various machinic surges especially in the growth of technology. The legacy of this age appears in the 'paradigmatic reterritorializations of the type work family and nation'. The age of capitalist deterritorialization of knowledges and techniques This began principally in the 18th century, arising from disequilibrium between men and machines. Social territories changed. Capital became the new mechanism to reterritorialize and develop a semiotics of machinic processes. Two deterritorialized classes developed together with a general equivalence between goods and human activity. History became a matter of perpetual development and relaunching, in the form of a '"capitalist passion"' (9). The development of printed text became more general, so did steel and steam engines. Time was manipulated and cease to be a natural rhythm, leading to techniques like Taylorism and 'economic semiotization', involving seeing human capacities as virtual and developing a predictive calculus; biological revolutions which will lead to biochemical revolutions. The result was an overcoding, from human 'adjacency with regard to machinic phyla'(10) implying corporeal modifications in the form of a functionalism. Oddly, although univeralistic, this sort of functionalism has 'folded back on itself', reterritorialized on nations, classes corporations, races and so on. Although enlightenment was possible, profit was fetishised leading to a specifically bourgeois power. The combination of universality and localism has led to 'the most obtuse, asocial and infantiIizing subjective background' (11) for this group, appearing as excessively individual responsibility and blame, described nicely in Kafka. The age of planetary computerisation This is where a new machinic subjectivity develops. New media become dominant, leading to 'polyphony' combining human and machinic voices, while public opinion becomes a matter of statistical apparatuses and modeling, as in 'the film industry'. New materials are produced and new sources of energy: the issue is whether these will never be harnessed by suitable social assemblages. Data Processing has increased enormously, and this has helped machinic subjectivities develop beyond any obvious challenges. Biological engineering now opens the possibility of remodelling living forms, with consequent changes in the ecological and imaginary spheres. The main question is why all this potential still seems to produce only the old systems of alienation, oppressive mass manipulation, a consensual politics. There are still dogmatic theories which claim to be able to break with capitalism. Others dream of returning to the past, and these now include Stalinists. Yet others think that the havoc of modernity will eventually bring progress. Some offer the retreat to 'chronic marginality' (12). A proper rethinking would focus on the interweaving of voices and pathways as above. For the third pathway, the creation of new existential territories will be inevitable, relating to 'the person, the imaginary and the constitution of an environment of gentleness'. For the second, collective and productive developments must be retained as legitimate, as long as human truths are reinstated as important. In particular, there will be a need to emphasize 'a fundamental right to singularity' (13), including an ethics of finitude. Existing universes of reference in politics and ethics must be extended to include aesthetic universes, including the tendency to rupture sense, engage in processes, even at the expense of being incapable of accounting for their own developments, risking madness. The consistency offered by the notion of developing self reference implies that everyone takes on their own potentials, the goal is to transform the whole planet from a hell for most to 'a universe of creative enchantments'. Of course this is utopian, but questions about subjectivity are crucial. The Japanese example shows us that the most modern capitalist enterprises are still connected to 'archaisms': Shinto Buddhism seems to have been suitably flexible here in the development of the subtle formula. In Brazil, archaic subjectivities also appear today in a different way: substantial social polarization is sustained by 'a somewhat racist Yankee wave', expressed best in television, combined with syncretic religions, inherited from Africa, and widely spread. The crises of Integrated World Capitalism are deep. It requires further self referential subjectivity, but blocks it at the same time. The old religious superego still tries to recolonise. However the three capitalistic voices and pathways vary in different geopolitical locations. In the Christian west, a transcendent centre is preserved, the and development is extending even to the east. However, the system is now saturated, blocking the second voice of pathway. The third voice of self reference varies according to a north south axis, in a kind of new 'barbarian compromise' (14). The older monotheism is no longer adequate to develop a suitable subjectivity, and as a result, even Capital is beginning to 'shatter into animist and machinic polyvocity' (15): ironically, the old neglected African and Indian cultures might be more suitable for 'subjective reappropriation of machinic self reference'. The same developments can even be found in Italy, with a combination of family enterprises and major manufacturers of electronics: here, further development might even depend on the old subjective archaisms. The issue with social progress turns on these questions of subjectivity and its production. There are no external fundamental mechanisms, nor universal drives in the unconscious—both these are myths, and liberating pathways are possible. The current massive domination of subjectivity by 'apparatuses of power and knowledge' have still not squeezed out alternatives, and there is a noticeable link between creativity and the old notions of sociality. Other types of subjective production are still conceivable, especially those that are 'processual and singularizing'. These latter may be the only way to provide us with a reason for living faced with death and entropy. Chapter one Analytic cartographies [Dense and obscure, but very insightful. Takes a lot of decpihering. I have glossed as usual] The point is not to reconstitute freudianism, although bits of it still useful. Schizoanalysis is not just a psychological process. Elements of it already exist in other areas. We want to avoid a new institutional foundation. The point is to develop a discipline for 'reading other modeling systems' (17), not as a general model but a metamodel. Of course metamodeling is also common elsewhere: any act of subjectivity involves it in the form of transferring models between problems of different kinds, another example of transversality. The point is to think of analysis in a new way, not so much working with systems of statements and structures, but more with assemblages of enunciation which can produce new coordinates for reading and thus new representations and propositions. This will be 'eccentric' (18) compared with established professional practices and institutions. Instead, the analysis will be focused on 'the impact of Assemblages of enunciation on symbiotic and subjective productions in a given problematic context'. The context can be any particular existential or coherent set of references, themselves 'a process of self organization or singularization'. Thinking of assemblages of enunciation will avoid existing concepts of the unconscious or of subjectivity [not to be reduced to 'drives, affects, intra-subjective instances and intersubjective relations'], although both will find a place in schizoanalysis. Some assemblages of enunciation will not have any semiotic, signifying or subjective components, or even conscious components: we are moving away from a 'problematic of the individuated subject, of the thinking monad delimited by consciousness'. The ensembles are always 'indifferently material and/or semiotic, individual and/or collective, actively machinic and/or passively fluctuating'. These assemblages interact with 'radically heterogeneous domains', avoiding the usual categories and focusing instead on singular becomings. Classical analysis only looks at context in terms of its signifying tendencies, but this should be seen instead as 'a referent generative of pragmatic effects' (19) in particular fields. The point is not to establish signifying chains, but rather to look at signifying mutations of all the registers in question. Some assemblages will be particularly valuable as analyzers [as in Psychoanalysis and Transversality] of the particular unconscious formations in question. This analytic assemblage can take the form of an individual, like Freud; a social group [the example is a subculture who can exploit the potentialities of a ghetto]; more diffuse social phenomena collective sensibilities or opinions; some 'prepersonal practice' like a creative style, another mutation that can [like all the examples] link individuals and groups without them even being aware of it. There are multiple combinations as well. Assemblages should focus more on the process of formation rather than fixed apparatuses or groups. There will never be a standard schizoanalytic protocol, but rather a constant challenging of rules, 'an anti-rule rule'. Effects can either be to recalibrate analysis, or even to produce new splits in formations. These effects are precisely the analytic matter, how assemblages offer each other solutions or forms of administration, or masks. New possibilities can arise even in context that appear to be blocked, requiring further study of relations of production and micro politics. The notion of subjectivity that emerges involves 'a metamodeling of trans-Assemblage relations'. There is no relation to a conventional essence of a subject. Subjectivity itself has to be established at the intersection of various flows, of signs and machines, sense material and social facts, and transformations in assemblages themselves. Such a notion is no longer confined just to human territories. It implies further original singularizations, 'becomings animal, vegetable, cosmos... multivalent sex, becomings incorporeal'(20). It is the 'abstract machinic Phylum' 'adjacent' to humans, that will provide these possibilities, something that thinks for human beings. [On the phylum, try the excellent introduction by DeLanda here] It would be wrong to think exclusively in terms of speech and direct communication, 'archaic forms of enunciation'. Machinic channels are much more important [not just technical machines but also 'scientific, social, aesthetic etc.']. These have extended and exceeded the old territories based on individuals and social groups. That communication was 'logocentric', and required mastery of particular ensembles, but deterritorialized enunciation is machinic and involves 'non human procedures and memories' in the construction of various semiotics complexes. However, this is not to impose some evolutionary system on communication: rather the point is to understand different modalities of assemblages of enunciation. Non semiotic assemblages include the organizational codes of social insects. Humans have similar systems such as 'those of endocrine regulation' (21) which can also be seen 'to hold a determining place at the heart of assemblages', as when self intoxication produces endorphins which in turn can exaggerate things like 'sado masochistic tableaux' or 'mental anorexia'. Non subjective semiotic assemblages are found in 'psychosomatic tableaux'[Reich on 'character armour': 'stylistic character defenses that we develop throughout our life, usually starting before we can think or talk' -- see link]. Subjective but 'non conscientalized' semiotic assemblages are found in human ethology, with its interest in unconscious in printing, display, behavioural hostility and so on [hence Plateau 11 in ATP]. This contradicts conventional psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the Unconscious and human language. Schizoanalysis would see this as a reduction of subjectivity to a capitalist context. However the productions of subjectivity are important—it is just that they need to be metamodelled in terms of assemblages of different domains. Human beings occupy unconscious domains of equal importance, found in structures of representation and language, but also in other systems of coding or tracing found in different organic social or economic domains. Subjectification, the establishment of lived territory, will then 'only be occasional, optional' (22). The same goes with the issue of consciousness and the processes of becoming conscious ['conscientalization']: if we are driving a car, for example we have different systems of, consciousness at different levels of vigilance and attention. Certain forms of machinic communication are also involved in this example, so the overall assemblage of enunciation also includes several levels of relations to machines. Schizoanalytic metamodels therefore map these different 'compositions of the unconscious, contingent to topographies', which involve in connection with various kinds of social and cultural formations. This can incorporate existing notions of subjectivity and the unconscious, but it will never reduce these to 'a structural prototype'. Consciousness and subjectivity It is tempting to think of an unconscious at two levels, absolute and molecular which has no standard forms of representation by only 'asignifying figures' (22) [indicated apparently in Freud's early work on dreams, where the symbols were idiosyncratic and organized according to their own logic], and the relative molar one which has conventional representations. However, it is important to avoid such a simple division, found in both Freud and Lacan [unconscious and conscious or id and ego, and the imaginary and the real respectively]. Analysis of the unconscious in neurosis has revealed an accompanying hyperconsciousness [some standard commentary about the subjective symptoms?]. Neurotics have both asignifying matter and conventional representations with 'idiosyncratic modes of conscentialization'(23). This combination or assemblage should not be reduced only to the subjective, partly because it clearly indicates '"limit consciousness"' [eg extreme forms of dissociation or catatonia]. It follows that every enunciation can be both conscious and unconscious, and the proportion and intensity depends on assemblages themselves 'that authorise their composite assembly, superpositions, slidings and disjunctions'. There may also be, operating 'at a tangent', an 'absolute consciousness... the absolute Unconscious of a non-thetic self presence', not involving the usual relations with the other and with society. Apart from avoiding binary divisions, we should also avoid notions such as subjectivity or consciousness considered as transcendental entities unaffected by concrete situations. In practice, the most abstract references always 'mesh with the real', as they encounter contingent flows and territories. This opens them both to historical and other forms of mutation. Significations are not independent of the libido, and Lacan was wrong to increasingly substitute the signifier and its dynamics for the libido. Sense-making can be opposed, especially passively, to material flows including semiotic ones. It can also originate with machinic fluctuations, not just existing strata and static states. This sort of process breaks with the usual system of equivalences and fixed maps, at least as entire assemblages (there may well be rigidity in some areas of an assemblage, such as the way in which the oedipal triangle is supported by the capitalist field of production). It is more interesting to look at those cases where assemblages join together and develop 'metamodeling coordinates': junctions produce connections, but not fixed constraints, and connections can be weakened and decreased again. [The example then ensues of a case where a singer sufferers bereavement and as a result loses part of the range of her voice. This apparently shows the effect of several assemblages, some of which exceed subjective understanding, 'the limit of the person'. Enunciations of the past dominate the present and restrict possibilities, symbolized by the representation of the mother. Treatment could have explored still further blocks, but it is not always wise to do so, but therapists should work in terms of an assemblage of enunciation rather than just a lost object as is classic. This particular case, the singer was able to reorganise her assemblage and recover, managing her superego differently: the experience of bereavement was taken to be an alarm signal rather than a fixed constraint, in a 'pragmatic transformation' (25). This is better than the usual negative judgement found in Freudian analysis which might reawaken the old issue of oedipal guilt and infantile depression. Instead of a general social inhibition, we are working instead with a singularization, affecting singing specifically. Other possibilities were awakened, including faciality traits separated from the mother and the superego. Apparently, this is rather like the way in which myths work to manage the link between the death triumph and particular Kleinian objects]. The functors [mappings between categories] of deterritorialization Consciousness can be understood to work in terms of deterritorialization as well as via the unity of the psyche, which is a 'founding myth of capitalist subjectivity' (26). Instead we should think of processes of conscientializiation, as existential territories become deterritorialized and tangled. Subjectivity is restored in a second dimension, 'energetic discursivation'. There are four functors, F T Φ [pronounced 'Φ'] and U, each operating in four domains, respectively flows of material and signs, existential territories, abstract machinic phyla, and incorporeal universes, at least as they become brought to consciousness ['consciential']. They operate together [diagram on page 27] and together configure subjectivity, desire, energy and different modes of discourse and consciousness. We can avoid any notion of infrastructure, including bodily or instinctual, any sort of determinism, especially if based on need or lack, and any sort of behavioural conditioning. [To avoid reproducing the diagram, Φ and U are connected on the same horizontal level through 'propositional discursivity' {formal theoretical discourse?}. On a horizontal below, F and T are connected through 'energetic discursivity' {driven by libido?}. The vertical dimensions in the square are forms of deterritorialization, objective between Φ and F, and subjective between U and T. I fear there may be much more to come]. The relations between these entities is what is crucial, and the role they play in the overall assemblage. It is not a topology. The transformations are what counts in the model, as the (classically separated) orders traverse. Everything will turn on the precise combinations of the actual and virtual on the one hand, and the possible and the real on the other [another diagram page 28 -- again, Φ and U provide actual and virtual possibilities respectively, while F and T provide actual and virtual real respectively]. The real and the possible are arranged so that 'the reality of the possible always has primacy over the possibility of the real' (28) [necessary if we are going to critically analyze and extend the concrete and actual real]. We can also understand the virtual functors as the 'integrals' of the actual ones [not really sure about this, maybe the argument is that changes in the virtual will explain changes in the actual?]. In particular the unconscious will be founded on notions of deterritorialization. Unconscious versus libido Freud developed a series of abstract quantities in order to make psychology scientific and thus reject notions like the soul. The psyche could then be seen abstractly, as deterritorialized, not just as described subjectively [phenomenologically in the usual sense]. Despite the dangers, this did not lead to reductionism, but offered instead a whole series of new interpretations, equivalent to the adventures of Dada or surrealism. Perhaps the scientific schema increased Freud's creative confidence. Certainly, associationism had to be left behind in order to focus on 'the unconscious processes of semiotic singularization' (29), the so called primary process. A neuronal model did persist, however, and this produced a number of reterritorializations. We can see this by examining his notions of the libido and the unconscious. The libido is both a processual energy, or a static energy which restratified psychic formations. Freud tried to explain these two possibilities by distinguishing between object libido and ego libido. However the notion of the libidinal balance must be rejected, and a notion of micropolitical choice developed instead. Then, the libido can become deterritorialized itself, and become an 'abstract matter of possibility', involving a 'libido phylum', the integral of various flows of desire. Freud offered a reterritorialized option as a flow of energy produced by drives and organized in various stages, always in opposition to 'entropic death'. The unconscious similarly can be considered differently. It is best seen as an 'ensemble of lines of alterity, virtual possibilities, unprecedented new becomings' (30). However Freud saw it more as a refuge for the repressed, constrained by the conscious or superego. Jung continued to explore the former, but in a limited way [thinking of a series of archetypes and collective structures and complexes]. Later formulations in Freud were even more territorial— a spiritual plane in a topology devoid of content and exhibiting chaos; a temporal plane displaying different stages of development, which had the effect of domesticating the early studies of child sexuality [by seeing it as a phantasy rather than the result of actual seduction], and which subjected the unconscious to the ordinary experiences of time. The object of desire similarly was initially presented as something rich and ambiguous, escaping binary logic, occupying a collection of different subjects and sexualities, 'like a "knot" of overdetermination'(31), a connection with the unknown, revealing 'indefinite lines of singularization'. Klein saw the object as something outside the framework of the person, partial in that sense, suggesting all sorts of other connections with various becomings, but then closed things off by suggesting a list of typical partial objects which became 'normative landmarks' on the individual's journey to normal genital sexuality. This attempt to categorize objects into good and bad ones affects Lacan and the objet petit a as well. The same goes with otherness. It got reterritorialized as a quality of interpersonal relations, and turned into a complex structure of symbolic castration through oedipus. The different approaches between Freud and Guattari are summarized in a diagram on page 32. The attempt is not to form a new scientific conceptual framework—indeed the approach required will be 'similar to the aesthetic disciplines'. Most psychologies mix science and magic: there's nothing wrong with magic which can provide useful maps of psychic assemblages which are not so reductionist as the scientific approaches. However, this is readily acknowledged, and there is at all levels a normal scientific 'deception' and a posturing which is 'generally in painfully bad taste and unbearably affected'. In
practice, there are three sorts of articulation
between scientistic approaches and the applied
domain: ascetic pathways (following experimental
procedures, assuming perfectly defined objects,
establishing apparent laws, and often
associationist, and eventually leading to
behaviourism—largely abandoned, but still
appearing in the laboratories and textbooks;
'hysterical identification '(33) involving
mimesis of procedures rather than actually
attempting falsification as in Popper [sic]
(psychotherapy currently follows this path and
has developed a particular cast of initiates and
a body of doctrine, even though phenomena of
belief are still 'elaborate' (34);
'propping'(particular scientific phrases are
retained or used as metaphors). All are
reductionist. Psychology should not
apologise for its unscientific nature, but
rather identify the 'fundamentally illusory and
pernicious viewpoint' of scientism.
Indeed, science began by bracketing out anything
idiosyncratic or singular and developing an
approach based on a
'specific semiotic phylum', which simply ignores
the essential point about subjectivity. If
anything, science might benefit from reawakening
some of the subjective bases with which it began
[citing Merleau-Ponty].
Positivism remains as an obstacle to a proper analytic approach, although it is still regarded as a popular third stage of society as in Comte. In practice, the three stages have always overlapped, and even science producing different forms of subjectivity, and even science has not managed to dispense with earlier forms [animist and transcendental are singled out]. There must always be some underlying perceptual scheme, some affects, imaginary activity and representation, just as in dreams or madness—different universes in different modalities, as complex as each other even though sometimes seeming banal. Overall, the sort of rationality that affects science should also be subject to an analysis based on a cartography of unconscious subjectivity. Without this, the map of science does not actually represent its territory Cartography should replace formal logic and discourse. This would consolidate rationality rather than replace it, extending existing logical definitions of representation and the notation, and restoring 'ontological pragmatics' (35), connecting 'specific existential qualities'. There is no universal away to represent this process, because approaches like Klein's or Lacan's are not universal: instead we should attempt to identify 'crystals of singularization' (36), specific points inside coordinates which are capable of generating 'mutant universes of reference'. These can no longer be accessed immediately, although once they could in animism or in certain ruptures with normality. Instead we need to think about 'apparatuses of analytic enunciation from scratch', which will be like artistic creation, not just to extend psychoanalysis or art but to attempt to establish a whole new degrees of freedom, to overcome existing economic and social constraints, to restore the proper purpose of human activity, both collective and individual. From postmodernism to the post media era People have lost faith with the notion of progress, modernity and its connection with emancipation, so social relations seem to have been frozen, with no challenge from the conventional sources. However, this does not mean that nothing can be done, as implied by post modernists. Postmodernism is really a 'final twitch of modernism' (37), an inversion of its formalism. It is unlikely that it will regenerate new kinds of painting [a relaunch of the 'creative phyla']. Architecture might be different. However the danger is that capitalism has always both de and reterritorialized, especially in attacking traditional systems of value, and replacing them with frameworks that are similar or similarly functioning. What we have with postmodernism is a drive to subjective deterritorializing combined with an equally strong impulse to reterritorialize, developed in particular by the tremendous growth of communication and information machines (so the effect is to deterritorialize only the traditional human faculties). Collective subjectivity has failed to grasp this and has become conservative: the only hope is that a subsequent inversion of history and will lead to new possibilities for emancipation and new 'assemblages of subjective production'(38). [Some
postmodern architects are discussed, including
Venturi, seen as into reterritorialization as
above]. So is Lyotard right?
The collapse of master narratives for him has
led him to suspect any attempt at concerted
social action and developing consensual values
in favour of little narratives, the
'heterogeneous "pragmatics of language
particles"'. He has joined Baudrillard
in suspecting the very categories of the
social and political in favour of language
games. His earlier radicalism as when he
organized Socialism or Barbarism has
faded into a simple demand for access to data
banks. We are left with only 'erratic
clouds of floating discourse in a signifying
ether' (39). But this reduces the social to
the linguistic, and the linguistic to mere
signifying chains, exactly as in modernist
structuralism. All of these approaches
have been over influenced by information
theory and cybernetics, which have been
borrowed rather than understood.
