markov-go/deluze.txt

A Thousand Plateaus
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    A THOUSAND
      PLATEAUS
      Capitalism and
      Schizophrenia

         Gilles Deleuze
         Felix Guattari
Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi




       University of Minnesota Press
                Minneapolis
                  London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully
acknowledges translation assistance provided for this
book by the French Ministry of Culture and by the
National Endowment for the Humanities, an
independent federal agency.

Copyright © 1987 by the University of Minnesota Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Eleventh printing 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deleuze, Gilles.
     [Mille plateaux. English]
     A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia/Gilles
  Deleuze, Felix Guattari; translation and foreword by Brian
  Massumi.
  p. cm.
     Translation of: Mille plateaux, v. 2 of Capitalisme et
  schizophrénie.
     A companion volume to Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and
     schizophrenia.
     Bibliography: p.
     Includes index.
     ISBN 0-8166-1401-6
     ISBN 0-8166-1402-4 (pbk.)
     1. Philosophy. I. Guattari, Félix. II. Title
  B77.D413 1987
  194-dcl9                                                    87-18623

Originally published as Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et
Schizophrénie © 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.

Photo of Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor,
reproduced by permission of G. Ricordi, Milan, copyright © 1970
by G. Ricordi E.G. SPA; photo of Fernand Léger, Men in the
Cities, 1919, copyright © 1987 by ARS, N.Y./SPADEM; photo of
Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922, reproduced by permission
of The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., copyright © 1987 by
Cosmopress, Geneva.

The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
                           Contents




Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy Brian Massumi       ix
Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments                     xvi
Author's Note                                                     xx
 1. Introduction: Rhizome                                        3
    Root, radicle, and rhizome—Issues concerning books—The One and
    the Multiple—Tree and rhizome—The geographical directions,
    Orient, Occident, America—The misdeeds of the tree—What is a
    plateau?
 2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?                                 26
    Neurosis and psychosis—For a theory of multiplicities—Packs—The
    unconscious and the molecular
 3. 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think
    It Is?)                                                        39
    Strata—Double articulation (segmentarity)—What constitutes the
    unity of a stratum—Milieus—The diversity within a stratum: forms
    and substances, epistrata and parastrata—Content and expression—
    The diversity among strata—The molar and the molecular—Abstract
    machine and assemblage: their comparative states—Metastrata
 4. November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics                75
    The order-word—Indirect discourse—Order-words, acts, and incor-
                                  V
                            vi D CONTENTS

   poreal transformations—Dates—Content and expression, and their
   respective variables—The aspects of the assemblage—Constants, var-
   iables, and continuous variation—Music—Style—Major and minor
   —Becoming—Death and escape, figure and metamorphosis
5. 5 87 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs               111
   The signifying despotic regime—The passional subjective regime—
   The two kinds of delusion and the problem of psychiatry—The
   ancient history of the Jewish people—The line of flight and the
   prophet—The face, turning away, and betrayal—The Book—The sys-
   tem of subjectivity: consciousness and passion, Doubles—Domestic
   squabble and office squabble—Redundancy—The figures of deter-
   ritorialization—Abstract machine and diagram—The generative, the
   transformational, the diagrammatic, and the machinic
6. November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body
   Without Organs?                                             149
   The body without organs, waves and intensities—The egg—
   Masochism, courtly love, and the Tao—The strata and the plane of
   consistency—Antonin Artaud—The art of caution—The three-body
   problem—Desire, plane, selection, and composition
 7. Year Zero: Faciality                                              167
    White wall, black hole—The abstract machine of faciality—Body,
    head, and face—Face and landscape—The courtly novel—Theorems
    of deterritorialization—The face and Christ—The two figures of the
    face: frontal view and profile, the turning away—Dismantling the face
 8. 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"                     192
    The novella and the tale: the secret—The three lines—Break, crack,
    and rupture—The couple, the double, and the clandestine
9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity                             208
   Segmentarity, primitive and civilized—The molar and the molec-
   ular—Fascism and totalitarianism—The segmented line and the
   quantum flow—Gabriel Tarde—Masses and classes—The abstract
   machine: mutation and overcoding—What is a power center?—The
   three lines and the dangers of each—Fear, clarity, power, and death
10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-
    Imperceptible . ..                                            232
    Becoming—Three aspects of sorcery: multiplicity; the Anomalous, or
    the Outsider; transformations—Individuation and Haecceity: five
    o'clock in the evening—Longitude, latitude, and the plane of
    consistency—The two planes, or the two conceptions of the plane—
                             CONTENTS D vii

    Becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, becoming-
    molecular: zones of proximity—Becoming imperceptible—The
    secret—Majority, minority, minoritarian—The minoritarian charac-
    ter and dissymmetry of becoming: double becoming—Point and line,
    memory and becoming—Becoming and block—The opposition
    between punctual systems and multilinear systems—Music, painting,
    and becomings—The refrain—Theorems of deterritorialization con-
    tinued—Becoming versus imitation
11. 1837: Of the Refrain                                            310
    In the dark, at home, toward the world—Milieus and rhythm—The
    placard and the territory—Expression as style: rhythmic faces,
    melodic landscapes—Bird song—Territoriality, assemblages, and
    interassemblages—The territory and the earth, the Natal—The prob-
    lem of consistency—Machinic assemblage and abstract machine—
    Classicism and milieus—Romanticism, the territory, the earth, and
    the people—Modern art and the cosmos—Form and substance, forces
    and material—Music and refrains; the great and the small refrain
12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine                   351
    The two poles of the State—The irreducibility and exteriority of the
    war machine—The man of war—Minor and major: the minor
    sciences—The body and esprit de corps—Thought, the State, and
    nomadology—First aspect: the war machine and nomad space—
    Second aspect: the war machine and the composition of people, the
    nomad number—Third aspect: the war machine and nomad affects
    —Free action and work—The nature of assemblages: tools and signs,
    arms and jewelry—Metallurgy, itinerancy, and nomadism—The
    machinic phylum and technological lineages—Smooth space, stri-
    ated space, holey space—The war machine and war: the complexities
    of the relation
13. 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture                                     424
    The paleolithic State—Primitive groups, towns, States, and world-
    wide organizations—Anticipate, ward off—The meaning of the word
    "last" (marginalism)—Exchange and stock—Capture: landownership
    (rent), fiscal organization (taxation), public works (profit)—The prob-
    lem of violence—The forms of the State and the three ages of Law—
    Capitalism and the State—Subjection and enslavement—Issues in
    axiomatics
14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated                        474
    The technological model (textile)—The musical model—The mari-
                           viii D CONTENTS

   time model—The mathematical model (multiplicities)—The physi-
   cal model—The aesthetic model (nomad art)
15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines        501
   Notes                                                    517
   Bibliography (compiled by Brian Massumi)                 579
   Index                                                    587
   List of Illustrations                                    611
                  Translator's Foreword:
                 Pleasures of Philosophy
                      Brian Massumi




This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub-
sets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to
approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to
music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That
presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can
be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn
from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the
humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would
listen to a record?1
    "Philosophy, nothing but philosophy."2 Of a bastard line.
    The annals of official philosophy are populated by "bureaucrats of pure
reason" who speak in "the shadow of the despot" and are in historical com-
plicity with the State.3 They invent "a properly spiritual... absolute State that
... effectively functions in the mind." Theirs is the discourse of sovereign
judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by "good" sense, of rocklike iden-
tity, "universal" truth, and (white male) justice. "Thus the exercise of their
thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant sig-
nifications, and with the requirements of the established order."4
    Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles of his earliest
                                       ix
                        x D TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants. "What got me by dur-
ing that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-
fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I
imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child
that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous."5 Hegel is
absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.6 To Kant he
dedicated an affectionate study of "an enemy." Yet much of positive value
came of Deleuze's flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of
thinkers who were tied by no direct descendance but were united in their
opposition to the State philosophy that would nevertheless accord them
minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza,
Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a "secret link constituted by the critique
of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of
forces and relations, the denunciation of power."7 Deleuze's first major
statements written in his own voice, Difference et repetition (1968) and
Logique du sens (1969), cross-fertilized that line of "nomad" thought with
contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker revolt of May 1968
and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the intellectual in society8 led
him to disclaim the "ponderous academic apparatus"9 still in evidence in
those works. However, many elements of the "philosophy of difference" they
elaborated were transfused into a continuing collaboration, of which A
 Thousand Plateaus is the most recent product.
    Felix Guattari is a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political activ-
ist. He has worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental psy-
chiatric clinic founded by Lacanian analyst Jean Oury. Guattari himself
was among Lacan's earliest trainees, and although he never severed his ties
with Lacan's Freudian School the group therapy practiced at La Borde
took him in a very different direction. The aim at La Borde was to abolish
the hierarchy between doctor and patient in favor of an interactive group
dynamic that would bring the experiences of both to full expression in such
a way as to produce a collective critique of the power relations in society as
a whole. "The central perspective i s . . . to promote human relations that do
not automatically fall into roles or stereotypes but open onto fundamental
relations of a metaphysical kind that bring out the most radical and basic
alienations of madness or neurosis"10 and channel them into revolutionary
practice. Guattari collaborated beginning in 1960 on group projects dedi-
cated to developing this radical "institutional psychotherapy,"11 and later
entered an uneasy alliance with the international antipsychiatry move-
ment spearheaded by R.D. Laing in England and Franco Basaglia in Italy.12
As Lacanian schools of psychoanalysis gained ground against psychiatry,
the contractual Oedipal relationship between the analyst and the transfer-
ence-bound analysand became as much of a target for Guattari as the legal
                       TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD D xi

bondage of the institutionalized patient in the conventional State hospital.
He came to occupy the same position in relation to psychoanalysis as he
had all along in relation to the parties of the left: an ultra-opposition within
the opposition. His antihierarchical leanings made him a precursor to the
events of May 1968 and an early partisan of the social movements that
grew from them, including feminism and the gay rights movement. ^Anti-
Oedipus (1972),u his first book with Deleuze, gave philosophical weight to
his convictions and created one of the intellectual sensations of postwar
France with its spirited polemics against State-happy or pro-party versions
of Marxism and school-building strains of psychoanalysis, which sepa-
rately and in various combinations represented the dominant intellectual
currents of the time (in spite of the fundamentally anarchist nature of the
spontaneous popular uprisings that had shaken the world in 1968). "The
most tangible result of Anti-Oedipus was that it short-circuited the connec-
tion between psychoanalysis and the far left parties," in which he and
Deleuze saw the potential for a powerful new bureaucracy of analytic
reason.15
   For many French intellectuals, the hyperactivism of post-May gave way
to a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion (Tel Quel) or political
conservatism (the Nouveaux Philosophes) in a foreshadowing of the
Reagan eighties. Deleuze and Guattari never recanted. Nor did they sim-
ply revive the polemics. A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written over a seven-
year period, was billed as a sequel to Anti-Oedipus and shares its subtitle,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. But it constitutes a very different project. It
is less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative "nomad"
thought called for in Anti-Oedipus.
   "State philosophy" is another word for the representational thinking
that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered
an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands
of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory gener-
ally. As described by Deleuze,16 it reposes on a double identity: of the think-
ing subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own
presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts,
and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a
shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Rep-
resentational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspon-
dence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of
judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms
is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought
its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are
limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties
possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and
                      xii D TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a
term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or
gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = noiy. Iden-
tity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for
order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally
been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the
State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth cen-
tury with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become
the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States.
The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by
Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the
nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle"
(truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this
principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would
be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"17—each mind an
analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the
State. Prussian mind-meld.18 More insidious than the well-known practi-
cal cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning mili-
tary funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the
form of representational thinking itself, that "properly spiritual absolute
State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social
fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and
Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name "phallogocentrism" (what
the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In
the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe it
as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose
spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class).
    "Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered
interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose
on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division
between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being;
it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds.
The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislat-
ing subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which
their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secon-
dary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing
state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of
reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the
brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain
encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a
juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The
edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations
                      TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD D xiii

encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the
circumstances."19 Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of
circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application
of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction.
The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad
thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x = noty (I = I
= not you) with an open equation:.. . + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick +
window + . . .). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components,
reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank,
it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthe-
sizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hin-
dering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The modus
operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is
negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside
to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls.
    The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space.
Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is
confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of
that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad
space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move
to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an
open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself
in a closed space (hold the fort).
   A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of
thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad
thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called
it the "gay science." Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice
Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside thought."20
In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms "pragmatics" and
"schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network
strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is
that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of phi-
losophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philo-
sophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their
respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.21 On a strictly
formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the
smooth spaces.22 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more
inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form
of philosophy.
    Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Pla-
teaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you
cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you
                      xiv D TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They
follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go
about your daily business.
   A Thousand Plateaus is conceived as an open system.23 It does not pre-
tend to have the final word. The authors' hope, however, is that elements of
it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into the mel-
ody of their everyday lives.
   Each "plateau" is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a
variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplace-
ment, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors
are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an
open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word
"plateau" comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in
which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West's orgas-
mic orientation.24 In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when cir-
cumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not
automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sus-
tained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can
be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive
states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. Each
section of A Thousand Plateaus tries to combine conceptual bricks in such
a way as to construct this kind of intensive state in thought. The way the
combination is made is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call
consistency—not in the sense of a homogeneity, but as a holding together
of disparate elements (also known as a "style").25 A style in this sense, as a
dynamic holding together or mode of composition, is not something lim-
ited to writing. Filmmakers, painters, and musicians have their styles,
mathematicians have theirs, rocks have style, and so do tools, and technol-
ogies, and historical periods, even—especially—punctual events. Each
section is dated, because each tries to reconstitute a dynamism that has
existed in other mediums at other times. The date corresponds to the point
at which that particular dynamism found its purest incarnation in matter,
the point at which it was freest from interference from other modes and
rose to its highest degree of intensity. That never lasts more than a flash,
because the world rarely leaves room for uncommon intensity, being in
large measure an entropic trashbin of outworn modes that refuse to die.
Section 12, for example, the "Treatise on Nomadology," is dated 1227 A.D.
because that is when the nomad war machine existed for a moment in its
pure form on the vacant smooth spaces of the steppes of Inner Asia.
   The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises from
the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau to the
next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a
                       TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD D xv

concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next
appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious.
Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.
   Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book
entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting or
politics. The authors steal from other disciplines with glee, but they are
more than happy to return the favor. Deleuze's own image for a concept is
not a brick, but a "tool box."26 He calls his kind of philosophy "pragmatics"
because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system
of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you
don't, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand
envelops an energy of prying.
   The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry
open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of
the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterim-
ages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating
a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest num-
ber, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous.
Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.
   The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts
does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possi-
ble to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?
   The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that hap-
pens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off
buying a record.
                Notes on the Translation
                          and
                  Acknowledgments




   AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment
in Deleuze and Guattari). L 'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect
and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage
from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an
augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection
(Spinoza's affectio) is each such State considered as an encouner between
the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its
broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies).
   DRAW. In A Thousand Plateaus, to draw is an act of creation. What is
drawn (the Body without Organs, the plane of consistency, a line of flight)
does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word tracer captures this
better: It has all the graphic connotations of "to draw" in English, but can
also mean to blaze a trail or open a road. "To trace" (d'ecalquer), on the
other hand, is to copy something from a model.
   FLIGHT/ESCAPE. Both words translate fuite, which has a different range
of meanings than either of the English terms. Fuite covers not only the act
of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the
distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no rela-
tion to flying.
                                      xvi
       NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS D xvii

   MILIEU. In French, milieu means "surroundings," "medium" (as in
chemistry), and "middle." In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari,
"milieu" should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings.
   PLANE. The word plan designates both a "plane" in the geometrical sense
and a "plan." The authors use it primarily in the first sense. Where both
meanings seem to be present (as in discussions of the plan d'organisatori)
"plan(e)" has been used in the translation.
   POWER. Two words for "power" exist in French, puissance and pouvoir.
In Deleuze and Guattari, they are associated with very different concepts
(although the terminological distinction is not consistently observed).
Puissance refers to a range of potential. It has been defined by Deleuze as a
"capacity for existence," "a capacity to affect or be affected," a capacity to
multiply connections that may be realized by a given "body" to varying
degrees in different situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or
fullness of existence (or a degree on such a scale), analogous to the capacity
of a number to be raised to a higher "power." It is used in the French trans-
lation of Nietzsche's term "will to power." Like its English counterpart, it
has an additional mathematical usage, designating the number of elements
in a finite or infinite set. Here, puissance pertains to the virtual (the plane
of consistency), pouvoir to the actual (the plane of organization). The
authors use pouvoir in a sense very close to Foucault's, as an instituted and
reproducible relation offeree, a selective concretization of potential. Both
puissance and pouvoir have been translated here as "power," since the dis-
tinction between the concepts is usually clear from the context. The French
terms have been added in parentheses where confusion might arise, and in
occasional passages where puissance is rendered as "potential."
   PROCESS/PROCEEDING. The authors employ two words normally trans-
lated as "process." Processus in their usage is the more general of the two,
covering both the stratified and destratified dimensions of an occurrence.
Proces pertains only to the stratification. In standard French, proces also
means "trial" (as in the title of the Kafka novel). Deleuze and Guattari
exploit this polysemy as a way of emphasizing the role of organizations of
social power and regimes of signs in operations constitutive of the subject,
or proces de subjectivation. Proces is usually (once again, there is slippage in
their usage) translated as "proceeding," despite the occasional awkward-
ness this produces in English, in an attempt to preserve both associations: a
process, or way of proceeding, and a legal proceeding, or trial. Processus is
always "process."
   SELF. Both Moi and Soi have usually been translated as "Self," with the
French in brackets. Soi is the self in its broadest sense, but as a neuter third-
person pronoun implies an impersonality at the basis of the self. Moi is a
      xviii D NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

more restricted concept: the "me" as subject of enunciation for the "I" (je)
as subj ect of the statement. It is also the French term for the Freudian ego.
   SIGNIFIANCE/INTERPRETANCE. I have followed the increasingly com-
mon practice of importing signifiance and interpretanceinto English with-
out modification. In Deleuze and Guattari these terms refer respectively to
the syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes of language as a "signifying
regime of signs." They are borrowed from Benveniste ("signifying capac-
ity" and "interpretative capacity" are the English translations used in
Benveniste's work).
   STATEMENT. Enonce (often "utterance") has been translated here as
"statement," in keeping with the choice of the English translators of
Foucault, to whose conception Deleuze and Guattari's is closest. "Enunci-
ation" is used for enonciation.
   TRAIT. The word trait has a range of meanings not covered by any single
word in English. Literally, it refers to a graphic drawing, and to the act of
drawing a line. Abstractly, it is the purely graphic element. Figuratively, it
is an identifying mark (a feature, or trait in the English sense), or any act
constituting a mark or sign. In linguistics, "distinctive features" (traits
distinctifs or traits pertinents) are the elementary units of language that
combine to form a phoneme. Trait also refers to a projectile, especially an
arrow, and to the act of throwing a projectile. Here, "trait" has been
retained in all but narrowly linguistic contexts.
   GENDER-BIASED USAGE has been largely eliminated through plural-
ization or the use of male and female pronouns. However, where Deleuze
and Guattari seem deliberately to be using "man" to designate a socially
constructed, patriarchal standard of human behavior applied to both men
and women, the masculine generic has been retained.


   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I would like to express my gratitude to the
National Endowment for the Humanities and the French Ministry of Cul-
ture for their generous assistance, without which this translation would not
have been possible, and to the authors for their patience in answering my
questions. Winnie Berman, Ken Dean, Nannie Doyle, Shoshana Felman,
Jim Fleming, Robert Hurley, Fredric Jameson, Sylvere Lotringer, Susan
McClary, Giorgio Passerone, Paul Patton, Dana Polan, Mary Quaintance,
Michael Ryan, Lianne Sullivan, Susan Yazijian, and Caveh Zahedi pro-
vided much-appreciated aid and advice. Glenn Hendler likes to see his
name in print.
   I consulted the following translations: "Rhizome" (first version), trans.
Paul Foss and Paul Patton, Ideology and Consciousness, no. 8 (Spring 1981,
      NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS D xix

pp. 49-71); "Rhizome" (final version), trans. John Johnston in Deleuze
and Guattari, On the Line (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983); "One or Sev-
eral Wolves?" (first version), trans. Mark Seem, Semiotext(e), vol. 2, no. 3,
pp. 137-147 (1977); "How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs" (first
version, abridged), trans. Suzanne Guerlac, Semiotext(e) vol. 4, no. 1
(1981), pp. 265-270.
   Portions of this translation have appeared previously. "Treatise on
Nomadology" was published as a separate book entitled Nomad Machine
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Extracts from "Becoming-Intense ..."
appeared under the title "Becoming-Woman" in Subjects/Objects, no. 3
(Spring 1985), pp. 24-32, and from "The Smooth and the Striated" under
the title "Nomad Art" mArtandText, no. 19(Oct.-Nov. 1985), pp. 16-23.
                        Authors' Note




This book is the companion volume to Anti-Oedipus (paperback ed., Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1983). Together they make up Capitalism and
Schizophrenia.
   It is composed not of chapters but of "plateaus." We will try to explain
why later on (and also why the texts are dated). To a certain extent, these
plateaus may be read independently of one another, except the conclusion,
which should be read at the end.
A Thousand Plateaus
This page intentionally left blank
               1. Introduction: Rhizome




The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several,
there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that
came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have
assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our
own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecog-
nizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us
act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say
the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To
reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no
longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves.
Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
   A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed
matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a
subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their
relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological move-
ments. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or
segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of
deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on
                                       3
                       4 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on
the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable
speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind,
and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet
what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has
been elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic assem-
blage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signi-
fying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side
facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organ-
ism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate,
and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a
name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a
book? There are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered,
their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on
a "plane of consistency" assuring their selection. Here, as elsewhere, the
units of measure are what is essential: quantify writing. There is no differ-
ence between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book
also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection
with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We
will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look
for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in con-
nection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in
which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and
with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists
only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little
machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a
war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract
machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting
literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other
machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in
order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordi-
nary bureaucratic machine . . . (What if one became animal or plant
through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first
through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage.
It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.
    All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities,
lines of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various
types, bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the
plane of consistency, and in each case the units of measure. Stratometers,
deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence: Not only do
these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as
always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with
                        INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 5

signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to
come.
    A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the
world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as
noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book).
The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific
to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the
book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. How could the law
of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division
between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we
encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in
the most "dialectical" way possible, what we have before us is the most clas-
sical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature
doesn't work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple,
lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous
one. Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a tap-
root, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiri-
tual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the
One that becomes two, then of the two that become four. . . Binary logic is
the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as "advanced" as lin-
guistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains
wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical
trees, which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much
as to say that this system of thought has never reached an understanding of
multiplicity: in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must
assume a strong principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt pos-
sible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four,
or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the piv-
otal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn't get us very far.
The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal rela-
tionships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no bet-
ter understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates
in the object, the other in the subject. Binary logic and biunivocal relation-
ships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian
interpretation of Schreber's case), linguistics, structuralism, and even
information science.
   The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book,
to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the principal
root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite
multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing
development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root,
but the root's unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask
                       6 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by
demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive
totality. Take William Burroughs's cut-up method: the folding of one text
onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like
a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under
consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity contin-
ues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can
also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus. Most modern meth-
ods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid
in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of
totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic,
dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is
offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. The abortionists of unity
are indeed angel makers, doctores angelici, because they affirm a properly
angelic and superior unity. Joyce's words, accurately described as having
"multiple roots," shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language,
only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche's
aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic
unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as
much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dual-
ism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural
reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed
in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. The world
has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes
to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always sup-
plementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos,
but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than
root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being
fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the
world. In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple," difficult as
it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical clever-
ness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always
adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of
sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—
always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always sub-
tracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write
at n - 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhi-
zome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles.
Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be
rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant
life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in
their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their func-
                        INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 7

tions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome
itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all
directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each
other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass,
or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct
feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approxi-
mate characteristics of the rhizome.
    1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhi-
zome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very differ-
ent from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. The linguistic
tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichot-
omy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a
linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very
diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring
into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of dif-
fering status. Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly
within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break
between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to
confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about lan-
guage, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of
assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky's grammaticality, the cate-
gorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a
marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically
correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a
verb phrase (first dichotomy . . .). Our criticism of these linguistic models
is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not
abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects
a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collec-
tive assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social
field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic
chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sci-
ences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating
very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic,
gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any lin-
guistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized
languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a
homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich's words,
"an essentially heterogeneous reality."1 There is no mother tongue, only a
power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.
Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb.
It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train
tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.2 It is always possible to break a language
                       8 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally
different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical
about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome
type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto
other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon
itself, except as a function of impotence.
    3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively
treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to
the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.
Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomulti-
plicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object,
or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object
or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object,
only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in
number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combina-
tion therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). Puppet
strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an
artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another
puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the strings or
rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that its multi-
plicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text.
Granted; but the actor's nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they fall
through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated... . The inter-
play approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to the
Fates or Norns."3 An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimen-
sions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its
connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those
found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When Glenn Gould
speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he
is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece
proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept measuring ele-
ments according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself
become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered
(the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that
domain). We do not have units (unites) of measure, only multiplicities or
varieties of measurement. The notion of unity (unite) appears only when
there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corre-
sponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity
forming the basis for a set of biunivocal relationships between objective
elements or points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary
logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty
dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding).
                        INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 9

The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be
overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and
above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of num-
bers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they
fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of
consistency of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this "plane"
increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities
are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or
deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect
with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of
all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of
dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a sup-
plementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of
flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on
a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of
dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane
of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, his-
torical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.
Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable
speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with
the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to
the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance
or subject. The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. Flat
multiplicities ofn dimensions are asignifying and asubjective. They are
designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives (some couchgrass,
some of a rhizome . ..).
    4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks
separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be
broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old
lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an
animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been
destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to
which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc.,
as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There
is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line
of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie
back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichot-
omy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make
a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will
reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that
restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject—
anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups
                       10 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes,
couchgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad are only the products of an
active and temporary selection, which must be renewed.
   How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterri-
torialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another?
The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but
the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless
deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus.
But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and
orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that
the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion
(mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the
strata—a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on
one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, some-
thing else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, sur-
plus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a
becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of
these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the
reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form
relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever
further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of
two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhi-
zome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signify-
ing. Remy Chauvin expresses it well: "the aparallel evolution of two beings
that have absolutely nothing to do with each other."4 More generally, evolu-
tionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and
descent. Under certain conditions, a virus can connect to germ cells and
transmit itself as the cellular gene of a complex species; moreover, it can
take flight, move into the cells of an entirely different species, but not with-
out bringing with it "genetic information" from the first host (for example,
Benveniste and Todaro's current research on a type C virus, with its double
connection to baboon DNA and the DNA of certain kinds of domestic
cats). Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent
descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhi-
zome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one
already differentiated line to another.5 Once again, there is aparallel evolu-
tion, of the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or cop-
ies of each other (a becoming-baboon in the cat does not mean that the cat
"plays" baboon). We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses
cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. As Francois Jacob says,
transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures,
fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous to
                       INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 11

those of "the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle
Ages."6 Transversal communications between different lines scramble the
genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular,
particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our
polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or
diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-
genealogy.
    The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted
belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the
world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book
assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterri-
torialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world
(if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on
binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature. The
crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon
reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates noth-
ing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is
its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes impercepti-
ble itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its
"aparallel evolution" through to the end. The wisdom of the plants: even
when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome
with something else—with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there
is also an aspect under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do
people, etc.). "Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us."
Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line
of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortu-
ous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate
deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line
consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then
you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish them-
selves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions.
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization,
extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine
covering the entire plane of consistency. "Go first to your old plant and
watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must
have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and
from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is
growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil's weed plants
that are growing in between are yours. Later... you can extend the size of
your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the
way."7 Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many "transforma-
tional multiplicities," even overturning the very codes that structure or
                       12 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and prolif-
erations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.8
    5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not
amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea
of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal
unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure is more
like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate constituents,
while the unity of the product passes into another, transformational and
subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a departure from the repre-
sentative model of the tree, or root—pivotal taproot or fascicles (for exam-
ple, Chomsky's "tree" is associated with a base sequence and represents the
process of its own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the
oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound struc-
ture are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of tree
logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanaly-
sis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized
into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed
within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to
maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious
that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory
and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure
or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates
and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.
    The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a
map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp;
it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map
from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in
contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed
in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between
fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum
opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a
part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimen-
sions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It
can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an
individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived
of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Per-
haps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it
always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhi-
zome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of
flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map
has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes
back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the trac-
                       INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 13

ing always involves an alleged "competence." Unlike psychoanalysis, psy-
choanalytic competence (which confines every desire and statement to a
genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous trac-
ings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure),
schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is
given to it—divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary,
or syntagmatic. (It is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of
the cartography of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content
to make ready-made tracings—Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad
daddy, the bad mommy and the good mommy—while the child makes a
desperate attempt to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst
totally misconstrues.)9 Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a
genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political options for
problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politi-
cally, in other words, with all the force of his or her desire.
    Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps
to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be
traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and
sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of
redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a multipli-
city have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications,
mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attribu-
tions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual diver-
gence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or
outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the trac-
ing should always be put back on the map. This operation and the previous
one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing
reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by
selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other
restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always
creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the
map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and
radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities accord-
ing to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has gen-
erated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing
something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is
so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the trac-
ing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages,
incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis
and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the
unconscious, and the latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies
(it's not surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics).
                        14 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psycho-
analysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING
HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he
began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and
guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building,
then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents' bed,
they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud).
Freud explicitly takes Little Hans's cartography into account, but always
and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. And look what
Melanie Klein did to Little Richard's geopolitical maps: she developed
photos from them, made tracings of them. Strike the pose or follow the
axis, genetic stage or structural destiny—one way or the other, your rhi-
zome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after
every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed,
arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire
moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercus-
sions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts
on desire by external, productive outgrowths.
   That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsym-
metrical, operation. Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots
or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans, studying the
unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the
family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.;
how these lines are blocked, how the child is made to take root in the family,
be photographed under the father, be traced onto the mother's bed; then
how Professor Freud's intervention assures a power takeover by the
signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the
child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the
becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses
must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible
lines of flight. The same applies to the group map: show at what point in the
rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership,
fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only underground,
continuing to make rhizome in the shadows. Deligny's method: map the
gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the
same child, for several different children.10 If it is true that it is of the
essence of the map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausi-
ble that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assum-
ing the necessary precautions are taken (once again, one must avoid any
Manichaean dualism). For example, one will often be forced to take
dead ends, to work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find
a foothold in formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse,
                      INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 15

rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational
operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in
spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, one will bolster oneself
directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and
make new connections. Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing, rhizome-
root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialization. There
exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root
division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome. The coordinates are deter-
mined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics
composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may
form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or
else it is a microscopic element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets rhizome
production going. Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they
can begin to burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a
Kafka novel. An intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory
perception, synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose,
challenging the hegemony of the signifier. In the case of the child, gestural,
mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extri-
cate themselves from the "tracing," that is, from the dominant competence
of the teacher's language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance of
power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky's
syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhi-
zome.11 To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem
to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but
put them to strange new uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing
in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of
arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Noth-
ing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and
aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city
entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility
connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine.
   Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified
matter. What are wrongly called "dendrites" do not assure the connection
of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role
of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic
microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the
brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a
whole uncertain, probabilistic system ("the uncertain nervous system").
Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much
more a grass than a tree. "The axon and the dendrite twist around each
other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the
thorns."12 The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiolo-
                      16 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

gists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on
the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantita-
tive: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term
memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or pho-
tograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or
immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time
after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multipli-
city. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not
that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not
grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term
Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even
if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts.
Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the
instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome.
Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and trans-
lates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, offbeat,
in an "untimely" way, not instantaneously.
   The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating
the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity. If we con-
sider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of opposed segment
for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this kind of segment is a
"link dipole," in contrast to the "unit dipoles" formed by spokes radiating
from a single center.13 Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the
radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplici-
ties. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not
get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with cen-
ters of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized
memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives infor-
mation from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along
preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information
science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of
thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre
Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing "the imagery of
command trees" (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note that
"accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving
arborescent structures privileged status        The arborescent form admits
of topological explanation.... In a hierarchical system, an individual has
only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior.... The channels
of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the
individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place" (signifiance and
 subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has
reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one—of what we call the radicle
                      INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 17

type—because its ostensibly nonhierarchical presentation or statement in
fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An example is the
famous friendship theorem: "If any two given individuals in a society have
precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the
friend of all the others." (Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual
friend is. Who is "the universal friend in this society of couples: the master,
the confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the
initial axioms." Who is this friend of humankind? Is it thep/zz/osopher as
he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity that makes
itself felt only through its absence or subjectivity, saying all the while, I
know nothing, I am nothing?) Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theo-
rems. Such is indeed the principle of roots-trees, or their outcome: the
radicle solution, the structure of Power.14
    To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems,
finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neigh-
bor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals
are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment—such
that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result syn-
chronized without a central agency. Transduction of intensive states
replaces topology, and "the graph regulating the circulation of information
is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical graph.. . . There is no reason for
the graph to be a tree" (we have been calling this kind of graph a map). The
problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n
individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General is
to be found in an acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of
states with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or
guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a
central order. The authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic
multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any centralizing or unifying
automaton as an "asocial intrusion."15 Under these conditions, n is in fact
always n - 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot emphasize that the opposition,
centered-acentered, is valid less as a designation for things than as a mode
of calculation applied to things. Trees may correspond to the rhizome, or
they may burgeon into a rhizome. It is true that the same thing is generally
susceptible to both modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but
not without undergoing a change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an exam-
ple again: it subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchi-
cal graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the
phallus-tree—not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation
and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it
bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the uncon-
scious. Psychoanalysis's margin of maneuverability is therefore very
                        18 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general,
always a leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats
the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic net-
work of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely differ-
ent state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics;
Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an
 "acentered organization of a society of words." For both statements and
desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to
make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the uncon-
scious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is pre-
cisely this production of the unconscious.
      It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western
thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theol-
ogy, ontology, all of philosophy . . . : the root-foundation, Grund, ratine,
fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation;
 the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced
 by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal
 raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire ani-
 mal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the
 steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather
 than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individ-
 ual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to
 closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agri-
 culture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable
 individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals
 derived from a wide range of "clones." Does not the East, Oceania in par-
 ticular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect
 to the Western model of the tree? Andre Haudricourt even sees this as the
 basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of tran-
 scendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God
 who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths
 (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds).16 Transcendence: a specif-
 ically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is
 different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same
 plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the
 other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also
 from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bod-
 ies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or
 the grass. Henry Miller: "China is the weed in the human cabbage patch.
 . . . The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor.... Of all the imaginary
 existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most sat-
 isfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Ser-
                       INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 19

mons on the Mount.... Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventu-
ally things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred
to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out.... The weed
exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between,
among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the
poppy is maddening—but the weed is rank growth . . . : it points a
moral."17 Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an
imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map?
    America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination
by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the
quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy
(Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything
important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the Ameri-
can rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive
lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American
books are different from European books, even when the American sets off
in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass.
And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and
the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic
West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting
and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American "map" in the West,
where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put
its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came
full circle; its West is the edge of the East.18 (India is not the intermediary
between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is
the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti
Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don't go for the root, follow
the canal...
    Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still more)?
Western bureaucracy: its agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and fields; trees
and their role as frontiers; the great census of William the Conqueror; feu-
dalism; the policies of the kings of France; making property the basis of the
State; negotiating land through warfare, litigation, and marriages. The
kings of France chose the lily because it is a plant with deep roots that clings
to slopes. Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy
to depict an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the
Orient the State does not act following a schema of arborescence corre-
sponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy
is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic
power with "weak property," in which the State engenders channeled and
channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel's work that have not been
refuted).19 The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead, which is still a
                       20 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting
under a tree; Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao's river and
Louis's tree. Has not America acted as an intermediary here as well? For it
proceeds both by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only the
Indians but also the farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration
from the outside. The flow of capital produces an immense channel, a
quantification of power with immediate "quanta," where each person
profits from the passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the
reality-myth of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty
again): in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and
rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself;
capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism
by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them
both—all for the worst.
   At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical
distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of showing
that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierar-
chy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism
between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no
blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes,
and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations
of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are
anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots,
and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and
canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a tran-
scendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the sec-
ond operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and
outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise
to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of
a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a
question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of
a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up
again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in
order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly
unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can
only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approxima-
tion; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We
invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dual-
ism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models.
Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had
no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic
formula we all seek—PLURALISM = MONISM—via all the dualisms that are
                      INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 21

the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever
rearranging.
    Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees
or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its
traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into
play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome
is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that
becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple
derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not
of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither
beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and
which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions
having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of con-
sistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - 1). When a mul-
tiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as
well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a
set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and
biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only
of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the
line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after
which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.
These lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the
arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and
positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction:
neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as
tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory,
or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest,
capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography,
unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, con-
structed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible,
modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of
flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In con-
trast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of
communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered,
nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an
organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation
of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but
also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural
and artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all
manner of "becomings."
   A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhi-
zome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to
                      22 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of
intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmina-
tion point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example:
mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this
bizarre intensive stabilization. "Some sort of continuing plateau of inten-
sity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a
regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and
actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a
plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.20 For example, a
book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What
takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with
one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a "plateau" any
multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground
stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this
book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular
form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us
would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines
here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave
one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made cir-
cles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be
related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a
method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexi-
cal agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can
substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic pro-
cedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a differ-
ent dimension for an image-book. Technonarcissism. Typographical,
lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when they no longer
belong to the form of expression of a hidden unity, becoming themselves
dimensions of the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of rare
successes in this.21 We ourselves were unable to do it. We just used words
that in turn function for us as plateaus. RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS =
STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS. These words are con-
cepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a
particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines
of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.). Nowhere do we claim for
our concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar with scientif-
icity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages. And the only
assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective assem-
blages of enunciation. No signifiance, no subjectification: writing to the
«th power (all individuated enunciation remains trapped within the domi-
nant significations, all signifying desire is associated with dominated sub-
jects). An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows,
                       INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 23

material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any
recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus).
There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world)
and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the
author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain
multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel
nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short,
we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The
outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assem-
blage with the outside, against the book as image of the world. A rhizome-
book, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book. Never send down
roots, or plant them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting to the
old procedures. "Those things which occur to me, occur to me not from the
root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let someone
then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade of grass
and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle."22 Why is
this so difficult? The question is directly one of perceptual semiotics. It's
not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from
above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it,
you'll see that everything changes. It's not easy to see the grass in things and
in words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to be "rumi-
nated"; never is a plateau separable from the cows that populate it, which
are also the clouds in the sky).
   History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the
name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the
topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.
There are rare successes in this also, for example, on the subject of the
Children's Crusades: Marcel Schwob's book multiplies narratives like so
many plateaus with variable numbers of dimensions. Then there is
Andrzejewski's book, Les portes duparadis (The gates of paradise), com-
posed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of children; a flow of walk-
ing with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes; the semiotic flow of the
confessions of all the children who go up to the old monk at the head of the
procession to make their declarations; a flow of desire and sexuality, each
child having left out of love and more or less directly led by the dark posthu-
mous pederastic desire of the count of Vendome; all this with circles of con-
vergence. What is important is not whether the flows are "One or
multiple"—we're past that point: there is a collective assemblage of enun-
ciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both
plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more
recent example is Armand Farrachi's book on the Fourth Crusade, La dis-
location, in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse, or else
                      24 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the typography begin
to dance as the crusade grows more delirious.23 These are models of
nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war machine and lines of
flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarily, the State
apparatus. But why is a model still necessary? Aren't these books still
"images" of the Crusades? Don't they still retain a unity, in Schwob's case a
pivotal unity, in Farrachi's an aborted unity, and in the most beautiful
example, Les portes du paradis, the unity of the funereal count? Is there a
need for a more profound nomadism than that of the Crusades, a
nomadism of true nomads, or of those who no longer even move or imitate
anything? The nomadism of those who only assemble (agencent). How can
the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity,
rather than a world to reproduce? The cultural book is necessarily a tracing:
already a tracing of itself, a tracing of the previous book by the same author,
a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endless tracing
of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and
future. Even the anticultural book may still be burdened by too heavy a cul-
tural load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting instead of remembering,
for underdevelopment instead of progress toward development, in
nomadism rather than sedentarily, to make a map instead of a tracing.
RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do
besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-
tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous. For science would go com-
pletely mad if left to its own devices. Look at mathematics: it's not a
science, it's a monster slang, it's nomadic. Even in the realm of theory,
especially in the realm of theory, any precarious and pragmatic framework
 is better than tracing concepts, with their breaks and progress changing
nothing. Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break. The nomads
 invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus. History has
 never comprehended nomadism, the book has never comprehended the
 outside. The State as the model for the book and for thought has a long his-
 tory: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the
 interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the
 functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State's preten-
 sion to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine's relation to an
outside is not another "model"; it is an assemblage that makes thought
itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every mobile machine, a
stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).
    Write to the nth power, the n - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhi-
zomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or
multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the
point into a line!24 Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line
                      INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 25

of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just
ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not
photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the
wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they say about old man
river:
                He don't plant 'tatos
                Don't plant cotton
                Them that plants them is soon forgotten
                But old man river he just keeps rollin' along
   A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between
things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alli-
ance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of
the rhizome is the conjunction, "and. . . and.. . and. . ." This conjunction
carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb "to be." Where are you
going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are
totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again
from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false
conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, ped-
agogical, initiatory, symbolic...). But Kleist, Lenz, and Buchner have
another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through
the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.25 Ameri-
can literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic
direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things,
establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations,
nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics.
The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things
pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation
going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular
direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a
stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up
speed in the middle.
        2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?




  Field of Tracks, or Wolf Line

That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew
that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by,
then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing
about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood
was what a dog is, and a dog's tail. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough.
The Wolf-Man knew that Freud would soon declare him cured, but that it
was not at all the case and his treatment would continue for all eternity
under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire. Finally, he knew that he was in the pro-
cess of acquiring a veritable proper name, the Wolf-Man, a name more
properly his than his own, since it attained the highest degree of singularity
                                     26
                     1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 27

in the instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity: wolves. He
knew that this new and true proper name would be disfigured and mis-
spelled, retranscribed as a patronymic.
    Freud, for his part, would go on to write some extraordinary pages.
Entirely practical pages: his article of 1915 on "The Unconscious," which
deals with the difference between neurosis and psychosis. Freud says that
hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison
between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc. Doubtless, it is at
one and the same time that they apprehend the object globally and perceive
it as lost. Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically
as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp
the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches. The psychotic can: "we
should expect the multiplicity of these little cavities to prevent him from
using them as substitutes for the female genital."1 Comparing a sock to a
vagina is OK, it's done all the time, but you'd have to be insane to compare
a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas: that's what Freud says.
This represents an important clinical discovery: a whole difference in style
between neurosis and psychosis. For example, Salvador Dali, in attempt-
ing to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about THE rhinoceros
horn; he has not for all of that left neurotic discourse behind. But when he
starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the
feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the pres-
ence of madness. Is it still a question of a comparison at all? It is, rather, a
pure multiplicity that changes elements, or becomes. On the micrological
level, the little bumps "become" horns, and the horns, little penises.
    No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this
art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing
back molar unities, reverting to his familiar themes of the father, the penis,
the vagina, Castration with a capital C... (On the verge of discovering a
rhizome, Freud always returns to mere roots.) The reductive procedure of
the 1915 article is quite interesting: he says that the comparisons and iden-
tifications of the neurotic are guided by representations of things, whereas
all the psychotic has left are representations of words (for example, the
word "hole"). "What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance
between the things denoted but the sameness of the words used to express
them" (p. 201). Thus, when there is no unity in the thing, there is at least
unity and identity in the word. It will be noted that names are taken in their
extensive usage, in other words, function as common nouns ensuring the
unification of an aggregate they subsume. The proper name can be nothing
more than an extreme case of the common noun, containing its already
domesticated multiplicity within itself and linking it to a being or object
posited as unique. This jeopardizes, on the side of words and things both,
                    28 D 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

the relation of the proper name as an intensity to the multiplicity it instan-
taneously apprehends. For Freud, when the thing splinters and loses its
identity, the word is still there to restore that identity or invent a new one.
Freud counted on the word to reestablish a unity no longer found in things.
Are we not witnessing the first stirrings of a subsequent adventure, that of
the Signifier, the devious despotic agency that substitutes itself for
asignifying proper names and replaces multiplicities with the dismal unity
of an object declared lost?
   We're not far from wolves. For the Wolf-Man, in his second so-called
psychotic episode, kept constant watch over the variations or changing
path of the little holes or scars on the skin of his nose. During the first epi-
sode, which Freud declares neurotic, he recounted a dream he had about
six or seven wolves in a tree, and drew five. Who is ignorant of the fact that
wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud. With
false scruples he asks, How are we to explain the fact that there are five, six,
or seven wolves in this dream? He has decided that this is neurosis, so he
uses the other reductive procedure: free association on the level of the rep-
resentation of things, rather than verbal subsumption on the level of the
representation of words. The result is the same, since it is always a question
of bringing back the unity or identity of the person or allegedly lost object.
The wolves will have to be purged of their multiplicity. This operation is
accomplished by associating the dream with the tale, "The Wolf and the
Seven Kid-Goats" (only six of which get eaten). We witness Freud's reduc-
tive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave the wolves to take the shape of
goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. Seven wolves that
are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the Wolf-Man himself) is
hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen his parents make love at
five o'clock, and the roman numeral V is associated with the erotic spread-
ing of a woman's legs. Three wolves: the parents may have made love three
times. Two wolves: the first coupling the child may have seen was the two
parents moreferarum, or perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf is the
father, as we all knew from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not
just a castrater but also castrated. Who is Freud trying to fool? The wolves
never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already decided
from the very beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus
between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents.
Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves
and the meaning of their silent call, the call to become-wolf. Wolves watch,
intently watch, the dreaming child; it is so much more reassuring to tell
oneself that the dream produced a reversal and that it is really the child who
sees dogs or parents in the act of making love. Freud only knows the
                     1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 29

Oedipalized wolf or dog, the castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in
the kennel, the analyst's bow-wow.
    Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to
be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can't be one wolf, you're
always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all
at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others. In becoming-
wolf, the important thing is the position of the mass, and above all the posi-
tion of the subject itself in relation to the pack or wolf-multiplicity: how the
subject joins or does not join the pack, how far away it stays, how it does or
does not hold to the multiplicity. To soften the harshness of her response,
Franny recounts a dream: "There is a desert. Again, it wouldn't make any
sense to say that I am in the desert. It's a panoramic vision of the desert, and
it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert. It's only a desert because of its ocher
color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a
swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer players, or agroup of Tuareg. lam on the
edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by
one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only
place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the
fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position
to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant
motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm.
They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the
crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in
perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a
feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness." A very good schizo
dream. To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely out-
side it, removed from it: to be on the edge, to take a walk like Virginia Woolf
(never again will I say, "I am this, I am that").2
    Problems of peopling in the unconscious: all that passes through the
pores of the schizo, the veins of the drug addict, swarming, teeming, fer-
ment, intensities, races and tribes. This tale of white skin prickling with
bumps and pustules, and of dwarfish black heads emerging from pores gri-
macing and abominable, needing to be shaved off every morning—is it a
tale by Jean Ray, who knew how to bring terror to phenomena of
micromultiplicity? And how about the "Lilliputian hallucinations" on
ether? One schizo, two schizos, three: "There are babies growing in my
every pore"—"With me, it's not in the pores, it's in my veins, little iron
rods growing in my veins"—"I don't want them to give me any shots,
except with camphorated alcohol. Otherwise breasts grow in my every
pore." Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of
the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the uncon-
scious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of
                     30 D 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person. Schizos, on the other hand,
have sharp eyes and ears. They don't mistake the buzz and shove of the
crowd for daddy's voice. Once Jung had a dream about bones and skulls. A
bone or a skull is never alone. Bones are a multiplicity. But Freud wants the
dream to signify the death of someone. "Jung was surprised and pointed
out that there were several skulls, not just one. Yet Freud still. . ."3
   A multiplicity of pores, or blackheads, of little scars or stitches. Breasts,
babies, and rods. A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, or Tuareg. A multi-
plicity of wolves or jackals . . . All of these things are irreducible but bring
us to a certain status of the formations of the unconscious. Let us try to
define the factors involved: first, something plays the role of the full
body—the body without organs. In the preceding dream it was the desert.
In the Wolf-Man's dream it is the denuded tree upon which the wolves are
perched. It is also the skin as envelope or ring, and the sock as reversible
surface. It can be a house or part of a house, any number of things, any-
thing. Whenever someone makes love, really makes love, that person con-
stitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people.
A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body
upon which that which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is
distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the
form of molecular multiplicities. The desert is populous. Thus the body
without organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of
the organs insofar as it composes an organism. The body without organs is
not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has
blown apart the organism and its organization. Lice hopping on the beach.
Skin colonies. The full body without organs is a body populated by multi-
plicities. The problem of the unconscious has most certainly nothing to do
with generation but rather peopling, population. It is an affair of world-
wide population on the full body of the earth, not organic familial genera-
tion. "I love to invent peoples, tribes, racial origins . . . I return from my
tribes. As of today, I am the adoptive son of fifteen tribes, no more, no less.
And they in turn are my adopted tribes, for I love each of them more than if
I had been born into it." People say, After all, schizophrenics have a mother
and a father, don't they? Sorry, no, none as such. They only have a desert
with tribes inhabiting it, a full body clinging with multiplicities.
   This brings us to the second factor, the nature of these multiplicities and
their elements. RHIZOME. One of the essential characteristics of the dream
of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance
in relation to the others. On the Wolf-Man's nose, the elements, deter-
mined as pores in the skin, little scars in the pores, little ruts in the scar tis-
sue, ceaselessly dance, grow, and diminish. These variable distances are
not extensive quantities divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible,
                    1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 31

or "relatively indivisible," in other words, they are not divisible below or
above a certain threshold, they cannot increase or diminish without their
elements changing in nature. A swarm of bees: here they come as a rumble
of soccer players in striped jerseys, or a band of Tuareg. Or: the wolf clan
doubles up with a swarm of bees against the gang of Deulhs, under the
direction of Mowgli, who runs on the edge (yes, Kipling understood the call
of the wolves, their libidinal meaning, better than Freud; and in the Wolf-
Man's case the story about wolves is followed by one about wasps and but-
terflies, we go from wolves to wasps). What is the significance of these
indivisible distances that are ceaselessly transformed, and cannot be
divided or transformed without their elements changing in nature each
time? Is it not the intensive character of this kind of multiplicity's elements
and the relations between them? Exactly like a speed or a temperature,
which is not composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is
enveloped in or envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature.
The metrical principle of these multiplicities is not to be found in a homo-
geneous milieu but resides elsewhere, in forces at work within them, in
physical phenomena inhabiting them, precisely in the libido, which consti-
tutes them from within, and in constituting them necessarily divides into
distinct qualitative and variable flows. Freud himself recognizes the multi-
plicity of libidinal "currents" that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That makes it
all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the unconscious
the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the lit-
tle scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme
hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father
who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him. (As Ruth Mack
Brunswick says, Let's go all the way, the wolves are "all the fathers and doc-
tors" in the world; but the Wolf-Man thinks, "You trying to tell me my ass
isn't a wolf?")
   What should have been done is the opposite, all of this should be under-
stood in intensity: the Wolf is the pack, in other words, the multiplicity
instantaneously apprehended as such insofar as it approaches or moves
away from zero, each distance being nondecomposable. Zero is the body
without organs of the Wolf-Man. If the unconscious knows nothing of
negation, it is because there is nothing negative in the unconscious, only
indefinite moves toward and away from zero, which does not at all express
lack but rather the positivity of the full body as support and prop ("for an
afflux is necessary simply to signify the absence of intensity"). The wolves
designate an intensity, a band of intensity, a threshold of intensity on the
Wolf-Man's body without organs. A dentist told the Wolf-Man that he
"would soon lose all his teeth because of the violence of his bite"—and that
his gums were pocked with pustules and little holes.4 Jaw as high intensity,
                    32 D 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

teeth as low intensity, and pustular gums as approach to zero. The wolf, as
the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a
representative, a substitute, but an I feel. I feel myself becoming a wolf, one
wolf among others, on the edge of the pack. A cry of anguish, the only one
Freud hears: Help me not become wolf (or the opposite, Help me not fail in
this becoming). It is not a question of representation: don't think for a min-
ute that it has to do with believing oneself a wolf, representing oneself as a
wolf. The wolf, wolves, are intensities, speeds, temperatures, nondecom-
posable variable distances. A swarming, a wolfing. Who could ever believe
that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine, or that the two
are only linked by an Oedipal apparatus, by the all-too-human figure of the
Father? For in the end the anus also expresses an intensity, in this case the
approach to zero of a distance that cannot be decomposed without its ele-
ments changing in nature. Afield of anuses, just like a pack of wolves. Does
not the child, on the periphery, hold onto the wolves by his anus? The jaw
descends to the anus. Hold onto those wolves by your jaw and your anus.
The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it's not that simple; jaw and wolf form a multipli-
city that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf, as a function of
other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities, between thresh-
olds. Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming-
inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is. To
become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following dis-
tinct but entangled lines. A hole is no more negative than a wolf. Castra-
tion, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has no
understanding of multiplicities as formations of the unconscious. A wolf is
a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles,
productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molecular multi-
plicities. It is not even sufficient to say that intense and moving particles
pass through holes; a hole is just as much a particle as what passes through
it. Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles but particles
traveling faster than the speed of light. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas,
there is no castration.
    Let us return to the story of multiplicity, for the creation of this substan-
tive marks a very important moment. It was created precisely in order to
escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape
dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease
treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the
organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come, and instead distinguish
between different types of multiplicity. Thus we find in the work of the
mathematician and physicist Riemann a distinction between discreet mul-
tiplicities and continuous multiplicities (the metrical principle of the sec-
ond kind of multiplicity resides solely in forces at work within them). Then
                    1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 33

in Meinong and Russell we find a distinction between multiplicities of
magnitude or divisibility, which are extensive, and multiplicities of dis-
tance, which are closer to the intensive. And in Bergson there is a distinc-
tion between numerical or extended multiplicities and qualitative or
durational multiplicities. We are doing approximately the same thing
when we distinguish between arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic
multiplicities. Between macro- and micromultiplicities. On the one hand,
multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable, total-
izable, organizable; conscious or preconscious—and on the other hand,
libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities composed of
particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that
do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly con-
struct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as
they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold.
The elements of this second kind of multiplicity are particles; their rela-
tions are distances; their movements are Brownian; their quantities are
intensities, differences in intensity.
   This only provides the logical foundation. Elias Canetti distinguishes
between two types of multiplicity that are sometimes opposed but at other
times interpenetrate: mass ("crowd") multiplicities and pack multiplici-
ties. Among the characteristics of a mass, in Canetti's sense, we should note
large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members, concentration,
sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way hierarchy, organization of
territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs. Among the char-
acteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nonde-
composable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities
as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierar-
chization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorial-
ization, and projection of particles.5 Doubtless, there is no more equality
or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different
kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by move, must wager
everything every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or
capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a
line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it, and to
which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only integrate
these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a nega-
tive sign. Canetti notes that in a pack each member is alone even in the
company of others (for example, wolves on the hunt); each takes care of
himself at the same time as participating in the band. "In the changing con-
stellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again
find himself at its edge. He may be in the center, and then, immediately
afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge and then back in the center. When
                    34 n 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the
right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the
wilderness."6 We recognize this as the schizo position, being on the periph-
ery, holding on by a hand or a f o o t . . . As opposed to the paranoid position
of the mass subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the
group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group; be securely
embedded in the mass, get close to the center, never be at the edge except in
the line of duty. Why assume (as does Konrad Lorenz, for example) that
bands and their type of companionship represent a more rudimentary evo-
lutionary state than group societies or societies of conjugality? Not only do
there exist bands of humans, but there are particularly refined examples:
"high-society life" differs from "sociality" in that it is closer to the pack.
Social persons have a certain envious and erroneous image of the high-
society person because they are ignorant of high-society positions and hier-
archies, the relations of force, the very particular ambitions and projects.
High-society relations are never coextensive with social relations, they do
not coincide. Even "mannerisms" (all bands have them) are specific to
micromultiplicities and distinct from social manners or customs.
   There is no question, however, of establishing a dualist opposition
between the two types of multiplicities, molecular machines and molar
machines; that would be no better than the dualism between the One and
the multiple. There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single
assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses
in packs. Trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of arbor-
escence. How could mad particles be produced with anything but a gigantic
cyclotron? How could lines of deterritorialization be assignable outside of
circuits of territoriality? Where else but in wide expanses, and in major
upheavals in those expanses, could a tiny rivulet of new intensity suddenly
start to flow? What do you not have to do in order to produce a new sound?
Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-inhuman, each
involves a molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or prepares the
way for them. In Kafka, it is impossible to separate the erection of a great
paranoid bureaucratic machine from the installation of little schizo
machines of becoming-dog or becoming-beetle. In the case of the Wolf-
Man, it is impossible to separate the becoming-wolf of his dream from the
military and religious organization of his obsessions. A military man does
a wolf; a military man does a dog. There are not two multiplicities or two
machines; one and the same machinic assemblage produces and distrib-
utes the whole, in other words, the set of statements corresponding to the
"complex." What does psychoanalysis have to say about all of this? Oedi-
pus, nothing but Oedipus, because it hears nothing and listens to nobody. It
flattens everything, masses and packs, molecular and molar machines,
                    1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 35

multiplicities of every variety. Take the Wolf-Man's second dream during
his so-called psychotic episode: in the street, a wall with a closed door, to
the left an empty dresser; in front of the dresser, the patient, and a big
woman with a little scar who seems to want to skirt around the wall; behind
the wall, wolves, rushing for the door. Even Brunswick can't go wrong:
although she recognizes herself in the big woman, she does see that this
time the wolves are Bolsheviks, the revolutionary mass that had emptied
the dresser and confiscated the Wolf-Man's fortune. The wolves, in a
metastable state, have gone over to a large-scale social machine. But psycho-
analysis has nothing to say about all of these points—except what Freud
already said: it all leads back to daddy (what do you know, he was one of the
leaders of the liberal party in Russia, but that's hardly important; all that
needs to be said is that the revolution "assuaged the patient's feelings of
guilt"). You'd think that the investments and counterinvestments of the
libido had nothing to do with mass disturbances, pack movements, collec-
tive signs, and particles of desire.
   Thus it does not suffice to attribute molar multiplicities and mass
machines to the preconscious, reserving another kind of machine or multi-
plicity for the unconscious. For it is the assemblage of both of these that is
the province of the unconscious, the way in which the former condition the
latter, and the latter prepare the way for the former, or elude them or return
to them: the libido suffuses everything. Keep everything in sight at the
same time—that a social machine or an organized mass has a molecular
unconscious that marks not only its tendency to decompose but also the
current components of its very operation and organization; that any indi-
vidual caught up in a mass has his/her own pack unconscious, which does
not necessarily resemble the packs of the mass to which that individual
belongs; that an individual or mass will live out in its unconscious the
masses and packs of another mass or another individual. What does it
mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract
him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates,
whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to
find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within
himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join
them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the
other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every
love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be
formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some-
one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires
the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the
multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A
pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a
                   36 n 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's
throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent
upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. Albertine is slowly
extracted from a group of girls with its own number, organization, code,
and hierarchy; and not only is this group or restricted mass suffused by an
unconscious, but Albertine has her own multiplicities that the narrator,
once he has isolated her, discovers on her body and in her lies—until the
end of their love returns her to the indiscernible.
   Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the
masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from the
internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. The
distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which
are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different
types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places—
machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given
moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: "I love you" (or
whatever). For Kafka, Felice is inseparable from a certain social machine,
and, as a representative of the firm that manufactures them, from
parlograph machines; how could she not belong to that organization in the
eyes of Kafka, a man fascinated by commerce and bureaucracy? But at the
same time, Felice's teeth, her big carnivorous teeth, send her racing down
other lines, into the molecular multiplicities of a becoming-dog, a
becoming-jackal . .. Felice is inseparable from the sign of the modern
social machines belonging to her, from those belonging to Kafka (not the
same ones), and from the particles, the little molecular machines, the
whole strange becoming or journey Kafka will make and have her make
through his perverse writing apparatus.
   There are no individual statements, only statement-producing ma-
chinic assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally libidinal
and unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment, we will
note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds:
human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molec-
ular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal appara-
tuses (yes, of course there are Oedipal statements, many of them); and
counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning. We will
go into it later. We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, only of
types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment form a
single machinic assemblage, the faceless figure of the libido. Each of us is
caught up in an assemblage of this kind, and we reproduce its statements
when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we speak in our
own name when we produce its statement. And what bizarre statements
they are; truly, the talk of lunatics. We mentioned Kafka, but we could just
                    1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 37

as well have said the Wolf-Man: a religious-military machine that Freud
attributes to obsessional neurosis; an anal pack machine, an anal be-
coming-wolf or -wasp or -butterfly machine, which Freud attributes to the
hysteric character; an Oedipal apparatus, which Freud considers the sole
motor, the immobile motor that must be found everywhere; and a counter-
Oedipal apparatus—incest with the sister, schizo-incest, or love with "peo-
ple of inferior station"; and anality, homosexuality?—all that Freud sees
only as Oedipal substitutes, regressions, and derivatives. In truth, Freud
sees nothing and understands nothing. He has no idea what a libidinal
assemblage is, with all the machineries it brings into play, all the multiple
loves.
   Of course, there are Oedipal statements. For example, Kafka's story,
"Jackals and Arabs," is easy to read in that way: you can always do it, you
can't lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing. The Arabs
are clearly associated with the father and the jackals with the mother;
between the two, there is a whole story of castration represented by the
rusty scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs are an extensive, armed,
organized mass stretching across the entire desert; and the jackals are an
intense pack forever launching into the desert following lines of flight or
deterritorialization ("they are madmen, veritable madmen"); between the
two, at the edge, the Man of the North, the jackal-man. And aren't those big
scissors the Arab sign that guides or releases jackal-particles, both to accel-
erate their mad race by detaching them from the mass and to bring them
back to the mass, to tame them and whip them, to bring them around?
Dead camel: Oedipal food apparatus. Counter-Oedipal carrion apparatus:
kill animals to eat, or eat to clean up carrion. The jackals formulate the
problem well: it is not that of castration but of "cleanliness" (propret'e, also
"ownness"), the test of desert-desire. Which will prevail, mass territoriality
or pack deterritorialization? The libido suffuses the entire desert, the body
without organs on which the drama is played out.
   There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is
the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents
of enunciation (take "collective agents" to mean not peoples or societies
but multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an
individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multi-
plicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation
of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name.
The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. The
proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a
field of intensity. What Proust said about the first name: when I said
Gilberte's name, I had the impression that I was holding her entire body
naked in my mouth. The Wolf-Man, a true proper name, an intimate first
                     38 D 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

name linked to the becomings, infinitives, and intensities of a multiplied
and depersonalized individual. What does psychoanalysis know about
multiplication? The desert hour when the dromedary becomes a thousand
dromedaries snickering in the sky. The evening hour when a thousand
holes appear on the surface of the earth. Castration! Castration! cries the
psychoanalytic scarecrow, who never saw more than a hole, a father or a
dog where wolves are, a domesticated individual where there are wild mul-
tiplicities. We are not just criticizing psychoanalysis for having selected
Oedipal statements exclusively. For such statements are to a certain extent
part of a machinic assemblage, for which they could serve as correctional
indexes, as in a calculation of errors. We are criticizing psychoanalysis for
having used Oedipal enunciation to make patients believe they would pro-
duce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own
name. The trap was set from the start: never will the Wolf-Man speak. Talk
as he might about wolves, howl as he might like a wolf, Freud does not even
listen; he glances at his dog and answers, "It's daddy." For as long as that
lasts, Freud calls it neurosis; when it cracks, it's psychosis. The Wolf-Man
will receive the psychoanalytic medal of honor for services rendered to the
cause, and even disabled veterans' benefits. He could have spoken in his
own name only if the machinic assemblage that was producing particular
statements in him had been brought to light. But there is no question of that
in psychoanalysis: at the very moment the subject is persuaded that he or
she will be uttering the most individual of statements, he or she is deprived
of all basis for enunciation. Silence people, prevent them from speaking,
and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven't said a thing: the
famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling: Six
wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How's that? Goats, you say? How inter-
esting. Take away the goats and all you have left is a wolf, so it's your father
. . . That is why the Wolf-Man feels so fatigued: he's left lying there with all
his wolves in his throat, all those little holes on his nose, and all those libidi-
nal values on his body without organs. The war will come, the wolves will
become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will remain suffocated by all he had
to say. All we will be told is that he became well behaved, polite, and
resigned again, "honest and scrupulous." In short, cured. He gets back by
pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological vision: "Nothing
can be more valuable for a young person than the love of nature and a com-
prehension of the natural sciences, in particular zoology."7
 3. 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals
   (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)




Double Articulation




                      39
                 40 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain
machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing
several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his simian
disposition. He explained that the Earth—the Deterritorialized, the
Glacial, the giant Molecule—is a body without organs. This body without
organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all direc-
tions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory par-
ticles. That, however, was not the question at hand. For there simultane-
ously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that
is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratifica-
tion. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of
imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance
and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large
and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of
capture, they are like "black holes" or occlusions striving to seize whatever
comes within their reach.1 They operate by coding and territorialization
upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality.
The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire sys-
tem of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, con-
stantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded,
deterritorialized).
   Challenger quoted a sentence he said he came across in a geology text-
book. He said we needed to learn it by heart because we would only be in a
position to understand it later on: "A surface of stratification is a more
compact plane of consistency lying between two layers." The layers are the
strata. They come at least in pairs, one serving as substratum for the other.
The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the
strata. The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one
side it faces the strata (in this direction, the assemblage is an inter stratum),
but the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of
consistency (here, it is a metastratum). In effect, the body without organs is
itself the plane of consistency, which becomes compact or thickens at the
level of the strata.
    God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata
come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself
has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of dou-
ble articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the
strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely var-
iable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple
case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-
flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon
which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms).
                 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 41

The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures
(forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are
simultaneously actualized (substances). In a geological stratum, for exam-
ple, the first articulation is the process of "sedimentation," which deposits
units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its
succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the "fold-
ing" that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from
sediment to sedimentary rock.
    It is clear that the distinction between the two articulations is not
between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed
matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as
formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and
deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territorially;
therefore each possesses both form and substance. For now, all we can say is
that each articulation has a corresponding type of segmentarity or multi-
plicity: one type is supple, more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is
more rigid, molar, and organized. Although the first articulation is not
lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in partic-
ular that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenom-
ena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization,
and finalization. Both articulations establish binary relations between
their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation
and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far
more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the
sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that
structure is the earth's last word. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted
that the distinction between the two articulations is always that of the
molecular and the molar.
    He skipped over the immense diversity of the energetic, physico-
chemical, and geological strata. He went straight to the organic strata, or
the existence of a great organic stratification. The problem of the
organism—how to "make" the body an organism—is once again a problem
of articulation, of the articulatory relation. The Dogons, well known to the
professor, formulate the problem as follows: an organism befalls the body
of the smith, by virtue of a machine or machinic assemblage that stratifies
it. "The shock of the hammer and the anvil broke his arms and legs at the
elbows and knees, which until that moment he had not possessed. In this
way, he received the articulations specific to the new human form that was
to spread across the earth, a form dedicated to work.... His arm became
folded with a view to work."2 It is obviously only a manner of speaking to
limit the articulatory relation to the bones. The entire organism must be
considered in relation to a double articulation, and on different levels.
                 42 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

First, on the level of morphogenesis: on the one hand, realities of the
molecular type with aleatory relations are caught up in crowd phenomena
or statistical aggregates determining an order (the protein fiber and its
sequence or segmentarity); on the other hand, these aggregates themselves
are taken up into stable structures that "elect" stereoscopic compounds,
form organs, functions, and regulations, organize molar mechanisms, and
even distribute centers capable of overflying crowds, overseeing mecha-
nisms, utilizing and repairing tools, "overcoding" the aggregate (the fold-
ing back on itself of the fiber to form a compact structure; a second kind of
segmentarity).3 Sedimentation and folding, fiber and infolding.
   On a different level, the cellular chemistry presiding over the constitu-
tion of proteins also operates by double articulation. This double articula-
tion is internal to the molecular, it is the articulation between small and
large molecules, a segmentarity by successive modifications and polymeri-
zation. "First, the elements taken from the medium are combined through
a series of transformations.. . .All this activity involves hundreds of chem-
ical reactions. But ultimately, it produces a limited number of small com-
pounds, a few dozen at most. In the second stage of cellular chemistry, the
small molecules are assembled to produce larger ones. It is the polymeriza-
tion of units linked end-to-end that forms the characteristic chains of mac-
romolecules. . .. The two stages of cellular chemistry, therefore, differ in
their function, products and nature. The first carves out chemical motifs;
the second assembles them. The first forms compounds that exist only
temporarily, for they are intermediaries on the path of biosynthesis; the
second constructs stable products. The first operates by a series of different
reactions; the second by repeating the same reaction."4 There is, moreover,
a third level, upon which cellular chemistry itself depends. It is the genetic
code, which is in turn inseparable from a double segmentarity or a double
articulation, this time between two types of independent molecules: the
sequence of protein units and the sequence of nucleic units, with binary
relations between units of the same type and biunivocal relationships
between units of different types. Thus there are always two articulations,
two segmentarities, two kinds of multiplicity, each of which brings into
play both forms and substances. But the distribution of these two articula-
tions is not constant, even within the same stratum.
   The audience rather sulkily denounced the numerous misunderstand-
ings, misinterpretations, and even misappropriations in the professor's
presentation, despite the authorities he had appealed to, calling them his
"friends." Even the Dogons . . . And things would presently get worse. The
professor cynically congratulated himself on taking his pleasure from
behind, but the offspring always turned out to be runts and wens, bits and
pieces, if not stupid vulgarizations. Besides, the professor was not a geolo-
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 43

gist or a biologist, he was not even a linguist, ethnologist, or psychoanalyst;
what his specialty had been was long since forgotten. In fact, Professor
Challenger was double, articulated twice, and that did not make things any
easier, people never knew which of him was present. He (?) claimed to have
invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics,
stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the
science of multiplicities. Yet no one clearly understood what the goals,
method, or principles of this discipline were. Young Professor Alasca,
Challenger's pet student, tried hypocritically to defend him by explaining
that on a given stratum the passage from one articulation to the other was
easily verified because it was always accompanied by a loss of water, in
genetics as in geology, and even in linguistics, where the importance of the
"lost saliva" phenomenon is measured. Challenger took offense, preferring
to cite his friend, as he called him, the Danish Spinozist geologist,
Hjelmslev, that dark prince descended from Hamlet who also made lan-
guage his concern, precisely in order to analyze its "stratification."
Hjelmslev was able to weave a net out of the notions of matter, content and
expression, form and substance. These were the strata, said Hjelmslev. Now
this net had the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality, since
there was a form of content no less than a form of expression. Hjelmslev's
enemies saw this merely as a way of rebaptizing the discredited notions of
the signified and signifier, but something quite different was actually going
on. Despite what Hjelmslev himself may have said, the net is not linguistic
in scope or origin (the same must be said of double articulation: if language
has a specificity of its own, as it most certainly does, that specificity con-
sists neither in double articulation nor in Hjelmslev's net, which are gen-
eral characteristics of strata).
   He used the term matter for the plane of consistency or Body without
Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or
destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles,
pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities. He used the
term content for formed matters, which would now have to be considered
from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are "chosen,"
and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order (substance and form
of content). He used the term expression for functional structures, which
would also have to be considered from two points of view: the organization
of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds
(form and content of expression). A stratum always has a dimension of the
expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative invariance;
for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a relatively invariant
expression by means of which they determine the compounds, organs, and
functions of the organism.5 To express is always to sing the glory of God.
                 44 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals,
orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even riv-
ers, every stratified thing on earth. The first articulation concerns content,
the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not
between forms and substances but between content and expression,
expression having just as much substance as content and content just as
much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides
with the molecular and the molar, and sometimes not; this is because con-
tent and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and some-
times along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity
between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal pre-
supposition. The distinction between content and expression is always
real, in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their dou-
ble articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them accord-
ing to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real
distinction. (On the other hand, there is no real distinction between form
and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are
nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable,
although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless
forms.)
    Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and
expression are relative terms ("first" and "second" articulation should also
be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is capable of
invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and
expression are two variables of a function of stratification. They not only
vary from one stratum to another, but intermingle, and within the same
stratum multiply and divide ad infinitum. Since every articulation is dou-
ble, there is not an articulation of content and an articulation of
expression—the articulation of content is double in its own right and con-
stitutes a relative expression within content; the articulation of expression
is also double and constitutes a relative content within expression. For this
reason, there exist intermediate states between content and expression,
expression and content: the levels, equilibriums, and exchanges through
which a stratified system passes. In short, we find forms and substances of
content that play the role of expression in relation to other forms and sub-
stances, and conversely for expression. These new distinctions do not,
therefore, coincide with the distinction between forms and substances
within each articulation; instead, they show that each articulation is
already, or still, double. This can be seen on the organic stratum: proteins
of content have two forms, one of which (the infolded fiber) plays the role
of functional expression in relation to the other. The same goes for the
nucleic acids of expression: double articulations cause certain formal and
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 45

substantial elements to play the role of content in relation to others; not
only does the half of the chain that is reproduced become a content, but the
reconstituted chain itself becomes a content in relation to the "messenger."
There are double pincers everywhere on a stratum; everywhere and in all
directions there are double binds and lobsters, a multiplicity of double
articulations affecting both expression and content. Through all of this,
Hjelmslev's warning should not be forgotten: "The terms expression plane
and content plane . . . are chosen in conformity with established notions
and are quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no justifica-
tion for calling one, and not the other, of these entities expression, or one,
and not the other, content. They are defined only by their mutual solidarity,
and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are defined only
oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the
same function."6 We must combine all the resources of real distinction,
reciprocal presupposition, and general relativism.