Instead we need a focus on 'concrete social assemblages'. These are not the primary groups of sociology. They do not just perform at the linguistic level, but also have 'ethological and ecological dimensions, economic, aesthetic, corporeal, phantasmatic semiotic components that are irreducible to the semiology of language, a multitude of incorporeal universes of reference' (40) existing beyond the immediately empirical [not a bad definition of the essence of assemblages of enunciation here]. Despite the stress on pragmatics, it is a structuralist conception of speech and language that dominates, one that ignores the 'unconscious, aesthetic and micro political' formations. As a result, this approach depends heavily upon opinion and the trends of the day, which seem self evident [my objection to Barthes and his new semiology]. It ignores the link between any particular social development and the 'desingularizing and infantilizing reduction of capitalist productions of the signifier', an illustration of Lacan's saying that the signifier becomes the subject for another signifier. It may be true that the 'signaletic primary matter' is increasingly produced by machines, but this does not mean that human creativity must inevitably become alienated: instead, machinic networks can be seen instead as processes of subjectification, leading to new forms of creativity. Assemblages of enunciation still demonstrate options for subjectivity. The material of logical discursive sets can indeed be referred to external objects in standard coordinates, but not that which arises from 'logics of self reference...existential intensities'. We might also call these logics 'logics of bodies without organs', or logics of existential territories. Their objects feature ontological ambiguity, and relations between objects and subjects that can not effectively be rendered in discourse as unambiguous figures in a system of coordinates of representation. They cannot be apprehended from the outside, but only grasped existentially. These ambiguous objects are transversal and so can escape conventional constraints. Originally, Freud grasped this, as indicated in the early conceptions of identification, transference, the phantasm etc., but he then reduced the logic of the unconscious into the 'logic of dominant realities' (41), losing the specificity of the discourse, especially the ways in which semiotic segments broke with conventional signification and produced new existential conditions including neurosis. Lacan's topography is also compartmental. Some linguistics of enunciation have noted the particular pragmatic effectiveness of language apart from the classical notions of signification and the notation, but did not pursue the issue beyond their own specialisms—to have done so would have been to break with the boundaries around language. Nevertheless, this shows how language can escape from its own constraints, by making 'pragmatic singularities crystallize', bringing sensible territories into existence. All other semiotic components do this as well, including 'natural and machinic encoding'. Capitalist subjectivity emphasizes the linguistic signifier as part of its programme to generate equivalences and develop abstract values, but studies of other semiotics systems can oppose this imperialism, and restore 'the rhizomes of realities and imaginaries'(42). We have to construct the alternative, though, and 'no postmodern spontaneity' will do this. The new information and communication technologies have to be incorporated in this programme. They can develop innovative forms of consultation and collective action; they can resingularize forms of expression [I'm not sure I can understand how this is to be done through the use of databanks or the 'miniaturization and personalization of apparatuses']; they can develop an infinity of '"existential shifters"' permitting access to different creative and mutant universes. This will be the post media revolution. There need be no disengagement or withdrawal into closed groups, but rather a new platform for minoritarian groups more alert to the new dangers of nuclear arms, famine, ecological catastrophe, and the 'mass mediatic pollution of subjectivity'. Schizoanalytic meta-modelings Psychoanalysis has many of the same characteristics as the Christian religion, with its own founding fathers, writings like gospels, congregations, excommunication of heretics and so on. Psychoanalysis has attempted to absorb science rather than rejecting it. It also requires more participation among users and 'its myths are more deterritorialized' (43). Above all, psychoanalysis and religion both attempt to grasp subjectivity and its ethics with capitalist logics in conformity with capitalist logics—'systems of judgment proceeding by generalized equivalence, the conjuring and repression of animist intensities, the conversion of singular trajectories' and the circulation of entities on a deterritorialized market. Psychoanalysis offers some initial freedom of expression, only to take it over later and subject it to stereotypes which are 'perhaps even more tyrannical'. In this way, the normal constraints on discourse are removed, and thus the illusion generated that singularities of desire might be expressed. However, this only disguises the remodelling of enunciation. This makes psychoanalysis a secondary kind of religion, 'a religion of pure form', constraining practices empty of content, and upholding the freedom of expression only in principle. Before this expression goes very far, it encounters 'the apparatus of the cure', various rituals and 'incisive interpretations' (44). These seem to be neutral observations based on listening, but this becomes 'ostentatious silence and a cheap priestliness', a remote form of control, that can even be internalized by the patient. It means that the patient feels it is all his fault, especially if he rejects the official interpretations, and then the cure becomes further examples of guilt and alienation. Another analogy is to see psychoanalysis as a kind of organized tourism [sic], something programmed and internalized, while appearing as freedom. The enduring popularity of psychoanalysis despite all its crises and internal problems, arises because its practices offer a grasp of mutant subjectivities and of variable machines of enunciation to grasp subjectivity, but in a particularly deterritorialized way. Indeed, its popularity acts as a coefficient of deterritorialization. It reflects the classic 'double tension' of capitalist subjectivity, developing deterritorialization in one direction, away from the classic subjective orders of childhood, family or ethnicity, while reterritorializing in a more functional way. This is functional for capital because it tends to neutralize and forbid 'processual singularities', promote 'the active ignorance of contingency and finitude' and thus infantilize its protagonists. [Same could be said of the enduring appeal of Psychology in Education or elsewhere] This sort of subjectivity cannot develop self reflection [rendered as is not 'the object of an eternal return on itself', 45], but develops a spiral of regression. It recognizes itself in the myths of the media and in 'pseudo scientific' psychological references. Freud knew that adult subjectivity was always accompanied by infantile subjectivity, but did not realize that this is the result of modes of production of subjectivity, not universal complexes. Television has a particular role here in producing subjective figures, eliminating any challenging singularity, and even based on psychoanalysis. The media also combine de and reterritorialization [so does education!] in forms of enunciation, and this produces 'ever more platitudes' and superficiality. Mcluhan was right to say that subjectivity is becoming as flat as TV. Lewis Carroll produced a 'map of flat affects in Alice in Wonderland'. But psychoanalysis is the ultimate practice in reducing signification and making 'affects and representations equivalent' [ the emotional impact of affects and representations as in autoethnography?] . This important function is what explains its continuing popularity. We need instead to do schizoanalytic research. Psychoanalysis should not be personological nor about intersubjective representations as in oedipus. It should focus on 'the meta modeling of pragmatic models of submission to the modern systems of "gentle" alienation and exploitation'. It should not confine itself to elite concerns and practices, but extend into modern apparatuses of health, universities, the media. these apparatuses become increasingly dominated by supervision or 'theological overcoding' to preserve systems of normalization and blame at work in the 'collective psyche' via 'a multitude of molecular relays'. Chapter two. Semiotic energetics [A formalised account of the elements and processes that link them on what is sometimes called the plane of consistency. The elements inhabit the four domains we have discussed above, with some additional qualities. The processes involve new terminology, such as the notion of a tensor {roughly, a combination of vectors in an n dimensional space}. There is also the term 'noematic', which I first came across when reading Husserl, roughly referring to the qualities of a perception which can be properly traced to the mental processes of perception, as opposed to the 'noetic' which, again roughly, refers to those qualities perceived as belonging to the object itself. The whole chapter is extremely dense and schematic, and, unfortunately, occasionally rather pompous. What follows is my own gloss as usual, one which omits an awful lot of detail. The main issues seem to be: (a) signs are linked to non-signs in semiotization or discursivity, requiring two levels of subjectivity or thought {the Unconscious} (b) the consciousness can continue to receive effects from the non-semiotized, and these can also be internalized after semiotization as affects; (c) there is a 'surplus value' of sense in both pre-semiotic and semiotic levels; (d) this enables a pragmatics of innovation at the third level of thought]; (e) there is a two-way flow between the semiotic, pragmatic and pre-semiotic levels so possibilities can be added, sometimes 'machinic' ones;(f) a complex number of tensors link the levels, of different kinds with different possibilities to combine or separate, actualize or virtualize, and their operations are not purely subjective nor determined, nor arbitrary but depend on the characteristics of the four domains, which are not fixed either but open to influence from the others] The semiotic energetic is to replace the importing of classic thermodynamic notions. Would also replaces the base and superstructure model which affects both Freud and Marx, with libido and economic flow as the base respectively. The result of this model has been to think in terms of an 'infrastructure complex' (48), which has reduced and reified anything inside the infrastructure, making us incapable of noticing movements and transformations unless they are to be traced to some model of the energy in the base. There was often a thermodynamic understanding of energy here. Only those 'givens' that could be explained in terms of the base were to be seen as reality, and the proper objects of science, but only by reducing the inner dynamics of those Givens. This also made the Givens abstractly equivalent, reducing them to 'a "capitalistic pulp"', omitting singularities, the effects of representation, affects and other combinations of energetic processes. The approach ended in structuralism or in system building, a further kind of 'entropism' which applies a formalism derived from the superstructure to the infrastructure [seeing everything as a language]. This formalism operates with a flow of binary alternatives. The production of subjectivity was then separated from semiotics effectiveness, 'a cult of information or of the signifier'(49), and important issues were bypassed, including the relation between what was given by the system and forms of conceptual and observational expression. This in turn led to have very limited notion of choice available in the 'megamachine of the production of culture', and clearly offered a suitable model of subjectivity and expression to the system of Integrated World Capitalism. Freudian semiotic energetics Freud
dabbled with scientism, perhaps as a
safeguard against the ruptures of sense
exhibited by neurotics. A basic
apparatus remained, involving an apparatus
connecting energy components and mental
representation, sometimes only as a
metaphor. Thus the first model of the
consciousness suggested the notion of a
somatic drive and drive energy, possibly
biomechanical, appearing as a series of
excitations, principally erotic ones, and
requiring a constant equilibrium to resolve
the tensions. However, there was
another psychic language involving object
representations, phantasms and
intersubjective relations with
objects. Psychic life was not entirely
dependent on the causal drives, especially
since the psyche can distort the effects,
through the famous 'displacement,
condensation, over determination,
hallucination…' (50). An
ambiguity remained concerning how the two
were connected, whether the somatic was
integral to the psychic, for example.
However Freud set out to explore particular
connections between the sexual libido and
the ways in which sense was made,
notwithstanding the more cosmological stuff
about the dualisms between Eros and Death
etc.
The second topography, id - ego - superego, placed less emphasis on the energy metaphors and more on 'anthropomorphic models'. The final stage was Lacan and structuralism, where the signifying chain virtually obliterated any notion of the libido. Indeed, libidinal flow became a mere 'organ of the drive' [so another dimension to the BWO], relating only to the incorporeal and linguistic. They retained its sense of energy, but denied that sexual energy in particular was special. The schizoanalytic unconscious The term unconscious here stands only for a field of schizoanalysis, much more than that delimited in psychoanalysis, where it is restricted to the idea of a particular family based notion of subjectivity in developed industrial societies, or those manifestations that appear in the process of a cure. There will be diverse means of semiotization, no centring of subjectification on persons, including the analyst, a move away from conventional 'signifying interpretation' towards to assemblages of enunciation. These will produce 'subjective affects and machinic effects' (51). These will deviate from conventional 'stratified redundancies', initiating a process, a problematic, an 'evolutionary phylum'. This does not involve putting aside any form of evaluation or any attempts to develop a scientific analysis: any way, classic Freudian analysis was hardly falsifiable [another reference to Popper here]. It will operate with different source of energy, possibly with a distinctive flow associated with distinctive psychic operations, avoiding thermodynamic concepts, including entropy. These terms are fine in special assemblages of enunciation had dealing with science and technology. The point is that in other conditions, the territories, universes, flows and machines produce different assemblages, which can also affect each other. We need to map the possibilities in developing a definite 'psychophysics'(52) not confine ourselves to particular cases. There will be no univocal energetic base, and no dualism between inertia and subjective animation. Heterogeneous domains will be straddled as a form of transversality, producing different modes between flows of matter and energy; abstract machinic phyla [that here provide us with 'objective laws and changes']; existential territories seen as acting for themselves; incorporeal universes going beyond the constraints provided by the first three domains. It will be necessary to argue that sometimes, the interactions do not lead to equilibrium, but that they exist already as 'powdery metamorphic bifurcations at the heart of the most apparently amorphous of states'[unnecessarily poetic—why not just call this the virtual level of vectors and attractors etc] There will be processes of quantification [which I think involves something other than the normal processes of measuring stuff]. We will not think in terms of sets whose elements have been predefined or collected, but rather in terms of assemblages there can show radical transformation, 'schizzes or relinkages' (53), that can fluctuate, reorder, even implode. We find these assemblages in dreams and also in 'intellection in the nascent state'. It is not that ambiguity arises from mere fuzzy subsets, but is found on a general plane of immanence, occupying 'different levels of consistency of energy', with notions of presupposition linking them. The assemblages that are found on the plane of consistency can be fractured at different levels of energy [changes of state in DeLanda's terminology]. However,we cannot delineate these entities or their quanta of energy without semiotization, and that would involve us in various other complex assemblages of semiotization. This semiotics will not be confined to conventional linguistics, but will take the form more of its early conception 'an encyclopaedic science of the phenomena of expression'. It will also borrow from Hjemslev and the notion of a 'glossematics'[a note explains that Hjemslev and the others at Copenhagen have wanted to develop a whole 'algebra' to show the relations and presuppositions between different semiotic 'magnitudes', going both beyond current linguistics and even symbolic logic, and assuming some inner coherence in the material being analysed. There is also this from the Wikipedia entry: The glosseme is defined as the smallest irreducible unit of both the content and expression planes of language...It is an abstracting form of structuralism, concerned with how "functives" describe relationships among "terminals" rather than with words themselves. This system, constructed without recourse to any particular language or constructivist modality, seeks to establish a universal standard defining the necessary and sufficient conditions of language.More detail is provided in a clear review by Screel, available online: it refers to Deleuze on the cinematic sign specifically. For me, the basic point is not how Hjemslev differs from other linguists, but how his notion of language and the sign differs from very commonsense conceptions of the sign as some clear label or name for a clearly defined thing as in objectivity or realism-- ambiguity haunts both names and things and the sign actually articulates both, fixes the meaning of both content and expression at the same time. For Guattari, maybe, this makes his point that linguistics which emphasise the signifier aspect of the sign assume some fixed meaning or set of connected meanings, irrespective of content, and realism or objectivity does the same for content the other way around]. Non separability, separation and quantification [Here we go]. Transversality cannot be studied using the traditional coordinates as in physics, but nor is it just a matter of open playfulness and contingency. Instead there are 'non programmed potentialities', or at least potentialities programmed by discontinuous segments or 'unforeseen smoothings and foldings of possibility' (54). There also can be areas which are stratified and structured which look like conventional homeostases. But these will not control subjectivity as they did in Freud. They have their place, but they should be seen as frozen degrees of freedom. Nonseparabiliy, separation and quantification refer to three types of semiotic energy: Nonseparability refers to 'synchronic correlations at a distance that make different entities compossible'. There need be no semiotic localization, which means that the 'observer assemblage' is not a coordinating factor. The general plane of consistency contains instead 'tensors of nonseparability' linking various entities. They are located on an axis of deterritorialization, from finite to infinite. There is another dimension to be explained later in terms of semiotic content and expression. Separation refers to transformations linking entities over time, providing for a semiotic component. These transformations may produce different possibilities—'to exit, discursivize, delocalise or detotalize'(55). Separation is not just the opposite of nonseparability, since there are no semiotic dimensions in the second process, which is self sufficient. Separation is a possibility contained within nonseparability. It appears on the plane of consistency as vectorized tensors, the result of either discursivity or detotalization. These tensors may be semiotic, producing entities available to the senses—'sensible Territories, Diagrams, Noemas and machinic propositions '[I'm not sure why some of these nouns are capitalised, but I don't capitalise them myself in what follows]. There may also be 'tensors of surplus value of the possible', arising from changes in the four domains above which can both relay sense and produce pragmatic effects and subjective affects. Quantification refers to those relations between nonseparability and separation. These two do not interact, but they establish 'sites of entities' forming a level that will produce 'instances' that can possess energy in conventional terms. These instances will appear to generate conventional flows like action and reaction. For this to happen, assemblages of enunciation have had to be constructed so that they can 'become producers of quantification', acquiring a particular point of view or reading capacity that interprets entities in terms of combinations of energetic flows [so quantification here refers to metrication, making extensive forces from intensive ones?]. What this implies is that any kind of molar quantified striation must presuppose some sort of problematic at the molecular level [a general principle of his metapsychology he says]. On the plane of consistency, quantification is revealed as the projection of a particular ability to discern quanta of deterritorialization inside processes of nonseparability, and quanta of discursivity inside processes of separation [in other words help us see how much deterritorialization or discursivity is present in these processes]. This is necessarily external to nonseparability because there is no internal semiotic potential. It would be wrong to see these three qualities in some sort of hierarchy. We find quantification on the plane of consistency in the form of 'synaptic tensors'(56), having the 'quanta of discursivity of synapses' of both effect and affect. These will connect the tensors of surplus value to particular 'entity sites' found an apparent systems and structures. This is another way of connecting ['aggregating'] nonseparability and separation, 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic reference'. Overall, the plane of consistency has 'four domains of consistency': F, flows arranged in 'complexions', Φ , abstract machines arranged as rhizomes; T, where entities appear as cutouts; U, where entities are arranged as constellations. Although we think of this as a two dimensional plane, it actually occurs as a folded surface 'traversed by a complex line of assemblages' (57). The line will also be discontinuous since the tensors of discursivity produce ruptures. [Overall, lunatic obsessive classification of abstract forms which will have to conform to each other as we go along probably in the form of ad hoc amendments and revisions]. The cartography of assemblages We find contradictory demands in this model of the unconscious. Each of its three levels [below] is autonomous, but the entities on them are related, through presupposition and through various transformations. Such relations threaten the collapse of the levels, but there are 'certain topographical constraints'[purely in his model that is]. In the first place, there is a 'principle of exclusion' which means no direct relations between the tensors in the four domains. Secondly, a 'principle of dyschrony' means that the way the tensors are vectorized will differ, according to whether they are found on the axis of deterritorialization or that of discursivity [one difference is between a synchronic and a diachronic dimension respectively. The other difference is that one is 'bijective' and the other 'projective': Wikipedia tells us that 'a bijection, bijective function or one-to-one correspondence is a function between the elements of two sets, where each element of one set is paired with exactly one element of the other set, and each element of the other set is paired with exactly one element of the first set. There are no unpaired elements'. 'Projective' might refer to projective geometry as in DeLanda]. Thirdly there are principles of presupposition so that the first level [intrinsic reference] does not presuppose any other, but the semiotic level presupposes that level, and the pragmatic or subjective presupposes both the earlier ones. The four domains of the plane of consistency [The four domains are F, T, Φ and U as above]. Discursivity implies a particular argument that there is both a given and a giving. If there is a giving, there must be 'unary values'(58) which implies a particular discontinuity between given and giving, which in turn means that there must be some process of ontological appropriation in assemblages, if only because it is possible to say that something is either there or not. This provides a certain 'concatenation' between entities, and we're going to call them cutouts for T and constellations for U. [Apparently based on a Stoic concept] these terms imply a mixture but not a total interpenetration, and thus a preservation of the heterogeneity of components. Plural values on the other hand relate to the given, implying a certain dimension of continuity, and a 'processual multiplicity in assemblages' (59), as when we find a proliferation of different species, and can notice differences or even accidents. These relations of concatenation will be called complexion for F and rhizome for Φ [so a rhizome here is a processual multiplicity, an unfolding of potential, some evolutionary development?]. Another Stoic concept [oh good] implies the possibility of only relative delimitations, or 'trajectories of becoming'[but only in an evolutionary direction?] The domains of given and giving are not always tightly compartmentalized. Non-giving can also be given in some systems and vice versa. [Somehow] this relates to Hjemslev and the notion of the solidarity of the sign in semiotics, a union between content and expression. For Guattari, this union arises from a common plane of immanence which will 'authorise' various 'translations, symmetries and reversions' between the terms. For deterritorialization, there is a cosmological argument, suggesting 'two domains of intrinsic reference' (60) related by either tensors of discursivity or 'assemblage synapses'[really obscure and accompanied by a ludicrously complex diagrams of the possibilities pages 60, 61. What this particular point seems to be about is that there is a systemic referent in the given, but a structural referent in the giving, surely a fancy way of saying some objective referent which will be connected to a linguistic one?]. The axis of deterritorialization actually has two segments as well: finite values offer reversible relations based around an equilibrium point, while infinite ones imply irreversible drifting beyond any equilibrium. [The possibilities for discursivity and deterritorialization in the four domains appears in yet another diagram 61] Structures and systems of the primary unconscious We find here 'tensors of intrinsic reference' [no semiotic as above] (62), bijective and connected by a continuous line. These seem to represent fixed parts of the domain, inaccessible to schizoanalysis [if I have interpreted one of the ludicrous diagrams correctly, these lines run from machinic rhizomes to matters of content, and from constellations of universes to 'existential matrices'. I assume that these are inaccessible to schizoanalysis because they simply arise in the primary unconscious]. There are two types of tensors of intrinsic reference, though: systemic, found in the given, linking sites in F and Φ [the only example I could grasp was of an organic system operating ontogenetically, that is machinically, to join together material and energetic flows, with the junction mechanism developing phylogenetically]; structural, found in the giving, linking entities in T and U [a musical structure can crystallize incorporeal universes and their actualisations in melody or rhythm]. The semiotic tensors of the secondary unconscious These are still tensors of intrinsic reference, but they develop 'projective vectors with a continuous line'. They are not reversible but have points of origin and points of arrival, the latter being 'a semiotic entity'. They combine both an 'ontological ambiguity' and 'a surplus value of possibility' which can be used in pragmatic action. Here, we can schizoanalyze the components, expanding or localizing, enlarging or shrinking their object, enriching or reducing expression. Semiotic potentials are also conveyed in various tensors: the two tensors of persistence run from systems to structures and may convey sensible contents within T, through various 'complexions' of energy and signaletic matter [these seem to be the ones that also run from rhizomes to matters of content]. These can also produce 'existential cutouts' that are not tightly defined but have a certain potential or possibility, not dependent on either subject or object [the only example I can follow was a totemic icon in an anthropological assemblage. Other examples include a refrain of territorialization in an ethological assemblage] Another tensor of persistence deals with noematic contents inside U, running just like the other tensors of persistence but this time ending in 'incorporeal noematic constellations' (63): these were also contain potentials and possibilities produced by a particular multiplicity with a particular kind of duration [the ludicrous example here is the Cheshire cat smile—pass. Apparently it occupies all points in space, rendered by this obsessive as having an absolute speed—I suppose ideas or thoughts, noema if you must, obviously have these characteristics. [Readers will be as delighted as I was to discover that] there also two 'tensors of transistence' this time serving as vectors between structures and systems. They may be diagrammatic, produced as an actualization of the contents of F. Here, discourse moves from existential cutouts [existential matrices in constellations of universes] back to various complexions of energy and signs. These complexions again are not fixed but have a potential for possibilities, as long as they obey things like existing physical laws and other physical constraints [the constraints affecting the use of a credit card is the example]. The other type is machinic, involving an actualized 'abstract propositional expression', running from incorporeal constellations of universes and existential territories to machinic rhizomes, again awakening potential for possibilities: they can actually exceed the matters of expression [the example here is the 'incorporeal faciality of Christ' attached to all capitalist machinic phyla, as argued in ATP]. Persistence and transistence of the tertiary unconscious Here we have reached a level of the unconscious which is constituted by pragmatic synapses of effect or subjective synapses of affect. Here, the synapses have to configure the various processes of nonseparability, separation and quantification, drawing on the potentials found in systems and structures at level one, and semiotic concatenations at level two [so this is the machinic notion of the subject? It considers possibilities in objective systems and in linguistic structures? In a kind of abduction?]. Effects are actualised and affects virtualised, but this depends on the particular nature of the assemblages at work. There is no warrant for a continuous and rational consciousness at work. Instead we have 'temporal schizzes and dyschronies' (65), fragmented becomings. We also have efferent and afferent synapses [working outwards to carry effects to people, and inwards to carry affects as in C17th notions of affect]—the first one carries surplus value from possibilities to systems and structures in level one of consciousness, the second relays surplus values to the semiotic systems in the first place. This [complex diagram on page 60] is only a model, and we would expect to find a larger number of synapses articulated in a complex network of assemblages: the model is a kind of ideal type [sic], representing the 'ensemble of capitalist productions of subjectivity'. Not only that, each synapse can have valences [in sets of 2, 3, or 4] :
Everything depends on 'a game of taking consistency' (66). Consistency of affect can occur at zero levels of discursivity. If it does so, its associated effects can also acquire consistency [the origins of things seeming 'natural'?] . [in another kind of consistency] virtual and actual affect can 'envelop' each other. There is no difference ontologically between the states. In particular, we should not see the virtual as an unreal crystal of possibility needing actualization before it exists: the virtual aspects of the unconscious are potential energies as much as the actual energies studied by psychologists. Nor can we retain the normal hierarchies of thinking which have produced different types of logic: the same instances can be seen as elementary quanta, semiotic operators and assemblage quantification. It might seem like a dream logic or an archaic one, but it must also be seen as promising 'an era to come of sign-particles' (67). Chapter 3 The cycle of assemblages (first global approach) [Thick bullshit and obsessive detail exploring formal possibilities. I can offer only my own gloss expressing my own initial understanding. I will have to return to this as I read more expert commentaries on what on earth this book is all about. To give you an example of the vulgarity of my gloss, I have rendered the original bullshit: 'The unary discontinuity of contingency T cannot be simply articulated to intensive incorporeal (non-discurive) multiplicities U' as 'We cannot just map the complexities of existence directly to the theoretical multiplicities found in U'. However, this makes it heavy going, and sometimes my notes are actually longer than the very brief subsections in this chapter!] If we operate with a two-term axiomatic (such as Being /Nothingness), we will be left only with a limited representation of one term and an inaccessible ground. Dialectics with three terms produce only pyramids and trees. We need at least four terms in a matrix [the inspiration for Ettinger?] Then we will be able to see new forms of generation of entities, perhaps following 'a principle of self affirmation'[69], or autopoiesis [sic]. We can investigate models based on reference to the outside [some determinate reality?], using only the domains of flow, which will give us 'discontinuous discursivity', or Φ , which will give us a 'continuous "intercalary" discursivity'. However, those metamodels based on something only internally consistent ['endo-referred'] will require considerably more heterogeneity of dimensions and processes of singularization. We cannot just map the complexities of existence directly to the theoretical multiplicities found in U. A synapse is required as an intercalation, arising from another kind of machinic relations also found in Φ . Nevertheless, the 'continuous' [meaning both constant and joined together? ] possibilities in both Φ and U provide all the possibilities for territorialization and contingency in actual flows and territories [must do so, by our definition?] . Φ is a category of discursivity The usual (phenomenological) approaches to discursivity seem to assume there is also a discursive given. Some philosophy has attempted to investigate non-discursive giving. Science has attempted to deterritorialize the given, but has not developed the role of the assemblages of enunciation. We have to rethink continuous discursivity in the domain Φ as involving the infinite multiplicity of a state. What is given then represents what appear as contingently in territories [so actual as manifestation of virtual etc]. Normal types of discursivity involve sequential orders coordinated by the conventional EST coordinates ['energetico - spatial - temporal'(75)]. it can take the mode of either a rhizome or parallel linear chains. With rhizomes, we will expect 'knots and crossroads'(70), explicable only as a 'machinic consistency'. With linear chains, we will find heterogeneous 'clusters and agglomerations', separated by levels and thresholds of deterritorialization. Operators that transcend [empirically, generalkize?] these clusters will lead us to consider constellations of universes of reference 'that refer us to the logic of bodies without organs' (71) [presumably, seeing a spatial potential which then takes particular forms or stratifications?]. Rhizomes imply 'immanent machinic relations' and linear chains 'transcendent machinic relations' (71). Where machinic articulations join together, we have a problematic. We might then pursue either interlinear compositions [the example is a polyphonic multiplicity in Bakhtin], or harmonic mutations found in enunciation [the origin of things like metaphors and analogies?]. Synapses are not involved in machinic sequences [I can't see why—surely they also have to be referred to issues of universes and territories? Maybe this is a 'pure' level requiring no semioitzation? I think Guattari is raising this is the question in the final piece in this section]. This leaves the question [indeed] of how machinism is to be articulated [and] how enunciations intrude into linear consistency [this is a gap that could be filled by the classic subject, of course. Isn't it what the politically motivated have to do?] . Φ is a category of exo-reference or allo-reference Discursivity involves memory, or something machinic, which is the same thing. In the domain of Φ we find whole 'chains of machine memories', and it is this that provides potential surplus values: we have something more than just an addition of components. Memory acts as an integral for flows of pure discursivity, operating not just with actual potentials but memories of virtual potentials found in U, '(= the point of view of all potential enunciators)'—an echo here of Badiou on the universal?]. For example, two particles can interact and bring to that interaction 'all the potential experiences in other contexts'[actually rendered as some comment about particles in the big bang]. We should not see this as a matter relating figures and grounds, for example, [anti-Lyotard?] because F and Φ operate according to different logics [expanded inexplicably page 72], but nevertheless discourse in machinic propositions depends on the particular operation of universes of reference. Φ is a category of continuity The domain of Φ includes 'all possible pro-positions and trans-positions with regard to "contingenced" states of flow'. It is hard to see how we can specify this process as producing multiple possibilities working through effects, compared to 'virtual affect', which is 'enunciative virtualization'(73) [which is what happens when you spell out lots of possibilities at the formal level and then have to think up the exact differences between them. Are subjective propositions the effects of machinic phyla, or are they better understood as universalized affects which appear objective to new subjects?]. Φ is a proto-energetic category It can transfer its effects in the form of potential energy, both material potentiality and semiotic. Energy should be considered as transfers between deterritorialized levels, and thus is an integral of deterritorialization of the discursivity of flows [the more energy, the more discursivity in flows]. We need a general theory of energetic charge that allows semiotic effects '(the impact of the sign particle)' to have real energy in its effects. This will be part of the general argument for a reversability of entities, so that what was Φ can become F, and T become U. [Classic philosophical argument—if X has the qualities we want, that must be because something that causes X also has the qualities we want] Machinic diachrony and synchrony We can think in terms of machinic evolutionism in a 'mechanosphere' operating diachronically and synchronically. In the first case, each machine is linked to other machines in the form of the form of substitution or in terms of preparing another machine for future use. There is a rhizome of 'machinic implication'. For the second case, there is planetary integration, leading not to one tyrannical mega machine but rather to a 'powdery molecular machinic multiplicity' (74) [why 'powdery'? Granulated, dusty, contaminating every human?]. We return to the issue of machines and structures here, with machines carrying surplus value and possibilities, while structures are 'exo-determined, passive'. Feedback is never 'innocent'[purely functional or neutral?], since all feedback refers to a universe of self reference, a proto subjectivity [that is the ability to feed back indicates a subjective capacity?]. These will be subjects at various levels however, not just the human—the organ, the cell, corporeal memories and all assemblages. There is also a machinic self consistency, a matter of transistence, operating at different levels. This gets back to the issue of the relations between Φ and U above. We can see this in terms of a machinic plane of consistency in Φ , with a connected plane of immanence or of self reference in U. However, this will not be a universal plane of immanence, but one specifically responsible for existence. Universes and paradigms Kuhn's paradigms [sic] refer only to phyla and not the link to constellations of universes [an example of the criticism of science above]. However, real problems are like other living beings, but operating in different coordinates. Even so, there are not just the EST coordinates, but other intrinsic and intensive ones. We can also amend the notion of a desiring machine developed in earlier work. The point there was to link effects from signaletic matters [NB signaletic means something that communicates but not by signifying,ie not by being attached to a signifier. It can have aesthetic. semiotic or prxzsagmatric implications says Genosko] or semniotizing] to subjective operations, even the most deterritorialized ones. Desire became a description of a particular process, a line of deterritorialization, seen as emanating from particular abstract machines. However, we can now reframe the issue in terms of 'problematics of the production of enunciation' (74). Flows and phyla We return to the notion of flows and how they turn into phyla. Flows tend to smooth things out, by repeating them, giving them an identity and thus producing linear continuity. They also cut out figures. They appear in finite forms, usually EST coordinates. They carry feedback as 'a memory of smoothing'(75). Smoothing requires 'proto enunciation', but feedback requires 'proto machinism'[I suspect all these are definitional. Feedback requires generalization away from the specific outlines of the case?] We can consider flows as 'intensive fluctuation', which will produce 'territorialized discursivity'. This takes the form of a relation between primary material, EST-based or signaletic; a repetition of smoothed forms on a continuum, or a form which is protomachinic; certain operators that mediate both position and retain these protomachinic forms: positioning requiring both a process of persistence or a 'memory of being' and protoenunciation.. Fluctuations can take the overall form of linking primary matter, protomachinic forms and protoenunciative substances. {no problem then -- we have solved the question of how they link by finding magic 'proto' qualities] These links are best seen as a static form of 'substantial {ie found in substances} deterritorialization'. Another static form involve certain relations of expression: there may be 'autistic' (76) relations, where the protomachinic form is just determined by primary matter. They can also be 'dialectical exhaustion' (77) which emerges from the relations between only the protomachinic figures [that is something idealist?], and not from any smoothing from flows of matter themselves [the diagram on 77 this seems to have primary matter largely derived from particular abstract figures]. [Somehow] this will produce a regrouping of smoothed components into particular distributions among the functions of content and expression [idealism sees expression as determining content?] . Expression itself takes the form of chains of machinic phyla [only, no primary matter], in the form of virtualization only through enunciation. Territories can be derived, linked to phyla subsequently, only as a form of 'grasping' the implications [uncritically applying the abstract terms, as Hegel did when he applied the concept of Reason to the actual Prussian State? See Althusser on the circularity of humanist 'recognition']. This is a static kind of 'expressive deterritorialization'. Assemblages of enunciation We can explain deterritorialization in terms of relations between the four domains. It would involve a certain amount of smoothing of flows as we develop protomachinic smoothing into machinic phyla for example. This will be part of a more general process of smoothing and striation: the latter produces all heterogeneity, the former enables the transformation of neighbourhoods between registers [cf zones of proximity in ATP?] . Both cases require a combination of homogeneity and heterogeneity, opposed alternately in both entities and registers [as in a four by four table]. As examples, flows in F can be concatenated in a way 'correlative' to a striation, the generation of heterogeneity in the sensible world. However they can be divided into semiotic and EST flows through a process of bipolarization, involving the operation of smoothing machinic phyla. Smoothing and striation are linked in the sense that striations will involve vertical smoothings of deterritorialization, and horizontal smoothings of discursivization [hilarious diagram 79]. The first one involves the establishment of levels operating between the possible and the virtual [just another definition of vertical smoothing really]. The discursive one links F and Φ in extrinsic coordinates [once we have made this link, we can understand actual flows in virtual terms?]. We still have to explain the links in terms of 'a problematic of energy'(80). Somehow, flows of expression '"extract themselves"' from fluctuations in sense data [terrible weasel] in the form of machinic deterritorialization, and this will energize the smoothing of flows. So everything depends on the status of these machines that can do this extraction [just the repetition of the same abstract possibility in different terms. Basically, things have to be smoothed out, or rendered less heterogeneous, in order to develop relations between them, and this can either be done in discourse or by some process of deterritorialization operating outside of discourse, associated with machines]. Description of the first four phases of the cycle of the assemblages of enunciation There are no simple models because in new loops are constantly appearing in the relations between the fields, as deterritorialization and reterritorialization expand. Sensible smoothing: sub position [Mystifying use of terms in physics such as brownian motions and binary series, perhaps to distinguish these processes from subjective for linguistic ones]. In brownian motion [taken as a simple beginning] redundancies among entities disperse, or become linear. This is a way of controlling 'the aleatory chains of the "primitive soup"' (81). There is no clear line between these chains, however. Nevertheless, generally speaking the redundancy of an entity takes place after it has been segmented: this segment is identified and then retained in memory in order to be reproduced, in a linear sequence. For persistence ['persistential consistency'] there therefore has to be a structure to identify and one to implement the memory of redundancy. Identifying requires location in a system of relative coordinates, and memory has to be divided into two levels -- [I think the argument here is that the immediate memory of the segment has to be replaced by a more general memory that will help us actually systematically forget the first link in the chain]. This more general external memory is required for calibration and reproduction of deterritorialized forms. It is not that the smoothing of the segments means that the original heterogeneous inputs have disappeared. As we know from wave physics [!] we can become aware both of the control exercised by discursivity and the apparent independent status of matter: both are required if we are to alter and develop forms. Matter, substance and form are not connected entirely logically [actually 'dialectically'] and the earlier elements remain to introduce innovation once the process of developing forms has begun. The instantial striation of flows: dis-position What are the implications for heterogeneity, once we have discussed smoothing at the sensible level? Machinic smoothing is internal, but there can be a process that transcends different orders, a form of expressive coordination of smoothing. The forms of smoothing discussed above depend on the process of segmentation, but we can also proceed with a process of 'differential pinpointing that I will call in-stantiation or the marking of difference' (82). Here, flows themselves can be heterogeneous and show quantifiable differences—for example, they cannot all be reduced to a digital form. We have to remember that flows are striated at the junction of discursive and deterritorializing smoothing, the 'articulation of sensible qualities' on the one hand, and the development of a 'register of abstract qualities' as machinic forms. The first is both discontinuous and finite, the second continuous and 'trans-finite', featuring 'trans-ordination'. There are therefore two kinds of heterogeneities, one found in the sensible, the other at the level of potentials. The first one can be amorphous and linked to proximal references only. The second is protogenetic, opening up heterogeneity, developing possibilities, but only if it mobilizes all four domains [-simpler links can be recuperated or made static?], using all the qualities, all the forms of striation and smoothing in the entire cycle of assemblages. In this way, each entity will involve having added to them the qualities of all the others [rendered as the 'requalification' of the others]. Any particular instant of a flow will requalify both material flows and those internal ones associated with machines: similarly, the overall processes of machinic flows will entail the requalification of instants of flow [everything is connected to everything else is usual]. The point is that the surplus value of possibilities found in instances of flows depends not only on any local redundancies they may possess, but also a number of possible dispositions 'before, after, next to and beyond its actual manifestations' (84), a kind of inherent mutation of consistency which will produce smoothing to permit further flows and also links with machinic phyla seen here as 'fields of possibility'. [This is 'adjacency' -- proximity to another domain with a smoothing neighbourhood between?] . Machinic smoothing: pro-position Machines operate with striated flows, some of which are found in matter, and others as the result of human intervention. However, machines are not determined by the striations, and in this sense the striations represent instance of possibility which can be exploited in machinic smoothing. This internal involve selecting interactions, regrouping them, sometimes disposing them as bipolar options, especially between expression and content [abbreviated hereafter as EC] this does not imply that the only connection between expression and content is a transcendental one: almost any other connection is equally possible. However they do illustrate machinic pro-positions 'composed of sign-particles' (85). Machinic expression confirms consistency on the differences between flows, permitting these differences to be expressed in a language. This releases a new set of possibilities moving away from the original contingency in the flows. This in turn produces 'pragmatic effectiveness' of the machinic pro positions, a 'machinic power' able to requalify flows including 'retroactive smoothing'. This is an example of the general logic of the cycle of assemblages. Intervals [the importance of the interval is also clear in Deleuze on Hume and Bergson] are introduced in contingent sequences and they can be engaged in new constructions, a matter of being processed to the nth degree. In this way discursive domains, potentials and universes of virtuality expand continuously. However, is not just a matter of expansion, but 'rupture and rearrangement' are also required (86). 'Ontological mutations' are triggered. For example, when sensible flows are 'substantialized' and internally referenced [made subject to thought about their internal qualities], 'linearized discursive sequences' arise, and these allude to a principle of immanence. Machinic smoothing does not follow the nature of a flow, but opens a new possibility and permits pragmatic machinics, putting to work...encodings and diverse modes of semiotization'. Universes can also be smoothed and in this case, a whole 'generalised and infinite opening' can appear, escaping even discourse and producing new kinds of self referencing. [Examples represented in a diagram page 87, taking the form for some reason of triangles linking matter substance and form. Bodies without organs are not smoothed because they the are not affected by extrinsic relations, such as external logic, and located between incorporeal multiplicities and existential territories. The particular form of smoothing that divides into expression and content changes points of view on what counts as being and what counts as a fluctuation. So it moves beyond proximal notions only. This makes possible a new kind of heterogeneity away from space and time—this is what he means by 'pro positional or Trans positional'. Instead of local coordinates locating a point of view, we have more general ones prospective ones, new and original problematics, introducing the 'statistically unpredictable'. There are still further developments of machinic time in particular. With the 'EC function' heterogeneity can produce effects, registering heterogeneity actively, placing it in a frame of reference that can be prolonged, enriched and developed as a capital. Changes of state also imply changes of energy. Particular signaletics become charged with energy, producing possible encodings, as an 'afferent to evaluations' (88). These initial and elementary levels of energy operate as a minimal thresholds for even the most complex assemblages of semiotization. Before we can categorize, either with objects or subjective components, we need a point of view, as an interaction. The EC split helps the point of view amplify and multiply. We come to realize that the connection between signifiers and signifieds is arbitrary. But there are still connections not discussed in Saussure: the signifier is not completely independent but might reveal various machinic connections between form and reference as in diagrammatic operations [ same as the iconic sign?]. However, even the most passive forms of expression can become 'active sign particles'. We need to turn to Hjemslev. The figures of expression are identical to the figures of content in form, produced by the same 'deterritorialized machinism' (89), and this explains their overlapping and interchangeability in semiotic terms. We can easily see how machines can produce assemblages of signs in the current era of informatics and AI. Similarly, the connection between flows of energy and signaletic flows is commonly perceived [the example is using a bank card]. However, we need to see that it is the form of these connections that produces energetic potential, rather than the specific contents of the signs or the qualities [eg electronic or not]. Consider the example of the ordinary metal key. Each specific key is an example drawn from a 'continuum of forms', and it has specific effectiveness when connected to a specific lock. We can also identified two 'limit profiles', two diagrams [one for the lock, one for the key? ] outlining the thresholds of error. The passage from incorrect to correct form [which can be seen as 'a signaletic catalysis']has implications for mechanics and dynamics independent of the energy required to make it work. Once the device has been encoded, after signaletic catalysis, the forms of expression can relate back to actual matter and energy—there is a 'EC machinic smoothing' which can in turn released the potentials of the phyla, so a mere territorialized local flow gets requalified and connects with potential. For this to happen, we have to connect the operation of the key and lock with 'deterritorialized machinic propositions', and 'abstract machines'[discussed below]. This is an example of the extensions following from the split between expression and content [I'm not at all sure anything particularly gripping is being described here—we are turning the key, and then generalising away from that specific mechanical operation to consider machines and how they work as a result of their own material qualities and the ones that we add]. For this to happen, there must be a common and 'correct' form between the key, the lock, and the limit profiles. This form effectively changes 'ontological texture' by joining heterogeneous key and lock, within certain variations, and then exploring possibilities, initially by considering the limit profiles [more common sense on stilts]. Smooth machinic flows continually do this, joining concrete and possible heterogeneity, enabling them to connect entities. Another way of saying this is that they connect extensive coordinates with potential, and Endo and relative ordinates. This should be seen as a matter of energy not identity, not an imposition of identity on being, not an exclusive reliance on internal reference, but rather 'deterritorialized constancy and consistency' (90). Rhizomatic striation: trans position So a known set of flows can bring molecular and deterritorialized charges of energy. But they can also be striated in another way, developing the potential of the heterogeneity. This is an assemblage of enunciation that is properly machinic. When we considered the possibilities offered by the key, we were still operating with a restricted paradigm, a set of effective profiles. We could explore this paradigm further as we saw, but the opportunity to do so is a bit unpredictable, aleatory. Abstract machines by contrast coordinate links with universes and manage possibilities, according to the degrees of deterritorialization they offer. We consider this not as arising from a bipolar EC split, but as a for the development of a rhizome. This in turn offers 'multipolar transposition of the possible' to the nth degree as abstract machines interact in Φ . Take the example of the relation between wasp and orchid [oh no], a 'complex sexual machine' that benefits both. Two heterogeneous components are connected and this is 'crystallised deep in the genetic codes' (91), affecting not only individuals but the species. There is an evolutionary dimension here involving reaction with multiple elements from the environment, a 'possibillistic phyla at the most deterritorialized levels'. As with Heidegger, being is not reduced to just what is real, but now includes the possible and the notion of what is necessary. But machinic operators do more—they convert possibilities into necessary effects, a form of 'ontological production'. Reality is a crystallization of this machinic activity, 'essentially a machinic product'. This is a new kind of smoothing, one that involves a break ['caesura'], as incorporeal universes take on substance. This break is not like the extraction of flows discussed above, since a particular instance of a flow becomes detached from all the others and becomes autonomous. Nor is it like the EC relation operating on striated flows which involves a process of making explicit the heterogeneity of flows. This break detaches autonomous flows completely from any extrinsic ordering, and regroups them as E or C. Extensive ordering now becomes intensive [follows from autonomy]. It is no longer a matter of producing different points of view, more the 'operational integration of heterogeneous points of view' (92), an operation which actually removes the idea of an external point of view. Instead of separating layers in flows, or bipolarising them, universes of reference are put in parallel to manifest flows. They interact and overlap in all dimensions, as rhizomes, producing 'knots of effectiveness'. They therefore develop hypercontinuity, preserved even in moments of stasis, by retaining universes of possibilities and compossibility. In this, what was identified as a redundancy or an entity in a flow can be requalified, or repositioned compared to its position in its current stasis. This will challenge notions of identity and identification. The full double nature of sign particles can be utilized—they can refer not just to extrinsic coordinates but to intrinsic ones too; they may appear as located in a system of invariance or constancy, but they can now be seen also as bearers of energy. Intensive characteristics in abstract machines are not just pro positional but can now become trans positional as a well, not only moving through a paradigm but operating at the level of phyla, even crossing phyla. They represent a deep structure for manifest flows. This structure does not just refer to simple external objects, nor does it operate with arborescent logic, or with mathematical axioms. Abstract machines produce them and they have no fixed identity, nor can they be coded in the terms of science [lovely pseudy bit here: 'as hard as the diorite stelae of King Hammurabi']. Abstract machines constantly explore and rework variations and derivations in fields of possibility [which is what he says he means by trans positional]. Does this infer complete anarchy and endless interference? Luckily not, because what is happening is the useful channeling of various instance of flow, governed by the principles of the development of complexity, breaking with territorialization, and developing singularities. This increases the power of their effects, now understood as 'the potentiality for singularization, or, in other words, a reduction of entropy'(93) [sounds awfully like the elan vitale]. As an example, the concepts of mathematical physics were deterritorialized and then applied to nuclear physics, with important results. Machinic deterritorialization is everywhere and can escape laws, hierarchies and metrics. It has no beginning or end. It is 'becoming processualizing itself' (94) [it's God]. It is the development of heterogeneity into difference, a constant development of new realities. It singularizes but also hypercomplexifies [handy!] And we will inevitably have to explain how these two processes are articulated [sigh!]. Abstract machine and concrete machine Concrete machines appear to be clearly defined objects with boundaries, governed by the various functional imperatives in the form of inputs and outputs. However, the boundaries are actually arbitrary-- is a locomotive separate from its track or from the social assemblage that runs it? Social machines are also not tightly bounded—technical teams link with engineers and politicians [sounds a bit like ANT]. There are many 'trees of implication' to join them. We have to think in terms of 'a machinic functionality' traversing specific machines. This in turn depends on flows and signaletic systems. It does not make a difference whether these things are designed by humans, or other living structures in evolutionary systems. Signaletics and coding are 'not peculiar to man'(95). In this sense, we can consider physical, biological and chemical systems as expressive strata. We are in some danger of repetition [!] because we have already seen that divisions into expression and content can occur from the smoothing of flows—and now we are seeing it as a machinic function. The argument so far has been that flows pass their effects into machines and other incorporeals and territories, but we can also see it the other way around [so as not to be pinned down anywhere] We can see machines as the things that smooth flows, even though they are themselves a junction of flows. This makes them ontologically mutant: they combine both territorialized flows and deterritorialized phyla. When they operate diagrammatically, developing language, images, tracings, planes or programs for concrete machines, they are actually doing two things [evaluating them, that is adding values?]. One process looks outside [is 'exo-referenced' as before] and deals with the material process, while the other produces complexity, singularity, and 'existential consistency'. We can see this by considering locks and keys again. We can think of them as having 'contingent, concrete, discrete forms' with a kind of 'self enclosed singularity', and also a possibilistic forms across continuous variation, offering 'processual singularization'. The latter process means that locks and keys possess a 'continuist texture'; belong to incorporeal universes where other forms and profiles exist, possibly as a set, whether 'authorized' or not; permit 'pragmatic calibration of the system' enabling us to see which particular manifestations work and then supporting them. All machines have this double characteristic, offering both simple heterogeneity and 'heterogeneity of heterogeneity'[that is different sorts of heterogeneity—what a pseud!]