   The question we must ask is what on a given stratum varies and what
does not. What accounts for the unity and diversity of a stratum? Matter,
the pure matter of the plane of consistency (or inconsistency) lies outside
the strata. The molecular materials borrowed from the substrata may be
the same throughout a stratum, but that does not mean that the molecules
will be the same. The substantial elements may be the same throughout the
stratum without the substances being the same. The formal relations or
bonds may be the same without the forms being the same. In biochemistry,
there is a unity of composition of the organic stratum defined at the level of
materials and energy, substantial elements or radicals, bonds and reac-
tions. But there is a variety of different molecules, substances, and forms.
   Should we not sing the praise of Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire? For in the nine-
teenth century he developed a grandiose conception of stratification. He
said that matter, considered from the standpoint of its greatest divisibility,
consists in particles of decreasing size, flows or elastic fluids that "deploy
themselves" by radiating through space. Combustion is the process of this
escape or infinite division on the plane of consistency. Electrification is the
opposite process, constitutive of strata; it is the process whereby similar
particles group together to form atoms and molecules, similar molecules to
form bigger molecules, and the biggest molecules to form molar aggregates:
"the attraction of like by like," as in a double pincer or double articulation.
Thus there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum, matter is the
same on all the strata. But the organic stratum does have a specific unity of
composition, a single abstract Animal, a single machine embedded in the
stratum, and presents everywhere the same molecular materials, the same
elements or anatomical components of organs, the same formal connec-
                 46 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

tions. Organic forms are nevertheless different from one another, as are
organs, compound substances, and molecules. It is of little or no impor-
tance that Geoffroy chose anatomical elements as the substantial units
rather than protein and nucleic acid radicals. At any rate, he already
invoked a whole interplay of molecules. The important thing is the princi-
ple of the simultaneous unity and variety of the stratum: isomorphism of
forms but no correspondence; identity of elements or components but no
identity of compound substances.
   This is where the dialogue, or rather violent debate, with Cuvier came
in. To keep the last of the audience from leaving, Challenger imagined a
particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead, in puppet theater style.
Geoffroy called forth Monsters, Cuvier laid out all the Fossils in order,
Baer flourished flasks filled with embryos, Vialleton put on a tetrapod's
belt, Perrier mimed the dramatic battle between the Mouth and the Brain,
and so on. Geoffroy: The proof that there is isomorphism is that you can
always get from one form on the organic stratum to another, however dif-
ferent they may be, by means of "folding." To go from the Vertebrate to the
Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate's backbone together,
bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to the nape of its neck ...
Cuvier (angrily): That's just not true! You go from an Elephant to a
Medusa; I know, I tried. There are irreducible axes, types, branches. There
are resemblances between organs and analogies between forms, nothing
more. You're a falsifier, a metaphysician. Vialleton (a disciple of Cuvier
and Baer): Even if folding gave good results, who could endure it? It's not
by chance that Geoffroy only considers anatomical elements. No muscle or
ligament would survive it. Geoffroy: I said that there was isomorphism but
not correspondence. You have to bring "degrees of development or perfec-
tion" into the picture. It is not everywhere on a stratum that materials
reach the degree at which they form a given aggregate. Anatomical ele-
ments may be arrested or inhibited in certain places by molecular clashes,
the influence of the milieu, or pressure from neighbors to such an extent
that they compose different organs. The same formal relations or connec-
tions are then effectuated in entirely different forms and arrangements. It
is still the same abstract Animal that is realized throughout the stratum,
only to varying degrees, in varying modes. Each time, it is as perfect as its
surroundings or milieu allows it to be (it is obviously not yet a question of
evolution: neither folding nor degrees imply descent or derivation, only
autonomous realizations of the same abstract relations). This is where
Geoffroy invoked Monsters: human monsters are embryos that were
retarded at a certain degree of development, the human in them is only a
straitjacket for inhuman forms and substances. Yes, the Heteradelph is a
crustacean. Baer (an ally of Cuvier and contemporary of Darwin, about
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 47

whom he had reservations, in addition to being an enemy of Geoffroy):
That's not true, you can't confuse degrees of development with types of
forms. A single type has several degrees, a single degree is found in several
types, but never will you make types out of degrees. An embryo of one type
cannot display another type; at most, it can be of the same degree as an
embryo of the second type. Vialleton (a disciple of Baer's who took both
Darwin and Geoffroy one further): And then there are things that only an
embryo can do or endure. It can do or endure these things precisely because
of its type, not because it can go from one type to another according to
degrees of development. Admire the Tortoise. Its neck requires that a cer-
tain number of protovertebrae change position, and its front limbs must
slide 180 degrees in relation to that of a bird. You can never draw conclu-
sions about phylogenesis on the basis of embryogenesis. Folding does not
make it possible to go from one type to another; quite the contrary, the
types testify to the irreducibility of the forms of folding . . . (Thus Vialleton
presented two kinds of interconnected arguments in the service of the same
cause, saying first that there are things no animal can do by reason of its
substance, and then that there are things that only an embryo can do by rea-
son of its form. Two strong arguments.)7
    We're a little lost now. There is so much going on in these retorts. So
many endlessly proliferating distinctions. So much getting even, for episte-
mology is not innocent. The sweet and subtle Geoffroy and the violent and
serious Cuvier do battle around Napoleon. Cuvier, the rigid specialist, is
pitted against Geoffroy, always ready to switch specialities. Cuvier hates
Geoffroy, he can't stomach Geoffrey's lighthearted formulas, his humor
(yes, Hens do indeed have teeth, the Lobster has skin on its bones, etc.).
Cuvier is a man of Power and Terrain, and he won't let Geoffroy forget it;
Geoffroy, on the other hand, prefigures the nomadic man of speed. Cuvier
reflects a Euclidean space, whereas Geoffroy thinks topologically. Today
let us invoke the folds of the cortex with all their paradoxes. Strata are topo-
logical, and Geoffroy is a great artist of the fold, a formidable artist; as
such, he already has a presentiment of a certain kind of animal rhizome
with aberrant paths of communication—Monsters. Cuvier reacts in terms
of discontinuous photographs, and casts of fossils. But we're a little lost,
because distinctions have proliferated in all directions.
    We have not even taken Darwin, evolutionism, or neoevolutionism into
account yet. This, however, is where a decisive phenomenon occurs: our
puppet theater becomes more and more nebulous, in other words, collec-
tive and differential. Earlier, we invoked two factors, and their uncertain
relations, in order to explain the diversity within a stratum—degrees of
development or perfection and types of forms. They now undergo a pro-
found transformation. There is a double tendency for types of forms to be
                 48 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

understood increasingly in terms of populations, packs and colonies,
collectivities or multiplicities; and degrees of development in terms of
speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential relations. A double deepening.
This, Darwinism's fundamental contribution, implies a new coupling of
individuals and milieus on the stratum.8
    First, if we assume the presence of an elementary or even molecular pop-
ulation in a given milieu, the forms do not preexist the population, they are
more like statistical results. The more a population assumes divergent
forms, the more its multiplicity divides into multiplicities of different
nature, the more its elements form distinct compounds or matters—the
more efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or divides up the milieu.
Thus the relationship between embryogenesis and phylogenesis is
reversed: the embryo does not testify to an absolute form preestablished in
a closed milieu; rather, the phylogenesis of populations has at its disposal,
in an open milieu, an entire range of relative forms to choose from, none of
which is preestablished. In embryogenesis, "It is possible to tell from the
parents, anticipating the outcome of the process, whether a pigeon or a wolf
is developing.... But here the points of reference themselves are in
motion: there are only fixed points for convenience of expression. At the
level of universal evolution, it is impossible to discern that kind of refer-
ence point         Life on earth appears as a sum of relatively independent
species of flora and fauna with sometimes shifting or porous boundaries
between them. Geographical areas can only harbor a sort of chaos, or, at
best, extrinsic harmonies of an ecological order, temporary equilibriums
between populations."9
    Second, simultaneously and under the same conditions, the degrees are
not degrees of preexistent development or perfection but are instead global
and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of the advan-
tage they give particular elements, then a particular multiplicity in the
milieu, and as a function of a particular variation in the milieu. Degrees are
no longer measured in terms of increasing perfection or a differentiation
and increase in the complexity of the parts, but in terms of differential rela-
tions and coefficients such as selective pressure, catalytic action, speed of
propagation, rate of growth, evolution, mutation, etc. Relative progress,
then, can occur by formal and quantitative simplification rather than by
complication, by a loss of components and syntheses rather than by acqui-
sition (it is a question of speed, and speed is a differential). It is through
populations that one is formed, assumes forms, and through loss that one
progresses and picks up speed. Darwinism's two fundamental contribu-
tions move in the direction of a science of multiplicities: the substitution of
populations for types, and the substitution of rates or differential relations
for degrees.10 These are nomadic contributions with shifting boundaries
                 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 49

determined by populations or variations of multiplicities, and with differ-
ential coefficients or variations of relations. Contemporary biochemistry,
or "molecular Darwinism" as Monod calls it, confirms, on the level of a
single statistical and global individual, or a simple sample, the decisive
importance of molecular populations and microbiological rates (for exam-
ple, the endlessness of the sequence composing a chain, and the chance var-
iation of a single segment in the sequence).
   Challenger admitted having digressed at length but added that there was
no possible way to distinguish between the digressive and the nondi-
gressive. The point was to arrive at several conclusions concerning the
unity and diversity of a single stratum, in this case the organic stratum.
   To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which
is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial ele-
ments, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the
unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified,
and come from "substrata." But of course substrata should not be thought
of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex
than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard
against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials fur-
nished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stra-
tum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that
of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial ele-
ments is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an aug-
mentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an
exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under con-
sideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and com-
pounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials
constitute an exterior o/the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter
because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and
selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials.
Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through
their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for
the relation between them. For example, on a crystalline stratum, the
amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has
formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of
amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal
must move out to the system's exterior, where the amorphous medium can
crystallize (the aptitude to switch over to the other form of organization).
To the point that the seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exte-
rior and interior are interior to the stratum. The same applies to the organic
stratum: the materials furnished by the substrata are an exterior medium
constituting the famous prebiotic soup, and catalysts play the role of seed
                  50 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

in the formation of interior substantial elements or even compounds.
These elements and compounds both appropriate materials and exteri-
orize themselves through replication, even in the conditions of the primor-
dial soup itself. Once again, interior and exterior exchange places, and both
are interior to the organic stratum. The limit between them is the mem-
brane that regulates the exchanges and transformation in organization (in
other words, the distributions interior to the stratum) and that defines all
of the stratum's formal relations or traits (even though the situation and
role of the limit vary widely depending on the stratum, for example, the
limit of the crystal as compared to the cellular membrane). We may there-
fore use the term central layer, or central ring, for the following aggregate
comprising the unity of composition of a stratum: exterior molecular
materials, interior substantial elements, and the limit or membrane con-
veying the formal relations. There is a single abstract machine that is envel-
oped by the stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as
opposed to the Planomenon of the plane of consistency.
    It would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to isolate this unitary,
central layer of the stratum, or to grasp it in itself, by regression. In the first
place, a stratum necessarily goes from layer to layer, and from the very
beginning. It already has several layers. It goes from a center to a periphery,
at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new
center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward,
then turn back. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate
states, and this process is one of the local conditions of the central ring
(different concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain
threshold of identity). These intermediate states present new figures of
milieus or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. They are inter-
mediaries between the exterior milieu and the interior element, substantial
elements and their compounds, compounds and substances, and between
the different formed substances (substances of content and substances of
expression). We will use the term epistrata for these intermediaries and
superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels. Returning to our two exam-
ples, on the crystalline stratum there are many intermediaries between the
exterior milieu or material and the interior seed: a multiplicity of perfectly
discontinuous states of metastability constituting so many hierarchical
degrees. Neither is the organic stratum separable from so-called interior
milieus that are interior elements in relation to exterior materials but also
exterior elements in relation to interior substances." These internal
organic milieus are known to regulate the degree of complexity or differen-
tiation of the parts of an organism. A stratum, considered from the stand-
point of its unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial
epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it down
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 51

into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a periph-
ery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center, and in turn
gives forth discontinuous epistrata.
    That is not all. In addition to this new or second-degree relativity of inte-
rior and exterior, there is a whole history on the level of the membrane or
limit. To the extent that elements and compounds incorporate or appropri-
ate materials, the corresponding organisms are forced to turn to other
"more foreign and less convenient" materials that they take from still
intact masses or other organisms. The milieu assumes a third figure here: it
is no longer an interior or exterior milieu, even a relative one, nor an inter-
mediate milieu, but instead an annexed or associated milieu. Associated
milieus imply sources of energy different from alimentary materials.
Before these sources are obtained, the organism can be said to nourish
itself but not to breathe: it is in a state of suffocation.12 Obtaining an energy
source permits an increase in the number of materials that can be trans-
formed into elements and compounds. The associated milieu is thus
defined by the capture of energy sources (respiration in the most general
sense), by the discernment of materials, the sensing of their presence or
absence (perception), and by the fabrication or nonfabrication of the corre-
sponding compounds (response, reaction). That there are molecular per-
ceptions no less than molecular reactions can be seen in the economy of the
cell and the property of regulatory agents to "recognize" only one or two
kinds of chemicals in a very diverse milieu of exteriority. The development
of the associated milieus culminates in the animal worlds described by von
Uexkiill, with all their active, perceptive, and energetic characteristics.
The unforgettable associated world of the Tick, defined by its gravitational
energy of falling, its olfactory characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its
active characteristic of latching on: the tick climbs a branch and drops onto
a passing mammal it has recognized by smell, then latches onto its skin (an
associated world composed of three factors, and no more). Active and per-
ceptive characteristics are themselves something of a double pincer, a dou-
ble articulation.13
   Here, the associated milieus are closely related to organic forms. An
organic form is not a simple structure but a structuration, the constitution
of an associated milieu. An animal milieu, such as the spider web, is no less
"morphogenetic" than the form of the organism. One certainly cannot say
that the milieu determines the form; but to complicate things, this does not
make the relation between form and milieu any less decisive. Since the
form depends on an autonomous code, it can only be constituted in an
associated milieu that interlaces active, perceptive, and energetic charac-
teristics in a complex fashion, in conformity with the code's requirements;
and the form can develop only through intermediary milieus that regulate
                 52 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

the speeds and rates of its substances; and it can experience itself only in a
milieu of exteriority that measures the comparative advantages of the asso-
ciated milieus and the differential relations of the intermediary milieus.
Milieus always act, through selection, on entire organisms, the forms of
which depend on codes those milieus sanction indirectly. Associated
milieus divide a single milieu of exteriority among themselves as a func-
tion of different forms, just as intermediate milieus divide a milieu of
exteriority among themselves as a function of the rates or degrees of a sin-
gle form. But the dividing is done differently in the two cases. In relation to
the central belt of the stratum, the intermediate strata or milieus constitute
"epistrata" piled one atop the other, and form new centers for the new
peripheries. We will apply the term "parastrata" to the second way in which
the central belt fragments into sides and "besides," and the irreducible
forms and milieus associated with them. This time, it is at the level of the
limit or membrane of the central belt that the formal relations or traits
common to all of the strata necessarily assume entirely different forms or
types of forms corresponding to the parastrata. A stratum exists only in its
epistrata and parastrata, so that in the final analysis these must be consid-
ered strata in their own right. The ideally continuous belt or ring of the
stratum—the Ecumenon defined by the identity of molecular materials,
substantial elements, and formal relations—exists only as shattered, frag-
mented into epistrata and parastrata that imply concrete machines and
their respective indexes, and constitute different molecules, specific sub-
stances, and irreducible forms.14
   We may now return to the two fundamental contributions of Darwinism
and answer the question of why forms or types of forms in the parastrata
must be understood in relation to populations, and degrees of develop-
ment in the epistrata as rates or differential relations. First, parastrata
envelop the very codes upon which the forms depend, and these codes nec-
essarily apply to populations. There must already be an entire molecular
population to be coded, and the effects of the code, or a change in the code,
are evaluated in relation to a more or less molar population, depending on
the code's ability to propagate in the milieu or create for itself a new associ-
ated milieu within which the modification will be popularizable. Yes, we
must always think in terms of packs and multiplicities: a code does or does
not take hold because the coded individual belongs to a certain population,
"the population inhabiting test tubes, a flask full of water, or a mammal's
intestine." What does it mean to say that new forms and associated milieus
potentially result from a change in the code, a modification of the code, or a
variation in the parastratum? The change is obviously not due to a passage
from one preestablished form to another, in other words, a translation
from one code to another. As long as the problem was formulated in that
                 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 53

fashion, it remained insoluble, and one would have to agree with Cuvier
and Baer that established types of forms are irreducible and therefore do
not admit of translation or transformation. But as soon as it is recognized
that a code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it,
the problem receives a new formulation. There is no genetics without
"genetic drift." The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated
that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential mar-
gin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free
variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left
free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from
the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and
Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation
between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we
call surplus value of code, or side-communication.'5 We will have occasion
to discuss this further, for it is essential to all becomings-animal. Every
code is affected by a margin of decoding due to these supplements and sur-
plus values—supplements in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in
the order of a rhizome. Forms in the parastrata, the parastrata themselves,
far from lying immobile and frozen upon the strata, are part of a machinic
interlock: they relate to populations, populations imply codes, and codes
fundamentally include phenomena of relative decoding that are all the
more usable, composable, and addable by virtue of being relative, always
"beside."
   Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the
parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and
movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epis-
trata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements
that constitute them as the parastrata are from their processes. Nomadic
waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the
periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to
the old center and launching forth to the new.16 The organization of the
epistrata moves in the direction of increasing deterritorialization. Physical
particles and chemical substances cross thresholds of deterritorialization
on their own stratum and between strata; these thresholds correspond to
more or less stable intermediate states, to more or less transitory valences
and existences, to engagements with this or that other body, to densities of
proximity, to more or less localizable connections. Not only are physical
particles characterized by speeds of deterritorialization—Joycean
tachyons, particles-holes, and quarks recalling the fundamental idea of the
"soup"—but a single chemical substance (sulfur or carbon, for example)
has a number of more and less deterritorialized states. The more interior
milieus an organism has on its own stratum, assuring its autonomy and
                 54 O 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more
deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be under-
stood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and
rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power
that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has
reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is
deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on
its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterrito-
rialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role
by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migra-
tion, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is
intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it
evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and
spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritoriali-
zation (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define com-
plementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this
way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or inten-
sive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting
determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on
a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterrito-
rialization).17
   As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined
degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no
way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we
see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into pro-
cesses of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in
movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is
no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one
hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary,
a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding.
Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless
have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deter-
ritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition,
these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.
    On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the
milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their
compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized.
Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the mod-
ifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other
hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a
certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a cer-
tain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 55

and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, con-
struct or produce territorial signs (indexes). This is especially true of an ani-
mal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into
zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and
correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding
inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or
prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a dou-
ble movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of
exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes neces-
sary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain
its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull's line of
flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).18 A second
kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows
from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an associa-
tion with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior
milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its
associated milieu to explore land, forced to "stand on its own legs," now
carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting
the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a
fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then,
are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them
of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain
sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these move-
ments that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continu-
ally moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of
composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and move-
ments of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but
they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are con-
tinually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the
level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a
prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the
level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accel-
erations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterrito-
rialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.
   These relative movements should most assuredly not be confused with
the possibility of absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight,
absolute drift. The former are stratic or interstratic, whereas the latter con-
cern the plane of consistency and its destratification (its "combustion," as
Geoffrey would say). There is no doubt that mad physical particles crash
through the strata as they accelerate, leaving minimal trace of their pas-
sage, escaping spatiotemporal and even existential coordinates as they
tend toward a state of absolute deterritorialization, the state of unformed
                   56 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

matter on the plane of consistency. In a certain sense, the acceleration of
relative deterritorializations reaches the sound barrier: if the particles
bounce off this wall, or allow themselves to be captured by black holes, they
fall back onto the strata, into the strata's relations and milieus; but if they
cross the barrier they reach the unformed, destratified element of the plane
of consistency. We may even say the the abstract machines that emit and
combine particles have two very different modes of existence: the Ecumenon
and the Planomenon. Either the abstract machines remain prisoner to
stratifications, are enveloped in a certain specific stratum whose program
or unity of composition they define (the abstract Animal, the abstract
chemical Body, Energy in itself) and whose movements of relative
deterritorialization they regulate, Or, on the contrary, the abstract machine
cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the
plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes, the same machine at
work in astrophysics and in microphysics, in the natural and in the artifi-
cial, piloting flows of absolute deterritorialization (in no sense, of course, is
unformed matter chaos of any kind). But this presentation is still too
simplified.
   First, one does not go from the relative to the absolute simply by acceler-
ation, even though increases in speed tend to have this comparative and
global result. Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant acceler-
ator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possi-
ble to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay.
Retarded development is an example. What qualifies a deterritorialization
is not its speed (some are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes
epistrata and parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the
contrary, jumps from one singularity to another following a nondecom-
posable, nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane of consis-
tency. Second, under no circumstances must it be thought that absolute
deterritorialization comes suddenly of afterward, is in excess or beyond.
That would preclude any understanding of why the strata themselves are
animated by movements of relative deterritorialization and decoding that
are not like accidents occurring on them. In fact, what is primary is an abso-
lute deterritorialization an absolute line of flight, however complex or
multiple—that of the plane of consistency or body without organs (the
Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This absolute deterritorialization
becomes relative only after stratification occurs on that plane or body: It
is the strata that are always residue, not the opposite. The question is not
how something manages to leave the strata by how things get into them
in the first place. There is a perpetual immanence of absolute deterritori-
alization within relative deterritorialization; and the machinic assem-
blages between strata that regulate the differential relations and relative
                 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 57

movements also have cutting edges of deterritorialization oriented toward
the absolute. The plane of consistency is always immanent to the strata; the
two states of the abstract machine always coexist as two different states of
intensities.

    Most of the audience had left (the first to go were the Marinetians with
their double articulation, followed by the Hjelmslevians with their content
and expression, and the biologists with their proteins and nucleic acids).
The only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed to other follies,
along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and scattered individuals.
Challenger, moreover, had changed since the beginning of his talk. His
voice had become hoarser, broken occasionally by an apish cough. His
dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program
for pure computers. Or else he was dreaming of an axiomatic, for axi-
omatics deals essentially with stratification. Challenger was addressing
himself to memory only. Now that we had discussed what was constant and
what varied in a stratum from the standpoint of substances and forms, the
question remaining to be answered was what varied between strata from
the standpoint of content and expression. For if it is true that there is
always a real distinction constitutive of double articulation, a reciprocal
presupposition of content and expression, then what varies from one stra-
tum to another is the nature of this real distinction, and the nature and
respective positions of the terms distinguished. Let us start with a certain
group of strata that can be characterized summarily as follows: on these
strata, content (form and substance) is molecular, and expression (form
and substance) is molar. The difference between the two is primarily one of
order of magnitude or scale. Resonance, or the communication occurring
between the two independent orders, is what institutes the stratified sys-
tem. The molecular content of that system has its own form corresponding
to the distribution of elemental masses and the action of one molecule
upon another; similarly, expression has a form manifesting the statistical
aggregate and state of equilibrium existing on the macroscopic level.
Expression is like an "operation of amplifying structuration carrying the
active properties of the originally microphysical discontinuity to the
macrophysical level."
   We took as our point of departure cases of this kind on the geological
stratum, the crystalline stratum, and physicochemical strata, wherever the
molar can be said to express microscopic molecular interactions ("the crys-
tal is the macroscopic expression of a microscopic structure"; the "crystal-
line form expresses certain atomic or molecular characteristics of the
constituent chemical categories"). Of course, this still leaves numerous
possibilities, depending on the number and nature of the intermediate
                  58 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

states, and also on the impact of exterior forces on the formation of expres-
sion. There may be a greater or lesser number of intermediate states
between the molecular and the molar; there may be a greater or lesser num-
ber of exterior forces or organizing centers participating in the molar form.
Doubtless, these two factors are in an inverse relation to each other and
indicate limit-cases. For example, the molar form of expression may be of
the "mold" type, mobilizing a maximum of exterior forces; or it may be of
the "modulation" type, bringing into play only a minimum number of
them. Even in the case of the mold, however, there are nearly instantane-
ous, interior intermediate states between the molecular content that
assumes its own specific forms and the determinate molar expression of
the outside by the form of the mold. Conversely, even when the multiplica-
tion and temporalization of the intermediate states testify to the endo-
genous character of the molar form (as with crystals), a minimum of
exterior forces still intervene in each of the stages.19 We must therefore say
that the relative independence of content and expression, the real distinc-
tion between molecular content and molar expression with their respective
forms, has a special status enjoying a certain amount of latitude between
the limit-cases.
   Since strata are judgments of God, one should not hesitate to apply all
the subtleties of medieval Scholasticism and theology. There is a real dis-
tinction between content and expression because the corresponding forms
are effectively distinct in the "thing" itself, and not only in the mind of the
observer. But this real distinction is quite special; it is only formal since the
two forms compose or shape a single thing, a single stratified subject. Vari-
ous examples of formal distinction can be cited: between scales or orders of
magnitude (as between a map and its model; or, in a different fashion,
between the micro- and macrophysical levels, as in the parable of
Eddington's two offices); between the various states or formal reasons
through which a thing passes; between the thing in one form, and as
affected by a possibly exterior causality giving it a different form; and so
forth. (There is a proliferation of distinct forms because, in addition to
content and expression each having its own forms, intermediate states
introduce forms of expression proper to content and forms of content
proper to expression.)
   As diverse and real as formal distinctions are, on the organic stratum the
very nature of the distinction changes. As a result, the entire distribution
between content and expression is different. The organic stratum never-
theless preserves, and even amplifies, the relation between the molecular
and the molar, with all kinds of intermediate states. We saw this in the case
of morphogenesis, where double articulation is inseparable from a com-
munication between two orders of magnitude. The same thing applies to
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 59

cellular chemistry. But the organic stratum has a unique character that
must account for the amplifications. In a preceding discussion, expression
was dependent upon the expressed molecular content in all directions and
in every dimension and had independence only to the extent that it
appealed to a higher order of magnitude and to exterior forces: The real dis-
tinction was between forms, but forms belonging to the same aggregate, the
same thing or subject. Now, however, expression becomes independent in its
own right, in other words, autonomous. Before, the coding of a stratum was
coextensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other hand, it
takes place on an autonomous and independent line that detaches as much
as possible from the second and third dimensions. Expression ceases to be
voluminous or superficial, becoming linear, unidimensional (even in its
segmentarity). The essential thing is the linearity of the nucleic sequence.20
The real distinction between content and expression, therefore, is not sim-
ply formal. It is strictly speaking real, and passes into the molecular, with-
out regard to order of magnitude. It is between two classes of molecules,
nucleic acids of expression and proteins of content, nucleic elements or
nucleotides and protein elements or amino acids. Both expression and
content are now molecular and molar. The distinction no longer concerns a
single aggregate or subject; linearity takes us further in the direction of flat
multiplicities, rather than unity. Expression involves nucleotides and
nucleic acids as well as molecules that, in their substance and form, are
entirely independent not only of molecules of content but of any directed
action in the exterior milieu. Thus invariance is a characteristic of certain
molecules and is not found exclusively on the molar scale. Conversely, pro-
teins, in their substance and form of content, are equally independent of
nucleotides: the only thing univocally determined is that one amino acid
rather than another corresponds to a sequence of three nucleotides.2' What
the linear form of expression determines is therefore a derivative form of
expression, one that is relative to content and that, through a folding back
upon itself of the protein sequence of the amino acids, finally yields the
characteristic three-dimensional structures. In short, what is specific to the
organic stratum is this alignment of expression, this exhaustion or detach-
ment of a line of expression, this reduction of form and substance of expres-
sion to a unidimensional line, guaranteeing their reciprocal independence
from content without having to account for orders of magnitude.
   This has many consequences. The new configuration of expression and
content conditions not only the organism's power to reproduce but also its
power to deterritorialize or accelerate deterritorialization. The alignment
of the code or linearity of the nucleic sequence in fact marks a threshold of
deterritorialization of the "sign" that gives it a new ability to be copied and
makes the organism more deterritorialized than a crystal: only something
                  60 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

deterritorialized is capable of reproducing itself. When content and
expression are divided along the lines of the molecular and the molar, sub-
stances move from state to state, from the preceding state to the following
state, or from layer to layer, from an already constituted layer to a layer in
the process of forming, while forms install themselves at the limit between
the last layer or last state and the exterior milieu. Thus the stratum devel-
ops into epistrata and parastrata; this is accomplished through a set of
inductions from layer to layer and state to state, or at the limit. A crystal dis-
plays this process in its pure state, since its form expands in all directions,
but always as a function of the surface layer of the substance, which can be
emptied of most of its interior without interfering with the growth. It is the
crystal's subjugation to three-dimensionality, in other words its index of
territoriality, that makes the structure incapable of formally reproducing
and expressing itself; only the accessible surface can reproduce itself, since
it is the only deterritorializable part. On the contrary, the detachment of a
pure line of expression on the organic stratum makes it possible for the
organism to attain a much higher threshold of deterritorialization, gives it
a mechanism of reproduction covering all the details of its complex spatial
structure, and enables it to put all of its interior layers "topologically in
contact" with the exterior, or rather with the polarized limit (hence the spe-
cial role of the living membrane). The development of the stratum into
epistrata and parastrata occurs not through simple inductions but through
transductlons that account for the amplification of the resonance between
the molecular and the molar, independently of order of magnitude; for the
functional efficacy of the interior substances, independently of distance;
and for the possibility of a proliferation and even interlacing of forms,
independently of codes (surplus values of code or phenomena of trans-
coding or aparallel evolution).22
    There is a third major grouping of strata, defined less by a human
essence than, once again, by a new distribution of content and expression.
Form of content becomes "alloplastic" rather than "homoplastic"; in other
words, it brings about modifications in the external world. Form of expres-
sion becomes linguistic rather than genetic; in other words, it operates with
symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable, and modifiable from out-
side. What some call the properties of human beings—technology and
language, tool and symbol, free hand and supple larynx, "gesture and
speech"—are in fact properties of this new distribution. It would be diffi-
cult to maintain that the emergence of human beings marked the absolute
origin of this distribution. Leroi-Gourhan's analyses give us an under-
standing of how contents came to be linked with the hand-tool couple and
expressions with the face-language couple.23 In this context, the hand must
not be thought of simply as an organ but instead as a coding (the digital
                   10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 61

code), a dynamic structuration, a dynamic formation (the manual form, or
manual formal traits). The hand as a general form of content is extended in
tools, which are themselves active forms implying substances, or formed
matters; finally, products are formed matters, or substances, which in turn
serve as tools. Whereas manual formal traits constitute the unity of compo-
 sition of the stratum, the forms and substances of tools and products are
organized into parastrata and epistrata that themselves function as verita-
ble strata and mark discontinuities, breakages, communications and diffu-
sions, nomadisms and sedentarities, multiple thresholds and speeds of
relative deterritorialization in human populations. For with the hand as a
formal trait or general form of content a major threshold of deterri-
torialization is reached and opens, an accelerator that in itself permits a
shifting interplay of comparative deterritorializations and reterritorial-
izations—what makes this acceleration possible is, precisely, phenomena
of "retarded development" in the organic substrata. Not only is the hand a
deterritorialized front paw; the hand thus freed is itself deterritorialized in
relation to the grasping and locomotive hand of the monkey. The synergis-
tic deterritorializations of other organs (for example, the foot) must be
taken into account. So must correlative deterritorializations of the milieu:
the steppe as an associated milieu more deterritorialized than the forest,
  exerting a selective pressure of deterritorialization upon the body and tech-
nology (it was on the steppe, not in the forest, that the hand was able to
appear as a free form, and fire as a technologically formable matter).
Finally, complementary reterritorializations must be taken into account
(the foot as a compensatory reterritorialization for the hand, also
occurring on the steppe). Maps should be made of these things, organic,
ecological, and technological maps one can lay out on the plane of
consistency.
    On the other hand, language becomes the new form of expression, or
rather the set of formal traits defining the new expression in operation
throughout the stratum. Just as manual traits exist only in forms and
formed matters that shatter their continuity and determine the distribu-
tion of their effects, formal traits of expression exist only in a diversity of
formal languages and imply one or several formable substances. The sub-
stance involved is fundamentally vocal substance, which brings into play
various organic elements: not only the larynx, but the mouth and lips, and
the overall motricity of the face. Once again, a whole intensive map must
be accounted for: the mouth as a deterritorialization of the snout (the
whole "conflict between the mouth and the brain," as Perrier called it); the
lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips, in other
words, an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human
females have breasts, in other words, deterritorialized mammary glands:
                  62 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accom-
panied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts,
and the breasts on the lips). What a curious deterritorialization, filling
one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe, once more,
seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the "supple larynx" is a
development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in
a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryn-
geal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the
forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly. Everyone knows that lum-
berjacks rarely talk.24 Physiological, acoustic, and vocal substance are not
the only things that undergo all these deterritorializations. The form of
expression, as language, also crosses a threshold.
    Vocal signs have temporal linearity, and it is this superlinearity that con-
stitutes their specific deterritorialization and differentiates them from
genetic linearity. Genetic linearity is above all spatial, even though its seg-
ments are constructed and reproduced in succession; thus at this level it
does not require effective overcoding of any kind, only phenomena of end-
to-end connection, local regulations, and partial interactions (overcoding
takes place only at the level of integrations implying different orders of
magnitude). That is why Jacob is reluctant to compare the genetic code to a
language; in fact, the genetic code has neither emitter, receiver, compre-
hension, nor translation, only redundancies and surplus values.25 The tem-
poral linearity of language expression relates not only to a succession but to
a formal synthesis of succession in which time constitutes a process of lin-
ear overcoding and engenders a phenomenon unknown on the other strata:
translation, translatability, as opposed to the previous inductions and
transductions. Translation should not be understood simply as the ability
of one language to "represent" in some way the givens of another language,
but beyond that as the ability of language, with its own givens on its own
stratum, to represent all the other strata and thus achieve a scientific con-
ception of the world. The scientific world (Welt, as opposed to the Umwelt
of the animal) is the translation of all of the flows, particles, codes, and ter-
ritorialities of the other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of
signs, in other words, into an overcoding specific to language. This prop-
erty of overcoding or superlinearity explains why, in language, not only is
expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent
of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass from
one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic code, for
example, between RNA and DNA chains. We will see later on how this situ-
ation gives rise to certain imperialist pretentions on behalf of language,
which are naively expressed in such formulas as: "Every semiology of a
nonlinguistic system must use the medium of language... .Language is the
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 63

interpreter of all the other systems, linguistic and nonlinguistic." This
amounts to defining an abstract character of language and then saying that
the other strata can share in that character only by being spoken in lan-
guage. That is stating the obvious. More positively, it must be noted that
the immanence within language of universal translation means that its
epistrata and parastrata, with respect to superpositions, diffusions, com-
munications, and abutments, operate in an entirely different manner than
those of other strata: all human movements, even the most violent, imply
translations.
    We have to hurry, Challenger said, we're being rushed by the line of time
on this third stratum. So we have a new organization of content and
expression, each with its own forms and substances: technological content,
semiotic or symbolic expression. Content should be understood not sim-
ply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that preexists
them and constitutes states of force or formations of power. Expression
should be understood not simply as the face and language, or individual
languages, but as a semiotic collective machine that preexists them and
constitutes regimes of signs. A formation of power is much more than a
tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. Rather, they act as
determining and selective agents, as much in the constitution of languages
and tools as in their usages and mutual or respective diffusions and com-
munications. The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are
fully a part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their
pincers out in all directions at all the other strata. Is this not like an interme-
diate state between the two states of the abstract Machine"?—the state in
which it remains enveloped in a corresponding stratum (ecumenon), and
the state in which it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of
consistency (planomenon). The abstract machine begins to unfold, to
stand to full height, producing an illusion exceeding all strata, even though
the machine itself still belongs to a determinate stratum. This is, obviously,
the illusion constitutive of man (who does man think he is?). This illusion
derives from the overcoding immanent to language itself. But what is not
illusory are the new distributions between content and expression: techno-
logical content characterized by the hand-tool relation and, at a deeper
level, tied to a social Machine and formations of power; symbolic expres-
sion characterized by face-language relations and, at a deeper level, tied to
a semiotic Machine and regimes of signs. On both sides, the epistrata and
parastrata, the superposed degrees and abutting forms, attain more than
ever before the status of autonomous strata in their own right. In cases
where we can discern two different regimes of signs or two different forma-
tions of power, we shall say that they are in fact two different strata in
human populations.
                 64 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

    What precisely is the relation now between content and expression, and
what type of distinction is there between them? It's all in the head. Yet
never was a distinction more real. What we are trying to say is that there is
indeed one exterior milieu for the entire stratum, permeating the entire
stratum: the cerebral-nervous milieu. It comes from the organic substra-
tum, but of course that substratum does not merely play the role of a sub-
stratum or passive support. It is no less complex in organization. Rather, it
constitutes the prehuman soup immersing us. Our hands and faces are
immersed in it. The brain is a population, a set of tribes tending toward two
poles. In Leroi-Gourhan's analyses of the constitution of these two poles in
the soup—one of which depends on the actions of the face, the other on the
hand—their correlation or relativity does not preclude a real distinction
between them; quite the contrary, it entails one, as the reciprocal presuppo-
sition of two articulations, the manual articulation of content and the
facial articulation of expression. And the distinction is not simply real, as
between molecules, things, or subjects; it has become essential (as they
used to say in the Middle Ages), as between attributes, genres of being, or
irreducible categories: things and words. Yet we find that the most general
of movements, the one by which each of the distinct articulations is already
double in its own right, carries over onto this level; certain formal elements
of content play the role of expression in relation to content proper, and cer-
tain formal elements of expression play the role of content in relation to
expression proper. In the first case, Leroi-Gourhan shows how the hand
creates a whole world of symbols, a whole pluridimensional language, not
to be confused with unilinear verbal language, which constitutes a radiat-
ing expression specific to content (he sees this as the origin of writing).26
The second case is clearly displayed in the double articulation specific to
language itself, since phonemes form a radiating content specific to the
expression of monemes as linear significant segments (it is only under
these conditions that double articulation as a general characteristic of
strata has the linguistic meaning Martinet attributes to it). Our discussion
of the relations between content and expression, the real distinction
between them, and the variations of those relations and that distinction on
the major types of strata, is now provisionally complete.
    Challenger wanted to go faster and faster. No one was left, but he went on
anyway. The change in his voice, and in his appearance, was growing more
and more pronounced. Something animalistic in him had begun to speak
when he started talking about human beings. You still couldn't put your
finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the spot. He
still had three problems he wanted to discuss. The first seemed primarily
terminological: Under what circumstances may we speak of signs? Should
we say they are everywhere on all the strata and that there is a sign when-
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 65

ever there is a form of expression? We may summarily distinguish three
kinds of signs: indexes (territorial signs), symbols (deterritorialized signs),
and icons (signs ofreterritorialization). Should we say that there are signs
on all the strata, under the pretext that every stratum includes territoriali-
ties and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization? This
kind of expansive method is very dangerous, because it lays the ground-
work for or reinforces the imperialism of language, if only by relying on its
function as universal translator or interpreter. It is obvious that there is no
system of signs common to all strata, not even in the form of a semiotic
"chora" theoretically prior to symbolization.27 It would appear that we
may accurately speak of signs only when there is a distinction between
forms of expression and forms of content that is not only real but also cate-
gorical. Under these conditions, there is a semiotic system on the corre-
sponding stratum because the abstract machine has precisely that fully
erect posture that permits it to "write," in other words, to treat language
and extract a regime of signs from it. But before it reaches that point, in
so-called natural codings, the abstract machine remains enveloped in the
strata: It does not write in any way and has no margin of latitude allowing it
to recognize something as a sign (except in the strictly territorial sense of
animal signs). After that point, the abstract machine develops on the plane
of consistency and no longer has any way of making a categorical distinc-
tion between signs and particles; for example, it writes, but flush with the
real, it inscribes directly upon the plane of consistency. It therefore seems
reasonable to reserve the word "sign" in the strict sense for the last group of
strata. This terminological discussion would be entirely without interest if
it did not bring us to yet another danger: not the imperialism of language
affecting all of the strata, but the imperialism of the signifier affecting lan-
guage itself, affecting all regimes of signs and the entire expanse of the
strata upon which they are located. The question here is not whether there
are signs on every stratum but whether all signs are signifiers, whether all
signs are endowed with signifiance, whether the semiotic of signs is neces-
sarily linked to a semiology of the signifier. Those who take this route may
even be led to forgo the notion of the sign, for the primacy of the signifier
over language guarantees the primacy of language over all of the strata even
more effectively than the simple expansion of the sign in all directions.
What we are saying is that the illusion specific to this posture of the abstract
Machine, the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between
one's pincers, can be better secured through the erection of the signifier
than through the extension of the sign (thanks to signifiance, language can
claim to be in direct contact with the strata without having to go through
the supposed signs on each one). But we're still going in the same circle,
we're still spreading the same canker.
                 66 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

    The linguistic relation between the signifier and signified has, of course,
been conceived in many different ways. It has been said that they are
arbitrary; that they are as necessary to each other as the two sides of the
same leaf; that they correspond term by term, or else globally; and that they
are so ambivalent as to be indistinguishable. In any event, the signified is
thought not to exist outside of its relationship with signifier, and the ulti-
mate signified is the very existence of the signifier, extrapolated beyond the
sign. There is only one thing that can be said about the signifier: it is Redun-
dancy, it is the Redundant. Hence its incredible despotism, and its success.
Theories of arbitrariness, necessity, term-by-term or global correspon-
dence, and ambivalence serve the same cause: the reduction of expression
to the signifier. Yet forms of content and forms of expression are highly
relative, always in a state of reciprocal presupposition. The relations
between their respective segments are biunivocal, exterior, and "de-
formed." There is never conformity between the two, or from one to the
other. There is always real independence and a real distinction; even to fit
the forms together, and to determine the relations between them, requires a
specific, variable assemblage. None of these characteristics applies to the
signifier-signified relation, even though some seem to coincide with it par-
tially and accidentally. Overall, these characteristics stand in radical oppo-
sition to the scenario of the signifier. A form of content is not a signified,
any more than a form of expression is a signifier.28 This is true for all the
strata, including those on which language plays a role.
    Signifier enthusiasts take an oversimplified situation as their implicit
model: word and thing. From the word they extract the signifier, and from
the thing a signified in conformity with the word, and therefore subjugated
to the signifier. They operate in a sphere interior to and homogeneous with
language. Let us follow Foucault in his exemplary analysis, which, though
it seems not to be, is eminently concerned with linguistics. Take a thing like
the prison: the prison is a form, the "prison-form"; it is a form of content on
a stratum and is related to other forms of content (school, barracks, hospi-
tal, factory). This thing or form does not refer back to the word "prison"
but to entirely different words and concepts, such as "delinquent" and
"delinquency," which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating,
and even committing criminal acts. "Delinquency" is the form of expres-
sion in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content "prison." Delin-
quency is in no way a signifier, even a juridical signifier, the signified of
which would be the prison. That would flatten the entire analysis. More-
over, the form of expression is reducible not to words but to a set of state-
ments arising in the social field considered as a stratum (that is what a
regime of signs is). The form of content is reducible not to a thing but to a
complex state of things as a formation of power (architecture, regimenta-
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 67

tion, etc.). We could say that there are two constantly intersecting multipli-
cities, "discursive multiplicities" of expression and "nondiscursive multi-
plicities" of content. It is even more complex than that because the prison
as a form of content has a relative expression all its own; there are all kinds
of statements specific to it that do not necessarily coincide with the state-
ments of delinquency. Conversely, delinquency as a form of expression has
an autonomous content all its own, since delinquency expresses not only a
new way of evaluating crimes but a new way of committing them. Form of
content and form of expression, prison and delinquency: each has its own
history, microhistory, segments. At most, along with other contents and
expressions, they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting not at
all as a signifier but as a kind of diagram (a single abstract machine for the
prison and the school and the barracks and the hospital and the fac-
tory ...). Fitting the two types of forms together, segments of content and
segments of expression, requires a whole double-pincered, or rather
double-headed, concrete assemblage taking their real distinction into
account. It requires a whole organization articulating formations of power
and regimes of signs, and operating on the molecular level (societies char-
acterized by what Foucault calls disciplinary power).29 In short, we should
never oppose words to things that supposedly correspond to them, nor
signifiers to signifieds that are supposedly in conformity with them. What
should be opposed are distinct formalizations, in a state of unstable equi-
librium or reciprocal presupposition. "// is in vain that we say what we see;
what we see never resides in what we say."30 As in school: there is not just one
writing lesson, that of the great redundant Signifier for any and all
signifieds. There are two distinct formalizations in reciprocal presupposi-
tion and constituting a double-pincer: the formalization of expression in
the reading and writing lesson (with its own relative contents), and the
formalization of content in the lesson of things (with their own relative
expressions). We are never signifier or signified. We are stratified.
   The preferred method would be severely restrictive, as opposed to the
expansive method that places signs on all strata or signifier in all signs
(although at the limit it may forgo signs entirely). First, there exist forms of
expression without signs (for example, the genetic code has nothing to do
with a language). It is only under certain conditions that strata can be said
to include signs; signs cannot be equated with language in general but are
defined by regimes of statements that are so many real usages or functions
of language. Then why retain the word sign for these regimes, which forma-
lize an expression without designating or signifying the simultaneous con-
tents, which are formalized in a different way? Signs are not signs of a thing;
they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a
certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements, and it is for
                 68 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

this reason that the word should be retained (as we have seen, this applies
even to animal "signs").
    Next, if we consider regimes of signs using this restrictive definition, we
see that they are not, or not necessarily, signifiers. Just as signs designate
only a certain formalization of expression in a determinate group of strata,
signifiance itself designates only one specific regime among a number of
regimes existing in that particular formalization. Just as there are ase-
miotic expressions, or expressions without signs, there are asemiological
regimes of signs, asignifying signs, both on the strata and on the plane of
consistency. The most that can be said of signifiance is that it characterizes
one regime, which is not even the most interesting or modern or contempo-
rary one, but is perhaps only more pernicious, cancerous, and despotic
than the others, and more steeped in illusion than they.
    In any case, content and expression are never reducible to signified-
signifier. And (this is the second problem) neither are they reducible to
base-superstructure. One can no more posit a primacy of content as the
determining factor than a primacy of expression as a signifying system.
Expression can never be made into a form reflecting content, even if one
endows it with a "certain" amount of independence and a certain potential
for reacting, if only because so-called economic content already has a form
and even forms of expression that are specific to it. Form of content and
form of expression involve two parallel formalizations in presupposition:
it is obvious that their segments constantly intertwine, embed themselves
in one another; but this is accomplished by the abstract machine from
which the two forms derive, and by machinic assemblages that regulate
their relations. If this parallelism is replaced by a pyramidal image, then
content (including its form) becomes an economic base of production dis-
playing all of the characteristics of the Abstract; the assemblages become
the first story of a superstructure that, as such, is necessarily situated
within a State apparatus; the regimes of signs and forms of expression
become the second story of the superstructure, defined by ideology. It isn't
altogether clear where language should go, since the great Despot decided
that it should be reserved a special place, as the common good of the nation
and the vehicle for information. Thus one misconstrues the nature of lan-
guage, which exists only in heterogeneous regimes of signs, and rather than
circulating information distributes contradictory orders. It misconstrues
the nature of regimes of signs, which express organizations of power or
assemblages and have nothing to do with ideology as the supposed expres-
sion of a content (ideology is a most execrable concept obscuring all of the
effectively operating social machines). It misconstrues the nature of orga-
nizations of power, which are in no way located within a State apparatus
but rather are everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expres-
                   10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 69

 sion, the segments of which they intertwine. Finally, it misconstrues the
 nature of content, which is in no way economic "in the last instance," since
 there are as many directly economic signs or expressions as there are
 noneconomic contents. Nor can the status of social formations be analyzed
 by throwing some signifier into the base, or vice versa, or a bit of phallus or
 castration into political economy, or a bit of economics or politics into
 psychoanalysis.
     There is a third problem. It is difficult to elucidate the system of the
 strata without seeming to introduce a kind of cosmic or even spiritual evo-
 lution from one to the other, as if they were arranged in stages and ascended
 degrees of perfection. Nothing of the sort. The different figures of content
 and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere or noosphere, but
 everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by considering the
 strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than
 another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no
 fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another
 without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the stand-
 point of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as
 an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order
 can be reversed, with cultural or technical phenomena providing a fertile
 soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even
 particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects . . . It's even worse
 nowadays: you can't even tell in advance which stratum is going to commu-
 nicate with which other, or in what direction. Above all, there is no lesser,
 no higher or lower, organization; the substratum is an integral part of the
 stratum, is bound up with it as the milieu in which change occurs, and not
 an increase in organization.31 Furthermore, if we consider the plane of con-
 sistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a
 semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron
 crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystalli-
 zation produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter... There
 is no "like" here, we are not saying "like an electron," "like an interaction,"
 etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that con-
 sists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual
 organites, authentic sign sequences. It's just that they have been uprooted
 from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what
 makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency
 possible. A silent dance. The plane of consistency knows nothing of differ-
 ences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the dif-
ference between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the
distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and
                  70 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the
 strata.
     But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata
that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization?
 Eyes are black holes, but what are black holes and eyes outside their strata
and territorialities? What it comes down to is that we cannot content our-
selves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the
 destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and
defined by relative speeds of deterritorialization; moreover, absolute
 deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spin-
offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always pri-
 mary and always immanent. In addition, the plane of consistency is
occupied, drawn by the abstract Machine; the abstract Machine exists
simultaneously developed on the destratified plane it draws, and envel-
oped in each stratum whose unity of composition it defines, and even half-
 erected in certain strata whose form of prehension it defines. That which
 races or dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the aura of
 its stratum, an undulation, a memory or tension. The plane of consistency
 retains just enough of the strata to extract from them variables that operate
 in the plane of consistency as its own functions. The plane of consistency,
 or planomenon, is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed
 matters, but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every kind. It is true
 that on the plane of consistency there are no longer forms or substances,
 content or expression, respective and relative deterritorializations. But
 beneath the forms and substances of the strata the plane of consistency (or
 the abstract machine) constructs continuums of intensity: it creates conti-
 nuity for intensities that it extracts from distinct forms and substances.
 Beneath contents and expressions the plane of consistency (or the abstract
 machine) emits and combines particles-signs that set the most asignifying
 of signs to functioning in the most deterritorialized of particles. Beneath
 relative movements the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) per-
forms conjunctions of flows of deterritorialization that transform the
 respective indexes into absolute values. The only intensities known to the
 strata are discontinuous, bound up in forms and substances; the only parti-
cles are divided into particles of content and articles of expression; the only
deterritorialized flows are disjointed and reterritorialized. Continuum of
intensities, combined emission of particles or signs-particles, conjunction
of deterritorialized flows: these are the three factors proper to the plane of
consistency; they are brought about by the abstract machine and are consti-
tutive of destratification. Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic
white night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of
 "plan(n)ing," of diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The
                 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 71

abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combina-
tions, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.
   A final distinction must now be noted. Not only does the abstract
machine have different simultaneous states accounting for the complex-
ity of what takes place on the plane of consistency, but the abstract
machine should not be confused with what we call a concrete machinic
assemblage. The abstract machine sometimes develops upon the plane of
consistency, whose continuums, emissions, and conjugations it con-
structs, and sometimes remains enveloped in a stratum whose unity of
composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines. The
machinic assemblage is something entirely different from the abstract
machine, even though it is very closely connected with it. First, on a stra-
tum, it performs the coadaptations of content and expression, ensures
biunivocal relationships between segments of content and segments of
expression, and guides the division of the stratum into epistrata and
parastrata. Next, between strata, it ensures the relation to whatever
serves as a substratum and brings about the corresponding changes in
organization. Finally, it is in touch with the plane of consistency because
it necessarily effectuates the abstract machine on a particular stratum,
between strata, and in the relation between the strata and the plane. An
assemblage (for example, the smith's anvil among the Dogons) is neces-
sary for the articulations of the organic stratum to come about. An assem-
blage is necessary for the relation between two strata to come about. And
an assemblage is necessary for organisms to be caught within and perme-
ated by a social field that utilizes them: Must not the Amazons amputate a
breast to adapt the organic stratum to a warlike technological stratum, as
though at the behest of a fearsome woman-bow-steppe assemblage?
Assemblages are necessary for states offeree and regimes of signs to inter-
twine their relations. Assemblages are necessary in order for the unity of
composition enveloped in a stratum, the relations between a given stra-
tum and the others, and the relation between these strata and the plane of
consistency to be organized rather than random. In every respect,
machinic assemblages effectuate the abstract machine insofar as it is
developed on the plane of consistency or enveloped in a stratum. The
most important problem of all: given a certain machinic assemblage,
what is its relation of effectuation with the abstract machine? How does it
effectuate it, with what adequation? Classify assemblages. What we call
the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic
assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or between strata.
   The system of the strata thus has nothing to do with signifier and signi-
fied, base and superstructure, mind and matter. All of these are ways of
reducing the strata to a single stratum, or of closing the system in on itself
                 72 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

by cutting it off from the plane of consistency as destratification. We had to
summarize before we lost our voice. Challenger was finishing up. His voice
had become unbearably shrill. He was suffocating. His hands were becom-
ing elongated pincers that had become incapable of grasping anything but
could still vaguely point to things. Some kind of matter seemed to be pour-
ing out from the double mask, the two heads; it was impossible to tell
whether it was getting thicker or more watery. Some of the audience had
returned, but only shadows and prowlers. "You hear that? It's an animal's
voice." So the summary would have to be quick, the terminology would
have to be set down as well as possible, for no good reason. There was a first
group of notions: the Body without Organs or the destratified Plane of
Consistency; the Matter of the Plane, that which occurs on the body or
plane (singular, nonsegmented multiplicities composed of intensive con-
tinuums, emissions of particles-signs, conjunctions of flows); and the
abstract Machine, or abstract Machines, insofar as they construct that
body or draw that plane or "diagram" what occurs (lines of flight, or abso-
lute deterritorializations).
   Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the
strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emis-
sions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of
expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In con-
junctions, they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and
diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary
reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articula-
tions animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms
and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with
relations that are determinable in every case. Such are the strata. Each stra-
tum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are
really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and
expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that
place their segments in relation. What varies from stratum to stratum is the
nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the nature of
the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative move-
ments. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of
real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude,
with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the real-
real distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of a
linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction
between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a
superlinearity of expression (translation).
   Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stra-
tum has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements,
                  10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 73

and formal traits (Ecumenon). But it divides into parastrata according to
its irreducible forms and associated milieus, and into epistrata according
to its layers of formed substances and intermediary milieus. Epistrata and
parastrata must themselves be thought of as strata. A machinic assemblage
is an interstratum insofar as it regulates the relations between strata, as well
as the relations between contents and expressions on each stratum, in
conformity with the preceding divisions. A single assemblage can borrow
from different strata, and with a certain amount of apparent disorder;
conversely, a stratum or element of a stratum can join others in function-
ing in a different assemblage. Finally, the machinic assemblage is a
 metastratum because it is also in touch with the plane of consistency and
necessarily effectuates the abstract machine. The abstract machine exists
enveloped in each stratum, whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it
defines, and developed on the plane of consistency, whose destratification
it performs (the Planomenon). Thus when the assemblages fit together the
variables of a stratum as a function of its unity, they also bring about a spe-
cific effectuation of the abstract machine as it exists outside the strata.
Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of the
contents and expression on each stratum, and at the intersection of all of
the strata with the plane of consistency. They rotate in all directions, like
beacons.
    It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning. The
double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the
tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to
eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of olibanum
and "hung with strangely figured arras." Disarticulated, deterritorialized,
Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was
leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. He whispered some-
thing else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs proliferate.
Panic is creation. A young woman cried out, her face "convulsed with a
wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than they had seen
on human countenance before." No one had heard the summary, and no
one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of
him, slowly hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre tra-
jectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assem-
blage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking
and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: "The figure slumped
oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort
of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock          The figure had now reached
the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a
blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling
made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped
                 74 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

case and pulled the door shut after i t . . . . The abnormal clicking went on,
beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-
openings"32—the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere.
   4. November 20, 1923—Postulates of
              Linguistics




  The Order-word Assemblage


          I. "Language Is Informational and Comiminicational"
When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or
arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing her-
self when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as
"insign," give orders or commands. A teacher's commands are not external
or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from primary
significations or result from information: an order always and already con-
cerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The compulsory
education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon
the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of
                                    75
           76 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the
statement-subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementary unit of language—
the statement—is the order-word.1 Rather than common sense, a faculty
for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable
faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words.
Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedi-
ence. "The baroness has not the slightest intention of convincing me of her
sincerity; she is simply indicating that she prefers to see me pretend to
agree."2 We see this in police or government announcements, which often
have little plausibility or truthfulness, but say very clearly what should be
observed and retained. The indifference to any kind of credibility exhib-
ited by these announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof
that the issue lies elsewhere. Let people say...: that is all language
demands. Spengler notes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the
statement of a judgment or the expression of a feeling, but "the command,
the expression of obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or
negation," very short phrases that command life and are inseparable from
enterprises and large-scale projects: "Ready?" "Yes." "Go ahead."3 Words
are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give
workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before
it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior significations or
to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite. Informa-
tion is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission,
and observation of orders as commands. One must be just informed
enough not to confuse "Fire!" with "Fore!" or to avoid the unfortunate situ-
ation of the teacher and the student as described by Lewis Carroll (the
teacher, at the top of the stairs, asks a question that is passed on by servants,
who distort it at each step of the way, and the student, below in the court-
yard, returns an answer that is also distorted at each stage of the trip back).
Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and
waits.4 Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death
sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it.
    The hard part is to specify the status and scope of the order-word. It is
not a question of the origin of language, since the order-word is only a
language-function, a function coextensive with language. If language
always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic
point of departure, it is because language does not operate between some-
thing seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to say-
ing. We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has
seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to
you. Hearsay. It does not even suffice to invoke a vision distorted by pas-
sion. The "first" language, or rather the first determination of language, is
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 77

not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse. The importance some
have accorded metaphor and metonymy proves disastrous for the study of
language. Metaphors and metonymies are merely effects; they are a part of
language only when they presuppose indirect discourse. There are many
passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speak-
ing in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative
movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse.5 Benveniste
denies that the bee has language, even though it has an organic coding pro-
cess and even uses tropes. It has no language because it can communicate
what it has seen but not transmit what has been communicated to it. A bee
that has seen a food source can communicate the message to bees that did
not see it, but a bee that has not seen it cannot transmit the message to oth-
ers that did not see it.6 Language is not content to go from a first party to a
second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily
goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in
this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not
the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a trac-
ing. But how can the order-word be a function coextensive with language
when the order, the command, seems tied to a restricted type of explicit
proposition marked by the imperative?
    Austin's famous theses clearly demonstrate that the various extrinsic
relations between action and speech by which a statement can describe an
action in an indicative mode or incite it in an imperative mode, etc., are not
all there is. There are also intrinsic relations between speech and certain
actions that are accomplished by sayingthem (the performative: I swear by
saying "I swear"), and more generally between speech and certain actions
that are accomplished in speaking (the illocutionary: I ask a question by
saying "Is ... ?" I make a promise by saying "I love you ..."; I give a com-
mand by using the imperative, etc.). These acts internal to speech, these
immanent relations between statements and acts, have been termed
implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions, as opposed to the potentially
explicit assumptions by which a statement refers to other statements or an
external action (Ducrot). The theory of the performative sphere, and the
broader sphere of the illocutionary, has had three important and immedi-
ate consequences: (1) It has made it impossible to conceive of language as a
code, since a code is the condition of possibility for all explanation. It has
also made it impossible to conceive of speech as the communication of
information: to order, question, promise, or affirm is not to inform some-
one about a command, doubt, engagement, or assertion but to effectuate
these specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit acts. (2) It has made it
impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scien-
tific zones of language independent of pragmatics. Pragmatics ceases to be
           78 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

a "trash heap," pragmatic determinations cease to be subject to the alterna-
tive: fall outside language, or answer to explicit conditions that syntacticize
and semanticize pragmatic determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes
the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself
into everything. (3) It makes it impossible to maintain the distinction
between language and speech because speech can no longer be defined sim-
ply as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary signification, or the var-
iable application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite, the meaning
and syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the
speech acts they presuppose.7
    It is true that it is still difficult to see how speech acts or implicit presup-
positions can be considered a function coextensive with language. It is all
the more difficult if one starts with the performative (that which one does
by saying it) and moves by extension to the illocutionary (that which one
does in speaking). For it is always possible to thwart that move. The
performative can be walled in by explaining it by specific syntactic and
semantic characteristics avoiding any recourse to a generalized prag-
matics. According to Benveniste, for example, the performative relates not
to acts but instead to a property ofself-referentiality of terms (the true per-
sonal pronouns, I, Y O U . . . , defined as shifters). By this account, a
preexistent structure of subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, in language,
rather than presupposing speech acts, is adequate to account for them.8
Benveniste thus defines language as communicational rather than infor-
mational; this properly linguistic intersubjectivity, or subjectification,
explains all the rest, in other words, everything that is brought into being by
saying it. The question is whether subjective communication is any better a
linguistic notion than ideal information. Oswald Ducrot has set forth the
reasons that have led him to reverse Benveniste's schema: The phenome-
non ofself-referentiality cannot account for the performative. The oppo-
site is the case; it is "the fact that certain statements are socially devoted to
the accomplishment of certain actions" that explains self-referentiality.
The performative itself is explained by the illocutionary, not the opposite.
It is the illocutionary that constitutes the nondiscursive or implicit presup-
positions. And the illocutionary is in turn explained by collective assem-
blages of enunciation, by juridical acts or equivalents of juridical acts,
which, far from depending on subjectification proceedings or assignations
of subjects in language, in fact determine their distribution. Communica-
tion is no better a concept than information; intersubjectivity gets us no
further than signifiance in accounting for these "statements-acts" assem-
blages that in each language delimit the role and range of subjective mor-
phemes.9 (We will see that the analysis of indirect discourse confirms this
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 79

point of view since it shows that subjectifications are not primary but
result from a complex assemblage.)
    We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for
example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every state-
ment to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are,
and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not con-
cern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a "social
obligation." Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Ques-
tions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language
is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts cur-
rent in a language at a given moment.
    The relation between the statement and the act is internal, immanent,
but it is not one of identity. Rather, it is a relation of redundancy. The order-
word itself is the redundancy of the act and the statement. Newspapers,
news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we "must" think,
retain, expect, etc. Language is neither informational nor communica-
tional. It is not the communication of information but something quite dif-
ferent: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to
another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes
an act and the act is accomplished in the statement. The most general
schema of information science posits in principle an ideal state of maxi-
mum information and makes redundancy merely a limitative condition
serving to decrease this theoretical maximum in order to prevent it from
being drowned out by noise. We are saying that the redundancy of the
order-word is instead primary and that information is only the minimal
condition for the transmission of order-words (which is why the opposition
to be made is not between noise and information but between all the
indisciplines at work in language, and the order-word as discipline or
"grammaticality"). Redundancy has two forms, frequency and resonance;
the first concerns the signifiance of information, the second (I = I) con-
cerns the subjectivity of communication. It becomes apparent that infor-
mation and communication, and even signifiance and subjectification, are
subordinate to redundancy. A distinction is sometimes made between
information and communication; some authors envision an abstract
signifiance of information and an abstract subjectification of communica-
tion. None of this, however, yields an implicit or primary form of language.
There is no signifiance independent of dominant significations, nor is
there subjectification independent of an established order of subjection.
Both depend on the nature and transmission of order-words in a given
social field.
    There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enun-
ciation. Yet relatively few linguists have analyzed the necessarily social
           80 O NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

character of enunciation.' ° The problem is that it is not enough to establish
that enunciation has this social character, since it could be extrinsic; there-
fore too much or too little is said about it. The social character of enuncia-
tion is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how
enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then becomes clear
that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to
the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and deter-
mines it to be so. It is for this reason that indirect discourse, especially
 "free" indirect discourse, is of exemplary value: there are no clear, distinc-
tive contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individ-
uated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation,
but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative
subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their
shifting distributions within discourse. Indirect discourse is not explained
by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely
appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single
voice, the glimmer of girls in a monologue by Charlus, the languages in a
language, the order-words in a word. The American murderer "Son of
Sam" killed on the prompting of an ancestral voice, itself transmitted
through the voice of a dog. The notion of collective assemblage of enuncia-
tion takes on primary importance since it is what must account for the
social character. We can no doubt define the collective assemblage as the
redundant complex of the act and the statement that necessarily accom-
plishes it. But this is still only a nominal definition; it does not even enable
us to justify our previous position that redundancy is irreducible to a sim-
ple identity (or that there is no simple identity between the statement and
the act). If we wish to move to a real definition of the collective assemblage,
we must ask of what consist these acts immanent to language that are in
redundancy with statements or constitute order-words.
    These acts seem to be defined as the set of all incorporeal transforma-
tions current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society.
We may take the word "body" in its broadest sense (there are mental bod-
ies, souls are bodies, etc.). We must, however, distinguish between the
actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only
noncorporeal attributes or the "expressed" of a statement. When Ducrot
asks what an act consists of, he turns precisely to the juridical assemblage,
taking the example of the judge's sentence that transforms the accused into
a convict. In effect, what takes place beforehand (the crime of which some-
one is accused), and what takes place after (the carrying out of the penalty),
are actions-passions affecting bodies (the body of the property, the body of
the victim, the body of the convict, the body of the prison); but the transfor-
mation of the accused into a convict is a pure instantaneous act or incorpo-
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 81

real attribute that is the expressed of the judge's sentence.11 Peace and war
are states or interminglings of very different kinds of bodies, but the decla-
ration of a general mobilization expresses an instantaneous and incorpo-
real transformation of bodies. Bodies have an age, they mature and grow
old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal trans-
formations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular socie-
ties. "You are no longer a child": this statement concerns an incorporeal
transformation, even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their
actions and passions. The incorporeal transformation is recognizable by
its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement
expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces;
that is why order-words are precisely dated, to the hour, minute, and sec-
ond, and take effect the moment they are dated. Love is an intermingling of
bodies that can be represented by a heart with an arrow through it, by a
union of souls, etc., but the declaration "I love you" expresses a noncor-
poreal attribute of bodies, the lover's as well as that of the loved one. Eating
bread and drinking wine are interminglings of bodies; communing with
Christ is also an intermingling of bodies, properly spiritual bodies that are
no less "real" for being spiritual. But the transformation of the body of the
bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is the pure expressed
of a statement attributed to the bodies. In an airplane hijacking, the threat
of a hijacker brandishing a revolver is obviously an action; so is the execu-
tion of the hostages, if it occurs. But the transformation of the passengers
into hostages, and of the plane-body into a prison-body, is an instantane-
ous incorporeal transformation, a "mass media act" in the sense in which
the English speak of "speech acts." The order-words or assemblages of
enunciation in a given society (in short, the illocutionary) designate this
instantaneous relation between statements and the incorporeal transfor-
mations or noncorporeal attributes they express.
   The instantaneousness of the order-word, which can be projected to
infinity, placed at the origin of society, is quite strange; for Rousseau, for
example, the passage from the state of nature to the social state is like a leap
in place, an incorporeal transformation occurring at zero hour. Real his-
tory undoubtedly recounts the actions and passions of the bodies that
develop in a social field; it communicates them in a certain fashion; but it
also transmits order-words, in other words, pure acts intercalated into that
development. History will never be rid of dates. Perhaps economics or
financial analysis best demonstrates the presence and instantaneousness
of these decisive acts in an overall process (that is why statements defi-
nitely do not belong to ideology, but are already at work in what is suppos-
edly the domain of the economic base). The galloping inflation in
Germany after 1918 was a crisis affecting the monetary body, and many
           82 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

other bodies besides; but the sum of the "circumstances" suddenly made
possible a semiotic transformation that, although indexed to the body of
the earth and material assets, was still a pure act or incorporeal trans-
formation—November 20, 1923.. .'2
   The assemblages are in constant variation, are themselves constantly
subject to transformations. First, the circumstances must be taken into
account: Benveniste clearly demonstrates that a performative statement is
nothing outside of the circumstances that make it performative. Anybody
can shout, "I declare a general mobilization," but in the absence of an effec-
tuated variable giving that person the right to make such a statement it is an
act of peurility or insanity, not an act of enunciation. This is also true of "I
love you," which has neither meaning nor subject nor addressee outside of
circumstances that not only give it credibility but make it a veritable
assemblage, a power marker, even in the case of an unhappy love (it is still
by a will to power that one obeys ...). The general term "circumstances"
should not leave the impression that it is a question only of external cir-
cumstances. "I swear" is not the same when said in the family, at school, in
a love affair, in a secret society, or in court: it is not the same thing, and nei-
ther is it the same statement; it is not the same bodily situation, and neither
is it the same incorporeal transformation. The transformation applies to
bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation. There are variables
of expression that establish a relation between language and the outside, but
precisely because they are immanent to language. As long as linguistics
confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or pho-
nological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject
and accordingly botches the assemblage; it consigns circumstances to the
exterior, closes language in on itself, and makes pragmatics a residue. Prag-
matics, on the other hand, does not simply appeal to external circum-
stances: it brings to light variables of expression or of enunciation that are
so many internal reasons for language not to close itself off. As Volosinov
[Bakhtin] says, as long as linguistics extracts constants, it is incapable of help-
ing us understand how a single word can be a complete enunciation; there
must be "an extra something" that "remains outside of the scope of the entire
set of linguistic categories and definitions," even though it is still entirely
within the purview of the theory of enunciation or language.'3 The order-word
is precisely that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation. The
instantaneousness of the order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of varia-
tion in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed.
    Pragmatics is a politics of language. A study such as Jean-Pierre Faye's
on the constitution of Nazi statements in the German social field is in this
respect exemplary (and cannot be directly transferred to the constitution
of Fascist statements in Italy). Transformational research of this kind is
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 83

concerned with the variation of the order-words and noncorporeal attri-
butes linked to social bodies and effectuating immanent acts. We may take
as another example, under different conditions, the formation of a prop-
erly Leninist type of statement in Soviet Russia, basing ourselves on a text
by Lenin entitled "On Slogans" (1917). This text constituted an incorpo-
real transformation that extracted from the masses a proletarian class as an
assemblage of enunciation before the conditions were present for the prole-
tariat to exist as a body. A stroke of genius from the First Marxist Interna-
tional, which "invented" a new type of class: Workers of the world, unite!14
Taking advantage of the break with the Social Democrats, Lenin invented
or decreed yet another incorporeal transformation that extracted from the
proletarian class a vanguard as an assemblage of enunciation and was
attributed to the "Party," a new type of party as a distinct body, at the risk of
falling into a properly bureaucratic system of redundancy. The Leninist
wager, an act of audacity? Lenin declared that the slogan (mot d'ordre) "All
power to the Soviets" was valid only from the 27th of February to the 4th of
July for the peacetime development of the Revolution, and no longer held
in the state of war; the passage from peace to war implied this transforma-
tion, not just from the masses to a guiding proletariat, but from the prole-
tariat to a directing vanguard. July 4 exactly the power of the Soviets came
to an end. All of the external circumstances can be assigned: the war as well
as the insurrection that forced Lenin to flee to Finland. But the fact
remains that the incorporeal transformation was uttered on the 4th of July,
prior to the organization of the body to which it would be attributed,
namely, the Party itself. "Every particular slogan must be deduced from the
totality of the specific features of a definite political situation."15 If the
objection is leveled that these specific features pertain to politics and not
linguistics, it must be observed how thoroughly politics works language
from within, causing not only the vocabulary but also the structure and all
of the phrasal elements to vary as the order-words change. A type of state-
ment can be evaluated only as a function of its pragmatic implications, in
other words, in relation to the implicit presuppositions, immanent acts, or
incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new config-
urations of bodies. True intuition is not a judgment of grammaticality but
an evaluation of internal variables of enunciation in relation to the aggre-
gate of the circumstances.
   We have gone from explicit commands to order-words as implicit pre-
suppositions; from order-words to the immanent acts or incorporeal trans-
formations they express; and from there to the assemblages of enunciation
whose variables they are. To the extent these variables enter at a given
moment into determinable relations, the assemblages combine in a regime
of signs or a semiotic machine. It is obvious that a society is plied by several
           84 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

semiotics, that its regimes are in fact mixed. Moreover, at a later time there
will arise new order-words that will modify the variables and will not yet be
part of a known regime. Thus the order-word is redundancy in several
ways: as a function of the process of transmission essential to it, and in
itself, from the time it is emitted, in its "immediate" relation with the act or
transformation it effectuates. The order-word is already redundancy even
when it is in rupture with a particular semiotic. That is why every state-
ment of a collective assemblage of enunciation belongs to indirect dis-
course. Indirect discourse is the presence of a reported statement within
the reporting statement, the presence of an order-word within the word.
Language in its entirety is indirect discourse. Indirect discourse in no way
supposes direct discourse; rather, the latter is extracted from the former, to
the extent that the operations of signifiance and proceedings of subjec-
tification in an assemblage are distributed, attributed, and assigned, or
that the variables of the assemblage enter into constant relations, however
temporarily. Direct discourse is a detached fragment of a mass and is born
of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage; but the collective
assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name,
the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice.
I always depend on a molecular assemblage of enunciation that is not given
in my conscious mind, any more than it depends solely on my apparent
social determinations, which combine many heterogeneous regimes of
signs. Speaking in tongues. To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of
the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather
the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self
(Moi). I is an order-word. A schizophrenic said: "I heard voices say: he is
conscious of life."16 In this sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but
it is a cogito that makes self-consciousness the incorporeal transformation
of an order-word, or a result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is
still the free indirect discourse running through me, coming from other
worlds or other planets. That is why so many artists and writers have been
tempted by the seance table. When we ask what faculty is specific to the
order-word, we must indeed attribute to it some strange characteristics: a
kind of instantaneousness in the emission, perception, and transmission of
order-words; a wide variability, and a power of forgetting permitting one to
feel absolved of the order-words one has followed and then abandoned in
order to welcome others; a properly ideal or ghostly capacity for the appre-
hension of incorporeal transformations; an aptitude for grasping language
as an immense indirect discourse.'7 The faculty of the cuer and the cued, of
the song that always holds a tune within a tune in a relation of redundancy;
a faculty that is in truth mediumistic, glossolalic, or xenoglossic.
    Let us return to the question of how this defines a language-function, a
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 85

function coextensive with language. It is evident that order-words, collec-
tive assemblages, or regimes of signs cannot be equated with language. But
they effectuate its condition of possibility (the superlinearity of expres-
sion), they fulfill in each instance this condition of possibility; without
them, language would remain a pure virtuality (the superlinear character
of indirect discourse). Doubtless, the assemblages vary, undergo transfor-
mation. But they do not necessarily vary by language, they do not corre-
spond to the various languages. A language seems to be defined by the
syntactical, semantic, phonological constants in its statements; the collec-
tive assemblage, on the contrary, concerns the usage of these constants in
relation to variables internal to enunciation itself (variables of expression,
immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations). Different constants, dif-
ferent languages, may have the same usage; the same constants in a given
language may have different usages, successively or even simultaneously.
We cannot content ourselves with a duality between constants as linguistic
factors that are explicit or potentially explicit, and variables as extrinsic,
nonlinguistic factors. For the pragmatic variables of usage are internal to
enunciation and constitute the implicit presuppositions of language. Thus
if the collective assemblage is in each instance coextensive with the linguis-
tic system considered, and to language as a whole, it is because it expresses
the set of incorporeal transformations that effectuate the condition of pos-
sibility of language and utilize the elements of the linguistic system. The
language-function thus defined is neither informational nor communi-
cational; it has to do neither with signifying information nor with
intersubjective communication. And it is useless to abstract a signifiance
outside information, or a subjectivity outside communication. For the
subjectification proceedings and movement of signifiance relate to
regimes of signs, or collective assemblages. The language-function is the
transmission of order-words, and order-words relate to assemblages, just as
assemblages relate to the incorporeal transformations constituting the var-
iables of the function. Linguistics is nothing without a pragmatics
(semiotic or political) to define the effectuation of the condition of possibil-
ity of language and the usage of linguistic elements.

           II. "There Is an Abstract Machine of Language That
                Does Not Appeal to Any 'Extrinsic' Factor"
If in a social field we distinguish the set of corporeal modifications and the
set of incorporeal transformations, we are presented, despite the variety in
each of the sets, with two formalizations, one of content, the other of
expression. For content is not opposed to form but has its own formal-
ization: the hand-tool pole, or the lesson of things. It is, however, opposed
           86 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

to expression, inasmuch as expression also has its own formalization: the
face-language pole, the lesson of signs. Precisely because content, like
expression, has a form of its own, one can never assign the form of expres-
sion the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corre-
sponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity. The
two formalizations are not of the same nature; they are independent, heter-
ogeneous. The Stoics were the first to theorize this independence: they dis-
tinguished between the actions and passions of bodies (using the word
"body" in the broadest sense, as applying to any formed content) and
incorporeal acts (the "expressed" of the statements). The form of expres-
sion is constituted by the warp of expresseds, and the form of content by the
woof of bodies. When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads
through the body, when a drop of wine falls into water, there is an intermin-
gling of bodies; but the statements, "The knife is cutting the flesh," "I am
eating," "The water is turning red," express incorporeal transformations of
an entirely different nature (events).18 The genius of the Stoics was to have
taken this paradox as far as it could go, up to the point of insanity and cyni-
cism, and to have grounded it in the most serious of principles: their reward
was to be the first to develop a philosophy of language.
   The paradox gets us nowhere unless, like the Stoics, we add that incorpo-
real transformations, incorporeal attributes, apply to bodies, and only to
bodies. They are the expressed of statements but are attributed to bodies.
The purpose is not to describe or represent bodies; bodies already have
proper qualities, actions and passions, souls, in short forms, which are
themselves bodies. Representations are bodies too! If noncorporeal attri-
butes apply to bodies, if there are good grounds for making a distinction
between the incorporeal expressed "to become red" and the corporeal
quality "red," etc., it has nothing to with representation. We cannot even
say that the body or state of things is the "referent" of the sign. In expressing
the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token attributing it to the body, one
is not representing or referring but intervening in a way; it is a speech act.
The independence of the two kinds of forms, forms of expression and
forms of content, is not contradicted but confirmed by the fact that the
expressions or expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents, not to
represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down
or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different
way. The warp of the instantaneous transformations is always inserted into
the woof of the continuous modifications. (Hence the significance of dates
for the Stoics. From what moment can it be said that someone is bald? In
what sense does a statement of the type "There will be a naval battle tomor-
row" constitute a date or order-word?) The night of August 4, July 4,1917,
November 20, 1923: What incorporeal transformation is expressed by
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 87

these dates, incorporeal yet attributed to bodies, inserted into them? The
independence of the form of expression and the form of content is not the
basis for a parallelism between them or a representation of one by the other,
but on the contrary a parceling of the two, a manner in which expressions
are inserted into contents, in which we ceaselessly jump from one register
to another, in which signs are at work in things themselves just as things
extend into or are deployed through signs. An assemblage of enunciation
does not speak "of things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and
states of content. So that the same x, the same particle, may function either
as a body that acts and undergoes actions or as a sign constituting an act or
order-word, depending on which form it is taken up by (for example, the
theoretico-experimental aggregate of physics). In short, the functional in-
dependence of the two forms is only the form of their reciprocal presup-
position, and of the continual passage from one to the other. We are never
presented with an interlinkage of order-words and a causality of contents
each in its own right; nor do we see one represent the other, with the second
serving as referent. On the contrary, the independence of the two lines is
distributive, such that a segment of one always forms a relay with a segment
of the other, slips into, introduces itself into the other. We constantly pass
from order-words to the "silent order" of things, as Foucault puts it, and
vice versa.
   But when we use a word as vague as "intervene," when we say that
expressions intervene or insert themselves into contents, are we not still
prey to a kind of idealism in which the order-word instantaneously falls
from the sky? What we must determine is not an origin but points of inter-
vention or insertion in the framework of the reciprocal presupposition of
the two forms. Both forms of content and forms of expression are insepara-
ble from a movement of deterritorialization that carries them away. Both
expression and content are more or less deterritorialized, relatively
deterritorialized, according to the particular state of their form. In this
respect, one cannot posit a primacy of expression over content, or content
over expression. Sometimes the semiotic components are more deter-
ritorialized than the material components, and sometimes the reverse. For
example, a mathematical complex of signs may be more deterritorialized
than a set of particles; conversely, the particles may have experimental
effects that deterritorialize the semiotic system. A criminal action may be
deterritorializing in relation to the existing regime of signs (the earth cries
for revenge and crumbles beneath my feet, my offense is too great); but the
sign that expresses the act of condemnation may in turn be deter-
ritorializing in relation to all actions and reactions ("a fugitive and a
vagabond shall thou be in the earth" [Gen. 4:12], you cannot even be
killed). In short, there are degrees of deterritorialization that quantify the
           88 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

respective forms and according to which contents and expression are
conjugated, feed into each other, accelerate each other, or on the contrary
become stabilized and perform a reterritorialization. What we call circum-
stances or variables are these degrees themselves. There are variables of
content, or proportions in the interminglings or aggregations of bodies, and
there are variables of expression, factors internal to enunciation. Germany,
toward November 20, 1923: on the one hand, the deterritorializing infla-
tion of the monetary body and, on the other, in response to the inflation, a
semiotic transformation of the reichsmark into the rentenmark, making
possible a reterritorialization. Russia, toward July 4,1917: on the one hand
proportions of a state of "bodies" Soviets-provisional government, and on
the other the elaboration of a Bolshevik incorporeal semiotic, accelerating
things and contributing to the action of the detonating body of the Party. In
short, the way an expression relates to a content is not by uncovering or rep-
resenting it. Rather, forms of expression and forms of content communi-
cate through a conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization,
each intervening, operating in the other.
   We may draw some general conclusions on the nature of Assemblages
from this. On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two seg-
ments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a
machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling
of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assem-
blage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transforma-
tions attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both
territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting
edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. No one is better than
Kafka at differentiating the two axes of the assemblage and making them
function together. On the one hand, the ship-machine, the hotel-machine,
the circus-machine, the castle-machine, the court-machine, each with its
own intermingled pieces, gears, processes, and bodies contained in one
another or bursting out of containment (see the head bursting through the
roof)-19 On the other hand, the regime of signs or of enunciation: each
regime with its incorporeal transformations, acts, death sentences and
judgments, proceedings, "law." It is obvious that statements do not repre-
sent machines: the Stoker's discourse does not describe stoking as a body; it
has its own form, and a development without resemblance.20 Yet it is
attributed to bodies, to the whole ship as a body. A discourse of submission
to order-words; a discourse of discussion, claims, accusation, and defense.
On the second axis, what is compared or combined of the two aspects, what
always inserts one into the other, are the sequenced or conjugated degrees
of deterritorialization, and the operations of reterritorialization that stabi-
lize the aggregate at a given moment. K., the K.-function, designates the
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 89

line of flight or deterritorialization that carries away all of the assemblages
but also undergoes all kinds of reterritorializations and redundancies—
redundancies of childhood, village-life, love, bureaucracy, etc.
   The tetravalence of the assemblage. Taking the feudal assemblage as an
example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining
feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the over-
lord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new
relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of
bodies—a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider
statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorpo-
real transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of
obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of
enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal
territorialities and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of
deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, state-
ments and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the
Crusades.
   It would be an error to believe that content determines expression by
causal action, even if expression is accorded the power not only to "reflect"
content but to react upon it in an active way. This kind of ideological con-
ception of the statement, which subordinates it to a primary economic con-
tent, runs into all kinds of difficulties inherent to dialectics. First, although
it may be possible to conceive of a causal action moving from content to
expression, the same cannot be said for the respective forms, the form of
content and the form of expression. We must recognize that expression is
independent and that this is precisely what enables it to react upon con-
tents. This independence, however, has been poorly conceived. If contents
are said to be economic, the form of content cannot be said to be economic
and is reduced to a pure abstraction, namely, the production of goods and
the means of that production considered in themselves. Similarly, if ex-
pressions are said to be ideological, the form of expression is not said to be
ideological and is reduced to language as abstraction, as the availability of a
good shared by all. Those who take this approach claim to characterize
contents and expressions by all the struggles and conflicts pervading them
in two different forms, but these forms themselves are exempt from strug-
gle and conflict, and the relation between them remains entirely indeter-
minate.21 The only way to define the relation is to revamp the theory of
ideology by saying that expressions and statements intervene directly in
productivity, in the form of a production of meaning or sign-value. The
category of production doubtless has the advantage of breaking with
schemas of representation, information, and communication. But is it any
more adequate than these schemas? Its application to language is very
           90 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

ambiguous in that it appeals to an ongoing dialectical miracle of the
transformation of matter into meaning, content into expression, the social
process into a signifying system.
   We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to
the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of
bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies
and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expan-
sions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another. What
regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted interminglings of bodies
is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime. Even technology
makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools exist only in rela-
tion to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible.
The stirrup entails a new man-horse symbiosis that at the same time entails
new weapons and new instruments. Tools are inseparable from symbioses
or amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage. They
presuppose a social machine that selects them and takes them into its "phy-
lum": a society is defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools. Similarly,
the semiotic or collective aspect of an assemblage relates not to a produc-
tivity of language but to regimes of signs, to a machine of expression whose
variables determine the usage of language elements. These elements do not
stand on their own any more than tools do. There is a primacy of the
machinic assemblage of bodies over tools and goods, a primacy of the col-
lective assemblage of enunciation over language and words. The articula-
tion of the two aspects of the assemblage is effected by the movements of
deterritorialization that quantify their forms. That is why a social field is
defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight
running through it. An assemblage has neither base nor superstructure,
neither deep structure nor superficial structure; it flattens all of its dimen-
sions onto a single plane of consistency upon which reciprocal presupposi-
tions and mutual insertions play themselves out.
   The other mistake (which is combined with the first as needed) is to
believe in the adequacy of the form of expression as a linguistic system.
This system may be conceived as a signifying phonological structure, or as
a deep syntactical structure. In either case, it is credited with engendering
semantics, therefore of fulfilling expression, whereas contents are rele-
gated to the arbitrariness of a simple "reference" and pragmatics to the
exteriority of nonlinguistic factors. What all of these undertakings have in
common is to erect an abstract machine of language, but as a synchronic set
of constants. We will not object that the machine thus conceived is too
abstract. On the contrary, it is not abstract enough, it remains "linear." It
remains on an intermediate level of abstraction allowing it to consider lin-
guistic factors in themselves, independently of nonlinguistic factors, and
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 91

to treat those linguistic factors as constants. But if the abstraction is taken
further, one necessarily reaches a level where the pseudoconstants of lan-
guage are superseded by variables of expression internal to enunciation
itself; these variables of expression are then no longer separable from the
variables of content with which they are in perpetual interaction. If the
external pragmatics of nonlinguistic factors must be taken into considera-
tion, it is because linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal prag-
matics involving its own factors. It is not enough to take into account the
signified, or even the referent, because the very notions of signification
and reference are bound up with a supposedly autonomous and constant
structure. There is no use constructing a semantics, or even recognizing a
certain validity to pragmatics, if they are still pretreated by a phonological
or syntactical machine. For a true abstract machine pertains to an assem-
blage in its entirety: it is defined as the diagram of that assemblage. It is not
language based but diagrammatic and superlinear. Content is not a signi-
fied nor expression a signifier; rather, both are variables of the assemblage.
We get nowhere until the pragmatic, but also semantic, syntactical, and
phonological determinations are directly linked to the assemblages of
enunciation upon which they depend. Chomsky's abstract machine retains
an arborescent model and a linear ordering of linguistic elements in sen-
tences and sentence combinations. But as soon as pragmatic values or
internal variables are taken into account, in particular with respect to indi-
rect discourse, one is obliged to bring "hypersentences" into play or to con-
struct "abstract objects" (incorporeal transformations). This implies
superlinearity, in other words, a plane whose elements no longer have a
fixed linear order: the rhizome model.22 From this standpoint, the inter-
penetration of language and the social field and political problems lies at
the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface. The abstract
machine as it relates to the diagram of the assemblage is never purely a mat-
ter of language, except for lack of sufficient abstraction. It is language that
depends on the abstract machine, not the reverse. At most, we may dis-
tinguish in the abstract machine two states of the diagram, one in which
variables of content and expression are distributed according to their het-
erogeneous forms in reciprocal presupposition on a plane of consistency,
and another in which it is no longer even possible to distinguish between
variables of content and expression because the variability of that same
plane has prevailed over the duality of forms, rendering them "indis-
cernible." (The first state relates to still relative movements of deterritori-
alization; in the second, an absolute threshold of deterritorialization has
been reached.)
           92 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

 III. "There Are Constants or Universals of Language That Enable Us to
                  Define It as a Homogeneous System"
The question of structural invariants—and the very idea of structure is
inseparable from invariants, whether atomic or relational—is essential to
linguistics. It is what allows linguistics to claim a basis in pure scientificity,
to be nothing but science ... safe from any supposedly external or prag-
matic factor. The question of invariants assumes several closely connected
forms: (1) the constants of a language (phonological, by commutativity;
syntactical, by transformativity; semantic, by generativity); (2) the uni-
versals of language (by decomposition of the phoneme into distinctive
features; of syntax into fundamental constituents; of signification into
minimal semantic elements); (3) trees linking constants to one another,
with binary relations between trees (see Chomsky's linear arborescent
method); (4) competence, in principle coextensive with language and
defined by judgments of grammaticality; (5) homogeneity, bearing on ele-
ments and relations as well as intuitive judgments; (6) synchrony, which
erects an "in-itself' and a "for-itself' of language, perpetually moving from
the objective system to the subjective consciousness that apprehends its
principle (that of the linguist himself or herself).
   One can juggle all of these factors, subtract some or even add new ones.
They go together, however, because the essentials of all of them are present
on the level of any one. For example, the distinction between speech and
language is recapitulated in the distinction between competence and per-
formance, but at the level of grammaticality. If it is objected that the dis-
tinction between competence and performance is entirely relative (a
linguistic competence can be economic, religious, political, or aesthetic,
etc.; the teaching competence of a grade school teacher may be only a per-
formance in relation to the judgment of an inspector or government regula-
tions), linguists respond that they are willing to multiply levels of
competence, and even to introduce pragmatic values into the system.
Brekle, for example, proposes adding an "idiosyncratic performatory com-
petence" factor tied to a whole constellation of linguistic, psychological, or
sociological factors. But what use is this injection of pragmatics if
pragmatics is in turn considered to have constants or universals of its own?
And in what way are expressions like "I," "promise," "know" more univer-
sal than "greet," "name," or "condemn"?23 Similarly, when efforts are
made to make Chomsky's trees bud and to shatter linear order, as long as
the pragmatic components marking the ruptures are placed above the tree
or effaced from the derivation nothing has really been accomplished, one
has failed to constitute a rhizome.24 In truth, the nature of the abstract
machine is the most general problem: there is no reason to tie the abstract
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS O 93

to the universal or the constant, or to efface the singularity of abstract
machines insofar as they are built around variables and variations.
    The debate between Chomsky and Labov will give us a better under-
standing of what the issue is. Every language is an essentially heterogene-
ous reality; linguists know this and say so. But this is a factual remark.
Chomsky asks only that one carve from this aggregate a homogeneous or
standard system as a basis for abstraction or idealization, making possible
a scientific study of principles. Limiting oneself to standard English is thus
not the issue, for even a linguist who studies Black English or the English of
the ghettos is obliged to extract a standard system guaranteeing the con-
stancy and homogeneity of the object under study (no science can operate
any other way, they say). Thus Chomsky pretends to believe that by assert-
ing his interest in the variable features of language, Labov is situating him-
self in a de facto pragmatics external to linguistics.25 Labov, however, has
other ambitions. When he brings to light lines of inherent variation, he does
not see them simply as "free variants" pertaining to pronunciation, style,
or nonpertinent features that lie outside the system and leave the homoge-
neity of the system intact; neither does he see them as a de facto mix
between two systems, each homogeneous in its own right, as if the speaker
moved from one to the other. He refuses the alternative linguistics set up
for itself: assigning variants to different systems, or relegating them to a
place outside the structure. It is the variation itself that is systematic, in the
sense in which musicians say that "the theme is the variation." Labov sees
variation as a de jure component affecting each system from within, send-
ing it cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it
off, to make it homogeneous in principle. Labov does consider variables of
all kinds, phonetic, phonological, syntactical, semantic, stylistic. Yet it
would seem difficult to accuse him of missing the distinction between the
de jure and the de facto—or between linguistics and stylistics, or
synchrony and diachrony, or pertinent and nonpertinent features, or com-
petence and performance, or the grammaticality of language and the
agrammaticality of speech. Although this may be hardening his positions,
we would say rather that Labov proposes a different distribution of the de
facto and the de jure, and especially a different conception of the de jure
itself and of abstraction. He takes the example of a young black person
who, in a very short series of phrases, seems to pass from the Black English
system to the standard system eighteen times. Is it not the abstract distinc-
tion between the two systems that proves arbitrary and insufficient? For
the majority of the forms belongs to one or the other only by virtue of the
fortuities of a given sequence. Must it not be admitted that every system is
in variation and is defined not by its constants and homogeneity but on the
           94 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

contrary by a variability whose characteristics are immanent, continuous,
and regulated in a very specific mode (variable or optional rules)?25
    How can we conceptualize this continuous variation at work within a
language, even if it means overstepping the limits Labov sets for himself as
well as the conditions of scientificity invoked by linguistics? In the course
of a single day, an individual repeatedly passes from language to language.
He successively speaks as "father to son" and as a boss; to his lover, he
speaks an infantilized language; while sleeping he is plunged into an oniric
discourse, then abruptly returns to a professional language when the tele-
phone rings. It will be objected that these variations are extrinsic, that it is
still the same language. But that is to prejudge the question. First, it is not
certain that the phonology is the same, nor the syntax, nor the semantics.
Second, the whole question is whether this supposedly identical language
is defined by invariants or, on the contrary, by the line of continuous varia-
tion running through it. Some linguists have suggested that linguistic
change occurs less by systemic rupture than by a gradual modification of
frequency, by a coexistence and continuity of different usages. Take as an
example the statement, "I swear!" It is a different statement depending on
whether it is said by a child to his or her father, by a man in love to his loved
one, or by a witness before the court. These are like three sequences. (Or
Messiaen's four "amen"s stretched over seven sequences.) Once again,
there is no reason to say that the variables are merely situational, and that
the statement remains constant in principle. Not only are there as many
statements as there are effectuations, but all of the statements are present
in the effectuation of one among them, so that the line of variation is vir-
tual, in other words, real without being actual, and consequently continu-
ous regardless of the leaps the statement makes. To place the statement in
continuous variation is to send it through all the prosodic, semantic, syn-
tactical, and phonological variables that can affect it in the shortest
moment of time (the smallest interval). Build the continuum of "I swear!"
with the corresponding transformations. This is the standpoint of
pragmatics, but a pragmatics internal to language, immanent, including
variations of linguistic elements of all kinds. For example, Kafka's line of
the three proceedings: the father's proceedings in the family, the engage-
ment proceedings at the hotel; and the court proceedings. There is a con-
stant tendency to seek a "reduction": everything is explained by the
situation of the child in relation to its father, or of the man in relation to
castration, or of the citizen in relation to the law. But this is to content one-
self with extracting a pseudoconstant of content, which is no better than
extracting a pseudoconstant of expression. Placing-in-variation allows us
to avoid these dangers, because it builds a continuum or medium without
beginning or end. Continuous variation should not be confused with the
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 95

continuous or discontinuous character of the variable itself: the order-
word, a continuous variation for a discontinuous variable . . . A variable
can be continuous over a portion of its trajectory, then leap or skip, without
that affecting its continuous variation; what this does is impose an absent
development as an "alternative continuity" that is virtual yet real.
    A constant or invariant is defined less by its permanence and duration
than by its function as a center, if only relative. In the tonal or diatonic sys-
tem of music, laws of resonance and attraction determine centers valid for
all modes and endowed with stability and attractive power (pouvoir). These
centers therefore organize distinct, distinctive, forms that are clearly estab-
lished for a certain amount of time: a linear, codified, centered system of
the arborescent type. It is true that the minor "mode" gives tonal music a
decentered, runaway, fugitive character due to the nature of its intervals
and the lesser stability of its chords. This mode thus has the ambiguity of
undergoing operations that align it to a major model or standard at the
same time as it continues to display a certain modal power (puissance) irre-
ducible to tonality, as though music set out on a journey and garnered all
resurgences, phantoms of the Orient, imaginary lands, traditions from all
over. But temperament, tempered chromaticism has an even greater ambi-
guity: stretching the action of the center to the most distant tones, but also
preparing the disaggregation of the central principle, replacing the cen-
tered forms of continuous development with a form that constantly dis-
solves and transforms itself. When development subordinates form and
spans the whole, as in Beethoven, variation begins to free itself and
becomes identified with creation. But when chromaticism is unleashed,
becomes a generalized chromaticism, turns back against temperament,
affecting not only pitches but all sound components—durations, intensi-
ties, timbre, attacks—it becomes impossible to speak of a sound form
organizing matter; it is no longer even possible to speak of a continuous
development of form. Rather, it is a question of a highly complex and elab-
orate material making audible nonsonorous forces. The couple matter-
form is replaced by the coupling material-forces. The synthesizer has taken
the place of the old "a priori synthetic judgment," and all functions change
accordingly. By placing all its components in continuous variation, music
itself becomes a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of a tree, and enters
the service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences,
ruptures, and breaks are a part. Thus the important thing is certainly not to
establish a pseudobreak between the tonal system and atonal music; the
latter, on the contrary, in breaking away from the tonal system, only carried
temperament to its ultimate conclusion (although no Viennese stopped
there). The essential thing is almost the opposite movement: the ferment in
the tonal system itself (during much of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
           96 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

turies) that dissolved temperament and widened chromaticism while pre-
serving a relative tonality, which reinvented new modalities, brought a new
amalgamation of major and minor, and in each instance conquered realms
of continuous variation for this variable or that. This ferment came to the
forefront and made itself heard in its own right; and, through the molecular
material thus wrought, it made audible the nonsonorous forces of the
cosmos that have always agitated music—a bit of Time in the pure state,27 a
grain of absolute Intensity... The words "tonal," "modal," "atonal" do not
mean much. Music is not alone in being art as cosmos and in drawing the
virtual lines of an infinite variation.
   Once again, the objection will be raised that music is not a language, that
the components of sound are not pertinent features of language, that there
is no correspondence between the two. We are not suggesting any corre-
spondence. We keep asking that the issue be left open, that any presup-
posed distinction be rejected. This especially applies to the language-
speech distinction, which is used to relegate all kinds of variables at work
within expression and enunciation to a position outside language. The
Voice-Music relation proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other
hand, could have taken not only phonetics and prosody but all of linguistics
in a different direction. The voice in music has always been a privileged
axis of experimentation, playing simultaneously on language and sound.
Music has linked the voice to instruments in various ways; but as long as
the voice is song, its main role is to "hold" sound, it functions as a constant
circumscribed on a note and accompanied by the instrument. Only when
the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that renders it heter-
ogeneous to itself and gives it a power of continuous variation: it is then
no longer accompanied, but truly "machined," it belongs to a musical
machine that prolongs or superposes on a single plane parts that are spo-
ken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental, or perhaps electronic-
ally generated. This is the sound plane of a generalized "glissando"
implying the constitution of a statistical space in which each variable has,
not an average value, but a probability of frequency that places it in contin-
uous variation with the other variables.28 Luciano Berio's Visage (Face)
and Dieter Schnebel's Glossolalie (Speaking in tongues) are typical exam-
ples of this. And despite what Berio himself says, it is less a matter of using
pseudoconstants to produce a simulacrum of language or a metaphor for
the voice than of attaining that secret neuter language without constants
and entirely in indirect discourse where the synthesizer and the instrument
speak no less than the voice, and the voice plays no less than the instru-
ment. It should not be thought that music has forgotten how to sing in a
now mechanical and atomized world; rather, an immense coefficient of
variation is affecting and carrying away all of the phatic, aphatic, linguistic,
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 97

poetic, instrumental, or musical parts of a single sound assemblage—"a
simple scream suffusing all degrees" (Thomas Mann). There are many pro-
cedures for placing the voice in variation, not only Sprechgesang (speech-
song), which constantly leaves pitch behind by descent or ascent, but also
circular breathing techniques and zones of resonance in which several
voices seem to issue from the same mouth. Secret languages are very
significant in this connection, in learned as well as popular music. Certain
ethnomusicologists have found extraordinary cases (in Dahomey, for
example) where a first, diatonic, vocal part is superseded by a chromatic
descent into a secret language that slips from one sound to the next in a con-
tinuous fashion, modulating a sound continuum into smaller and smaller
intervals until it becomes a "parlando" all of the intervals of which blur
together—and then the diatonic part is itself transposed according to the
chromatic levels of a terraced architecture, the song sometimes interrupted
by a parlando, by a simple conversation lacking definite pitch.29 It is per-
haps characteristic of secret languages, slangs, jargons, professional lan-
guages, nursery rhymes, merchants' cries to stand out less for their lexical
inventions or rhetorical figures than for the way in which they effect con-
tinuous variations of the common elements of language. They are chro-
matic languages, close to a musical notation. A secret language does not
merely have a hidden cipher or code still operating by constants and form-
ing a subsystem; it places the public language's system of variables in a state
ofvariation.
   This is what we are getting at: a generalized chromaticism. Placing ele-
ments of any nature in continuous variation is an operation that will per-
haps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in
advance. On the contrary, this operation in principle bears on the voice,
speech, language, and music simultaneously. There is no reason to make
prior, principled distinctions. Linguistics in general is still in a kind of
major mode, still has a sort of diatonic scale and a strange taste for domi-
nants, constants, and universals. All languages, in the meantime, are in
immanent continuous variation: neither synchrony nor diachrony, but
asynchrony, chromaticism as a variable and continuous state of language.
For a chromatic linguistics according pragmatism its intensities and
values.
   What is called a style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is
nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation. Of the dual-
isms established by linguistics, there are few with a more shaky foundation
than the separation between linguistics and stylistics: Because a style is not
an individual psychological creation but an assemblage of enunciation, it
unavoidably produces a language within a language. Take an arbitrary list
of authors we are fond of: Kafka once again, Beckett, Gherasim Luca, Jean-
           98 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

Luc Godard. It will be noted that they are all more or less in a bilingual situ-
ation: Kafka, the Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German; Beckett, the
Irishman writing in English and French; Luca, originally from Romania;
Godard and his will to be Swiss. But this is only circumstantial, an oppor-
tunity, and the opportunity can be found elsewhere. It will also be noted
that many of them are not only or not primarily writers (Beckett and
theater and television, Godard and film and television, Luca and his
audiovisual machines). The reason for this is that when one submits lin-
guistic elements to a treatment producing continuous variation, when one
introduces an internal pragmatics into language, one is necessarily led to
treat nonlinguistic elements such as gestures and instruments in the same
fashion, as if the two aspects of pragmatics joined on the same line of varia-
tion, in the same continuum. Moreover, the idea perhaps comes first from
outside, with language following only later, as with the necessarily exterior
sources of a style. But the essential thing is that each of these authors has his
own procedure of variation, his own widened chromaticism, his own mad
production of speeds and intervals. The creative stammering of Gherasim
Luca, in the poem "Passionnement" (Passionately).30 Godard's is another
kind of stammering. In theater: Robert Wilson's whispering, without defi-
nite pitch, and Carmelo Bene's ascending and descending variations.31 It's
easy to stammer, but making language itself stammer is a different affair; it
involves placing all linguistic, and even nonlinguistic, elements in varia-
tion, both variables of expression and variables of content. A new form of
redundancy. AND ... AND . . . AND . . . There has always been a struggle in
language between the verb etre (to be) and the conjunction et (and) between
est and et (is and and [which in French are identical in pronunciation—
Trans.]) It is only in appearance that these two terms are in accord and
combine, for the first acts in language as a constant and forms the diatonic
scale of language, while the second places everything in variation, consti-
tuting the lines of a generalized chromaticism. From one to the other,
everything shifts. Writers in British or American English have been more
conscious than the French of this struggle and the stakes involved, and of
the valence of the "and."32 It was Proust who said that "masterpieces are
written in a kind of foreign language." That is the same as stammering,
making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a for-
eigner, but in one's own tongue, not only when speaking a language other
than one's own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same lan-
guage, without even a dialect or patois. To be a bastard, a half-breed, but
through a purification of race. That is when style becomes a language. That
is when language becomes intensive, a pure continuum of values and inten-
sities. That is when all of language becomes secret, yet has nothing to hide,
as opposed to when one carves out a secret subsystem within language. One
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 99

attains this result only by sobriety, creative subtraction. Continuous varia-
tion has only ascetic lines, a touch of herb and pure water.
    It is possible to take any linguistic variable and place it in variation fol-
lowing a necessarily virtual continuous line between two of its states. We
are no longer in the situation of linguists who expect the constants of lan-
guage to experience a kind of mutation or undergo the effects of changes
accumulated in speech alone. Lines of change or creation are fully and
directly a part of the abstract machine. Hjelmslev remarked that a language
necessarily includes unexploited possibilities or potentialities and that the
abstract machine must include these possibilities or potentialities.33
"Potential" and "virtual" are not at all in opposition to "real"; on the con-
trary, the reality of the creative, or the placing-in-continuous variation of
variables, is in opposition only to the actual determination of their con-
stant relations. Each time we draw a line of variation, the variables are of a
particular nature (phonological, syntactical or grammatical, semantic, and
so on), but the line itself is apertinent, asyntactic or agrammatical,
asemantic. Agrammaticality, for example, is no longer a contingent char-
acteristic of speech opposed to the grammaticality of language; rather, it is
the ideal characteristic of a line placing grammatical variables in a state of
continuous variation. Let us take Nicolas Ruwet's examples of certain sin-
gular expressions of Cummings's: "he danced his did," or "they went their
came." It is possible to reconstitute the variations through which the gram-
matical variables pass in virtuality in order to end up as agrammatical
expressions of this kind ("he did his dance," "he danced his dance," "he
danced what he did,"...; "they went as they came," "they went their
way," .. .).34 In spite of Ruwet's structural interpretation, we should avoid
taking the view that the atypical expression is produced by the successive
correct forms. It is instead the atypical expression that produces the
placing-in-variation of the correct forms, uprooting them from their state
as constants. The atypical expression constitutes a cutting edge of
deterritorialization of language, it plays the role of tensor; in other words, it
causes language to tend toward the limit of its elements, forms, or notions,
toward a near side or a beyond of language. The tensor effects a kind of
transit! vization of the phrase, causing the last term to react upon the pre-
ceding term, back through the entire chain. It assures an intensive and
chromatic treatment of language. An expression as simple as AND . . . can
play the role of tensor for all of language. In this sense, AND is less a
conjunction than the atypical expression of all of the possible conjunctions
it places in continuous variation. The tensor, therefore, is not reducible
either to a constant or a variable, but assures the variation of the variable
by subtracting in each instance the value of the constant (n - 1). Tensors
coincide with no linguistic category; nevertheless they are pragmatic
           100 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

values essential to both assemblages of enunciation and indirect dis-
courses.35
   Some believe that these variations do not express the usual labor of cre-
ation in language and remain marginal, confined to poets, children, and
lunatics. That is because they wish to define the abstract machine by con-
stants that can be modified only secondarily, by a cumulative effect or
syntagmatic mutation. But the abstract machine of language is not univer-
sal, or even general, but singular; it is not actual, but virtual-real; it has, not
invariable or obligatory rules, but optional rules that ceaselessly vary with
the variation itself, as in a game in which each move changes the rules. That
is why abstract machines and assemblages of enunciation are complemen-
tary, and present in each other. The abstract machine is like the diagram of
an assemblage. It draws lines of continuous variation, while the concrete
assemblage treats variables and organized their highly diverse relations as a
function of those lines. The assemblage negotiates variables at this or that
level of variation, according to this or that degree of deterritorialization,
and determines which variables will enter into constant relations or obey
obligatory rules and which will serve instead as a fluid matter for variation.
We should not conclude from this that the assemblage brings only a certain
resistance or inertia to bear against the abstract machine; for even "con-
stants" are essential to the determination of the virtualities through which
the variation passes, they are themselves optionally chosen. There is
indeed braking and resistance at a certain level, but at another level of the
assemblage there is nothing but a come-and-go between different types of
variables, and corridors of passage traveled in both directions: the varia-
bles effectuate the machine in unison, in the sum of their relations. There is
therefore no basis for a distinction between a constant and collective lan-
guage, and variable and individual speech acts. The abstract machine is
always singular, designated by the proper mane of a group or individual,
while the assemblage of enunciation is always collective, in the individual
as in the group. The Lenin abstract machine, and the Bolshevik collective
assemblage .. . The same goes for literature, for music. There is no primacy
of the individual; there is instead an indissolubility of a singular Abstract
and a collective Concrete. The abstract machine does not exist indepen-
dently of the assemblage, any more than the assemblage functions inde-
pendently of the machine.

IV. "Language Can Be Scientifically Studied Only under the Conditions
                of a Standard or Major Language"
Since everybody knows that language is a heterogeneous, variable reality,
what is the meaning of the linguists' insistence on carving out a homoge-
          NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 101

neous system in order to make a scientific study possible? It is a question of
extracting a set of constants from the variables, or of determining constant
relations between variables (this is already evident in the phonologists'
concept of commutativity). But the scientific model taking language as an
object of study is one with the political model by which language is homog-
enized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major
or dominant language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science,
nothing but pure science—it wouldn't be the first time that the order of
pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order. What is
grammaticality, and the sign S, the categorical symbol that dominates
statements? It is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker, and
Chomsky's trees establish constant relations between power variables.
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the
prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be
ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institu-
tions. The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother
tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times
advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centers
simultaneously. We can conceive of several ways for a language to homoge-
nize, centralize: the republican way is not necessarily the same as the royal
way, and is not the least harsh.36 The scientific enterprise of extracting con-
stants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise
of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.
               Speak white and loud
               yes what a wonderful language
               for hiring
               giving orders
               appointing the hour of death in the works
               and of the break that refreshes . . .
   Must a distinction then be made between two kinds of languages, "high"
and "low," major and minor? The first would be defined precisely by the
power (pouvoir) of constants, the second by the power (puissance) of varia-
tion. We do not simply wish to make an opposition between the unity of a
major language and the multiplicity of dialects. Rather, each dialect has a
zone of transition and variation; or better, each minor language has a prop-
erly dialectical zone of variation. According to Malmberg, it is rare to find
clear boundaries on dialect maps; instead, there are transitional and
limitrophe zones, zones of indiscernibility. It is also said that "the
Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional
accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no
exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than by
          102 n NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

any system of spelling."37 The very notion of dialect is quite questionable.
Moreover, it is relative because one needs to know in relation to what major
language it exercises its function: for example, the Quebecois language
must be evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in rela-
tion to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and syn-
tactical elements, in order to set them in variation. The Bantu dialects
must be evaluated not only in relation to the mother tongue but also in rela-
tion to Afrikaans as a major language, and English as a counter-major lan-
guage preferred by blacks.38 In short, the notion of dialect does not
elucidate that of minor language, but the other way around; it is the minor
language that defines dialects through its own possibilities for variation.
Should we identify major and minor languages on the basis of regional situ-
ations of bilingualism or multilingualism including at least one dominant
language and one dominated language, or a world situation giving certain
languages an imperialist power over others (for example, the role of Ameri-
can English today)?
   At least two things prevent us from adopting this point of view. As
Chomsky notes, a dialect, ghetto language, or minor language is not
immune to the kind of treatment that draws a homogeneous system from it
and extracts constants: Black English has its own grammar, which is not
defined by a sum of mistakes or infractions against standard English; but
that grammar can be studied only by applying to it the same rules of study
that are applied to standard English. In this sense, the notions of major and
minor seem to have no linguistic relevance. When French lost its world-
wide major function it lost nothing of its constancy and homogeneity, its
centralization. Conversely, Afrikaans attained homogeneity when it was a
locally minor language struggling against English. Even politically, espe-
cially politically, it is difficult to see how the upholders of a minor language
can operate if not by giving it (if only by writing in it) a constancy and
homogeneity making it a locally major language capable of forcing official
recognition (hence the political role of writers who assert the rights of a
minor language). But the opposite argument seems more compelling: the
more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language, the
more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into a
"minor" language. It is futile to criticize the worldwide imperialism of a
language by denouncing the corruptions it introduces into other languages
(for example, the purists' criticisms of English influences in French, the
petit-bourgeois or academic denunciation of "Franglais"). For if a lan-
guage such as British English or American English is major on a world
scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the world, using
very diverse procedures of variation. Take the way Gaelic and Irish English
set English in variation. Or the way Black English and any number of
          NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 103

"ghetto languages" set American English in variation, to the point that
New York is virtually a city without a language. (Furthermore, American
English could not have constituted itself without this linguistic labor of the
minorities.) Or the linguistic situation in the old Austrian empire: German
was a major language in relation to the minorities, but as such it could not
avoid being treated by those minorities in a way that made it a minor
language in relation to the German of the Germans. There is no language
that does not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities. So at
the most general level of linguistics, Chomsky's and Labov's positions are
constantly passing and converting into each other. Chomsky can say that
even a minor, dialectical, or ghetto language cannot be studied unless
invariants are extracted from it and "extrinsic or mixed" variables are
eliminated; and Labov can respond that even a standard or major language
cannot be studied independently of "inherent" variations, which are pre-
cisely neither mixed nor extrinsic. You will never find a homogeneous sys-
tem that is not still or already affected by a regulated, continuous, immanent
process of variation (why does Chomsky pretend not to understand this?).
   There are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible treat-
ments of the same language. Either the variables are treated in such a way
as to extract from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as
to place them in continuous variation. We were wrong to give the impres-
sion at times that constants existed alongside variables, linguistic con-
stants alongside variables of enunciation: that was only for convenience of
presentation. For it is obvious that the constants are drawn from the varia-
bles themselves; universals in linguistics have no more existence in them-
selves than they do in economics and are always concluded from a
universalization or a rendering-uniform involving variables. Constant is
not opposed to variable; it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other
kind of treatment, or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules cor-
respond to the first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules concern the
construction of a continuum of variation. Moreover, there are a certain
number of categories or distinctions that cannot be invoked, that are inap-
plicable and useless as a basis for objections because they presuppose the
first treatment and are entirely subordinated to the quest for constants: for
example, language as opposed to speech; synchrony as opposed to
diachrony; competence as opposed to performance; distinctive features as
opposed to nondistinctive (or secondarily distinctive) features. For
nondistinctive features, whether prosodic, stylistic, or pragmatic, are not
only omnipresent variables, in contrast to the presence or absence of a con-
stant; they are not only superlinear and "suprasegmental" elements, in
contrast to linear segmental elements; their very characteristics give them
the power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous
          104 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

variation—for example, the impact of tone on phonemes, accent on mor-
phemes, or intonation on syntax. These are not secondary features but
another treatment of language that no longer operates according to the pre-
ceding categories.
    "Major" and "minor" do not qualify two different languages but rather
two usages or functions of language. Bilingualism, of course, provides a
good example, but once again we use it simply for the sake of convenience.
Doubtless, in the Austrian empire Czech was a minor language in relation
to German; but the German of Prague already functioned as a potentially
minor language in relation to the German of Vienna or Berlin; and Kafka, a
Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German, submits German to creative
treatment as a minor language, constructing a continuum of variation,
negotiating all of the variables both to constrict the constants and to
expand the variables: make language stammer, or make it "wail," stretch
tensors through all of language, even written language, and draw from it
cries, shouts, pitches, durations, timbres, accents, intensities. Two con-
joined tendencies in so-called minor languages have often been noted: an
impoverishment, a shedding of syntactical and lexical forms; but simulta-
neously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload and
paraphrase. This applies to the German of Prague, Black English, and
Quebecois. But with rare exceptions, the interpretation of the linguists has
been rather malevolent, invoking a consubstantial poverty and preciosity.
The alleged poverty is in fact a restriction of constants and the overload an
extension of variations functioning to deploy a continuum sweeping up all
components. The poverty is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to
sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from
above or below instead of positioning oneself within it. And the overload is
not a rhetorical figure, a metaphor, or symbolic structure; it is a mobile par-
aphrase bearing witness to the unlocalized presence of an indirect dis-
course at the heart of every statement. From both sides we see a rejection of
reference points, a dissolution of constant form in favor of differences in
 dynamic. The closer a language gets to this state, the closer it comes not
 only to a system of musical notation, but also to music itself.39
    Subtract and place in variation, remove and place in variation: a single
 operation. Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty
 in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation
that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a becoming-
 minor of the major language. The problem is not the distinction between
 major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It is a question not of
 reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of deterritorializing
the major language. Black Americans do not oppose Black to English, they
transform the American English that is their own language into Black
          NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 105

English. Minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist only in rela-
tion to a major language and are also investments of that language for the
purpose of making it minor. One must find the minor language, the dialect
or rather idiolect, on the basis of which one can make one's own major lan-
guage minor. That is the strength of authors termed "minor," who are in
fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one's own language, in
other words, to attain that sobriety in the use of a major language, in order
to place it in a state of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). It
is in one's own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the
major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages.
Use the minor language to send the major language racing. Minor authors
are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience
themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of lan-
guages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language
achieved by stretching tensors through it.
    The notion of minority is very complex, with musical, literary, linguis-
tic, as well as juridical and political, references. The opposition between
minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a con-
stant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to
evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average
adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language
(Joyce's or Ezra Pound's Ulysses). It is obvious that "man" holds the
majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women,
blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once
in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is
extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other
way around. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way around.
Even Marxism "has almost always translated hegemony from the point of
view of the national worker, qualified, male and over thirty-five."40 A
determination different from that of the constant will therefore be consid-
ered minoritarian, by nature and regardless of number, in other words, a
subsystem or an outsystem. This is evident in all the operations, electoral
or otherwise, where you are given a choice, but on the condition that your
choice conform to the limits of the constant ("you mustn't choose to
change society..."). But at this point, everything is reversed. For the
majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is
never anybody, it is always Nobody—Ulysses—whereas the minority is
the becoming of everybody, one's potential becoming to the extent that one
deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian "fact," but it is the ana-
lytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian of every-
body. That is why we must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a
constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the
           106 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming. The problem
is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant.
There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All
becoming is minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a
minority, definable as a state or subset; but they create only by making pos-
sible a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they
themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of human-
kind, men and women both. The same goes for minor languages: they are
not simply sublanguages, idiolects or dialects, but potential agents of the
major language's entering into a becoming-minoritarian of all of its dimen-
sions and elements. We should distinguish between minor languages, the
major language, and the becoming-minor of the major language. Minori-
ties, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity,
or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought
of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable
movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. That is why
Pasolini demonstrated that the essential thing, precisely in free indirect
discourse, is to be found neither in language A, nor in language B, but "in
language X, which is none other than language A in the actual process of
becoming language B."41 There is a universal figure of minoritarian con-
sciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that becoming is creation.
One does not attain it by acquiring the majority. The figure to which we are
referring is continuous variation, as an amplitude that continually over-
steps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess
or default. In erecting the figure of a universal minoritarian consciousness,
one addresses powers (puissances) of becoming that belong to a different
realm from that of Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. Continuous variation
constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the
majoritarian Fact of Nobody. Becoming-minoritarian as the universal fig-
ure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor
language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes
revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connect-
ing, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous be-
coming.42
    The major and minor mode are two different treatments of language,
one of which consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it
in continuous variation. The order-word is the variable of enunciation that
effectuates the condition of possibility of language and defines the usage of
its elements according to one of the two treatments; we must therefore
return to it as the only "metalanguage" capable of accounting for this dou-
ble direction, this double treatment of variables. The problem of the func-
tions of language is in general poorly formulated because this order-word
           NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 107

variable, which subsumes all possible functions, is overlooked. Following
Canetti's suggestions, we may begin from the following pragmatic situa-
tion: the order-word is a death sentence; it always implies a death sentence,
even if it has been considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory,
temporary, etc. Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive
the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must them-
selves inflict, take elsewhere. A father's orders to his son, "You will do
this," "You will not do that," cannot be separated from the little death sen-
tence the son experiences on a point of his person. Death, death; it is the
only judgment, and it is what makes judgment a system. The verdict. But
the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected: it is like a
warning cry or a message to flee. It would be oversimplifying to say that
flight is a reaction against the order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its
other face in a complex assemblage, its other component. Canetti is right to
invoke the lion's roar, which enunciates flight and death simultaneously.43
The order-word has two tones. The prophet receives order-words just as
much in taking flight as in longing for death: Jewish prophetism fused the
wish to be dead and the flight impulse with the divine order-word.
     Now if we consider the first aspect of the order-word, in other words,
death as the expressed of the statement, it clearly meets the preceding
requirements: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is attributed
to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, lends it the authentic char-
acter of an incorporeal transformation. What precedes and follows it may
be an extensive system of actions and passions, a slow labor of bodies; in
itself, it is neither action nor passion, but a pure act, a pure transformation
that enunciation fuses with the statement, the sentence. That man is dead
. . . You are already dead when you receive the order-word ... In effect,
death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bod-
ies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even sym-
bolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or
state. This is the sense in which Canetti speaks of "enantiomorphosis":44 a
regime that involves a hieratic and immutable Master who at every
moment legislates by constants, prohibiting or strictly limiting metamor-
phoses, giving figures clear and stable contours, setting forms in opposi-
tion two by two and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form
to the other. It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body sep-
arates and distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as it is the
extremity of a body, is the noncorporeal attribute that limits and completes
that body: death is the Figure. It is through death that a body reaches com-
pletion not only in time but in space, and it is through death that its lines
form or outline a shape. There are dead spaces just as there are dead times.
"If [enantiomorphosis is] practiced often the whole world shrivels....
           108 D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

Social prohibitions against metamorphosis are perhaps the most impor-
tant of all. . . . Death itself, the strictest of all boundaries, is what is inter-
posed between classes."45 In a regime of this kind, any new body requires
the erection of an opposable form, as well as the formation of distinct sub-
jects; death is the general incorporeal transformation attributed to all bod-
ies from the standpoint of their forms and substances (for example, the
body of the Party cannot come into its own without an operation of
enantiomorphosis, and without the formation of new activists, which
assumes the elimination of the first generation).
    It is true that we are bringing in considerations of content as well as
expression. For even at the moment when the two planes are most distinct,
as the regime of bodies and the regime of signs in an assemblage, they are
still in reciprocal presupposition. The incorporeal transformation is the
expressed of order-words, but also the attribute of bodies. Not only do lin-
guistic variables of expression enter into relations of formal opposition or
distinction favorable to the extraction of constants; nonlinguistic variables
of content do also. As Hjelmslev notes, an expression is divided, for exam-
ple, into phonic units in the same way a content is divided into social, zoo-
logical, or physical units ("calf divides into young-bovine-male).46 The
network of binarities, or arborescences, is applicable to both sides. There
is, however, no analytic resemblance, correspondence, or conformity
between the two planes. But their independence does not preclude isomor-
phism, in other words, the existence of the same kind of constant relations
on both sides. It is by virtue of this type of relations that linguistic and
nonlinguistic elements are inseparable from the start, despite their absence
of correspondence. The elements of content give the interminglings of bod-
ies clear contours at the same time as the elements of expression give the
noncorporeal expresseds a power of sentencing or judgment. These ele-
ments are all abstract or deterritorialized to different degrees, but in each
instance they effect a reterritorialization of the overall assemblage on cer-
tain order-words and contours. Indeed, the significance of the doctrine of
synthetic judgment is to have demonstrated that there is an a priori link
(isomorphism) between Sentence and Figure, form of expression and form
of content.
    If we consider the other aspect of the order-word, flight rather than
death, it appears that variables are in a new state, that of continuous varia-
tion. An incorporeal transformation is still attributed to bodies, but it is
now a passage to the limit: that is the only way, not to eliminate death, but
to reduce it or make it a variation itself. This movement pushes language to
its own limits, while bodies are simultaneously caught up in a movement of
metamorphosis of their contents or a process of exhaustion causing them
to reach or overstep the limit of their figures. This is an appropriate place to
          NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 109

bring up the opposition between minor sciences and major sciences: for
example, the tendency of the broken line to become a curve, a whole opera-
tive geometry of the trait and movement, a pragmatic science of placings-
in-variation that operates in a different manner than the royal or major
science of Euclid's invariants and travels a long history of suspicion and
even repression (we will return to this question later).47 The smallest inter-
val is always diabolical: the master of metamorphoses is opposed to the
invariant hieratic king. It is as though an intense matter or a continuum of
variation were freed, here in the internal tensors of language, there in the
internal tensions of content. The idea of the smallest interval does not
apply to figures of the same nature; it implies at least a curve and a straight
line, a circle and a tangent. We witness a transformation of substances and
a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor
of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does
not end at a precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that intense
matter, the material power of that language. A matter more immediate,
more fluid, and more ardent than bodies or words. In continuous variation
the relevant distinction is no longer between a form of expression and a
form of content but between two inseparable planes in reciprocal presup-
position. The relativity of the distinction between them is now fully rea-
lized on the plane of consistency, where the assemblage is swept up by a
now absolute deterritorialization. Absolute, however, does not mean
undifferentiated: differences, now "infinitely small," are constituted in a
single matter serving both for expression as incorporeal power and for con-
tent as limitless corporeality. The relation of presupposition between vari-
ables of content and expression no longer requires two forms: the
placing-in-variation of the variables instead draws the two forms together
and effects the conjunction of cutting edges of deterritorialization on both
sides; this occurs on the plane of a single liberated matter that contains no
figures, is deliberately unformed, and retains in expression and in content
only those cutting edges, tensors, and tensions. Gestures and things, voices
and sounds, are caught up in the same "opera," swept away by the same
shifting effects of stammering, vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling. A syn-
thesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually
making "fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each
other in some way." The moment this conjunction occurs there is a com-
mon matter. It is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or
the diagram of the assemblage. The synthesizer has replaced judgment,
and matter has replaced the figure or formed substance. It is no longer even
appropriate to group biological, physicochemical, and energetic intensi-
ties on the one hand, and mathematical, aesthetic, linguistic, informa-
tional, semiotic intensities, etc., on the other. The multiplicity of systems
          H O D NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

of intensities conjugates or forms a rhizome throughout the entire assem-
blage the moment the assemblage is swept up by these vectors or tensions of
flight. For the question was not how to elude the order-word but how to
elude the death sentence it envelops, how to develop its power of escape,
how to prevent escape from veering into the imaginary or falling into a
black hole, how to maintain or draw out the revolutionary potentiality of
the order-word. Hofmannsthal adopts the order-word, "Germany, Ger-
many!", or the need to reterritorialize, even in a "melancholy mirror." But
beneath this order-word he hears another, as if the old German "figures"
were mere constants that were then effaced to uncover a relation with
nature and life all the more profound for being variable. When should this
relation to life be a hardening, when submission? At what moment is rebel-
lion called for and at what moment surrender or impassibility? When is dry
speech necessary and when exuberance or amusement?48 Whatever the
breaks and ruptures, only continuous variation brings forth this virtual
line, this virtual continuum of life, "the essential element of the real
beneath the everyday." There is a splendid statement in one of Herzog's
films. The main character asks himself a question and then says, Who will
answer this answer? Actually, there is no question, answers are all one ever
answers. To the answer already contained in a question (cross-exam-
ination, competition, plebiscite, etc.) one should respond with questions
from another answer. One should bring forth the order-word of the order-
word. In the order-word, life must answer the answer of death, not by flee-
ing, but by making flight act and create. There are pass-words beneath
order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage,
whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified composi-
tions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is nec-
essary to extract one from the other—to transform the compositions of
order into components of passage.
  5. 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes
                   of Signs



                     The Order of the Ark of the Israelites




  A New Regime

We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of signs, at least
when the expression is linguistic. A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic
system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves:
there is always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from
and independent of the form of expression, and the two forms pertain to
assemblages that are not principally linguistic. However, one can proceed
as though the formalization of expression were autonomous and self-
sufficient. Even if that is done, there is such diversity in the forms of
expression, such a mixture of these forms, that it is impossible to attach
any particular privilege to the form or regime of the "signifier." If we call
the signifying semiotic system semiology, then semiology is only one
regime of signs among others, and not the most important one. Hence the
necessity of a return to pragmatics, in which language never has universal-
ity in itself, self-sufficient formalization, a general semiology, or a meta-
                                      111
             112 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

language. Thus it is the study of the signifying regime that first testifies to
the inadequacy of linguistic presuppositions, and in the very name of
regimes of signs.
   There is a simple general formula for the signifying regime of the sign
(the signifying sign): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another
sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the
sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign's relation to a state of
things it designates, or to an entity it signifies, but only the formal relation
of sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain. The
limitlessness of signifiance replaces the sign. When denotation (here, des-
ignation and signification taken together) is assumed to be part of connota-
tion, one is wholly within this signifying regime of the sign. Not much
attention is paid to indexes, in other words, the territorial states of things
constituting the designatable. Not much attention is paid to icons, that is,
operations of reterritorialization constituting the signifiable. Thus the sign
has already attained a high degree of relative deterritorialization; it is
thought of as a symbol in a constant movement of referral from sign to sign.
The signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign. All signs are signs of
signs. The question is not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other
signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network with-
out beginning or end that projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmo-
spheric continuum. It is this amorphous continuum that for the moment
plays the role of the "signified," but it continually glides beneath the
signifier, for which it serves only as a medium or wall: the specific forms of
all contents dissolve in it. The atmospherization or mundanization of con-
tents. Contents are abstracted. This is the situation Levi-Strauss describes:
the world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the signi-
fied is given without being known.1 Your wife looked at you with a funny
expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the
IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw
two sticks on the sidewalk positioned like the hands of a watch. They were
whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. It doesn't mat-
ter what it means, it's still signifying. The sign that refers to other signs is
struck with a strange impotence and uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier
that constitutes the chain. The paranoiac shares this impotence of the
deterritorialized sign assailing him from every direction in the gliding
atmosphere, but that only gives him better access to the superpower of the
signifier, through the royal feeling of wrath, as master of the network
spreading through the atmosphere. The paranoid despotic regime: they are
attacking me and making me suffer, but I can guess what they're up to, I'm
one step ahead of them, I've always known, I have power even in my impo-
tence. "I'll get them."
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 113