. The passage from one to the other can be understood as a form of repetition or reproduction. Finally, singularization is never ending [the example says we can always specify things like location more precisely by using more and more accurate measurement]. Reproduction never ends, but we have a boundary problem again. The example above refers to reproduction at the infinitesimal scale, where we can pin it down by using sign particles. There is another kind in Φ , often seen in engineering as a function of the margins of error or intervals between entities and flows, 'mechanics in play' technologists call it apparently. There are certain margins that limit reproducible forms. We see this phylogenetically with evolutionary variation, and we can understand this is as a control on absolute [or 'solipsistic'] heterogeneity. All the action takes place with molecular differences and we see the changes from disposition to pro position and then trans position. The infinite does not fall back into extremes singularization at the infinitesimal level as above, but develops extraneously—'it becomes productive of the possible and the virtual' (97). [ With a further explanation of the differences between disposition, 'instantial striation', pro position, smoothing via a biunivocal relationship between flows; trans positional striation in Φ , a general formula lying behind concrete machines]. Signaletic machines follow this process of 'virtual deterritorialization' starting from singularities. However concrete machines operate with flows and existential territories, and this helps them affect molar fields of content [apparently expression lives in molecular fields]. This is an important addition in operating consistently with existential territories and incorporeal universes, an important 'looping and inversion' found in cycles of assemblages. Back to rhizomatic striations, the 'bearer of abstract machinism' (98). Some correlated categories need to be requalified. We have already seen a change in ontological qualifications as we passed from the manifest flows to more possible its tick smoothed forms in phyla. We can now consider one particular stasis [a diagram on page 99] summarizing the possibilities [I might even reproduce it]. Smoothing offers a form of ontological conversion, but striation leads to 'processes of enrichment of the possible and the virtual'. Smoothing passively records the state of an ontological mutation and capitalises this state, but striations develop it, increases the potential, the processes and the intensities. We need a bit more on how extensive coordinates become intensive ordinates. Result of this process is that the machine ceases to rely on exo coordinates. Whereas enunciation before relied on discourse, temporalization and energization, it now depends instead on 'non discursive self enunciation'. This is a non discursive complexity. It occurs because existential affects,meta models of singularities and processes are transferred: They cannot be modelled themselves. Extensity produces a frame with an inside and an outside and circumscribes entities: this constructs relationships between the object and its reference, like a figure in the ground. The abstract machine does not limit things in this way because it transforms the whole universe of reference, offering instead a continuous system of variations of dispositions and affectations: even if we return to the same location, we may not occupy the same extensively defined site. Extrinsic coordinates were autonomous and reversible, but intensive ordinance are not reversible. The extensive becomes the intensive as a result of a process of 'negotiation' [like a driver negotiates a bend is the example] through concrete machines. This goes through stages—breaking free from manifest flows, and initially limiting the powers of self reference, which becomes a matter of quantity of intensity. The terms here are non oppositional and non discursive, unlike the binaries of structuralism. Requalification takes place according to 'specific rhythmic sequences' (100), for example in the form of a refrain. Between these sequences, there is a partial opening to possibilistic phyla and virtual universes that were not already implied philosophical science fiction here, like those descriptions of a consistent alien world]. The combustion engine has an obvious sequential process, but there's also a less obvious phylogenetic one, mutations 'entailed' by the process of machinic generation. Energy can be translated in the form of energetic discursivity taking on new qualities as it is integrated into machines sequences. Translation is only a problem if we operate with static strata and separate territories. If we postulate 'deterritorialized machinic knots' operating across the whole field there is no need to assume differences of potential to explain transfers of energy: these will only occur in a fully discursively limited and contingent flow. Instead, we should see relations between molar strata in terms of 'the molecular play of charges proper to sign particles' (101). There is no general energetic charge, rather charges associated with particular pragmatic possibilistic effects. These are 'negentropic' . In quantitative terms, energy changes at the molecular level are smaller, but there are still differences between them, 'by relative degrees of deterritorialization'. The more they are deterritorialized, the greater their potential at the molar level—for example, changes in the operation of 'signaletic machines of mathematical physics' reached a certain threshold and were then able to affect the concept of classical physics. We need to think in terms not of a transfer of undifferentiated energy, but rather of charged potential pragmatic effects.This will help us grasp energy in quantitative terms and extrinsic coordinates on the one hand, and in qualitative terms in fields of possibility on the other. Later, we will discuss different existential necessities as a relays of these charges. We remain with the problem of differences of degree of deterritorialization. These seem to be neither logical nor the result of quantification [just argued above]. We need to bear in mind the links between quantitative and qualitative dimensions rather than develop general postulates governing the exchanges between different sorts of energy. We need to consider negentropy in phyla as 'reservoirs of potential effectuation' (102). They will vary according to the 'richness' of constellations of universes of reference, and/or the number of openings provided to machinic monads. This will also cover the effects of phyla on assemblages. Assemblages will be able to establish transversal relations to external strata according to their 'rates of deterritorialization, irreversibility, self consistency, self evaluation, self enunciation'. Then we can call these overall 'rates of inherence', and their opposite, 'rates of dishrnce'found in particular stases. These will imply disjunction of conventional coordinates and energy, and also the autonomy of purely discursive chains of expression. [Jesus! What a nightmare! Ended in a migraine!] Chapter four: reference and consistency The chaotic plane of immanence It is awfully difficult to use static concepts to represent chaos, even fractals, if the creation of chaos is its essence, as it is with the '"primordial soup" of the Plane of immanence' (103). This makes it impossible to grasp and impossible to subject to discursive logic. However, there are processes that produce order [must be as a necessary logical complement to pure chaos], such as 'proto-fractalization' and other forms of composition and 'complexification'. Nevertheless, virtuality is essentially chaotic , inexhaustible, infinitely determinable. There must be material providing for these possibilities: for every aleatory sequence there will be 'virtual attractors of processual complexification'[handy how it all works out - transcendental deduction really] We can call this a hypercomplexity, more than ordinary notions of complexity [found in flows and phyla] and also discourse, which will occur as a self generating process, discursivizing complexity. We can call these filters. In other words as well as combinations of order and disorder, chaos also contains existential operators and ways to manifest them. We can define catastrophe [as in Thom?] as the collapse of these discursive filters. However, these filters are often mutant, with incalculable results. Comparing order with chaos will help us focus upon the 'endo-consistency' between existential territories and universes of reference (104). Within the primordial soup of the plane of immanence, we find two sorts of relations—of reference and of consistency. Reference refers to the passive collectivity of instants, both territorialized and deterritorialized. It helps things hold together, in the absence of any sort of subject 'to hold together at all'. A number of states that can be described as '"there is"' (105) are connected. We cannot decide if they are the same, but there can be a process of repetition or iteration, a process whereby 'something stays in place by returning to it incessantly'. This is a form of constitution of states, and it is an example of how 'existential glue oozing from chaos' begins to underpin conventional spatial order. Luckily, space is 'essentially glischroidic'[I spent a while looking at this term. Its origin is the Greek term for viscosity, and it has a medical uses in the definition of epilepsy], and this does not necessarily produce subsets or internal divisions. We have a notion of existence as coexistence or trans-existence, 'existential transitivity' or transversality. We should not think of this in terms of the usual notions of conventional interaction, and think instead of action and reaction in the particular context of related objects. We need at least to think of a multipolar structure. There is no process whereby something passes between the referring and what is referred. Instead we have 'existential self affirmation', and changes of state involve no transfer of energy [since they are self contained processes]. They also happen at infinite speed, even faster than the speed of light, 'a reference speed'' This in turn makes us think differently about consistency, which is produced by types of iteration, both of infinite speed and decelerated speed. The latter can also be called reterritorialization. We can now use this notion of consistency as a 'fundamental new dimension of assemblages'(106), or at least those which begin in chaos. We can also better explain the differences between the four domains. What happens is that infinite speeds of reference transfer complexity and hypercomplexity between Φ and U. [Somehow], infinite speed becomes the same as very changeable ['labile'] forms of iteration and are thus at zero consistency, while restricted speeds produced reterritorialization linking T and F in a process of 'existential "grasping" (or self-referential agluttination) '. [He is in SF mode, making it all up, and repeating definitions in different forms of words]. So deceleration brings more consistency, and this in turn closes the possibilities of opening up again. [Lower speeds cool things down -- and vice versa] Consistency is more temporal. It expresses the qualities of connective processes, how dense or precarious they are, and also the sorts of transitions they feature. We should not be misled by particular extensive distinctiveness, because this is largely contingent. Things that appear as entities get their arrangements and axiomatics from other abstract machines. Only some have the capacity to break with this connective passivity and regain a more active processual connectivity: this capacity would depend on whether the [passive] consistency can be fractured [all circular and definitional again]. We have to allow for such associations instead of using binary oppositions [and one of Sartre's is reworked page 107]. We will produce 'an open range of existential intensities' instead. We can also break with 'ancestral myths' about the permanence of being or even the conservation of energy. There is no 'brute form of being' independently of assemblages that grasp it, register its effects or change its trajectory. 'Being is the modulation of consistency', a matter of bringing together and dismantling. If it is cohesive and coherent, that is because of the connection between processes of 'intrinsic consistency themselves'(107-8), and nothing external or inherent. [And here we have the same argument but backwards] transversality requires infinite speeds of reference and recursive smoothing in processes which also implies striation. We might consider the example of a catalyst in chemistry. Enzymes can speed up reactions by enormous factors. Their action focuses on one particular aspect of a molecule which it can recognise via a specific filter. The whole process shows a combination of smoothing, acceleration and specificity of effect. We can understand enzymes in terms of the way or of losing ontological consistency, a deterritorialization leading to new possibilities. We can see the fields of the possible in Φ and 'mutations of virtuality' in U, applied to living matter. Filters The primordial soup of the plane of immanence has two kinds of entities: chaotic multiplicities and existential filters. The first compose and decompose complex arrangements at infinite speed. Filters can be seen as 'hooks for chaotic multiplicities'(109). The two 'engender' each other and this provides the combinations of reference and consistency above : Filters provide a relative stability and consistency, and multiplicities provide assemblages with hypercomplexity to re-energise them. Chaos dominates wherever the dimensions do not cross, and new entities arise infinitely when they do. Both crossing and uncrossing are found constantly together, but sometimes one dominates: crossing produces the possible, uncrossing the virtual. There are also different sorts of attractors as filters, including circular or strange ones, enzymes, genetic codes, even financial institutions [weird -- these are just 'natural' too?]. Filters act as interfaces between the virtuality of chaos and actual potentialities. Everything depends on how the dimensions are crossed and uncrossed [tells us nothing really] Reference in particular depends on crossing producing a cycle of assemblages. Consistency striates Planes of reference [which are also apparently immanent], but not binaries or even distinctive oppositions. Instead there are 'pathic categories' [lovely bit of bullshit here: 'the pathic categories that Viktor von Weiszäcker opposes to ontic categories' -- brilliant name. Apparently, he was a physician interested in psychosomatic illness]. The first apparently referred 'to willing, to power and the diverse modalities of duty' [in producing symptoms?] not notions of conventional coordinates and causality. This apparently was an argument that subjectivity is 'the movement of a relation to the ground' (110), but Guattari sees it as the basis of existential appropriation and existential transference between T and U. [Only goes to show that you can't just abandon the subject without some sort of substitute of the subjective process]. All this will eventually make sense as a series of components of assemblages of enunciation. They require both absolutely deterritorialized null consistencies and only relatively deterritorialized consistencies. Apparently this is rather like seeing a quantum of energy as both wave and particle. It is also like certain psychotic symptoms, which feature both 'a corporeal ego territory with a slow consistency' and 'deterritorialized universes associated with this territory' referring to them, and yet with a much more rapid consistency appearing as the 'truth charges that delirium might harbour'. We can operate at both exo and endo levels, consistency of flows and phyla, and 'existential agglutination' [mysterious magic process of the appearance of entities] with T and U. The former give us propositions and the latter dispositions, potentials and instants respectively: either may be grasped clearly while leaving the other one fuzzy. Proto enunciative processes [Absolutely delirious obsessional science fiction here, virtually indecipherable. Largely repeats the main points above anyway] . Filtering is more than just 'passive smoothing of powdery diversity' (111), because an existential surplus value is also released, requiring an assemblage of enunciation to realize it as capital. The four domains will be understood fully as a matrix with more complex operators and filters than just a linear ones we have been discussing [figure 4.4 on page 112 talks about synapses linking Φ and U, pathic operators linking U and T, modules linking T and F and ontic operators linking F and Φ . They also link exo and endo levels of consistency, with Φ as the most exo and T as the most endo.] [Then he goes completely nuts and refers to further diagrams with loads of special terms, which I cannot be bothered to elaborate. Here is a very brief summary] There can be rhizomes of abstract machinic possibility, moving from N possibilities to M characteristics [something more fixed and ordered]. Each/some specific series have an 'enunciative guarantor' produced by reference to elements in T. There are however more deterritorialized lines which have different sorts of enunciative guarantors. Territorialized guarantors in series and flows are modular, which seems to mean firmly connected to existential operators, unlike deterritorialized guarantors of the kind found in phyla. Those things that gain an existence in phyla depend on 'mutational filters' and because they are deterritorialized they appear ubiquitous and absolutely translatable. They take on a contingent quality because they are capable of repetition [not firm connections to existential operators as above]. There is a form of 'modular immanence'. For the whole thing to work, infinite speeds at the virtual level have to 'hold together'(112) with decelerated speeds and make possible certain 'discontinuous intensive striations' at the crossover—the continuous must envelope the discontinuous and the intensive the discursive. Let us try and clarify the proto enunciative processes at work in the very first stages when entities emerge from the primordial soup [some fucking chance!] Exo reference/endo reference In a given multiplicity, it is possible to connect terms discursively, as a form of exo reference, but this will depend on a serial arrangement which can be considered as endo-reference, something intensive and non discursive, a 'proto existential operator'(113) [same old transcendental deduction] Exo consistency/Endo consistency We can have 'cold consistency, or a pure passive territorialized connectivity, or...a hot deterritorialized consistency'. These [all?] display 'existential glue' which links the exo and endo relations above, and gives series a notion of 'existential self reference'. They can also vary: exo consistent domains open up new fields of possibility in phyla following new constellations of universes of reference [not the other way around? Both knowing him?] ; trans consistent domains feature filtering and striations, mixtures, crossings, catalysis and so on; endo consistent domains with decelerated flows. We need synapses to join the excesses in a incorporeal universes of reference to the existential levels. This operates at infinite speed, that is 'with no ontological consistency, although according to a principle of irreversible necessitating (the pathic mode of referencing)' (114) [fuck knows what that means! Because somehow {human?} existence depends on it? The whole notion of the pathic seems to have been borrowed from this original work on psychosomatic symptoms in humans and then generalized into this major philosophical category as some kind of meaningful opposition to the ontic. This seems a tad contingent to put it mildly, and just smuggles the subjective and human back in]. In the process of actualization or territorialization [which seems to be what this is about], exo consistency has to be modified and made chaotic again. We can apparently use this to explain what Freud called the primary process, 'remanences of being' [ a remanence is apparently that magnetic field which is left behind when a magnet is removed] [looks a bit like epiphanies]. Smoothings and striations So far we have considered entities arising from proximities [in time?] Of between the four domains. However, we can use assemblages of enunciation 'in a synchronic fashion' (116). Chapter five. The domain of flows [This is the first of a series of discussions of the processes and elements inside each of the domains and their interconnections. Luckily, the mad elaborations and obsessive classifications seem to be slowing down a bit, and there is some repetition, at least of the basic points, which is all that I am interested in. No doubt the elaborate terminology helps make allusions to sundry fashionable theorists of the time, but for my purposes it just looks like unnecessary bullshit. The basic point is that flows have to be stabilized in order to have an impact in territories, take on an existence {I have not retained the awful terms like 'existentialization'. which my speech recognition software rejects}. There are a number of ways in which this is done, including different degrees types and levels of smoothing, each with a different effect as we shall see. The section ends with a reminder that there is also a link between flows and Φ as well as T, and that the whole cycle has to be invoked in order to fully realize the surplus value of this connection] The smoothing of flows involves a certain degree of making them homogeneous, 'in some cases indexed with intentionality'(117) [so the subject slinks back in]. This can be seen as a sort of grasping and it has the same effect as the modularisation of experience discussed above. We must not forget the relation with Φ however, which will provide new possibilities for having an impact in T. When different smoothings join, we can get striations. This will look like discontinuity from the point of view of the link between F and T, as general determinability is 'slowed down'. However there can also be deterritorialized consistency since there is always an imminent [sic, but this is surely poor proofreading and it should be immanent] alternative, with connections to new universes of reference or with underlying chaos. It might even be possible to say that there is always a double relation here, but it will be important to avoid any notion of essential or universal connections. Instead, the relation between adjacent realities, corporeal and incorporeal, arises here from 'ontological pragmatics' (118) some notion of becoming necessary [which he claims he has discussed before, meaning he has asserted it]. Such pragmatics in turn requires the joint action of 'territorialized proto-enunciation'and 'deterritorialized ontic operators (concrete machines)', mutational filters or abstract machines, and the 'pathic operators of self consistency' (119)[—that is processes of actualization in all four domains, the whole cycle of assemblages. These all seem to be formally required according to the definition of ontological pragmatics in the first place]. Purely at the theoretical level however we still need to specify relations which both exclude and yet co-occur, as with the paradoxes of physics involving waves and particles, tight determination and the aleatory [this is because we are operating at such an ambitious level that we want to include theoretical physics, or is it just that Guattari wants to involve the terms?]. We also have the paradoxical relations between expression and content, semiotic and material, the contingent and the universal, the immanent and the transcendent. Finally we have aesthetic and religious a-signifying material which can still be found in different forms of discourse. The rhizomatic flows of Φ 'hang over' flows both material and semiotic, but also affect them at the molecular level. It follows that there is no centre or absolute, no overall law, but rather 'relative levels of transcendence', itself contingent on the action of different operators. Sensible smoothing or sub position If we consider the originary state of matter, perhaps as a form of brownian motion as above, then reference [a form of connection or consistency defined above] is universal and therefore non specific, referring to everything at absolute speed. We can understand this as having a zero memory of arrangements in the soup of chaos.
The existence of these stages is simultaneous with the systems of reference in each case, assuming 'infinite speeds of determinability'. However, layering can also be slowed down and become 'a series of finite points of view'. Here, the reference of these points of view to other series is 'infinitely deferred'[rather than completely lost] (123), and they can return, however long it might take—this is what constitutes the characteristics of virtuality. Processes of determinability continue but in the phyla and the deterritorialized universes. [I think this is quite an important way to rescue the fundamental determination of actual events, suggesting that it must persist, but not always in the most of this observable and empirical way, by linking through the virtual for example] So we have combinations of coalescence and heterogeneity as serial determinations become finite and limited. This is how flow becomes 'a modular component of enunciation', with combinations of references and consistencies with various levels of continuity. The striation of the in-stantiation of flows Flows take an actual form as a result of having limits imposed by a particular point of view, even if this is an immanent one, not from some inherent undecidable quality. This limitation is actually required if the full set of possibilities in phyla are to be realized, especially their 'non discursive self enunciative correlates'. New possibilities of deterritorialization are implied, including various logics that might produce 'molecular intervals, amplifications, bifurcations, and infinite fractalization' (124). Not only that, the same series can sometimes be found in different modules. This will require further theoretical elaboration [sigh]. The possibilities arise because distinctive territorialized flows are both self consistent, and open to alterity. It is not that these are dialectically opposed, more that they cross, and this opens 'a sort of frantic slalom' to escape either 'petrification' or 'dissolution'[they're alive!]. The agglomeration that is the territorialized flow still possesses a referential series which is potentially infinite. The module [same as agglomeration] uniting specific series and the infinite referential series will be affected by an attractor 'or phase space' between modules. This attractor can unify 'potential series of determinations', infinitely so. We can therefore see a module as a mere 'stopping zone', where determinations are suspended (125). This [new, magic] attractor can attract determinations from non discursive relations between T and U, and this itself implies some new agglomeration coming into existence, a new module or assemblage. Here, we will find a 'territorialized incarnation' of determinations that had been virtual. It can also get determinations from the discursive qualities implied in flows. Here the outcome will be machinic smoothing, those possibilities that were not fully realized in actual modules [maybe]. These new possibilities will then be incorporated into memory, going beyond those already coded as durations of alterity or paradigm sets of serials. Thus the attractor opens up new forms of qualitative possibility which are not easily reduced to quantitative description of flows to [somebody called Ivar Ekeland there is cited here] (126). It is another argument for cartography rather than fixed geometry or topology. In this way, we have established that flows are striated as a result of two sorts of smoothing. One is territorialized and discursive, because sensible qualities are being articulated. The other is deterritorialized and refers to 'abstract qualities inherent in machinic Propositions' [pro-position or Proposition mean something special as we saw above] (127). It follows that we have two types of heterogeneity, a sensible one with specific references, and another which is both processual and proto-genetic. For the last to be realized, we need a cycle going through all four domains. This in turn will involve 'over determination' affecting each entity: again this is more than simple determinism and quantification [it is also described as an opening to or 'ad-vent']. Possibilities can remain permanently, awaiting a particular hypercomplex singularization to take on existence. In other words, the realization of surplus value also depends on 'a-signifying ruptures' of reality, beyond even notions of the aleatory or random. Overall, actual manifestations are only a small part of what exists. Its existence is contingent and localized, and this in turn depends on all sorts of 'dispositions, trans-positions, catastrophes and possible accidents'(127). Chapter six the domain of phyla [Usual problems here with terminology and offhand references to some topological procedures like the 'baker's transformation' and 'homothety'—I have relied on Google for a basic grasp. Overall, the problem is to explain both absolute openness and possibility, and the closed and fixed forms that are also found in reality. We have to explain both homogeneity and heterogeneity, both stability and openness to possibility. We do this by suggesting that both opposing terms are contained in the same particular forms: one argument is going to be about content and expression, for example, which will help us explain how matter becomes 'signaletic' leading to the elaborations in Φ and U. I'm still not sure if it is at all credible or magic—for me, DeLanda's commentary is indispensable. As usual, it is hard to decide if it is bullshit—just when I do, I stumble across an insight. I have tried to rendered these in my own much simpler terms] The problem is really to explain the 'ordinary consistencies and temporalities' and their connections with Φ , where we're going to find 'infinitely slow speeds of separability and infinitely rapid speeds of continuity' (129). We will need consider the whole cycle of assemblages. For the moment, the problem is to move from modular flows and explore their connections with possibilities in the phyla. Modules operate according to rather limited notions of neighbourhood and distribution and this makes them compact, but we find other relations in the domain of Φ which are not compact. In turn we will have to account for determinisms which will not just stick to each other in space and time, operating not just with chronological chains but other sequences, including algorithmic ones. In Φ , we will find connections with events that are very remote in time: there will be a smoothing of time in these terms. As a result, we will be able to consider flow and transversability in a non territorialized way, not just in F and T where it produces layers or concretions. We can think of two sorts of determinability, intrinsic and extrinsic, the first one found in modules, the second involving serials migrating into deterritorialized spaces and eventually into Φ and U. In modules, a system of reference connects entities with the same ontological status, capable of being added or subtracted. This is a form of consecutive determination. However, there will also be 'caesuras'[must be?]. In extrinsic connection, heterogeneous entities are connected. We have to see connections in terms of 'discursive phase spaces, non discursive enunciative basins'(130). An intensive relation and a form of connection which is not passive but 'actively disjunctive', a way of generating complexity. The smoothing of extrinsic determinability Modular connections offer a striation which generates a sensible territory, by aggregating different speeds [the speeds are found in all objects, so that the most objective of objects has a very low speed]. However, expressive smoothing aggregates speeds of a different nature, and this becomes important. Separation becomes a matter of '"negative"determinability': this is controlled by a particular phase space [I don't know if this is a particular phase space already identified elsewhere. It has a name -- φ {also pronounced as 'phi' -- this is the lower case form} , which Wikipedia tells us might be the symbol for the 'golden ratio' -- 'an irrational number with a value of approximately 1.618033988 which expresses the relationship that the sum of two quantities is to the larger quantity as the larger is to the smaller.' Or possibly 'Euler's totient function, an arithmetic function that counts totatives' {where a totative is 'A positive integer that is smaller than or equal to, and coprime to, another given positive integer.' ]. What can happen is that relations between matter, substance and form can change from a modular striation to expressive smoothing [apparently illustrated in a series of incomprehensible diagrams pp. 131,132]. What seems to happen is that matter can now take on the consistency of a formed flow and become 'proto-enunciative' (131) at a particular threshold, and thus take on an expressive function [can become the object of something in a discourse or semiotic sequence, or rather a potential base for such discourses?] . It seems that a formed flow is always [logically? empirically?] associated with unformed matter in a module, and that the stability of this association is easily disturbed by 'the play of a little difference, the intrusion of an infinitesimal deterritorialization' [what others have called 'trembling'] . This results in a certain detachment of this substance from the module and from a merely existential status: it begins to 'work for itself somehow' and initiate a whole new flow, a signaletic one [more or less what I just said]. These will break from modular limits and become deterritorialized. They also break the existing relation between matter and form [explained in terms of a tensor which confines everything to sensible striations --it's all relentlessly non-humanist], and thus appear to be arbitrary or aleatory. A new kind of determinability can then appear. Everything depends on the substance reaching that threshold, converting material into signaletic flow [also known as 'expressive fractalization'(133)]. We can get a kind of determinability, an inner proliferation, and this dominates the formation of relations with other identities. We have a whole 'multiplicity of entitarian choices, optional junctions, generating so many lines of flight of possibility'. The external constraints on determinability break down producing a whole 'infinite process of imploding'. The only connections with the original module are through 'homothety'[a kind of projection of a shape on to a larger area] or a 'baker transformation'[a baffling mathematical concept found in topology which refers to the transformation of a substance by stretching and folding and raises all sorts of gripping mathematical issues about mixture and uniformity: an early model of chaos, apparently. It might be worth investigating more except that it is just being used as a possible image of the implosions and fractal development]. This is not a descent into anarchy, because it is still controlled by various phase spaces and enunciative basins found in Φ and U respectively. [The diagram summarizing this argument on page 133 also notes that sensible flows are best understood as contingent, while signaletic flows are singular] The expressive function: f(exp) We're not talking here about a flight that ends in abolition, because some elements of sensible support or material base are retained [the modular references are reproduced is how he puts it], but also enriched by the proliferation of possibilities in a particular phase space [the controlled possibilities depending upon degrees of freedom?]. This in turn will permit different forms of expressive matter, depending on different forms of creation and mutation. The original coding is undone by these fluctuations. These new forms may include genetic, semiotic, or ethological codes, and more a '"constructivist" forms of expression including 'phonic, scriptural, organic'(134). When an expressive dimension develops, a matter becomes both something for itself, articulated in modules, and something for something else according to various pro-positions. We can distinguish a fractal proliferation, the basis of this expressive function, found in abstract machinic phyla and incorporeal universes of reference, and various 'residual discursive forms' of it, shaped by particular relations between matter and forms, at the sensible level, which are still important for the existential function [apparently to come]. The expressive function itself works with two registers. First it repeats certain aspects of the sensible module that originally supported it, including 'formulae of symmetry'[possibly in the technical sense of symmetry explained by DeLanda—roughly the basic shape of objects depending on how many characteristics they have, so a circle is more symmetrical than a square, although we can turn one into the other by adding dimensions]. Secondly, deformations arise from the new set of references in the phase space of possibility producing new, possibly unimaginable before, 'angles of approach'. After all, fractalization is more than repetition but possesses a 'surplus value of code'. We have a phase space introducing these possibilities 'adjacent to F'. [Example follows about the phase space relative to the figure 225, an integer which can be made up of all sorts of fractions, irrational numbers and others, diagram on 135. {Ken Gale et al should have explored this with the colour 'red'!