    Nothing is ever over and done with in a regime of this kind. It's made for
that, it's the tragic regime of infinite debt, to which one is simultaneously
debtor and creditor. A sign refers to another sign, into which it passes and
which carries it into still other signs. "To the point that it returns in a circu-
lar fashion ..." Not only do signs form an infinite network, but the net-
work of signs is infinitely circular. The statement survives its object, the
name survives its owner. Whether it passes into other signs or is kept in
reserve for a time, the sign survives both its state of things and its signified;
it leaps like an animal or a dead person to regain its place in the chain and
invest a new state, a new signified, from which it will in turn extricate
itself.2 A hint of the eternal return. There is a whole regime of roving, float-
ing statements, suspended names, signs lying in wait to return and be
propelled by the chain. The signifier as the self-redundancy of the deterri-
torialized sign, a funereal world of terror.
    But what counts is less this circularity of signs than the multiplicity of
the circles or chains. The sign refers not only to other signs in the same cir-
cle, but to signs in other circles or spirals as well. Robert Lowie describes
how Crow and Hopi men react differently when their wives cheat on them
(the Crow are nomadic hunters and the Hopi sedentaries with an imperial
tradition): "A Crow Indian whose wife has cheated on him slashes her face,
whereas the Hopi who has fallen victim to the same misfortune, without
losing his calm, withdraws and prays for drought and famine to descend on
the village." It is easy to see where the paranoia resides, the despotic ele-
ment or signifying regime, or again, as Levi-Strauss says, "the bigotry": "In
effect, for a Hopi everything is connected: a social disturbance or a domes-
tic incident calls into question the system of the universe, the levels of
which are united by multiple correspondences; a disruption on one plane is
only intelligible, and morally tolerable, as a projection of other disruptions
involving other levels."3 The Hopi jump from one circle to another, or from
one sign to another on a different spiral. One leaves the village or the city,
only to return. The jumps may be regulated not only by presignifying ritu-
als but also by a whole imperial bureaucracy passing judgment on their
legitimacy. The jumps are not made at random, they are not without rules.
Not only are they regulated, but some are prohibited: Do not overstep the
outermost circle, do not approach the innermost circle .. . There is a dis-
tinction between circles because, although all signs refer to each other only
to the extent that they are deterritorialized, oriented toward the same cen-
ter of signifiance, distributed throughout an amorphous continuum, they
have different speeds of deterritorialization attesting to a place of origin
(temple, palace, house, street, village, bush, etc.), and they have differential
relations maintaining the distinction between circles or constituting
thresholds in the atmosphere of the continuum (private and public, family
             114 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

incident and social disorder). Moreover, the distribution of these thresh-
olds and circles changes according to the case. Deception is fundamental to
the system. Jumping from circle to circle, always moving the scene, playing
it out somewhere else: such is the hysteric operation of the deceiver as sub-
ject, answering to the paranoid operation of the despot installed in his cen-
ter of signifiance.
    There is one other aspect: the signifying regime is not simply faced with
the task of organizing into circles signs emitted from every direction; it
must constantly assure the expansion of the circles or spiral, it must pro-
vide the center with more signifier to overcome the entropy inherent in the
system and to make new circles blossom or replenish the old. Thus a secon-
dary mechanism in the service of signifiance is necessary: interpretance or
interpretation. This time the signifier assumes a new figure: it is no longer
the amorphous continuum that is given without being known and across
which the network of signs is strung. A portion of signified is made to corre-
spond to a sign or group of signs for which that signified has been deemed
suitable, thus making it knowable. To the syntagmatic axis of the sign refer-
ring to other signs is added a paradigmatic axis on which the sign, thus for-
malized, fashions for itself a suitable signified (once again there is
abstraction of the content, but in a new way). The interpretive priest, the
seer, is one of the despot-god's bureaucrats. A new aspect of deception
arises, the deception of the priest: interpretation is carried to infinity and
never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpre-
tation. The signified constantly reimparts signifier, recharges it or pro-
duces more of it. The form always comes from the signifier. The ultimate
signified is therefore the signifier itself, in its redundancy or "excess." It is
perfectly futile to claim to transcend interpretation or even communica-
tion through the production of signifier, because communication and
interpretation are what always serve to reproduce and produce signifier.
That is certainly not the way to revive the notion of production. The dis-
covery of the psychoanalyst-priests (a discovery every kind of priest or seer
made in their time) was that interpretation had to be subordinated to
signifiance, to the point that the signifier would impart no signified with-
out the signified reimparting signifier in its turn. Actually, there is no
longer even any need to interpret, but that is because the best interpreta-
tion, the weightiest and most radical one, is an eminently significant
silence. It is well known that although psychoanalysts have ceased to speak,
they interpret even more, or better yet, fuel interpretation on the part of the
subject, who jumps from one circle of hell to the next. In truth, signifiance
and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other
words, humankind's fundamental neurosis.
    There is not much to say about the center of signifiance, or the Signifier
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 115

in person, because it is a pure abstraction no less than a pure principle; in
other words, it is nothing. Lack or excess, it hardly matters. It comes to the
same thing to say that the sign refers to other signs ad inf initum and that the
infinite set of all signs refers to a supreme signifier. At any rate, this pure
formal redundancy of the signifier could not even be conceptualized if it
did not have its own substance of expression, for which we must find a
name: faciality. Not only is language always accompanied by faciality
traits, but the face crystallizes all redundancies, it emits and receives,
releases and recaptures signifying signs. It is a whole body unto itself: it is
like the body of the center of signifiance to which all of the deterritorialized
signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization.
The voice emanates from the face; that is why, however fundamentally
important the writing machine is in the imperial bureaucracy, what is writ-
ten retains an oral or nonbook character. The face is the Icon proper to the
signifying regime, the reterritorialization internal to the system. The
signifier reterritorializes on the face. The face is what gives the signifier
substance; it is what fuels interpretation, and it is what changes, changes
traits, when interpretation reimparts signifier to its substance. Look, his
expression changed. The signifier is always facialized. Faciality reigns
materially over that whole constellation of signifiances and interpretations
(psychologists have written extensively on the baby's relations to the moth-
er's face, and sociologists on the role of the face in mass media and adver-
tising). The despot-god has never hidden his face, far from it: he makes
himself one, or even several. The mask does not hide the face, it is the face.
The priest administers the face of the god. With the despot, everything is
public, and everything that is public is so by virtue of the face. Lies and
deception may be a fundamental part of the signifying regime, but secrecy
is not.4 Conversely, when the face is effaced, when the faciality traits dis-
appear, we can be sure that we have entered another regime, other zones
infinitely muter and more imperceptible where subterranean becomings-
animal occur, becomings-molecular, nocturnal deterritorializations over-
spilling the limits of the signifying system. The despot or god brandishes
the solar face that is his entire body, as the body of the signifier. He looked
at me queerly, he knitted his brow, what did I do to make him change
expression? I have her picture in front of me, it's as if she were watching me
... Surveillance by the face, as Strindberg said. Overcoding by the signifier,
irradiation in all directions, unlocalized omnipresence.
    Finally, the face or body of the despot or god has something like a
counterbody: the body of the tortured, or better, of the excluded. There is
no question that these two bodies communicate, for the body of the despot
is sometimes subjected to trials of humiliation or even torture, or of exile
and exclusion. "At the opposite pole one might imagine placing the body of
             116 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own
ceremonial... not in order to ground the surplus power possessed by the
person of the sovereign, but in order to code the lack of power with which
those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the
political field the condemned man outlines the symmetrical, inverted fig-
ure of the king."5 The one who is tortured is fundamentally one who loses
his or her face, entering into a becoming-animal, a becoming-molecular the
ashes of which are thrown to the wind. But it appears that the one who is
tortured is not at all the final term, but rather the first step before exclu-
sion. Oedipus, at least, understood that. He tortured himself, gouged out
his own eyes, then went away. The rite, the becoming-animal of the scape-
goat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a sec-
ond is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying
regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the
system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given
period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that
eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also
assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier at its center
and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. Finally,
and especially, it incarnates that line of flight the signifying regime cannot
tolerate, in other words, an absolute deterritorialization; the regime must
block a line of this kind or define it in an entirely negative fashion precisely
because it exceeds the degree of deterritorialization of the signifying sign,
however high it may be. The line of flight is like a tangent to the circles of
signifiance and the center of the signifier. It is under a curse. The goat's
anus stands opposite the face of the despot or god. Anything that threatens
to put the system to flight will be killed or put to flight itself. Anything that
exceeds the excess of the signifier or passes beneath it will be marked with a
negative value. Your only choice will be between a goat's ass and the face of
the god, between sorcerers and priests. The complete system, then, consists
of the paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the
temple; the interpreting priests who continually recharge the signified in
the temple, transforming it into signifier; the hysterical crowd of people
outside, clumped in tight circles, who jump from one circle to another; the
faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treated,
and adorned by the priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight
into the desert. This excessively hasty overview is applicable not only to the
imperial despotic regime but to all subjected, arborescent, hierarchical,
centered groups: political parties, literary movements, psychoanalytic
associations, families, conjugal units, etc. The photo, faciality, redun-
dancy, signifiance, and interpretation are at work everywhere. The dreary
world of the signifier; its archaism with an always contemporary function;
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 117

its essential deception, connoting all of its aspects; its profound antics.
The signifier reigns over every domestic squabble, and in every State
apparatus.
   The signifying regime of the sign is defined by eight aspects or princi-
ples: (1) the sign refers to another sign, ad infinitum (the limitlessness of
signifiance, which deterritorializes the sign); (2) the sign is brought back by
other signs and never ceases to return (the circularity of the deterrito-
rialized sign); (3) the sign jumps from circle to circle and constantly dis-
places the center at the same time as it ties into it (the metaphor or hysteria
of signs); (4) the expansion of the circles is assured by interpretations that
impart signified and reimpart signifier (the interpretosis of the priest); (5)
the infinite set of signs refers to a supreme signifier presenting itself as both
lack and excess (the despotic signifier, the limit of the system's deterrito-
rialization); (6) the form of the signifier has a substance, or the signifier has
a body, namely, the Face (the principle of faciality traits, which constitute a
reterritorialization); (7) the system's line of flight is assigned a negative
value, condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime's power of
deterritorialization (the principle of the scapegoat); (8) the regime is one of
universal deception, in its jumps, in the regulated circles, in the seer's regu-
lation of interpretations, in the publicness of the facialized center, and in
the treatment of the line of flight.
   Not only is this semiotic system not the first, but we see no reason to
accord it any particular privilege from the standpoint of an abstract evolu-
tionism. We would like to indicate very briefly certain characteristics of the
other two semiotic systems. First, the so-called primitive, presignifying
semiotic, which is much closer to "natural" codings operating without
signs. There is no reduction to faciality as the sole substance of expression:
there is no elimination of forms of content through abstraction of the signi-
fied. To the extent that there is still abstraction of content from a strictly
semiotic point of view, it fosters a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of
expression that prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preserves
expressive forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality,
gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal
form.6 A variety of forms and substances of expression intersect and form
relays. It is a segmentary but plurilinear, multidimensional semiotic that
wards off any kind of signifying circularity. Segmentarity is the law of the
lineages. Here, the sign owes its degree of relative deterritorialization not
to a perpetual referral to other signs but rather to a confrontation between
the territorialities and compared segments from which each sign is
extracted (the camp, the bush, the moving of the camp). Not only is the
polyvocality of statements preserved, but it is possible to finish with a
statement: A name that has been used up is abolished, a situation quite
            118 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

unlike the placing in reserve or transformation occurring in the signifying
semiotic. The meaning of cannibalism in a presignifying regime is pre-
cisely this: eating the name, a semiography that is fully a part of a semiotic
in spite of its relation to content (the relation is an expressive one).7 It
should not be thought that a semiotic of this kind functions by ignorance,
repression, or foreclosure of the signifier. On the contrary, it is animated by
a keen presentiment of what is to come. It does not need to understand it to
fight against it. It is wholly destined by its very segmentarity and poly-
vocality to avert the already-present threat: universalizing abstraction,
erection of the signifier, circularity of statements, and their correlates, the
State apparatus, the instatement of the despot, the priestly caste, the scape-
goat, etc. Every time they eat a dead man, they can say: one more the State
won't get.
   There is another semiotic, the countersignifying semiotic (whose most
notable representatives are the fearsome, warlike, and animal-raising
nomads, as opposed to hunter nomads, who belong to the previous
semiotic). This time, the semiotic proceeds less by segmentarity than by
arithmetic and numeration. Of course, the number already played a role of
great importance in the division and union of segmentary lineages; it also
had a function of decisive importance in the signifying imperial bureau-
cracy. But that was a kind of number that represented or signified, a num-
ber "incited, produced, caused by something other than itself." On the
contrary, a numerical sign that is not produced by something outside the
system of marking it institutes, which marks a mobile and plural distribu-
tion, which itself determines functions and relations, which arrives at
arrangements rather than totals, distributions rather than collections,
which operates more by breaks, transitions, migration, and accumulation
than by combining units—a sign of this kind would appear to belong to the
semiotic of a nomad war machine directed against the State apparatus. The
numbering number.8 Its numerical organization into tens, fifties, hun-
dreds, thousands, etc., and the associated spatial organization were obvi-
ously adopted by State armies, but basically bear witness to a military
system specific to the great nomads of the steppes, from the Hyksos to the
Mongols. They were superposed upon the principle of lineage. Secrecy and
spying are important elements of the war machine's semiotic of Numbers.
The role of Numbers in the Bible is not unrelated to the nomads, since
Moses got the idea from his father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite: he used it as an
organizational principle for the march and migration, and applied it him-
self to the military domain. In this countersignifying regime, the imperial
despotic line of flight is replaced by a line of abolition that turns back
against the great empires, cuts across them and destroys them, or else con-
quers them and integrates with them to form a mixed semiotic.
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 119

   We would like to go into greater detail on a fourth regime of signs, the
postsignifying regime, which has different characteristics opposing it to
signifiance and is defined by a unique procedure, that of "subjecti-
fication."
   There are many regimes of signs. Our own list is arbitrarily limited.
There is no reason to identify a regime or a semiotic system with a people
or historical moment. There is such mixture within the same period or the
same people that we can say no more than that a given people, language,
or period assures the relative dominance of a certain regime. Perhaps all
semiotics are mixed and not only combine with various forms of content
but also combine different regimes of signs. Presignifying elements are
always active in the signifying regime; countersignifying elements are
always present and at work within it; and postsignifying elements are
already there. Even that is to mark too much temporality. The semiotics
and their mixtures may appear in a history of confrontation and inter-
mingling of peoples, but also in languages in which there are several com-
peting functions, or in a psychiatric hospital in which different forms of
insanity coexist among the patients or even combine in a single patient; or
in an ordinary conversation in which people are speaking the same
tongue but different languages (all of a sudden a fragment of an unex-
pected semiotic surfaces). We are not suggesting an evolutionism, we are
not even doing history. Semiotic systems depend on assemblages, and it is
the assemblages that determine that a given people, period, or language,
and even a given style, fashion, pathology, or minuscule event in a limited
situation, can assure the predominance of one semiotic or another. We
are trying to make maps of regimes of signs: we can turn them around or
retain selected coordinates or dimensions, and depending on the case we
will be dealing with a social formation, a pathological delusion (d'elire), a
historical event, etc. We will see this on another occasion when we deal
with a dated social system, "courtly love," and then switch to a private
enterprise called "masochism." We can also combine maps or separate
them. To make the distinction between two types of semiotics (for exam-
ple, the postsignifying regime and the signifying regime), we must con-
sider very diverse domains simultaneously.
   In the first years of the twentieth century, psychiatry, at the height of its
clinical skills, confronted the problem of nonhallucinatory delusions in
which mental integrity is retained without "intellectual diminishment."
There was a first major grouping, paranoid or interpretive delusions,
which already subsumed various aspects. But the question of the possible
independence of another group was prefigured in Esquirol's monomania
and Kraepelin's querulous delusion, and later defined by Serieux and
Capgras as grievance delusion, and by Clerambault as passional delusion
             120 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

("querulousness or seeking redress, jealousy, erotomania"). Basing our-
selves on very fine studies of Serieux and Capgras on the one hand, and
Clerambault on the other (the latter took the distinction furthest), we will
contrast a paranoid-interpretive ideal regime of signifiance with a
passional, postsignifying subjective regime. The first regime is defined by
an insidious onset and a hidden center bearing witness to endogenous
forces organized around an idea; by the development of a network stretch-
ing across an amorphous continuum, a gliding atmosphere into which the
slightest incident may be carried; by an organization of radiating circles
expanding by circular irradiation in all directions, and in which the indi-
vidual jumps from one point to another, one circle to another, approaches
the center then moves away, operates prospectively and retrospectively;
and by a transformation of the atmosphere, as a function of variable traits
or secondary centers clustered around a principal nucleus. The second
regime, on the contrary, is defined by a decisive external occurrence, by a
relation with the outside that is expressed more as an emotion than an idea,
and more as effort or action than imagination ("active delusion rather than
ideational delusion"); by a limited constellation operating in a single sec-
tor, by a "postulate" or "concise formula" serving as the point of departure
for a linear series or proceeding that runs its course, at which point a new
proceeding begins. In short, it operates by the linear and temporal succes-
sion of finite proceedings, rather than by the simultaneity of circles in unlim-
ited expansion.9
   This story of two kinds of delusions without intellectual diminishment
is of great importance. For it is not a disruption of a preexisting discipline
of psychiatry; it lies at the heart of the constitution of the psychiatrist in the
nineteenth century and explains why he or she was from the start what he
or she has been ever since: the psychiatrist was born cornered, caught
between legal, police, humanitarian demands, accused of not being a true
doctor, suspected of mistaking the sane for mad and the mad for sane, prey
to quandaries of conscience, the last Hegelian belle ame. If we consider the
two types of intact delusions, we can say that people in the first group seem
to be completely mad, but aren't: President Schreber developed his radiat-
ing paranoia and relations with God in every direction, but he was not mad
in that he remained capable of managing his wealth wisely and distinguish-
ing between circles. At the other pole are those who do not seem mad in any
way, but are, as borne out by their sudden actions, such as quarrels, arsons,
murders (Esquirol's four great monomanias, erotic, intellectual, arson,
and homocidal, already belong in this category). In short, psychiatry was
not at all constituted in relation to the concept of madness, or even as a
modification of that concept, but rather by its split in these two opposite
directions. And is it not our own double image, all of ours, that psychiatry
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 121

thus reveals: seeming mad without "being it, then being it without seeming
it? (This twofold assertion is also psychoanalysis's point of departure, its
way of linking into psychiatry: we seem to be mad but aren't, observe the
dream; we are mad but don't seem to be, observe everyday life.) Thus psy-
chiatrists were alternately in the position of on the one hand pleading for
tolerance and understanding, underscoring the uselessness of confine-
ment, appealing for open-door asylums; and on the other arguing for
stepped-up surveillance and special high-security asylums, stricter mea-
sures necessitated by the fact that the mad seemed not to be.10 Is it by
chance that the distinction between the two major kinds of delusions, idea-
tional and active, in many ways recapitulates the distinction between the
classes (paranoiacs do not particularly need to be committed, they are usu-
ally bourgeois, whereas monomaniacs, passional redress-seekers, are most
often from the working and rural classes, or are marginal, as in the case of
political assassins)." A class with radiant, irradiating ideas (but of course!)
against a class reduced to linear, sporadic, partial, local actions . . . All par-
anoiacs are not bourgeois, all passionals or monomaniacs are not proletar-
ian. But God and his psychiatrists are charged with recognizing, among
these de facto mixes, those who preserve, even in delusion, the class-based
social order, and those who sow disorder, even strictly localized, such as
haystack fires, parental murders, declasse love and aggression.
   We are trying, then, to make a distinction between a paranoid, signify-
ing, despotic regime of signs and a passional or subjective, postsignifying,
authoritarian regime. Authoritarian is assuredly not the same as despotic,
passional is not the same as paranoid, and subjective is not the same as sig-
nifying. What happens in the second regime, by comparison with the signi-
fying regime as we have already defined it? In the first place, a sign or
packet of signs detaches from the irradiating circular network and sets to
work on its own account, starts running a straight line, as though swept into
a narrow, open passage. Already the signifying system drew a line of flight
or deterritorialization exceeding the specific index of its deterritorialized
signs, but the system gave that line a negative value and sent the scapegoat
fleeing down it. Here, it seems that the line receives a positive sign, as
though it were effectively occupied and followed by a people who find in it
their reason for being or destiny. Once again, we are not, of course, doing
history: we are not saying that a people invents this regime of signs, only
that at a given moment a people effectuates the assemblage that assures the
relative dominance of that regime under certain historical conditions (and
that regime, that dominance, that assemblage may be assured under other
conditions, for example, pathological, literary, romantic, or entirely mun-
dane). We are not saying that a people is possessed by a given type of
delusion but that the map of a delusion, its coordinates considered, may
             122 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

coincide with the map of a people, its coordinates considered. The para-
noid Pharaoh and the passional Hebrew? In the case of the Jewish people, a
group of signs detaches from the Egyptian imperial network of which it was
a part and sets off down a line of flight into the desert, pitting the most
authoritarian of subjectivities against despotic signifiance, the most
passional and least interpretive of delusions against interpretational
paranoid delusion, in short, a linear "proceeding and grievance" against
the irradiating circular network. Your grievance, your proceeding: that is
Moses' word to his people, and the proceedings come one after the other
along a line of Passion.12 From this Kafka derives his own conception of
querulousness or the proceeding, and the succession of linear segments:
the father-proceeding, hotel-proceeding, ship-proceeding, court-pro-
ceeding . ..
    We cannot overlook the most fundamental or extensive event in the his-
tory of the Jewish people: the destruction of the Temple, in two stages (587
B.C. and A.D. 70). The whole history of the Temple—the mobility and fra-
gility of the ark, then the construction of a House by Solomon, its recon-
struction under Darius, etc.—has meaning only in relation to renewed
proceedings of destruction, the two supreme moments of which came with
Nebuchadnezzar and Titus. A temple, mobile, fragile, or destroyed: the ark
is no more than a little portable packet of signs. An entirely negative line of
flight occupied by the animal or scapegoat laden with all the dangers
threatening the signifier has become an impossibility. Let misfortune
befall us: this formula punctuates Jewish history. It is we who must follow
the most deterritorialized line, the line of the scapegoat, but we will change
its sign, we will turn it into the positive line of our subjectivity, our Passion,
our proceeding or grievance. We will be our own scapegoat. We will be the
lamb: "The God who, like a lion, was given blood sacrifice must be shoved
into the background, and the sacrificed god must occupy the fore-
ground. . . . God became the animal that was slain, instead of the animal
that does the slaying."13 We will follow, we will wed the tangent separating
the land from the waters, we will separate the circular network from the
gliding continuum, we will make the line of separation our own, in order to
forge our path along it and dissociate the elements of the signifier (the dove
of the ark). A narrow line of march, an in-between that is not a mean but a
slender line. There is a Jewish specificity, immediately affirmed in a
semiotic system. This semiotic, however, is no less mixed than any other.
On the one hand, it is intimately related to the countersignifying regime of
the nomads (the Hebrews had a nomadic past, a continuing relationship
with the nomadic numerical organization that inspired them, and their
own particular becoming-nomad; their line of deterritorialization owed
much to the military line of nomadic destruction).14 On the other hand, it
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 123

has an essential relation to the signifying semiotic itself, for which the
 Hebrews and their God would always be nostalgic: reestablish an imperial
society and integrate with it, enthrone a king like everybody else (Samuel),
rebuild a temple that would finally be solid (David and Solomon,
Zachariah), erect the spiral of the Tower of Babel and find the face of God
again; not just bring the wandering to a halt, but overcome the diaspora,
which itself exists only as a function of an ideal regathering. We only have
space to indicate what, in this mixed semiotic, bears witness to the new
postsignifying subjective or passional regime.
   Faciality undergoes a profound transformation. The god averts his face,
which must be seen by no one; and the subject, gripped by a veritable fear of
the god, averts his or her face in turn. The averted faces, in profile, replace
the frontal view of the radiant face. It is this double turning away that draws
the positive line of flight. The prophet is the main figure in this assemblage;
he needs a sign to guarantee the word of God, he is himself marked by a sign
indicating the special regime to which he belongs. It is Spinoza who has
elaborated the profoundest theory of prophetism, taking into account the
semiotic proper to it. Cain, who turns away from the God who turns away
from him, already follows the line of deterritorialization, protected by a
sign allowing him to escape death. The mark of Cain. A punishment worse
than imperial death? The Jewish God invented the reprieve, existence in
reprieve, indefinite postponement.^ But He also invented the positivity of
alliance, or the covenant, as the new relation with the deity, since the sub-
ject remains alive. Abel, whose name is vanity, is nothing; Cain is the true
man. This is very different from the system of rigging or deception animat-
ing the face of the signifier, the interpretation of the seer and the displace-
ments of the subject. It is the regime of betrayal, universal betrayal, in
which the true man never ceases to betray God just as God betrays man,
with the wrath of God defining the new positivity. Before his death, Moses
receives the words of the great song of betrayal. Even the prophet, unlike
the seer-priest, is fundamentally a traitor and thus fulfills God's order bet-
ter than anyone who remained faithful could. God calls upon Jonah to go to
Nineveh to entreat the inhabitants, who had repeatedly betrayed God, to
mend their ways. But Jonah's first act is to take off in the opposite direc-
tion; he also betrays God, fleeing "far from the face of Adonai."16 He takes
a ship for Tarshish and sleeps, like a righteous man. The tempest sent by
God causes him to be thrown into the sea, where he is swallowed by the
great fish and vomited out at the boundary between land and water, the
limit of separation or line of flight earlier occupied by the dove of the Ark
(Jonah, precisely, is the word for dove). But Jonah, in fleeing from the face
of God, did exactly what God had wanted: he took the evil of Nineveh
upon himself; he did it even more effectively than God had wanted, he
             124 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

anticipated God. That is why he slept like a righteous man. God let him
live, temporarily protected by the tree of Cain, but then made the tree die
because Jonah had renewed the covenant by occupying the line of flight.17
Jesus universalizes the system of betrayal: he betrays the God of the Jews,
he betrays the Jews, he is betrayed by God ("Why hast thou forsaken me?"
[Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34—Trans.]), he is betrayed by Judas, the true
man. He took evil upon himself, but the Jews who kill him also take it upon
themselves. Jesus is asked for a sign of his divine descendance: he invokes
the sign of Jonah [Luke 11:29—Trans.]. Cain, Jonah, and Jesus constitute
three great linear proceedings along which signs rush and form relays.
There are many others. Everywhere a double turning away on a line of
flight.
   When a prophet declines the burden God entrusts to him (Moses,
Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), it is not because the burden would have been too
heavy, as with an imperial oracle or seer who refuses a dangerous mission.
It is instead a case like Jonah's, who by hiding and fleeing and betraying
anticipates the will of God more effectively than if he had obeyed. The
prophet is always being forced by God, literally violated by him, much
more than inspired by him. The prophet is not a priest. The prophet does
not know how to talk, God puts the words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a
new form of semiophagy. Unlike the seer, the prophet interprets nothing:
his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative, his relation to
God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and signifying; he
anticipates and detects the powers (puissances) of the future rather than
applying past and present powers (pouvoirs). Faciality traits no longer func-
tion to prevent the formation of a line of flight, or to form a body of
signifiance controlling that line and sending only a faceless goat down it.
Rather, it is faciality itself that organizes the line of flight, in the face-off
between two countenances that become gaunt and turn away in profile.
Betrayal has become an idee fixe, the main obsession, replacing the deceit
of the paranoiac and the hysteric. The "persecutor-persecuted" relation
has no relevance whatsoever: its meaning is altogether different in the
authoritarian passional regime than in the despotic paranoid regime.
    Something is still bothering us: the story of Oedipus. Oedipus is almost
unique in the Greek world. The whole first part is imperial, despotic, para-
noid, interpretive, divinatory. But the whole second part is Oedipus's wan-
dering, his line of flight, the double turning away of his own face and that of
God. Rather than very precise limits to be crossed in order, or which one
does not have the right to cross (hybris), there is a concealed limit toward
which Oedipus is swept. Rather than interpretive signifying irradiation,
there is a subjective linear proceeding permitting Oedipus to keep a secret,
but only as a residue capable of starting a new linear proceeding. Oedipus,
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 125

his name is atheos: he invents something worse than death or exile, he wan-
ders and survives on a strangely positive line of separation or deterri-
torialization. Holderlin and Heidegger see this as the birth of the double
 turning away, the change of face, and also the birth of modern tragedy, for
which they bizarrely credit the Greeks: the outcome is no longer murder or
 sudden death but survival under reprieve, unlimited postponement.18
Nietzsche suggests that Oedipus, as opposed to Prometheus, was the
 Semitic myth of the Greeks, the glorification of Passion or passivity.'9 Oe-
dipus: Greek Cain. Let us return to psychoanalysis. It was not by chance
that Freud pounced upon Oedipus. Psychoanalysis is a definite case of a
mixed semiotic: a despotic regime of signifiance and interpretation, with
irradiation of the face, but also an authoritarian regime of subjectification
and prophetism, with a turning away of the face (the positioning of the psy-
choanalyst behind the patient suddenly assumes its full significance).
Recent efforts to explain that a "signifier represents the subject for another
signifier" are typically syncretic: a linear proceeding of subjectivity along
with a circular development of the signifier and interpretation. Two abso-
lutely different regimes of signs in a mix. But the worst, most underhanded
of powers are founded on it.
    One more remark on the story of authoritarian passional betrayal, as
opposed to despotic paranoid deception. Everything is infamy, but Borges
botched his history of universal infamy.20 He should have distinguished
between the great realm of deceptions and the great realm of betrayals. And
also between the various figures of betrayal. There is, in effect, a second fig-
ure of betrayal that springs up at certain places at certain times, but always
as a function of a variable assemblage with new components. Christianity
is a particularly important case of a mixed semiotic, with its signifying
imperial combination together with its postsignifying Jewish subjectivity.
It transforms both the ideal signifying system and the postsignifying
passional system. It invents a new assemblage. Heresies are still a part of
deception, just as orthodoxy is a part of signifiance. But there are heresies
that are more than heresies and profess pure treason, for example, the
Buggers; it is not by chance that the Bulgars played a special role.21 Beware
the Bulgars, as Monsieur Plume would say. The problem is one of territori-
alities in relation to deep movements of deterritorialization. England,
another territoriality or another deterritorialization: Cromwell, every-
where a traitor, a straight line of passional subjectification opposed to the
royal center of signifiance and the intermediary circles: the dictator against
the despot. Richard III, the deformed, the twisted, whose ideal is to betray
everything: he confronts Lady Anne in a face-off in which the two counte-
nances turn away, but each knows she or he is the other's, destined for the
other. This is unlike Shakespeare's other historical dramas, in which kings
             126 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

and assassins deceive in order to take power but then become good kings.
That kind are men of the State. Richard III comes from elsewhere: his ven-
tures, including those with women, derive more from a war machine than
from a State apparatus. He is the traitor, springing from the great nomads
and their secrecy. He says so from the beginning, when he mentions a secret
project infinitely surpassing the conquest of power. He wants to return the
war machine both to the fragile State and pacified couples. The only one to
guess is Lady Anne, fascinated, terrified, consenting. Elizabethan theater
is full of these traitorous characters who aspire to be absolute traitors, in
opposition to the deceptions of the man of the court or even of the State.
    How many betrayals accompanied the great discoveries of Christen-
dom, the discovery of new lands and continents! Lines of deterrito-
rialization on which small groups betray everything, their companions, the
king, the indigenous peoples, the neighboring explorer, in the mad hope of
founding, with a woman of their family, a race that would finally be pure
and represent a new beginning. Herzog's film, Aguirre, is very Shakespear-
ean. Aguirre asks, How can one be a traitor everywhere and in everything?
I'm the only traitor here. No more deception, it's time for betrayal. What a
grandiose dream! I will be the last traitor, the total traitor, and therefore the
last man.
    Then there was the Reformation: the extraordinary figure of Luther, as
traitor to all things and all people; his personal relation with the Devil
resulting in betrayal, through good deeds as well as bad.
    These new figures of betrayal always return to the Old Testament: I am
the wrath of God. But betrayal has become humanist, it does not fall
between God and his own men; it relies on God, but falls between the men
of God and the others, denounced as deceivers. In the end, there is only one
man of God or of the wrath of God, a single betrayer against all deceivers.
But every deceiver is mixed, and which does not take him- or herself to be
the one? And what betrayer does not say to him- or herself at some point
that he or she was nothing but a deceiver after all? (See the strange case of
Maurice Sachs.)
    It is clear that the book, or what takes its place, has a different meaning
in the signifying paranoid regime than in the postsignifying passional
regime. In the first case, there is an emission of the despotic signifier, and
its interpretation by scribes and priests, which fixes the signified and
reimparts signifier; but there is also, from sign to sign, a movement from
one territory to another, a circulation assuring a certain speed of
deterritorialization (for example, the circulation of an epic, or the rivalry
between several cities for the birth of a hero, or, once again, the role of
scribe-priests in exchanges of territorialities and genealogies).22 What
takes the place of the book always has an external model, a referent, face,
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 127

family, or territory that preserves the book's oral character. On the con-
trary, in the passional regime the book seems to be internalized, and to
internalize everything: it becomes the sacred written Book. It takes the
place of the face and God, who hides his face and gives Moses the inscribed
stone tablets. God manifests himself through trumpets and the Voice, but
what is heard in sound is the nonface, just as what is seen in the book are
words. The book has become the body of passion, just as the face was the
body of the signifier. It is now the book, the most deterritorialized of
things, that fixes territories and genealogies. The latter are what the book
says, and the former the place at which the book is said. The function of
interpretation has totally changed. Or it disappears entirely in favor of a
pure and literal recitation forbidding the slightest change, addition, or
commentary (the famous "stultify yourself of the Christians belongs to
this passional line; the Koran goes the furthest in this direction). Or else
interpretation survives but becomes internal to the book itself, which loses
its circulatory function for outside elements: for example, the different
types of coded interpretation are fixed according to axes internal to the
book; interpretation is organized according to correspondences between
two books, such as the Old and New Testaments, and may even induce a
third book suffused by the same element of interiority.23 Finally, interpre-
tation may reject all intermediaries or specialists and become direct, since
the book is written both in itself and in the heart, once as a point of
subjectification and again in the subject (the Reformation conception of
the book). In any case, this is the point of departure for the delusional pas-
sion of the book as origin and finality of the world. The unique book, the
total work, all possible combinations inside the book, the tree-book, the
cosmos-book: all of these platitudes so dear to the avant-gardes, which cut
the book off from its relations with the outside, are even worse than the
chant of the signifier. Of course, they are entirely bound up with a mixed
semiotic. But in truth they have a particularly pious origin. Wagner,
Mallarme, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles. If passional delusion is
profoundly monomaniacal, monomania for its part found a fundamental
element of its assemblage in monotheism and the Book. The strangest cult.
   This is how things are in the passional regime, or the regime of
subjectification. There is no longer a center of signifiance connected to
expanding circles or an expanding spiral, but a point of subjectification
constituting the point of departure of the line. There is no longer a
signifier-signified relation, but a subject of enunciation issuing from the
point of subjectification and a subject of the statement in a determinable
relation to the first subject. There is no longer sign-to-sign circularity, but a
linear proceeding into which the sign is swept via subjects. We may con-
sider these three diverse realms.
            128 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

    1. The Jews as opposed to the empires. God withdraws his face, becom-
ing a point of subjectification for the drawing of a line of flight or
deterritorialization; Moses is the subject of enunciation, constituted on the
basis of the tablets of God that replace the face; the Jewish people consti-
tute the subject of the statement, for betrayal as well as for a new land, and
enter an ever-renewed covenant or linear "proceeding" rather than a circu-
lar expansion.
   2. So-called modern, or Christian, philosophy. Descartes as opposed to
ancient philosophy. There is a primacy of the idea of the infinite as an
absolutely necessary point of subjectification. The Cogito, consciousness,
the "I think" is the subject of enunciation that reflects its own use and
conceives of itself following a line of deterritorialization represented by
methodical doubt. The subject of the statement is the union of the soul and
the body, or feeling, guaranteed in a complex way by the cogito, and per-
forms the necessary reterritorializations. The cogito is a proceeding that
must always be recommenced, haunted by the possibility of betrayal, a
deceitful God, and an evil Genius. When Descartes says, I can infer "I
think therefore I am" but not "I walk therefore I am," he is initiating the
distinction between the two subjects (what still-Cartesian contemporary
linguists call a shifter, even though they find traces of the second subject in
the first).
    3. Nineteenth-century psychiatry: monomania distinguished from
mania; subjective delusion separated from ideational delusions; "posses-
sion" replacing sorcery; a slow elaboration of passional delusion, as dis-
tinct from paranoia . . . The schema of passional delusion according to
Clerambault is as follows: the Postulate as the point of subjectification
(He loves me); pride as the tonality of the subject of enunciation (de-
lusional pursuit of the loved one); Spite, Rancor (a result of a reversion
to the subject of the statement). Passional delusion is a veritable cogito. In
the foregoing example of erotomania, as well as in jealousy and querulous
delusion, Clerambault stresses that a sign must follow a segment or linear
proceeding through to the end before it can begin another, whereas the
signs in paranoid delusion form an endless, self-adjusting network devel-
oping in all directions. The cogito also follows a linear temporal proceed-
ing needing to be recommenced. The history of the Jews is punctuated by
catastrophes after each of which there were just enough survivors to start
a new proceeding. In the course of a proceeding, while there is linear
movement the plural is often used, whereas there is a return to the Singu-
lar as soon as there is a pause or stoppage marking the end of one move-
ment before another begins.24 Fundamental segmentarity: one proceed-
ing must end (and its termination must be marked) before another begins,
to enable another to begin.
            587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 129

   The point of subj edification is the origin of the passional line of the
postsignifying regime. The point of subjectification can be anything. It
must only display the following characteristic traits of the subjective
semiotic: the double turning away, betrayal, and existence under reprieve.
For anorexics, food plays this role (anorexics do not confront death but
save themselves by betraying food, which is equally a traitor since it is sus-
pected of containing larvae, worms, and microbes). A dress, an article of
underwear, a shoe are points of subjectification for a fetishist. So is a
faciality trait for someone in love, but the meaning of faciality has
changed; it is no longer the body of the signifier but has become the point
of departure for a deterritorialization that puts everything else to flight. A
thing, an animal, will do the trick. There are cogitos on everything. "A
pair of eyes set far apart, a head hewn of quartz, a haunch that seemed to
live its own l i f e . . . . Whenever the beauty of the female becomes irresisti-
ble, it is traceable to a single quality":25 a point of subjectification in the
departure of a passional line. Moreover, several points coexist in a given
individual or group, which are always engaged in several distinct and not
always compatible linear proceedings. The various forms of education or
"normalization" imposed upon an individual consist in making him or
her change points of subjectification, always moving toward a higher,
nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the
point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a
mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunci-
ation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to
statements in conformity with a dominant reality (of which the mental
reality just mentioned is a part, even when it seems to oppose it). What is
important, what makes the postsignifying passional line a line of subjecti-
fication or subjection, is the constitution, the doubling of the two sub-
jects, and the recoiling of one into the other, of the subject of enunciation
into the subject of the statement (the linguists acknowledge this when
they speak of the "imprint of the process of enunciation in the state-
ment"). Signifiance brought about uniformity in the substance of enunci-
ation; now subjectivity effects an individuation, collective or particular.
Substance has become subject, as they say. The subject of enunciation
recoils into the subject of the statement, to the point that the subject of the
statement resupplies subject of enunciation for another proceeding. The
subject of the statement has become the "respondent" or guarantor of the
subject of enunciation, through a kind of reductive echolalia, in a
biunivocal relation. This relation, this recoiling, is also that of mental
reality into the dominant reality. There is always an appeal to a dominant
reality that functions from within (already in the Old Testament, and dur-
ing the Reformation, with trade and capitalism). There is no longer even a
             130 n 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

need for a transcendent center of power; power is instead immanent and
melds with the "real," operating through normalization. A strange inven-
tion: as if in one form the doubled subject were the causeof the statements
of which, in its other form, it itself is a part. This is the paradox of the
legislator-subject replacing the signifying despot: the more you obey the
statements of the dominant reality, the more in command you are as sub-
ject of enunciation in mental reality, for in the end you are only obeying
yourself! You are the one in command, in your capacity as a rational
being. A new form of slavery is invented, namely, being slave to oneself, or
to pure "reason," the Cogito. Is there anything more passional than pure
reason? Is there a colder, more extreme, more self-interested passion than
the Cogito?
    Althusser clearly brings out this constitution of social individuals as
subjects: he calls it interpellation ("Hey you, over there!") and calls the
point of subjectification the Absolute Subject; he analyzes the "specular
doubling" of subjects and for purposes of demonstration uses the example
of God, Moses, and the Jewish people.26 Linguists like Benveniste adopt a
curious linguistic personology that is very close to the Cogito: the You,
which can doubtless designate the person one is addressing, but more
importantly, a point of subjectification on the basis of which each of us is
constituted as a subject. The /as subject of enunciation, designating the
person that utters and reflects its own use in the statement ("the empty
nonreferential sign"); this is the I appearing in propositions of the type "I
believe, I assume, I think..." Finally, the I as subject of the statement,
indicating a state for which a She or He could always be substituted ("I suf-
 fer, I walk, I breathe, I feel.. .").27 This is not, however, a question of a lin-
guistic operation, for a subject is never the condition of possibility of
language or the cause of the statement: there is no subject, only collective
assemblages of enunciation. Subjectification is simply one such assem-
blage and designates a formalization of expression or a regime of signs
rather than a condition internal to language. Neither is it a question of a
movement characteristic of ideology, as Althusser says: subjectification as
a regime of signs or a form of expression is tied to an assemblage, in other
words, an organization of power that is already fully functioning in the
economy, rather than superposing itself upon contents or relations
between contents determined as real in the last instance. Capital is a point
of subjectification par excellence.
    The psychoanalytic cogito: the psychoanalyst presents him- or herself as
an ideal point of subjectification that brings the patient to abandon old,
so-called neurotic, points. The patient is partially a subject of enunciation
in all he or she says to the psychoanalyst, and under the artificial mental
conditions of the session: the patient is therefore called the "analysand."
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 131

But in everything else the patient says or does, he or she is a subject of the
statement, eternally psychoanalyzed, going from one linear proceeding to
another, perhaps even changing analysts, growing increasingly submissive
to the normalization of a dominant reality. In this sense, psychoanalysis,
with its mixed semiotic, fully participates in a line of subjectification. The
psychoanalyst does not even have to speak anymore, the analysand
assumes the burden of interpretation; as for the psychoanalyzed patient,
the more he or she thinks about "his" or "her" next session, or the preced-
ing one, in segments, the better a subject he or she is.
    Just as the paranoid regime had two axes—one sign referring to another
(making the sign a signifier), and the signifier referring to the signified—so
too the passional regime, the line of subjectification, has two axes, one
syntagmatic and the other paradigmatic: as we have just seen, the first axis
is consciousness. Consciousness as passion is precisely that doubling of
subjects, of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement, and
the recoiling of one into the other. But the second form of subjectification
is love as passion, love-passion, another type of double, of doubling and
recoiling. Here again, a variable point of subjectification serves to distrib-
ute two subjects that as much conceal their faces as reveal them to each
other, that wed a line of flight, a line of deterritorialization forever drawing
them together and driving them apart. But everything changes: there is a
celibate side to this doubled consciousness, and there is a passional love
couple that no longer has any use for consciousness or reason. Yet it is the
same regime, even in betrayal and even if the betraying is done by a third
party. Adam and Eve, and Cain's wife (about whom the Bible should have
said more). Richard III, the traitor, is in the end given consciousness in a
dream, but only the strange face-off with Lady Anne, a meeting of two
countenances that conceal themselves knowing that they have promised
themselves to each other following the same line that will nonetheless sepa-
rate them. The most loyal and tender, or intense, love assigns subject of
enunciation and a subject of the statement that constantly switch places,
wrapped in the sweetness of being a naked statement in the other's mouth,
and of the other's being a naked enunciation in my own mouth. But there is
always a traitor in the making. What love is not betrayed? What cogito lacks
its evil genius, the traitor it will never be rid of? "Tristan . . . Isolde . . .
Isolde.. . Tristan": the cry of the two subjects climbs the scale of intensities
until it reaches the summit of a suffocating consciousness, whereas the ship
follows the line of the waters, the line of death and the unconscious,
betrayal, a continuous melody line. Passional love is a cogito built for two,
just as the cogito is a passion for the self alone. There is a potential couple in
the cogito, just as there is a doubling of a single virtual subject in love-
passion. Klossowski has created the strangest figures on the basis of this
             132 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

complementarity between an over intense thought and an over feverish
couple. The line of subjectification is thus entirely occupied by the Double,
but it has two figures since there are two kinds of doubles: the syntagmatic
figure of consciousness, or the consciousness-related double, relating to
form (Self = Self [Moi = Moi\); and the paradigmatic figure of the couple,
or the passional double, relating to substance (Man = Woman; here, the
double is immediately the difference between the sexes).
   We can follow the becoming of these doubles in mixed semiotics, which
are interminglings as well as degradations. On the one hand, the passional
love double, the couple in love-passion, falls into a conjugal relation or
even a "domestic squabble" situation: Which is the subject of enunciation?
Which is the subject of the statement? The battle of the sexes: You 're steal-
ing my thoughts. The domestic squabble has always been a cogito for two, a
war cogito. Strindberg took this fall of love-passion into despotic conju-
gality and hysterico-paranoid squabbling to its extreme ("she" says she
found it all by herself when in fact she owes it all to me, echo, thought theft,
O Strindberg!).28 On the other hand, the consciousness-related double of
pure thought, the couple of the legislating subject, falls into a bureaucratic
relation and a new form of persecution in which one double takes over the
role of subject of enunciation while the other is reduced to a subject of the
statement; the cogito itself becomes an "office squabble," a bureaucratic
love delusion. A new form of bureaucracy replaces or conjugates with the
old imperial bureaucracy, the bureaucrat says / think (Kafka goes the fur-
thest in this direction, as in the example of Sortini and Sordini in The Cas-
tle, or the many subjectifications of Klamm). 29 Conjugality is the
development of the couple, and bureaucracy the development of the
cogito. But one is contained in the other: amorous bureaucracy, bureau-
cratic couple. Too much has been written on the double, haphazardly,
metaphysically, finding it everywhere, in any old mirror, without noticing
the specific regime it possesses both in a mixed semiotic where it intro-
duces new phases, and in the pure semiotic of subjectification where it
inscribes itself on a line of flight and introduces very particular figures.
Once again: the two figures of thought-consciousness and love-passion in
the postsignifying regime; the two moments of bureaucratic consciousness
and conjugal relation in the mixed fall or combination. But even in a mixed
state, the original line is easily discovered by semiotic analysis.
   There is a redundancy of consciousness and love that is not the same as
the signifying redundancy of the other regime. In the signifying regime,
redundancy is a phenomenon of objective frequency involving signs or ele-
ments of signs (the phonemes, letters, and groups of letters in a language):
there is both a maximum frequency of the signifier in relation to each sign,
and a comparative frequency of one sign in relation to another. In any case,
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 133

it could be said that this regime develops a kind of "wall" on which signs are
inscribed, in relation to one another and in relation to the signifier. In the
postsignifying regime, on the other hand, the redundancy is one of subjec-
tive resonance involving above all shifters, personal pronouns and proper
names. Here again, we may distinguish between the maximum resonance
of self-consciousness (Self = Self [Moi = Moi]) and a comparative reso-
nance of names (Tristan ... Isolde .. .)• This time, however, there is no
longer a wall upon which the frequency is tallied but instead a black hole
attracting consciousness and passion and in which they resonate. Tristan
calls Isolde, Isolde calls Tristan, both drawn toward the black hole of a self-
consciousness, carried by the tide toward death. When the linguists distin-
guish between two forms of redundancy, frequency and resonance, they
often ascribe the latter a merely derivative status.30 In fact, it is a question
of two semiotics that mix but retain their own distinct principles (similarly,
one could define other forms of redundancy, such as rhythmic, gestural, or
numerical, relating to the other regimes of signs). The most essential dis-
tinction between the signifying regime and the subjective regime and their
respective redundancies is the movement of deterritorialization they
effectuate. Since the signifying sign refers only to other signs, and the set of
all signs to the signifier itself, the corresponding semiotic enjoys a high
level of deterritorialization; but it is a deterritorialization that is still
relative, expressed as frequency. In this system, the line of flight remains
negative, it is assigned a negative sign. As we have seen, the subjective
regime proceeds entirely differently: precisely because the sign breaks its
relation of signifiance with other signs and sets off racing down a positive
line of flight, it attains an absolute deterritorialization expressed in the
black hole of consciousness and passion. The absolute deterritorialization
of the cogito. That is why subjective redundancy seems both to graft
itself onto signifying redundancy and to derive from it, as second-degree
redundancy.
    Things are even more complicated than we have let on. Subjectification
assigns the line of flight a positive sign, it carries deterritorialization to the
absolute, intensity to the highest degree, redundancy to a reflexive form,
etc. But it has its own way of repudiating the positivity it frees, or of
relativizing the absoluteness it attains, without, however, falling back to
the preceding regime. In this redundancy of resonance, the absolute of con-
sciousness is the absolute of impotence and the intensity of passion, the
heat of the void. This is because Subjectification essentially constitutes
finite linear proceedings, one of which ends before the next begins: thus the
cogito is always recommenced, a passion or grievance is always recapitu-
lated. Every consciousness pursues its own death, every love-passion its
own end, attracted by a black hole, and all the black holes resonate together.
             134 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

Thus subjectification imposes on the line of flight a segmentarity that is
forever repudiating that line, and upon absolute deterritorialization a
point of abolition that is forever blocking that deterritorialization or
diverting it. The reason for this is simple: forms of expression and regimes
of signs are still strata (even considered in themselves, after abstracting
forms of content); subjectification is no less a stratum than signifiance.
   The principal strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance
and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection. These strata to-
gether are what separates us from the plane of consistency and the abstract
machine, where there is no longer any regime of signs, where the line of
flight effectuates its own potential positivity and deterritorialization its
absolute power. The problem, from this standpoint, is to tip the most favor-
able assemblage from its side facing the strata to its side facing the plane of
consistency or the body without organs. Subjectification carries desire to
such a point of excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself
in a black hole or change planes. Destratify, open up to a new function, a
diagrammatic function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and
passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an
experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities, an
emission of particles-signs. Make the body without organs of conscious-
ness and love. Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification: "To
become the great lover, the magnetizer and catalyzer . . . one has to first
experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool."31 Use the / think
for a becoming-animal, and love for a becoming-woman of man. Desub-
jectify consciousness and passion. Are there not diagrammatic redundan-
cies distinct from both signifying redundancies and subjective redundan-
cies? Redundancies that would no longer be knots of arborescence but
resumptions and upsurges in a rhizome? Stammer language, be a foreigner
in one's own tongue:
            do domi not passi do not dominate
            do not dominate your passive passions not

           do devouring not not dominate
           your rats your rations your rats rations not not. . .32
It seems necessary to distinguish between three types of deterrito-
rialization: the first type is relative, proper to the strata, and culminates in
signifiance; the second is absolute, but still negative and stratic, and
appears in subjectification (Ratio et Passio)', finally, there is the possibility
of a positive absolute deterritorialization on the plane of consistency or the
body without organs.
               587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 135

    We have not, of course, managed to eliminate forms of content (for
 example, the role of the Temple, or the position of a dominant Reality,
 etc.). What we have done is to isolate, under artificial conditions, a certain
 number of semiotics displaying very diverse characteristics. Thepresigni-
fying semiotic, in which the "overcoding" marking the privileged status of
 language operates diffusely: enunciation is collective, statements them-
 selves are polyvocal, and substances of expression are multiple; relative
 deterritorialization is determined by the confrontation between the terri-
 torialities and segmentary lineages that ward off the State apparatus. The
signifying semiotic: overcoding is fully effectuated by the signifier, and by
the State apparatus that emits it; there is uniformity of enunciation, unifi-
 cation of the substance of expression, and control over statements in a
 regime of circularity; relative deterritorialization is taken as far as it can go
by a redundant and perpetual referral from sign to sign. The countersig-
 nifying semiotic: here, overcoding is assured by the Number as form of
 expression or enunciation, and by the War Machine upon which it
 depends; deterritorialization follows a line of active destruction or aboli-
 tion. The postsignifying semiotic, in which overcoding is assured by the
 redundancy of consciousness; a subjectification of enunciation occurs on a
 passional line that makes the organization of power (pouvoir)) immanent
 and raises deterritorialization to the absolute, although in a way that is still
 negative.




   (1) The Center or the Signifier; the faciality of the god or despot. (2) The Temple or Pal-
   ace, with priests and bureaucrats. (3) The organization in circles and the sign referring
   to other signs on the same circle or on different circles. (4) The interpretive develop-
   ment of signifier into signified, which then reimparts signifier. (5) The expiatory ani-
   mal; the blocking of the line of flight. (6) The scapegoat, or the negative sign of the line
   of night.
            136 n 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

    Yet we must consider two aspects: on the one hand, these semiotics are
still concrete even after forms of content have been abstracted, but only to
the extent that they are mixed, that they constitute mixed combinations.
Every semiotic is mixed and only functions as such; each one necessarily
captures fragments of one or more other semiotics (surplus value of code).
Even from this perspective, the signifying semiotic has no privileged status
to apply toward the formation of a general semiology: in particular, the way
in which it combines with the passional semiotic of subjectification ("the
signifier for the subject") implies nothing that would privilege it over other
combinations, for example, the combination of the passional semiotic and
the countersignifying semiotic, or of the countersignifying semiotic and
the signifying semiotic itself (when the Nomads turn imperial), etc. There
is no general semiology.
    For example, without privileging one regime over another, it is possible
to construct schemas of the signifying and postsignifying semiotics that
clearly illustrate the possibilities for concrete mixture.
    The second aspect, complementary but very different, consists in the
possibility of transforming one abstract or pure semiotic into another, by
virtue of the translatability ensuing from overcoding as the special charac-
teristic of language. This time, it is no longer a question of concrete mixed
semiotics but of transformations of one abstract semiotic into another
(even though that transformation is not itself abstract, in other words,
effectively takes place without being performed by a "translator" in the
role of pure knower). All transformations taking a given semiotic into the
presignifying regime may be called analogical transformations; those that
take it into the signifying regime are symbolic; into the countersignifying
regime, polemical or strategic; into the postsignifying regime, conscious-
ness-related or mimetic; finally, transformations that blow apart semiotics
systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of a positive abso-
lute deterritorialization are called diagrammatic. A transformation is not
the same thing as a statement in a pure semiotic; nor even an ambiguous
statement requiring a whole pragmatic analysis to determine the semiotic
it belongs to; nor a statement belonging to a mixed semiotic (although the
transformation may have that effect). A transformational statement marks
the way in which a semiotic translates for its own purposes a statement
originating elsewhere, and in so doing diverts it, leaving untransformable
residues and actively resisting the inverse transformation. Furthermore,
transformations are not limited to the ones we just listed. It is always
through transformation that a new semiotic is created in its own right.
Translations can be creative. New pure regimes of signs are formed through
transformation and translation. Again, there is no general semiology but
rather a transsemiotic.
               587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 137




   (1) The point of subjectification, replacing the center of signfiance. (2) The two faces
   turned away from each other. (3) The subject of enunciation resulting from the point of
   subjectification and the turning away. (4) The subject of the statement, into which the
   subject of enunciation recoils. (5) The succession of finite linear proceedings accompa-
   nied by a new form of priest and a new bureaucracy. (6) The line of flight, which is freed
   but still segmented, remaining negative and blocked.

   In analogical transformations, we often see sleep, drugs, and amorous
rapture form expressions that translate into presignifying regimes the sub-
jective or signifying regimes one wishes to impose upon the expressions,
but which they resist by themselves imposing upon these regimes an unex-
pected segmentarity and polyvocality. Christianity underwent strange cre-
ative translations in its transmission to "barbarian" or even "savage"
peoples. The introduction of monetary signs into certain commercial cir-
cuits in Africa caused those signs to undergo an analogical transformation
that was very difficult to control (except when the circuits underwent a
destructive transformation instead).33 The songs of black Americans,
including, especially, the words, would be a better example, since they
show how the slaves "translated" the English signifier and made presig-
nifying or even countersignifying use of the language, blending it with their
own African languages just as they blended old African work songs with
their new forced labor; these songs also show how, with Christianization
and the abolition of slavery, the slaves underwent a proceeding of
"subjectification" or even "individuation" that transformed their music,
while the music simultaneously transformed the proceeding by analogy;
and also how unique problems of "faciality" were posed when whites in
"blackface" appropriated the words and songs and blacks responded by
darkening their faces another hue, taking back their dances and songs, even
transforming or translating those of the whites.34 Of course, the crudest
and most visible transformations were in the other direction: the symbolic
translations occurring when the signifier takes power. The preceding exam-
ples concerning monetary signs and rhythmic regimes can be repeated in
the opposite direction. The passage from an African dance to a white dance
             138 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

often exhibits a consciousness-related or mimetic translation, accompa-
nied by a power takeover by signifiance and subjectification. ("In Africa
the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the phallus becomes
erect and is handled like a banana it is not a 'personal hard-on' we see but a
tribal erection. . . . The hoochie-koochie dancer of the big city dances
alone—a fact of staggering significance. The law forbids response, forbids
participation. Nothing is left of the primitive rite but the 'suggestive'
movements of the body. What they suggest varies with the individual
observer.")^
   It is not simply linguistic, lexical, or even syntactic transformations that
determine the importance of a true semiotic translation but the opposite.
Crazy talk is not enough. In each case we must judge whether what we see
is an adaptation of an old semiotic, a new variety of a particular mixed
semiotic, or the process of creation of an as yet unknown regime. For exam-
ple, it is relatively easy to stop saying "I," but that does not mean that you
have gotten away from the regime of subjectification; conversely, you can
keep on saying "I," just for kicks, and already be in another regime in which
personal pronouns function only as fictions. Signifiance and interpre-
tation are so thick-skinned, they form such a sticky mixture with sub-
jectification, that it is easy to believe that you are outside them when you
are in fact still secreting them. People sometimes denounce interpretation
yet show so signifying a face that they simultaneously impose interpreta-
tion upon the subject, which continues to nourish itself on it in order to sur-
vive. Who can really believe that psychoanalysis is capable of changing a
semiotic amassing every deception? The only change there has been is a
role switch. Instead of a patient who signifies and a psychoanalyst who
interprets, we now have a signifying analyst and it is the patient who does
all the interpreting. In the antipsychiatric experiment of Kingsley Hall,
Mary Barnes, a former nurse turned "schizophrenic," embraces the new
semiotic of the Voyage, only to arrogate to herself a veritable power in the
community and reintroduce as a collective delusion the worst kind of psy-
choanalytic regime of interpretation ("She interpreted everything that was
done for her, or for anyone else for that matter. . .").36 A highly stratified
semiotic is difficult to get away from. Even a presignifying, or counter-
signifying, semiotic, even an asignifying diagram, harbors knots of coinci-
dence just waiting to form virtual centers of signifiance and points of
subjectification. Of course, an operation of translation is not easy when it
is a question of destroying a dominant atmospheric semiotic. One of the
things of profound interest in Castaneda's books, under the influence of
drugs, or other things, and of a change of atmosphere, is precisely that they
show how the Indian manages to combat the mechanisms of interpretation
and instill in the disciple a presignifying semiotic, or even an asignifying
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 139

diagram: Stop! You're making me tired! Experiment, don't signify and
interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations,
regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your
prefab childhood and Western semiology. "Don Juan stated that in order
to arrive at 'seeing' one first had to 'stop the world.' 'Stopping the world'
was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which
the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation,
which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circum-
stances alien to the flow."37 In short, a true semiotic transformation
appeals to all kinds of variables, not only external ones, but also variables
implicit to language, internal to statements.
   Pragmatics, then, already displays two components. The first could be
called generative since it shows how the various abstract regimes form con-
crete mixed semiotics, with what variants, how they combine, and which
one is predominant. The second is the transformational component, which
shows how these regimes of signs are translated into each other, especially
when there is a creation of a new regime. Generative pragmatics makes
tracings of mixed semiotics; transformational pragmatics makes maps of
transformations. Although a mixed semiotic does not necessarily imply
effective creativity, and may content itself with combinatory possibilities
without veritable transformation, it is still the transformational compo-
nent that accounts for the originality of a regime as well as for the novelty of
the mixes it enters at a given moment in a given domain. This second com-
ponent is therefore the more profound, and it is the only means of measur-
ing the elements of the first component.38 For example, we may ask when
statements of the Bolshevik type first appeared, and how Leninism, at the
time of the break with the social democrats, effected a veritable transfor-
mation that created an original semiotic, even if its fall into the mixed
semiotic of Stalinist organization was inevitable. In an exemplary study,
Jean-Pierre Faye did a detailed analysis of the transformations that pro-
duced Nazism, viewed as a system of new statements in a given social field.
At what moment is a regime of signs established, and in what domain?
Throughout an entire people? In a fraction of that people? In a more or less
localizable margin inside a psychiatric hospital? (For as we have seen we
can find a semiotic of subjectification in the ancient history of the Jews,
but also in psychiatric diagnosis in the nineteenth century, with, of course,
profound variations and even veritable transformations in the correspond-
ing semiotic.) All of these questions fall within the purview of pragmatics.
There is no question that the most profound transformations and transla-
tions of our time are not occurring in Europe. Pragmatics should reject the
idea of an invariant immune from transformation, even if it is the in-
variant of a dominant "grammaticality." For language is a political affair
            140 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

before it is an affair for linguistics; even the evaluation of degrees of gram-
maticality is a political matter.
   What is a semiotic, in other words, a regime of signs or a formalization
of expression? They are simultaneously more and less than language.
Language as a whole is defined by "superlinearity," its condition of possi-
bility; individual languages are defined by constants, elements, and rela-
tions of a phonological, syntactical, and semantic nature. Doubtless,
every regime of signs effectuates the condition of possibility of language
and utilizes language elements, but that is all. No regime can be identical
to that condition of possibility, and no regime has the property of con-
stants. As Foucault clearly shows, regimes of signs are only functions of
existence of language that sometimes span a number of languages and are
sometimes distributed within a single language; they coincide neither
with a structure nor with units of a given order, but rather intersect them
and cause them to appear in space and time. This is the sense in which
regimes of signs are assemblages of enunciation, which cannot be ade-
quately accounted for by any linguistic category: what makes a proposi-
tion or even a single word a "statement" pertains to implicit presupposi-
tions that cannot be made explicit, that mobilize pragmatic variables
proper to enunciation (incorporeal transformations). This precludes
explaining an assemblage in terms of the signifier or the subject, because
both pertain to variables of enunciation within the assemblage. It is
signifiance and subjectification that presuppose the assemblage, not the
reverse. The names we gave to the regimes of signs ("presignifying," "sig-
nifying," "countersignifying," "postsignifying") would remain evolution-
ist if heterogeneous functions or varieties of assemblages did not
effectively correspond to them (segmentarization, signifiance and inter-
pretation, numeration, subjectification). Regimes of signs are thus
defined by variables that are internal to enunciation but remain external
to the constants of language and irreducible to linguistic categories.
   But at this point, everything turns around, and the reasons why a regime
of signs is less than language also become the reasons why it is more than
language. Only one side of the assemblage has to do with enunciation or
formalizes expression; on its other side, inseparable from the first, it for-
malizes contents, it is a machinic assemblage or an assemblage of bodies.
Now contents are not "signifieds" dependent upon a signifier in any way,
nor are they "objects" in any kind of relation of causality with the subject.
They have their own formalization and have no relation of symbolic corre-
spondence or linear causality with the form of expression: the two forms
are in reciprocal presupposition, and they can be abstracted from each
other only in a very relative way because they are two sides of a single
assemblage. We must therefore arrive at something in the assemblage itself
            587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 141

that is still more profound than these sides and can account for both of the
forms in presupposition, forms of expression or regimes of signs (semiotic
systems) and forms of content or regimes of bodies (physical systems). This
is what we call the abstract machine, which constitutes and conjugates all of
the assemblage's cutting edges of deterritorialization.39 We must say that
the abstract machine is necessarily "much more" than language. When lin-
guists (following Chomsky) rise to the idea of a purely language-based
abstract machine, our immediate objection is that their machine, far from
being too abstract, is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of
expression and to alleged universals that presuppose language. Abstracting
content is an operation that appears all the more relative and inadequate
when seen from the viewpoint of abstraction itself. A true abstract machine
has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expres-
sion and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency,
which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and
reterritorializations. The abstract machine in itself is destratified, deter-
ritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no
distinction within itself between content and expression, even though out-
side itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata,
domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or
corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows noth-
ing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It oper-
ates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form. Substances and
forms are of expression "or" of content. But functions are not yet
"semiotically" formed, and matters are not yet "physically" formed. The
abstract machine is pure Matter-Function—a diagram independent of the
forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute.
    We define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which noth-
ing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor
form, neither content nor expression.40 Substance is a formed matter, and
matter is a substance that is unformed either physically or semiotically.
Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are really distinct
from each other, function has only "traits," of content and of expression,
between which it establishes a connection: it is no longer even possible to
tell whether it is a particle or a sign. A matter-content having only degrees
of intensity, resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed, or tardi-
ness; and a function-expression having only "tensors," as in a system of
mathematical, or musical, writing. Writing now functions on the same
level as the real, and the real materially writes. The diagram retains the
most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression,
in order to conjugate them. Maximum deterritorialization sometimes
starts from a trait of content and sometimes from a trait of expression; that
             142 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

trait is said to be "deterritorializing" in relation to the other precisely
because it diagrams it, carries it off, raises it to its own power. The most
deterritorialized element causes the other element to cross a threshold ena-
bling a conjunction of their respective deterritorializations, a shared accel-
eration. This is the abstract machine's absolute, positive deterritoria-
lization. That is why diagrams must be distinguished from indexes, which
are territorial signs, but also from icons, which pertain to reterrito-
rialization, and from symbols, which pertain to relative or negative deterri-
torialization.41 Defined diagrammatically in this way, an abstract machine
is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a
transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it
plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not func-
tion to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is
yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of cre-
ation or potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always
"prior to" history. Everything escapes, everything creates—never alone,
but through an abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity,
effects conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and
contents. This Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstrac-
tion of a supposedly pure machine of expression. It is an Absolute, but one
that is neither undifferentiated nor transcendent. Abstract machines thus
have proper names (as well as dates), which of course designate not persons
or subjects but matters and functions. The name of a musician or scientist
is used in the same way as a painter's name designates a color, nuance, tone,
or intensity: it is always a question of a conjunction of Matter and Func-
tion. The double deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is
marked by a Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In
physics and mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine,
and in algebra of a Galois abstract machine (defined precisely by an arbi-
trary line, called the adjunctive line, which conjugates with a body taken as
a starting point), etc. There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract
machine functions directly in a matter.
    Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no regimes of signs on the dia-
grammatic level, or on the plane of consistency, because form of expression
is no longer really distinct from form of content. The diagram knows only
traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content insofar as they are
material and of expression insofar as they are functional, but which draw
one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorialization:
particles-signs. There is nothing surprising in this, for the real distinction
between form of expression and form of content appears only with the
strata, and is different on each one. It is on the strata that the double articu-
lation appears that formalizes traits of expression and traits of content,
            587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 143

each in its own right, turning matters into physically or semiotically
formed substances and functions into forms of expression or content.
Expression then constitutes indexes, icons, or symbols that enter regimes
or semiotic systems. Content then constitutes bodies, things, or objects
that enter physical systems, organisms, and organizations. The deeper
movement for conjugating matter and function—absolute deterri-
torialization, identical to the earth itself—appears only in the form of
respective territorialities, negative or relative deterritorializations, and
complementary reterritorializations. All of this culminates in a language
stratum that installs an abstract machine on the level of expression and
takes the abstraction of content even further, tending to strip it of any form
of its own (the imperialism of language, the pretensions to a general
semiology). In short, the strata substantialize diagrammatic matters and
separate a formed plane of content from a formed plane of expression.
They hold expressions and contents, separately substantialized and forma-
lized, in the pincers of a double articulation assuring their independence
and real distinction and enthroning a dualism that endlessly reproduces
and redivides. They shatter the continuums of intensity, introducing
breaks between different strata and within each stratum. They prevent
conjunctions of flight from forming and crush the cutting edges of deterri-
torialization, either by effecting reterritorializations that make these
movements merely relative, or by assigning certain of the lines an entirely
negative value, or again by segmenting them, blocking them, plugging
them, or plunging them into a kind of black hole.
   Above all, diagrammaticism should not be confused with an operation
of the axiomatic type. Far from drawing creative lines of flight and conju-
gating traits of positive deterritorialization, axiomatics blocks all lines,
subordinates them to a punctual system, and halts the geometric and alge-
braic writing systems that had begun to run off in all directions. This hap-
pened in relation to the question of indeterminism in physics: a "reorder-
ing" was undertaken to reconcile it with physical determinism. Mathemat-
ical writing systems were axiomatized, in other words, restratified,
resemiotized, and material flows were rephysicalized. It is as much a politi-
cal as a scientific affair: science must not go crazy. Hilbert and de Broglie
were as much politicians as scientists: they reestablished order. An
axiomatization, a semiotization, a physicalization, is not a diagram but in
fact the opposite of a diagram. The program of a stratum, against the dia-
gram of the plane of consistency. This does not, however, preclude the
diagram's heading back down the road to escape and scattering new, singu-
lar abstract machines (the mathematical creation of improbable functions
was carried out in opposition to axiomatization, and the material inven-
tion of unfindable particles in opposition to physicalization). Science as
            144 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

such is like everything else; madness is as intrinsic to it as reorderings. The
same scientists may participate in both aspects, having their own madness,
police, signifiances, or subjectifications, as well as their own abstract
machines, all in their capacity as scientists. The phrase "the politics of sci-
ence" is a good designation for these currents, which are internal to science
and not simply circumstances and State factors that act upon it from the
outside, leading it to make as atomic bomb here and embark upon a space
program there. These political influences or determinations would not
exist if science itself did not have its own poles, oscillations, strata, and
destratifications, its own lines of flight and reorderings, in short, the more
or less potential events of its own politics, its own particular "polemics," its
own internal war machine (of which thwarted, persecuted, or hindered sci-
entists are historically a part). It is not enough to say that axiomatics does
not take invention and creation into account: it possesses a deliberate will
to halt or stabilize the diagram, to take its place by lodging itself on a level
of coagulated abstraction too large for the concrete but too small for the
real. We will see in what sense this is the "capitalist" level.
   We cannot, however, content ourselves with a dualism between the
plane of consistency and its diagrams and abstract machines on the one
hand, and the strata and their programs and concrete assemblages on the
other. Abstract machines do not exist only on the plane of consistency,
upon which they develop diagrams; they are already present enveloped or
"encasted" in the strata in general, or even erected on particular strata
upon which they simultaneously organize a form of expression and a form
of content. What is illusory in the second case is the idea of an exclusively
expressive or language-based abstract machine, not the idea of an abstract
machine internal to the stratum and accounting for the relativity of those
two distinct forms. Thus there are two complementary movements, one by
which abstract machines work the strata and are constantly setting things
loose, another by which they are effectively stratified, effectively captured
by the strata. On the one hand, strata could never organize themselves if
they did not harness diagrammatic matters or functions and formalize
them from the standpoint of both expression and content; every regime of
signs, and even signifiance and subjectification, is still a diagrammatic
effect (although relativized and negativized). One the other hand, abstract
machines would never be present, even on the strata, if they did not have
the power or potentiality to extract and accelerate destratified particles-
signs (the passage to the absolute). Consistency is neither totalizing nor
structuring; rather, it is deterritorializing (a biological stratum, for exam-
ple, evolves not according to statistical phenomena but rather according to
cutting edges of deterritorialization). The security, tranquillity, and ho-
meostatic equilibrium of the strata are thus never completely guaranteed:
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 145

to regain a plane of consistency that inserts itself into the most diverse sys-
tems of stratification and jumps from one to the other, it suffices to prolong
the lines of flight working the strata, to connect the dots, to conjugate the
processes of deterritorialization. We have seen that signifiance and inter-
pretation, consciousness and passion, can prolong themselves following
these lines, and at the same time open out onto a properly diagrammatic
experience. All of these states or modes of the abstract machine coexist in
what we call the machinic assemblage. The assemblage has two poles or
vectors: one vector is oriented toward the strata, upon which it distributes
territorialities, relative deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the
other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon
which it conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the
absolute of the earth. It is along its stratic vector that the assemblage differ-
entiates a form of expression (from the standpoint of which it appears as a
collective assemblage of enunciation) from a form of content (from the
standpoint of which it appears as a machinic assemblage of bodies); it fits
one form to the other, one manifestation to the other, placing them in recip-
rocal presupposition. But along its diagrammatic or destratified vector, it
no longer has two sides; all it retains are traits of expression and content
from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and
cutting edges that conjugate.
   A regime of signs has more than just two components. It has, in fact, four
of them, which form the object of Pragmatics. The first was the generative
component, which shows how a form of expression located on the language
stratum always appeals to several combined regimes, in other words, how
every regime of signs or semiotic is concretely mixed. On the level of this
component, one can abstract forms of content, most successfully if empha-
sis is placed on the mixture of regimes in the form of expression: one should
not, however, conclude from this the predominance of a regime constitut-
ing a general semiology and unifying forms. The second, transformational,
component, shows how one abstract regime can be translated, transformed
into another, and especially how it can be created from other regimes. This
second component is obviously more profound, because all mixed regimes
presuppose these transformations from one regime to another, past, pres-
ent, or potential (as a function of the creation of new regimes). Once again,
one abstracts, or can abstract, content, since the analysis is limited to meta-
morphoses internal to the form of expression, even though the form of
expression is not adequate to account for them. The third component is
diagrammatic: it consists in taking regimes of signs or forms of expression
and extracting from them particles-signs that are no longer formalized but
instead constitute unformed traits capable of combining with one another.
This is the height of abstraction, but also the moment at which abstraction
             146 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

becomes real; everything operates through abstract-real machines (which
have names and dates). One can abstract forms of content, but one must
simultaneously abstract forms of expression; for what is retained of each
are only unformed traits. That is why an abstract machine that would oper-
ate purely on the level of language is an absurdity. It is clear that this dia-
grammatic component is in turn more profound than the transformational
component: the creations-transformations of a regime of signs operate by
the emergence of ever-new abstract machines. Finally, the last, properly
machinic, component is meant to show how abstract machines are effectu-
ated in concrete assemblages; it is these assemblages that give distinct form
to traits of expression, but not without doing the same for traits of
content—the two forms being in reciprocal presupposition, or having a
necessary, unformed relation that once again prevents the form of expres-
sion from behaving as though it were self-sufficient (although it is indepen-
dent or distinct in a strictly formal way).
   Thus pragmatics (or schizoanalysis) can be represented by four circular
components that bud and form rhizomes.