} We will probably have to think in terms of more than two dimensions, however, and think more in terms of folding representing different aspects of 'contingencing' as in the baker transformation. The possible folds are aleatory, but also confined to a particular structure of necessity. The entity that results is both a mere illustration of an infinite number of possibilities, and also a 'contingent and necessary hook' for the procedures of folding. In another example, a plant on his windowsill is a sensible territory and one of its references is the colour green {sic!}. At the modular level, the green colour is 'encysted' with the specific being-there of the plant, but we can grasp the colour from multiple points of view, and certain of its features will be contingent, depending on the intervention of other variables such as light or temperature: we will end with 'an infinity of points of view', in a particular set or phase space. These points of view will not be random or indifferent, but arising from particular constraints which will relate the variables]. It follows that human knowledge arises from a human form that eventually happened one day, but that human form can also be seen according to quite different modalities, existing on 'other ontological levels'(136). In other words, there are elements of proto-knowledge in human knowledge, found widely dispersed in structural territories or deterritorialized systems. It is the phase space that encloses elements enough to produce a being-there from a state that also includes 'proto-alterity'. We can understand this articulation in terms of an expression-content relation [where content is regulated by the phase space]. In that phase space, 'intrinsic formal determinability' that produces modules and territories are now deterritorialized and combined with extrinsic determinability. This produces the paradoxical combination of a territorial state found as a module, and a consistent state but now subject to extrinsic determinability. Returning to the example, the 'serial trait' represented by the colour green can be both fixed in a module, and circulating in a phase space as a fractal state, or incorporeal discursive form [in Φ and U respectively]. So the single characteristic is also the same as something circulating through virtual universes as well as material flows. These two worlds, 'contingent territorialities' and 'transversal, fractal and deterritorialized entities' might well be grasped on a pure abstract level of reference. This is the plane of consistency which traverses the collection of states of things. However, the cartographic approach suggests another way to grasp the connections, as an 'assemblage of intermediary temporalities', the zones of contingency in FT and virtuality in Φ U. It follows that we will never encounter either in only in a pure state, that there will be different degrees of contingency and deterritorialization in these expressive assemblages, although we may be able to get access indirectly through things such as mystic experience or a 'divinatory hysteria' (137) [nausea in Sartre is another possibility for him], on the 'outskirts of ordinary enunciation'. We should incorporate these as components of the cartography of subjectivity. Summarizing, we now have: modules which focus on finite contingency; 'monads of infinite determinability'[first time we have seen that term] featuring incorporeal smoothing in Φ or U; assemblages of both relative contingency and relative transcendence, and these will help us grasp the full creative role of the cycle of assemblages. Let's return to the notion of expression. It is now a correlate of deterritorialized and fractal smoothing of modular striations. It is produced by machines of expression which 'somehow'(138) force the possible out of encysted modular forms [horrible metaphor]. Smoothing requires decompartmentalization of the various contents produced by the local fields of possibility. It is not a matter of relating a simple 'univocal' register of expression to a similar one of content, because content is never homogenous, and expression never hegemonic. There are degrees of smoothing of content, because expression has heterogeneous components and different kinds of consistency according to how it is 'inscribed' by various 'multiple incorporeal referents'. There is no general theory of expression as a result, despite some parallels, say between baroque music and mathematics. Transversality [of expression] requires deterritorialized content, but there are still 'thresholds, decelerations and detours'. We also need modules and contingencies as well as more open forms. Some thresholds in expression can be seen as junctions producing new components of possibility, because of their connection with various 'adventitious universes of reference' that had been held in reserve. Sometimes, the surface produced by a phase may be compatible with 'the basin of virtuality of a new universe of reference'(139) [I think of this basin as a bit like the hollows in space time surrounding solid bodies that attract passing ones]. This may produce new components of expression which will start up fractal folding again, or open the process to extrinsic determinability. We're not talking about a striation here but rather a continuous engendering. However, this can sometimes also be delayed by a connection with a universe of reference [with an allusion to 'différance']: the combination of engendering and delay produces stochastic paths and rhizomes [not just constant arborescent engendering]. [So rhizomes have an ontological mechanism] Renewed fractal development can also lead to new deterritorialized folding and to another phase space. They can also be new forms of 'referential enunciation'. This will prevent the regular collection of contents into paradigms according to formal processes of composition. Instead, we can have the consistent development of the singular and the irreversible, possibly with a whole new enunciative basin. Turning to semiotics specifically, it is impossible to locate a genesis. There may be local ones coordinated at the molar level and producing a particular kind of extensive and intrinsic determinability. There may be unlocalized ones at the molecular level producing 'intensive - extrinsic determinability' (140) [apparently, these can be more or less instant, lacking a trajectory, so escaping from the need to specify some energy as below]. Conventional coordinates get deterritorialized in order to generate categories of general measurement [in a bit that I particularly do not understand, there is apparently some dissymmetry in such measurements at the quantum level]. Signaletic flows can act as catalyses on material flows as they turn into instants of material processes, which means that there must be a component of energy in expression. There must be some transfer of energy between action and effect if these are to be put into connection to permit communication [and a process of amplification]. In effect, [and rather the other way around], entities with a potential for action and effect must communicate, signal to each other, recognize each other [also required for the mysterious process of 'resonance' in Diff'n'Rep?. There is a 'signaletics within the materiality of flows'(141) and this underpins the potential for action at the molecular level. New possibilities appear to alter the composition of entities, change the qualities of separability, and trigger 'fractal faults'. These possibilities will eventually appear in the molar order as well. There therefore must be [transcendental deduction again] some really universal and basic principle of expression ['expressive apprehension of entities and relations'] in the same phase space or basin of universe of reference. We can think of it as a kind of energy that generates both of being for self and of being outside of self, and it has different levels of energy rather than some pure form [we have to avoid all pure forms here, Guattari says, or we will be supporting the notion of the universal role of the signifier]. There is an abstract ['in the sense of extraction'] energy at work even in those familiar modules that link matter and form [it provides one of the tensions in modules] These are required for any kind of consistency arising from chaos. However, modules operate with a memory of flows ['a memorial taking consistency']. This modular consistency is disrupted by the processes described above, and determinability can now work in a different way, towards separation and towards the affirmation of the possible. These were already at work in other deterritorialized and immaterial areas. Entities now become 'powdery, atmospheric, molecular', but not entirely free to combine or to refer to each other. Instead they are 'assigned to enunciative basins'. These are also relatively deterritorialized and can join with other basins, either through internal mutation or because of the affects of foldings of phyla or other 'singularization factors'. The existential function f(exi)and the diagrammatic function f(diag) Expressive smoothing acts on modular structures in another direction. It operates towards the existential and the pragmatic as a kind of reciprocal to the smoothing directed at the incorporeal. However, pragmatic actualization requires a number of other thresholds to be achieved—Da Vinci thought up a flying machine, but it could not be actualized until scientific and technological development and the accumulation of 'immense Capitals of knowledge' (142) and their accompanying institutions. Expressive discursivity bumps into the limits offered by 'reality...the modular stratification of the everyday world'. However, pragmatics is not just a bolt on to apparently more basic functions of language like denotation and signification. Expression also produces existential mutations [he reminds us that 'enunciation and existence arise from the same apparatuses of Expression and are even similar expressions']. A renewal of expressive functions brings about changes in territorialized modules as well as the opposite deterritorialization of forms. As a results, old forms of sensible territory develop new 'species of existential territory'(143). All this happens in another phase space relating to content [with another Φ attractor] . Partly, this is the result of various machinic propositions which develop a consistency [apparently to be explained later] which can counter actual flows. However, we now realize that Expression actually has different properties of requalification: it is the 'formal endpoint' of the modular function and the way in which it links matter and form; it is the result of an expressive tensor, which will lead to an eventual 'Point of Contingencing'; it is a way of linking matter and form to produce substance in existential terms. We can understand the overall process in a number of ways, including the ways in which hysteria alters discursive chains and their denotations and conventional expressions, as a kind of conversion. The new chains take on corporeal form, as 'an ontological simulation'. The overall result is to produce 'an existential body without organs' which rapidly acquires 'a proxy organicity'. In this way, discursive chains can appear as '"scene shifters"'(144) They also appear as existential refrains, including 'faciality traits, emblems and signatures'. The first one emerges from the modular structures that produced the human face after deterritorializing animal faces. They are expressive because there is a code in faciality [all that stuff about black holes and white screens in ATP?]. However, possible combinations are limited, so that 'excessive laughter' for example looks like a sign of madness. They can also be seen as diagrammatic, and as a signature of a particular individual or group: this is how faces come to represent leadership and communal loyalty [the example is the face of Christ in the middle ages --especially the depiction of him as all-powerful]. Emblems and signatures work in the same way. They denote specific things in modules, but they also have a a function that makes them refer to a whole 'enacted subjectivity' with all sorts of political and ethical implications. When expression acts back on existence, it does not just return to previous striations, because it is no longer a passive form. Now it contains 'semiotic potentials', although these are actually brought from phyla and universes of virtuality. However, we also have to remember that the development of fractals can produce residual forms which remain. Expressive requalification, say in the form of a refrain, lends these residues a new 'virulent hyper active memory' (145) and these become open to new inputs. So when an existential function follows an expressive function which produces a fractal rupture, there can be a kind of 'intermediary reterritorialization'. This is the diagrammatic function. A diagram folds together all the possibilities and potentials resulting from fractalization, and this brings surplus values of possibility. These possibilities actually arise from things brought together by the phase attractor of content. However, it is best understood as a return to a point of contingency [better than stasis -- it is where we can see that arrangements are contingent, arbitrary?] rather than an eruption from it as with expression [in the form of an enunciative catalysis produced by the refrains and synapses, it seems]. It is not an irresistible process, but something rather precarious, confined, inspired by existential refrains [and other pragmatic impulses?] [Marvelous gobbledegook ensues, page 145, the gist of which is that there must be some connection with actual enunciations in T and U if the diagram is to be put to work. The whole cycle of assemblages and their various determinabilities is invoked again]. The diagrammatic function is an example of how expressive functions acquire energy, and begin to circulate sign particles. Existential refrains We have some examples, but now we have to establish that they arise at the junction of two 'existential and diagrammatic functions', that they involve a process, an activity and a way that exceeds 'grasping' as in the existential function above. Again we can get some examples from psychiatry in the form of obsessive rituals or systematized delirium—both attempt to recompose in erratic ways bits of an old existential territory, but they also display a process, 'a line of flight, a "fugue of sense"' charged with desire. Refrains appear in two states: 'atonic' which simply indexes a particular discursive residue of a dead memory, reawakening earlier substances in modules; an excited state which uses the surplus possibilities in diagrams to produce 'original' shapes and genetic processes as a kind of catalysis. The first one appears after an intrinsic cracking in a module which will question the relation between matter and form. In the excited state, extrinsic points of view originating in diagrams are introduced, as kind of positive determinability [a limited one, that also introduces negative determinability, which is the way in which he describes the production of separation]. Modules change as a result as they become open to other enunciative assemblages. Refrains therefore act to open up choice or options [not just reinforce the old patterns as in the first examples in ATP of children or birds reassuring themselves?] but only within the limits set by the degrees of freedom of the system. A number of consequences are possible. First, the status quo persists, which we see with emblems or institutional signatures [the face is less suitable, apparently because it contains more potential creativity]. Second, there can be unstable equilibrium, with the refrain announcing alternative universes of reference at the virtual level. A potential fractalization is indicated, transversality becomes possible. This possible consequence appears with Freudian slips, but also with dada and surrealism and the use of objective chance or playful breaks. In the third possibility, there is a 'straightforward processual mutation' (148), as in the example of Proust where the processes of concrete time eventually produce the general notion of 'lost Time'. Refrains can also appear in the form of concrete machines to be discussed later. As these examples indicate, there can be a positive practice of existential refrains, despite the passivity introduced by 'capitalistic - monotheism'. Some animist societies show this. Psychoanalysis missed this altogether, however, by introducing the constraints of unconscious complexes or structuralist relations with part objects. We could even develop a positive practice against bureaucracy if we deliberately 'artificialized, "baroquized"'the mechanisms (149): pointless repetition as a refrain would obstruct their normal workings, break out from technological or scientific paradigms, and reintroduce ethics and aesthetics. Thus analyzing refrains could produce 'a different subjectivity, other enunciative modalities that dis-pose existence differently'[sounds pretty much like what the Situationsts were doing? I have always liked ironic or surreal bureaucratic procedure]. The striation of phyla This should be understood in terms of regularities, rules and principles that are required to be put 'adjacent' to flows, to provide a texture for them, and a 'relative ontological autonomy' compared to the sensible world and conventional coordinates and framings. This sort of ontological striation in phyla appears as usual where two smoothings join, in this case expressive smoothing and smoothings introduced by incorporeal universes of reference. What makes the relation between phyla and universes difficult is that they have to be compossible rather than clearly distinct from each other. T and F are really distinct, with different kinds of determinability, and different combinations of them to produce different sorts of smoothing and striation. But traits of determinability are mixed between phyla and universes, producing a characteristic kind of smoothing and striations which is 'rigorously synchronic and homothetic' and which will need to be explored. Chapter seven the domain of universes [Usual discussion of smoothing as an operation to link the virtual with the actual, the possible with the real, but this time with some additional considerations because we are discussing enunciation. The most obscure of all so far,partly to use terms that break with conventional linguistics and thus deny its uniqueness?] The phase spaces of possibility have surfaces and these become 'enunciative instances' connected with U. However, these instances are rather peculiar in being both 'distinct and indistinct at the same time' (151). Face spaces are produced as particular states of possibility as a particular contingency, including a break with conventional contingency, sets off a fractal unfolding. However in that phase space at the virtual level, all possible fractal unfoldings are represented, including future ones. As fractal unfolding proceeds to infinity, the phase space becomes identical to the general plane of consistency or chaosmos. The only thing that stops this infinite determinability is the intrusion of a particular decelerated determinability, but not in the same way as with modules which are more definite: here, we have a much more 'floating, diffuse, atmospheric' form. At particular moments, phases may be separate from each other even if they operate simultaneously. Yet each phase contains all the others virtually [because ultimately they can be tracked back to a plane of consistency, I think]. Thus separation produced by deceleration at particular times is also accompanied by a relation of infinite speed, since each phase space is an element in the whole paradigm that leads to the plane of consistency. What we have is 'a vibratory state of the same process' (152). We can see this as a kind of 'continuist - fractal - molecular discursivity'. But there is also a process of non discursive enunciation, appearing as an element in U. This is also both distinct, local and contingent, and delocalised and infinitely dispersed as a kind of atmosphere. The latter quality permits migration of the elements just as phase mutations spread and end in the plane of consistency. This enunciative element is therefore both the result of contingent separability and the representation of possible positions of fractal unfolding, both an actualized enunciation [actually the locus for one] and an infinity of virtual denunciations [I'm not at all sure this is not just a fancy way of saying that linguistic terms, for example can both denote and connote]. It follows [?] that determinability cannot be localized in either Φ or U because there are no distinct aggregates. The problem is that 'enunciative intentionality' sets off continuous fractalization [fractalization now standing for any sort of proliferation and complexity?]. The trouble is that it is always capable of intercalation [I think]: we see this in obsessive conditions. However, together, a sense of virtual enunciation develops, between those phases that produce a limited kind of determinability. In this way, enunciations in U can also be seen to smooth, gather and integrate particular enunciations. This takes the form of sets of 'traits of determinability', and again they can be intrinsic [referring us all the way back to the modular sequence]; extrinsic introduced by content in its phases; infinite based on this notion of continuous determinability. In each case [?] the infinite fractal process takes on the form of a contingent determination, in this case an element of U, and this 'snags, fixes, ballasts it'(154). The chaosmosis of the continuum There are three different kinds of enunciation: modular and contingent; monadic involving absolute determinability [where a monad is what—a single enunciator, a single pov?] ; mixed assemblage, with both infinite and convergent determinability. Modules offer a form of reference based on a sensible territory, something actively finite, something putting into process contingency from a particular point of view. Monadic forms are more scattered since they often repeat: every time they get actualised, an infinite set of virtual determinations is channeled. As soon as something becomes actualised and attempts to relate to some other actual, an enunciative filter interposes itself [and this filter seems to involve infinite possibilities again]. It might be possible to separate particular enunciations, but they tend to come with 'an ontological plenitude' of possible series that prevents any segmentation or closure or striation. Determinability is not confined or limited, but stays in the atmosphere, like an aerosol or suspension. [Still on the monadic] Apparently, this is a characteristic of the plane of consistency considered as a chaosmosis. It features both chaos, with entropy and redundancy, but also another 'paradoxical' characteristic in the form of 'the ensemble of neg-entropic virtualities'[creative possibilities?]. These two poles pair up to produce particular modes of proximity, both spatial and temporal. Spatial orders combine infinite distance with 'infinitesimal circumscription', while temporal orders smooth future and past. There is also a new energy produced by heterogeneous basins. Somehow this adds a certain transversality to stochastic process, in the form of symmetry and 'gestaltist relations' between heterogeneous situations. We can consider these processes together as offering 'new modalities of circumstance'. Although apparently offering absolute determinability, the limits are being constantly overcome. There is 'an eternal repetition' although this also produces 'an inexhaustible surplus value of sense and existence'. The whole notion of otherness collapses, leading to 'a generalised enunciative transfer,a hegemonic transitivity and transversality' (156) [once we start describing and representing objects, we find that this is limitless, a bit like schizoanalytic cartography itself?]. We can experience something like this at those moments when we realize that consciousness constructs the entire outside world and all the selves and others in it. This moment of megalomania becomes entirely internal and circular, because nothing independent exists against which to recognize itself [an essential externality for subjectivity as argued above]. This might also hinted at the capitalist obsession to find a generalized equivalence for everything. [Turning to the third kind, the mixed assemblage]. We find these everywhere in the cycle of assemblages. It is a general problem to explain how creative capacities of assemblages becomes stabilized or hooked by contingency, links established between incorporeal universes and sensible modules. Another problem is how to explain particular forms of temporality between the two abstract possibilities with things like refrains or 'existential auto consistency'. The answer will lead us [as in transcendental deduction] to an underlying process that produces both the continuous and the discontinuous, found also in the chaosmos. [It looks like he is trying to preserve the notion of a universal determinability here, page 157, as a form of enunciation overcoming all specific forms of contingent determinability] the smoothing of virtual determinability appears in the form of diagrams or singularities and should not be seen in platonic terms completely remote from sensible 'hooks'. Symmetries Different types appear in the three domains considered so far. In F we find 'reversible, extensional symmetries'; in Φ 'relatively reversible fractal symmetries'; and in U 'irreversible internal symmetries'. In F the connection between different entities implies the existence of something held in common, and this is extensional symmetry. Each element can generates its own relation with other elements [at right angles so to speak]. These relations are reversible, with no origin and no particular direction. This is different from the processes of fractal proliferation because each stage is different from the one that precedes it, it is '"dated"' by the process (158). Fractal symmetry in Φ is not a matter of conventional space and time, but rather topological deformation and deterritorialization. Molar similarities are based on elements at the molecular level. Again this shows us something interesting and paradoxical [!], a separation that is not contingent, 'a virtual and unlocalizable separability'. [Wonderful abstract possibility generated by his endless tables and classifications?] [I can only grasp the simplest form of the next point, that each 'signaletic element finds itself doubled by a multitude of "freeze frames"'. Apparently the wider point is that unlike modular determination, the very 'texture of determinability' changes, and content becomes important instead of some formal external notion of symmetry. This permits machinic propositions to bring something additional to expression in the form of 'activated formulae, virulent abstract machinisms'. These in turn develop 'transverse, evolving, creative bridges between different assemblages'. This [somehow] is associated with the third kind of symmetry [and apparently he has borrowed the turn from some contemporary physics] [Overall, pretty incomprehensible, I fear. The basics appear to be that symmetry can be creative if it is not just reversible and extensional, but that these forms of creative symmetry obviously have to be described in an unusually technical way, which seems to involve our old favourite combination of apparently paradoxical elements, in this case separation and continuity]. The striations of virtual universes Incorporeal universes repeat but also produce irreversible singularities. They affirm themselves; they are neither finite nor discursive. We can call them universes of reference or universes of enunciation. We're going to borrow Spinoza's weasel and say 'that it is in their essence to exist' (159). They feature both infinitely speedy and infinitely decelerated types of change. Their singularizations show 'internal necessitation'and this underpins the existential weight of assemblages. Assemblages in turn energize virtual universes, as the possible becomes necessary. [More difficult stuff, apparently based on Spinoza]. Assemblages 'authorise' the existence of each other in the form of extrinsic determinability. Intrinsic determinability is thus subsidiary, except for 'a pure and empty consistency of existential grasping'. Extrinsic coordinates include real ones in F, and possibilistic or legal ones in Φ. However, extrinsic forms have an internal base of their own, a striation which must be adequate. What incorporeal universes do is to energetically requalify assemblages rather than energize them directly. This process can be seen as either procession, working from points of contingency in the domain of flows through to U, then T and back to F, or recession, beginning in U and linking Φ, F and T. Procession is diachronic, but recessive requalification is synchronic or structural. Procession involves reference, but recession enunciation, a form of 'existential taking on of consistency' (160). However there is something specific to striations in U, an 'ontological sliding' so that references to objects become subjected to aesthetic consistency. It is not just a matter of abstracting universals. Universes are made consistent or striated as a result of a particular constellation within them, one which is both singular and singularising. This particular constellation crystallizes in U. We can describe this process in the terms of Art or in the 'practices of certain cults'. We must also recognize the paradox that energetic requalification involves the return of aesthetic singularities. It is really the result of experimentation, which can itself be seen as 'irreducibly singular incarnation' of certain smoothed energies. We can now see experimentation as an aesthetic performance, so actual existential acts have the same structure whether scientific or artistic. Despite Habermas's efforts [sic], there are no obvious rules, but rather 'a legality without law', rather like Kant's notion of the beautiful [and we know what Bourdieu said about that—the unconscious judgments of the elite based on their need to distance themselves from the masses]. We can also bring in Kuhn [!] on paradigms, if we see these as akin to aesthetic schools, since they also implies singular constellations of universes of reference. Synaptic dis-position We have seen this process before when talking about striations of flows. However, there are differences in the 'synaptic interval'(161). This time there is a break that is 'rich in content', but this content is now a- signifying, that is detached from its [linguistic] paradigms and syntagms. It appears as a residue, but it manages to offer a new kind of expression. It will offer a 'double articulation', linking Φ and T. It will permit 'hyper complexification'of self reference. It will offer a synapses seen, or 'seems shifter', aimed not at finding some inner lost meaning, but rather crystallising a constellation that singular eyes is. [We've already discussed aesthetics and scientific paradigms, but] now we can include other examples of discursivity in dreams or Freudian slips, best seen as a genuine mutations of assemblages of enunciation rather than as symptoms. We can also examined dada and surrealism and the ways in which they developed the creative potential of synapses like this, 'dice throws', bending understandings and sense. Other forms of psychiatry tried to understand these examples, but they all operated with 'the promotion of an abstract subject'(162), some 'structurally homogenous unconscious' in an unchallenged symbolic order, 'constantly recentred...on individuated lived experience' (163). Instead, concrete productions of subjectivity are 'essentially heterogeneous, a multicentred processes, tributary to assemblages of enunciation meshing with disparate, aleatory and/or historical realities', escaping from structure and culture. The issue is how to explain signified content not as autonomous but as the basis for certain conversions. One conversion might be into the refrain, and the issue is whether there is an incorporeal equivalent. Partial contents can open up new virtual fields. Certain machinic propositions, requalified through the cycle of assemblages, can 'represent the new, non discursive and virtual instances of enunciation', without reverting to conventional signification. Such machinic propositions do not just represent the fractal and deterritorialized virtual at the moment of breaks with contingency, but energize them, act as sign particles [permit new creative signification?]