  (1) The generative component: the study of concrete mixed semiotics; their mixtures
  and variations. (2) The transformational component: the study of pure semiotics; their
  transformations-translations and the creation of new semiotics. (3) The diagrammatic
  component: the study of abstract machines, from the standpoint of semiotically
  unformed matters in relation to physically unformed matters. (4) The machinic com-
  ponent: the study of the assemblages that effectuate abstract machines, simultaneously
  semiotizing matters of expression and physicalizing matters of content.

   Pragmatics as a whole would consist in this: making a tracing of the
mixed semiotics, under the generative component; making the transfor-
mational map of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and
creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings; making the diagram of
the abstract machines that are in play in each case, either as potentialities
or as effective emergences; outlining the program of the assemblages that
             587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 147

distribute everything and bring a circulation of movement with alterna-
tives, jumps, and mutations.
    For example, in considering a given "proposition," in other words, a ver-
bal aggregate defined syntactically, semantically, and logically as the
expression of an individual or group ("I love you" or "I am jealous"), one
would begin by asking to which "statement" this proposition corresponds
in the group or individual (for the same proposition can be tied to com-
pletely different statements). This question means: What regime of signs is
the proposition taken up by and without which its syntactical, semantic,
and logical elements would remain totally empty universal conditions?
What nonlinguistic element, or variable of enunciation, gives it consis-
tency? There is a presignifying "I love you" of the collective type in which,
as Miller says, a dance weds all the women of the tribe; there is a counter-
signifying "I love you" of the distributive and polemical type that has to do
with war and relations of force (the "I love you" of Penthesilea and Achil-
les); there is an "I love you" that is addressed to a center of signifiance and
uses interpretation to make a whole series of signifieds correspond to the
signifying chain; and there is a postsignifying or passional "I love you" that
constitutes a proceeding beginning from a point of subjectification, then
another, and yet another. Similarly, the proposition "I am jealous" is
clearly not the same statement in the passional regime of subjectification
as in the paranoid regime of signifiance: these are two distinct delusions.
Second, once it has been determined which statement the proposition cor-
responds to in a given group or individual at a given time, one would look
into the possibilities not only of mixture but also of translation and trans-
formation into another regime, or into statements belonging to other
regimes; one would look at what passes and does not pass in such a transfor-
mation, what remains irreducible and what flows. Third, one could try to
create new, as yet unknown statements for that proposition, even if the
result were a patois of sensual delight, physical and semiotic systems in
shreds, asubjective affects, signs without signifiance where syntax, seman-
tics, and logic are in collapse. This research should go from the worst to the
best since it would cover precious, metaphorical, or stultifying regimes as
well as cries-whispers, feverish improvisations, becomings-animal,
becomings-molecular, real transsexualities, continuums of intensity, con-
stitutions of bodies without organs . .. These two poles are inseparable;
they entertain perpetual relations of transformation, conversion, jumping,
falling, and rising. This final research simultaneously brings into play, on
the one hand, abstract machines, diagrams and diagrammatic functions,
and, on the other hand, machinic assemblages, the formal distinctions they
make between expression and content, and their investments of words and
organs according to a relation of reciprocal presupposition. For example,
            148 D 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

the "I love you" of courtly love: What is its diagram, what abstract machine
emerges, and what is the new assemblage? These questions apply as much
to destratification as to the organization of strata. In short, there are no
syntactically, semantically, or logically definable propositions that tran-
scend or loom above statements. All methods for the transcendentaliza-
tion of language, all methods for endowing language with universals, from
Russell's logic to Chomsky's grammar, have fallen into the worst kind of
abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract
and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not based on language, and
language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural
or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on
regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic
functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of
semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no universal prepositional logic,
nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for
itself. "Behind" statements and semioticizations there are only machines,
assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the
stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of lan-
guage and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to
logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element
upon which all the rest depend.
    6. November 28, 1947: How Do You
             Make Yourself
         a Body without Organs?




  The Dogon Egg and the Distribution of Intensities

At any rate, you have one (or several). It's not so much that it preexists or
comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any
rate, you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you;
it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the
moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. This is not
reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to
your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a
                                         149
     150 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without
Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People
ask, So what is this BwO?—But you're already on it, scurrying like a ver-
min, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler
and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight—fight
and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous
defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On November
28,1947, Artaud declares war on the organs: To be done with the judgment
of God, "for you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless
than an organ."1 Experimentation: not only radiophonic but also biologi-
cal and political, incurring censorship and repression. Corpus and Socius,
politics and experimentation. They will not let you experiment in peace.
   The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough
of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them. A long procession.
The hypochondriac body: the organs are destroyed, the damage has already
been done, nothing happens anymore. "Miss X claims that she no longer
has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin
and bones of a disorganized body. These are her own words."2 The para-
noid body: the organs are continually under attack by outside forces, but
are also restored by outside energies. ("He lived for a long time without a
stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus,
without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow
part of his own larynx with his food, etc. But divine miracles ('rays') always
restored what had been destroyed.")3 The schizo body, waging its own
active internal struggle against the organs, at the price of catatonia. Then
the drugged body, the experimental schizo: "The human body is scandal-
ously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not
have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and
mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it
should have been in the first place."4 The masochist body: it is poorly
understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the BwO. It
has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose
are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working;
flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make
sure everything is sealed tight.
   Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified,
sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance? So
why these examples, why must we start there? Emptied bodies instead of
full ones. What happened? Were you cautious enough? Not wisdom, cau-
tion. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of cau-
tion. Many have been defeated in this battle. Is it really so sad and
dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your
     HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 151

lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with
your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on
your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your
belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage,
Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.
Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say
instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't
sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis,
experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find
out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sad-
ness and joy. It is where everything is played out.
   "Mistress, 1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight, for
ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2) One
hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin sewing,
you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the skin around the glans to the
glans itself, preventing the top from tearing; you sew the scrotum to the skin
of the thighs. You sew the breasts, securely attaching a button with four
holes to each nipple. You may connect them with an elastic band with
buttonholes—Now you go on to the second phase: 4) You can choose either
to turn me over on the table so I am tied lying on my stomach, but with my
legs together, or to bind me to the post with my wrists together, and my legs
also, my whole body tightly bound; 5) You whip my back buttocks thighs, a
hundred lashes at least; 6) You sew my buttocks together, all the way up and
down the crack of my ass. Tightly, with a doubled thread, each stitch knot-
ted. If I am on the table, now tie me to the post; 7) You give me fifty thrashes
on the buttocks; 8) If you wish to intensify the torture and carry out your
threat from last time, stick the pins all the way into my buttocks as far as
they go; 9) Then you may tie me to the chair; you give me thirty thrashes on
the breasts and stick in the smaller pins; if you wish, you may heat them
red-hot beforehand, all or sorne. I should be tightly bound to the chair,
hands behind my back so my chest sticks out. I haven't mentioned burns,
only because I have a medical exam coming up in awhile, and they take a
long time to heal." This is not a phantasy, it is a program: There is an essen-
tial difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy
and the antipsychiatric experimentation of the program. Between the
phantasy, an interpretation that must itself be interpreted, and the motor
program of experimentation.5 The BwO is what remains when you take
everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and
signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the
opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything
into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it
botches the BwO.
     152 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

   Something will happen. Something is already happening. But what
comes to pass on the BwO is not exactly the same as how you make yourself
one. However, one is included in the other. Hence the two phases set forth
in the preceding letter. Why two clearly distinguished phases, when the
same thing is done in both cases—sewing and flogging? One phase is for the
fabrication of the BwO, the other to make something circulate on it or pass
across it; the same procedures are nevertheless used in both phases, but
they must be done over, done twice. What is certain is that the masochist
has made himself a BwO under such conditions that the BwO can no longer
be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves. It is false to
say that the masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that he is
looking for pleasure in a particularly suspensive or roundabout way. The
masochist is looking for a type of BwO that only pain can fill, or travel over,
due to the very conditions under which that BwO was constituted. Pains
are populations, packs, modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he
engenders and augments. The same goes for the drugged body and intensi-
ties of cold, refrigerator waves. For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What
type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predeter-
mining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to
pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and
what expected? In short, there is a very special relation of synthesis and
analysis between a given type of BwO and what happens on it: an a priori
synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given mode
(but what it will be is not known) and an infinite analysis by which what is
produced on the BwO is already part of that body's production, is already
included in the body, is already on it (but at the price of an infinity of pas-
sages, divisions, and secondary productions). It is a very delicate experi-
mentation since there must not be any stagnation of the modes or slippage
in type: the masochist and the drug user court these ever-present dangers
that empty their BwO's instead of filling them.
    You can fail twice, but it is the same failure, the same danger. Once at the
level of the constitution of the BwO and again at the level of what passes or
does not pass across it. You think you have made yourself a good BwO, that
you chose the right Place, Power (Puissance), and Collectivity (there is
always a collectivity, even when you are alone), and then nothing passes,
nothing circulates, or something prevents things from moving. A paranoid
point, a point of blockage, an outburst of delirium: it comes across clearly
in Speed, by William Burroughs, Jr. Is it possible to locate this danger
point, should the block be expelled, or should one instead "love, honor, and
serve degeneracy wherever it surfaces"? To block, to be blocked, is that not
still an intensity? In each case, we must define what comes to pass and what
does not pass, what causes passage and prevents it. As in the meat circuit
     HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 153

according to Lewin, something flows through channels whose sections are
delimited by doors with gatekeepers, passers-on.6 Door openers and trap
closers, Malabars and Fierabras. The body is now nothing more than a set
of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels, each with a
proper name: a peopling of the BwO, a Metropolis that has to be managed
with a whip. What peoples it, what passes across it, what does the blocking?
     A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by
intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene,
a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has noth-
ing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes
intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is
itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is mat-
ter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the
matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that
zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy.
Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is
why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism
and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the
intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by
dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic
movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as
pure intensities.7 The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or posi-
tion, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close,
. . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second
adjustments."8 The tantric egg.
     After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO? The attri-
butes are types or genuses of BwO's, substances, powers, zero intensities as
matrices of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass:
waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities
produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix. The
masochist body as an attribute or genus of substance, with its production
of intensities and pain modes based on its degree 0 of being sewn up. The
drugged body as a different attribute, with its production of specific inten-
sities based on absolute Cold = 0. ("Junkies always beef about The Cold as
they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered
necks . . . pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm, he wants to be
cool-cooler-COLD. But he wants The Cold like he wants His Junk—NOT
OUTSIDE where it does him no good but INSIDE so he can sit around with a
spine like a frozen hydraulic jack... his metabolism approaching Absolute
     154 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

Zero.")9 Etc. The problem of whether there is a substance of all substances,
a single substance for all attributes, becomes: Is there a totality of all
BwO'sl If the BwO is already a limit, what must we say of the totality of all
BwO's? It is a problem not of the One and the Multiple but of a fusional
multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one
and the multiple. A formal multiplicity of substantial attributes that, as
such, constitutes the ontological unity of substance. There is a continuum
of all of the attributes or genuses of intensity under a single substance, and
a continuum of the intensities of a certain genus under a single type or
attribute. A continuum of all substances in intensity and of all intensities
in substance. The uninterrupted continuum of the BwO. BwO, imma-
nence, immanent limit. Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics, lovers—
all BwO's pay homage to Spinoza. The BwO is the field of immanence of
desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a
process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it
be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it).
    Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of
immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire:
the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. Facing
north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not lack what it desires?).
The priest carried out the first sacrifice, named castration, and all the men
and women of the north lined up behind him, crying in cadence, "Lack,
lack, it's the common law." Then, facing south, the priest linked desire to
pleasure. For there are hedonistic, even orgiastic, priests. Desire will be
assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire
for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting
it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as dis-
charge: the priest carries out the second sacrifice, named masturbation.
Then, facing east, he exclaimed: Jouissance is impossible, but impossible
jouissance is inscribed in desire. For that, in its very impossibility, is the
 Ideal, the "manque-a-jouir that is life."10 The priest carried out the third
 sacrifice, phantasy or the thousand and one nights, the one hundred twenty
 days, while the men of the East chanted: Yes, we will be your phantasy, your
ideal and impossibility, yours and also our own. The priest did not turn to
the west. He knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought
that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules, that it led nowhere
and was uninhabited by people. But that is where desire was lurking, west
was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions, rediscovered
or deterritorialized.
    The most recent figure of the priest is the psychoanalyst, with his or her
three principles: Pleasure, Death, and Reality. Doubtless, psychoanalysis
demonstrated that desire is not subordinated to procreation, or even to
     HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 155

genitality. That was its modernism. But it retained the essentials; it even
found new ways of inscribing in desire the negative law of lack, the external
rule of pleasure, and the transcendent ideal of phantasy. Take the interpre-
tation of masochism: when the ridiculous death instinct is not invoked, it is
claimed that the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can
only get it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to
allay or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochist's suffering
is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the
pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure
is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffer-
ing; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it inter-
rupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is
immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contempla-
tions, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by
pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents
them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. In short, the mas-
ochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and
bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways,
other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the
point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them.
    Take a masochist who did not undergo psychoanalysis: "PROGRAM . . .
At night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the
bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the bath. Put
on the entire harness right away also, the reins and thumbscrews, and
attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal
sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as
the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the
reins alternately tightened and loosened. The master will never approach
her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should dis-
play impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mas-
ter will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing."11 What is this
masochist doing? He seems to be imitating a horse, Equus eroticus, but
that's not it. Nor are the horse and the master-trainer or mistress images of
the mother or father. Something entirely different is going on: a becoming-
animal essential to masochism. It is a question of forces. The masochist
presents it this way: Training axiom—destroy the instinctive forces in order
to replace them with transmitted forces. In fact, it is less a destruction than
an exchange and circulation ("what happens to a horse can also happen to
me"). Horses are trained: humans impose upon the horse's instinctive
forces transmitted forces that regulate the former, select, dominate,
overcode them. The masochist effects an inversion of signs: the horse
transmits its transmitted forces to him, so that the masochist's innate
     156 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

forces will in turn be tamed. There are two series, the horse's (innate force,
force transmitted by the human being), and the masochist's (force trans-
mitted by the horse, innate force of the human being). One series explodes
into the other, forms a circuit with it: an increase in power or a circuit of
intensities. The "master," or rather the mistress-rider, the equestrian,
ensures the conversion offerees and the inversion of signs. The masochist
constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the
field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane
of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress. "Results to be
obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and
that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with
yours. . . . Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowl-
edging it, I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that
have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your
caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will
give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never
would have had it otherwise."'2 Legs are still organs, but the boots now only
determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO.
    Similarly, or actually in a different way, it would be an error to interpret
courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The
renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies
on the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks any-
thing but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence. Pleasure is
an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to "find
themselves" in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the
most artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely
whether it is necessary to find oneself. Courtly love does not love the self,
any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or religious way. It is
a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass,
self and other—not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader
extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be per-
sonal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. The field of
immanence is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an
external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows
no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence
in which they have fused. "Joy" in courtly love, the exchange of hearts, the
test or "assay": everything is allowed, as long as it is not external to desire or
transcendent to its plane, or else internal to persons. The slightest caress
may be as strong as an orgasm; orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable
one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle. Everything is allowed:
all that counts is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself, Immanence,
instead of a measure that interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms,
      HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 157

namely, internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority.13 If
pleasure is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossi-
ble to fill but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity, in other words, the
plane of consistency it draws in the course of its process.
   A great Japanese compilation of Chinese Taoist treatises was made in
A.D. 982-984. We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities between
female and male energy, with the woman playing the role of the innate or
instinctive force (Yin) stolen by or transmitted to the man in such a way
that the transmitted force of the man (Yang) in turn becomes innate, all the
more innate: an augmentation of powers.14 The condition for this circula-
tion and multiplication is that the man not ejaculate. It is not a question of
experiencing desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to
produce a kind of externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting
an intensive body without organs, Tao, a field of immanence in which
desire lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or tran-
scendent criterion. It is true that the whole circuit can be channeled toward
procreative ends (ejaculation when the energies are right); that is how Con-
fucianism understood it. But this is true only for one side of the assemblage
of desire, the side facing the strata, organisms, State, family... It is not
true for the other side, the Tao side of destratification that draws a plane of
consistency proper to desire. Is the Tao masochistic? Is courtly love Taoist?
These questions are largely meaningless. The field of immanence or plane
of consistency must be constructed. This can take place in very different
social formations through very different assemblages (perverse, artistic,
scientific, mystical, political) with different types of bodies without
organs. It is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and
techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether
the pieces can fit together, and at what price. Inevitably, there will be mon-
strous crossbreeds. The plane of consistency would be the totality of all
BwO's, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chi-
nese, another American, another medieval, another petty perverse, but all
in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person
takes and makes what she or he can, according to tastes she or he will have
succeeded in abstracting from a Self [Moi], according to a politics or strat-
egy successfully abstracted from a given formation, according to a given
procedure abstracted from its origin.
   We distinguish between: (1) BwO's, which are different types, genuses,
or substantial attributes. For example, the Cold of the drugged BwO, the
Pain of the masochist BwO. Each has its degree 0 as its principle of produc-
tion (remissio). (2) What happens on each type of BwO, in other words, the
modes, the intensities that are produced, the waves that pass (latitude). (3)
The potential totality of all BwO's, the plane of consistency (Omnitudo,
     158 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

sometimes called the BwO). There are a number of questions. Not only
how to make oneself a BwO, and how to produce the corresponding
intensities without which it would remain empty (not exactly the same
question). But also how to reach the plane of consistency. How to sew up,
cool down, and tie together all the BwO's. If this is possible to do, it is only
by conjugating the intensities produced on each BwO, by producing a con-
tinuum of all intensive continuities. Are not assemblages necessary to fab-
ricate each BwO, is not a great abstract Machine necessary to construct the
plane of consistency? Gregory Bateson uses the term plateau for continu-
ous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow
themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than
they allow themselves to build toward a climax; examples are certain sex-
ual, or aggressive, processes in Balinese culture.15 A plateau is a piece of
immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a pla-
teau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency.
The BwO is a component of passage.
   A rereading of Heliogabale and Les Tarahumaras. For Heliogabalus is
Spinoza, and Spinoza is Heliogabalus revived. And the Tarahumaras are
experimentation, peyote. Spinoza, Heliogabalus, and experimentation
have the same formula: anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not
the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the mul-
tiple.16 These two books by Artaud express the multiplicity of fusion,
fusionability as infinite zero, the plane of consistency, Matter where no
gods go; principles as forces, essences, substances, elements, remissions,
productions; manners of being or modalities as produced intensities,
vibrations, breaths, Numbers. Finally, the difficulty of reaching this world
of crowned Anarchy if you go no farther than the organs ("the liver that
turns the skin yellow, the brain wracked by syphilis, the intestines that
expel filth") and if you stay locked into the organism, or into a stratum that
blocks the flows and anchors us in this, our world.
   We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite
of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism.
The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs
called the organism. It is true that Artaud wages a struggle against the
organs, but at the same time what he is going after, what he has it in for, is
the organism: The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of
organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.11 The
BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its "true organs,"
which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the
organic organization of the organs. The judgment of God, the system of the
judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He
who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism,
     HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 159

because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so
He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already
that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on
which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO;
rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accu-
 mulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful
labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant
and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are
bonds, pincers. "Tie me up if you wish." We are continually stratified. But
who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism
belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is
that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations,
foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a significa-
tion and a subject—occur. For the judgment of God weighs upon and is
exercised against the BwO; it is the BwO that undergoes it. It is in the BwO
that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism.
The BwO howls: "They've made me an organism! They've wrongfully
folded me! They've stolen my body!" The judgment of God uproots it from
its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the
BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratifi-
cation into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and
the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation.
If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each
stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum. For many a stra-
tum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God.
A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, which
frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the sur-
faces of stratification that block it or make it recoil.
    Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the
ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectifi-
cation. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and interpreta-
tion, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized,
you will be an organism, you will articulate your body—otherwise you're
just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and
interpreted—otherwise you're just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed
down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the
statement—otherwise you're just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the
BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulations) as the property of the
plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no
signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving,
even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification).
What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we
     160 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how
necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You
don't do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-
destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the
organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to
connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions,
levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territor-
ies and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actu-
ally, dismantling the organism is no more difficult than dismantling the
other two strata, signifiance and subjectification. Signifiance clings to the
soul just as the organism clings to the body, and it is not easy to get rid of
either. And how can we unhook ourselves from the points of subjectifi-
cation that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality? Tearing the con-
scious away from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration,
tearing the unconscious away from signifiance and interpretation in order
to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly no more or less difficult
than tearing the body away from the organism. Caution is the art common
to all three; if in dismantling the organism there are times one courts death,
in slipping away from signifiance and subjection one courts falsehood, illu-
sion and hallucination and psychic death. Artaud weighs and measures
every word: the conscious "knows what is good for it and what is of no value
to it: it knows which thoughts and feelings it can receive without danger
and with profit, and which are harmful to the exercise of its freedom.
Above all, it knows just how far its own being goes, and just how far it has
not yet gone or does not have the right to go without sinking into the unreal,
the illusory, the unmade, the unprepared . . . a Plane which normal con-
sciousness does not reach but which Ciguri allows us to reach, and which is
the very mystery of all poetry. But there is in human existence another
plane, obscure and formless, where consciousness has not entered, and
which surrounds it like an unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case
may be. And which itself gives off adventurous sensations, perceptions.
These are those shameless fantasies which affect an unhealthy con-
scious. . . . I too have had false sensations and perceptions and I have
believed in them."18
   You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and
you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only
to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it,
when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep
small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond
to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its
plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered
the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they
     HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 161

had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at
which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of
the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching
the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but
nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is
because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it
and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you
blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing
the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged
toward catastrophe. Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—
is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw
the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down
on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a
stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous
place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines
of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try
out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new
land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one
succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and
escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, con-
jugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and sub-
jective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified
for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata
to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assem-
blage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only
there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, con-
junction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your
own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective
machines. Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it
makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us
recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a "place,"
already a difficult operation, then to find "allies," and then gradually to
give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment
lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For
the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a
Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people,
powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not "my" body without
organs, instead the "me" (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable
and changing in form, crossing thresholds).
   In the course of Castaneda's books, the reader may begin to doubt the
existence of the Indian Don Juan, and many other things besides. But that
has no importance. So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather
     162 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather
than an account of an initiation. The fourth book, Tales of Power, is about
the living distinction between the "Tonal" and the "Nagual." The tonal
seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is
organized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying
or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is
memorizable in the form of something recalling something else; finally, it
is the Self (Moi), the subject, the historical, social, or individual person,
and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including
God, the judgment of God, since it "makes up the rules by which it appre-
hends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world."19 Yet
the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the
same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs
has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpreta-
tion, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their
fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine
segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject.
Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced his-
tory, individual or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems:
it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata,
the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of
the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The nagual, on the con-
trary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a
BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or
phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make sig-
nify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and
when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream
or a reality, if it is "your goddam mother" or something else entirely). There
is no longer a Self [Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a
dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.20
The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a
sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain
moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of
the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without
organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of noth-
ingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: "The tonal
must be protected at any cost."21
    We still have not answered the question of why there are so many dan-
gers, and so many necessary precautions. It is not enough to set up an
abstract opposition between the strata and the BwO. For the BwO already
exists in the strata as well as on the destratified plane of consistency, but in
a totally different manner. Take the organism as a stratum: there is indeed a
     HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 163

BwO that opposes the organization of the organs we call the organism, but
there is also a BwO of the organism that belongs to that stratum. Cancerous
tissue: each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, prolife-
rates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must
resubmit it to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also
to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the
"other" BwO on the plane of consistency. Take the stratum of signifiance:
once again, there is a cancerous tissue, this time of signifiance, a burgeon-
ing body of the despot that blocks any circulation of signs, as well as
preventing the birth of the asignifying sign on the "other" BwO. Or take
a stifling body of subjectification, which makes a freeing all the more
unlikely by forbidding any remaining distinction between subjects. Even if
we consider given social formations, or a given stratic apparatus within a
formation, we must say that every one of them has a BwO ready to gnaw,
proliferate, cover, and invade the entire social field, entering into relations
of violence and rivalry as well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money
(inflation), but also a BwO of the State, army, factory, city, Party, etc. If the
strata are an affair of coagulation and sedimentation, all a stratum needs is
a high sedimentation rate for it to lose its configuration and articulations,
and to form its own specific kind of tumor, within itself or in a given forma-
tion or apparatus. The strata spawn their own BwO's, totalitarian and fas-
cist BwO's, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency. It is not
enough to make a distinction between full BwO's on the plane of consis-
tency and empty BwO's on the debris of strata destroyed by a too-violent
destratification. We must also take into account cancerous BwO's in a stra-
tum that has begun to proliferate. The three-body problem. Artaud said that
outside the "plane" is another plane surrounding us with "an unillu-
minated extension or a menace, as the case may be." It is a struggle and as
such is never sufficiently clear. How can we fabricate a BwO for ourselves
without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or the empty
BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How can we tell the
three Bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this problem.
The extraordinary composition of To Be Done with the Judgment of God:
he begins by cursing the cancerous body of America, the body of war and
money; he denounces the strata, which he calls "caca"; to the strata he
opposes the true Plane, even if it is only peyote, the little trickle of the
Tarahumaras; but he also knows about the dangers of a too-sudden, care-
less destratification. Artaud was constantly grappling with all of that, and
flowed with it. Letter to Hitler. "Dear Sir, In 1932 in the Ider Cafe in Berlin,
on one of the evenings when I made your acquaintance and shortly before
you took power, I showed you roadblocks on a map that was not just a map
of geography, roadblocks against me, an act of force aimed in a certain
     164 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

number of directions you indicated to me. Today Hitler I lift the road-
blocks I set down! The Parisians need gas. Yours, A.A.—P.S. Be it under-
stood, dear sir, that this is hardly an invitation, it is above all a warning."22
That map that is not only a map of geography is something like a BwO
intensity map, where the roadblocks designate thresholds and the gas,
waves or flows. Even if Artaud did not succeed for himself, it is certain that
through him something has succeeded for us all.
   The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is
perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of
experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is the milieu of pure
intensity, spatium not extension, Zero intensity as principle of production.
There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryol-
ogy and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg
always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but
is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migra-
tions, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. The BwO is not "before" the
organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of construct-
ing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult
regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the
child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears
from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter
that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his
or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block,
a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child
"before" the adult, or the mother "before" the child: it is the strict contem-
poraneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of compar-
ative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The
BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be
either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud
failed to understand about Weissmann: the child as the germinal contem-
porary of its parents. Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a
body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but
always a contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute them-
selves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the
form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer any-
thing more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradi-
ents. "A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack
anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the
pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. The indefinite arti-
cle is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a fragmented,
splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the
opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost
     HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 165

unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a differen-
tiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of organs, with
their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside
an assemblage, and according to machinic connections operating on a
BwO. Logos spermaticos. The error of psychoanalysis was to understand
BwO phenomena as regressions, projections, phantasies, in terms of an
image of the body. As a result, it only grasps the flipside of the BwO and
immediately substitutes family photos, childhood memories, and part-
objects for a worldwide intensity map. It understands nothing about the
egg nor about indefinite articles nor about the contemporaneousness of a
continually self-constructing milieu.
    The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one de-
sires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of
immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destra-
tification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire.
Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the
power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire,
even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the constitution of
a BwO under one relation or another. It is a problem not of ideology but of
pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cos-
mic matter. That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is
knowing whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to dis-
tinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bod-
ies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing false desires,
but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic pro-
liferation, or else too-violent destratification, and that which pertains to
the construction of the plane of consistency (keep an eye out for all that is
fascist, even inside us, and also for the suicidal and the demented). The
plane of consistency is not simply that which is constituted by the sum of all
BwO's. There are things it rejects; the BwO chooses, as a function of the
abstract machine that draws it. Even within a BwO (the masochist body,
the drugged body, etc.), we must distinguish what can be composed on the
plane and what cannot. There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but
is there also a possible use that would be in conformity with the plane of
consistency? Even paranoia: Is there a possibility of using it that way in
part? When we asked the question of the totality of all BwO's, considered as
substantial attributes of a single substance, it should have been under-
stood, strictly speaking, to apply only to the plane. The plane is the totality
of the full BwO's that have been selected (there is no positive totality
including the cancerous or empty bodies). What is the nature of this total-
ity? Is it solely logical? Or must we say that each BwO, from a basis in its
own genus, produces effects identical or analogous to the effects other
     166 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

BwO's produce from a basis in their genera? Could what the drug user or
masochist obtains also be obtained in a different fashion in the conditions
of the plane, so it would even be possible to use drugs without using drugs,
to get soused on pure water, as in Henry Miller's experimentations? Or is it
a question of a real passage of substances, an intensive continuum of all the
BwO's? Doubtless, anything is possible. All we are saying is that the iden-
tity of effects, the continuity of genera, the totality of all BwO's, can be
obtained on the plane of consistency only by means of an abstract machine
capable of covering and even creating it, by assemblages capable of plug-
ging into desire, of effectively taking charge of desires, of assuring their
continuous connections and transversal tie-ins. Otherwise, the BwO's of
the plane will remain separated by genus, marginalized, reduced to means
of bordering, while on the "other plane" the emptied or cancerous doubles
will triumph.
                  7. Year Zero: Faciality




Earlier, we encountered two axes, signifiance and subjectification. We saw
that they were two very different semiotic systems, or even two strata.
Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs
and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which
it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics
are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise
that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly
enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. A broad face with
white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head,
white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is
not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The
form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indetermi-
nate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his
or her choices ("Hey, he seems angry . . ."; "He couldn't say it..."; "You
see my face when I'm talking to you ..."; "look at me carefully..."). A
                                      167
                         168 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not
speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to spe-
cific faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of
frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any
expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations.
Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion,
would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that
select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a
dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy
with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance
or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order
to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen.
The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through;
it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the
camera, the third eye.
    Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that consti-
tutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the
concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape on the white wall. It vaguely
begins to appear in the black hole. In film, the close-up of the face can be
said to have two poles: make the face reflect light or, on the contrary,
emphasize its shadows to the point of engulfing it "in pitiless darkness."1 A
psychologist once said that the face is a visual percept that crystallizes out
of "different varieties of vague luminosity without form or dimension." A
suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures, a face. According to this
account, the dimensionless black hole and formless white wall are already
there to begin with. And there are already a number of possible combina-
tions in the system: either black holes distribute themselves on the white
wall, or the white wall unravels and moves toward a black hole combining
all black holes, hurtling them together or making them "crest." Sometimes
faces appear on the wall, with their holes; sometimes they appear in the
hole, with their linearized, rolled-up wall. A horror story, the face is a hor-
ror story. It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it
needs all by itself; it is certain that subjectivity does not dig its hole all
alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are
engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces
them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity
its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a
face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the change-
able combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to
resemble what it produces, or will produce.
    The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance
juncture when you are just falling asleep, or into a twilight state or halluci-
                        YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 169

nating, or doing an amusing physics experiment . . . Kafka's novella,
"Blumfeld":2 the bachelor returns home in the evening to find two little
ping-pong balls jumping around by themselves on the "wall" constituted
by the floor. They bounce everywhere and even try to hit him in the face.
They apparently contain other, still smaller, electric balls. Blumfeld finally
manages to lock them up in the black hole of a wardrobe. The scene contin-
ues the next day when Blumfeld tries to give the balls to a small, feeble-
minded boy and two grimacing little girls, and then at the office, where he
encounters his two grimacing and feebleminded assistants, who want to
make off with a broom. In a wonderful ballet by Debussy and Nijinsky, a
little tennis ball comes bouncing onto the stage at dusk, and at the end
another ball appears in a similar fashion. This time, between the two balls,
two girls and a boy who watches them develop passional dance and facial
traits in vague luminosities (curiosity, spite, irony, ecstasy. . .).3 There is
nothing to explain, nothing to interpret. It is the pure abstract machine of a
twilight state. White wall/black hole? But depending on the combinations,
the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white. The balls can bounce
off of a wall or spin into a black hole. Even upon impact they can have the
relative role of a hole in relation to the wall, just as when they are rolling
straight ahead they can have the relative role of a wall in relation to the hole
they are heading for. They circulate in the white wall/black hole system.
Nothing in all of this resembles a face, yet throughout the system faces are
distributed and faciality traits organized. Nevertheless, the abstract
machine can be effectuated in other things besides faces, but not in any
order, and not without the necessary foundation (raisons).
    The face has been a major concern of American psychology, in particu-
lar the relation between the mother and the child through eye-to-eye con-
tact. Four-eye machine? Let us recall certain stages in the research: (1)
Isakower's studies on falling asleep, in which so-called proprioceptive sen-
sations of a manual, buccal, cutaneous, or even vaguely visual nature recall
the infantile mouth-breast relation. (2) Lewin's discovery of a white screen
of the dream, which is ordinarily covered by visual contents but remains
white when the only dream contents are proprioceptive sensations (this
screen or white wall, once again, is the breast as it approaches, getting
larger and then pressing flat). (3) Spitz's interpretation according to which
the white screen, rather than being a representation of the breast itself as an
object of tactile sensation or contact, is a visual percept implying a mini-
mum of distance and upon which the mother's face appears for the child to
use as a guide in finding the breast. Thus there is a combination of two very
different kinds of elements: manual, buccal, or cutaneous proprioceptive
sensations; and the visual perception of the face seen from the front against
the white screen, with the shape of the eyes drawn in for black holes. This
                         170 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

visual perception very quickly assumes decisive importance for the act of
eating, in relation to the breast as a volume and the mouth as a cavity, both
experienced through touch.4
   We can now propose the following distinction: the face is part of a
surface-holes, holey surface, system. This system should under no cir-
cumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the
(proprioceptive) body. The head is included in the body, but the face is not.
The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, tri-
angular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps a vol-
ume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more
than holes. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The
face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it
ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional,
polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been
decoded and has to be overcodedby something we shall call the Face. This
amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the
head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes,
the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality. But the
operation does not end there: if the head and its elements are facialized, the
entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevi-
table process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey
surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An operation
worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand, breast, stom-
ach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized. Fetish-
ism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these processes of facializa-
tion. It is not at all a question of taking a part of the body and making it
resemble a face, or making a dream-face dance in a cloud. No anthropo-
morphism here. Facialization operates not by resemblance but by an order
of reasons. It is a much more unconscious and machinic operation that
draws the entire body across the holey surface, and in which the role of the
face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all of the decoded
parts. Everything remains sexual; there is no sublimation, but there are
new coordinates. It is precisely because the face depends on an abstract
machine that it is not content to cover the head, but touches all other parts of
the body, and even, if necessary, other objects without resemblance. The
question then becomes what circumstances trigger the machine that pro-
duces the face and facialization. Although the head, even the human head,
is not necessarily a face, the face is produced in humanity. But it is pro-
duced by a necessity that does not apply to human beings "in general." The
face is not animal, but neither is it human in general; there is even some-
thing absolutely inhuman about the face. It would be an error to proceed as
though the face became inhuman only beyond a certain threshold: close-
                        YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 171

up, extreme magnification, recondite expression, etc. The inhuman in
human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-
up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness
and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings have a des-
tiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations,
to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to
animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and spe-
cial becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and
get out of the black holes, that makefaciality traits themselves finally elude
the organization of the face—freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair car-
ried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing
into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivi-
ties. "I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I
swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of
the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is
no logic whatsoever. . . . I have broken the wall. . .. My eyes are useless, for
they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must be-
come a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never
arrested, never looking back, never dwindling.... Therefore I close my
ears, my eyes, my mouth.'''5 BwO. Yes, the face has a great future, but only if
it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective.
But so far we have explained nothing of what we sense.
    The move from the body-head system to the face system has nothing to
do with an evolution or genetic stages. Nor with phenomenological posi-
tions. Nor with integrations of part-objects, or structural or structuring sys-
tems. Nor can there be any appeal to a preexisting subject, or one brought
into existence, except by this machine specific to faciality. In the literature
of the face, Sartre's text on the look and Lacan's on the mirror make the
error of appealing to a form of subjectivity or humanity reflected in a
phenomenological field or split in a structural field. The gaze is but secon-
dary in relation to thegazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror
is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality. Neither will we
speak of a genetic axis, or the integration of part-objects. Any approach
based on stages in ontogenesis is arbitrary: it is thought that what is fastest
is primary, or even serves as a foundation or springboard for what comes
next. An approach based on part-objects is even worse; it is the approach of
a demented experimenter who flays, slices, and anatomizes everything in
sight, and then proceeds to sew things randomly back together again. You
can make any list of part-objects you want: hand, breast, mouth, e y e s . . .
It's still Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally
organs without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without
organs, animated by various intensive movements that determine the
                        172 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

nature and emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an
organism, or even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part. It
becomes apparent that the slowest of movements, or the last to occur or
arrive, is not the least intense. And the fastest may already have converged
with it, connected with it, in the disequilibrium of a nonsynchronic devel-
opment of strata that have different speeds and lack a sequence of stages
but are nevertheless simultaneous. The question of the body is not one of
part-objects but of differential speeds.
    These movements are movements of deterritorialization. They are what
"make" the body an animal or human organism. For example, the prehen-
sile hand implies a relative deterritorialization not only of the front paw but
also of the locomotor hand. It has a correlate, the use-object or tool: the
club is a deterritorialized branch. The breast of the woman, with her up-
right posture, indicates a deterritorialization of the animal's mammary
gland; the mouth of the child, adorned with lips by an outfolding of the
mucous membranes, marks a deterritorialization of the snout and mouth
of the animal. Lips-breast: each serves as a correlate of the other.6 The
human head implies a deterritorialization in relation to the animal and has
as its correlate the organization of a world, in other words, a milieu that has
itself been deterritorialized (the steppe is the first "world," in contrast to
the forest milieu). But the face represents a far more intense, if slower,
deterritorialization. We could say that it is an absolute deterritorialization:
it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the
organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as signi-
fiance and subjectification. Now the face has a correlate of great impor-
tance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized
world. There are a number of face-landscape correlations, on this "higher"
level. Christian education exerts spiritual control over both faciality and
landscapity (paysageite): Compose them both, color them in, complete
them, arrange them according to a complementarity linking landscapes to
faces.7 Face and landscape manuals formed a pedagogy, a strict discipline,
and were an inspiration to the arts as much as the arts were an inspiration
to them. Architecture positions its ensembles—houses, towns or cities,
monuments or factories—to function like faces in the landscape they
transform. Painting takes up the same movement but also reverses it, posi-
tioning a landscape as a face, treating one like the other: "treatise on the
face and the landscape." The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a
landscape; that is the definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen
and camera. But the same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting,
even the novel: close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations. So, is
your mother a landscape or a face? A face or a factory? (Godard.) All faces
envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated
                        YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 173

by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What
face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what
landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it, providing
an unexpected complement for its lines and traits? Even when painting
becomes abstract, all it does is rediscover the black hole and white wall, the
great composition of the white canvas and black slash. Tearing, but also
stretching of the canvas along an axis of escape (fuite), at a vanishing point
(point defuite), along a diagonal, by a knife slice, slash, or hole: the machine
is already in place that always functions to produce faces and landscapes,
however abstract. Titian began his paintings in black and white, not to
make outlines to fill in, but as the matrix for each of the colors to come.
   The novel—A flock of geese flew which the snow had dazzled. [Perceval]
saw them and heard them, for they were going away noisily because of a fal-
con which came drawing after them at a great rate until hefound abandoned
one separated from the flock, and he struck it so and bruised it that he
knocked it down to earth.... When Perceval saw the trampled snow on which
the goose had lain, and the blood which appeared around, he leaned upon his
lance and looked at that image, for the blood and the snow together seemed
to him like the fresh color which was on the face of his friend, and he thinks
until heforgets himself; for the vermilion seated on white was on herface just
the same as these three drops of blood on the white snow.... We have seen a
knight who is dozing on his charger. Everything is there: the redundancy
specific to the face and landscape, the snowy white wall of the landscape-
face, the black hole of the falcon and the three drops distributed on the wall;
and, simultaneously, the silvery line of the landscape-face spinning toward
the black hole of the knight deep in catatonia. Cannot the knight, at certain
times and under certain conditions, push the movement further still, cross-
ing the black hole, breaking through the white wall, dismantling the face—
even if the attempt may backfire?8 All of this is in no way characteristic of
the genre of the novel only at the end of its history; it is there from the
beginning, it is an essential part of the genre. It is false to see Don Quixote
as the end of the chivalric novel, invoking the hero's hallucinations, hare-
brained ideas, and hypnotic or cataleptic states. It is false to see novels such
as Beckett's as the end of the novel in general, invoking the black holes, the
characters' line of deterritorialization, the schizophrenic promenades of
Molloy or the Unnameable, their loss of their names, memory, or purpose.
The novel does have an evolution, but that is surely not it. The novel has
always been defined by the adventure of lost characters who no longer
know their name, what they are looking for, or what they are doing, amnesi-
acs, ataxies, catatonics. They differentiate the genre of the novel from the
genres of epic or drama (when the dramatic or epic hero is stricken with
folly or forgetting, etc., it is in an entirely different way). La princesse de
                        174 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

Cleves is a novel precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the peo-
ple of the time: the states of absence or "rest," the sleep that overtakes the
characters. There is always a Christian education in the novel. Molloy is the
beginning of the genre of the novel. When the novel began, with Chretien
de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would accompany it
over the entire course of its history was already there: The knight of the
novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing,
what people say to him, he doesn't know where he is going or to whom he is
speaking, he is continually drawing a line of absolute deterritorialization,
but also losing his way, stopping, and falling into black holes. "He awaits
chivalry and adventure." Open Chretien de Troyes to any page and you will
find a catatonic knight seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting,
seeing the face of his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to
make him respond. Lancelot, in the presence of the queen's white face,
doesn't notice his horse plunge into the river; or he gets into a passing cart
and it turns out to be the cart of disgrace. There is a face-landscape aggre-
gate proper to the novel, in which black holes sometimes distribute them-
selves on a white wall, and the white line of the horizon sometimes spins
toward a black hole, or both simultaneously.

                    Theorems of Deterritorialization, or
                         Machinic Propositions9
First theorem: One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least
two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each of the
two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization must not be
confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily
implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized,
serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as
well. Thus there is an entire system of horizontal and complementary reter-
ritorializations, between hand and tool, mouth and breast, face and land-
scape. Second theorem: The fastest of two elements or movements of
deterritorialization is not necessarily the most intense or most deterri-
torialized. Intensity of deterritorialization must not be confused with
speed of movement or development. The fastest can even connect its inten-
sity to the slowest, which, as an intensity, does not come after the fastest but
is simultaneously at work on a different stratum or plane (for example, the
way the breast-mouth relation is guided from the start by a plane of
faciality). Third theorem: It can even be concluded from this that the least
deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized. This is
where the second system of reterritorializations conies in, the vertical
system running from bottom to top. This is the sense in which not only
                        YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 175

the mouth but also the breast, hand, the entire body, even the tool, are
"facialized." As a general rule, relative deterritorializations (transcoding)
reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in certain respects absolute
(overcoding). We have seen that the deterritorialization of the head into a
face is absolute but remains negative in that it passes from one stratum to
another, from the stratum of the organism to those of signifiance and
subjectification. The hand and breast reterritorialize on the face and in the
landscape: they are facialized at the same time as they are landscapified.
Even a use-object may come to be facialized: you might say that a house,
utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc., is watching me, not because it
resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall/black hole
process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization. The
close-up in film pertains as much to a knife, cup, clock, or kettle as to a face
or facial element, for example, Griffith's "the kettle is watching me." Is it
not fair to say, then, that there are close-ups in novels, as when Dickens
writes the opening line of The Cricket on the Hearth: "The kettle began
it. . .",10 and in painting, when a utensil becomes a face-landscape from
within, or when a cup on a tablecloth or a teapot is facialized, in Bonnard,
Vuillard? Fourth theorem: The abstract machine is therefore effectuated
not only in the faces that produce it but also to varying degrees in body
parts, clothes, and objects that it facializes following an order of reasons
(rather than an organization of resemblances).
   Yet the question remains: When does the abstract machine of faciality
enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some simple examples: the
maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional
power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the
political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons,
and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of film operating
through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of television. It is
not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the cipher-
ing it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible. This is an affair
not of ideology but of economy and the organization of power (pouvoir).
We are certainly not saying that the face, the power of the face (la puissance
du visage), engenders and explains social power (pouvoir). Certain assem-
blages of power (pouvoir) require the production of a face, others do not. If
we consider primitive societies, we see that there is very little that operates
through the face: their semiotic is nonsignifying, nonsubjective, essentially
collective, polyvocal, and corporeal, playing on very diverse forms and
substances. This polyvocality operates through bodies, their volumes,
their internal cavities, their variable exterior connections and coordinates
(territorialities). A fragment from a manual semiotic, a manual sequence,
may be coordinated, without subordination or unification, with an oral
                         176 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

sequence, or a cutaneous one, or a rhythmic one, etc. Lizot, for example,
shows how "the dissociation of duty, ritual and daily life is almost total...
it is strange, inconceivable to us": during mourning behavior, certain
people make obscene jokes while others cry; or an Indian abruptly stops
crying and begins to repair his flute; or everybody goes to sleep.'' The same
goes for incest. There is no incest prohibition; instead, there are sequences
of incest that connect with sequences of prohibition following specific
coordinates. Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the multidi-
mensionality of bodies. Even masks ensure the head's belonging to the
body, rather than making it a face. Doubtless, there are profound move-
 ments of deterritorialization that shake up the coordinates of the body and
outline particular assemblages of power; however, they connect the body
not to faciality but to becomings-animal, in particular with the help of
drugs. Of course, there is no less spirituality for that, for these becomings-
animal involve an animal Spirit—a jaguar-spirit, bird-spirit, ocelot-spirit,
toucan-spirit—that takes possession of the body's interior, enters its
 cavities, and fills its volumes instead of making a face for it. Possession
 expresses a direct relation between Voices and the body rather than a rela-
tion to the face. Shaman, warrior, and hunter organizations of power, frag-
 ile and precarious, are all the more spiritual by virtue of the fact that they
 operate through corporeality, animality, and vegetality. When we said ear-
 lier that the human head still belongs to the stratum of the organism, we
 obviously were not denying the existence of culture and society among
 these peoples; we were merely saying that these cultures' and societies'
 codes pertain to bodies, to the belonging of heads to bodies, to the ability of
 the body-head system to become and receive souls, and to receive them as
 friends while repulsing enemy souls. "Primitives" may have the most
 human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but they have no
 face and need none.
    The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the
white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the
black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European,
what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary
everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth-century psychiatrists were right to say
that erotomania, unlike nymphomania, often remains pure and chaste;
this is because it operates through the face and facialization). Not a univer-
sal, but fades totius universi. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the
facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of
Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific
idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general
of functions: the function of biuni vocalization, or binarization. It has two
aspects: the abstract machine of faciality, insofar as it is composed by a
                        YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 177

black hole/white wall system, functions in two ways, one of which concerns
the units or elements, the other the choices. Under the first aspect, the
black hole acts as a central computer, Christ, the third eye that moves
across the wall or the white screen serving as general surface of reference.
Regardless of the content one gives it, the machine constitutes a facial unit,
an elementary face in biunivocal relation with another: it is a man or a
woman, a rich person or a poor one, an adult or a child, a leader or a subject,
"an x or a y." The movement of the black hole across the screen, the trajec-
tory of the third eye over the surface of reference, constitutes so many
dichotomies or arborescences, like four-eye machines made of elementary
faces linked together two by two. The face of a teacher and a student, father
and son, worker and boss, cop and citizen, accused and judge ("the judge
had a stern expression, his eyes were horizonless..."): concrete individu-
alized faces are produced and transformed on the basis of these units, these
combinations of units—like the face of a rich child in which a military call-
ing is already discernible, that West Point chin. You don't so much have a
face as slide into one.
    Under the second aspect, the abstract machine of faciality assumes a
role of selective response, or choice: given a concrete face, the machine
judges whether it passes or not, whether it goes or not, on the basis of the
elementary facial units. This time, the binary relation is of the "yes-no"
type. The empty eye or black hole absorbs or rejects, like a half-doddering
despot who can still give a signal of acquiescence or refusal. The face of a
given teacher is contorted by tics and bathed in an anxiety that makes it "no
go." A defendant, a subject, displays an overaffected submission that turns
into insolence. Or someone is too polite to be honest. A given face is neither
a man's nor a woman's. Or it is neither a poor person's nor a rich person's.
Is it someone who lost his fortune? At every moment, the machine rejects
faces that do not conform, or seem suspicious. But only at a given level of
choice. For it is necessary to produce successive divergence-types of devi-
ance for everything that eludes biunivocal relationships, and to establish
binary relations between what is accepted on first choice and what is only
tolerated on second, third choice, etc. The white wall is always expanding,
and the black hole functions repeatedly. The teacher has gone mad, but
madness is a face conforming to the nth choice (not the last, however, since
there are mad faces that do not conform to what one assumes madness
should be). A ha! It's not a man and it's not a woman, so it must be a trans-
vestite: The binary relation is between the "no" of the first category and the
"yes" of the following category, which under certain conditions may just as
easily mark a tolerance as indicate an enemy to be mowed down at all costs.
At any rate, you've been recognized, the abstract machine has you
inscribed in its overall grid. It is clear that in its new role as deviance
                          178 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

detector, the faciality machine does not restrict itself to individual cases
but operates in just as general a fashion as it did in its first role, the compu-
tation of normalities. If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your aver-
age ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-
types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third
category. They are also inscribed on the wall, distributed by the hole. They
must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as the
white man's claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation
of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is
grasped as an "other."12 Racism operates by the determination of degrees
of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to inte-
grate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward
waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions,
in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never
abides alterity (it's a Jew, it's an Arab, it's a Negro, it's a lunatic . . .). From
the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the out-
side. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not
to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is
internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective
choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates
waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped
out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of
divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naivete.
   On the brighter side, painting has exploited all the resources of the
Christ-face. Painting has taken the abstract white wall/black hole machine
of faciality in all directions, using the face of Christ to produce every kind
of facial unit and every degree of deviance. In this respect, there is an
exultation in the painting of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, like an
unbridled freedom. Not only did Christ preside over the facialization of
the entire body (his own) and the landscapification of all milieus (his own),
but he composed all of the elementary faces and had every divergence at his
disposal: Christ-athlete at the fair, Christ-Mannerist queer, Christ-Negro,
or at least a Black Virgin at the edge of the wall. The most prodigious
strokes of madness appear on canvas under the auspices of the Catholic
code. A single example chosen from many [Giotto, The Life of St. Francis,
scene XII, The Transfiguration—Trans.]: against the white background of
the landscape and the black-blue hole of the sky, the crucified Christ-
turned-kite-machine sends stigmata to Saint Francis by rays; the stigmata
effect the facialization of the body of the saint, in the image of the body of
Christ; but the rays carrying the stigmata to the saint are also the strings
Francis uses to pull the divine kite. It was under the sign of the cross
                       YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 179

that people learned to steer the face and processes of facialization in all
directions.
   Information theory takes as its point of departure a homogeneous set of
ready-made signifying messages that are already functioning as elements
in biunivocal relationships, or the elements of which are biunivocally
organized between messages. Second, the picking of a combination
depends on a certain number of subjective binary choices that increase pro-
portionally to the number of elements. But the problem is that all of this
biunivocalization and binarization (which is not just the result of an
increase in calculating skills, as some say) assumes the deployment of a wall
or screen, the installation of a central computing hole without which no
message would be discernible and no choice could be implemented. The
black hole/white wall system must already have gridded all of space and
outlined its arborescences or dichotomies for those of signifier and
subjectification even to be conceivable. The mixed semiotic of signifiance
and subjectification has an exceptional need to be protected from any
intrusion from the outside. In fact, there must not be any exterior: no
nomad machine, no primitive poly vocality must spring up, with their com-
binations of heterogeneous substances of expression. Translatability of
any kind requires a single substance of expression. One can constitute sig-
nifying chains operating with deterritorialized, digitalized, discrete ele-
ments only if there is a semiological screen available, a wall to protect
them. One can make subjective choices between two chains or at each point
in a chain only if no outside tempest sweeps away the chains and subjects.
One can form a web of subjectivities only if one possesses a central eye, a
black hole capturing everything that would exceed or transform either the
assigned affects or the dominant significations. Moreover, it is absurd to
believe that language as such can convey a message. A language is always
embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast them in
relation to the signifiers in progress and subjects concerned. Choices are
guided by faces, elements are organized around faces: a common grammar
is never separable from a facial education. The face is a veritable mega-
phone. Thus not only must the abstract machine of faciality provide a pro-
tective screen and a computing black hole; in addition, the faces it
produces draw all kinds of arborescences and dichotomies without which
the signifying and the subjective would not be able to make the arbor-
escences and dichotomies function that fall within their purview in lan-
guage. Doubtless, the binarities and biunivocalities of the face are not the
same as those of language, of its elements and subjects. There is no resem-
blance between them. But the former subtend the latter. When the faciality
machine translates formed contents of whatever kind into a single sub-
stance of expression, it already subjugates them to the exclusive form of
                        180 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

signifying and subjective expression. It carries out the prior gridding that
makes it possible for the signifying elements to become discernible, and for
the subjective choices to be implemented. The faciality machine is not an
annex to the signifier and the subject; rather, it is subjacent (connexe) to
them and is their condition of possibility. Facial biunivocalities and bina-
rities double the others; facial redundancies are in redundancy with signi-
fying and subjective redundancies. It is precisely because the face depends
on an abstract machine that it does not assume a preexistent subject or
signifier; but it is subjacent to them and provides the substance necessary
to them. What chooses the faces is not a subject, as in the Szondi test; it is
faces that choose their subjects. What interprets the black blotch/white
hole figure, or the white page/black hole, is not a signifier, as in the Ror-
schach test; it is that figure which programs the signifiers.
    We have made some progress toward answering the question of what
triggers the abstract machine of faciality, for it is not in operation all the
time or in just any social formation. Certain social formations need face,
and also landscape.13 There is a whole history behind it. At very different
dates, there occurred a generalized collapse of all of the heterogeneous,
polyvocal, primitive semiotics in favor of a semiotic of signifiance and
subjectification. Whatever the differences between signifiance and subjec-
tification, whichever prevails over the other in this case or that, whatever
the varying figures assumed by their de facto mixtures—they have it in
common to crush all polyvocality, set up language as a form of exclusive
expression, and operate by signifying biunivocalization and subjective
binarization. The superlinearity proper to language is no longer coordi-
nated with multidimensional figures: it now flattens out all volumes and
subordinates all lines. Is it by chance that linguistics always, and very
quickly, encounters the problem of homonymy, or ambiguous statements
that it then subjects to a set of binary reductions? More generally, linguis-
tics can tolerate no poly vocality or rhizome traits: a child who runs around,
plays, dances, and draws cannot concentrate attention on language and
writing, and will never be a good subject. In short, the new semiotic needs
systematically to destroy the whole range of primitive semiotic systems,
even if it retains some of their debris in well-defined enclosures.
    However, there is more to the picture than semiotic systems waging war
on one another armed only with their own weapons. Very specific assem-
blages of power impose signifiance and subjectification as their determinate
form of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new contents: there
is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification with-
out an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without
assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and
subjects. It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian forma-
                        YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 181

tions, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in
other words, the means both to crush the other semiotics and protect itself
against any threat from outside. A concerted effort is made to do away with
the body and corporeal coordinates through which the multidimensional
or polyvocal semiotics operated. Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dis-
mantled, becomings-animal hounded out, deterritorialization pushed to a
new threshold—a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of
signifiance and subjectification. A single substance of expression is pro-
duced. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the
abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness
of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject. You will be pinned to
the white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This machine is called the
faciality machine because it is the social production efface, because it per-
forms the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and
objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus. The deter-
ritorialization of the body implies a reterritorialization on the face; the
decoding of the body implies an overcoding by the face; the collapse of cor-
poreal coordinates or milieus implies the constitution of a landscape. The
semiotic of the signifier and the subjective never operates through bodies.
It is absurd to claim to relate the signifier to the body. At any rate it can be
related only to a body that has already been entirely facialized. The differ-
ence between our uniforms and clothes and primitive paintings and garb is
that the former effect a facialization of the body, with buttons for black
holes against the white wall of the material. Even the mask assumes a new
function here, the exact opposite of its old one. For there is no unitary func-
tion of the mask, except a negative one (in no case does the mask serve to
dissimulate, to hide, even while showing or revealing). Either the mask
assures the head's belonging to the body, its becoming-animal, as was the
case in primitive societies. Or, as is the case now, the mask assures the erec-
tion, the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the
body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the
face. The inhumanity of the face. Never does the face assume a prior
signifier or subject. The order is totally different: despotic and authoritar-
ian concrete assemblage of power —*. triggering of the abstract machine of
faciality, white wall/black hole —> installation of the new semiotic of
signifiance and subjectification on that holey surface. That is why we have
been addressing just two problems exclusively: the relation of the face to
the abstract machine that produces it, and the relation of the face to the
assemblages of power that require that social production. The face is a
politics.
    Of course, we have already seen that signifiance and subjectification are
semiotic systems that are entirely distinct in their principles and have
                         182 O YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

different regimes (circular irradiation versus segmentary linearity) and
different apparatuses of power (despotic generalized slavery versus author-
itarian contract-proceeding). Neither begins with Christ, or the White
Man as Christian universal: there are Indian, African, and Asiatic despotic
formations of signifiance; the authoritarian process of subjectification
appears most purely in the destiny of the Jewish people. But however dif-
ferent these semiotics are, they still form a de facto mix, and it is at the level
of this mixture that they assert their imperialism, in other words, their
common endeavor to crush all other semiotics. There is no signifiance that
does not harbor the seeds of subjectivity; there is no subjectification that
does not drag with it remnants of signifier. If the signifier bounces above all
off a wall, if subjectivity spins above all toward a hole, then we must say that
the wall of the signifier already includes holes and the black hole of subjec-
tivity already carries scraps of wall. The mix, therefore, has a solid founda-
tion in the indissociable white wall/black hole machine, and the two
semiotics intermingle through intersection, splicing, and the plugging of
one into the other, as with the "Hebrew and the Pharaoh." But there is more
because the nature of the mixtures may vary greatly. If it is possible to
assign the faciality machine a date—the year zero of Christ and the histori-
cal development of the White Man—it is because that is when the mixture
ceased to be a splicing or an intertwining, becoming a total interpene-
tration in which each element suffuses the other like drops of red-black
wine in white water. Our semiotic of modern White Men, the semiotic of
capitalism, has attained this state of mixture in which signifiance and
subjectification effectively interpenetrate. Thus it is in this semiotic that
faciality, or the white wall/black hole system, assumes its full scope. We
must, however, assess the states of mixture and the varying proportions of
the elements. Whether in the Christian or pre-Christian state, one element
may dominate another, one may be more or less powerful than the other.
We are thus led to define limit-faces, which are different from both the
facial units and the degrees of facial divergence previously defined.
    1. The black hole is on the white wall. It is not a unit, since the black hole
is in constant movement on the wall and operates by binarization. Two
black holes, four black holes, n black holes distribute themselves like eyes.
Faciality is always a multiplicity. The landscape will be populated with eyes
or black holes, as in an Ernst painting, or a drawing by Aloi'se or Wolfli. Cir-
cles are drawn around a hole on the white wall; an eye can be placed in each
of the circles. We can even propose the following law: the more circles there
are around a hole, the more the bordering effect acts to increase the surface
over which the hole slides and to give that surface a force of capture. Per-
haps the purest case is to be found in popular Ethiopian scrolls represent-
ing demons: on the white surface of the parchment, two black holes are
                          YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 183

drawn, or an outline of round or rectangular faces; but the black holes
spread and reproduce, they enter into redundancy, and each time a secon-
dary circle is drawn, a new black hole is constituted, an eye is put in it.'4 An
effect of capturing a surface that becomes more enclosed the more it
expands. This is the signifying despotic face and the multiplication proper
to it, its proliferation, its redundancy of frequency. A multiplication of
eyes. The despot or his representatives are everywhere. This is the face as
seen from the front, by a subject who does not so much see as get snapped
up by black holes. This is a figure of destiny, terrestrial destiny, objective
signifying destiny. The close-up in film knows this figure well: the Griffith
close-up of a face, an element of a face or a facialized object, which then
assumes an anticipatory temporal value (the hands of the clock fore-
shadow something).




    Simple machine
                               With multiple                 Four-Eye Machine
                               bordering effects




                   Proliferation of Eyes By Multiplication of Border

  Terrestrial Signifying Despotic Face

   2. Now, on the contrary, the white wall has unraveled, becoming a silver
thread moving toward the black hole. One black hole "crests" all the other
black holes, all of the eyes and faces, while the landscape becomes a thread
                         184 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

whose far end coils around the hole. It is still a multiplicity but constitutes a
different figure of destiny: reflexive, passional, subjective destiny. It is the
maritime face or landscape: it follows the line separating the sky from the
waters, or the land from the waters. This authoritarian face is in profile and
spins toward the black hole. Or else there are two faces facing each other,
but in profile to the observer, and their union is already marked by a limit-
less separation. Or else the faces turn away from each other, swept away by
betrayal. Tristan, Isolde, Isolde, Tristan, in the boat carrying them to the
black hole of betrayal and death. A faciality of consciousness and passion, a
redundancy of resonance and coupling. This time, the effect of the close-up
is no longer to expand a surface while simultaneously closing it off; its only
function is to have an anticipatory temporal value. It marks the origin of a
scale of intensity, or is part of that scale; the closer the faces get to the black
hole as termination point, the more the close-up heats the line they follow.
Eisenstein's close-ups versus Griffith's (the intensive heightening of
shame, or anger, in the close-ups in Potemkiri).1^ Here again, it is clear that
any combination is possible between the two limit-figures of the face. In
Pabst's Lulu, the despotic face of the fallen Lulu is associated with the
image of a bread knife, which has the anticipatory value of foreshadowing
the murder; but the authoritarian face of Jack the Ripper also ascends a
whole scale of intensities leading to the knife and Lulu's murder.
    More generally, we may note characteristics common to the two limit-
figures. First, although the white wall, the broad cheeks, is the substantial
element of the signifier, and the black hole the reflexive element of subjec-
tivity, they always go together. But in one of two modes: either the black
holes distribute themselves and multiply on the white wall, or the wall,
reduced to its crest or horizon thread, hurtles toward a black hole that
crests them all. There is no wall without black holes, and no black hole
without a wall. Second, in both cases the black hole is necessarily sur-
rounded by a border, or even bordered more than once: the effect of this
border is either to expand the surface of the wall or to intensify the line. The
black hole is never in the eyes (pupil); it is always inside the border, and the
eyes are always inside the hole: dead eyes, which see all the better for being
in a black hole.16 These common characteristics do not preclude the exis-
tence of a limit-difference between the two figures of the face, and propor-
tions according to which first one then the other dominates in the mixed
semiotic. The terrestrial signifying despotic face, the maritime subjective
passional authoritarian face (the desert can also be a sea of land). Two fig-
ures of destiny, two states of the faciality machine. Jean Paris has clearly
shown how these poles operate in painting, the pole of the despotic Christ
and that of the passional Christ: on the one hand, the face of Christ seen
from the front, as in a Byzantine mosaic, with the black hole of the eyes
                           YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 185

against a gold background, all depth projected forward; and on the other
hand, faces that cross glances and turned away from each other, seen half-
turned or in profile, as in a quattrocento painting, their sidelong glances
drawing multiple lines, integrating depth into the painting itself (arbitrary
examples of transition and mixture can be cited, such a Duccio's Calling
of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew, against the background of an aquatic land-
scape; the second formula has already overtaken Christ and the first fisher-
man, while the second fisherman remains within the Byzantine code).17



                                                                      Celebatory Machine




                                                                      Coupled Machine




                                                              Complex Machine
                                                                1. Musicality Line
                                                                2. Picturality Line
                                                                3. Landscapity Line
                                                                4. Faciality Line
                                                                5. Consciousness Line
                                                                6. Passion Line
                                                                   Etc.


  Maritime Subjective Authoritarian Face (after Tristan and Isolde)

   Swann's Love: Proust was able to make the face, landscape, painting,
music, etc., resonate together. Three moments in the story of Swann and
Odette. First, a whole signifying mechanism is set up. The face of Odette
with her broad white or yellow cheeks, and her eyes as black hoes. But this
face continually refers back to other things, also arrayed on the wall. That is
Swann's aetheticism, his amateurism: a thing must always recall some-
thing else, in a network of interpretations under the sign of the signifier.
A face refers back to a landscape. A face must "recall" a painting, or a
                         186 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

fragment of a painting. A piece of music must let fall a little phrase that
connects with Odette's face, to the point that the little phrase becomes only
a signal. The white wall becomes populous, the black holes are arrayed.
This entire mechanism of signifiance, with its referral of interpretations,
prepares the way for the second, passional subjective, moment, during
which Swann's jealousy, querulous delusion, and erotomania develop.
Now Odette's face races down a line hurtling toward a single black hole,
that of Swann's Passion. The other lines, of landscapity, picturality, and
musicality, also rush toward this catatonic hole and coil around it, border-
ing it several times.
   But in the third moment, at the end of his long passion, Swann attends a
reception where he sees the faces of the servants and guests disaggregate
into autonomous aesthetic traits, as if the line of picturality regained its
independence, both beyond the wall and outside the black hole. Then
Vinteuil's little phrase regains its transcendence and renews its connection
with a still more intense, asignifying, and asubjective line of pure musi-
cality. And Swann knows that he no longer loves Odette and, above all, that
Odette will never again love him.
   Was this salvation through art necessary? For neither Swann nor Proust
was saved. Was it necessary to break through the wall and out of the hole in
this way, by renouncing love? Was not that love rotten from the start, made
of signifiance and jealousy? Was it possible to do anything else, considering
Odette's mediocrity and Swann's aestheticism? In a way, the madeleine is
the same story. The narrator munches his madeleine: redundancy, the
black hole of involuntary memory. How can he get out of that? And it is,
above all, something one has to get out of, escape from. Proust knows that
quite well, even if his commentators do not. But the way he gets out is
through art, uniquely through art.
   How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the
wall? How do you dismantle the face? Whatever genius there may be in the
French novel, that is not its affair. It is too concerned with measuring the
wall, or even with building it, with plumbing the depths of black holes and
composing faces. The French novel is profoundly pessimistic and idealis-
tic, "critical of life rather than creative of life." It stuffs its characters down
the hole and bounces them off the wall. It can only conceive of organized
voyages, and of salvation only through art, a still Catholic salvation, in
other words, salvation through eternity. It spends its time plotting points
instead of drawing lines, active lines of flight or of positive deterritori-
alization. The Anglo-American novel is totally different. "To get away. To
get away, out!... To cross a horizon .. ."18 From Hardy to Lawrence, from
Melville to Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get out, breakthrough,
make a beeline, don't get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, fol-
                          YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 187

low it or create it, to the point of treachery. That is why their relationship to
other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and also to drugs and
voyages in place, is entirely different from that of the French. They know
how difficult it is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of conscious-
ness and memory, of the couple and conjugality. How tempting it is to let
yourself get caught, to lull yourself into it, to latch back onto aface. "[Being]
locked away in the black hole. . . gave her a molten copperish glow, the
words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for
a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to
reintegrate and repose for a few moments. . . . At first I mistook it for pas-
sion, for ecstasy. . . . I thought I had found a living volcano, a female
Vesuvius. I never thought I had found a human ship going down in an
ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star
gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above
our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it
was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without
aspect."19 A copperish glow like the face at the bottom of a black hole. The
point is to get out of it, not in art, in other words, in spirit, but in life, in real
life. Don't take away my power to love. These English and American authors
also know how hard it is to break through the wall of the signifier. Many
people have tried since Christ, beginning with Christ. But Christ himself
botched the crossing, the jump, he bounced off the wall. "As if by a great
recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole
negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert
mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible"—the
Face.20 Cross the wall, the Chinese perhaps, but at what price? At the price
of a becoming-animal, a becoming-flower or rock, and beyond that a strange
becoming-imperceptible, a becoming-hard now one with loving.21 It is a
question of speed, even if the movement is in place. Is this also to dismantle
the face, or as Miller says, no longer to look at or into the eyes but to swim
through them, to close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light
moving at ever-increasing speed? Of course, this requires all the resources
of art, and art of the highest kind. It requires a whole line of writing,
picturality, musicality... For it is through writing that you become animal,
it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that
you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and impercepti-
ble: in love. But art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life
lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only
in art, and all of those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art,
taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that
never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward
the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless.
                         188 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

   Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it
by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others',
their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant sig-
nifications all at the same time? The organization of the face is a strong
one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole
set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of
signifiance and subjectification. What is a tic? It is precisely the continu-
ally refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sover-
eign organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down
on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its
organization upon it. (There is a medical distinction between the clonic or
convulsive tic and the tonic or spasmodic tic; perhaps we can say that in the
first case the faciality trait that is trying to escape has the upper hand,
whereas in the second case the facial organization that is trying to clamp
back down or immobilize itself has the upper hand.) But if dismantling the
face is a major affair, it is because it is not simply a question of tics, or an
amateur's or aesthete's adventure. If the face is a politics, dismantling the
face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-
clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall
of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity. Here, the
program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: Find your black holes and white
walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dis-
mantle them and draw your lines of flight.22
   It is time once again to multiply practical warnings. First, it is never a
question of a return to ... It is not a question of "returning" to the
presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples. We will
always be failures at playing African or Indian, even Chinese, and no voy-
age to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to cross the wall, get
out of the hole, or lose our face. We will never succeed in making ourselves a
new primitive head and body, human, spiritual, and faceless. It would only
be taking more photos and bouncing off the wall again. We will always find
ourselves reterritorialized again. O my little desert island, on you I am in
the Closerie des Lilas again, O my deep ocean, you reflect the lake in the
Bois de Boulogne, O little phrase of Vinteuil, you recall a sweet moment.
These are Eastern physical and spiritual exercises, but for a couple, like a
conjugal bed tucked with a Chinese sheet: you did do your exercises today,
didn't you? Lawrence has only one grudge against Melville: he knew better
than anyone how to get across the face, the eyes and horizon, the wall and
hole, but he mistook that crossing, that creative line, for an "impossible
return," a return to the savages in Typee, for a way of staying an artist and
hating life, of maintaining a nostalgia for the Home Country. ("He ever
pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had run away from as far as
                         YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 189

ships would carry h i m . . . . Melville came home to face out the rest of his
life.... He refused life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, pos-
sible perfect love     A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party
leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.. . . Melville was, at the core,
a mystic and an idealist.... And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine.
I say, let the old guns rot. Get new ones, and shoot straight.")2*
    We can't turn back. Only neurotics, or, as Lawrence says, "renegades,"
deceivers, attempt a regression. The white wall of the signifier, the black
hole of subjectivity, and the facial machine are impasses, the measure of
our submissions and subjections; but we are born into them, and it is there
we must stand battle. Not in the sense of a necessary stage, but in the sense
of a tool for which a new use must be invented. Only across the wall of the
signifier can you run lines of asignifiance that void all memory, all return,
all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of
subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed,
heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living
love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without
entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines.
Only on your face and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white
wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to
return to a primitive head, but to invent the combinations by which those
traits connect with landscapity traits that have themselves been freed from
the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also
been freed from their respective codes. With what joy the painters used the
face of Christ himself, taking it in every sense and direction; and it was not
simply the joy of a desire to paint, but the joy of all desires. Is it possible to
tell, when the knight of the courtly novel is in his catatonic state, whether
he is deep in his black hole or already astride the particles that will carry
him out of it to begin a new journey? Lawrence, who has been compared to
Lancelot, writes: "To be alone, mindless and memoryless beside the sea...
As alone and as absent and as present as an aboriginal dark on the sand in
the sun ... Far off, far off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man
might after death. . . The landscape?—he cared not a thing about the land-
scape. . . . Humanity?—there was none. Thought?—fallen like a stone into
the sea. The great, the glamorous past?—worn thin, frail, like a frail trans-
lucent film of shell thrown up on the shore."24 The uncertain moment at
which the white wall/black hole, black point/white shore system, as on a
Japanese print, itself becomes one with the act of leaving it, breaking away
from and crossing through it.
   We have seen that the abstract machine has two very different states:
sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about deterritorial-
izations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations that are absolute
                         190 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

but remain negative; sometimes it is developed on a plane of consistency
giving it a "diagrammatic" function, a positive value of deterritorial-
ization, the ability to form new abstract machines. Sometimes the abstract
machine, as the faciality machine, forces flows into signifiances and
subjectifications, into knots of aborescence and holes of abolition; some-
times, to the extent that it performs a veritable "defacialization," it frees
something like probe-heads (tetes chercheuses, guidance devices) that dis-
mantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour
out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favor of veritable rhizomes, and
steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorializaton or creative flight.
There are no more concentrically organized strata, no more black holes
around which lines coil to form borders, no more walls to which dichoto-
mies, binarities, and bipolar values cling. There is no more face to be in
redundancy with a landscape, painting, or little phrase of music, each per-
petually bringing the other to mind, on the unified surface of the wall or the
central swirl of the black hole. Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome
with a freed trait of landscapity, picturality, or musicality. This is not a col-
lection of part-objects but a living block, a connecting of stems by which
the traits of a face enter a real multiplicity or diagram with a trait of an
unknown landscape, a trait of painting or music that is thereby effectively
produced, created, according to quanta of absolute, positive deterritori-
alization—not evoked or recalled according to systems of reterritorializa-
tion. A wasp trait and an orchid trait. Quanta marking so many mutations
of abstract machines, each of which operates as a function of the other.
Thus opens a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization
of the possible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which marks a clo-
sure, an impotence.
   The face, what a horror. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores,
planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no need for a
close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-up, and naturally
inhuman, a monstrous hood. Necessarily so because it is produced by a
machine and in order to meet the requirements of the special apparatus of
power that triggers the machine and takes deterritorialization to the abso-
lute while keeping it negative. Earlier, when we contrasted the primitive,
spiritual, human head with the inhuman face, we were falling victim to a
nostalgia for a return or regression. In truth, there are only inhumanities,
humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of
very different natures and speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhu-
manity, has all the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of
the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged
into becomings-spiritual/animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether differ-
ent inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of "probe-heads";
                       YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 191

here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of
deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becom-
ings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere,
for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. Face, my love, you have
finally become a probe-head... Year zen, year omega, year c o . . . Must we
leave it at that, three states, and no more: primitive heads, Christ-face, and
probe-heads?
            8. 1874: Three Novellas, or
                "What Happened?"




It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the "novella" as a literary
genre: Everything is organized around the question, "What happened?
Whatever could have happened?" The tale is the opposite of the novella,
because it is an altogether different question that the reader asks with bated
breath: What is going to happen? Something is always going to happen,
come to pass. Something always happens in the novel also, but the novel
integrates elements of the novella and the tale into the variation of its
perpetual living present (duration). The detective novel is a particularly
hybrid genre in this respect, since most often the something = X that has
happened is on the order of a murder or theft, but exactly what it is that has
happened remains to be discovered, and in the present determined by the
model detective. Yet it would be an error to reduce these different aspects
to the three dimensions of time. Something happened, something is going
to happen, can designate a past so immediate, a future so near, that they are
one (as Husserl would say) with retentions and protentions of the present
                                      192
           1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 193

itself. Nevertheless, the distinction is legitimate, in view of the different
movements that animate the present, are contemporaneous with it: One
moves with it, another already casts it into the past from the moment it is
present (novella), while another simultaneously draws it into the future
(tale). We are lucky to have treatments of the same subject by a tale writer
and a novella writer: two lovers, one of whom dies suddenly in the other's
room. In Maupassant's tale, "Une ruse" (An artifice), everything revolves
around these questions: What is going to happen? How will the survivor
extricate himself from the situation? What will the third party-savior, in
this case a doctor, think of? In Barbey d'Aurevilly's novella, "Le rideau
cramoisi" (The crimson curtain), everything revolves around: Something
happened, but what? That is the question, not only because it is really not
known what the cold young woman just died from, but also because it will
never be known why she gave herself to the petty officer, or how the third
party-savior, here the colonel of the regiment, was able to arrange things.' It
should not be thought that it is easier to leave things open-ended: for there
to be something that has happened that we will never know about, or even
several things in a row, requires no less minute attention and precision than
the contrary case, when the author must invent the details of what will need
to be known. You will never know what just happened, or you will always
know what is going to happen: these are the reasons for the reader's two
bated breaths, in the novella and the tale, respectively, and they are two
ways in which the living present is divided at every instant. In the novella,
we do not wait for something to happen, we expect something to have just
happened. The novella is a last novella, whereas the tale is a first tale. The
"presence" of the tale writer is completely different from that of the novella
writer (and both are different from that of the novelist). Let us not dwell too
much on the dimensions of time: the novella has little to do with a memory
of the past or an act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fun-
damental forgetting. It evolves in the element of "what happened" because
it places us in a relation with something unknowable and imperceptible
(and not the other way around: it is not because it speaks of a past about
which it can no longer provide us knowledge). It may even be that nothing
has happened, but it is precisely that nothing that makes us say, Whatever
could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I
mailed that letter, etc.? What little blood vessel in my brain could have rup-
tured? What is this nothing that makes something happen? The novella has
a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with a secret matter or object to be
discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable),
whereas the tale has a relation to discovery (the form of discovery, indepen-
dent of what can be discovered). The novella also enacts postures of the
body and mind that are like folds or envelopments, whereas the tale puts
            194 D 1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

into play attitudes or positions that are like unfoldings and developments,
however unexpected. Barbey has an evident fondness for body posture, in
other words, states of the body when it is surprised by something that just
happened. In the preface to the Diaboliques, Barbey even suggests that
there is a diabolism of body postures, a sexuality, pornography, and scatol-
ogy of postures quite different from those that also, and simultaneously,
mark body attitudes or positions. Posture is like inverse suspense. Thus it
is not a question of saying that the novella relates to the past and the tale to
the future; what we should say instead is that the novella relates, in the pres-
ent itself, to the formal dimension of something that has happened, even if
that something is nothing or remains unknowable. Similarly, one should
not try to make the distinction between the novella and the tale coincide
with categories such as the fantastic, the fabulous, etc.; that is another
problem, there is no reason why it should overlap. The links of the novella
are: What happened? (the modality or expression), Secrecy (the form),
Body Posture (the content).
   Take Fitzgerald. He is a tale and novella writer of genius. He is a novella
writer when he asks himself, Whatever could have happened for things to
have come to this? He is the only one who has been able to carry this ques-
tion to such a point of intensity. It is not a question of memory, reflection,
old age, or fatigue, whereas the tale would deal with childhood, action, or
impulse. Yet it is true that Fitzgerald only asks himself the question of the
novella writer when he is personally worn-out, fatigued, sick, or even worse
off. But once again, there is not necessarily a connection: it can also be a
question of vigor, or love. It still is, even in desperate conditions. It is better
to think of it as an affair of perception: you enter a room and perceive
something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not
yet been done. Or you know that what is in the process of happening is hap-
pening for the last time, it's already over with. You hear an "I love you" you
know is the last one. Perceptual semiotics. God, whatever could have hap-
pened, even though everything is and remains imperceptible, and in order
for everything to be and remain imperceptible forever?
    Not only is there a specificity of the novella, but there is also a specific
way in which the novella treats a universal matter. For we are made of lines.
We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of writing conjugate with
other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the
variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines of writ-
ing. Perhaps the novella has its own way of giving rise to and combining
these lines, which nonetheless belong to everyone and every genre.
Vladimir Propp has said, with great solemnity, that the folktale must be
defined in terms of external and internal movements that it qualifies, for-
malizes, and combines in its own specific way.2 We would like to demon-
            1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 195

strate that the novella is defined by living lines, flesh lines, about which it
brings a special revelation. Marcel Arland is correct to say that the novella
"is nothing but pure lines right down to the nuances, and nothing but the
pure and conscious power of the word."3

                First Novella: "In the Cage," Henry James
The heroine, a young telegrapher, leads a very clear-cut, calculated life pro-
ceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams she takes one after the other,
day after day; the people to whom she sends the telegrams; their social class
and the different ways they use telegraphy; the words to be counted. More-
over, her telegraphist's cage is like a contiguous segment to the grocery
store next door, where her fiance works. Contiguity of territories. And the
fiance is constantly plotting out their future, work, vacations, house. Here,
as for all of us, there is a line of rigid segmentarity on which everything
seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the pas-
sage from one segment to another. Our lives are made like that: Not only
are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but
so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations
between people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or dis-
perse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency,
including personal identity. The fiance can say to the young woman, Even
though there are differences between our segments, we have the same tastes
and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a
grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conju-
gate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned ter-
ritories. They have a future but no becoming. This is the first life line, the
molar or rigid line of segmentarity; in no sense is it dead, for it occupies and
pervades our life, and always seems to prevail in the end. It even includes
much tenderness and love. It would be too easy to say, "This is a bad line,"
for you find it everywhere, and in all the other lines.
   A rich couple comes into the post office and reveals to the young woman,
or at least confirms, the existence of another life: coded, multiple tele-
grams, signed with pseudonyms. It is hard to tell who is who anymore, or
what anything means. Instead of a rigid line composed of well-determined
segments, telegraphy now forms a supple flow marked by quanta that are
like so many little segmentations-in-progress grasped at the moment of
their birth, as on a moonbeam, or on an intensive scale. Thanks to her "pro-
digious talent for interpretation," the young woman grasps that the man
has a secret that has placed him in danger, deeper and deeper in danger, in a
dangerous posture. It does not just have to do with his love relations with
the woman. James has reached the stage in his work when it is no longer the
           196 D 1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

matter of the secret that interests him, even if he has succeeded in render-
ing it entirely banal and unimportant. Now what counts is the form of the
secret; the matter no longer even has to be discovered (we never find out,
there are several possibilities, there is an objective indetermination, a kind
of molecularization of the secret). In relation to this man, directly with
him, the young telegraphist develops a strange passional complicity, a
whole intense molecular life that does not even enter into rivalry with the
life she leads with her fiance. What has happened, whatever could have
happened? This life, however, is not in her head, it is not imaginary. Rather,
we should say that there are two politics involved, as the young woman sug-
gests in a remarkable conversation with her fiance: a macropolitics and a
micropolitics that do not envision classes, sexes, people, or feelings in at all
the same way. Or again, there are two very different types of relations:
intrinsic relations of couples involving well-determined aggregates or ele-
ments (social classes, men and women, this or that particular person), and
less localizable relations that are always external to themselves and instead
concern flows and particles eluding those classes, sexes, and persons. Why
are the latter relations of doubles rather than of couples? "She was literally
afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be wait-
ing; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she was afraid."4 In any
case, this line is very different from the previous one; it is a line of molecu-
lar or supple segmentation the segments of which are like quanta of
deterritorialization. It is on this line that a present is defined whose very
form is the form of something that has already happened, however close
you might be to it, since the ungraspable matter of that something is
entirely molecularized, traveling at speeds beyond the ordinary thresholds
of perception. Yet we will not say that it is necessarily better.
    There is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering, react-
ing upon each other, introducing into each other either a current of supple-
ness or a point of rigidity. Nathalie Sarraute, in her essay on the novel,
praises English novelists, not only for discovering (as did Proust and
Dostoyevsky) the great movements, territories, and points of the uncon-
scious that allow us to regain time or revive the past, but also for
inopportunely following these molecular lines, simultaneously present and
imperceptible. She shows that dialogue or conversation does indeed com-
ply with the breaks of a fixed segmentarity, with vast movements of regu-
lated distribution corresponding to the attitudes and positions of each of
us; but also that they are run through and swept up by micromovements,
fine segmentations distributed in an entirely different way, unfindable par-
ticles of an anonymous matter, tiny cracks and postures operating by dif-
ferent agencies even in the unconscious, secret lines of disorientation or
            1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 197

 deterritorialization: as she puts it, a whole subconversation within conver-
 sation, in other words, a micropolitics of conversation.5
    Then James's heroine reaches a sort of maximum quantum in her sup-
 ple segmentarity or line of flow beyond which she cannot go (even if she
 wanted to, there is no going further). There is a danger that these vibrations
 traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance. What happened?
 The molecular relation between the telegraphist and the telegraph sender
 dissolved in the form of the secret—because nothing happened. Each of
 them is propelled toward a rigid segmentarity: he will marry the now-
 widowed lady, she will marry her fiance. And yet everything has changed.
 She has reached something like a new line, a third type, a kind of line of
flight that is just as real as the others even if it occurs in place: this line no
 longer tolerates segments; rather, it is like an exploding of the two
 segmentary series. She has broken through the wall, she has gotten out of
the black holes. She has attained a kind of absolute deterritorialization.
 "She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret any-
thing. There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only
glare."6 You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James. The
 nature of the secret has changed once again. Undoubtedly, the secret
 always has to do with love, and sexuality. But previously it was either only a
hidden matter given in the past (the better hidden the more ordinary it
was), and we did not exactly know what form to give it: See, I am bending
under the burden of my secret, see what mystery resides within me. It was a
way of seeming interesting, what D. H. Lawrence called "the dirty little
secret," my Oedipus, in a way. Or else the secret became the form of some-
thing whose matter was molecularized, imperceptible, unassignable: not a
given of the past but the ungivable "What happened?" But on this third line
there is no longer even any form—nothing but a pure abstract line. It is
because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be appre-
hended. To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in
order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order
finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A
clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody
else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be
nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. As
Kierkegaard says, nothing distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bour-
geois German going home or to the post office: he sends off no special tele-
graphic sign; he constantly produces or reproduces finite segments, yet he
is already moving on a line no one even suspects.7 In any case, the tele-
graphic line is not a symbol, and it is not simple. There are at least three of
them: a line of rigid and clear-cut segmentarity; a line of molecular
segmentarity; and an abstract line, a line of flight no less deadly and no less
            198 D 1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

alive than the others. On the first line, there are many words and conversa-
tions, questions and answers, interminable explanations, precisions; the
second is made of silences, allusions, and hasty innuendos inviting
interpretation. But if the third line flashes, if the line of flight is like a train
in motion, it is because one jumps linearly on it, one can finally speak
"literally" of anything at all, a blade of grass, a catastrophe or sensation,
calmly accepting that which occurs when it is no longer possible for any-
thing to stand for anything else. The three lines, however, continually
intermingle.

                              Second Novella:
                      "The Crack-up," F. Scott Fitzgerald
What happened? This is the question Fitzgerald keeps coming back to
toward the end, having remarked that "of course all life is a process of
breaking down."8 How should we understand this "of course"? We can say,
first of all, that life is always drawn into an increasingly rigid and desic-
cated segmentarity. For the writer Fitzgerald, voyages, with their clear-cut
segments, had lost their usefulness. There was also, from segment to seg-
ment, the depression, loss of wealth, fatigue and growing old, alcoholism,
the failure of conjugality, the rise of the cinema, the advent of fascism and
Stalinism, and the loss of success and talent—at the very moment
Fitzgerald would find his genius. " The big sudden blows that come, or seem
to come, from outside" (p. 69), and proceed by oversignificant breaks, mov-
ing us from one term to the other according to successive binary "choices":
rich/poor... Even when change runs in the other direction, there is noth-
ing to compensate for the rigidification, the aging that overcodes every-
thing that occurs. This is a line of rigid segmentarity bringing masses into
play, even if it was supple to begin with.
    But Fitzgerald says that there is another type of cracking, with an en-
tirely different segmentarity. Instead of great breaks, these are micro-
cracks, as in a dish; they are much more subtle and supple, and occur when
things are going well on the other side. If there is aging on this line, it is not of
the same kind: when you age on this line you don't feel it on the other line,
you don't notice it on the other line until after "it" has already happened on
this line. At such a moment, which does not correspond to any of the ages of
the other line, you reach a degree, a quantum, an intensity beyond which
you cannot go. (It's a very delicate business, these intensities: the finest
intensity becomes harmful if it overtaxes your strength at a given moment;
you have to be able to take it, you have to be in shape.) But what exactly hap-
pened? In truth, nothing assignable or perceptible: molecular changes,
redistributions of desire such that when something occurs, the self that
            1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 199

awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived.
This time, there are outbursts and crackings in the immanence of a rhi-
zome, rather than great movements and breaks determined by the tran-
scendence of a tree. The crack-up "happens almost without your knowing it
but is realized suddenly indeed" (p. 69). This molecular line, more supple
but no less disquieting, in fact, much more disquieting, is not simply inter-
nal or personal: it also brings everything into play, but on a different scale
and in different forms, with segmentations of a different nature,
rhizomatic instead of arborescent. A micropolitics.
    There is, in addition, a third line, which is like a line of rupture or a
"clean break" and marks the exploding of the other two, their shake-up...
in favor of something else? "This led me to the idea that the ones who had
survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no
parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be
forced back to the old one" (p. 81). Here, Fitzgerald contrasts rupture with
structural pseudobreaks in so-called signifying chains. But he also distin-
guishes it from more supple, more subterranean links or stems of the "voy-
age" type, or even from molecular conveyances. "The famous 'Escape' or
'run away from it all' is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the
South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A
clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable
because it makes the past cease to exist" (p. 81). Can it be that voyages are
always a return to rigid segmentarity? Is it always your daddy and mommy
that you meet when you travel, even as far away as the South Seas, like
Melville? Hardened muscles? Must we say that supple segmentarity itself
reconstructs the great figures it claimed to escape, but under the micro-
scope, in miniature? Beckett's unforgettable line is an indictment of all
voyages: " We don't travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we're foolish, but
not that foolish.'"
   In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volitized; the form of what
happened, of an imperceptible something that happened in a volatile mat-
ter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and clandestine
in motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any
longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any longer. My territories
are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite: because I
am in the process of drawing them. Wars, big and little, are behind me. Voy-
ages, always in tow to something else, are behind me. I no longer have any
secrets, having lost my face, form, and matter. I am now no more than a
line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love,
but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just
as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and
self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the
           200 D 1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

void. Absolute deterritorialization. One has become like everybody/the
whole world (tout le monde), but in a way that can become like everybody/
the whole world. One has painted the world on oneself, not oneself on the
world. It should not be said that the genius is an extraordinary person, nor
that everybody has genius. The genius is someone who knows how to make
everybody/the whole world a becoming (Ulysses, perhaps: Joyce's failed
ambition, Pound's near-success). One has entered becomings-animal,
becomings-molecular, and finally becomings-imperceptible. "I was off the
dispensing end of the relief roll forever. The heady villainous feeling con-
tinued. . . . I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a
bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand."9 Why such a
despairing tone? Does not the line of rupture or true flight have its own
danger, one worse than the others? Time to die. In any case, Fitzgerald pro-
poses a distinction between the three lines traversing us and composing "a
life" (after Maupassant). Break line, crack line, rupture line. The line of
rigid segmentarity with molar breaks; the line of supple segmentation with
molecular cracks; the line of flight or rupture, abstract, deadly and alive,
nonsegmentary.

                             Third Novella:
     "The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass," Pierrette Fleutiaux10
Some segments are more or less near, and others more or less distant. The
segments seem to encircle an abyss, a kind of huge black hole. On each seg-
ment there are two kinds of lookouts, near-seers and far-seers. What they
watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions, disturbances, and
rebellions occurring in the abyss. But there is a major difference between
the two types of lookouts. The near-seers have a simple spyglass. In the
abyss, they see the outline of gigantic cells, great binary divisions, dichoto-
mies, well-defined segments of the type "classroom, barracks, low-income
housing project, or even countryside seen from an airplane." They see
branches, chains, rows, columns, dominoes, striae. Once in a while along
the edges they discover a misshapen figure or a shaky contour. Then they
bring out the terrible Ray Telescope. It is used not to see with but to cut
with, to cut out shapes. This geometrical instrument, which emits a laser
beam, assures the dominion of the great signifying break everywhere and
restores the momentarily threatened molar order. The cutting telescope
overcodes everything; it acts on flesh and blood, but itself is nothing but
pure geometry, as a State affair, and the near-seers' physics in the service of
that machine. What is geometry, what is the State, and what are the near-
seers? These are meaningless questions ("I am speaking literally") because
it is not so much a question of defining something as effectively drawing a
            1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 201

line; not a line of writing but a line of rigid segmentarity along which every-
one will be judged and rectified according to his or her contours, individual
or collective.
    Very different is the situation of those with long-distance vision, the far-
seers, with all their ambiguities. There are very few of them, at most one per
segment. Their telescopes are complex and refined. But they are in no way
leaders. And what they see is entirely different from what the others see.
They see a whole microsegmentarity, details of details, "a roller coaster of
possibilities," tiny movements that have not reached the edge, lines or
vibrations that start to form long before there are outlined shapes, "seg-
ments that move by jerks." A whole rhizome, a molecular segmentarity
that does not permit itself to be overcoded by a signifier like the cutting
machine, or even to be attributed to a given figure, a given aggregate or ele-
ment. This second line is inseparable from the anonymous segmentation
that produces it and challenges everything all the time, without goal or rea-
son: "What happened?" The far-seers can divine the future, but always in
the form of a becoming of something that has already happened in a molec-
ular matter; unfindable particles. The situation is the same in biology: the
great cellular divisions and dichotomies, with their contours, are accompa-
nied by migrations, invaginations, displacements, and morphogenetic
impulses whose segments are marked not by localizable points but by
thresholds of intensity passing underneath, mitoses that scramble every-
thing, and molecular lines that intersect each other within the large-scale
cells and between their breaks. The situation is the same in a society: rigid
segments and overcutting segments are crosscut underneath by segmenta-
tions of another nature. But this is neither one nor the other, neither biol-
ogy nor a society; nor is it a resemblance between the two: "I am speaking
literally," I am drawing lines, lines of writing, and life passes between the
lines. A line of supple segmentarity formed and became entangled with the
other, but it was a very different kind of line, shakily drawn by the micro-
politics of the far-seers. It is a political affair, as worldwide in scope as the
other, but on a scale and in a form that is incommensurable, nonsuperpos-
able. It is also a perceptual affair, for perception always goes hand in hand
with semiotics, practice, politics, theory. One sees, speaks and thinks on a
given scale, and according to a given line that may or may not conjugate
with the other's line, even if the other is still oneself. If it does not, then you
should not insist, you should not argue; you should flee, flee, even saying as
you go, "Okay, okay, you win." It's no use talking; you first have to change
telescopes, mouths, and teeth, all of the segments. Not only does one speak
literally, one also lives literally, in other words, following lines, whether
connectable or not, even heterogeneous ones. Sometimes it doesn't work
when they are homogeneous."
           202 D 1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

   The ambiguity of the far-seers' situation is that they are able to detect the
slightest microinfraction in the abyss, things the others do not see; they also
observe, beneath its apparent geometrical justice, the dreadful damage
caused by the Cutting Telescope. They feel as though they foresee things
and are ahead of the others because they see the smallest thing as already
having happened; but they know that their warnings are to no avail because
the cutting telescope will set everything straight without being warned,
without the need for or possibility of prediction. At times they feel that
they do indeed see something the others do not, but at other times that
what they see differs only in degree and serves no purpose. Although they
are collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest project of control, how
could they not feel a vague sympathy for the subterranean activity revealed
to them? An ambiguity in the molecular line, as if it vacillated between two
sides. One day (what will have happened?), a far-seer will abandon his or
her segment and start walking across a narrow overpass above the dark
abyss, will break his or her telescope and depart on a line of flight to meet a
blind Double approaching from the other side.

   Individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesies,
tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We
said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather, of bun-
dles of lines, for each kind is multiple. We may be more interested in a cer-
tain line than in the others, and perhaps there is indeed one that is, not
determining, but of greater importance . . . if it is there. For some of these
lines are imposed on us from outside, at least in part. Others sprout up
somewhat by chance, from a trifle, why we will never know. Others can be
invented, drawn, without a model and without chance: we must invent our
lines of flight, if we are able, and the only way we can invent them is by
effectively drawing them, in our lives. Aren't lines of flight the most diffi-
cult of all? Certain groups or people have none and never will. Certain
groups or people lack a given kind of line, or have lost it. The painter Flor-
ence Julien has a special interest in lines of flight: she invented a procedure
by which she extracts from photographs lines that are nearly abstract and
formless. But once again, there is a bundle of very diverse lines: the line of
flight of children leaving school at a run is different from that of demon-
strators chased by the police, or of a prisoner breaking out. There are differ-
ent animal lines of flight: each species, each individual, has its own.
Fernand Deligny transcribes the lines and paths of autistic children by
means of maps: he carefully distinguishes "lines of drift" and "customary
lines." This does not only apply to walking; he also makes maps of percep-
tions and maps of gestures (cooking or collecting wood) showing custom-
ary gestures and gestures of drift. The same goes for language, if it is
            1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 203

present. Deligny opened his lines of writing to life lines. The lines are con-
stantly crossing, intersecting for a moment, following one another. A line of
drift intersects a customary line, and at that point the child does something
not quite belonging to either one: he or she finds something he or she lost—
what happened?—or jumps and claps his or her hands, a slight and rapid
movement—and that gesture in turn emits several lines.'2 In short, there is
a line of flight, which is already complex since it has singularities; and there
a customary or molar line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a
molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other.
    As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean noth-
ing. It is an affair of cartography. They compose us, as they compose our
map. They transform themselves and may even cross over into one
another. Rhizome. It is certain that they have nothing to do with language;
it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is writing that must
take sustenance from them, between its own lines. It is certain that they
have nothing to do with a signifier, the determination of a subject by the
signifier; instead, the signifier arises at the most rigidified level of one of
the lines, and the subject is spawned at the lowest level. It is certain that
they have nothing to do with a structure, which is never occupied by any-
thing more than points and positions, by arborescences, and which always
forms a closed system, precisely in order to prevent escape. Deligny
invokes a common Body upon which these lines are inscribed as so many
segments, thresholds, or quanta, territorialities, deterritorializations, or
reterritorializations. The lines are inscribed on a Body without Organs,
upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line
with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of the BwO.
This body is the only practical object of schizoanalysis: What is your body
without organs? What are your lines? What map are you in the process of
making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price,
for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your BwO,
merged with that line? Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are
you deterritorializing? Which lines are you severing, and which are you
extending or resuming? Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or
aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains only to linea-
ments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the
analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a
question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being.
Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their rela-
tions, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the
same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does.
Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new. Or rather, there is no problem of
application: the lines it brings out could equally be the lines of a life, a work
           204 D 1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

of literature or art, or a society, depending on which system of coordinates
is chosen.
   Line of molar or rigid segmentarity, line of molecular or supple seg-
mentation, line of flight—many problems arise. The first concerns the
particular character of each line. It might be thought that rigid segments
are socially determined, predetermined, overcoded by the State; there
may be a tendency to construe supple segmentarity as an interior activity,
something imaginary or phantasmic. As for the line of flight, would it not
be entirely personal, the way in which an individual escapes on his or her
own account, escapes "responsibilities," escapes the world, takes refuge
in the desert, or else in a r t . . . ? False impression. Supple segmentarity
has nothing to do with the imaginary, and micropolitics is no less exten-
sive or real than macropolitics. Politics on the grand scale can never
administer its molar segments without also dealing with the micro-
injections or infiltrations that work in its favor or present an obstacle to it;
indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater the molecularization
of the agencies they put into play. Lines of flight, for their part, never con-
sist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when
you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from
all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to
seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic,
about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight,
among animals or humans.13 Even History is forced to take that route
rather than proceeding by "signifying breaks." What is escaping in a soci-
ety at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are
invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State. "I may be run-
ning, but I'm looking for a gun as I go" (George Jackson). It was along lines
of flight that the nomads swept away everything in their path and found
new weapons, leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck. It is possible for a sin-
gle group, or a single individual even, to exhibit all the lines we have been
discussing simultaneously. But it is most frequently the case that a single
group or individual functions as a line of flight; that group or individual
creates the line rather than following it, is itself the living weapon it forges
rather than stealing one. Lines of flight are realities; they are very danger-
ous for societies, although they can get by without them, and sometimes
manage to keep them to a minimum.
   The second problem concerns the respective importance of the lines.
You can begin with the rigid segmentarity, it's the easiest, it's pregiven;
and then you can look at how and to what extent it is crosscut by a supple
segmentarity, a kind of rhizome surrounding its roots. Then you can look
at how the line of flight enters in. And alliances and battles. But it is also
possible to begin with the line of flight: perhaps this is the primary line,
            1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 205

 with its absolute deterritorialization. It is clear that the line of flight does
 not come afterward; it is there from the beginning, even if it awaits its
 hour, and waits for the others to explode. Supple segmentarity, then, is
 only a kind of compromise operating by relative deterritorializations and
permitting reterritorializations that cause blockages and reversions to
the rigid line. It is odd how supple segmentarity is caught between the two
other lines, ready to tip to one side or the other; such is its ambiguity. It is
 also necessary to look at the various combinations: it is quite possible that
 one group or individual's line of flight may not work to benefit that of
another group or individual; it may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw
 it even deeper into rigid segmentarity. It can happen in love that one per-
 son's creative line is the other's imprisonment. The composition of the
lines, of one line with another, is a problem, even of two lines of the same
type. There is no assurance that two lines of flight will prove compatible,
compossible. There is no assurance that the body without organs will be
 easy to compose. There is no assurance that a love, or a political ap-
proach, will withstand it.
     Third problem: there is a mutual immanence of the lines. And it is not
easy to sort them out. No one of them is transcendent, each is at work
within the others. Immanence everywhere. Lines of flight are immanent to
the social field. Supple segmentarity continually dismantles the concre-
tions of rigid segmentarity, but everything that it dismantles it reassembles
on its own level: micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power,
microfascisms. The line of flight blasts the two segmentary series apart; but
it is capable of the worst, of bouncing off the wall, falling into a black hole,
taking the path of greatest regression, and in its vagaries reconstructing the
most rigid of segments. Have you sown your wild oats? That is worse than
not escaping at all: See Lawrence's reproach to Melville.14 Between the
matter of a dirty little secret in rigid segmentarity, the empty form of
"What happened?" in supple segmentarity, and clandestinity of what can
no longer happen on the line of flight, how can we fail to see the upheavals
caused by a monster force, the Secret, threatening to bring everything tum-
bling down? Between the Couple of the first kind of segmentarity, the Dou-
ble of the second, and the Clandestine of the line of flight, there are so many
possible mixtures and passages.
    There is one last problem, the most anguishing one, concerning the dan-
gers specific to each line. There is not much to say about the danger con-
fronting the first, for the chances are slim that its rigidification will fail.
There is not much to say about the ambiguity of the second. But why is the
line of flight, even aside from the danger it runs of reverting to one of the
other two lines, imbued with such singular despair in spite of its message of
joy, as if at the very moment things are coming to a resolution its undertak-
           206 O 1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

ing were threatened by something reaching down to its core, by a death, a
demolition? Shestov said of Chekhov, a great creator of novellas: "There
can be practically no doubt that Chekhov exerted himself, and something
broke inside him. And the overstrain came not from hard and heavy labor;
no mighty overpowering exploit broke him: he stumbled and fell, he
slipped. . . . The old Chekhov of gaiety and mirth is no more. . . . Instead, a
morose and overshadowed man, a 'criminal.' "15 What happened? Once
again, this is the question facing all of Chekhov's characters. Is it not possi-
ble to exert oneself, and even break something, without falling into a black
hole of bitterness and sand? But did Chekhov really fall? Is that not to
judge him entirely from the outside? Was Chekhov not correct in saying
that however grim his characters are, he still carries "a hundred pounds of
love"? Of course, nothing is easy on the lines that compose us, and that con-
stitute the essence of the Novella (la Nouvelle), and sometimes of Good
News (la Bonne Nouvelle).
   What are your couples, your doubles, your clandestines, and what are
their mixes? When one person says to another, love the taste of whiskey on
my lips like I love the gleam of madness in your eyes, what lines are they in
the process of composing, or, on the contrary, making incompossible?
Fitzgerald: "Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relations will tell you
in good faith that it was my drinking that drove Zelda mad, and the other
half would assure you that it was her madness that drove me to drink. Nei-
ther of these judgments means much of anything. These two groups of
friends and relations would be unanimous in saying that each of us would
have been much better off without the other. The irony is that we have
never been more in love with each other in all of our lives. She loves the
alcohol on my lips. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations." "In the
end, nothing really had much importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in
all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other." Beautiful texts. All
of the lines are there: the lines of family and friends, of all those who
speak, explain, and psychoanalyze, assigning rights and wrongs, of the
whole binary machine of the Couple, united or divided, in rigid seg-
mentarity (50 percent). Then there is the line of supple segmentation,
from which the alcoholic and the madwoman extract, as from a kiss on the
lips and eyes, the multiplication of a double at the limit of what they can
endure in their state and with the tacit understandings serving them as
internal messages. Finally, there is a line of flight, all the more shared now
that they are separated, or vice versa, each of them the clandestine of the
other, a double all the more successful now that nothing has importance
any longer, now that everything can begin anew, since they have been
destroyed but not by each other. Nothing will enter memory, everything
was on the lines, between the lines, in the AND that made one and the.
          1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 207

other imperceptible, without disjunction or conjunction but only a line of
flight forever in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the
opposite of renunciation or resignation—a new happiness?
9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity




   Segmentarities (Overview of the Types)

We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being
is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing
us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially
segmented. The house is segmented according to its rooms' assigned pur-
poses; streets, according to the order of the city; the factory, according to the
nature of the work and operations performed in it. We are segmented in a
binary fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes,
but also men-women, adults-children, and so on. We are segmented in a cir-
                                            208
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 209

cular fashion, in ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce's
"letter": my affairs, my neighborhood's affairs, my city's, my country's, the
world's . . . We are segmented in a linear fashion, along a straight line or a
number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or
"proceeding": as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever
proceduring or procedured, in the family, in school, in the army, on the job.
School tells us, "You're not at home anymore"; the army tells us, "You're not
in school anymore" . .. Sometimes the various segments belong to different
individuals or groups, and sometimes the same individual or group passes
from one segment to another. But these figures of segmentarity, the binary,
circular, and linear, are bound up with one another, even cross over into each
other, changing according to the point of view. This is already evident among
"savage" peoples: Lizot shows how the communal House is organized in cir-
cular fashion, going from interior to exterior in a series of coronas within
which certain types of localizable activities take place (worship and ceremo-
nies, followed by exchange of goods, followed by family life, followed by
trash and excrement); at the same time "each of these coronas is itself trans-
versally divided, each segment devolves upon a particular lineage and is sub-
divided among different kinship groups."1 In a more general context,
Levi-Strauss shows that the dualist organization of primitive peoples has a
circular form, and also takes a linear form encompassing "any number of
groups" (at least three).2
   Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The
fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists to
account for so-called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central State
apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institu-
tions. In these societies, the social segments have a certain leeway, between
the two extreme poles effusion and scission, depending on the task and the
situation; there is also considerable communicability between heterogene-
ous elements, so that one segment can fit with another in a number of
different ways; and they have a local construction excluding the prior
determination of a base domain (economic, political, juridical, artistic);
they have extrinsic and situational properties, or relations irreducible to
the intrinsic properties of a structure; activity is continuous, so segmen-
tarity is not grasped as something separate from a segmentation-in-
progress operating by outgrowths, detachments, and mergings. Primitive
segmentarity is characterized by a polyvocal code based on lineages and
their varying situations and relations, and an itinerant territoriality based
on local, overlapping divisions. Codes and territories, clan lineages and tri-
bal territorialities, form a fabric of relatively supple segmentarity.3
   However, it seems to us difficult to maintain that State societies, even
our modern States, are any less segmentary. The classical opposition
              210 D 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

between segmentarity and centralization hardly seems relevant.4 Not only
does the State exercise power over the segments it sustains or permits to
survive, but it possesses, and imposes, its own segmentarity. Perhaps the
opposition sociologists establish between the segmentary and the central is
biological deep down: the ringed worm, and the central nervous system.
But the central brain itself is a worm, even more segmented than the others,
in spite of and including all of its vicarious actions. There is no opposition
between the central and the segmentary. The modern political system is a
global whole, unified and unifying, but is so because it implies a constella-
tion of juxtaposed, imbricated, ordered subsystems; the analysis of deci-
sion making brings to light all kinds of compartmentalizations and partial
processes that interconnect, but not without gaps and displacements.
Technocracy operates by the segmentary division of labor (this applies to
the international division of labor as well). Bureaucracy exists only in com-
partmentalized offices and functions only by "goal displacements" and the
corresponding "dysfunctions." Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the
boss's office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower. In short,
we would say that modern life has not done away with segmentarity but has
on the contrary made it exceptionally rigid.
    Instead of setting up an opposition between the segmentary and the cen-
tralized, we should make a distinction between two types of segmentarity,
one "primitive" and supple, the other "modern" and rigid. This distinction
reframes each of the figures previously discussed.
    1. Binary oppositions (men/women, those on top/those on the bottom,
etc.) are very strong in primitive societies, but seem to be the result of
machines and assemblages that are not in themselves binary. The social
binarity between men and women in a group applies rules according to
which both sexes must take their respective spouses from different groups
(which is why there are at least three groups). Thus Levi-Strauss can dem-
onstrate that dualist organization never stands on its own in this kind of
society. On the contrary, it is a particularity of modern societies, or rather
State societies, to bring into their own duality machines that function as
such, and proceed simultaneously by biunivocal relationships and succes-
sively by binarized choices. Classes and sexes come in twos, and phenom-
ena of tripartition result from a transposition of the dual, not the reverse.
We have already encountered this, notably in the case of the Face machine,
which differs in this respect from primitive head machines. It seems that
modern societies elevated dual segmentarity to the level of a self-sufficient
organization. The question, therefore, is not whether the status of women,
or those on the bottom, is better or worse, but the type of organization from
which that status results.
   2. Similarly, we may note that in primitive societies circular segmen-
               1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 211

tarity does not necessarily imply that the circles are concentric, or have the
same center. In a supple regime, centers already act as so many knots, eyes,
or black holes', but they do not all resonate together, they do not fall on the
same point, they do not converge in the same black hole. There is a multi-
plicity of animist eyes, each of which is assigned, for example, a particular
animal spirit (snake-spirit, woodpecker-spirit, cayman-spirit ...). Each
black hole is occupied by a different animal eye. Doubtless, we see opera-
tions of rigidification and centralization take shape here and there: all of
the centers must collect on a single circle, which itself has a single center.
The shaman draws lines between all the points or spirits, outlines a constel-
lation, a radiating set of roots tied to a central tree. This is the birth of a cen-
tralized power with an arborescent system to discipline the outgrowths of
the primitive rhizome.5 Here, the tree simultaneously plays the role of a
principle of dichotomy or binarity, and an axis of rotation. But the power of
the shaman is still entirely localized, strictly dependent upon a particular
segment, contingent upon drugs, and each point continues to emit inde-
pendent sequences. The same cannot be said of modern societies, or even
of States. Of course, the centralized is not opposed to the segmentary, and
the circles remain distinct. But they become concentric, definitively
arborified. The segmentarity becomes rigid, to the extent that all centers
resonate in, and all black holes fall on, a single point of accumulation that is
like a point of intersection somewhere behind the eyes. The face of the
father, teacher, colonel, boss, enter into redundancy, refer back to a center
of signifiance that moves across the various circles and passes back over all
of the segments. The supple microheads with animal facializations are
replaced by a macroface whose center is everywhere and circumference
nowhere. There are no longer n eyes in the sky, or in becomings-animal and
-vegetable, but a central computing eye scanning all of the radii. The cen-
tral State is constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity but by
a concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among
centers. There are already just as many power centers in primitive societies;
or, if one prefers, there are still just as many in State societies. The latter,
however, behave as apparatuses of resonance; they organize resonance,
whereas the former inhibit it.6
    3. Finally, in the case of linear segmentarity, we would say that each seg-
ment is underscored, rectified, and homogenized in its own right, but also
in relation to the others. Not only does each have its own unit of measure,
but there is an equivalence and translatability between units. The central
eye has as its correlate a space through which it moves, but it itself remains
invariant in relation to its movements. With the Greek city-state and
Cleisthenes' reform, a homogeneous and isotopic space appears that
overcodes the lineal segments, at the same time as distinct focal points
              212 O 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

begin to resonate in a center acting as their common denominator.7 Paul
Virilio shows that after the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire imposes a
geometrical or linear reason of State including a general outline of camps
and fortifications, a universal art of "marking boundaries by lines," a
laying-out of territories, a substitution of space for places and territoriali-
ties, and a transformation of the world into the city; in short, an increas-
ingly rigid segmentarity.8 The segments, once underscored or overcoded,
seem to lose their ability to bud, they seem to lose their dynamic relation to
segmentations-in-progress, or in the act of coming together or coming
apart. If there exists a primitive "geometry" (a protogeometry), it is an
operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affecta-
tions befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their seg-
mentation: there is "roundness," but no circle, "alignments," but no
straight line, etc. On the contrary, State geometry, or rather the bond
between the State and geometry, manifests itself in the primacy of the
theorem-element, which substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple mor-
phological formations, properties for affects, predetermined segments for
segmentations-in-progress. Geometry and arithmetic take on the power of
the scalpel. Private property implies a space that has been overcoded and
gridded by surveying. Not only does each line have its segments, but the
segments of one line correspond to those of another; for example, the wage
regime establishes a correspondence between monetary segments, produc-
tion segments, and consumable-goods segments.
    We may summarize the principal differences between rigid segmentarity
and supple segmentarity. In the rigid mode, binary segmentarity stands on
its own and is governed by great machines of direct binarization, whereas in
the other mode, binarities result from "multiplicities of n dimensions." Sec-
ond, circular segmentarity tends to become concentric, in other words,
causes all of its focal points to coincide in a single center that is in constant
movement but remains invariant through its movements, and is part of a
machine of resonance. Finally, linear segmentarity feeds into a machine of
overcoding that constitutes more geometrico homogeneous space and
extracts segments that are determinate as to their substance, form, and rela-
tions. It will be noted that this rigid segmentarity is always expressed by the
Tree. The Tree is the knot of arborescence or principle of dichotomy; it is the
axis of'rotation guaranteeing concentricity; it is the structure or network
gridding the possible. This opposition between arborified and rhizomatic
segmentarity is not just meant to indicate two states of a single process, but
also to isolate two different processes. For primitive societies operate essen-
tially by codes and territorialities. It is in fact the distinction between these
two elements, the tribal system of territories and the clan system of lineages,
that prevents resonance.9 Modern, or State, societies, on the other hand,
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 213

have replaced the declining codes with a univocal overcoding, and the lost
territories with a specific reterritorialization (which takes place in an
overcoded geometrical space). Segmentarity is always the result of an
abstract machine, but different abstract machines operate in the rigid and
the supple.

    It is not enough, therefore, to oppose the centralized to the segmentary.
Nor is it enough to oppose two kinds of segmentarity, one supple and prim-
itive, the other modern and rigidified. There is indeed a distinction
between the two, but they are inseparable, they overlap, they are entangled.
Primitive societies have nuclei of rigidity or arborification that as much
anticipate the State as ward it off. Conversely, our societies are still suf-
fused by a supple fabric without which their rigid segments would not hold.
Supple segmentarity cannot be restricted to primitive peoples. It is not the
vestige of the savage within us but a perfectly contemporary function,
inseparable from the other. Every society, and every individual, are thus
plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other molecu-
lar. If they are distinct, it is because they do not have the same terms or the
same relations or the same nature or even the same type of multiplicity. If
they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into each
other. The configurations differ, for example, between the primitives and
us, but the two segmentarities are always in presupposition. In short, every-
thing is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a
micropolitics. Take aggregates of the perception or feeling type: their molar
organization, their rigid segmentarity, does not preclude the existence of
an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine
segmentations that grasp or experience different things, are distributed
and operate differently. There is a micropolitics of perception, affection,
conversation, and so forth. If we consider the great binary aggregates, such
as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular
assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal
dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molec-
ular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and
the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.:
a thousand tiny sexes. And social classes themselves imply "masses" that
do not have the same kind of movement, distribution, or objectives and do
not wage the same kind of struggle. Attempts to distinguish mass from class
effectively tend toward this limit: the notion of mass is a molecular notion
operating according to a type of segmentation irreducible to the molar
segmentarity of class. Yet classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they
crystallize them. And masses are constantly flowing or leaking from
classes. Their reciprocal presupposition, however, does not preclude a dif-
             214 D 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

ference in viewpoint, nature, scale, and function (understood in this way,
the notion of mass has entirely different connotations than Canetti's
"crowd").
    It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with
compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each
segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or on
top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic segmen-
tation, a suppleness of and communication between offices, a bureaucratic
perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity practiced even against
administrative regulations. If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy,
it is because he shows how, at a certain level (but which one? it is not
localizable), the barriers between offices cease to be "a definite dividing
line" and are immersed in a molecular medium (milieu) that dissolves
them and simultaneously makes the office manager proliferate into
microfigures impossible to recognize or identify, discernible only when
they are centralizable: another regime, coexistent with the separation and
totalization of the rigid segments.I0 We would even say that fascism implies
a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their cen-
tralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian
State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devis-
ing: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship
type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only
at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of
totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a prolifera-
tion of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point,
before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural
fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's
fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple,
family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole
that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonat-
ing in a great, generalized central black hole.1' There is fascism when a war
machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National
Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it
unequaled ability to act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say
that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the German State admin-
istration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal
microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to
penetrate every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and supple
segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if
capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it pre-
ferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of
view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 215

segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less
fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical
power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitar-
ian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal
points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms
spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global ques-
tion: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own
repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do
they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they
tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex
assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microforma-
tions already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations,
semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual
energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in
interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular ener-
gies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organiza-
tions will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too easy to be
antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the
fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both
personal and collective.
    Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be
avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a little sup-
pleness is enough to make things "better." But microfascisms are what
make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as harmful as the
most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular
were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual and
interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the
other. Third, the two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small
form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail
and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coexten-
sive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the quali-
tative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or
cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between the
two, directly or inversely proportional.
   In the first case, the stronger the molar organization is, the more it
induces a molecularization of its own elements, relations, and elementary
apparatuses. When the machine becomes planetary or cosmic, there is an
increasing tendency for assemblages to miniaturize, to become micro-
assemblages. Following Andre Gorz's formula, the only remaining element
of work left under world capitalism is the molecular, or molecularized,
individual, in other words, the "mass" individual. The administration of a
great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-
              216 D 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point
that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of soci-
ety by and for a micropolitics of insecurity.12 However, the second case is
even more important: molecular movements do not complement but
rather thwart and break through the great worldwide organization. That is
what French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing was saying in his military
and political geography lesson: the more balanced things are between East
and West, in an overcoding and overarmed dualist machine, the more
"destabilized" they become along the other, North-South, line. There is
always a Palestinian or Basque or Corsican to bring about a "regional
destabilization of security."13 The two great molar aggregates of the East
and West are perpetually being undermined by a molecular segmentation
causing a zigzag crack, making it difficult for them to keep their own seg-
ments in line. It is as if a line of flight, perhaps only a tiny trickle to begin
with, leaked between the segments, escaping their centralization, eluding
their totalization. The profound movements stirring in a society present
themselves in this fashion, even if they are necessarily "represented" as a
confrontation between molar segments. It is wrongly said (in Marxism in
particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions. That is true only
on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society
is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always some-
thing that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the reso-
nance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to
a "change in values," the youth, women, the mad, etc. May 1968 in France
was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from
the viewpoint of macropolitics. It happens that people who are very lim-
ited in outlook or are very old grasp the event better than the most
advanced politicians, or politicians who consider themselves advanced
from the viewpoint of organization. As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs
to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped
greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this
case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May '68:
those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms understood nothing of
the event because something unaccountable was escaping. The politicians,
the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept repeat-
ing over and over again that "conditions" were not ripe. It was as though
they had been temporarily deprived of the entire dualism machine that
made them valid spokespeople. Bizarrely, de Gaulle, and even Pompidou,
understood much more than the others. A molecular flow was escaping,
minuscule at first, then swelling, without, however, ceasing to be
unassignable. The reverse, however, is also true: molecular escapes and
movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar orga-
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 217

nizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes,
classes, and parties.
   The issue is that the molar and the molecular are distinguished not by
size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system of reference envi-
sioned. Perhaps, then, the words "line" and "segment" should be reserved
for molar organization, and other, more suitable, words should be sought
for molecular composition. And in fact, whenever we can identify a well-
defined segmented line, we notice that it continues in another form, as a
quantum flow. And in every instance, we can locate a "power center" at the
border between the two, defined not by an absolute exercise of power
within its domain but by the relative adaptations and conversions it effects
between the line and the flow. Take a monetary flow with segments. These
segments can be defined from several points of view, for example, from the
viewpoint of a corporate budget (real wages, net profit, management sala-
ries, interest on assets, reserves, investments, etc.). Now this line of
payment-money is linked to another aspect, namely, the flow of financing-
money, which has, not segments, but rather poles, singularities, and quanta
(the poles of the flow are the creation of money and its destruction; the sin-
gularities are nominal liquid assets; the quanta are inflation, deflation,
stagflation, etc.). This has led some to speak of a "mutant, convulsive, cre-
ative and circulatory flow" tied to desire and always subjacent to the solid
line and its segments determining interest rates and supply and demand.14
In a balance of payment, we again encounter a binary segmentarity that
distinguishes, for example, so-called autonomous operations from
so-called compensatory operations. But movements of capital do not allow
themselves to be segmented in this way; because they are "the most thor-
oughly broken down, according to their nature, duration, and the personal-
ity of the creditor or debtor," one "no longer has any idea where to draw the
line when dealing with these flows."15 Yet there is always a correlation
between the two aspects since linearization and segmentation are where
flows run dry, but are also their point of departure for a new creation. When
we talk about banking power, concentrated most notably in the central
banks, it is indeed a question of the relative power to regulate "as much as"
possible the communication, conversion, and coadaptation of the two
parts of the circuit. That is why power centers are defined much more by
what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zone of power. In
short, the molecular, or microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by
the smallness of its elements but by the nature of its "mass"—the quantum
flow as opposed to the molar segmented line.16 The task of making the seg-
ments correspond to the quanta, of adjusting the segments to the quanta,
implies hit-and-miss changes in rhythm and mode rather than any omnip-
otence; and something always escapes.
               218 D 1933:MICROPOLITICSANDSEGMENTARITY

   We could take other examples, such as the power of the Church. Church
power has always been associated with a certain administration of sin
possessing a strong segmentarity (the seven deadly sins), units of measure
(how many times?), and rules of equivalence and atonement (confession,
penance . . .). But there is also what might be called the molecular flow of
sinfulness, something quite different yet complementary: it hugs close to
the linear zone, as though negotiated through it, but itself has only poles
(original sin-redemption or grace) and quanta ("that sin which is the
default of consciousness of sin"; the sin of having a consciousness of sin;
the sin of the consequence of having a consciousness of sin).17 The same
could be said of a flow of criminality, in contrast to the molar line of a legal
code and its divisions. Or to take another example, discussions of military
power, or the power of the army, consider a segmentable line broken down
into types of war corresponding exactly to the States waging war and the
political goals those States assign themselves (from "limited" war to "total"
war). But following Clausewitz's intuition, the war machine is very differ-
ent; it is a flow of absolute war stretching between an offensive and a defen-
sive pole, and is marked only by quanta (psychic and material forces that
are like the nominal liquid assets of war). We may say of the pure flow that it
is abstract yet real; ideal yet effective; absolute yet "differentiated." It is
true that the flow and its quanta can be grasped only by virtue of indexes on
the segmented line, but conversely, that line and those indexes exist only by
virtue of the flow suffusing them. In every case, it is evident that the seg-
mented line (macropolitics) is immersed in and prolonged by quantum
flows (micropolitics) that continually reshuffle and stir up its segments.

     A: flow and poles
     a: quanta
     b: line and segments
     B: power center
     (all of which constitutes a
     cycle or period)



   In homage to Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904): his long-forgotton work has
assumed new relevance with the influence of American sociology, in par-
ticular microsociology. It had been quashed by Durkheim and his school
(in polemics similar to and as harsh as Cuvier's against Geoffrey Saint-
Hilaire). Durkheim's preferred objects of study were the great collective
representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and overcoded.
Tarde countered that collective representations presuppose exactly what
needs explaining, namely, "the similarity of millions of people." That is
why Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail, or of the infini-
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 219

tesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and inventions constituting an
entire realm of subrepresentative matter. Tarde's best work was his analy-
ses of a minuscule bureaucratic innovation, or a linguistic innovation, etc.
The Durkheimians answered that what Tarde did was psychology or inter-
psychology, not sociology. But that is true only in appearance, as a first
approximation: a microimitation does seem to occur between two individ-
uals. But at the same time, and at a deeper level, it has to do not with an
individual but with a flow or a wave. Imitation is the propagation of a flow;
opposition is binarization, the making binary of flows; invention is a conju-
gation or connection of different flows. What, according to Tarde, is a flow?
It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage); a flow is always of
belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every society,
because they are flows and as such are "quantifiable"; they are veritable
social Quantities, whereas sensations are qualitative and representations
are simple resultants.18 Infinitesimal imitation, opposition, and invention
are therefore like flow quanta marking a propagation, binarization, or con-
jugation of beliefs and desires. Hence the importance of statistics, provid-
ing it concerns itself with the cutting edges and not only with the
"stationary" zone of representations. For in the end, the difference is not at
all between the social and the individual (or interindividual), but between
the molar realm of representations, individual or collective, and the molec-
ular realm of beliefs and desires in which the distinction between the social
and the individual loses all meaning since flows are neither attributable to
individuals nor overcodable by collective signifiers. Representations
already define large-scale aggregates, or determine segments on a line;
beliefs and desires, on the other hand, are flows marked by quanta, flows
that are created, exhausted, or transformed, added to one another, sub-
tracted or combined. Tarde invented microsociology and took it to its full
breadth and scope, denouncing in advance the misinterpretations to which
it would later fall victim.
    This is how you tell the difference between the segmented line and the
quantum flow. A mutant flow always implies something tending to elude or
escape the codes; quanta are precisely signs or degrees of deterrito-
rialization in the decoded flow. The rigid line, on the other hand, implies
an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering codes; its segments are
like reterritorializations on the overcoding or overcoded line. Let us return
to the case of original sin: it is the very act of a flow marking a decoding in
relation to creation (with just one last island preserved for the Virgin), and
a deterritorialization in relation to the land of Adam; but it simultaneously
performs an overcoding by binary organizations and resonance (Powers,
Church, empires, rich-poor, men-women, etc.) and complementary reter-
ritorializations (on the land of Cain, on work, on reproduction, on
              220 D 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

money.. .)• Now the two systems of reference are in inverse relation to
each other, in the sense that the first eludes the second, or the second arrests
the first, prevents it from flowing further; but at the same time, they are
strictly complementary and coexistent, because one exists only as a func-
tion of the other; yet they are different and in direct relation to each
other, although corresponding term by term, because the second only
effectively arrests the first on a "plane" that is not the plane specific to the
first, while the momentum of the first continues on its own plane.
   A social field is always animated by all kinds of movements of decoding
and deterritorialization affecting "masses" and operating at different
speeds and paces. These are not contradictions but escapes. At this level,
everything is a question of mass. For example, from the tenth to the four-
teenth centuries we see an acceleration of factors of decoding and deterri-
torialization: the masses of the last invaders swooping down from north,
east, and south; military masses turned into pillaging bands; ecclesiastical
masses confronted with infidels and heretics, and adopting increasingly
deterritorialized objectives; peasant masses leaving the seigneurial do-
mains; seigneurial masses forced to find means of exploitation less terri-
torial than serfdom; urban masses breaking away from the backcountry
and finding increasingly less territorialized social arrangements in the cit-
ies; women's masses detaching themselves from the old passional and con-
jugal code; monetary masses that cease to be a hoard object and inject
themselves into great commercial circuits.19 We may cite the Crusades as
effecting a connection of flows, each boosting and accelerating the others
(even the flow of femininity in the "faraway Princess," even the flow of chil-
dren in the Crusades of the thirteenth century). But at the same time, and
inseparably, there occur overcodings and reterritorializations. The Cru-
sades were overcoded by the pope and assigned territorial objectives. The
Holy Land, the Peace of God, a new type of abbey, new figures of money,
new modes of exploitation of the peasant through leasehold and the wage
system (or revivals of slavery), urban reterritorializations, etc., form a
complex system. At this point, we must introduce a distinction between the
two notions of connection and conjugation of flows. "Connection" indi-
cates the way in which decoded and deterritorialized flows boost one
another, accelerate their shared escape, and augment or stoke their quanta;
the "conjugation" of these same flows, on the other hand, indicates their
relative stoppage, like a point of accumulation that plugs or seals the lines
of flight, performs a general reterritorialization, and brings the flows under
the dominance of a single flow capable of overcoding them. But it is pre-
cisely the most deterritorialized flow, under the first aspect, that always
brings about the accumulation or conjunction of the processes, determines
the overcoding, and serves as the basis for reterritorialization under the
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 221

second aspect (we have already encountered a theorem according to which
it is always on the most deterritorialized element that reterritorialization
takes place). For example, the merchant bourgeoisie of the cities conju-
gated or capitalized a domain of knowledge, a technology, assemblages and
circuits into whose dependency the nobility, Church, artisans, and even
peasants would enter. It is precisely because the bourgeoisie was a cutting
edge of deterritorialization, a veritable particle accelerator, that it also per-
formed an overall reterritorialization.
    The task of the historian is to designate the "period" of coexistence or
simultaneity of these two movements (decoding-deterritorialization and
overcoding-reterritorialization). For the duration of this period, one distin-
guishes between the molecular aspect and the molar aspect: on the one hand,
masses or flows, with their mutations, quanta of deterritorialization, con-
nections, and accelerations; on the other hand, classes or segments, with
their binary organization, resonance, conjunction or accumulation, and line
of overcoding favoring one line over the others.20 The difference between
macrohistory and microhistory has nothing to do with the length of the
durations envisioned, long or short, but rather concerns distinct systems of
reference, depending on whether it is an overcoded segmented line that is
under consideration or the mutant quantum flow. The rigid system does not
bring the other system to a halt: the flow continues beneath the line, forever
mutant, while the line totalizes. Mass and class do not have the same con-
tours or the same dynamic, even though the same group can be assigned both
signs. The bourgeoisie considered as a mass and as a class... The relations
of a mass to other masses are not the same as the relations of the "corre-
sponding" class to the other classes. Of course, there are just as many rela-
tions offeree, and just as much violence, on one side as the other. The point
is that the same struggle assumes two very different aspects, in relation to
which the victories and defeats differ. Mass movements accelerate and feed
into one another (or dim for a long while, enter long stupors), but jump from
one class to another, undergo mutation, emanate or emit new quanta that
then modify class relations, bring their overcoding and reterritorialization
into question, and run new lines of flight in new directions. Beneath the self-
reproduction of classes, there is always a variable map of masses. Politics
operates by macrodecisions and binary choices, binarized interests; but the
realm of the decidable remains very slim. Political decision making neces-
sarily descends into a world of microdeterminations, attractions, and
desires, which it must sound out or evaluate in a different fashion. Beneath
linear conceptions and segmentary decisions, an evaluation of flows and
their quanta. A curious passage by Michelet reproaches Fra^ois I for having
badly evaluated the flow of emigration bringing to France large numbers of
people in struggle against the Church: Francois saw it only as an influx of
              222 D 1933:MICROPOLITICSANDSEGMENTARITY

potential soldiers, instead of perceiving a mass molecular flow which France
could have used to its own advantage by leading a different Reformation
than the one that occurred.21 Problems are always like this. Good or bad, pol-
itics and its judgments are always molar, but it is the molecular and its assess-
ment that makes it or breaks it.

   Now we are in a better position to draw a map. If we return to a very gen-
eral sense of the word "line," we see that there are not just two kinds of lines
but three. First, a relatively supple line of interlaced codes and territoriali-
ties; that is why we started with so-called primitive segmentarity, in which
the social space is constituted by territorial and lineal segmentations. Sec-
ond, a rigid line, which brings about a dualist organization of segments, a
concentricity of circles in resonance, and generalized overcoding; here, the
social space implies a State apparatus. This system is different from the
primitive system precisely because overcoding is not a stronger code, but a
specific procedure different from that of codes (similarly, reterrito-
rialization is not an added territory, but takes place in a different space
than that of territories, namely, overcoded geometrical space). Third, one
or several lines of flight, marked by quanta and defined by decoding and
deterritorialization (there is always something like a war machine func-
tioning on these lines).
   This way of presenting things still has the disadvantage of making it
seem as though primitive societies came first. In truth, codes are never sep-
arable from the movement of decoding, nor are territories from the vectors
of deterritorialization traversing them. And overcoding and reterrito-
rialization do not come after. It would be more accurate to say that there is a
space in which the three kinds of closely intermingled lines coexist, tribes,
empires, and war machines. We could also put it this way: lines of flight are
primary, or the already-rigid segments are, and supple segmentations
swing between the two. Take a proposition like the following one by the his-
torian Pirenne about barbarian tribes: "The Barbarians did not spontane-
ously hurl themselves upon the Empire. They were pushed forward by the
flood of the Hunnish advance, which in this way caused the whole series of
invasions."22 On one side, we have the rigid segmentarity of the Roman
Empire, with its center of resonance and periphery, its State, its pax
romana, its geometry, its camps, its limes (boundary lines). Then, on the
horizon, there is an entirely different kind of line, the line of the nomads
who come in off the steppes, venture a fluid and active escape, sow deterri-
torialization everywhere, launch flows whose quanta heat up and are swept
along by a Stateless war machine. The migrant barbarians are indeed
between the two: they come and go, cross and recross frontiers, pillage and
ransom, but also integrate themselves and reterritorialize. At times they
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 223

will subside into the empire, assigning themselves a segment of it, becom-
ing mercenaries or confederates, settling down, occupying land or carving
out their own State (the wise Visigoths). At other times, they will go over to
the nomads, allying with them, becoming indiscernible (the brilliant
Ostrogoths). Perhaps because they were constantly being defeated by the
Huns and Visigoths, the Vandals ("zone-two Goths") drew a line of flight
that made them as strong as their masters; they were the only band or mass
to cross the Mediterranean. But they were also the ones who produced the
most startling reterritorialization: an empire in Africa. 23 Thus it seems that
the three lines do not only coexist, but transform themselves into one
another, cross over into one another. Again, we have taken a summary
example in which the lines are illustrated by different groups. What we
have said applies all the more to cases in which all of the lines are in a single
group, a single individual.
    In view of this, it would be better to talk about simultaneous states of the
abstract Machine. There is on the one hand an abstract machine of
overcoding: it defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity, because it
produces or rather reproduces segments, opposing them two by two, mak-
ing all the centers resonate, and laying out a divisible, homogeneous space
striated in all directions. This kind of abstract machine is linked to the
State apparatus. We do not, however, equate it with the State apparatus
itself. The abstract machine may be defined, for example, more geomet-
rico, or under other conditions by an "axiomatic"; but the State apparatus
is neither geometry nor axiomatics: it is only the assemblage of
reterritorialization effectuating the overcoding machine within given lim-
its and under given conditions. The most we can say is that the State appa-
ratus tends increasingly to identify with the abstract machine it effectu-
ates. This is where the notion of the totalitarian State becomes meaningful:
a State becomes totalitarian when, instead of effectuating, within its own
limits, the worldwide overcoding machine, it identifies with it, creating the
conditions for "autarky," producing a reterritorialization by "closed ves-
sel," in the artifice of the void (this is never an ideological operation, but
rather an economic and political one).24
    On the other hand, at the other pole, there is an abstract machine of
mutation, which operates by decoding and deterritorialization. It is what
draws the lines of flight: it steers the quantum flows, assures the connec-
tion-creation of flows, and emits new quanta. It itself is in a state of flight,
and erects war machines on its lines. If it constitutes another pole, it is
because molar or rigid segments always seal, plug, block the lines of flight,
whereas this machine is always making them flow, "between" the rigid seg-
ments and in another, submolecular, direction. But between the two poles
there is also a whole realm of properly molecular negotiation, translation,
             224 D 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

and transduction in which at times molar lines are already undermined by
fissures and cracks, and at other times lines of flight are already drawn
toward black holes, flow connections are already replaced by limitative
conjunctions, and quanta emissions are already converted into center-
points. All of this happens at the same time. It is at the same time that lines
of flight connect and continue their intensities, whip particles-signs out of
black holes; and also retreat into the swirl of micro-black holes or mo-
lecular conjunctions that interrupt them; or again, enter overcoded,
concentricized, binarized, stable segments arrayed around a central black
hole.
    What is a center or focal point ofpowerl Answering this question will
illustrate the entanglement of the lines. We speak of the power of the army,
Church, and school, of public and private power . . . Power centers obvi-
ously involve rigid segments. Each molar segment has one or more centers.
It might be objected that the segments themselves presuppose a power cen-
ter, as what distinguishes and unites them, sets them in opposition and
makes them resonate. But there is no contradiction between the segmfpn-
tary parts and the centralized apparatus. On the one hand, the most rigid of
segmentarities does not preclude centralization: this is because the com-
mon central point is not where all the other points melt together, but
instead acts as a point of resonance on the horizon, behind all the other
points. The State is not a point taking all the others upon itself, but a reso-
nance chamber for them all. Even when the State is totalitarian, its func-
tion as resonator for distinct centers and segments remains unchanged: the
only difference is that it takes place under closed-vessel conditions that
increase its internal reach, or couples "resonance" with a "forced move-
ment." On the other hand, and conversely, the strictest of centralizations
does not eradicate the distinctiveness of the centers, segments, and circles.
When the overcoding line is drawn, it assures the prevalence of one seg-
ment, as such, over the other (in the case of binary segmentarity), gives a
certain center a power of relative resonance over the others (in the case of
circular segmentarity), and underscores the dominant segment through
which it itself passes (in the case of linear segmentarity). Thus centraliza-
tion is always hierarchical, but hierarchy is always segmentary.
    Each power center is also molecular and exercises its power on a
micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse, dispersed, geared
down, miniaturized, perpetually displaced, acting by fine segmentation,
working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault's analysis of "disci-
plines" or micropowers (school, army, factory, hospital, etc.) testifies to
these "focuses of instability" where groupings and accumulations confront
each other, but also confront breakaways and escapes, and where inver-
sions occur.25 What we have is no longer The Schoolmaster but the monitor,
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 225

the best student, the class dunce, the janitor, etc. No longer the general, but
the junior officers, the noncommissioned officers, the soldier inside me,
and also the malcontent: all have their own tendencies, poles, conflicts, and
relations offeree. Even the warrant officer and janitor are only invoked for
explanatory purposes; for they have a molar side and a molecular side, and
make us realize that the general or the landlord also had both sides all
along. We would not say that the proper name loses its power when it enters
these zones of indiscernibility, but that it takes on a new kind of power. To
talk like Kafka, what we have is no longer the public official Klamm, but
maybe his secretary Momus, or other molecular Klamms the differences
between which, and with Klamm, are all the greater for no longer being
assignable. ("[The officials] don't always stick to the same book, yet it isn't
the books they change, but their places, and [they] have to squeeze past one
another when they change places, because there's so little room." "This
official is rarely very like Klamm, and if he were sitting in his own office at
his own desk with his name on the door I would have no more doubt at
all,"26 says Barnabas, whose dream would be a uniquely molar segmen-
tarity, no matter how rigid and horrendous, as the only guarantee of cer-
tainty and security. But he cannot but notice that the molar segments are
necessarily immersed in the molecular soup that nourishes them and
makes their outlines waver.) And every power center has this microtexture.
The microtextures—not masochism—are what explain how the oppressed
can take an active role in oppression: the workers of the rich nations
actively participate in the exploitation of the Third World, the arming of
dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.
   This is not surprising since the texture lies between the line of
overcoding with rigid segments and the ultimate quantum line. It continu-
ally swings between the two, now channeling the quantum line back into
the segmented line, now causing flows and quanta to escape from the seg-
mented line. This is the third aspect of power centers, or their limit. For the
only purpose these centers have is to translate as best they can flow quanta
into line segments (only segments are totalizable, in one way or another).
But this is both the principle of their power and the basis of their impo-
tence. Far from being opposites, power and impotence complement and
reinforce each other in a kind of fascinating satisfaction that is found above
all in the most mediocre Statesmen, and defines their "glory." For they
extract glory from their shortsightedness, and power from their impotence,
because it confirms that there is no choice. The only "great" Statesmen are
those who connect with flows, like pilot-signs or particles-signs, and who
emit quanta that get out of the black holes: it is not by chance that these
men encounter each other only on lines of flight, in the act of drawing
them, sounding them out, following them, or forging ahead of them, even
             226 D 1933:MICROPOLITICSANDSEGMENTARITY

though they may make a mistake and take a fall (Moses the Hebrew,
Genseric the Vandal, Genghis the Mongol, Mao the Chinese . . .)-But there
is no Power regulating the flows themselves. No one dominates the growth
of the "monetary mass," or money supply. If an image of the master or an
idea of the State is projected outward to the limits of the universe, as if
something had domination over flows as well as segments, and in the same
manner, the result is a fictitious and ridiculous representation. The stock
exchange gives a better image of flows and their quanta than does the State.
Capitalists may be the masters of surplus value and its distribution, but
they do not dominate the flows from which surplus value derives. Rather,
power centers function at the points where flows are converted into seg-
ments: they are exchangers, converters, oscillators. Not that the segments
themselves are governed by a decision-making power. We have seen, on the
contrary, that segments (classes, for example) form at the conjunction of
masses and deterritorialized flows and that the most deterritorialized flow
determines the dominant segment; thus the dollar segment dominates cur-
rency, the bourgeoisie dominates capitalism, etc. Segments, then, are
themselves governed by an abstract machine. But what power centers gov-
ern are the assemblages that effectuate that abstract machine, in other
words, that continually adapt variations in mass and flow to the segments
of the rigid line, as a function of a dominant segment and dominated seg-
ments. Much perverse invention can enter into the adaptations.
   This is the sense in which we would speak, for example, of banking
power (the World Bank, central banks, credit banks): if the flow of
financing-money, or credit money, involves the mass of economic transac-
tions, what banks govern is the conversion of the credit money that has
been created into segmentary payment-money that is appropriated, in
other words, coinage or State money for the purchase of goods that are
themselves segmented (the importance of the interest rate in this respect).
What banks govern is the conversion between the two kinds of money, and
the conversion of the segments of the second kind into any given good.27
The same could be said of every central power. Every central power has
three aspects or zones: (1) its zone of power, relating to the segments of a
solid rigid line; (2) its zone of indiscernibility, relating to its diffusion
throughout a microphysical fabric; (3) its zone of impotence, relatingto the
flows and quanta it can only convert without being able to control or
define. It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center
draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity. Better to
be a tiny quantum flow than a molar converter, oscillator, or distributor!
Returning to the example of money, the first zone is represented by the
public central banks; the second by the "indefinite series of private rela-
tions between banks and borrowers"; the third by the desiring flow of
               1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 227

money, whose quanta are defined by the mass of economic transactions. It
is true that the same problems are reformulated at the level of these very
transactions, in relation to other power centers. But the first zone of the
power center is always defined by the State apparatus, which is the assem-
blage that effectuates the abstract machine of molar overcoding; the sec-
ond is defined in the molecular fabric immersing this assemblage; the third
by the abstract machine of mutation, flows, and quanta.