. So synapses in the form of machinic propositions prevent the 'implosion' of assemblages of enunciation [that is, their capture by ultimate determinations?] on the plane of consistency. They can be seen as a new abstract machinic process, operating between Φ and U, and displaying four dimensions: 'singularization, heterogenesis, necessitation and irreversiblization' (163). [These are all now included as further examples of processes linking the four domains in a diagram on 165]. Singularization is the deterritorialized counterpart of the process of contingency in sensible modules [so it is a floating kind of contingency?] It is attracted to points of the breakdown of contingency, but offers a surplus value of possibility, one which will produce a diagrammatic function for example. Rather than extending determinability to infinity in a fractal process, it operates instead with 'a sort of ontological stamp, a decreeing of existential necessitation'. This in turn links U and T. When a virtual enunciation is singularized, in the form of a particular constellation of the universe, possibilities in Φ become necessary and regular. The turning of possibility into necessity energises an assemblage, and shows a process whereby signaletic flows become flows of sign particles. Once synapses singularizes, assemblage processes become irreversible, internally disymmetric. This takes the form of dating or situating even the most deterritorialized enunciation. We see this in the form of dating particular constellations of universes by giving them signatures, proper names, like Marxism. Heterogenesis arises from the very interior of a constellation of universes, in the form of 'existential autonomization', being for itself, or requalification coming from T. Heterogeneity provides an 'enunciative matrix'[which can include the combinations of the four processes—on the diagram, they occupy reciprocal angles on the diagonals between the four domains]. It is not so much a comparison between distinct entities, more the persistence of a disparity or disymmetry, which never developed into a proper alterity. There are no structures inside incorporeal universities to centre them or attach them to anything outside: heterogeneity and alterity are better understood as the result of 'ontological self affirmation' arising in existential territories. Overall, we needed to discuss these stages in the cycle of assemblages. We will still need more details on the particular modes of requalification. This will help us understand the processes of living beings, including individuation and speciation and the effects of 'birth, death, alterity, possibly sex and personal consciousness'(166). We also needed to show how new possibilities can arise from breaks in the conventional processes or 'relays of contingency, singularity and finitude'. [NB we have not discussed in more detail T -- Guattari thinks that has been discussed adequately in his earlier accounts of Integrated World Capitalism? Existential implications are also pursued in the next chapter] Chapter eight Enunciative recursion [NB recursion = the repetition of a process to clarify a problem] [The actualizing/territorializing effects of the cycle of assemblages, although doubtless there will also be deterritorialization as well.] Contingency, and its development into a point of contingencing [same as a moment of relative actualization or territorialization?] is produced by crossing operations in all 4 domains [and we have described this in terms of the four functions like f(exp) etc]. In Φ fractal folds in expression initiates the diagrammatic function. In U synapses relay constellations of universes in a contingent manner,and this can produce the refrain. In T, the pathic function [now aka the pathematic function -- in current usage meaning relating to emotion or suffering, but here a process producing the pathic?] 'releases' self-reference. In F, 'its own domain', cycling through the other domains produces 'an energized sign particle' leading to 'concrete existential machines as in f(exi) [the production of substance as above] (167). Energetic requalifications As general expression changes to a diagrammatic form,it can join with material flows and change their state in a process like energetic conversion [a parking permit sets off a parking barrier is the example]. It shows how a semiotic with no energy itself, sets off an eneregtic state, overcoming the problem of explaining changes of state with no actual transfer of energy [in ch.2].[If I get this right] it is a matter of seeing [what normal people would consider as latent energy] energy as simultaneously hyperaccelerated and hyperdecelerated rather than of working with different [eg latent and active, non-transferable and transferable] forms.[There is only one energy]. All changes of state,all modifications are therefore energetic,including Zen changes in consciousness. 'It is therefore difficult to object to' (169) the idea that signaletic matters are also energetically charged, in particular in developing memories and recordings which will allow a passage to the act. [weak extension of the argument] Perhaps energy lies in expression and not form, however? If we agreed, we would still be left with the issue of the gap between observable and pragmatic states and how these get bridged. Far better to just assert that form is also energy, although a different kind. We will be able to explain how assemblages of semioticization can actually amplify in their effects. We have to accept that there are certain thresholds of energy which will ultimately produce 'machinic - pragmatic effects'. [All this follows by implication rather than demonstration, of course]. Prior to any notion of representation of the objective by the subjective, we have to admit that the point of view is an act and it prefigures 'some energized interaction'. This includes even the most deterritorialized and virtual [non-subjective] acts of enunciation in U, which produce synapses in constellations: here we have a bridge between energy and information [that is information energizes]. The same goes with possibilities in Φ, which are circumscribed by a selection [by a synapse] of traits of determinability, which emerge from the general plane of consistency. These possibilities also remain fuzzy or vague because they can exhibit both infinite or infinitesimal speed according to the components of the phylum being selected. We have therefore established a notion of possibility, especially in constellations of U, which are also necessary, without even being actualized. We are suggesting that there is a 'an infinitesimal, unlocalized double, non separable energy' (170) [why not call it Spirit and be done with it?], that is not exclusive to particular operations. The four recursive causalities We know there is a real chaos, but do we really need a virtual chaosmosis as well? [in other word, why not just stick with theoretical physics?] But enunciative recursion implies such a thing [and maybe so does our whole cartographic stance]. We can assert that real chaos is only an 'aleatory projection' of completely differentiated and unstructured chaosmotic processes [and infinite regress threatens—what is chaosmosis a projection of?]. Instead of a discursive theory to explain it, we will need a notion of aggregates or populations of entities, and to understand those, we'll have to abandon the usual rational principles of identity contradiction and the rest. These aggregates will be produced by fractal processuality, which implies a simultaneous reality and virtuality. Even simultaneous doesn't really grasp it because we are talking about a contingent process that decentres enunciations and crosses 'thresholds of veracity'. One implication is that we have to revise our notion of causality as involving a well defined combination of causes lying behind any particular state of things. We are now working with heterogeneous causality in non discursive space. It might not be 'rash' [weak] to see the four operations of requalification between the four domains as forms of causality. Thus we can think of diagrammatic function as representing formal cause, not least because it is irreversible. Final causes can be seen as the emergence of refrains following the recession of singularities in synapses originating in constellations of U. Efficient causes can be seen as the effects of energies in the form of pathic 'recursion of heterogenesis' produced by existential territories with effects in T. Material or 'concrete machinic causes' (171) refer to the affects of sign particles and the way they necessitate. Let's explore issues of the speed of determinability that are implied [oh yes, let's]. With flows, both sensible and signaletic, discursive formations bundled in modules, combine infinite speed within phase spaces, and infinite deceleration [separation] between them, in a striation of flows appearing in any instant of flow. However, this is a unique ontological case. Let's follow some implications for the plane of immanence, 'or the primordial soup of redundancies' (172). We will find both discursive chaos operating at an infinite speed of determinability, and a non discursive chaosmosis with no extrinsic reference, with no part part or part whole relations, featuring some 'hyper ordering' at an infinitely decelerated speed of determinability, or 'immutability'. This arises because absolute determinability is never reached—'because even infinite time would not suffice for it'. It thus features a permanent virtual tension within itself and it is that that joins it to real chaos [the two are never finally joined, because real chaos can never be fully formed, and is likely to melt again 'at the first instant']. There is always a 'deterritorializing crack' in the real that projects into the virtual, and no permanently uninterrupted path or duration for an entity. It is this paradox that we can find in constellations of universes. Before we get there, we need to tidy up what can happen to entities in Φ and T. These are linked symmetrically. [We seem to want to construe these us forces acting upon the basic modular arrangement]. One force offers discontinuous fractalization working at infinite speed, and this is found in Φ. In T we find another fractalization, this time a 'continuist' one, and decelerated speed eventually producing pathic operators. The discontinuity arises from combinations of flows carrying both reference and traits of determinability. This discontinuity 'integrates' positive determinability [remembering that, according to Wikipedia anyway, 'an integral assigns numbers to functions in a way that can describe displacement, area, volume, and other concepts that arise by combining infinitesimal data'...'a limiting procedure that approximates the area of a curvilinear region by breaking the region into thin vertical slabs'. Guattari seems to use it as a function describing and regulating or circumscribing the operation of more specific functions and operations?]. What modules do is to 'freeze' and select positive traits. In Φ, the negativity [infinite deceleration] is preserved in a form of consistency that is deterritorialized but which circumscribes much more diffuse and powdery, unlocalizable traits. This is a 'fractal molecular consistency' (173) and is this that integrates negative determinability. There are also 'intermediate temporalizations'... Intermediate temporalities These connect 'behaviours of pure discursivity' based on machinic propositions, and non discursive blocks found as existential territories [he also calls them durations]. For the former, time is artificial, abstract or digital. The latter display 'a unary Parmenidian time' [I think of Parmenides as an early phenomenologist because Husserl mentions him. I think of him as offering an account of duration as subjective time. A fuller account is available on the indispensable Wikipedia]. 'Temporalities of subjectification' connect the two, producing a metamodel of an objective world, but also particular synaptic moments that produce an notion of existing in the present, somewhere on the horizon of constellations of universes. How does this form of temporality appear in singularized enunciations? At least it is better than the unidimensional time, the 'informational linearity'of capitalism, based on general equivalence between different sorts of discursivity and determination of existential territories. We find this temporality in mythic or aesthetic, even schizophrenic meta models, which offer montages of different components of time together with a basis of modules and refrains—together they produce a particular assemblage of enunciation. However, not all these components need be included, as long as we resist naive models [some in phenomenology]: time is composite and incessantly recomposed. We can't predict that particular components will always appear in particular contexts, say economic ones. Instead, particular conjunctions of components produce particular compositions, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes durable, sometimes stable or unstable, appearing in activities as diverse as 'birth, death, desire, madness' (175). This is why enunciation is central to being and time [and now we can re-read Parmenidies -- and Heidegger -- 175] and discover Aion. Discursive temporalities intersect with existential durations, but not mechanically [in an example, he drives his car 'on autopilot' -- but 'particular [emergent] connections with machinic durations and temporalizations' wakes him up.] We find this in many disruptive experiences. They reveal a combination of two processes -- 'fractal-processual-discursive and fractal-recessual-nondiscursive', both found in the 'chaotic soup of the Plane of Consistency' (176). We can also experince examples where a field of virtuality appears 'in a hegemonic fashion' to disrupt a normal state of affairs -- described variously as 'a moment of fecund delirium... an instant of seeing... a minute of eternity... a gestalt switch' (177). A field of possibility becomes available, a new line of discursivity from the originally non-discursive. It is different in modules [which seen to have some more direct dependence on Aion, in that a definite interconnection or interaction of the kind above does not appear]. The apparent autonomy of conventional time arises after a particular constellation of universes finds its simplest expression, is reduced to one dimension. This is best seen in capitalistic constellations, although these may have developed at the very dawn of human history. Enunciative fractalization The intermediate temporalities are fractal. Flows connect to phyla through 'fractal sweeping/scanning'[allegedly discussed above], and this also produced a relation between molar and molecular [with a reference back to the baker transformation]. There are other fractal procedures linking universes in Aion and the registers of enunciations. Fractalization in normal time [Chronos] arises from attractors that articulate lines of possibility in flows and produce 'pseudo territories or deterritorialized phyla'. Fractalization in Aion offers no such circumscription, and avoids the effects of normal time. Once it crosses a particular threshold, it produces 'a -signifying synapses' which are irreversible, which singularize and make heterogeneous, and also necessitate. This breaks with extrinsic coordinates producing 'pure intensive iteration' with no 'discursive memory'(178). Indeed they can produce '"active forgetting"',[somehow linked to the eternal return—pass]. It therefore acts as 'pure Parmenidian immanence', with no inside or outside—it is 'a pure body without organs, a pure self referential affirmation'. Existential synapses also exist to cross chronic and aionic temporalities, producing a link between molar discursive sets and molecular non discursive intensity [intensity here meaning something intrinsic rather than something emotionally intense? Not sure though, because affect gets a big talk up below]. Discursivity in normal time articulates sets and elements through: envelopment, where one subset is preeminent; through differential solidarity of given sets with other sets not covered in the same reference; between elements of a subset where there may be both rupture and passage according to the particular combinations of reference and heterogeneity; transcendental referents, referred to some more general system of coordinates. It is often the case that capitalistic coordinates involving equivalency dominate, but we might also still find mythical and ideological coordinates as well. Discursivity in Aion involves reference to an external context which might have enunciative instances involved in it. Here we have to operate with 'non proximal fractalization', a process of 'frozen existential grasping of heterogeneous enunciative nuclei'(179), fragments, partial enunciations, made heterogeneous by intensive qualities. These offer 'molecular nonseparability' [ie found together in some of the social aggregates?] which apparently appear at the very heart of the enunciative genesis of [conventional] form and content. Intensive coordinates are not limited by time, space or energy and thus produce a kind of 'megalomania' in enunciating monads. Nor is there a limit to their molecular components, which become infinitesimal, a matter of their machinic essence. In conventional time, abstract machines exist at the same level as the operators, but not in Aionic time—there is no underlying form. Instead, we find certain existential qualities which are organizing themselves. Only this assumption will stop infinite fractal regression. [These qualities seen particularly mysterious as being absolutely distinct and absolutely indistinct at the same time—the latter arising because we can use the same form of knowing to get to them, including 'transferential apprehension, or knowing by affect' (180). Thus affect becomes hegemonic [sic]. There is an endless connection otherwise between these elements. Fractal processes produce hyper complexity. We experience this in terms of our 'pragmatic sensori-motor and cognitive memories'. This is unlike the processes with machinic phyla, however, chaos arises instead from a definite 'systemic deterritorialization', developed by certain external catalytic operators. [The bizarre example that follows turns on the photography of Tahara, also appearing in a separate entry.] Certain features of photographs, including their puncta [as in Barthes?] or other disturbing effects can lead to the 'fractal deterritorialization of a portrait'. This depends on a more general process of the deterritorialization of faciality which breaks out from conventional signification. As a result, we can see faciality as a kind of basic model of the apprehension of meaning, producing both sense and a 'non discursive dimension of human comprehensibility'. Different universes of reference are transversally related 'in a single moment of impact'. 'The production of subjectivity is nothing other than this fractal machinic of faciality inexorably caught up in a becoming-abstract'. There is no [other] ground or limit to the implosion involved, and this is how we can grasp 'the totality of the world'. (181). Existing concepts are only intermediaries, something produced by a machine. There are no basic building blocks. For example, the basic organs of biology have turned into the basic particles of physics. Particular logics of discursivity become more abstract [head toward 'abstract machines of enunciation']. We can see that there is a 'an irreducible becoming' traversing every established order. We should see scientific analysis as the product of particular kinds of algorithmic operations. Schizoanalytic analysis therefore rejects objectivist descriptions in favour of grasping the impact of enunciative processes, especially their impact on the normal notions of signification and sense organized according to conventional paradigms and syntagms. This is why we have focused on the four domains and the ways in which the chaosmos produces different kinds of enunciative breakthrough in each [a diagram on 181 summarises the different processes in the different domains and how they converge. An additional diagram on 182 shows how enunciation produces energy which then produces praxis and process. This is 'enunciative hyper complexity']. Necessitation Enunciation offers 'the choice for finitude', an attachment'with a view to constituting a world' [echoes of the assumed desire of the universe to actualize itself, a kind of elan vital?]. We have seen how this works in normal time in terms of modular striations grasping flows. Aionic flows are different again, no longer stabilised by phase spaces which guarantee their internal consistency. Enunciation here has no other purpose but to offer dis-position, resting on nothing. It can exist as 'pure existential self affirmation' which somehow grasps the elements in the other domains. But it can also exist in and of itself, and this is necessitation. Modules are not linked causally or directly, but they affirm each other in a form of 'intensive becoming'. In turn, this will generate enunciation through 'generalised transference'. [What about that bit of necessity that implies death and endings?]. There can also exist 'sensible ex-modules', as monads, connected through fractal processes, with no substantial inner or outer contexts. These offer empty repetition. Sometimes this can become a refrain, still a-signifying. They are also open to molecularization [with a reference to somebody called Edgar Morin] (183). However, these still retain a potential for registering determinations from the whole to which they once belonged, and this is the basis for the particular texture of assemblages. We can see this as a particular kind of qualitative existence. There is a tendency to constrain any links with deterritorialized phyla, however, because these modules do not perform signification but just preserve their existence. This is a form of underlying contingency found in necessitation, in this context, a necessary finitude experienced by every machine. Let's take some helpful examples [!]. There is a discrepancy between the actual form of a house, with its insides and outsides, and the existential assemblage which notes it. Human beings can experience a notion of the outside through affect, for example [he talks about visual adjustments, and different sorts of air coming into his lungs]. [Another example concerns an astronomer who agreed to verify a particular calculation—unless you know the case of Galle, this is not very helpful]. There is also 'pubescent hormonal speech', associated with biological sexual maturity, which effects refrains. There is the machinic aspect of learning to drive a car or play football. There are also poets who can open up 'virtualities without shores'. [So these are all examples of determinisms working in both directions?]. Heterogenesis T and U are linked by pathic operators that produce heterogeneity. This helps an identity to be allocated to a particular energy site as a part of 'ontological grasping'. However, the major part of this operation involves 'the intensive affirmation of a for-itself' (184). Heterogeneous is is different [! ] and operates through a fractal process, the transference of knowledge, the combination of a nucleus of self reference and a proto energetic basin. The process also produces apparent existentially singular positions. Intensive differentiation exists in all self ordered systems. Reference is internal but also related to other systems. It is not a matter of the composition of elements, but rather a disposition so that each point becomes a centre of reference for the whole: the human equivalent is the stage or video, capturing elements in the scene. The scene is not an interaction of elements, but rather an agglomeration. Nor a matter of grasping the scene from the outside by an enunciative assemblage, because that assemblage itself is constituted by the act of looking at something. The gaze does not just necessarily control the scene, because it also apprehends things which are extra territorial, 'elements of dehiscence' [I have looked this up before. It means the spilling out of something through a split or cut]. In technical terms we can see that the scene is heterogeneous, with both modular serial and finite relations between F and T, and fractal, non proximal and infinite relations between T and U. Self existential processes are therefore both territorializing and deterritorializing. It is not just a matter of forming up in extrinsic coordinates, but also contributing to 'processual ordinates'. The two forms are transposable, not just limited to structures, but also linking to abstract machines. The very dimensions of time and substance are fractalized. Sensible and abstract qualities can relate transversaly. [The example is the pathic operators of the Proustian search, the ways in which times are linked by connections with quite heterogeneous substances like flavours, memories, little phrases of music and so on. Heterogeneity here indicates an underlying 'labour of heterogenesis' in which each dimension is explored, and aleatory factors are discovered to be immanent to assemblages. This particular assemblage appears as as a result of 'existential glue' containing all sorts of bifurcations and degrees of freedom, with fractal folding operating to connect heterogeneous qualities and their implications]. Heterogenesis therefore can 'date' the processes involved in an assemblage of enunciation, both de- and reterritorialization. It produces the crystal of an event, limiting transversal links. For Proust, the search is dated by events like stepping on the wobbly paving stone, and this then produces a whole series of expressive components and their music-like links, a form of qualitative hyper fractalization. This in turn appears in opposition to the topographical fractalization, and the result is 'new artificial procedures of subjectification' [that is as a result of Proust's deliberate 'machinic' technique]. A particular expression can develop links with the whole world. This looks like the result of 'an enunciating subjectivity' [not necessarily located in a person], and determinability seems to be decelerated and take the form of intermediate temporality [above] [note that as I suspected fractal processes and determinability, 'amount to the same thing'(185). Synapses are responsible for these transitions [implying some rather contingent connection between different sorts of determinability]. The switch between different sorts of determinability sets the tempo [for Proust? I think we're generalising here to all human life]. The refrains are components of singularization [interesting additional point] and they also control by stopping and starting of different forms of determination [in the example, we can consider life as a physical and chemical system which displays both acceleration and deceleration]. This heterogenesis is not found in 'the "normal" modalities of knowledge' (186). We get this knowledge instead through 'non discursive affects'. We can see this more clearly with psychotic conditions and their characteristic coordinates, and with 'aesthetic illumination'. We have to cross a threshold of enunciation, [as a kind of leap]. In practice, 'knowledge of the other and knowledge through the other'are continuous, music both informs the listener and forms up their competence as the listener. This shows that 'affect should stop being thought of as a raw energetic matter', but is complex and filled with potential—love does not stop with mere discharge of the libido but opens to unknown worlds. We should think of a generalised transference linking not just individuals, but all animal and cosmic becomings, which also have 'pathic indices'. The gaze is not accidental, nor driven by the superego, but is 'essentially faciality, as the substance of all humanly significant sense'. Every affect should be understood as only partly human, but also connected to women, animal and facialized becoming, at the crossroads of sense. Properly elucidating heterogeneity means we can start to consider alterities 'that haunt the affective horizons of the living world and its cosmic beginnings'. Considering heterogeneity revitalises affect and its autonomous power. It is not like topographical fractals which do not have the power to define a world without limits. Enunciative fractalization develops the 'infinite operative power of subjectification' (187). It is capable of rewriting everything. It is the source of 'the aleatory, bifurcation, freedom' found in enunciative assemblages We have considered enunciation as a form of proto-energy in each of the four domains rather than using one of the classic dualisms like sensibility and understanding. Refrains, both synaptic and modular, make machinic propositions effective and incarnate them. The possibility of new arrangements must imply some kind of molecular proto-energy, addressed most specifically here in terms of semiotic energy. [There is an example of dice throwing showing that the effects even of simple repetition of the result increases a certain 'probabilitarian tension', the presence of a 'deterritorialized virtual energy' which is easy to detect. A singular result might be produced with all sorts of unforeseen potentials, and explaining that result in turn involves linking with a constellation of universes of reference, and discussions of things like transgression or cheating. The sequence of dice throws acquires power in a complex assemblage]. Such energetic assemblages have been described as drives, those complexes revealed by slips of the tongue or by dream works, narrative tension and so on. Singularization and irreversibilization Determinability can be defined as information before it is assigned to a referent. It can remain 'scattered and powdery' in incorporeal universes, but it also has a form of organization, 'a virtual dis-position'(188). This is provided through the synapses that focus it in particular constellations. In sensible modules it can be stratified and disposition becomes territorialization, but one that still displays a link between an instant and an infinite distance [represented here using the same symbol for infinite acceleration]. This provides the constant potential for metamorphosis in stratified entities [and the example is the famous connection between wasp and orchid produced by a rhizome of machinic propositions]. Nevertheless, any kind of determinability found in a constellation lacks the freedom of operation in the chaosmos. It experiences constraint such as irreversible ordering, or the affects of well known constants including pi. There can still be transference from one basin of energy to another, changes of register like those between physics and chemistry, and this has raised problems in physics about the conversion or conservation of energy. His problem in particular is how to explain how virtual proto-energy produces actual forms of determination, and how fractal deconstruction can be slowed in diagrams only to take on new forms of energy as a form of surplus value. Perhaps we need to argue that reality is always 'predisposed to all mutations, even the catastrophic'. If we have a rupture in reversibility between expressive and diagrammatic functions, that is because it worlks as a synapse rather than a simple connection between the decent of expression and an ascent of the diagram. The synapse offers an 'enunciative surplus value'(189), but at the price of energetic entropy and irreversibility. Synapses can therefore be seen as 'deterritorialized releases of enunciation', acting as an integral of sensible refrains. Psychoanalysis has attempted to explain this in terms of the phantasm or the archetype, but this was not abstract enough. Matter itself features hyper complexity. We should see at work machinic propositions which break away from the constraints of signification and diagrammatic functioning so as to influence further existential enunciation [which also operates through the pathic]. This opens any particular enunciative scene to a constellation of the universe of reference. The synapse itself provides a certain consistency, acting as a break on possibilities, an 'a signifying catalysis'. However, there is no alternate reference point in concepts like absolute otherness. Alterity is relative, and this provides the possibility for different forms of enunciation composed of the various enunciative fragments in the four domains. This happens on the margins as a self organizing process. Russian Formalists were close in seeing content as only an aspect of form. The point is to develop analytic praxes from this view however—dealing with forms, perhaps slowing them down or making them visible by altering our perceptions, or other processes of defamiliarisation. We can then acquire metamodeling materials to guide 'an initiatory enunciation'. [There is a summary diagram of the different dimensions of enunciation on page 190] [Then there is a series of shorter pieces] The refrains of being and sense [Basically an analysis of one of his own dreams, illustrating classic Freudian mechanisms of overdetermination and displacement, but also showing how the elements from the various domains can also be shown to appear. Too detailed, so here are the edited highlights] Dreams classically show the options for subjectification that breaks with dominant norms and significations. Their study also shows the necessary components of an open model of the unconscious. The Freudian distinction between primary and subsequent social processes need not be upheld, since the dream does not arise from some deep contents and processes but rather indicate 'a machinics on the surface of its text' (191). The part-objects in it are not the results of a mutilating process of castration but should be seen as 'autonomized operators of subjectification', and the apparent break with sense only shows subjectification 'in the nascent state', a fractalization that breaks out of closure, a matter of deterritorialization. [Details of the dream follows. The components are particular people, a large square in a composite city, and a car whose parking place has been forgotten . There are also lapsuses, the most interesting of which involves him calling the character Gilles instead of his real name!] The various associations are then uncovered, such as which actual city it is, which happens to be called Mer, although the obvious associations with the sea and his mother are extended because he associates his father with residence in that city. Other elements include an earlier dream and his own four part matrix charting the domains: an intellectual reservation about the symmetry of the flows between the parts is represented as the presence of a mysterious zone in the city square which has to be crossed in an unusual way. The car also changes its characteristic, in that a Renault becomes a BMW. He drove the BMW during the upheavals of 1968 [more below]. The dream of losing the Renault can be understood as representing 'four a-signifying indices' (195): it is lost or cut out, as the 'putting into parentheses of an ego object'; the name becoming a set of initials has a kind of sense [as does the substitution of a set of initials for a name below]; there is a hesitation over the connection between the events; there is 'the most stupid, mechanical association' between forgetting where the car is parked and the theoretical objection he had to an incomplete self analysis in a correspondence between Freud and Fleiss [!] The strange substitution of the name of Deleuze for the name of the character [Yasha David, a Czech refugee in France and collaborator in understanding Kafka] shows the complexities of enunciation [but in quite a different direction to Lacan, whose understandings of the elaborate fantasies of Schreber were important in his claim that the unconscious is structured like a language]. Guattari thinks of Bakhtin and 'polyphonic dialogical sequences': these linked together the various female people in the dream and might also help understand various constellations