     We cannot say that one of these three lines is bad and another good, by
 nature and necessarily. The study of the dangers of each line is the object of
 pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to repre-
 sent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, mark-
 ing their mixtures as well as their distinctions. According to Nietzsche's
 Zarathustra and Castaneda's Indian Don Juan, there are three or even four
 dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust,
 the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition.28 We can guess what
 fear is. We are always afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organi-
 zation that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines
that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system
 of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that. "The values, morals,
 fatherlands, religions and private certitudes our vanity and self-compla-
 cency generously grant us are so many abodes the world furnishes for those
who think on that account that they stand and rest amid stable things; they
know nothing of the enormous rout they are heading f o r . . . in flight from
flight."™ We flee from flight, rigidify our segments, give ourselves over to
binary logic; the harder they have been to us on one segment, the harder we
 will be on another; we reterritorialize on anything available; the only
segmentarity we know is molar, at the level of the large-scale aggregates we
belong to, as well as at the level of the little groups we get into, as well as at
the level of what goes on in our most intimate and private recesses. Every-
thing is involved: modes of perception, kinds of actions, ways of moving,
 life-styles, semiotic regimes. A man comes home and says, "Is the grub
 ready?", and the wife answers, "What a scowl! Are you in a bad mood?":
two rigid segments in confrontation. The more rigid the segmentarity, the
 more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is, and how it makes us retreat
 into the first line.
     The second danger, Clarity, seems less obvious. Clarity, in effect, con-
cerns the molecular. Once again, everything is involved, even perception,
 even the semiotic regime, but this time on the second line. Castaneda illus-
 trates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception to which drugs
give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and
 sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the
              228 D 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

molar structure. That is precisely what clarity is: the distinctions that
appear in what used to seem full, the holes in what used to be compact; and
conversely, where just before we saw end points of clear-cut segments, now
there are indistinct fringes, encroachments, overlappings, migrations, acts
of segmentation that no longer coincide with the rigid segmentarity. Every-
thing now appears supple, with holes in fullness, nebulas in forms, and flut-
ter in lines. Everything has the clarity of the microscope. We think we have
understood everything, and draw conclusions. We are the new knights; we
even have a mission. A microphysics of the migrant has replaced the
macrogeometry of the sedentary. But this suppleness and clarity do not
only present dangers, they are themselves a danger. First, supple segmen-
tarity runs the risk of reproducing in miniature the affections, the affecta-
tions, of the rigid: the family is replaced by a community, conjugality by a
regime of exchange and migration; worse, micro-Oedipuses crop up,
microfascisms lay down the law, the mother feels obliged to titillate her
child, the father becomes a mommy. A dark light that falls from no star and
emanates such sadness: this shifting segmentarity derives directly from the
most rigid, for which it is indirect compensation. The more molar the
aggregates become, the more molecular become their elements and the
relations between their elements: molecular man for molar humanity. One
deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to knot and annul the mass
movements and movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of
marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others. But above all,
supple segmentarity brings dangers of its own that do not merely reproduce
in small scale the dangers of molar segmentarity, which do not derive from
them or compensate for them. As we have seen, microfascisms have a spe-
cificity of their own that can crystallize into a macro fascism, but may also
float along the supple line on their own account and suffuse every little cell.
A multitude of black holes may very well not become centralized, and acts
instead as viruses adapting to the most varied situations, sinking voids in
molecular perceptions and semiotics. Interactions without resonance.
Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little mono-
manias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole
and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights
giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of
justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man. We have overcome fear, we have
sailed from the shores of security, only to enter a system that is no less
concentricized, no less organized: the system of petty insecurities that
leads everyone to their own black hole in which to turn dangerous, possess-
ing a clarity on their situation, role, and mission even more disturbing than
the certitudes of the first line.
   Power (Pouvoir) is the third danger, because it is on both lines simultane-
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 229

ously. It stretches from the rigid segments with their overcoding and reso-
nance to the fine segmentations with their diffusion and interactions, and
back again. Every man of power jumps from one line to the other, alternat-
ing between a petty and a lofty style, the rogue's style and the grandiloquent
style, drugstore demagoguery and the imperialism of the high-ranking gov-
ernment man. But this whole chain and web of power is immersed in a
world of mutant flows that eludes them. It is precisely its impotence that
makes power so dangerous. The man of power will always want to stop the
lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in
the overcoding machine. But he can do so only by creating a void, in other
words, by first stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it
within the local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving
the assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in
the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the "closed vessel."
     But there is a fourth danger as well, and this is the one that interests us
most, because it concerns the lines of flight themselves. We may well have
presented these lines as a sort of mutation or creation drawn not only in the
imagination but also in the very fabric of social reality; we may well have
attributed to them the movement of the arrow and the speed of an
absolute—but it would be oversimplifying to believe that the only risk they
fear and confront is allowing themselves to be recaptured in the end, letting
themselves be sealed in, tied up, reknotted, reterritorialized. They them-
selves emanate a strange despair, like an odor of death and immolation, a
state of war from which one returns broken: they have their own dangers
distinct from the ones previously discussed. This is exactly what led
Fitzgerald to say: "I had a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a
deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No
problem set—simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.
. . . My self-immolation was something sodden-dark."30 Why is the line of
flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having
destroyed everything one could? This, precisely, is the fourth danger: the
line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of
connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning
to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition. Like
Kleist's line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide, double sui-
cide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death.
     We are not invoking any kind of death drive. There are no internal
drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what
the assemblage determines it to be. The assemblage that draws lines of
flight is on the same level as they are, and is of the war machine type. Muta-
tions spring from this machine, which in no way has war as its object, but
rather the emission of quanta of deterritorialization, the passage of mutant
              230 D 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

flows (in this sense, every creation is brought about by a war machine).
There are many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different ori-
gin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic ori-
gin and is directed against the State apparatus. One of the fundamental
problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it
and make it a piece in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institu-
tion; and the State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is
precisely when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other
object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it
frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a transformation
of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only
object left for the war machine after it has lost its power to change. War, it
must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either
after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus, or even
worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction.
When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of
flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition. (Later, we will propose a theory of
the complex relation between the war machine and war.)31
    This brings us back to the paradox of fascism, and the way in which fas-
cism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State affair: it
essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized assem-
blage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the
case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not a war machine, that
takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism
is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war
machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the
sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the
State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State
is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in fascism a realized nihil-
ism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible
lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it
transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that
from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were
bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and
the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish but that their
undertaking would be resumed, all across Europe, all over the world,
throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did
not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of
others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your
own death against the death of others, and measure everything by
"deleometers." Klaus Mann's novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely
ordinary Nazi speeches and conversations: "Heroism was something that
              1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 231

was being ruled out of our lives. . . . In reality, we are not marching forward,
we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fiihrer is dragging us toward the
shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who
have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? . . .
Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the fren-
zied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bod-
ies of the dead!"32 Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the
crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is just a
matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology. But that is not true.
The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not
simply imply a need to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations.
We prefer to follow Faye's inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi state-
ments, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in
the most absurd of conversations. They always contain the "stupid and
repugnant" cry, Long live death!, even at the economic level, where the
arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment
veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction.
Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not
by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal State:
so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an undertaking of a
war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of abso-
lute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the State itself. "The
triggering of a hitherto unknown material process, one that is limitless and
aimless. . . . Once triggered, its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the
indirect strategy effectively places the dominant powers outside the usual
categories of space and time. . . . It was in the horror of daily life and its
environment that Hitler finally found his surest means of governing, the
legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right up to
the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total war, far
from discharging the repulsive nature of its power, normally only increase
its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: If the war is lost, may the
nation perish. Here, Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order
to complete the destruction of his own people, by obliterating the last
remaining resources of its life-support system, civil reserves of every kind
(potable water, fuel, provisions, etc.)."33 It was this reversion of the line of
flight into a line of destruction that already animated the molecular
focuses of fascism, and made them interact in a war machine instead of res-
onating in a State apparatus. A war machine that no longer had anything
but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop
the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.
10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-
 Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .




                 232
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 233

Memories of a Moviegoer. I recall the fine film Willard (1972, Daniel
Mann). A "B" movie perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular be-
cause the heroes are rats. My memory of it is not necessarily accurate. I will
recount the story in broad outline. Willard lives with his authoritarian
mother in the old family house. Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother
orders him to destroy a litter of rats. He spares one (or two or several). After
a violent argument, the mother, who "resembles" a dog, dies. The house is
coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it. He likes the
principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious intelligence.
There is also a white female rat, Ben's companion. Willard spends all his
free time with them. They multiply. Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben,
to the home of the businessman, who is put to a terrible death. But he fool-
ishly takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to
let the employees kill the white rat. Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a
long, hard glare. Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his
becoming-rat. He tries with all his might to remain among humans. He
even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office who bears a
strong "resemblance" to a rat—but it is only a resemblance. One day when
he has invited the young woman over, all set to be conjugalized, reoedi-
palized, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate. Willard tries to drive him
away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he then is lured
to the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him
to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.
    It is all there: there is a becoming-animal not content to proceed by
resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent
an obstacle or stoppage; the proliferation of rats, the pack, brings a
becoming-molecular that undermines the great molar powers of family,
career, and conjugality; there is a sinister choice since there is a "favorite"
in the pack with which a kind of contract of alliance, a hideous pact, is
made; there is the institution of an assemblage, a war machine or criminal
machine, which can reach the point of self-destruction; there is a circula-
tion of impersonal affects, an alternate current that disrupts signifying
projects as well as subjective feelings, and constitutes a nonhuman sexual-
ity; and there is an irresistible deterritorialization that forestalls attempts
at professional, conjugal, or Oedipal reterritorialization. (Are there Oedi-
pal animals with which one can "play Oedipus," play family, my little dog,
my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw us into an irre-
sistible becoming? Or another hypothesis: Can the same animal be taken
up by two opposing functions and movements, depending on the case?)

  Memories of a Naturalist. One of the main problems of natural history
was to conceptualize the relationships between animals. It is very different
          234 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

in this respect from later evolutionism, which defined itself in terms of
genealogy, kinship, descent, and filiation. As we know, evolutionism would
arrive at the idea of an evolution that does not necessarily operate by
filiation. But it was unavoidable that it begin with the genealogical motif.
Darwin himself treats the evolutionist theme of kinship and the naturalist
theme of the sum and value of differences or resemblances as very separate
things: groups that are equally related can display highly variable degrees
of difference with respect to the ancestor. Precisely because natural history
is concerned primarily with the sum and value of differences, it can con-
ceive of progressions and regressions, continuities and major breaks, but
not an evolution in the strict sense, in other words, the possibility of a
descent the degrees of modification of which depend on external condi-
tions. Natural history can think only in terms of relationships (between A
and B), not in terms of production (from A to x).
    But something very important transpires at the level of relationships.
For natural history conceives of the relationships between animals in two
ways: series and structure. In the case of a series, I say a resembles b, b
resembles c, etc.; all of these terms conform in varying degrees to a single,
eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series. This
is exactly what the theologians used to call an analogy of proportion. In the
case of a structure, I say a is to b as c is to d; and each of these relationships
realizes after its fashion the perfection under consideration: gills are to
breathing under water as lungs are to breathing air; or the heart is to gills as
the absence of a heart is to tracheas [in insects]. . . This is an analogy of pro-
portionality. In the first case, I have resemblances that differ from one
another in a single series, and between series. In the second case, I have dif-
ferences that resemble each other within a single structure, and between
structures. The first form of analogy passes for the most sensible and popu-
lar, and requires imagination; but the kind of imagination it requires is a
studious one that has to take branchings in the series into account, fill in
apparent ruptures, ward off false resemblances and graduate the true ones,
and take both progressions and regressions or degraduations into account.
The second form of analogy is considered royal because it requires instead
all the resources of understanding (entendement), in order to define equiv-
alent relations by discovering, on the one hand, the independent variables
that can be combined to form a structure and, on the other hand, the corre-
lates that entail one another within each structure. As different as they are,
the two themes of series and structure have always coexisted in natural his-
tory; in appearance contradictory, in practice they have reached a more or
less stable compromise.1 In the same way, the two figures of analogy coex-
isted in the minds of the theologians in various equilibriums. This is
because in both cases Nature is conceived as an enormous mimesis: either
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 235

 in the form of a chain of beings perpetually imitating one another, progres-
sively and regressively, and tending toward the divine higher term they all
 imitate by graduated resemblance, as the model for and principle behind
the series; or in the form of a mirror Imitation with nothing left to imitate
because it itself is the model everything else imitates, this time by ordered
 difference. (This mimetic or mimological vision is what made the idea of
an evolution-production possible at that moment.)
    This problem is in no way behind us. Ideas do not die. Not that they
 survive simply as archaisms. At a given moment they may reach a scien-
tific stage, and then lose that status or emigrate to other sciences. Their
application and status, even their form and content, may change; yet they
retain something essential throughout the process, across the displace-
ment, in the distribution of a new domain. Ideas are always reusable,
because they have been usable before, but in the most varied of actual
modes. For, on the one hand, the relationships between animals are the
object not only of science but also of dreams, symbolism, art and poetry,
practice and practical use. And on the other hand, the relationships
between animals are bound up with the relations between man and ani-
mal, man and woman, man and child, man and the elements, man and the
physical and microphysical universe. The twofold idea "series-structure"
crosses a scientific threshold at a certain moment; but it did not start
there and it does not stay there, or else crosses over into other sciences,
animating, for example, the human sciences, serving in the study of
dreams, myths, and organizations. The history of ideas should never be
continuous; it should be wary of resemblances, but also of descents or
filiations; it should be content to mark the thresholds through which an
idea passes, the journeys it takes that change its nature or object. Yet the
objective relationships between animals have been applied to certain sub-
jective relations between man and animal, from the standpoint of a col-
lective imagination or a faculty of social understanding.
    Jung elaborated a theory of the Archetype as collective unconscious; it
assigns the animal a particularly important role in dreams, myths, and
human collectivities. The animal is inseparable from a series exhibiting the
double aspect of progression-regression, in which each term plays the role
of a possible transformer of the libido (metamorphosis). A whole approach
to the dream follows from this; given a troubling image, it becomes a ques-
tion of integrating it into its archetypal series. That series may include fem-
inine, masculine, or infantile sequences, as well as animal, vegetable, even
elementary or molecular sequences. In contrast to natural history, man is
now no longer the eminent term of the series; that term may be an ani-
mal for man, the lion, crab, bird of prey, or louse, in relation to a given act
or function, in accordance with a given demand of the unconscious.
          236 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL .. .

Bachelard wrote a fine Jungian book when he elaborated the ramified
series of Lautreamont, taking into account the speed coefficient of the
metamorphoses and the degree of perfection of each term in relation to a
pure aggressiveness as the principle of the series: the serpent's fang, the
horn of the rhinoceros, the dog's tooth, the owl's beak; and higher up, the
claw of the eagle or the vulture, the pincer of the crab, the legs of the louse,
the suckers of the octopus. Throughout Jung's work a process of mimesis
brings nature and culture together in its net, by means of analogies of pro-
portion in which the series and their terms, and above all the animals occu-
pying a middle position, assure cycles of conversion nature-culture-nature:
archetypes as "analogical representations."2
    Is it by chance that structuralism so strongly denounced the prestige
accorded the imagination, the establishment of resemblances in a series,
the imitation pervading the entire series and carrying it to its term, and
the identification with this final term? Nothing is more explicit than
Levi-Strauss's famous texts on totemism: transcend external resem-
blances to arrive at internal homologies.3 It is no longer a question of
instituting a serial organization of the imaginary, but instead a symbolic
and structural order of understanding. It is no longer a question of gradu-
ating resemblances, ultimately arriving at an identification between Man
and Animal at the heart of a mystical participation. It is a question of
ordering differences to arrive at a correspondence of relations. The ani-
mal is distributed according to differential relations or distinctive oppo-
sitions between species; the same goes for human beings, according to the
groups considered. When analyzing the institution of the totem, we do
not say that this group of people identifies with that animal species. We
say that what group A is to group B, species A' is to species B'. This method
is profoundly different from the preceding one: given two human groups,
each with its totem animal, we must discover the way in which the two
totems entertain relations analogous to those between the two groups—
the Crow is to the Falcon . . .
   The method also applies to Man-child, man-woman relations, etc. If we
note, for example, that the warrior has a certain astonishing relation to the
young woman, we refrain from establishing an imaginary series tying the
two together; instead, we look for a term effecting an equivalence of rela-
tions. Thus Vernant can say that marriage is to the woman what war is to
the man. The result is a homology between the virgin who refuses marriage
and the warrior who disguises himself as a woman.4 In short, symbolic
understanding replaces the analogy of proportion with an analogy of pro-
portionality; the serialization of resemblances with a structuration of dif-
ferences; the identification of terms with an equality of relations; the
metamorphoses of the imagination with conceptual metaphors; the great
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 237

continuity between nature and culture with a deep rift distributing corre-
spondences without resemblance between the two; the imitation of a pri-
mal model with a mimesis that is itself primary and without a model. A
man can never say: "I am a bull, a wolf..." But he can say: "I am to a
woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the
sheep." Structuralism represents a great revolution; the whole world
becomes more rational. Levi-Strauss is not content to grant the structural
model all the prestige of a true classification system; he relegates the serial
model to the dark domain of sacrifice, which he depicts as illusory, even
devoid of good sense. The serial theme of sacrifice must yield to the struc-
tural theme of the institution of the totem, correctly understood. But here,
as in natural history, many compromises are reached between archetypal
series and symbolic structures.5

     Memories of a Bergsonian. None of the preceding satisfies us, from our
restricted viewpoint. We believe in the existence of very special becom-
ings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting
the animal no less than the human. "From 1730 to 1735, all we hear about
are vampires." Structuralism clearly does not account for these becomings,
since it is designed precisely to deny or at least denigrate their existence: a
correspondence of relations does not add up to a becoming. When
structuralism encounters becomings of this kind pervading a society, it
sees them only as phenomena of degradation representing a deviation
from the true order and pertaining to the adventures of diachrony. Yet in
his study of myths, Levi-Strauss is always encountering these rapid acts by
which a human becomes animal at the same time as the animal becomes
. . . (Becomes what? Human, or something else?). It is always possible to try
to explain these blocks ofbecomingby a correspondence between two rela-
tions, but to do so most certainly impoverishes the phenomenon under
study. Must it not be admitted that myth as a frame of classification is quite
incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments of
tales? Must we not lend credence to Jean Duvignaud's hypothesis that
there are "anomic" phenomena pervading societies that are not degrada-
tions of the mythic order but irreducible dynamisms drawing lines of flight
and implying other forms of expression than those of myth, even if myth
recapitulates them in its own terms in order to curb them?6 Does it not
seem that alongside the two models, sacrifice and series, totem institution
and structure, there is still room for something else, something more secret,
more subterranean: the sorcerer and becomings (expressed in tales instead
of myths or rites)?
     A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a
resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification. The whole
          238 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

structuralist critique of the series seems irrefutable. To become is not to
progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the
imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest cosmic or
dynamic level, as in Jung or Bachelard. Becomings-animal are neither
dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue
here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitat-
ing an animal, it is clear that the human being does not "really" become an
animal any more than the animal "really" becomes something else. Becom-
ing produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we
say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the
block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that
which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as be-
coming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal
become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the ani-
mal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal
is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to
clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it
has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becom-
ing of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the
first. This is the principle according to which there is a reality specific to
becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of very different "dura-
tions," superior or inferior to "ours," all of them in communication).
    Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by
descent and filiation. Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation
is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It con-
cerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the
domain ofsymbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales
and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. There is a block of becoming that
snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever
descend. There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and
baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus. There is a block
of becoming between young roots and certain microorganisms, the alliance
between which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves
(rhizosphere). If there is originality in neoevolutionism, it is attributable in
part to phenomena of this kind in which evolution does not go from some-
thing less differentiated to something more differentiated, in which it
ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative or
contagious. Accordingly, the term we would prefer for this form of evolu-
tion between heterogeneous terms is "involution," on the condition that
involution is in no way confused with regression. Becoming is involu-
tionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the direction of
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 239

something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its
own line "between" the terms in play and beneath assignable relations.
   Neoevolutionism seems important for two reasons: the animal is
defined not by characteristics (specific, generic, etc.) but by populations
that vary from milieu to milieu or within the same milieu; movement
occurs not only, or not primarily, by filiative productions but also by
transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.
Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becom-
ing is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it
regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corre-
sponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or pro-
ducing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its
own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, "appearing," "being," "equal-
ing," or "producing."

   Memories of a Sorcerer, I. A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a
band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have
always known that. It may very well be that other agencies, moreover very
different from one another, have a different appraisal of the animal. One
may retain or extract from the animal certain characteristics: species and
genera, forms and functions, etc. Society and the State need animal charac-
teristics to use for classifying people; natural history and science need char-
acteristics in order to classify the animals themselves. Serialism and
structuralism either graduate characteristics according to their resem-
blances, or order them according to their differences. Animal characteris-
tics can be mythic or scientific. But we are not interested in characteristics;
what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, conta-
gion, peopling. I am legion. The Wolf-Man fascinated by several wolves
watching him. What would a lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly?
Beelzebub is the Devil, but the Devil as lord of the flies. The wolf is not fun-
damentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a
wolfing. The louse is a lousing, and so on. What is a cry independent of the
population it appeals to or takes as its witness? Virginia Woolfs experi-
ences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of
fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with the people she
approaches. We do not wish to say that certain animals live in packs. We
want nothing to do with ridiculous evolutionary classifications a la Lorenz,
according to which there are inferior packs and superior societies. What we
are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has
pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions within
these modes are called for. It is at this point that the human being encoun-
ters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the
           240 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . ..

pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity
that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? In
one of his masterpieces, H. P. Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph
Carter, who feels his "self reel and who experiences a fear worse than that
of annihilation: "Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate
and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And
more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but
moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems
and galaxies and cosmic continua. .. . Merging with nothingness is peace-
ful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no
longer a definite being distinguished from other beings," nor from all of the
becomings running through us, "that is the nameless summit of agony and
dread."7 Hofmannsthal, or rather Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with
a "people" of dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the interstices of
his disrupted self that the "soul of the animal bares its teeth at monsterous
fate":8 not pity, but unnatural participation. Then a strange imperative
wells up in him: either stop writing, or write like a r a t . . . If the writer is a
sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange
becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-
insect, becomings-wolf, etc. We will have to explain why. Many suicides by
writers are explained by these unnatural participations, these unnatural
nuptials. Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the
only population before which they are responsible in principle. The Ger-
man preromantic Karl Philipp Moritz feels responsible not for the calves
that die but before the calves that die and give him the incredible feeling of
an unknown Nature—affect? For the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is
it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws
the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not known the violence of
these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an
instant, making one scrape at one's bread like a rodent or giving one the yel-
low eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of
becomings. These are not regressions, although fragments of regression,
sequences of regression may enter in.
    We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuated ani-
mals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty
history, "my" cat, "my" dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us
into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal psy-
choanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little
brother behind them (when psychoanalysis talks about animals, animals
learn to laugh): anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. And then there is a
second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes; genus, classifica-
tion, or State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths,
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 241

in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or
models (Jung is in any event profounder than Freud). Finally, there are
more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a
becoming, a population, a tale . . . Or once again, cannot any animal be
treated in all three ways? There is always the possibility that a given animal,
a louse, a cheetah or an elephant, will be treated as a pet, my little beast.
And at the other extreme, it is also possible for any animal to be treated in
the mode of the pack or swarm; that is our way, fellow sorcerers. Even the
cat, even the dog. And the shepherd, the animal trainer, the Devil, may
have a favorite animal in the pack, although not at all in the way we were
just discussing. Yes, any animal is or can be a pack, but to varying degrees
of vocation that make it easier or harder to discover the multiplicity, or
multiplicity-grade, an animal contains (actually or virtually according to
the case). Schools, bands, herds, populations are not inferior social forms;
they are affects and powers, involutions that grip every animal in a becom-
ing just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal.
   Jorge Luis Borges, an author renowned for his excess of culture, botched
at least two books, only the titles of which are nice: first, A Universal His-
tory of Infamy, because he did not see the sorcerer's fundamental distinc-
tion between deception and treason (becomings-animal are there from the
start, on the treason side); second, his Manual dezoolog'iafantastica, where
he not only adopts a composite and bland image of myth but also elimi-
nates all of the problems of the pack and the corresponding becoming-
animal of the human being: "We have deliberately excluded from this
manual legends of transformations of the human being, the lobizbn, the
werewolf, etc."10 Borges is interested only in characteristics, even the most
fantastic ones, whereas sorcerers know that werewolves are bands, and
vampires too, and that bands transform themselves into one another. But
what exactly does that mean, the animal as band or pack? Does a band not
imply a filiation, bringing us back to the reproduction of given characteris-
tics? How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is
without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity without the
unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everybody knows it, but it is dis-
cussed only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to hered-
ity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production.
Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields,
and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a
sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again
every time, gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participations or
nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. Propagation
by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity,
even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire
          242 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic,
involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human
being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism.
Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are
neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural partici-
pations. That is the only way Nature operates—against itself. This is a far
cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, in which the only
differences retained are a simple duality between sexes within the same
species, and small modifications across generations. For us, on the other
hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many dif-
ferences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that
many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different
worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be
understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The Uni-
verse does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are
packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion.
   These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by conta-
gion, enter certain assemblages; it is there that human beings effect their
becomings-animal. But we should not confuse these dark assemblages,
which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations such as the institu-
tion of the family and the State apparatus. We could cite hunting societies,
war societies, secret societies, crime societies, etc. Becomings-animal are
proper to them. We will not expect to find filiative regimes of the family
type or modes of classification and attribution of the State or pre-State
type or even serial organizations of the religious type. Despite appearances
and possible confusions, this is not the site of origin or point of application
for myths. These are tales, or narratives and statements of becoming. It is
therefore absurd to establish a hierarchy even of animal collectivities from
the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are
lower on the scale and are superseded by State or familial societies. On the
contrary, there is a difference in nature. The origin of packs is entirely dif-
ferent from that of families and States; they continually work them from
within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other
forms of expression. The pack is simultaneously an animal reality, and the
reality of the becoming-animal of the human being; contagion is simulta-
neously an animal peopling, and the propagation of the animal peopling of
the human being. The hunting machine, the war machine, the crime
machine entail all kinds of becomings-animal that are not articulated in
myth, still less in totemism. Dumezil showed that becomings of this kind
pertain essentially to the man of war, but only insofar as he is external to
families and States, insofar as he upsets filiations and classifications. The
war machine is always exterior to the State, even when the State uses it,
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 243

appropriates it. The man of war has an entire becoming that implies multi-
plicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis and treason, the power of affect.
Wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men, men of every animality, secret brother-
hoods, animate the battlefields. But so do the animal packs used by men in
battle, or which trail the battles and take advantage of them. And together
they spread contagion.11 There is a complex aggregate: the becoming-
animal of men, packs of animals, elephants and rats, winds and tempests,
bacteria sowing contagion. A single Furor. War contained zoological se-
quences before it became bacteriological. It is in war, famine, and epidemic
that werewolves and vampires proliferate. Any animal can be swept up in
these packs and the corresponding becomings; cats have been seen on the
battlefield, and even in armies. That is why the distinction we must make is
less between kinds of animals than between the different states according
to which they are integrated into family institutions, State apparatuses,
war machines, etc. (and what is the relation of the writing machine and the
musical machine to becomings-animal?)

   Memories of a Sorcerer, II. Our first principle was: pack and contagion,
the contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes. But a
second principle seemed to tell us the opposite: wherever there is multipli-
city, you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that individ-
ual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal. There may be
no such thing as a lone wolf, but there is a leader of the pack, a master of the
pack, or else the old deposed head of the pack now living alone, there is the
Loner, and there is the Demon. Willard has his favorite, the rat Ben, and
only becomes-rat through his relation with him, in a kind of alliance of
love, then of hate. Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest master-
pieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but
one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a mon-
strous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick. There is
always a pact with a demon; the demon sometimes appears as the head of
the band, sometimes as the Loner on the sidelines of the pack, and some-
times as the higher Power (Puissance) of the band. The exceptional individ-
ual has many possible positions. Kafka, another great author of real
becomings-animal, sings of mouse society; but Josephine, the mouse
singer, sometimes holds a privileged position in the pack, sometimes a
position outside the pack, and sometimes slips into and is lost in the ano-
nymity of the collective statements of the pack.12 In short, every Animal
has its Anomalous. Let us clarify that: every animal swept up in its pack or
multiplicity has its anomalous. It has been noted that the origin of the word
anomal ("anomalous"), an adjective that has fallen into disuse in French,
is very different from that of anormal ("abnormal"): a-normal, a Latin
          244 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

adjective lacking a noun in French, refers to that which is outside rules or
goes against the rules, whereas an-omalie, a Greek noun that has lost its
adjective, designates the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of
deterritorialization.13 The abnormal can be defined only in terms of char-
acteristics, specific or generic; but the anomalous is a position or set of
positions in relation to a multiplicity. Sorcerers therefore use the old adjec-
tive "anomalous" to situate the positions of the exceptional individual in
the pack. It is always with the Anomalous, Moby-Dick or Josephine, that
one enters into alliance to become-animal.
    It does seem as though there is a contradiction: between the pack and the
loner; between mass contagion and preferential alliance; between pure
multiplicity and the exceptional individual; between the aleatory aggre-
gate and a predestined choice. And the contradiction is real: Ahab chooses
Moby-Dick, in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere, and
in so doing breaks with the law of the whalers according to which one
should first pursue the pack. Penthesilea shatters the law of the pack, the
pack of women, the pack of she-dogs, by choosing Achilles as her favorite
enemy. Yet it is by means of this anomalous choice that each enters into his
or her becoming-animal, the becoming-dog of Penthesilea, the becoming-
whale of Captain Ahab. We sorcerers know quite well that the contradic-
tions are real but that real contradictions are not just for laughs. For the
whole question is this: What exactly is the nature of the anomalous? What
function does it have in relation to the band, to the pack? It is clear that the
anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual; that would be to equate
it with the family animal or pet, the Oedipalized animal as psychoanalysis
sees it, as the image of the father, etc. Ahab's Moby-Dick is not like the little
cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it.
Lawrence's becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or
domestic relation. Lawrence is another of the writers who leave us troubled
and filled with admiration because they were able to tie their writing to real
and unheard-of becomings. But the objection is raised against Lawrence:
"Your tortoises aren't real!" And he answers: Possibly, but my becoming is,
my becoming is real, even and especially if you have no way of judging it,
because you're just little house dogs . . .14 The anomalous, the preferential
element in the pack, has nothing to do with the preferred, domestic, and
psychoanalytic individual. Nor is the anomalous the bearer of a species
presenting specific or generic characteristics in their purest state; nor is it a
model or unique specimen; nor is it the perfection of a type incarnate; nor
is it the eminent term of a series; nor is it the basis of an absolutely harmo-
nious correspondence. The anomalous is neither an individual nor a spe-
cies; it has only affects, it has neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor
specific or significant characteristics. Human tenderness is as foreign to it
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 245

as human classifications. Lovecraft applies the term "Outsider" to this
thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is lin-
ear yet multiple, "teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an
infectious disease, this nameless horror."
    If the anomalous is neither an individual nor a species, then what is it? It
is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering. This is our hypothesis:
a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension,
not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the
lines and dimensions it encompasses in "intension." If you change dimen-
sions, if you add or subtract one, you change multiplicity. Thus there is a
borderline for each multiplicity; it is in no way a center but rather the envel-
oping line or farthest dimension, as a function of which it is possible to
count the others, all those lines or dimensions constitute the pack at a given
moment (beyond the borderline, the multiplicity changes nature). That is
what Captain Ahab says to his first mate: I have no personal history with
Moby-Dick, no revenge to take, any more than I have a myth to play out;
but I do have a becoming! Moby-Dick is neither an individual nor a genus;
he is the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to
reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it. The elements of the pack are
only imaginary "dummies," the characteristics of the pack are only sym-
bolic entities; all that counts is the borderline—the anomalous. "To me,
the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me." The white wall. "Some-
times I think there is naught beyond. But 'tis enough."15 That the anoma-
lous is the borderline makes it easier for us to understand the various
positions it occupies in relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders,
and the various positions occupied by a fascinated Self (Moi). It is now
even possible to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding
the pitfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior collective
stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular assemblages they
bring into play). In any event, the pack has a borderline, and an anomalous
position, whenever in a given space an animal is on the line or in the act of
drawing the line in relation to which all the other members of the pack will
fall into one of two halves, left or right: a peripheral position, such that it is
impossible to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the
band, or at the shifting boundary of the band. Sometimes each and every
animal reaches this line or occupies this dynamic position, as in a swarm of
mosquitoes, where "each individual moves randomly unless it sees the rest
of [the swarm] in the same half-space; then it hurries to re-enter the group.
Thus stability is assured in catastrophe by a barrier."16 Sometimes it is a
specific animal that draws and occupies the borderline, as leader of the
pack. Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another
nature that no longer belongs to the pack, or never belonged to it, and that
          246 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ...

represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as
a trainer, outsider, etc. In any case, no band is without this phenomenon of
bordering, or the anomalous. It is true that bands are also undermined by
extremely varied forces that establish in them interior centers of the conju-
gal, familial, or State type, and that make them pass into an entirely differ-
ent form of sociability, replacing pack affects with family feelings or State
intelligibilities. The center, or internal black holes, assumes the principal
role. This is what evolutionism sees as progress, this adventure also befalls
bands of humans when they reconstitute group familialism, or even
authoritarianism or pack fascism.
    Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the
fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the
village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alli-
ance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation.
The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a
relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous. The
old-time theologians drew a clear distinction between two kinds of curses
against sexuality. The first concerns sexuality as a process of filiation
transmitting the original sin. But the second concerns it as a power of alli-
ance inspiring illicit unions or abominable loves. This differs signifi-
cantly from the first in that it tends to prevent procreation; since the
demon does not himself have the ability to procreate, he must adopt indi-
rect means (for example, being the female succubus of a man and then
becoming the male incubus of a woman, to whom he transmits the man's
semen). It is true that the relations between alliance and filiation come to
be regulated by laws of marriage, but even then alliance retains a danger-
ous and contagious power. Leach was able to demonstrate that despite all
the exceptions that seemingly disprove the rule, the sorcerer belongs first
of all to a group united to the group over which he or she exercises influ-
ence only by alliance: thus in a matrilineal group we look to the father's
side for the sorcerer or witch. And there is an entire evolution of sorcery
depending on whether the relation of alliance acquires permanence or
assumes political weight.17 In order to produce werewolves in your own
family it is not enough to resemble a wolf, or to live like a wolf: the pact
with the Devil must be coupled with an alliance with another family, and
it is the return of this alliance to the first family, the reaction of this alli-
ance on the first family, that produces werewolves by feedback effect. A
fine tale by Erckmann and Chatrian, Hugues-le-loup, assembles the tradi-
tions concerning this complex situation.18
    The contradiction between the two themes, "contagion through the ani-
mal as pack," and "pact with the anomalous as exceptional being," is pro-
gressively fading. It is with good reason that Leach links the two concepts of
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 247

alliance and contagion, pact and epidemic. Analyzing Kachin sorcery, he
writes: "Witch influence was thought to be transmitted in the food that the
women prepared. . . . Kachin witchcraft is contagious rather than heredi-
tary . . . it is associated with affinity, not filiation."19 Alliance or the pact is
the form of expression for an infection or epidemic constituting the form of
content. In sorcery, blood is of the order of contagion and alliance. It can be
said that becoming-animal is an affair of sorcery because (1) it implies an
initial relation of alliance with a demon; (2) the demon functions as the
borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes or in
which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion; (3) this becoming
itself implies a second alliance, with another human group; (4) this new
borderline between the two groups guides the contagion of animal and
human being within the pack. There is an entire politics of becomings-
animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages
that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead,
they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohib-
ited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all
the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If becoming-
animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the
imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in
its undertaking, by a rupture with the central institutions that have estab-
lished themselves or seek to become established.
   Let us cite pell-mell, not as mixes to be made, but as different cases to be
studied: becomings-animal in the war machine, wildmen of all kinds (the
war machine indeed comes from without, it is extrinsic to the State, which
treats the warrior as an anomalous power); becomings-animal in crime
societies, leopard-men, crocodile-men (when the State prohibits tribal and
local wars); becomings-animal in riot groups (when the Church and State
are faced with peasant movements containing a sorcery component, which
they repress by setting up a whole trial and legal system designed to expose
pacts with the Devil); becomings-animal in asceticism groups, the grazing
anchorite or wild-beast anchorite (the asceticism machine is in an anoma-
lous position, on a line of flight, off to the side of the Church, and disputes
the Church's pretension to set itself up as an imperial institution);20
becomings-animal in societies practicing sexual initiation of the "sacred
deflowerer" type, wolf-men, goat-men, etc. (who claim an Alliance supe-
rior and exterior to the order of families; families have to win from them
the right to regulate their own alliances, to determine them according to
relations of complementary lines of descent, and to domesticate this unbri-
dled power of alliance).21
   The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambig-
uous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated
          248 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of
totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always appropriated the
war machine in the form of national armies that strictly limit the be-
comings of the warrior. The Church has always burned sorcerers, or
reintegrated anchorites into the toned-down image of a series of saints
whose only remaining relation to animals is strangely familiar, domestic.
Families have always warded off the demonic Alliance gnawing at them, in
order to regulate alliances among themselves as they see fit. We have seen
sorcerers serve as leaders, rally to the cause of despotism, create the
countersorcery of exorcism, pass over to the side of the family and descent.
But this spells the death of the sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. We
have seen becoming spawn nothing more than a big domestic dog, as in
Henry Miller's damnation ("it would be better to feign, to pretend to be an
animal, a dog for example, and catch the bone thrown to me from time to
time") or Fitzgerald's ("I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you
throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand"). Invert
Faust's formula: So that is what it was, the form of the traveling scholar? A
mere poodle?22

   Memories of a Sorcerer, III. Exclusive importance should not be
attached to becomings-animal. Rather, they are segments occupying a
median region. On the near side, we encounter becomings-woman,
becomings-child (becoming-woman, more than any other becoming, pos-
sesses a special introductory power; it is not so much that women are
witches, but that sorcery proceeds by way of this becoming-woman). On
the far side, we find becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even
becomings-imperceptible. Toward what void does the witch's broom lead?
And where is Moby-Dick leading Ahab so silently? Lovecraft's hero
encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a
Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles. Sci-
ence fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, veg-
etable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, mole-
cules, and things imperceptible.23 The properly musical content of music is
plied by becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings-animal; how-
ever, it tends, under all sorts of influences, having to do also with the instru-
ments, to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic
lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the impercep-
tible appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule.
   If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even
nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time
and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-
molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off. Carlos Castaneda's
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 249

books clearly illustrate this evolution, or rather this involution, in which
the affects of a becoming-dog, for example, are succeeded by those of a
becoming-molecular, microperceptions of water, air, etc. A man totters
from one door to the next and disappears into thin air: "All I can tell you is
that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibers."24 All so-called initiatory
journeys include these thresholds and doors where becoming itself
becomes, and where one changes becoming depending on the "hour" of the
world, the circles of hell, or the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms,
and cries in variation. From the howling of animals to the wailing of ele-
ments and particles.
   Thus packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into
each other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when
they die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the
same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of
unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it
has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing
its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it
amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed
of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually
transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its
thresholds and doors. For example, the Wolf-Man's pack of wolves also
becomes a swarm of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small
holes and tiny ulcerations (the theme of contagion): all these heterogene-
ous elements compose "the" multiplicity of symbiosis and becoming. If we
imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity
toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation
of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact,
the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.
Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but
there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) fol-
lowing which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a
new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an
animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imper-
ceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines
constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. It is evident that the
Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not only does it border
each multiplicity, of which it determines the temporary or local stability
(with the highest number of dimensions possible under the circum-
stances), not only is it the precondition for the alliance necessary to becom-
ing, but it also carries the transformations of becoming or crossings of
multiplicities always farther down the line of flight. Moby-Dick is the
 White Wall bordering the pack; he is also the demonic Term of the Alliance;
          250 O 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

finally, he is the terrible Fishing Line with nothing on the other end, the line
that crosses the wall and drags the captain .. . where? Into the void . . .
   The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of logi-
cal order to this string, these crossings or transformations. It is already
going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vege-
table, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its
becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a
whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogenei-
ties, the Wolf-Man's wolves, bees, anuses, little scars. Of course, sorcery
always codifies certain transformations of becomings. Take a novel
steeped in the traditions of sorcery, Alexandre Dumas's Meneur de loups;
in a first pact, the man of the fringes gets the Devil to agree to make his
wishes come true, with the stipulation that a lock of his hair turn red each
time he gets a wish. We are in the hair-multiplicity, hair is the borderline.
The man himself takes a position on the wolves' borderline, as leader of the
pack. Then when he no longer has a single human hair left, a second pact
makes him become-wolf himself; it is an endless becoming since he is only
vulnerable one day in the year. We are aware that between the hair-
multiplicity and the wolf-multiplicity it is always possible to induce an
order of resemblance (red like the fur of a wolf); but the resemblance
remains quite secondary (the wolf of the transformation is black, with one
white hair). In fact, there is a first multiplicity, of hair, taken up in a
becoming-red fur; and a second multiplicity, of wolves, which in turn takes
up the becoming-animal of the man. Between the two, there is threshold
and fiber, symbiosis of or passage between heterogeneities. That is how we
sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogical con-
sistencies or compatibilities. The reason is simple. It is because no one, not
even God, can say in advance whether two borderlines will string together
or form a fiber, whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into
another given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will
enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning, multiplicity sus-
ceptible to transformation. No one can say where the line of flight will pass:
Will it let itself get bogged down and fall back to the Oedipal family animal,
a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to another danger, for example, turning
into a line of abolition, annihilation, self-destruction, Ahab, Ahab... ?We
are all too familiar with the dangers of the line of flight, and with its ambi-
guities. The risks are ever-present, but it is always possible to have the good
fortune of avoiding them. Case by case, we can tell whether the line is con-
sistent, in other words, whether the heterogeneities effectively function in
a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether the multiplicities are effectively trans-
formed through the becomings of passage. Let us take an example as simple
as: x starts practicing piano again. Is it an Oedipal return to childhood? Is it
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 251

a way of dying, in a kind of sonorous abolition? Is it a new borderline, an
active line that will bring other becomings entirely different from becom-
ing or rebecoming a pianist, that will induce a transformation of all of the
preceding assemblages to which x was prisoner? Is it a way out? Is it a pact
with the Devil? Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make
a rhizome. But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you
don't know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhi-
zome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment.
    That's easy to say? Although there is no preformed logical order to
becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is
that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of
events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the dangers. If multiplici-
ties are defined and transformed by the borderline that determines in each
instance their number of dimensions, we can conceive of the possibility of
laying them out on a plane, the borderlines succeeding one another, form-
ing a broken line. It is only in appearance that a plane of this kind "reduces"
the number of dimensions; for it gathers in all the dimensions to the extent
that flat multiplicities—which nonetheless have an increasing or decreas-
ing number of dimensions—are inscribed upon it. It is in grandiose and
simplified terms that Lovecraft attempted to pronounce sorcery's final
word: "Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his
understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his pres-
ent fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of
space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding
figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle
from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from
corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men know only through
guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimen-
sions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infin-
ity."25 Far from reducing the multiplicities' number of dimensions to two,
the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to
bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of
dimensions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete
forms. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers' drawings on this
plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for
them. This is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or
veering into the void. The only question is: Does a given becoming reach
that point? Can a given multiplicity flatten and conserve all its dimensions
in this way, like a pressed flower that remains just as alive dry? Lawrence, in
his becoming-tortoise, moves from the most obstinate animal dynamism
to the abstract, pure geometry of scales and "cleavages of division," with-
out, however, losing any of the dynamism: he pushes becoming-tortoise all
          252 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL .. .

the way to the plane of consistency.26 Everything becomes imperceptible,
everything is becoming-imperceptible on the plane of consistency, which is
nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard. It is the
Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Criterium (and still other names, as
the number of dimensions increases). At n dimensions, it is called the
Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since
it has no form itself, the abstract Machine of which each concrete assem-
blage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract
machine is the intersection of them all.
   Waves are vibrations, shifting borderlines inscribed on the plane of con-
sistency as so many abstractions. The abstract machine of the waves. In
The Waves, Virginia Woolf—who made all of her life and work a passage, a
becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and king-
doms—intermingles seven characters, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny,
Rhoda, Suzanne, and Percival. But each of these characters, with his or her
name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity (for example, Bernard
and the school offish). Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its
edge, and crosses over into the others. Percival is like the ultimate multipli-
city enveloping the greatest number of dimensions. But he is not yet the
plane of consistency. Although Rhoda thinks she sees him rising out of the
sea, no, it is not he. "When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle;
now it is upright—a column; now a fountain.. .. Behind it roars the sea. It
is beyond our reach."27 Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of con-
sistency they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates follow-
ing a line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane (each
chapter of Woolf s novel is preceded by a meditation on an aspect of the
waves, on one of their hours, on one of their becomings).

   Memories of a Theologian. Theology is very strict on the following point:
there are no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal. That is
because there is no transformation of essential forms; they are inalienable
and only entertain relations of analogy. The Devil and the witch, and the
pact between them, are no less real for that, for there is in reality a local
movement that is properly diabolical. Theology distinguishes two cases,
used as models during the Inquisition: that of Ulysses' companions, and
that of Diomedes' companions, the imaginary vision and the spell. In the
first, the subject believes him- or herself to be transformed into an animal,
pig, ox, or wolf, and the observers believe it too; but this is an internal local
movement bringing sensible images back to the imagination and bouncing
them off external meanings. In the second, the Devil "assumes" real ani-
mal bodies, even transporting the accidents and affects befalling them to
other bodies (for example, a cat or a wolf that has been taken over by the
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 253

Devil can receive wounds that are relayed to an exactly corresponding part
of a human body).28 This is a way of saying that the human being does not
become animal in reality, but that there is nevertheless a demonic reality of
the becoming-animal of the human being. Therefore it is certain that the
demon performs local transports of all kinds. The Devil is a transporter; he
transports humors, affects, or even bodies (the Inquisition brooks no com-
promises on this power of the Devil: the witch's broom, or "the Devil take
you"). But these transports cross neither the barrier of essential forms nor
that of substances or subjects.
    There is another, altogether different, problem concerning the laws of
nature that has to do not with demonology but with alchemy, and above all
physics. It is the problem of accidental forms, distinct from both essential
forms and determined subjects. For accidental forms are susceptible to
more and less: more or less charitable, but also more or less white, more or
less warm. A degree of heat is a perfectly individuated warmth distinct
from the substance or the subject that receives it. A degree of heat can enter
into composition with a degree of whiteness, or with another degree of
heat, to form a third unique individuality distinct from that of the subject.
What is the individuality of a day, a season, an event? A shorter day and a
longer day are not, strictly speaking, extensions but degrees proper to
extension, just as there are degrees proper to heat, color, etc. An accidental
form therefore has a "latitude" constituted by a certain number of
composable individuations. A degree, an intensity, is an individual, a
Haecceity that enters into composition with other degrees, other intensi-
ties, to form another individual. Can latitude be explained by the fact that
the subject participates more or less in the accidental form? But do these
degrees of participation not imply a flutter, a vibration in the form itself
that is not reducible to the properties of a subject? Moreover, if intensities
of heat are not composed by addition, it is because one must add their
respective subjects; it is the subjects that prevent the heat of the whole from
increasing. All the more reason to effect distributions of intensity, to estab-
lish latitudes that are "deformedly deformed," speeds, slownesses, and
degrees of all kinds corresponding to a body or set of bodies taken as longi-
tude: a cartography.29 In short, between substantial forms and determined
subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic
local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities,
events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from
those of the well-formed subjects that receive them.

   Memories of a Spinozist, I. Substantial or essential forms have been cri-
tiqued in many different ways. Spinoza's approach is radical: Arrive at ele-
ments that no longer have either form or function, that are abstract in this
          254 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ...

sense even though they are perfectly real. They are distinguished solely by
movement and rest, slowness and speed. They are not atoms, in other
words, finite elements still endowed with form. Nor are they indefinitely
divisible. They are infinitely small, ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid
out on the same plane of consistency or composition. They are not defined
by their number since they always come in infinities. However, depending
on their degree of speed or the relation of movement and rest into which
they enter, they belong to a given Individual, which may itself be part of
another Individual governed by another, more complex, relation, and so
on to infinity. There are thus smaller and larger infinities, not by virtue of
their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which
their parts enter. Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the
whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities.
The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine,
abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and
individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering
into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. There is therefore
a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and
the animate, the artificial and the natural. This plane has nothing to do
with a form or a figure, nor with a design or a function. Its unity has nothing
to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project
in the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon which everything is laid out,
and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all functions;
its dimensions, however, increase with those of the multiplicities of indi-
vidualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane, upon which things are dis-
tinguished from one another only by speed and slowness. A plane of
immanence or univocality opposed to analogy. The One is said with a single
meaning of all the multiple. Being expresses in a single meaning all that
differs. What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity
of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life.
    The never-ending debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire:
both agree at least in denouncing resemblances, or imaginary, sensible
analogies, but in Cuvier, scientific definition concerns the relations
between organs, and between organs and functions. Cuvier thus takes anal-
ogy to the scientific stage, making it an analogy of proportionality. The
unity of the plane, according to him, can only be a unity of analogy, there-
fore a transcendent unity that cannot be realized without fragmenting into
distinct branches, according to irreducible, uncrossable, heterogeneous
compositions. Baer would later add: according to noncommunicating
types of development and differentiation. The plane is a hidden plan(e) of
organization, a structure or genesis. Geoffroy has an entirely different
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL.. . D 255

point of view because he goes beyond organs and functions to abstract ele-
ments he terms "anatomical," even to particles, pure materials that enter
into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given
function depending on their degree of speed or slowness. Speed and slow-
ness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the
forms of structure but also the types of development. This approach later
reappears in an evolutionist framework, with Perrier's tachygenesis and
differential rates of growth in allometry: species as kinematic entities that
are either precocious or retarded. (Even the question of fertility is less one
of form and function than speed; do the paternal chromosomes arrive early
enough to be incorporated into the nuclei?) In any case, there is a pure
plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is
given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distin-
guished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or
that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their rela-
tions of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows
down or accelerates. A single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that
effectuate it. A unique plane of consistency or composition for the cephalo-
pod and the vertebrate; for the vertebrate to become an Octopus or Cuttle-
fish, all it would have to do is fold itself in two fast enough to fuse the
elements of the halves of its back together, then bring its pelvis up to the
nape of its neck and gather its limbs together into one of its extremities, like
"a clown who throws his head and shoulders back and walks on his head
and hands."30 Plication. It is no longer a question of organs and functions,
and of a transcendent Plane that can preside over their organization only
by means of analogical relations and types of divergent development. It is a
question not of organization but of composition; not of development or
differentiation but of movement and rest, speed and slowness. It is a ques-
tion of elements and particles, which do or do not arrive fast enough to
effect a passage, a becoming or jump on the same plane of pure imma-
nence. And if there are in fact jumps, rifts between assemblages, it is not by
virtue of their essential irreducibility but rather because there are always
elements that do not arrive on time, or arrive after everything is over; thus
it is necessary to pass through fog, to cross voids, to have lead times and
delays, which are themselves part of the plane of immanence. Even the
failures are part of the plane. We must try to conceive of this world in which
a single fixed plane—which we shall call a plane of absolute immobility or
absolute movement—is traversed by nonformal elements of relative speed
that enter this or that individuated assemblage depending on their de-
grees of speed and slowness. A plane of consistency peopled by anony-
mous matter, by infinite bits of impalpable matter entering into varying
connections.
           256 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

   Children are Spinozists. When Little Hans talks about a "peepee-
maker," he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically
to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary accord-
ing to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different
individuated assemblages it enters. Does a girl have a peepee-maker? The
boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to conjure away a fear of cas-
tration. It is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effec-
tively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function. Quite
simply, the same material has different connections, different relations of
movement and rest, enters different assemblages in the case of the boy and
the girl (a girl does not pee standing or into the distance). Does a locomo-
tive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage. Chairs
don't have them: but that is because the elements of the chair were not able
to integrate this material into their relations, or decomposed the relation
with that material to the point that it yielded something else, a rung, for
example. It has been noted that for children an organ has "a thousand vicis-
situdes," that it is "difficult to localize, difficult to identify, it is in turn a
bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy's heart..." This is not
at all because the organ is experienced as a part-object. It is because the
organ is exactly what its elements make it according to their relation of
movement or rest, and the way in which this relation combines with or
splits off from that of neighboring elements. This is not animism, any more
than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consis-
tency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite
number of assemblages. Children's questions are poorly understood if they
are not seen as question-machines; that is why indefinite articles play so
important a role in these questions (a belly, a child, a horse, a chair, "how is
a person made?"). Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher. We
call the longitude of a body the particle aggregates belonging to that body in
a given relation; these aggregates are part of each other depending on the
composition of the relation that defines the individuated assemblage of
the body.

    Memories of a Spinozist, II. There is another aspect to Spinoza. To every
relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an
infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations com-
posing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond inten-
sities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these
intensities come from external parts or from the individual's own parts.
Affects are becomings. Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the lati-
tude of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or
rather within the limits of that degree. Latitude is made up of intensive parts
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 257

falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive partsfalling under a rela-
 tion. In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and
 functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics;
 instead we will seek to count its affects. This kind of study is called
ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A race-
horse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox.
Von Uexkiill, in defining animal worlds, looks for the active and passive
affects of which the animal is capable in the individuated assemblage of
which it is a part. For example, the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself
up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets
 itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the
least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of the time the tick
 sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all that goes on in the
 immense forest. Its degree of power is indeed bounded by two limits: the
 optimal limit of the feast after which it dies, and the pessimal limit of the
 fast as it waits. It will be said that the tick's three affects assume generic and
 specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true
 from the standpoint of physiology, but not from the standpoint of Ethics.
 Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longi-
 tude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know nothing
 about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects
 are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with
 the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by
 it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in com-
posing a more powerful body.
     Once again, we turn to children. Note how they talk about animals, and
are moved by them. They make a list of affects. Little Hans's horse is not
representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element
or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse-omnibus-street. It is
 defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the
 individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, hav-
ing a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling
heavy loads, being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc.
These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a
horse "can do." They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-
power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can't
get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whip-
ping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days
 (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the
becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his
 mother's bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the
 nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning
          258 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ...

of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the
fall, shame .. . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a
question of imitating a horse, "playing" horse, identifying with one, or
even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do
with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether
Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement
and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects
aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans's
nor the horse's, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage,
for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show
something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what
way would that ameliorate Hans's problem, to what extent would it open a
way out that had been previously blocked? When Hofmannsthal contem-
plates the death throes of a rat, it is in him that the animal "bares his teeth at
monstrous fate." This is not a feeling of pity, as he makes clear; still less an
identification. It is a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely
different individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat become a thought, a
feverish thought in the man, at the same time as the man becomes a rat
gnashing its teeth in its death throes. The rat and the man are in no way the
same thing, but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a lan-
guage that is no longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of
forms, in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects. Unnatural par-
ticipation. But the plane of composition, the plane of Nature, is precisely
for participations of this kind, and continually makes and unmakes their
assemblages, employing every artifice.
    This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination, but a composi-
tion of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency: a plan(e), a program,
or rather a diagram, a problem, a question-machine. Vladimir Slepian for-
mulates the "problem" in a thoroughly curious text: I'm hungry, always
hungry, a man should not be hungry, so I'll have to become a dog—but
how? This will not involve imitating a dog, nor an analogy of relations. I
must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and
slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceed-
ing neither by resemblance nor by analogy. For I cannot become dog with-
out the dog itself becoming something else. Slepian gets the idea of using
shoes to solve this problem, the artifice of the shoes. If I wear shoes on my
hands, then their elements will enter into a new relation, resulting in the
affect or becoming I seek. But how will I be able to tie the shoe on my sec-
ond hand, once the first is already occupied? With my mouth, which in
turn receives an investment in the assemblage, becoming a dog muzzle,
insofar as a dog muzzle is now used to tie shoes. At each stage of the prob-
lem, what needs to be done is not to compare two organs but to place ele-
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 259

ments or materials in a relation that uproots the organ from its specificity,
making it become "with" the other organ. But this becoming, which has
already taken in feet, hands, and mouth, will nevertheless fail. It founders
on the tail. The tail would have had to have been invested, forced to exhibit
elements common to the sexual organ and the caudal appendage, so that
the former would be taken up in the becoming-dog of the man at the same
time as the latter were taken up in a becoming of the dog, in another becom-
ing that would also be part of the assemblage. The plan(e) fails, Slepian fal-
ters on this point. The tail remains an organ of the man on the one hand and
an appendage of the dog on the other; their relations do not enter into com-
position in the new assemblage. This is where psychoanalytic drift sets in,
bringing back all the cliches about the tail, the mother, the childhood mem-
ory of the mother threading needles, all those concrete figures and sym-
bolic analogies.31 But this is the way Slepian wants it in this fine text. For
there is a way in which the failure of the plan(e) is part of the plan(e) itself:
The plan(e) is infinite, you can start it in a thousand different ways; you will
always find something that comes too late or too early, forcing you to
recompose all of your relations of speed and slowness, all of your affects,
and to rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite undertaking. But there
is another way in which the plan(e) fails; this time, it is because another
plan(e) returns full force, breaking the becoming-animal, folding the ani-
mal back onto the animal and the person onto the person, recognizing only
resemblances between elements and analogies between relations. Slepian
confronts both dangers.
    We wish to make a simple point about psychoanalysis: from the begin-
ning, it has often encountered the question of the becomings-animal of the
human being: in children, who continually undergo becomings of this
kind; in fetishism and in particular masochism, which continually con-
front this problem. The least that can be said is that the psychoanalysts,
even Jung, did not understand, or did not want to understand. They killed
becoming-animal, in the adult as in the child. They saw nothing. They see
the animal as a representative of drives, or a representation of the parents.
They do not see the reality of a becoming-animal, that it is affect in itself,
the drive in person, and represents nothing. There exist no other drives
than the assemblages themselves. There are two classic texts in which
Freud sees nothing but the father in the becoming-horse of Hans, and
Ferenczi sees the same in the becoming-cock of Arpad. The horse's blind-
ers are the father's eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his mustache,
its kicks are the parents' "lovemaking." Not one word about Hans's rela-
tion to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a
child to see the spectacle "a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a horse
falls, a horse is whipped..." Psychoanalysis has no feeling for unnatural
          260 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL. ..

participations, nor for the assemblages a child can mount in order to solve
a problem from which all exits are barred him: a plan(e), not a phantasy.
Similarly, fewer stupidities would be uttered on the topic of pain, humilia-
tion, and anxiety in masochism if it were understood that it is the
becomings-animal that lead the masochism, not the other way around.
There are always apparatuses, tools, engines involved, there are always
artifices and constraints used in taking Nature to the fullest. That is
because it is necessary to annul the organs, to shut them away so that their
liberated elements can enter into the new relations from which the
becoming-animal, and the circulation of affects within the machinic
assemblage, will result. As we have seen elsewhere, this was the case for the
mask, the bridle, the bit, and the penis sheath in Equus eroticus: paradoxi-
cally, in the becoming-horse assemblage the man subdues his own "instinc-
tive" forces while the animal transmits to him its "acquired" forces.
Reversal, unnatural participation. And the boots of the woman-master
function to annul the leg as a human organ, to make the elements of the leg
enter a relation suited to the overall assemblage: "In this way, it will no
longer be women's legs that have an effect on me . . ,"32 But to break the
becoming-animal all that is needed is to extract a segment from it, to
abstract one of its moments, to fail to take into account its internal speeds
and slownesses, to arrest the circulation of affects. Then nothing remains
but imaginary resemblances between terms, or symbolic analogies
between relations. This segment refers to the father, that relation of move-
ment and rest refers to the primal scene, etc. It must be recognized that psy-
choanalysis alone is not enough to bring about this breakage. It only brings
out a danger inherent in becoming. There is always the danger of finding
yourself "playing" the animal, the domestic Oedipal animal, Miller going
bowwow and taking a bone, Fitzgerald licking your hand, Slepian returning
to his mother, or the old man playing horse or dog on an erotic postcard
from 1900 (and "playing" at being a wild animal would be no better).
Becomings-animal continually run these dangers.