of different levels of enunciation. [Other associations include the presence of a cave in the dream, associated with the loss of the car, which somehow invokes a text by Samuel Beckett and a psychological test he had invented earlier in his youth. Some of his diaries were stolen and this leads him to think about how his own past might be reconstructed by his friends, including an unhappy episode in which he displayed jealousies towards one of his partners: this was displaced on to an anxiety that David was jealous of his wife in a classic Freudian mechanism] Bakhtin's dialogism shows how lines of sense intersect, form a synapse of sense that can go on to catalyse a function, especially one accessing constellations of universes of reference. The dream itself shows different kinds of phyla—the circuit around the square, the lost car, David and his association with Deleuze, a cave, inhibition and a jealousy. Only the third one shows the role of proper names. The components are heterogeneous. We can explain the first one in terms of visual relations found in an existential territory. The second involves an absent machine or potentiality. The third is the classic mental operation [a Freudian slip] found in everyday psychopathology and here it acts as a synapse. The fourth one is a 'signified utterance' that becomes iconic as it develops: in this sense it becomes 'a chaotic black hole, the reverse of an existential territory. The fifth is a 'coarté effect' as in Rorschach [I couldn't find this term anywhere, but it might indicate a reluctance to express thoughts explicitly?], and it can apparently link to non discursive universes of reference. [These initial analyses are then developed, 197 F, as 'latent lines of subjectification'. It took some time to emerge, and the analysis seems to acquire the classic Freudian notion of a rational reconstruction of events in the past]. The analysis of the synapse might be worth summarizing in more detail. It features both a forgetting and a lapsus which can be reconstructed as an articulate phrase to describe looking for a car in a particular location with a particular person. How these events signify is explored in more detail—the car stands both for a relationship with a woman and a particular phase in his life, a glamorous phase which included the burgeoning relationship with Deleuze. There is also a particular operation which results in 'a machinic surplus value' (199): the trick of moving from a fully spelled out name to initials contaminates neighbouring proper names, so that they also become abstract and machinic [maybe]—he also referred to one of his lovers in the 60s by her initials. Altogether, associations with 1968 inform understandings in 1984. The various polyphonic lines go on to become 'embedded in extrinsic rhizomatic coordinates': the town square develops into a particular town and then a particular relationship with his parents. We can consider these elements as 'deterritorialized enunciative nuclei' (200). These are present in dreams and in reality. The production of subjectivity includes a role for the 'latent unconscious contents' as well as the 'consciously explicit utterances'. They act by forming deterritorialized universes, and 'heterogeneous modes of semiotization' are based upon them. We can see this by considering the different enunciative fragments associated with the move to initials with both the car and the woman—the abbreviation becomes deterritorialized, but subsequently, there is a 'phonological reterritorialization' since the initials AD also stand for another name—Adelaide [another lover who followed Arlette Donati or AD] We talking here about enunciative fragments, which are discontinuous, not located in paradigms or syntagms. They are indexed by proper names, associated with relationships with people. It is a kind of code or 'a signifying rupture'. Freed from structural constraint, these fragments develop 'synaptic semiotic chains', based on 'an enunciative existential function'. This can produce a fractal process that proliferates and develops all the resources of the imaginary, and that in turn will help us grasp an unresolved problem [apparently, inhibition stems from an unresolved relationship between birth and death -- see below]. We can also see how the components can help develop a 'harmonic nucleus', initially a partial one, linking say the components one and four [the square, with parental associations, and the cave]. We can even consider these to be components of a whole enunciative field. The movement around the square is understood visually or iconically, but there are also different phonological developments—the town Mer becomes mother (mere), while the name of another place sounds a bit like the name of yet another woman. He thought of these background worlds initially as a kind of 'ice palace' which later became a cave or zone, associated with the strange zone in the square and with the forgetting that led to the temporary loss of the car. It is really a struggle to understand the self enclosed existential territory represented by Mer by understanding it as 'cracked', (201) having a cave, accessible only through proper names associated with it. There is a second harmonic nucleus, developing from the synapse in component three [David and the lapsus that connects him with Deleuze]. This synapse is going to be applied to the other components, especially those of two and five, the machinic and the affective respectively. Thinking of the car reminds him of encountering a big demo in a particular street in Paris. It was a gay area, and it was also the scene of a particularly violent confrontation with the police. It is a way of demonstrating the coarté effect, and inhibition both towards physical fighting and towards homosexuality. However, there is a process of association set off by this location, including his encounters with other political activists and various ethnologists. He even took his first patient to a location in the same street. There is also an association with visiting a musician. So we have 'the whole world of diverse activities of creative machinic linkage' [evidently a happy time]. Thinking around the associations of AD helped to diversify semiotically, and even overcome some of the blockages of the more territorialized components, like the town of Mer. However, the role of jealousy is reterritorializing and blocking. The whole thing goes back to his relations with Donati and the subsequent lover and expresses his own tensions between believing in sexual liberation, but also becoming very jealous of his partner -- he searched for Donati on one of her escapades in his BMW! This jealousy is linked to the lapsus. It is David who is seen as the jealous one, while any jealousy of Deleuze must be suppressed in a 'nucleus of neutrality' and convention. What the dream shows is that we are both fixed on particular 'native lands', but also that desiring machines can develop processes of existential importance. However, there is often a particular escape from control, forgetting, inhibition, inconsistency. This is why we require substantial analysis, and we must remember that self analysis is also required, as in the bit about jealousy. Sometimes, forgetting can be the only way to prevent anxiety about death [referenced to a particular element in which his dying father offered him a 50 franc note towards his driving lessons, not realizing that it was 'no longer a great deal of money']. Refrains and existential affects [I still think the refrain is quite a difficult term that just tries to do too much—linking the human and animal, and overdoing the musical analogy so that refrains both calm people down and reassure them by reminding them of their territorial roots and assist creative thinking and breaks with convention. The latter arise when the refrain becomes deterritorialized and thus acts as a kind of semiotic resource for new experiences. The insistence that faciality is the most important component of a refrain is even more overdone. It might be so at moments with Proust, but to generalize from that to talk about all human understandings and subjective responses is a tad excessive. The discussion here also the links back to his section on the refrain in The Machinic Unconscious ] The affects of the imagination are real and persistent [as Freud said about affect in dreams]. 'Affect sticks to subjectivity' (203), that of the speaker as well as the listener. Spinoza noticed that affect is transitive—if we can imagine someone is experiencing an affect we become affected ourselves, so sadness turns to commiseration, hatred to a reciprocal hatred and so on. 'Affect is thus essentially a pre-personal category', preexisting identities, showing itself in unlocalizable transfers. This was grasped better by animist societies as a kind of circulating spirit or power of a sacred place. We can grasp it as showing polyvocal components of semiotization searching for existential consummation. It is both fuzzy and perfectly graspable in experience, say in 'thresholds of passage' or 'reversals of polarity'. It is also a component of animal becomings as we shall see. It is not graspable in discourses that offer distinctive oppositions in linear sequences including sequences of memories. It is more like ['assimilable to' (204)] Bergson's duration. It emerges from intensive categories arising from positioning oneself existentially. Affects cannot be quantified without losing their qualitative dimensions. It is those that offer a potential for and promote singularization and heterogenesis, and the composition of haecceities. Heterogeneous durations are appropriated for existential purposes, and this is best understood through ethics or aesthetics rather than science. Bakhtin is on to this in his description of aesthetic enunciation which he says is encompassed by the content, from the outside. This promotes our feeling of value, and we see ourselves as creating form. Seeing an affect in aesthetic terms makes it active as a component of enunciation, not just a 'passive correlate but its motor'. Affect is itself non discursive and offers no energy to transfer, so it is better seen as 'deterritorialized machinism'. We see ourselves as singular persons as a result of the complexity of the production of subjectivity. In particular circumstances, this also produces artistic creation. We are certainly not just produced as subjects just by linguistic structures. The components of subjectivity are heterogeneous and diverse. There is an analogy with those attempts to reduce a literary work to the operation of signifiers, but this will not lead us to supposing some creative personality [Bakhtin still]. Instead, linguistic material has five aspects that produce verbal affect: 'sound, meaning, syntagmatic links, the phatic valorization of an emotional and volitional order' (205) [the last one, which presumably makes five aspects by splitting into emotional and volitional, is really just another phrase for the production of verbal affect in readers, surely?]. Sounds gain impact from rhythm, intonation, mimicry and 'articulatory tension'. Things like narrative, metaphor and 'internal elan' also convey value and meaning. However, this is not just something material and physical, since it also requires 'the sense of appreciation'[which apparently involves becoming a whole human being—the old high aesthetic again]. This non discursive power of affects is hyper complex, arising from complex processuality, or the 'proliferation of mutating becomings'. It consists of 'modular components of proto-enunciation', but these engender 'a dis-position of enunciation'. Affect speaks to and through us [with an example of a combination of dusk and dark curtains in his room producing 'an uncanny Affect' which replaces the certainties he had just before, while the leitmotifs of Das Rheingold bring about all sorts of references, sentimental, mythical, historical and social]. Originally confined, these experiences dis-pose territorialization and overflow, engaging environment, memory and cognition, so that a person becomes 'a tributary' to a broader assemblage of enunciation, and the individual subject that speaks in the first person becomes only 'the fluctuating interception, the conscious "terminal" of those diverse components of temporalization'(206). This is especially so with affects that are not immediately presented to the senses, where 'procedures of elucidation threatened to flee in all directions'. However, perhaps the apparently sensible affects are really produced by the more problematic ones, in a reversal of the usual view that the simple produces the complex. Affect is always struggling towards a simple identity ['constantly questing to recapture itself'], but this is permanently delayed by 'proliferating phyla of problematization'. An 'infinite movement of fractal virtualization' comes first, which only gets simplified by existential self affirmation. We can see this in some psychopathology. Affect has to cross a threshold to attain consistency. Failure to do so produces pathological symptoms [described in more detail 206], which seemed to involve an inchoate relation between the different dimensions of affect, which include the relative autonomy of some of them. This is not to say that normal states always display harmony and equilibrium—indeed, excessive harmony and equilibria may produce melancholy. However the normal psyche can pass from one dimension of affect to another instead of being dominated by one. [NB there is an increasing tendency to describe affect in terms of 'pathic temporalization'—this may be a technical term, but it also seems to relate to the practice of holding back or accelerating particular aspects of subjective time, producing, say, inhibition on the one hand and maniac acceleration of enunciation on the other]. As ever, studies of the psychopathological can help us understand the complexities of affect, including the impact on semiotic activity, as in inhibitions, or the general preservation of the gap between expression and the interior. In general, 'semiotic discordances' are produced by intrusive extra-linguistic components: 'somatic, ethological, mythographic, institutional, economic, aesthetic, etc.' (207). In normal speech, these are usually more disciplined [including being subjected to capitalist laws of equivalence]. The refrain is a group of 'reiterated discursive sequences, closed on themselves, having as their function an extrinsic catalysis of existential affects'[they have catalytic effects on our real lives]. They can take different forms, segments of prose, emblems, faciality traits, leitmotifs, signatures and proper names. They can form transversal links between different substances, as in Proust where different refrains correspond with each other [this had such an impact on Deleuze, apparently, that he added a bit to his book on Proust -- I think Bogue says this]. They can operate with sensory inputs like the taste of the madeleine, or they could be more problematic, as in the notion of an 'ambience' in a salon. They can operate with an order of faciality as with the face of Odette [Swann decomposes her face into a number of specific features and then links them to various other objects of beauty—her nose to the nose of a portrait in a famous painting and so on. Other faces are also briefly de and recomposed in this way, like those of military officers, or of the sleeping Albertine. I still don't see the great significance of these small sections]. Refrains join the sensible and problematic dimensions of enunciation. If we take into account Hjemslev on the form of expression and the form of content, we have four possible semiotic functions of them, relating either to the referent or to enunciation itself: there is denotation, relating form of content and referent; the diagrammatic function relating matter of expression and referent; sensible affect, or refrain, relating enunciation and forms of expression; problematic aspects relating enunciation and the form of content, AKA the abstract machine. We might consider these as components of the usually undivided term 'the pragmatic' [a bit of a residual term for conventional linguistics as we saw]. It is the combination ['concatenation'] of these functions that explains how systems of expression move from the social and pre-personal, the ethical and the aesthetic to the personal/existential [maybe, 208]. The refrain and the abstract machine are 'bifaced', and this explains the location of 'existential praxial operators'at the junction of expression and content. There is no guiding structural synchrony here but rather 'contingent assemblages', heterogeneity, and irreversible singularization. Hjemslev shows that expression and content are reversible and this explains the heterogeneity of substances and matters. Bakhtin on the other hand argues that enunciation is layered, multi centred and polyphonic. Can we explain the entire 'multivalence' of enunciation by combining these two? Can we see how the heterogeneity of delirium or artistic creation can still produce sense 'outside commonsense'? We cannot just see these as deficient versions of the normal. It is mistaken to see enunciation as another residual in the formal analysis of linguistic structures. On the contrary, it lies at 'the active core of linguistic and semiotic creativity' (209). It singularizes. It is not a matter of being organized into syntagmatic or semantic trees, but rather pursuing the rhizomes that underpin the particular logical stages [Guattari also suggests that we call these by proper names, perhaps suggesting that they are particular conceptions by particular linguists?]. There are refrains at work that stabilize the environment for existential purposes, and we can use these to grasp the most abstract problematic affects[it occurs to me -- is a 'problematic affect' one that suggests a whole problematic or that arises from a whole problematic?] [Obscure] examples follow; Duchamp's painting of the bottle rack triggers various constellation of universes of reference that relate to his personal past and to more general cultural and economic connotations. We can use terms like Benjamin's 'aura' or Barthes's punctum here too. This is a kind of 'singular refrain making'. We find it in architecture as well, and it describes things like [micro] perceptions when walking down a street. We find such effects in ethological and archaic refrains as well. This is where we get the entire sense that the objects surrounding us are familiar and not eternally strange. Refrains of expression are particularly important with sensible affects, and might include, say, the intonation of a particular voice. Refrains of content, AKA abstract machines, are found in problematic affects, including those that head towards individualization as well as social behaviour: after all, the two refrains are not antagonistic or mutually exclusive. An Orthodox icon does not only represent a saint, but also opens a whole 'territory of enunciation'. Facial refrains get their particular intensity from the way that they are able to shift existential territories, both of the individual body and of various social identities. A signature on a document, say a contract, can also act as 'a refrain of capitalist normalization'. Instead of the normal unitary notion of a person, found in conventional psychology and psychoanalysis, we should think more in terms of complex affects which can even produce 'irreversible diachronic ruptures' [what most of us would call historical watersheds] (210), sometimes associated with charismatic figures like Christ or Lenin. In the case of Lenin, the specific procedures associated with his specific interventions and language provided a threshold of initiation for those who wanted to belong to the Party, and even a series of constraints for those who wanted a break with it, like Trotsky. We should think of enunciation as something complex as well. It is like a conductor who articulates specific musical performances together, sometimes allowing one to be dominant, sometimes not 'despotically overcoding' the score but allowing some improvisation, and generally aiming for a kind of collective emergent effect, once a threshold has been crossed, permitting the emergence of an entire aesthetic object, combining things like tempo, phrasing, harmonies and rhythms. Assemblages of enunciation can include multiple social voices, including some pre-personal ones, appearing as 'aesthetic ecstatic, a mystic effusion or an ethological panic', appearing as a syndrome like agoraphobia or as an ethical imperative. Affect is not a state to which one submits, but a complex subjective territory, proto-enunciation. It is also the place from which a potential praxis can emerge, with two joined dimensions. First, there is 'extrinsic dissymmetrization', where a particular intention directed at universes of reference [AKA 'fields of non discursive values'] can be clarified [its relevance becomes clear?]. Subjectivity takes on an ethical dimension, which in turn becomes a singularization of a trajectory, in turn understood as part of a personal historical process. Secondly, there is 'intrinsic symmetrization', a bit like the aesthetic attainment of Bakhtin above, or fractalization [as we explore?]. Here a deterritorialized object achieves consistency achieved from the impact of affect. The same goes with our sense of being able to develop autonomous enunciation. [A selection from Bakhtin extends the point, so that particular lyrics in songs, prayers or experiences like repentance become self sufficient, requiring no external satisfaction—the form itself takes on a completeness, using the qualities of the material itself, and the same goes for the content produced by an author. Classic misrecognition of the habitus? ]. However, we might also extend a bit some of the other work on aesthetic form in Bakhtin. He talks of a sense of isolation of the form [its uniqueness?], for example, but Guattari sees this as an 'active isolation'(211) which will set off a process ending in a grasp of 'a- signifiance'[sic, not 'significance'] [that is we realize some things cannot be grasped inside conventional signifiance?]. Other Bakhtin qualities like unification, individuation and and totalization can also be grasped as multiplication. Overall, the consistency and unity of an object 'is only the movement of subjectification' [that is, this complex business of subjectification, nothing to do with social constructivism in the usual sense]. Nothing is simply given. Consistency arises as the 'for itself' comes to dominate an existential territory, fleetingly: the for itself then appears as 'a stroboscopic memory'. Reference can now be understood as only the support for a reiterative refrain [again back to front from what you would normally think, where the reiteration of a refrain confers relations of reference]. It is the presence of the gap [compare this with 'the interval' that characterizes the subject in Deleuze's work on Hume and Bergson] that produces in us the experience or 'sentiment' of being , a sensible affect. The same gap also produces an active notion of being, a problematic affect Reiteration deterritorializes, in both a synchronic and diachronic dimension, and appears as a set of related intensive ordinates. Some of these coordinates are intentional, and these fractalize affective territories, symmetrically as in the Baker transformation for example. This produces a sense of a permanent work in progress ['inchoate tension' is his preferred term] where affect takes on a being, acquires consistency. Each partition receives homothetic [projective] effects from refrains, so that a whole set of points of view is established. However, others are 'trans-monadic' (212) or transversal coordinates [we nearly forgot those!] so that affect drifts from one existential territory to another, producing dates and durations which are singularities. Proustian refrains are supposed to be the best example. Subjectification involves the intersection of actual and virtual enunciative points of view. It attempts to reduce divisions. However, it is 'irremediably fragmentary, perpetually shifting, spaced out'. We appear to take on an existence after crossing a particular threshold rather than actually managing to establish a clear division between us and the rest of reality and circumscribe what is uniquely subjective. Concepts of self and other both result from an 'ethical intentionality and the aesthetic promotion of an end'. Classic conceptions of the ego are worthless because there is no such thing as a coherent ego. Rather we have 'a discursive set' of relations with a referent, often in the form of a gestalt. It follows that the subcategories of the classical ego are also unacceptable. Classical conceptions proceed to offer a meta model where some general displaced representation of the process of the ego is identified with a particular scene, but this means we can barely speak about it any further. Nevertheless, we classically think of the ego as the whole world, without limits, certainly not just associated with a body. [As in the normal sense of egoism] we find it difficult to believe that there is somewhere where we do not exist [like some external reality?]. This alternative is unthinkable, and people prefer not to talk about it. Affect is not simply elementary raw energy. It should be understood instead as the 'deterritorialized matter of enunciation' (213). This matter provides for insight and understanding that can be worked on, but not as in traditional psychoanalysis. Instead, we should explore the 'ethico-aesthetic dimensions' by examining refrains [apparently, Levinas also sees a link between faciality and ethics]. When looking at psychological automatism, delirium or the phantasm, we could see them as fixed states, or as a series of practices opening up refrains to new possibilities. Freud began with the notion of an assemblage of enunciation that was positively mutant, and he explored various refrains found in dreams and in pathologies, with only a tenuous link with semantic contents [which were merely the manifestations of something latent?]. His practice involved seeing how refrains play out on new scenes of affect, as in free association or suggestion. However, the semiotic components of these refrains were not seen as sufficiently heterogeneous, especially since the turn towards the domination of the signifier. Psychoanalysis should multiply expressive components and differentiate them. It should not focus its efforts on individual patients and their problems since this limits 'the dialectic of the gaze'. Analysis should work not just with speech but with objects like modeling clay, or with modern electronic media, the theatre, modern families and so on. This should stimulate the a-signifying components of the refrains. This in turn will help them to catalyze new universes of reference, by fractalizing. Instead of just interpreting the phantasm or the displacement of affect, both should become more operative and be applied to a new range. The point would be to detect and resolve 'encysted singularities' closed to outside influences and evidence. These may well be immediately contrary to the patient's interests, but they can be reworked to explore 'pragmatic virtualities' (214). How can we explain the reduction of psychoanalysis to the play of the signifier, in increasingly stereotyped applications? 'It is inseparable' from the general shape of capitalist universes, aimed at 'the equivalence of significations. The world where one thing is worth no more than another; where every existential singularity is methodologically devalued'. In particular contingency, like those of old age, illness or madness, are not granted any kind of existential status, but become instead 'abstract parameters' to be managed by welfare organizations in an all pervading atmosphere of 'anxiety and unconscious guilt'. We can see this in terms of disenchantment in Weber as generalized equivalents dominate and as value gets increasingly captured. Any hope for a future restoring social and aesthetic analytic practices must take advantage of the developments of new information technology. Genet regained [This is hard to follow if you don't know much about Genet the, so I only got a few bits. Genet refused to be considered as a writer because he thought this would make him 'camp on the bourgeois side of the barricade' (216), and his writing, according to Sartre, is best understood as a transformed onanism.] In general, we experience 'fragments of sense' or 'modules', and normally, we learn to police the 'heretical, dissident and perverse of voices' (222) they produce. However Genet only takes partial control, and reverses some normal valuations, as when punishment becomes erotic. 'In one case, it is the signifier that leads the dance, in the other it is the signified'. The idea is always to constitute 'an expression that everywhere exceeds its linguistic components'. By making the signifier and signified converge, and expression is produced that will 'impregnate a context'(223), and the context in turn will bring about 'impulses, it's paradigmatic perversions' affecting discursive chains with a linguistic or not'. A worked example appears on page 223 which opens the '"clandestine" germination of semantic content' by considering the origin of the term Fatah {as in Palestinian liberation movement}. Those 'significations surfacing in Arabic' are explored, which leads to a new possible meaning for the acronym fatah—'here the signified has moved into the position of the structural key for the signifier'. The exercise connects or constellates 'three Universes of reference: sexual, divine and revolutionary', as the words from the same route as the components of fatah disclose. Here, it is the phonemes, which unlock meaning and they also produce affects—sadness referring to the possible death of fighters for Genet. The theme of alternating shadow and light is pursued in other writing about American blacks. [Fatah receives approval from Guattari because it allows for the possibility of its own death, unlike the slogan for Israel which insists that Israel will live for ever]. There are other more abstract 'modules' at work as well, like various games threads, 'an abstract machine for flaking, layering the real' (224), and there is a comparison with Proust and the interweaving of 'leitmotifs, ...fecund moments...refrains'. Memory is not allowed to dominate, but the continual confrontation with 'heterogeneous realities' is pursued, a continuing opening up, an insistence on the presence of death and finitude and 'the risk of total and definitive incomprehension'. The creative aspects are best understood as 'enlarging fields of virtuality, allowing new Universes of reference and singular modalities of expression to emerge by conjugating heterogeneous voices... it is a matter of producing another real, correlative to another subjectivity' (225). Sometimes the pursuit of signification ends in a loss of control, when even the author is overwhelmed by associations [the example is Genet writing the term 'Hitlerian'and being overwhelmed by thoughts of the church of the Trinity—something to do with both of them featuring eagles possibly]. They can also be dialogues in the Bakhtin sense, and this can engender 'a surplus value of sense, a supplement of singularity, an existential taking consistency'. Proust had developed the relation between Charlus and Jupien as one resembling the wasp and the orchid [a marvelous scene where they encounter each other by accident, rapidly identify each other as complementary homosexuals, and go off for a quick one, all without exchanging words, all through extraordinary postures and looks]. For Genet, a flower is linked to a particular convict, then flowers and conflicts are linked in general, and this in turn helps Genet choose '" the universe wherein I delight"'. [Lots more examples of the writing ensue, PP. 226-7] Overall the writing is the result of 'the modular concatenation of cosmic and signaletic fluctuations and the "fabulous" harmonising of voices that were not generically destined to meet each other'(227). This leaves 'the subject without any hold on the creative process', neither from passive contemplation nor from active orchestration. The writer is not enunciating, doing more like 'primitive swallowing', attempting self mastery or perhaps the deliberate production 'of a mutant subjectivity'. These processes must 'avoid being imprisoned by the phantasm'. The example is a chance encounter between Genet and a couple of Palestinians [Hamza and his mum] in a refugee camp which produced profound affects although these were never fully understood. For Guattari what has happened is the development of 'an existential operator or synapse... an Assemblage that is at once psychic, material and social, able to put in place a new type of enunciation'(228). Hamza is about to depart on a mission, and he disappears for 14 years; his mother treats Genet as if he were her son and this produces 'genuine love at first sight for this unknown couple', a '"fixed mark" for love'. The whole sequence is converted into a fable with mystical visions of the son always together with the mother, fabulous connections between the couple and the Christ Pieta, the ability of Genet to play all the parts. The whole process shows how the emergent set of images, the fable 'become self sufficient, self referent, self processual' (229), 'a specific away of discursivizing subjectivity' in a particularly open way, by constantly scrutinising the religious icon' and showing new signs of possibility. 'Reality not only opens up, it is charged with infinite virtualities', but there is still a restraint by working with mythological characters. Eventually there will be 'a new splitting of the world' (230). This arises from synaptic connections, which are not just 'simple rearrangements or harmonics of sense', because they generates 'the pragmatic effects, an existential surplus value, the release of new Constellations of Universes of reference'. These will exceed the mundane issues of identity and persons and produce 'much more molecular praxes'. Thus the specific rather mundane fate of the Palestinian warrior does not detract from the power of creation because it 'doesn't reside in its visible cogs but in a machine of abstract intensities, conjugating Universes of jouissance, poetry, freedom, death to come'. The actual couple has been cut out for a particular purpose, isolating it from a whole continuum of space, time and 'all the connections with country, family and kin' [Genet's own words apparently]. [and Genet thinks that death will be welcome as long as he has achieved something in 1000th of a second]. Architectural enunciation [Again I have little independent knowledge of this] There is been a bewildering variety of architectural styles, and underneath we can probably discover 'ethico-political choices' (232). We can better understand what has happened by considering 'architectural enunciation' and its connections with the 'trade of the architect', rather than a sequence of dominant styles. Architects should not be seen as 'artists of built forms' but as people offering 'services in revealing the virtual desires of spaces, places, trajectories and territories'. They should develop their singular approach connecting 'individual and collective corporeality', and regulate desires against interests, become an analyst of subjectification, and, through architectural enunciation, contribute to 'contemporary productions of subjectivity'. Then we get on to two 'modalities of consistency of the enunciation of an architectural concept'[concept in the usual sense here, presumably, although there is still this initial insistence on singularity] Polyphonic components [a term also used in the section above on Genet to refer to modules] include the categories of a certain Boudon used by architects—those of refer to real space, those of refer to an external [eg symbolic] referent, those that refer to representations of architectural space, those that relate to ways of mediating between the spaces, using 'scale'. The should best be seen as specifics derived from an underlying virtual enunciation, explaining the tremendous variety of architectural products. Guattari supplies his own specific forms of enunciation on the 'continuous spectrum of virtual enunciations': Geopolitical enunciation, referring to the terrain or the cultural climate; urbanistic enunciation, relating to things like town planning regulations; economic enunciation where buildings express capitalist relations of force and respond to market value; functional enunciation relating to functional links with our other urban structures and functions linking 'micro facilities (light, air, communication, etc.)'(234). These will be expressed through various networks including social stratification various social bodies, and people like planners and experts. then we have technical enunciations relating to equipment and materials relating to engineers and chemists; signifying enunciations as when buildings incorporate symbolic forms or reflect specific ideological models like new towns; existential territorialization related to space [euclidean space positions the object in a univocal fashion within 'an axiomatico-deductive logic' (236) , apparently, while projective spaces offer metamorphic perspectives privileging the imaginary over reality, and labyrinthine topological spaces attempt to envelop tactile bodies as a deliberate affect]. We also have scriptural enunciations to coordinate the other components, and here the very development of expression offers 'coefficient of creativity... new potentialities', the introduction of ethics and aesthetics for example. There are 'synchronic existential dimensions' as well (237). Drawing on Bakhtin, there are 'cognitive ordinates' where a discursive logic guides the scriptural enunciation described above. There are also 'axiological ordinates' adding 'anthropocentric valorization' including ethics and economic and political systems. Finally 'aesthetic ordinates' where objects 'start to emit sense and form on their own count'. Again this can lead to new articulations between 'the built, the lived and the incorporeal'. These persist, even though capitalism attempts to impose 'functional, informational and communicational transparency', because they remain 'at the heart of the architectural object'. These ordinates are found underneath an 'external discursive face' although it also appears in a non discursive mode, which we can access as we experience 'spatialized affects'. There is a constant tendency for cognitive consistency to 'topple over into the imaginary'. Axiological consistency can lead to the challenge to those dimensions that are supposed to depict alterity and regulated desire [the implication here seems to be that people get tired of them]. Aesthetic thresholds can exceed those particular forms and intensities which they were designed to depict. Overall then, the specificity of architecture is that it tries to grasp affects of specialised enunciation. These will always be paradoxical objects that can be understood not in purely rational terms but 'through meta- modeling, aesthetic detour, mythical or ideological narrative'(238), like the part object. It requires transversal investigation across heterogeneous levels, but not to domesticate them—rather to 'engage them all deeply in fractal processes of heterogeness'. Architecture should be a catalysis to trigger semiotic 'chain reactions'to help us escape an open up new possibilities. Dwellings for example engender a 'feeling of intimacy and existential singularity' connected with the aura of familiar surroundings or landscapes occupied by memories, and this can 'generate proliferation and lines of flight in every register of the desire to live, the refusal to give in to the dominant inertia'. It is the same process of 'existential territorialization and synchronic taking consistency' that we find in the refrain or in other ways of occupying particular places. Architects therefore should help us recompose existential territories in the face of destructive capitalist flows. They should identify points of singularity, and should use 'every cartographic method' to do this. Commitment and the development of 'a particular regime of ethico-aesthetic autonomization' will support this process. Architectural truth 'will then be an effect of existential consummation and superabundance of being' (239). Architect should welcome the chance to be 'carried off by the process of eventization, that is to say, of the historical enrichment and resingularization of desire and of values' (239). Ethico-aesthetic refrains in the theatre of Witkiewicz [W, to spare my speech recognition system] [I know even less about the theatre or this person, which is a shame because I'm particularly interested in these refrains, which connect existential territories and incorporeal universes of reference, as I recall. I have only found a few nuggets ] Subjectification is constantly modified in the process of enunciation, so it can never be completed or disconnected from the world. 'From this point of view, theatre work may constitute one of its most significant paradigms' (241). Sensible refrains act as operators, linking the phase transitions between assemblages of enunciations. For example, 'a perverse enunciation' can occur, even in the middle of solemn ceremonies, or, going the other way, a Freudian slip can disrupt a register of enunciation. There are also 'problematic refrains, or abstract machines' which are less easy to grasp. Some narrative montages in W's theatre demonstrate this. These refrains are not just to be seen as something which signifies latent content, but rather are 'essentially existential shifters' which extend the consistency of universes of reference, through 'circumscription, singularization and support'. These universes cannot easily be localized; they are incorporeal with no particular limit in space and time, and having no 'organ' (242). Some act as symptoms of particular neurotic apprehensions of the world [which are existential, Guattari insists]. Some faciality refrains help even newborn babies relate to the maternal world. A particular 'modal pentatonic refrain' leads to the 'Debussyist universe'. We can enter the judicial world through various refrains referring to gesture, clothing and intonation. All of this requires 'specifically assembled catalysers'. These refrains can be recognized when they disrupt 'expressive concatenations', their syntagms or discourses. This can cause a particular discourse to stop developing relations and rather to 'pile up on itself and go round and round to infinity', or in bad cases, 'an implosion of the expressive system'. In good cases, the refrain can activate a particular 'segment of expression or content' and help to generate the process leading to a 'self referenced enunciative nucleus'[a new conscious and reflective basis for enunciation?] In the actual play [The Pragmatists], the five principal characters develop polyphony around the original theme, carried by some 'degree zero of expression, this inexhaustible flow of speech, this uninterrupted internal chattering' [sounds a laugh] which apparently gets connected, rather to his shame, to a conversation with one of the female characters [Mammalia], and which is seen as some 'constant stream of existence'. More positively, it is also seen as 'an indispensable chord in the symphony that constitutes his essence'[then a bit that reminds me of Gale and Wyatt on the endless creativity of writing—'[he experience of life is] " actually just the fact of talking itself... With words the wealth of possibilities is far greater than with events"'] Then there is a bit about double characters and how this common theme in plays is subverted by W—a double system of values produces 'an ethico-political wrenching', between aesthetics and morality, pure form vs. equality and justice. One character in particular wants to pursue aesthetic authenticity as 'a desire for abolition. "To live means to create the unknown!"' (243) [so Gale & Wyatt's endless project is a search for aboliltion of the subject -- except it's far too domesticated?]. This death drive is contrasted with a robust life drive in another character. Apparently, it all links to a campaign against alcohol in Germany before 1914, which was associated with various youth movements 'which in a way prefigure National Socialism'.[Apparently this also appears in The Magic Mountain, where Mann denounces 'abstinent scum']. The ferociously healthy one appears at first as a pragmatist, open to exploit the personal joyful benefits of everything, including art. This turns into a project for 'a fantastic and macabre cabaret', and he wants the death drive character to direct it. Various relationships, including incestuous ones complicate matters, but the idea is that 'in every domain the pragmatists appear to be called on to triumph over passionate idealists'(244). However, there is another character, the principal one, the 'Chinese Mummy' who offers an 'abstract machinic refrain', which dominates and escapes control by the characters. She turns on her sponsor, the life affirming one, and, via an affair in which the death affirming one drinks her blood, becomes 'a deterritorialized being', able to break away from the dualism offered by the other two characters. She does this by a particular form of enunciation that says there is a connection between abolition and pure creation from nothing, that everything is connected with everything else, that reality is nothing but these connection of segments. She is complemented by one of the characters as 'the most real Character of us all', bringing reality into their one sided perceptions. She creates in effect 'an incorporeal hyper-or sur-reality', and this is similar to the work of Kafka or Roussel. She acts as an intermediary to join together virtual threads that connect dreams and real life. One thing this does is to prevent the passion for self abolition by one of the characters, tortured by the prospect of sleep without dreams [like Hamlet!]. Apparently the associations between women, mothers and death has to be challenged, and more generally guilt dissociated from objects. She does this in a bizarre way, constructing a sound poem, reminiscent of Artaud, from the syllables of the name of the maternal figure who everyone loves [keep up!]. In this way, the name of the character Mammalia is deterritorialized, ceases to become a signifier [laden with all sorts of freudian guilt etc] , becomes part of 'an a-signifying refrain arising from a purely poetic rhythm'(245). Also, the characters becomes deterritorialized [by being reinterpreted by the Mummy, as a kind of symbolic violence] The guilt is never entirely sublimated, however, and W offers no simple remedies. Instead we are talking about 'a direct transmutation bearing on heterogeneous orders of reality' with no redeeming central theme, especially not '"any lousy teetotalling spirituality"' [quoting W ][then an irritating diversion into another play!]. So we can see various kinds of refrains, about health for example, together with various asignifying refrains, poetry in this case, and a sequence of colours in the other play. There is a problematic refrain as well, turning on how difficult it is to convert 'a passion for abolition into aesthetic creation', and how to manage desire for the 'woman-other'(246). We might be able to neutralise the femininity of some of the women [Mammalia is mute at first], perhaps even kill them, 'if possible at her request'—but women have to be killed infinitely because of the eternal return of the tension, a threat that egos will close up on themselves. Overall, the problem is to 'ward off death by processualizing creation', but without prostituting it. The theatre of W addresses this directly, warning against both implosion and the 'prefabricated myths of psychoanalysis, or initiatives in psychological re-adaptation or re-socialization'. Instead we have to pursue 'an open prospective re-singularising analysis', like Artaud's theatre of cruelty—'"Dadaism in life"'. Keiichi Tahara's faciality machine We can see a photographic portrait as providing a representation [at several levels, as in Barthes?], But we can also use certain traits of the face for quite different ends, to evoke memories or trigger affect. Tahara shows this second aspect best, and uses aspects of the subject's face to 'prepare the landscapes that obsess him'(247), as a further example of subjectification and its effects. In effect, enunciation is transferred from the spectator to the photograph, which has its own effects 'which starts to scrutinise you, which interpellates you, penetrates you'. We can examine all the photographs of personalities in a recent album [only some of which is online]. They show us three essential components: the face is cut out or deterritorialized; the gaze is subject to 'a fractal rupture'; the original significations attached to a proper name or subject become attached to an apparatus instead. The human face can already be seen as a gestalt figure detached from an animal muzzle. Modifications unnecessary for a culturally acceptable face, however, such as the proper dimensions of a smile that avoids becoming a grimace. Tahara shows how that rates of facial it he can be affected by framing and lighting effects to break the original montage and reveal different potentials. His portraits therefore tend towards becomings of various kinds, 'non human, animal, vegetable, mineral, cosmic'(248), and these in turn constitute 'prospective unconscious dimensions'. Examples of framing include rounding off the angles 'in an effect of fuzzification', using mirrors, imposing other frames on the face or person, using 'quadranglar objects' or a rectangle of light, or combinations of these procedures. We can even see the 'nesting of frames' demonstrating 'stages of fractalization', with layers or branches overlaying and enveloping persons. Result can be 'generalised disruption'or a particular kind of static petrification. Sometimes the light cuts the face vertically, or renders the face as a series of vertical strips: this cut is often a straight line, or can be multiplied into a series of columns. Rarely, the cut is horizontal, which 'brings to mind a musical score cut vertically by a stave'. Further deterritorialization involves making a small part of the face emerge from a larger dark mass; decentring a focal distance, sometimes with cigarette smoke for example, or blurring both face and background. There is a You Tube collection of some of the portraits here Meanwhile, try these:   Having deterritorialized and cut out, a new assemblage of enunciation can be developed, in pursuit of an aesthetic goal. For example, a portrait shows one eye visible in the light with just a glimmer of the other one in the shadow, in a 'quasi-hallucinatory fashion'(249). The invisible eye can be depicted metonymically by a small trace of white. This complementary relation produces 'the existential effect of being-seen-by-the-portrait', apparently much admired by surrealism. Could be this one (apparently, this is Boltanski, but not the photo that Guattari actually refers to):  This
is another one which might be it (
below). Guattari talks this up
rather: 'the window at which Boltanski
appears itself encompasses other
windows, and these three stages of
fractalization by the nesting of frames
then find themselves prolonged by the
multitude of layers and branches that
seem to envelop the person represented
in American shot' (248) [note seven
explains the 'American shot' as 'a term
from French film criticism that refers
to a framing of the character in ¾
length medium long shot' (284).]
 This relation between the interior and the photograph can also produce 'an autonomous, abyssally fractalized gaze'. Representation is animated and hollowed out. In the example, a portrait of Arman [which I can't find], a complementary relationship appears between his beard and a sculpture in the right background, his eye in shadow and an 'eye window protected by bars'. Other elements have the same effect—eyes obscured by a bar of shadow, half closed eyes with light playing on the eyelids, the light on the frames of a person's spectacles which are 'substituted for the brightness of his gaze',other light effects on glasses or eyes, or a way in which the iris or cornea 'becomes the seat of the omission of a light-gaze'(250). So normal sense is fractured, an 'existential transfer of enunciation is set off', and a portrait captures the gaze. Barthes uses terms like stadium as opposed to punctum, where the stadium is the conventional coded signification and the punctum is the '"accident which pricks me"'. The punctum becomes a metonym for a wider form of rupture, especially if it becomes a 'stigmata punctum', affecting our whole notion of time. However, this 'stubbornness of facticity' only affects some cases like the portrait of Barthes' dead mother, that provokes a whole memory. Tahara has different concerns, not to establish the identity of the subject, nor in deliberately changing the operations of signification. Instead, 'attested faciality' can even interfere with contextual clues provided by the photograph and thus bring into play 'deterritorialized universes of existential reference'. However, faciality has always had a deterritorialized function—the face of Christ haunts 'western capitalist subjectivity', the faces of US presidents appear on the dollar bill [shades of ATP]. There is always 'existential substance' in any signification, as well as formal sense [somehow, this shows the prevalence of 'deterritorialized faciality' in all signification]. Whatever appears as a sensible quality, a gestalt or even an abstract problematic, 'always does so as an enunciative nucleus incarnated in a face'[doubtful]. This applies to voices, which are also 'predisposed by this kind of non discursive faciality' (251). As a result, whatever appear as a simple 'present to itself' also features 'an absolutely different present'[not much different from Derrida arguing against Husserl that any language implies an other, or, for that matter, Husserl on the need for an other to limit subjectivity—a big theme in Deleuze eg in Logic of Sense]. This is not the 'big Other' of Lacan, but a different kind of alterity, 'modulated by the big and the small terms of history and by the mutation of technological phyla'[Christ knows what he means here, a more concrete other which can be massively generalized or local according to the importance given to it by history? How on earth could technological phyla produce different sorts of other? Communication technology?] It would be wrong to consider photography as a dated medium compared to cinema or video [which implies it is communication technology that he means]. The photograph above all other forms show the 'existential temporality of the machines of representation'—not as overloaded and talkative as other media, not peddling dominant enunciation to close down 'the free processes of subjectification', but rather allowing a certain freedom for 'the powers of partial temporalization'[that is making you realize the effects of time? Making you realize that something real once did exist?]. [He also thinks the comic strip can do this]. Overall, Tahara and others have developed diversity and play in the 'machinic components of the "armed" gaze'.The photographer is subjectively effaced. Moholy-Nagy, earlier, had developed this idea to outline eight types of gaze: 'abstract, exact,rapid,slow,intensified,penetrative, simultaneous and distorted'[this is referenced by Sontag 1973 On Photography]. Again, the portrait has been 'deterritorialized and desubjectified'. Instead we have a 'processsual faciality' that takes part in a project of staging or 'landscapifying', offering certain traits to the enunciator [who is the spectator after all?]. Two examples follow, with the first relating to Tahara's portrait of Kounelis [apparently 'two discs of raw light break away from the eyes, literally tearing the gaze towards us. They echo an equally rounded glimmer of light {on the right hand side of the face}. Consequently it is the whole photograph that becomes an eye]. The second one goes back to Arman where a white globule imposed on the nostril resonates with our other circles and traces to counterpoint the absent eye and to the photo which faces him, the sculpture.] In another example, two white globules appear from overexposing white shirt buttons, and relating to a map of Europe with large pins stuck in it. In another case two large lampshades have taken the place of eyes, and in yet another one two particular forms of light at the bottom of the photograph look like 'two capsule satellites'[apparently this suggestion of extra meaning from patterns of light is known as a 'type of "parasiting"'(252). Apparently Tahara told Guattari that first of all he has to understand what's going on in a gaze even before he takes a photo, and Guattari sees this as being able to 'free oneself from the superimposed significations that are imposed on the facialitarian landscape as if by themselves, it is to allow oneself to be dominated by the other gazes that organize themselves before your eyes'. Tahara photos offer instead 'multiple fractal cracks', that do not close off interpretative sequences. Instead, these can be reiterated indefinitely and 'emptily'[compare with the empty signifier?]. They can be 'new existential stases...new lines of sense and new universes of reference'. There are 'partial nuclei of enunciation' and an 'existential taking body' [sic], and these connect with all sorts of part objects transversally. In turn, the 'scopic drive' can be connected to other constellations of interest and desire. Although Tahara attaches proper names to his portraits, he does more than just represent people and denote an identity or offer a connoted message. The proper names should be seen really as 'notes of a musicality that everywhere exceeds them'. Bodies are deterritorialized and are transferred to us immediately and directly, appearing 'without limit and without organs': the proper names therefore are only an index for many other effects. 'Cracks in the street' This is a paper delivered at a conference, originally about discourse and then the 'text of the state', but he decides in the end to stick to the idea of discursivity. Discourse is 'a trajectory', or wandering, featuring various encounters, or the 'immobile peregrination' (253) when we contemplate a Zen Garden, or the pleasure of an autistic child at seeing water drop in a film by Victor -- Ce Gamin-la -- which apparently follows the experiments of Deligny, whom we have met before. However such discursivity might indeed depend on particular treatments of the commentators. There is also 'non verbal semiotization' which is increasingly important and nowadays assisted by computers. Overall the discussion can focus on textual discontinuity: 'gaps, ruptures, interstices, slippages, margins, crises, liminal periods,peripheries , frames, silences' (254). The focus is 'a composite memory of three paintings by Balthus on the theme of the street'[I think I have found them on the Web. I think I have arranged them in the right order from earliest at the top]:    In the second example, the perspective is 'thrown out of joint' the canvas is bigger than the characters look more solid. The woman's hair combines with the frame of the shop to produce 'a sort of Chinese ideogram of a red colour'. Her hand can be seen as just hanging there or as grabbing the thigh of the woman in front of her, the one carrying the '20 year old toddler in a sailor's uniform'. Although there are discrepancies, the gestures of the men and women 'respond to each other head on...like the front and the reverse of a new race of androgynous beings'. All of the relationships are enigmatic, connected by gazes which are often empty and disconnected. This leads Guattari to see 'an imperious occupation of space ...a radar- like system of surveillance, through which the hegemony of a seeing without a subject, without any object, with no purpose, predominates. A sort of panoptic supergeo'. The rather stylized setting only emphasizes the effects. [I must say that my attention was also drawn to what others have called the 'sexual struggle' going on in the left foreground] The third version has a more 'molecular treatment of plastic elements', a gradualized topology' which also serves to 'project us into an irreversible mutation of the universe'(255). The characters are smaller. It could be a theatre but also 'a zen composition for the city, associating living and inanimate forms'. The gazes are unfocused and the eyes blurred. Sightless windows encircle the scene. What we get from these paintings is 'the irreducible polyversity of the components of expression' to produce an aesthetic effect. These components are loaded with sense and recognizable forms, others carry history and cultural messages, while still others are 'a-signifying components that rest on the plane of lines of the Affects of colour' Simple hermeneutics or semiotic cannot reduce this heterogeneity, there is no resolution of the different elements of aesthetic discursivity. It is another example of how it is time to resist 'the plague of the signifier' (256). In the first paintings, the signifier 'has no ontological priority over the signified' [it makes no attempt to explain the objects?] . The painting has been produced 'in the manner of the early Italians' so it has 'cultural connotations', an 'aura of the archaic', and that also awakens affect. Where shall we find 'a signifying caesura' that generates sense? [As in classic structural analysis, presumably the split between signifier and signified]. We can only suggest one if we can definitively 'keep the functors of expression and the functors of content separate' [that is assume some objective content to be definitivey labelled?], but in this case they are 'all participate in the same deterritorialized formalism, as the Danish linguist Hjemslev had postulated'. Aesthetic discursivity involves an active heterogenesis between different registers, enacted by operators, 'concrete machines' which both dissociate and gather matters of expression and make them polyphonic as in Bakhtin. These machines can also transversalise these matters, shift between the levels of deterritorialized forms and processes, where the latter are abstract machines. This is the 'existentializing function' of aesthetics which involves a 'suspension of speech' (257), " a non discursive mode of expression" [quoting P Klossowski, Balthus's brother]. Images do not run in a sequence like speech and can therefore ignore time [like photos?]. They can also show how things in the foreground are related to those in the background on the same surface. However, enunciation about pictorial expression makes it discursive again. We have to find 'concrete operators' to help us pass between discourse and pictorial expression. Klossowski suggests that painting can allude to a memory of being outside of coordinates of space and time. It is like the problem in Heidegger of thinking of Being without changing it into a specific being: for him that showed that there is no easy solution to explaining existence, only constant questions, equilibrium followed by flight, proliferations, cracks and gaps. In the second version of the painting we find a 'phatic operator', which disrupts form and perceptual schema to produce 'new enunciative cutouts'. The gesticulations are exaggerated and the characters seem like they are stuck on. This serves to break with the internal logic of the painting to 'make signs to, to interpellate the spectator'. The characters seem to try to drag us into the scene [especially the sexual assault?]. We are required to become clairvoyants [I would say voyeurs]. Our own gaze is captured. That helps link the gaze machine in the painting and the unconscious processes triggered in us. The result is 'a curious trans human, trans machinic relation of intersubjectivity' (258). This link arises both from expression and contents acting together to become 'ostensive bearers of a message'. There is also 'a threatening tonality' which threatens the system of gazes. This is because the precariousness of the apparatus reminds us of our own 'ancestral fear of fragmentation and dismembering'. We see the cracking of structures of sense so the painting takes on this fear and then relays it back to us. However, paradoxically, this can actually come to guarantee our own 'existential consistency'[a kind of realization that full understanding and consistency is impossible except as some kind of accomplishment?]. So we have seen various 'processual operators to enslave our vision'[where enslavement refers to an attempt to program it, with a deliberate connection to computer software --master and slave programs and all that?]. In the second painting we see two principal operators: cutting out, the disarticulation of motifs and the construction of 'tableaux vivants'(259); the composition of lines and colours that is asignifying, with the consequence that we can now see 'constellation of existential universes' composed of the dance of forms and the superegoistic pole of petrified gazes. We see these combined and transformed in the third painting. There is an exaggerated cutting out of forms, although these are now shifted into the background. Instead of molar forms of cracking, we have more molecular forms such as the 'powdery grain of pictorial matter'. It is no longer the interrelationship of gazes among the characters, but the whole painting becomes a gaze. When we grasp this we are 'implanting a "becoming Balthus" at the heart of our ways of seeing the world'. Aesthetics can offer this sort of subjective mutation, although each assemblage has to be grasped concretely. The third painting makes this passing of meaning or transversality, or the 'transfer of subjectivity' the central operation, its real subject. It works through 'molecular fracturing of forms' and corresponding intensification of colour even though the palate is restricted. This visible but vague fracture can be understood in terms of fractal objects. [fractal sets are 'indefinitely extensible through internal homothety' (260)], and this helps us break with fixed identities. The process might be applied to both states of the psyche and the socius—so ego splitting, various complexes and so on can be better understood than by Freudian or structuralist analysis. The transitional object can be rethought, for example because it involves a 'transition of reference' from one particular constellation of universes to another. Back to the painting, we can see it triggering a fractal impulse transforming and producing a kind of cascade, between spatial dimensions and other temporal and incorporeal ones. In particular, there are three points. First, the painting 'permits an escape from systems of representation closed in on themselves—they become 'a "strange attractor" of transversality'. Secondly, the painting offers 'processuality','a constant repositioning of its ontological references' that will in turn modify existential dimensions and turn them in the direction of 'permanent resingularization'. Thirdly, this process shows how subjectivity is self produced from this process and reprocessing. There are political and ethical consequences. We might take this is an example of how to escape from constraining discursivity, capitalist subjectification, and replace it with multi centred heterogeneous polyocal approaches. We will focus on the signified, the iconic, the non-digital and thus liberate 'molecular populations' (261). These possibilities have been ignored in various kinds of positivism. Linguistic structuralism tries to confine the existential function to a box called 'pragmatics', less important than syntax and semantics. However, what this process does is to constitute existential territories, together with various refrains rooted in ethology, and even facial compositions and all the various objects found in the psyche. We should see these as 'possible procedures of fractalization', as part of the recomposition of existential territories. Only then will we be able to see how particular modalities of subjectification can develop in their own right. Music could offer a privilege terrain for this sort of process. We can examine the history of how voices and noises have been smoothed by various instrumental and scriptural machines as well as 'new assemblages of collective listening. The 'new sonorous matter' can be seen in terms of a fractal breach of these processes, a new processuality. We would need to explain this in detail, exploring the emergence of tonal music, scales with equal intervals, which break with a natural harmonics, how the scales developed [then there is a nice example of how semi tones like C and F were originally seen as satanic leading to new equalized scales]. The whole story will involve little differences accumulating, produced by an underlying 'molecular fractalization' (262). back to Deleuze page. At last!! , |