   Memories of a Haecceity. A body is not defined by the form that deter-
mines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it pos-
sesses or the functions it fulfills. On the plane of consistency, a body is
defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of
the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement
and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive
affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude).
Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. The credit
goes to Spinoza for calling attention to these two dimensions of the Body,
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 261

and for having defined the plane of Nature as pure longitude and latitude.
Latitude and longitude are the two elements of a cartography.
   There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person,
subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it.33 A sea-
son, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking
nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a
subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of rela-
tions of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to
affect and be affected. When demonology expounds upon the diabolical
art of local movements and transports of affect, it also notes the impor-
tance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious parti-
cles, favorable conditions for these transports. Tales must contain
haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations
that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and
subjects. Among types of civilizations, the Orient has many more
individuations by haecceity than by subjectivity or substantiality: the
haiku, for example, must include indicators as so many floating lines con-
stituting a complex individual. In Charlotte Bronte, everything is in terms
of wind, things, people, faces, loves, words. Lorca's "five in the evening,"
when love falls and fascism rises. That awful five in the evening! We say,
"What a story!" "What heat!" "What a life!" to designate a very singular
individuation. The hours of the day in Lawrence, in Faulkner. A degree of
heat, an intensity of white, are perfect individualities; and a degree of heat
can combine in latitude with another degree to form a new individual, as in
a body that is cold here and hot there depending on its longitude. Norwe-
gian omelette. A degree of heat can combine with an intensity of white, as
in certain white skies of a hot summer. This is in no way an individuality of
the instant, as opposed to the individuality of permanences or durations. A
tear-off calendar has just as much time as a perpetual calendar, although
the time in question is not the same. There are animals that live no longer
than a day or an hour; conversely, a group of years can be as long as the most
durable subject or object. We can conceive of an abstract time that is equal
for haecceities and for subjects or things. Between the extreme slownesses
and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy, Michel Tournier places
meteorology, where meteors live at our pace: "A cloud forms in the sky like
an image in my brain, the wind blows like I breathe, a rainbow spans the
horizon for as long as my heart needs to reconcile itself to life, the summer
passes like vacation drifts by." But is it by chance that in Tournier's novel
this certitude can come only to a twin hero who is deformed and
desubjectified, and has acquired a certain ubiquity?34 Even when times are
abstractly equal, the individuation of a life is not the same as the
individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support. It is not the
          262 O 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

same Plane: in the first case, it is the plane of consistency or of composition
of haecceities, which knows only speeds and affects; and in the second case,
it is the altogether different plane of forms, substances, and subjects. And it
is not in the same time, the same temporality. Aeon: the indefinite time of
the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides
that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-
here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going
to happen and has just happened. Chronos: the time of measure that situ-
ates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject.35
Boulez distinguishes tempo and nontempo in music: the "pulsed time" of a
formal and functional music based on values versus the "nonpulsed time"
of a floating music, both floating and machinic, which has nothing but
speeds or differences in dynamic.36 In short, the difference is not at all
between the ephemeral and the durable, nor even between the regular and
the irregular, but between two modes of individuation, two modes of
temporality.
    We must avoid an oversimplified conciliation, as though there were on
the one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other
hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type. For you will yield
nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that
you are nothing but that. When the face becomes a haecceity: "It seemed a
curious mixture that simply made do with time, weather and these peo-
ple."37 You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses
between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the
individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a
climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at
least you can have it, you can reach it. A cloud of locusts carried in by the
wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at
full moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a
decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things
and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated
aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longi-
tude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and sub-
jects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and
the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that
are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life. The
street enters into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters
into composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into
composition with each other. At most, we may distinguish assemblage
haecceities (a body considered only as longitude and latitude) and
interassemblage haecceities, which also mark the potentialities of becom-
ing within each assemblage (the milieu of intersection of the longitudes
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL.. . D 263

and latitudes). But the two are strictly inseparable. Climate, wind, season,
hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that pop-
ulate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be
read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. The becoming-
evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o'clock is this
animal! This animal is this place! "The thin dog is running in the road,
this dog is the road," cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel.
Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing
but dimensions of multiplicities. The street is as much a part of the
omnibus-horse assemblage as the Hans assemblage the becoming-horse of
which it initiates. We are all five o'clock in the evening, or another hour, or
rather two hours simultaneously, the optimal and the pessimal, noon-
midnight, but distributed in a variable fashion. The plane of consistency
contains only haecceities, along intersecting lines. Forms and subjects are
not of that world. Virginia Woolf s walk through the crowd, among the
taxis. Taking a walk is a haecceity; never again will Mrs. Dalloway say to
herself, "I am this, I am that, he is this, he is that." And "She felt very young;
at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through every-
thing; at the same time was outside, looking o n . . . . She always had the feel-
ing that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."38 Haecceity, fog,
glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it
is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a
rhizome.
    And it is not the same language, at least not the same usage of language.
For if the plane of consistency only has haecceities for content, it also has
its own particular semiotic to serve as expression. A plane of content and a
plane of expression. This semiotic is composed above all of proper names,
verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns. Indefinite article
+ proper name + infinitive verb constitutes the basic chain of expression,
correlative to the least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a
semiotic that has freed itself from both formal signifiances and personal
subjectifications. In the first place, the verb in the infinitive is in no way
indeterminate with respect to time; it expresses the floating, nonpulsed
time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure event or of becom-
ing, which articulates relative speeds and slownesses independently of the
chronometric or chronological values that time assumes in the other
modes. There is good reason to oppose the infinitive as mode and tense of
becoming to all of the other modes and tenses, which pertain to Chronos
since they form pulsations or values of being (the verb "to be" is precisely
the only one that has no infinitive, or rather the infinitive of which is only
an indeterminate, empty expression, taken abstractly to designate the sum
total of definite modes and tenses).39 Second, the proper name is no way
          264 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

the indicator of a subject; thus it seems useless to ask whether its operation
resembles the nomination of a species, according to whether the subject is
considered to be of another nature than that of the Form under which it is
classified, or only the ultimate act of that Form, the limit of classifica-
tion.40 The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun take
on the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a species. The
proper name fundamentally designates something that is of the order of
the event, of becoming or of the haecceity. It is the military men and meteo-
rologists who hold the secret of proper names, when they give them to a
strategic operation or a hurricane. The proper name is not the subject of a
tense but the agent of an infinitive. It marks a longitude and a latitude. If
Tick, Wolf, Horse, etc., are true proper names, they are so not by virtue of
the specific and generic denominators that characterize them but of the
speeds that compose them and the affects that fill them; it is by virtue of the
event they are in themselves and in the assemblages—the becoming-horse
of Little Hans, the becoming-wolf of the Were [which etymologically
means "man"—Trans.], the becoming-tick of the Stoic (other proper
names).
   Third, the indefinite article and the indefinite pronoun are no more
indeterminate than the infinitive. Or rather they are lacking a determina-
tion only insofar as they are applied to a form that is itself indeterminate,
or to a determinable subject. On the other hand, they lack nothing when
they introduce haecceities, events, the individuation of which does not
pass into a form and is not effected by a subject. The indefinite then has
maximum determination: once upon a time; a child is being beaten; a horse
is falling . . . Here, the elements in play find their individuation in the
assemblage of which they are a part, independent of the form of their con-
cept and the subjectivity of their person. We have remarked several times
the extent to which children use the indefinite not as something indetermi-
nate but, on the contrary, as an individuating function within a collectivity.
That is why we are dumbfounded by the efforts of psychoanalysis, which
desperately wants there to be something definite hidden behind the indefi-
nite, a possessive, a person. When the child says "a belly," "a horse," "how
do people grow up?" "someone is beating a child," the psychoanalyst hears
"my belly," "the father," "will I grow up to be like daddy?" The psychoana-
lyst asks: Who is being beaten, and by whom?41 Even linguistics is not
immune from the same prejudice, inasmuch as it is inseparable from a
personology; according to linguistics, in addition to the indefinite -article
and the pronoun, the third-person pronoun also lacks the determination of
subjectivity that is proper to the first two persons and is supposedly the
necessary condition for all enunciation.42
   We believe on the contrary that the third person indefinite, HE, THEY,
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 265

implies no indetermination from this point of view; it ties the statement to
a collective assemblage, as its necessary condition, rather than to a subject
of the enunciation. Blanchot is correct in saying that ONE and HE—one is
dying, he is unhappy—in no way take the place of a subject, but instead do
away with any subject in favor of an assemblage of the haecceity type that
carries or brings out the event insofar as it is unformed and incapable of
being effectuated by persons ("something happens to them that they can
only get a grip on again by letting go of their ability to say I").43 The HE does
not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It
does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first
two persons; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the tyr-
anny of subjective or signifying constellations, under the regime of empty
redundancies. The contents of the chains of expression it articulates are
those that can be assembled for a maximum number of occurrences and
becomings. "They arrive like fate ... where do they come from, how have
they pushed this far .. .?"44 He or one, indefinite article, proper name,
infinitive verb: A HANS TO BECOME HORSE, A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT
HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID, THEY ARRIVE HUNS. Classified ads,
telegraphic machines on the plane of consistency (once again, we are
reminded of the procedures of Chinese poetry and the rules for translation
suggested by the best commentators).45

   Memories of a Plan(e) Maker. Perhaps there are two planes, or two ways
of conceptualizing the plane. The plane can be a hidden principle, which
makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every
instant causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this or that
moment. But the plane itself is not given. It is by nature hidden. It can only
be inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise (simultane-
ously or successively, synchronically or diachronically). A plane of this
kind is as much a plan(e) of organization as of development: it is structural
or genetic, and both at once, structure and genesis, the structural plan(e) of
formed organizations with their developments, the genetic plan(e) of evo-
lutionary developments with their organizations. These are only nuances
of this first conception of the plane. To accord these nuances too much
importance would prevent us from grasping something more important;
that the plan(e), conceived or made in this fashion, always concerns the
development of forms and the formation of subjects. A hidden structure
necessary for forms, a secret signifier necessary for subjects. It ensues that
the plan(e) itself will not be given. It exists only in a supplementary dimen-
sion to that to which it gives rise (n +1). This makes it a teleological plan(e),
a design, a mental principle. It is a plan(e) of transcendence. It is a plan(e)
of analogy, either because it assigns the eminent term of a development or
          266 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . ..

because it establishes the proportional relations of a structure. It may be in
the mind of a god, or in the unconscious of life, of the soul, or of language: it
is always concluded from its own effects. It is always inferred. Even if it is
said to be immanent, it is so only by absence, analogically (metaphorically,
metonymically, etc.). The tree is given in the seed, but as a function of a
plan(e) that is not given. The same applies to music. The developmental or
organizational principle does not appear in itself, in a direct relation with
that which develops or is organized: There is a transcendent compositional
principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not "audible" by itself or
for itself. This opens the way for all possible interpretations. Forms and
their developments, and subjects and their formations, relate to a plan(e)
that operates as a transcendent unity or hidden principle. The plan(e) can
always be described, but as a part aside, as ungiven in that to which it gives
rise. Is this not how even Balzac, even Proust, describe their work's plan(e)
of organization or development, as though in a metalanguage? Is not
Stockhausen also obliged to describe the structure of his sound forms as
existing "alongside" them, since he is unable to make it audible? Life
plan(e), music plan(e), writing plan(e), it's all the same: a plan(e) that can-
not be given as such, that can only be inferred from the forms it develops
and the subjects it forms, since it is for these forms and these subjects.
    Then there is an altogether different plane, or an altogether different
conception of the plane. Here, there are no longer any forms or develop-
ments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is
no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of
movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at
least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and
particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless indi-
viduations that constitute collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but
things arrive late or early, and form this or that assemblage depending on
their compositions of speed. Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form
according to compositions of nonsubjectified powers or affects. We call
this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haec-
ceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to the plan(e)
of organization or development). It is necessarily a plane of immanence
and univocality. We therefore call it the plane of Nature, although nature
has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between
the natural and the artificial. However many dimensions it may have, it
never has a supplementary dimension to that which transpires upon it.
That alone makes it natural and immanent. The same goes for the principle
of contradiction: this plane could also be called the plane of
noncontradiction. The plane of consistency could be called the plane of
nonconsistency. It is a geometrical plane, no longer tied to a mental design
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 267

but to an abstract design. Its number of dimensions continually increases
as what happens happens, but even so it loses nothing of its planitude. It is
thus a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but this proliferation of
material has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or
the filiation of forms. Still less is it a regression leading back to a principle.
It is on the contrary an involution, in which form is constantly being dis-
solved, freeing times and speeds. It is a fixed plane, a fixed sound plane, or
visual plane, or writing plane, etc. Here, fixed does not mean immobile: it
is the absolute state of movement as well as of rest, from which all relative
speeds and slownesses spring, and nothing but them. Certain modern
musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said
to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound
plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the
imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential speeds and
slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark sec-
onds, tenths and hundredths of seconds.46 Or rather it is a question of a free-
ing of time, Aeon, a nonpulsed time for a floating music, as Boulez says, an
electronic music in which forms are replaced by pure modifications of
speed. It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed
this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and
genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation
against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest
also marks the absolute state of movement. The same could be said of
the fixed visual plane: Godard, for example, effectively carries the fixed
plane of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsists are
tiny variations of speed between movements in composition. Nathalie
Sarraute, for her part, proposes a clear distinction between two planes of
writing: a transcendent plan(e) that organizes and develops forms (genres,
themes, motifs) and assigns and develops subjects (personages, characters,
feelings); and an altogether different plane that liberates the particles of an
anonymous matter, allowing them to communicate through the "enve-
lope" of forms and subjects, retaining between them only relations of
movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane
itself is perceived at the same time as it allows us to perceive the impercep-
tible (the microplane, the molecular plane).47 So from the point of view of a
well-founded abstraction, we can make it seem as though the two planes,
the two conceptions of the plane, were in clear and absolute opposition.
From this point of view, we can say, You can see the difference between the
following two types of propositions: (1) forms develop and subjects form as
a function of a plan(e) that can only be inferred (the planfe] of organi-
zation-development); (2) there are only speeds and slownesses between
unformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers, as a func-
          268 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

tion of a plane that is necessarily given at the same time as that to which it
gives rise (the plane of consistency or composition).48
   Let us consider three major cases from nineteenth-century German lit-
erature, Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche. First, Holderlin's extraordinary
composition, Hyperion, as analyzed by Robert Rovini: the importance of
haecceities of the season type. These constitute, in two different ways, the
"frame of the narrative" (plan[e]) and the details of what happens within
that frame (the assemblages and interassemblages).49 He also notes how the
succession of the seasons and the superposition of the same season from
different years dissolves forms and persons and gives rise to movements,
speeds, delays, and affects, as if as the narrative progressed something were
escaping from an impalpable matter. And perhaps also the relation to a
"realpolitik," to a war machine, to a musical machine of dissonance.
   Kleist: everything with him, in his writing as in his life, becomes speed
and slowness. A succession of catatonic freezes and extreme velocities,
fainting spells and shooting arrows. Sleep on your steed, then take off at a
gallop. Jump from one assemblage to another, with the aid of a faint, by
crossing a void. Kleist multiplies "life plan(e)s," but his voids and failures,
his leaps, earthquakes, and plagues are always included on a single plane.
The plane is not a principle of organization but a means of transportation.
No form develops, no subject forms; affects are displaced, becomings cata-
pult forward and combine into blocks, like the becoming-woman of Achil-
les and the becoming-dog of Penthesilea. Kleist offers a wonderful
explanation of how forms and persons are only appearances produced by
the displacement of a center of gravity on an abstract line, and by the con-
junction of these lines on a plane of immanence. He is fascinated by bears;
they are impossible to fool because their cruel little eyes see through
appearances to the true "soul of movement," the Gemiit or nonsubjective
affect: the becoming-bear of Kleist. Even death can only be conceptualized
as the intersection of elementary reactions of different speeds. A skull
exploding, one of Kleist's obsessions. All of Kleist's work is traversed by a
war machine invoked against the State, by a musical machine invoked
against painting or the "picture." It is odd how Goethe and Hegel hated this
new kind of writing. Because for them the plan(e) must indissolubly be a
harmonious development of Form and a regulated formation of the Sub-
ject, personage, or character (the sentimental education, the interior and
substantial solidity of the character, the harmony or analogy of the forms
and continuity of development, the cult of the State, etc.). Their concep-
tion of the Plane is totally opposed to that of Kleist. The anti-Goetheism,
anti-Hegelianism of Kleist, and already of Holderlin. Goethe gets to the
crux of the matter when he reproaches Kleist for simultaneously setting up
a pure "stationary process" that is like the fixed plane, introducing voids
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 269

and jumps that prevent any development of a central character, and mobi-
lizing a violence of affects that causes an extreme confusion of feelings.50
   Nietzsche does the same thing by different means. There is no longer
any development of forms or formation of subjects. He criticizes Wagner
for retaining too much harmonic form, and too many pedagogical person-
ages, or "characters": too much Hegel and Goethe. Now Bizet, on the other
hand, Nietzsche says . . . It seems to us that fragmentary writing is not so
much the issue in Nietzsche. It is instead speeds and slownesses: not writ-
ing slowly or rapidly, but rather writing, and everything else besides, as a
production of speeds and slownesses between particles. No form will resist
that, no character or subject will survive it. Zarathustra is only speeds and
slownesses, and the eternal return, the life of the eternal return, is the first
great concrete freeing of nonpulsed time. Ecce Homo has only individ-
uations by haecceities. It is inevitable that the Plan(e), thus conceived, will
always fail, but that the failures will be an integral part of the plan(e): See
the multitude of plans for The Will to Power. For a given aphorism, it is
always possible, even necessary, to introduce new relations of speed and
slowness between its elements that truly make it change assemblages, jump
from one assemblage to the next (the issue is therefore not the fragment).
As Cage says, it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it fail.51 Precisely because
it is not a plan(e) of organization, development, or formation, but of
nonvoluntary transmutation. Or Boulez: "Program the machine so that
each time a tape is played on it, it produces different time characteristics."
So the plan(e)—life plan(e), writing plan(e), music plan(e)—must neces-
sarily fail for it is impossible to be faithful to it; but the failures are a part of
the plan(e) for the plan(e) expands or shrinks along with the dimensions of
that which it deploys in each instance (planitude of n dimensions). A
strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and
contagion-proliferation-involution.
   Why does the opposition between the two kinds of planes lead to a still
more abstract hypothesis? Because one continually passes from one to the
other, by unnoticeable degrees and without being aware of it, or one be-
comes aware of it only afterward. Because one continually reconstitutes
one plane atop another, or extricates one from the other. For example, all
we need to do is to sink the floating plane of immanence, bury it in the
depths of Nature instead of allowing it to play freely on the surface, for it to
pass to the other side and assume the role of a ground that can no longer be
anything more than a principle of analogy from the standpoint of organiza-
tion, and a law of continuity from the standpoint of development.52 The
plane of organization or development effectively covers what we have
called stratification: Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are
"strata" or relations between strata. The plane of consistency or imma-
          270 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL.. .

nence, on the other hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature, by
even the most artificial of means. The plane of consistency is the body
without organs. Pure relations of speed and slowness between particles
imply movements of deterritorialization, just as pure affects imply an
enterprise of desubjectification. Moreover, the plane of consistency does
not preexist the movements of deterritorialization that unravel it, the lines
of flight that draw it and cause it to rise to the surface, the becomings that
compose it. The plane of organization is constantly working away at the
plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or inter-
rupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify
them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely,
the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of
organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by
dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assem-
blages or microassemblages. But once again, so much caution is needed to
prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition
or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the
undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a mini-
mum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract
materials, affects, and assemblages?
   In fact, the opposition we should set up between the two planes is that
between two abstract poles: for example, to the transcendent, organiza-
tional plane of Western music based on sound forms and their develop-
ment, we oppose the immanent plane of consistency of Eastern music,
composed of speeds and slownesses, movements and rest. In keeping with
our concrete hypothesis, the whole becoming of Western music, all musical
becoming, implies a minimum of sound forms and even of melodic and
harmonic functions; speeds and slownesses are made to pass across them,
and it is precisely these speeds and slownesses that reduce the forms and
functions to the minimum. Beethoven produced the most astonishing
polyphonic richness with relatively scanty themes of three or four notes.
There is a material proliferation that goes hand in hand with a dissolution
of form (involution) but is at the same time accompanied by a continuous
development of form. Perhaps Schumann's genius is the most striking case
of form being developed only for the relations of speed and slowness one
materially and emotionally assigns it. Music has always submitted its
forms and motifs to temporal transformations, augmentations or diminu-
tions, slowdowns or accelerations, which do not occur solely according to
laws of organization or even of development. Expanding and contracting
microintervals are at play within coded intervals. Wagner and the post-
Wagnerians free variations of speed between sound particles to an even
greater extent. Ravel and Debussy retain just enough form to shatter it,
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 271

affect it, modify it through speeds and slownesses. Bolero is the classic
example, nearly a caricature, of a machinic assemblage that preserves a
minimum of form in order to take it to the bursting point. Boulez speaks of
proliferations of little motifs, accumulations of little notes that proceed
kinematically and affectively, sweeping away a simple form by adding indi-
cations of speed to it; this allows one to produce extremely complex
dynamic relations on the basis of intrinsically simple formal relations.
Even a rubato by Chopin cannot be reproduced because it will have differ-
ent time characteristics at each playing.53 It is as though an immense plane
of consistency of variable speed were forever sweeping up forms and func-
tions, forms and subjects, extracting from them particles and affects. A
clock keeping a whole assortment of times.
    What is a girl, what is a group of girls? Proust at least has shown us once
and for all that their individuation, collective or singular, proceeds not by
subjectivity but by haecceity, pure haecceity. "Fugitive beings." They are
pure relations of speeds and slownesses, and nothing else. A girl is late on
account of her speed: she did too many things, crossed too many spaces in
relation to the relative time of the person waiting for her. Thus her apparent
slowness is transformed into the breakneck speed of our waiting. It must be
said in this connection, and for the whole of the Recherche du temps perdu,
that Swann does not at all occupy the same position as the narrator. Swann
is not a rough sketch or precursor of the narrator, except secondarily and at
rare moments. They are not at all on the same plane. Swann is always think-
ing and feeling in terms of subjects, forms, resemblances between subjects,
and correspondences between forms. For him, one of Odette's lies is a form
whose secret subjective content must be discovered, provoking amateur
detective activity. To him Vinteuil's music is a form that must evoke some-
thing else, fall back on something else, echo other forms, whether paint-
ings, faces, or landscapes. Although the narrator may follow in Swann's
footsteps, he is nonetheless in a different element, on a different plane. One
of Albertine's lies is nearly devoid of content; it tends on the contrary to
merge with the emission of a particle issuing from the eyes of the beloved, a
particle that stands only for itself and travels too fast through the narrator's
auditory or visual field. This molecular speed is unbearable because it
indicates a distance, a proximity where Albertine would like to be, and
already is.54 So that the narrator's pose is not principally that of the investi-
gating detective but (a very different figure) that of the jailer. How can he
become master of speed, how can he stand it nervously (as a headache) and
perceptually (as a flash)? How can he build a prison for Albertine? Jealousy
is different in Swann and the narrator, as is the perception of music:
Vinteuil gradually ceases to be apprehended in terms of forms and compa-
rable subjects, and assumes incredible speeds and slownesses that combine
          272 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

on a plane of consistency of variation, the plane of music and of the
Recherche (just as Wagnerian motifs abandon all fixity of form and all
assignation of personages). It is as though Swann's desperate efforts to
reterritorialize the flow of things (to reterritorialize Odette on a secret,
painting on a face, music on the Bois de Boulogne) were replaced by the
sped-up movement of deterritorialization, by a linear speedup of the
abstract machine, sweeping away faces and landscapes, and then love, jeal-
ousy, painting, and music itself, according to increasingly stronger coeffi-
cients that nourish the Work at risk of dissolving everything and dying. For
the narrator, despite partial victories, fails in his project; that project was
not at all to regain time or to force back memories, but to become master of
speeds to the rhythm of his asthma. It was to face annihilation. But another
outcome was possible, or was made possible by Proust.

   Memories of a Molecule. Becoming-animal is only one becoming among
others. A kind of order or apparent progression can be established for the
segments of becoming in which we find ourselves; becoming-woman,
becoming-child; becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral; becomings-
molecular of all kinds, becomings-particles. Fibers lead us from one to the
other, transform one into the other as they pass through doors and across
thresholds. Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim: to
unleash these becomings. Especially music; music is traversed by a
becoming-woman, becoming-child, and not only at the level of themes and
motifs: the little refrain, children's games and dances, childhood scenes.
Instrumentation and orchestration are permeated by becomings-animal,
above all becomings-bird, but many others besides. The lapping, wailing of
molecular discordances have always been present, even if instrumental
evolution with other factors is now giving them growing importance, as the
value of a new threshold for a properly musical content: the sound mole-
cule, relations of speed and slowness between particles. Becomings-animal
plunge into becomings-molecular. This raises all kinds of questions.
   In a way, we must start at the end: all becomings are already molecular.
That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or
someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two fig-
ures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject
nor the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the sub-
ject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to
extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement
and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and
through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the
process of desire. This principle of proximity or approximation is entirely
particular and reintroduces no analogy whatsoever. It indicates as rigor-
                               1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 273

ously as possible a zone ofproximity55 or copres23 46 59 95 131 155 157 166 187 203 205 212 228 238 371 434 444 494 507 521 ously as possible a zone ofproximity55 or copresence of a particle, the move- ence of a particle, the move-
ment into which any particle that enters the zone is drawn. Louis Wolfson
embarks upon a strange undertaking: a schizophrenic, he translates as
quickly as possible each phrase in his maternal language into foreign words
with similar sound and meaning; an anorexic, he rushes to the refrigerator,
tears open the packages and snatches their contents, stuffing himself as
quickly as possible.56 It would be false to believe that he needs to borrow
"disguised" words from foreign languages. Rather, he snatches from his
own language verbal particles that can no longer belong to the form of that
language, just as he snatches from food alimentary particles that no longer
act as formed nutritional substances; the two kinds of particles enter into
proximity. We could also put it this way: Becoming is to emit particles that
take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a partic-
ular zone of proximity. Or, it is to emit particles that enter that zone
because they take on those relations. A haecceity is inseparable from the
fog and mist that depend on a molecular zone, a corpuscular space. Prox-
imity is a notion, at once topological and quantal, that marks a belonging to
the same molecule, independently of the subjects considered and the forms
determined.
          Scherer and Hocquenghem made this essential point in their reconsid-
eration of the problem of wolf-children. Of course, it is not a question of a
real production, as if the child "really" became an animal; nor is it a ques-
tion of a resemblance, as if the child imitated animals that really raised it;
nor is it a question of a symbolic metaphor, as if the autistic child that was
abandoned or lost merely became the "analogue" of an animal. Scherer
and Hocquenghem are right to expose this false reasoning, which is based
on a culturalism or moralism upholding the irreducibility of the human
order: Because the child has not been transformed into an animal, it must
only have a metaphorical relation to it, induced by the child's illness or
rejection. For their own part, they appeal to an objective zone of indetermi-
nation or uncertainty, "something shared or indiscernible," a proximity
"that makes it impossible to say where the boundary between the human
and animal lies," not only in the case of autistic children, but for all chil-
dren; it is as though, independent of the evolution carrying them toward
adulthood, there were room in the child for other becomings, "other con-
temporaneous possibilities" that are not regressions but creative involu-
tions bearing witness to "an inhumanity immediately experienced in the
body as such" unnatural nuptials "outside the programmed body." There
is a reality of becoming-animal, even though one does not in reality become
animal. It is useless, then, to raise the objection that the dog-child only
plays dog within the limits of his formal constitution, and does nothing
canine that another human being could not have done if he or she had so
           274 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

desired. For what needs to be explained is precisely the fact that all chil-
dren, and even many adults, do it to a greater or lesser degree, and in so
doing bear witness to an inhuman connivance with the animal, rather than
an Oedipal symbolic community.57 Neither should it be thought that chil-
dren who graze, or eat dirt or raw flesh, are merely getting the vitamins and
minerals they need. It is a question of composing a body with the animal, a
body without organs defined by zones of intensity or proximity. Where
does this objective indetermination or indiscernibility of which Scherer
and Hocquenghem speak come from?
   An example: Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into
composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted
from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the rela-
tion of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they
enter. Clearly, this something else can be quite varied, and be more or less
directly related to the animal in question: it can be the animal's natural
food (dirt and worm), or its exterior relations with other animals (you can
become-dog with cats, or become-monkey with a horse), or an apparatus or
prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal (muzzle and reindeer,
etc.), or something that does not even have a localizable relation to the ani-
mal in question. For this last case, we have seen how Slepian bases his
attempt to become-dog on the idea of tying shoes to his hands using his
mouth-muzzle. Philippe Gavi cites the performances of Lolito, an eater of
bottles, earthenware, porcelains, iron, and even bicycles, who declares: "I
consider myself half-animal, half-man. More animal than man. I love ani-
mals, dogs especially, I feel a bond with them. My teeth have adapted; in
fact, when I don't eat glass or iron, my jaw aches like a young dog's that
craves to chew a bone."58 If we interpret the word "like" as a metaphor, or
propose a structural analogy of relations (man-iron = dog-bone), we under-
stand nothing of becoming. The word "like" is one of those words that
change drastically in meaning and function when they are used in connec-
tion with haecceities, when they are made into expressions of becomings
instead of signified states or signifying relations. A dog may exercise its jaw
on iron, but when it does it is using its jaw as a molar organ. When Lolito
eats iron, it is totally different: he makes his jaw enter into composition
with the iron in such a way that he himself becomes the jaw of a molecular
dog. The actor Robert De Niro walks "like" a crab in a certain film
sequence; but, he says, it is not a question of his imitating a crab; it is a ques-
tion of making something that has to do with the crab enter into composi-
tion with the image, with the speed of the image.59 That is the essential
point for us: you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements,
you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the ani-
mal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 275

proximity of the animal molecule. You become animal only molecularly.
You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with
enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molec-
ular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar
species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words,
proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement
and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles. Of course there are
werewolves and vampires, we say this with all our heart; but do not look for
a resemblance or analogy to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in
action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the "real" animal
is trapped in its molar form and subjectivity). It is within us that the animal
bares its teeth like Hofmannsthal's rat, or the flower opens its petals; but
this is done by corpuscular emission, by molecular proximity, and not by
the imitation of a subject or a proportionality of form. Albertine can always
imitate a flower, but it is when she is sleeping and enters into composition
with the particles of sleep that her beauty spot and the texture of her skin
enter a relation of rest and movement that place her in the zone of a molec-
ular vegetable: the becoming-plant of Albertine. And it is when she is held
prisoner that she emits the particles of a bird. And it is when she flees,
launches down a line of flight, that she becomes-horse, even if it is the horse
of death.
    Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one
becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects,
objects, or form that we know from the outside and recognize from experi-
ence, through science, or by habit. If this is true, then we must say the same
of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do
not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities (al-
though it is possible—only possible—for the woman or child to occupy
privileged positions in relation to these becomings). What we term a molar
entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her form, endowed with
organs and functions and assigned as a subject. Becoming-woman is not
imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it. We are not, how-
ever, overlooking the importance of imitation, or moments of imitation,
among certain homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a
real transformation on the part of certain transvestites. All we are saying is
that these indissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be under-
stood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female
form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest,
or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce
in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman. We do not mean to
say that a creation of this kind is the prerogative of the man, but on the con-
trary that the woman as a molar entity has to become-woman in order that
          276 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

the man also becomes- or can become-woman. It is, of course, indispensa-
ble for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back
their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity: "we as
women .. ." makes its appearance as a subject of enunciation. But it is dan-
gerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function with-
out drying up a spring or stopping a flow. The song of life is often intoned
by the driest of women, moved by ressentiment, the will to power and cold
mothering. Just as a dessicated child makes a much better child, there
being no childhood flow emanating from it any longer. It is no more ade-
quate to say that each sex contains the other and must develop the opposite
pole in itself. Bisexuality is no better a concept than the separateness of the
sexes. It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary machine as
it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. It is thus necessary to
conceive of a molecular women's politics that slips into molar confronta-
tions, and passes under or through them.
    When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women's writ-
ing, she was appalled at the idea of writing "as a woman." Rather, writing
should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of
crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating
men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles—but also
very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable. The rise of women in
English novel writing has spared no man: even those who pass for the most
virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller, in their turn
continually tap into and emit particles that enter the proximity or zone of
indiscernibility of women. In writing, they become-women. The question
is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation
that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The
question is fundamentally that of the body—the body they steal from us in
order to fabricate opposable organisms. This body is stolen first from the
girl: Stop behaving like that, you're not a little girl anymore, you're not a
tomboy, etc. The girl's becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history,
or prehistory, upon her. The boy's turn comes next, but it is by using the girl
as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire, that an
opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too. The girl is
the first victim, but she must also serve as an example and a trap. That is
why, conversely, the reconstruction of the body as a Body without Organs,
the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-woman, or the
production of a molecular woman. Doubtless, the girl becomes a woman in
the molar or organic sense. But conversely, becoming-woman or the molec-
ular woman is the girl herself. The girl is certainly not defined by virginity;
she is defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a
combination of atoms, an emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 277

to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of
flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they
slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molec-
ular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross
right through. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to
pass between, the intermezzo—that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all
her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become. The girl is like the
block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term,
man, woman, child, adult. It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is
becoming-woman that produces the universal girl. Trost, a mysterious
author, painted a portrait of the girl, to whom he linked the fate of the revo-
lution: her speed, her freely machinic body, her intensities, her abstract
line or line of flight, her molecular production, her indifference to mem-
ory, her nonfigurative character—"the nonfigurative of desire."60 Joan of
Arc? The special role of the girl in Russian terrorism: the girl with the
bomb, guardian of dynamite? It is certain that molecular politics proceeds
via the girl and the child. But it is also certain that girls and children draw
their strength neither from the molar status that subdues them nor from
the organism and subjectivity they receive; they draw their strength from
the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between sexes and ages, the
becoming-child of the adult as well as of the child, the becoming-woman of
the man as well as of the woman. The girl and the child do not become; it is
becoming itself that is a child or a girl. The child does not become an adult
any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman
of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age. Knowing
how to age does not mean remaining young; it means extracting from one's
age the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the flows that constitute the
youth of that age. Knowing how to love does not mean remaining a man or a
woman; it means extracting from one's sex the particles, the speeds and
slownesses, the flows, the n sexes that constitute the girl of that sexuality. It
is Age itself that is a becoming-child, just as Sexuality, any sexuality, is a
becoming-woman, in other words, a girl. This by way of response to the stu-
pid question, Why did Proust make Albert Albertine?
   Although all becomings are already molecular, including becoming-
woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through
becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings. When the man of
war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides as a girl, it
is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide, to camouflage
oneself, is a warrior function, and the line of flight attracts the enemy, tra-
verses something and puts what it traverses to flight; the warrior arises in
the infinity of a line of flight. Although the femininity of the man of war is
not accidental, it should not be thought of as structural, or regulated by a
          278 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

correspondence of relations. It is difficult to see how the correspondence
between the two relations "man-war" and "woman-marriage" could entail
an equivalence between the warrior and the girl as a woman who refuses to
marry.61 It is just as difficult to see how the general bisexuality, or even
homosexuality, of military societies could explain this phenomenon,
which is no more imitative than it is structural, representing instead an
essential anomie of the man of war. This phenomenon can only be under-
stood in terms of becoming. We have seen how the man of war, by virtue of
his furor and celerity, was swept up in irresistible becomings-animal. These
are becomings that have as their necessary condition the becoming-woman
of the warrior, or his alliance with the girl, his contagion with her. The man
of war is inseparable from the Amazons. The union of the girl and the man
of war does not produce animals, but simultaneously produces the
becoming-woman of the latter and the becoming-animal of the former, in a
single "block" in which the warrior in turn becomes animal by contagion
with the girl at the same time as the girl becomes warrior by contagion with
the animal. Everything ties together in an asymmetrical block of becom-
ing, an instantaneous zigzag. It is in the vestiges of a double war machine—
that of the Greeks, soon to be supplanted by the State, and that of the
Amazons, soon to be dissolved—that Achilles and Penthesilea, the last
man of war and the last queen of the girls, choose one another, Achilles in a
becoming-woman, Penthesilea in a becoming-dog.
   The rites of transvestism or female impersonation in primitive societies
in which a man becomes a woman are not explainable by a social organiza-
tion that places the given relations in correspondence, or by a psychic
organization that makes the woman desire to become a man just as the man
desires to become a woman.62 Social structure and psychic identification
leave too many special factors unaccounted for: the linkage, unleashing,
and communication of the becomings triggered by the transvestite; the
power (puissance) of the resultant becoming-animal; and above all the par-
ticipation of these becomings in a specific war machine. The same applies
for sexuality: it is badly explained by the binary organization of the sexes,
and just as badly by a bisexual organization within each sex. Sexuality
brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are
like n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes. This is not a
return to those appalling metaphors of love and war, seduction and con-
quest, the battle of the sexes and the domestic squabble, or even the
Strindberg-war: it is only after love is done with and sexuality has dried up
that things appear this way. What counts is that love itself is a war machine
endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers. Sexuality is the
production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becom-
ings. Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 279

becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles. There is no need
for bestialism in this, although it may arise, and many psychiatric anec-
dotes document it in ways that are interesting, if oversimplified and conse-
quently off the track, too beastly. It is not a question of "playing" the dog,
like an elderly gentleman on a postcard; it is not so much a question of mak-
ing love with animals. Becomings-animal are basically of another power,
since their reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one cor-
responds but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and
makes us become—a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared
element from the animal far more effectively than any domestication, uti-
lization, or imitation could: "the Beast."
    If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with
the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all
rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The
imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula. For
example, Matheson's Shrinking Man passes through the kingdoms of
nature, slips between molecules, to become an unfindable particle in infi-
nite meditation on the infinite. Paul Morand's Monsieur Zero flees the
larger countries, crosses the smallest ones, descends the scale of States,
establishes an anonymous society in Lichtenstein of which he is the only
member, and dies imperceptible, forming the particle 0 with his fingers: "I
am a man who flees by swimming under water, and at whom all the world's
rifles fire. . . . I must no longer offer a target." But what does becoming-
imperceptible signify, coming at the end of all the molecular becomings
that begin with becoming-woman? Becoming-imperceptible means many
things. What is the relation between the (anorganic) imperceptible, the
(asignifying) indiscernible, and the (asubjective) impersonal?
    A first response would be: to be like everybody else. That is what
Kierkegaard relates in his story about the "knight of the faith," the man of
becoming: to look at him, one would notice nothing, a bourgeois, nothing
but a bourgeois. That is how Fitzgerald lived: after a real rupture, one suc-
ceeds . . . in being just like everybody else. To go unnoticed is by no means
easy. To be a stranger, even to one's doorman or neighbors. If it is so diffi-
cult to be "like" everybody else, it is because it is an affair of becoming. Not
everybody becomes everybody [and everything: tout le monde—Trans.],
makes a becoming of everybody/everything. This requires much asceti-
cism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English elegance, an
English fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-perceived, the too-
much-to-be-perceived. "Eliminate all that is waste, death, and superflu-
ity," complaint and grievance, unsatisfied desire, defense or pleading,
everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves, in our molarity.
For everybody/everything is the molar aggregate, but becoming everybody/
          280 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

everything is another affair, one that brings into play the cosmos with its
molecular components. Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is
to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of
elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece
in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with
other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first
one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clan-
destine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing,
that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized,
disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming
imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural,
but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance,
any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract
only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by
continued or superposed "traits," or strokes.63 It is in this sense that
becoming-everybody/everything, making the world a becoming, is to
world, to make a world or worlds, in other words, to find one's proximities
and zones of indiscernibility. The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and
each world as an assemblage effectuating it. If one reduces oneself to one or
several abstract lines that will prolong itself in and conjugate with others,
producing immediately, directly a world in which it is the world that
becomes, then one becomes-everybody/everything. Kerouac's dream, and
already Virginia Woolf s, was for the writing to be like the line of a Chinese
poem-drawing. She says that it is necessary to "saturate every atom," and
to do that it is necessary to eliminate, to eliminate all that is resemblance
and analogy, but also "to put everything into it": eliminate everything that
exceeds the moment, but put in everything that it includes—and the
moment is not the instantaneous, it is the haecceity into which one slips
and that slips into other haecceities by transparency.64 To be present at the
dawn of the world. Such is the link between imperceptibility, indis-
cernibility, and impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an
abstract line, a trait, in order to find one's zone of indiscernibility with
other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the
creator. One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/
everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily commu-
nicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that
prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of
things. One has combined "everything" (le "tout"): the indefinite article,
the infinitive-becoming, and the proper name to which one is reduced. Sat-
urate, eliminate, put everything in.
   Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature
imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 281

of a moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings, in
other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below
and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perception
are relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping what eludes
another: the eagle's eye... But the adequate threshold can in turn operate
only as a function of a perceptible form and a perceived, discerned subject.
So that movement in itself continues to occur elsewhere: if we serialize per-
ception, the movement always takes place above the maximum threshold
and below the minimum threshold, in expanding or contracting intervals
(microintervals). Like huge Japanese wrestlers whose advance is too slow
and whose holds are too fast to see, so that what embraces are less the
wrestlers than the infinite slowness of the wait (what is going to happen?)
and the infinite speed of the result (what happened?). What we must do is
reach the photographic or cinematic threshold; but in relation to the
photograph, movement and affect once again took refuge above and below.
When Kierkegaard adopts the marvelous motto, "I look only at the move-
ments,"65 he is acting astonishingly like a precursor of the cinema, multi-
plying versions of a love scenario (between Agnes and the merman)
according to variable speeds and slownesses. He has all the more reason to
say that there is no movement that is not infinite; that the movement of the
infinite can occur only by means of affect, passion, love, in a becoming that
is the girl, but without reference to any kind of "mediation"; and that this
movement as such eludes any mediating perception because it is already
effectuated at every moment, and the dancer or lover finds him- or herself
already "awake and walking" the second he or she falls down, and even the
instant he or she leaps.66 Movement, like the girl as a fugitive being, cannot
be perceived.
    However, we are obliged to make an immediate correction: movement
also "must" be perceived, it cannot but be perceived, the imperceptible is
also the percipiendum. There is no contradiction in this. If movement is
imperceptible by nature, it is so always in relation to a given threshold of
perception, which is by nature relative and thus plays the role of a media-
tion on the plane that effects the distribution of thresholds and percepts
and makes forms perceivable to perceiving subjects. It is the plane of
organization and development, the plane of transcendence, that renders
perceptible without itself being perceived, without being capable of being
perceived. But on the other plane, the plane of immanence or consistency,
the principle of composition itself must be perceived, cannot but be per-
ceived at the same time as that which it composes or renders. In this case,
movement is no longer tied to the mediation of a relative threshold that it
eludes ad infinitum; it has reached, regardless of its speed or slowness, an
absolute but differentiated threshold that is one with the construction of
          282 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ...

this or that region of the continued plane. It could also be said that move-
ment ceases to be the procedure of an always relative deterritorialization,
becoming the process of absolute deterritorialization. The difference
between the two planes accounts for the fact that what cannot be perceived
on one cannot but be perceived on the other. It is in jumping from one plane
to the other, or from the relative thresholds to the absolute threshold that
coexists with them, that the imperceptible becomes necessarily perceived.
Kierkegaard shows that the plane of the infinite, which he calls the plane of
faith, must become a pure plane of immanence that continually and imme-
diately imparts, reimparts, and regathers the finite: unlike the man of infi-
nite resignation, the knight of the faith or man of becoming will get the girl,
he will have all of the finite and perceive the imperceptible, as "heir appar-
ent to the finite."67 Perception will no longer reside in the relation between
a subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of
that relation, in the period associated with the subject and object. Percep-
tion will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout
its own proximity, as the presence of one haecceity in another, the
prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look
only at the movements.
   It is odd that the word "faith" should be used to designate a plane that
works by immanence. But if the knight is the man of becoming, then there
are all kinds of knights. Are there not even knights of narcotics, in the sense
that faith is a drug (in a way very different from the sense in which religion
is an opiate)? These knights claim that drugs, under necessary conditions
of caution and experimentation, are inseparable from the deployment of a
plane. And on this plane not only are becomings-woman, becomings-
animal, becomings-molecular, becomings-imperceptible conjugated, but
the imperceptible itself becomes necessarily perceived at the same time as
perception becomes necessarily molecular: arrive at holes, microintervals
between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines,
lines of transparency and intersection.68 Change perception; the problem
has been formulated correctly because it presents "drugs" as a pregnant
whole free of secondary distinctions (hallucinatory or nonhallucinatory,
hard or soft, etc.). All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifica-
tions of speed. What allows us to describe an overall Drug assemblage in
spite of the differences between drugs is a line of perceptive causality that
makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived; (2) perception is molec-
ular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and the perceived. The
Americans of the beat generation had already embarked on this path, and
spoke of a molecular revolution specific to drugs. Then came Castaneda's
broad synthesis. Leslie Fiedler set forth the poles of the American Dream:
cornered between two nightmares, the genocide of the Indians and the slav-
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 283

ery of the blacks, Americans constructed a psychically repressed image of
the black as the force of affect, of the multiplication of affects, but a socially
repressed image of the Indian as subtlety of perception, perception made
increasingly keen and more finely divided, infinitely slowed or acceler-
ated.69 In Europe, Henri Michaux tended to be more willing to free himself
of rites and civilizations, establishing admirable and minute protocols of
experience, doing away with the question of causality with respect to drugs,
delimiting drugs as well as possible, separating them from delirium and
hallucination. But at this point everything reconnects: again, the problem
is well formulated if we say that drugs eliminate forms and persons, if we
bring into play the mad speeds of drugs and the extraordinary posthigh
slownesses, if we clasp one to the other like wrestlers, if we confer upon per-
ception the molecular power to grasp microperceptions, microoperations,
and upon the perceived the force to emit accelerated or decelerated parti-
cles in a floating time that is no longer our time, and to emit haecceities that
are no longer of this world: deterritorialization, "I was disoriented . . ." (a
perception of things, thoughts, desires in which desire, thought, and the
thing have invaded all of perception: the imperceptible finally perceived).
Nothing left but the world of speeds and slownesses without form, without
subject, without a face. Nothing left but the zigzag of a line, like "the lash of
the whip of an enraged cart driver" shredding faces and landscapes.70 A
whole rhizomatic labor of perception, the moment when desire and per-
ception meld.
   This problem of specific causality is an important one. Invoking causali-
ties that are too general or are extrinsic (psychological or sociological) is as
good as saying nothing. There is a discourse on drugs current today that
does no more than dredge up generalities on pleasure and misfortune, on
difficulties in communication, on causes that always come from some-
where else. The more incapable people are of grasping a specific causality
in extension, the more they pretend to understand the phenomenon in
question. There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal
infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract
line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or of deterritorializa-
tion; this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities
of another nature, but is in no way explained by them. It is our belief that
the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly
invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as
the imperceptible is perceived. Drugs then appear as the agent of this
becoming. This is where pharmacoanalysis would come in, which must be
both compared and contrasted to psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis must
be taken simultaneously as a model, a contrasting approach, and a betrayal.
Psychoanalysis can be taken as a model of reference because it was able,
          284 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

with respect to essentially affective phenomena, to construct the schema of
a specific causality divorced from ordinary social or psychological general-
ities. But this schema still relies on a plane of organization that can never be
apprehended in itself, that is always concluded from something else, that is
always inferred, concealed from the system of perception: it is called the
Unconscious. Thus the plane of the Unconscious remains a plane of tran-
scendence guaranteeing, justifying, the existence of psychoanalysis and the
necessity of its interpretations. This plane of the Unconscious stands in
molar opposition to the perception-consciousness system, and because
desire must be translated onto this plane, it is itself linked to gross
molarities, like the submerged part of an iceberg (the Oedipal structure, or
the rock of castration). The imperceptible thus remains all the more imper-
ceptible because it is opposed to the perceived in a dualism machine.
Everything is different on the plane of consistency or immanence, which is
necessarily perceived in its own right in the course of its construction:
experimentation replaces interpretation, now molecular, nonfigurative,
and nonsymbolic, the unconscious as such is given in microperceptions;
desire directly invests the field of perception, where the imperceptible
appears as the perceived object of desire itself, "the nonfigurative of
desire." The unconscious no longer designates the hidden principle of the
transcendent plane of organization, but the process of the immanent plane
of consistency as it appears on itself in the course of its construction. For
the unconscious must be constructed, not rediscovered. There is no longer
a conscious-unconscious dualism machine, because the unconscious is, or
rather is produced, there where consciousness goes, carried by the plane.71
Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis
has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine episode marked a
turning point that forced Freud to renounce a direct approach to the
unconscious).
    But if it is true that drugs are linked to this immanent, molecular percep-
tive causality, we are still faced with the question of whether they actually
succeed in drawing the plane necessary for their action. The causal line, or
the line of flight, of drugs is constantly being segmentarized under the most
rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer. Even in
its supple form, it can mobilize gradients and thresholds of perception
toward becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, but even this is done in
the context of a relativity of thresholds that restrict themselves to imitating
a plane of consistency rather than drawing it on an absolute threshold.
What good does it do to perceive as fast as a quick-flying bird if speed and
movement continue to escape somewhere else? The deterritorializations
remain relative, compensated for by the most abject reterritorializations,
so that the imperceptible and perception continually pursue or run after
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 285

each other without ever truly coupling. Instead of holes in the world allow-
ing the world lines themselves to run off, the lines of flight coil and start to
swirl in black holes; to each addict a hole, group or individual, like a snail.
Down, instead of high. The molecular microperceptions are overlaid in
advance, depending on the drug, by hallucinations, delusions, false percep-
tions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts; they restore forms and subjects
every instant, like so many phantoms or doubles continually blocking con-
struction of the plane. Moreover, as we saw in our enumeration of the dan-
gers, not only is the plane of consistency in danger of being betrayed or
thrown offtrack through the influence of other causalities that intervene in
an assemblage of this kind, but the plane itself engenders dangers of its
own, by which it is dismantled at the same time as it is constructed. We are
no longer, it itself is no longer master of speeds. Instead of making a body
without organs sufficiently rich or full for the passage of intensities, drug
addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or a cancerous one: the causal
line, creative line, or line of flight immediately turns into a line of death
and abolition. The abominable vitrification of the veins, or the purulence
of the nose—the glassy body of the addict. Black holes and lines of death,
Artaud's and Michaux's warnings converge (they are more technical, more
consistent than the informational, psychoanalytic, or sociopsychological
discourse of treatment and assistance centers). Artaud: You will not avoid
hallucinations, erroneous perceptions, shameless phantasies, or bad feel-
ings, like so many black holes on the plane of consistency, because your
conscious will also go in that booby-trapped direction.72 Michaux: You will
no longer be master of your speeds, you will get stuck in a mad race between
the imperceptible and perception, a race all the more circular now that
everything is relative.73 You will be full of yourself, you will lose control,
you will be on a plane of consistency, in a body without organs, but at a
place where you will always botch them, empty them, undo what you do,
motionless rags. These words are so much simpler than "erroneous percep-
tions" (Artaud) or "bad feelings" (Michaux), but say the most technical of
things: that the immanent molecular and perceptive causality of desire
fails in the drug-assemblage. Drug addicts continually fall back into what
they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal,
a territorialization all the more artificial for being based on chemical sub-
stances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications. Drug addicts
may be considered as precursors or experimenters who tirelessly blaze new
paths of life, but their cautiousness lacks the foundation for caution. So
they either join the legion of false heroes who follow the conformist path of
a little death and a long fatigue. Or, what is worse, all they will have done is
make an attempt only nonusers or former users can resume and benefit
from, secondarily rectifying the always aborted plane of drugs, discovering
          286 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . ..

through drugs what drugs lack for the construction of a plane of consis-
tency. Is the mistake drug users make always to start over again from
ground zero, either going on the drug again or quitting, when what they
should do is make it a stopover, to start from the "middle," bifurcate from
the middle? To succeed in getting drunk, but on pure water (Henry Miller).
To succeed in getting high, but by abstention, "to take and abstain, espe-
cially abstain," I am a drinker of water (Michaux). To reach the point where
"to get high or not to get high" is no longer the question, but rather whether
drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time
perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the
world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other
than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather,
the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them. Is it cowardice or exploi-
tation to wait until others have taken the risks? No, it is joining an under-
taking in the middle, while changing the means. It is necessary to choose
the right molecule, the water, hydrogen, or helium molecule. This has noth-
ing to do with models, all models are molar: it is necessary to determine the
molecules and particles in relation to which "proximities" (indiscern-
ibilities, becomings) are engendered and defined. The vital assemblage,
the life-assemblage, is theoretically or logically possible with all kinds of
molecules, silicon, for example. But it so happens that this assemblage is
not machinically possible with silicon: the abstract machine does not let it
pass because it does not distribute zones of proximity that construct the
plane of consistency.74 We shall see that machinic reasons are entirely dif-
ferent from logical reasons or possibilities. One does not conform to a
model, one straddles the right horse. Drug users have not chosen the right
molecule or the right horse. Drugs are too unwieldy to grasp the impercep-
tible and becomings-imperceptible; drug users believed that drugs would
grant them the plane, when in fact the plane must distill its own drugs,
remaining master of speeds and proximities.

   Memories of the Secret. The secret has a privileged, but quite variable,
relation to perception and the imperceptible. The secret relates first of all
to certain contents. The content is too big for its form . . . or else the con-
tents themselves have a form, but that form is covered, doubled, or
replaced by a simple container, envelope, or box whose role it is to suppress
formal relations. These are contents it has been judged fitting to isolate or
disguise for various reasons. Drawing up a list of these reasons (shame,
treasure, divinity, etc.) has limited value as long as the secret is opposed to
its discovery as in a binary machine having only two terms, the secret and
disclosure, the secret and desecration. For on the one hand, the secret as
content is superseded by a perception of the secret, which is no less secret
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 287

than the secret. It matters little what the goal is, and whether the aim of the
perception is a denunciation, final divulging, or disclosure. From an anec-
dotal standpoint, the perception of the secret is the opposite of the secret,
but from the standpoint of the concept, it is a part of it. What counts is that
the perception of the secret must necessarily be secret itself: the spy, the
voyeur, the blackmailer, the author of anonymous letters are no less secre-
tive than what they are in a position to disclose, regardless of their ulterior
motives. There is always a woman, a child, a bird to secretly perceive the
secret. There is always a perception finer than yours, a perception of your
imperceptible, of what is in your box. We can even envision a profession of
secrecy for those who are in a position to perceive the secret. The protector
of the secret is not necessarily in on it, but is also tied to a perception, since
he or she must perceive and detect those who wish to discover the secret
(counterespionage). There is thus a first direction, in which the secret
moves toward an equally secretive perception, a perception that seeks to be
imperceptible itself. A wide variety of very different figures may revolve
around this first point. And then there is a second point, just as inseparable
from the secret as its content: the way in which it imposes itself and
spreads. Once again, whatever the finalities or results, the secret has a way
of spreading that is in turn shrouded in secrecy. The secret as secretion. The
secret must sneak, insert, or introduce itself into the arena of public forms;
it must pressure them and prod known subjects into action (we are refer-
ring to influence of the "lobby" type, even if the lobby is not in itself a secret
society).
   In short, the secret, defined as a content that has hidden its form in favor
of a simple container, is inseparable from two movements that can acci-
dentally interrupt its course or betray it, but are nonetheless an essential
part of it: something must ooze from the box, something will be perceived
through the box or in the half-opened box. The secret was invented by soci-
ety; it is a sociological or social notion. Every secret is a collective assem-
blage. The secret is not at all an immobilized or static notion. Only
becomings are secrets; the secret has a becoming. The secret has its origin
in the war machine; it is the war machine and its becomings-woman,
becomings-child, becomings-animal that bring the secret.75 A secret soci-
ety always acts in society as a war machine. Sociologists who have studied
secret societies have determined many of their laws: protection,
equalization and hierarchy, silence, ritual, deindividuation, centraliza-
tion, autonomy, compartmentalization, etc.76 But perhaps they have not
given enough weight to the principal laws governing the movement of con-
tent: (1) every secret society has a still more secret hindsociety, which either
perceives the secret, protects it, or metes out the punishment for its disclo-
sure (it is not at all begging the question to define the secret society by the
          288 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

presence of a secret hindsociety: a society is secret when it exhibits this
doubling, has this special section); (2) every secret society has its own mode
of action, which is in turn secret; the secret society may act by influence,
creeping, insinuation, oozing, pressure, or invisible rays; "passwords" and
secret languages (there is no contradiction here; the secret society cannot
live without the universal project of permeating all of society, of creeping
into all of the forms of society, disrupting its hierarchy and segmentation;
the secret hierarchy conjugates with a conspiracy of equals, it commands
its members to swim in society as fish in water, but conversely society must
be like water around fish; it needs the complicity of the entire surrounding
society). This is evident in cases as diverse as the mob groups of the United
States and the animal-men of Africa: on the one hand, there is the mode of
influence of the secret society and its leaders on the political or public fig-
ures of its surroundings; and on the other hand, there is the secret society's
mode of doubling itself with a hindsociety, which may constitute a special
section of killers or guards.77 Influence and doubling, secretion and concre-
tion, every secret operates between two "discreets" [discrets: also "discrete
(terms)"—Trans.] that can, moreover, link or meld in certain cases. The
child's secret combines these elements to marvelous effect: the secret as a
content in a box, the secret influence and propagation of the secret, the
secret perception of the secret (the child's secret is not composed of minia-
turized adult secrets but is necessarily accompanied by a secret perception
of the adult secret). A child discovers a secret...
    But the becoming of the secret compels it not to content itself with con-
cealing its form in a simple container, or with swapping it for a container.
The secret, as secret, must now acquire its own form. The secret is elevated
from a finite content to the infinite form of secrecy. This is the point at
which the secret attains absolute imperceptibility, instead of being linked
to a whole interplay of relative perceptions and reactions. We go from a
content that is well defined, localized, and belongs to the past, to the a pri-
ori general form of a nonlocalizable something that has happened. We go
from the secret defined as a hysterical childhood content to secrecy
defined as an eminently virile paranoid form. And this form displays the
same two concomitants of the secret, the secret perception and the mode of
action by secret influence; but these concomitants have become "traits" of
a form they ceaselessly reconstitute, reform, recharge. On the one hand,
paranoiacs denounce the international plot of those who steal their secrets,
their most intimate thoughts; or they declare that they have the gift of per-
ceiving the secrets of others before they have formed (someone with para-
noid jealousy does not apprehend the other in the act of escaping; they
divine or foresee the slightest intention of it). On the other hand, paranoi-
acs act by means of, or else suffer from, rays they emit or receive (Raymond
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 289

Roussel and Schreber). Influence by rays, and doubling by flight or echo,
are what now give the secret its infinite form, in which perceptions as well
as actions pass into imperceptibility. Paranoid judgment is like an antici-
pation of perception replacing empirical research into boxes and their con-
tents: guilty a priori, and in any event! (for example, the evolution of the
narrator of the Recherche in relation to Albertine). We can say, in summary
fashion, that psychoanalysis has gone from a hysterical to an increasingly
paranoid conception of the secret.78 Interminable analysis: the Uncon-
scious has been assigned the increasingly difficult task of itself being the
infinite form of secrecy, instead of a simple box containing secrets. You will
tell all, but in saying everything you will say nothing because all the "art" of
psychoanalysis is required in order to measure your contents against the
pure form. At this point, however, after the secret has been raised to the
level of a form in this way, an inevitable adventure befalls it. When the
question "What happened?" attains this infinite virile form, the answer is
necessarily that nothing happened, and both form and content are
destroyed. The news travels fast that the secret of men is nothing, in truth
nothing at all. Oedipus, the phallus, castration, "the splinter in the flesh"—
that was the secret? It is enough to make women, children, lunatics, and
molecules laugh.
   The more the secret is made into a structuring, organizing form, the
thinner and more ubiquitous it becomes, the more its content becomes
molecular, at the same time as its form dissolves. It really wasn't much, as
Jocasta says. The secret does not as a result disappear, but it does take on a
more feminine status. What was behind President Schreber's paranoid
secret all along, if not a becoming-feminine, a becoming-woman? For
women do not handle the secret in at all the same way as men (except when
they reconstitute an inverted image of virile secrecy, a kind of secrecy of the
gyneceum). Men alternately fault them for their indiscretion, their gossip-
ing, and for their solidarity, their betrayal. Yet it is curious how a woman
can be secretive while at the same time hiding nothing, by virtue of trans-
parency, innocence, and speed. The complex assemblage of secrecy in
courtly love is properly feminine and operates in the most complete trans-
parency. Celerity against gravity. The celerity of a war machine against the
gravity of a State apparatus. Men adopt a grave attitude, knights of the
secret: "You see what burden I bear: my seriousness, my discretion." But
they end up telling everything—and it turns out to be nothing. There are
women, on the other hand, who tell everything, sometimes in appalling
technical detail, but one knows no more at the end than at the beginning;
they have hidden everything by celerity, by limpidity. They have no secret
because they have become a secret themselves. Are they more politic than
we? Iphigenia. Innocent a priori. That is the girl's defense against the
          290 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

judgment preferred by men: "guilty a priori" . . . This is where the secret
reaches its ultimate state: its content is molecularized, it has become
molecular, at the same time as its form has been dismantled, becoming a
pure moving line—in the sense in which it can be said a given line is the
"secret" of a painter, or a given rhythmic cell, a given sound molecule
(which does not constitute a theme or form) the "secret" of a musician.
    If ever there was a writer who dealt with the secret, it was Henry James.
In this respect, he went through an entire evolution, like a perfecting of his
art. For he began by looking for the secret in contents, even insignificant,
half-opened ones, contents briefly glimpsed. Then he raised the possibility
of there being an infinite form of secrecy that no longer even requires a con-
tent and that has conquered the imperceptible. But he raises this possi-
bility only in order to ask the question, Is the secret in the content or in the
form? And the answer is already apparent: neither.19 James is one of those
writers who is swept up in an irresistible becoming-woman. He never
stopped pursuing his goal, inventing the necessary technical means. Mo-
lecularize the content of the secret and linearize its form. James explored it
all, from the becoming-child of the secret (there is always a child who dis-
covers secrets: What Maisie Knew) to the becoming-woman of the secret
(secrecy by a transparency that is no longer anything more than a pure line
that scarcely leaves any traces of its own passage; the admirable Daisy
Miller). James is not as close to Proust as people say; it is he who raises the
cry, "Innocent a priori!" (all Daisy asked for was a little respect, she would
have given her love for that. . .) in opposition to the "Guilty a priori" that
condemns Albertine. What counts in the secret is less its three states
(child's content, virile infinite form, pure feminine line) than the becom-
 ings attached to them, the becoming-child of the secret, its becoming-
 feminine, its becoming-molecular—which occur precisely at the point
where the secret has lost both its content and its form, where the impercep-
tible, the clandestine with nothing left to hide, has finally been perceived.
 From the gray eminence to the gray immanence. Oedipus passes through all
 three secrets: the secret of the sphinx whose box he penetrates; the secret
that weighs upon him as the infinite form of his own guilt; and finally, the
 secret at Colonus that makes him inaccessible and melds with the pure line
 of his flight and exile, he who has nothing left to hide, or, like an old No
 actor, has only a girl's mask with which to cover his lack of a face. Some
 people can talk, hide nothing, not lie: they are secret by transparency, as
 impenetrable as water, in truth incomprehensible. Whereas the others have
 a secret that is always breached, even though they surround it with a thick
wall or elevate it to an infinite form.
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 291

    Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks. Why are there so many
becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First because man is major-
itarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming
is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are referring not to
a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state or standard
in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to
be minoritarian: white-man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of
domination, not the reverse. It is not a question of knowing whether there
are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how "man" consti-
tuted a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily (ana-
lytically) form a majority. The majority in a government presupposes the
right to vote, and not only is established among those who possess that
right but is exercised over those who do not, however great their numbers;
similarly, the majority in the universe assumes as pregiven the right and
power of man.80 In this sense women, children, but also animals, plants,
and molecules, are minoritarian. It is perhaps the special situation of
women in relation to the man-standard that accounts for the fact that
becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman.
It is important not to confuse "minoritarian," as a becoming or process,
with a "minority", as an aggregate or a state. Jews, Gypsies, etc., may con-
stitute minorities under certain conditions, but that in itself does not
make them becomings. One reterritorializes, or allows oneself to be
reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is
deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-
black. Even women must become-woman. Even Jews must become-
Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if this is the case, then
becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much as the Jew.
Becoming-woman necessary affects men as much as women. In a way, the
subject in a becoming is always "man," but only when he enters a
becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major identity. As in
Arthur Miller's novel, Focus, or Losey's film, Mr. Klein: it is the non-Jew
who becomes Jewish, who is swept up in, carried off by, this becoming
after being rent from his standard of measure. Conversely, if Jews them-
selves must become-Jewish, if women must become-woman, if children
must become-child, if blacks must become-black, it is because only a
minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, but
under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation
to the majority. Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc., therefore
imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is
withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term (the medium
or agent) rises up from the minority. There is an asymmetrical and
indissociable block of becoming, a block of alliance: the two "Mr. Kleins,"
          292 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

the Jew and the non-Jew, enter into a becoming-Jewish (the same thing
happens in Focus).
    A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of all man.
A Jew becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. A
becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium
and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of the becoming
except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of
becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be
thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most
insignificant of things. You don't deviate from the majority unless there is
a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off. It is because the hero of
Focus, the average American, needs glasses that give his nose a vaguely
Semitic air, it is "because of the glasses" that he is thrown into this strange
adventure of the becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. Anything at all can do
the job, but it always turns out to be a political affair. Becoming-minori-
tarian is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power (puissance), an
active micropolitics. This is the opposite of macropolitics, and even of His-
tory, in which it is a question of knowing how to win or obtain a majority.
As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but
to become-black.81 Unlike history, becoming cannot be conceptualized in
terms of past and future. Becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to
questions of a future and a past of the revolution; it passes between the two.
Every becoming is a block of coexistence. The so-called ahistorical socie-
ties set themselves outside history, not because they are content to repro-
duce immutable models or are governed by a fixed structure, but because
they are societies of becoming (war societies, secret societies, etc.). There is
no history but of the majority, or of minorities as defined in relation to the
majority. And yet "how to win the majority" is a totally secondary problem
in relation to the advances of the imperceptible.
    Let us try to say it another way: There is no becoming-man because man
is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular. The
faciality function showed us the form under which man constitutes the
majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based: white,
male, adult, "rational," etc., in short, the average European, the subject of
enunciation. Following the law of arborescence, it is this central Point that
moves across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a
certain distinctive opposition, depending on which faciality trait is
retained: male-(female), adult-(child), white-(black, yellow, or red);
rational-(animal). The central point, or third eye, thus has the property of
organizing binary distributions within the dualism machines, and of
reproducing itself in the principal term of the opposition; the entire oppo-
sition at the same time resonates in the central point. The constitution of a
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 293

"majority" as redundancy. Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory,
through the position of the central point, its frequency (insofar as it is nec-
essarily reproduced by each dominant point), and its resonance (insofar as
all of the points tie in with it). Any line that goes from one point to another
in the aggregate of the molar system, and is thus defined by points answer-
ing to these mnemonic conditions of frequency and resonance, is a part of
the arborescent system.82
    What constitutes arborescence is the submission of the line to the point.
Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory
that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating
them as "childhood memories," as conjugal, or colonial memories. It is
possible to operate by establishing a conjunction or collocation of contigu-
ous points rather than a relation between distant points: you would then
have phantasies rather than memories. For example, a woman can have a
female point alongside a male point, and a man a male point alongside a
female one. The constitution of these hybrids, however, does not take us
very far in the direction of a true becoming (for example, bisexuality, as the
psychoanalysts note, in no way precludes the prevalence of the masculine
or the majority of the "phallus"). One does not break with the arborescent
schema, one does not reach becoming or the molecular, as long as a line is
connected to two distant points, or is composed of two contiguous points.
A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points
that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up
through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived,
transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points.83 A
point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither begin-
ning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the
absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad
play on words. A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an
average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming
is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is nei-
ther one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border
or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. If becoming is a
block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and
indiscernibility, a no-man's-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up
the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the
other—and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to
distance. The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the orchid
produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a lib-
erated piece of the orchid's reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in
that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its
own reproduction. A coexistence of two asymmetrical movements that
          294 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ...

combine to form a block, down a line of flight that sweeps away selective
pressures. The line, or the block, does not link the wasp to the orchid, any
more than it conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying
them away in a shared proximity in which the discernibility of points dis-
appears. The line-system (or block-system) of becoming is opposed to the
point-system of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line
frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible: the rhizome,
the opposite of arborescence; break away from arborescence. Becoming is
an antimemory. Doubtless, there exists a molecular memory, but as a fac-
tor of integration into a majoritarian or molar system. Memories always
have a reterritorialization function. On the other hand, a vector of
deterritorialization is in no way indeterminate; it is directly plugged into
the molecular levels, and the more deterritorialized it is, the stronger is the
contact: it is deterritorialization that makes the aggregate of the molecular
components "hold together." From this point of view, one may contrast a
childhood block, or a becoming-child, with the childhood memory: "a"
molecular child is produced. . . "a" child coexists with us, in a zone of prox-
imity or a block of becoming, on a line of deterritorialization that carries us
both off—as opposed to the child we once were, whom we remember or
phantasize, the molar child whose future is the adult. "This will be child-
hood, but it must not be my childhood," writes Virginia Woolf. (Orlando
already does not operate by memories, but by blocks, blocks of ages, block
of epochs, blocks of the kingdoms of nature, blocks of sexes, forming so
many becomings between things, or so many lines of deterritoriali-
zation.)84 Wherever we used the word "memories" in the preceding pages,
we were wrong to do so; we meant to say "becoming," we were saying
becoming.
   If the line is opposed to the point (or blocks to memories, becoming to
the faculty of memory), it is not in an absolute way: a punctual system
includes a certain utilization of lines, and the block itself assigns the point
new functions. In a punctual system, a point basically refers to linear coor-
dinates. Not only are a horizontal line and a vertical line represented, but
the vertical moves parallel to itself, and the horizontal superposes other
horizontals upon itself; every point is assigned in relation to the two base
coordinates, but is also marked on a horizontal line of superposition and
on a vertical line or plane of displacement. Finally, two points are con-
nected when any line is drawn from one to the other. A system is termed
punctual when its lines are taken as coordinates in this way, or as localizable
connections; for example, systems of arborescence, or molar and mne-
monic systems in general, are punctual. Memory has a punctual organiza-
tion because every present refers simultaneously to the horizontal line of
the flow of time (kinematics), which goes from an old present to the actual
           1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 295

present, and the vertical line of the order of time (stratigraphy), which goes
from the present to the past, or to the representation of the old present.
This is, of course, a basic schema that cannot be developed further without
running into major complications, but it is the one found in representa-
tions of art forming a "didactic" system, in other words, a mnemotechnics.
Musical representation, on the one hand, draws a horizontal, melodic line,
the bass line, upon which other melodic lines are superposed; points are
assigned that enter into relations of counterpoint between lines. On the
other hand, it draws a vertical, harmonic line or plane, which moves along
the horizontals but is no longer dependent upon them; it runs from high to
low and defines a chord capable of linking up with the following chords.
Pictorial representation has an analogous form, with means of its own: this
is not only because the painting has a vertical and a horizontal, but because
the traits and colors, each on its own account, relate to verticals of displace-
ment and horizontals of superposition (for example, the vertical cold form,
or white, light and tonality; the horizontal warm form, or black, chromatics
and modality, etc.). To cite only relatively recent examples, this is evident
in the didactic systems of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian, which neces-
sarily imply an encounter with music.
   Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a punctual system: (1)
Systems of this kind comprise two base lines, horizontal and vertical; they
serve as coordinates for assigning points. (2) The horizontal line can be
superposed vertically and the vertical line can be moved horizontally, in
such a way that new points are produced or reproduced, under conditions
of horizontal frequency and vertical resonance. (3) From one point to
another, a line can (or cannot) be drawn, but if it can it takes the form of a
localizable connection; diagonals thus play the role of connectors between
points of different levels or moments, instituting in their turn frequencies
and resonances on the basis of these points of variable horizon or verticon,
contiguous or distant.85 These systems are arborescent, mnemonic, molar,
structural; they are systems ofterritorialization or reterritorialization. The
line and the diagonal remain totally subordinated to the point because they
serve as coordinates for a point or as localizable connections for two
points, running from one point to another.
   Opposed to the punctual system are linear, or rather multilinear, sys-
tems. Free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has this
intention. One elaborates a punctual system or a didactic representation,
but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it. A punc-
tual system is most interesting when there is a musician, painter, writer,
philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it in order to oppose it, like a
springboard to jump from. History is made only by those who oppose his-
tory (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it). This is
          296 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

not done for provocation but happens because the punctual system they
found ready-made, or themselves invented, must have allowed this opera-
tion: free the line and the diagonal, draw the line instead of plotting a point,
produce an imperceptible diagonal instead of clinging to an even elabo-
rated or reformed vertical or horizontal. When this is done it always goes
down in History but never comes from it. History may try to break its ties
to memory; it may make the schemas of memory more elaborate, super-
pose and shift coordinates, emphasize connections, or deepen breaks. The
dividing line, however, is not there. The dividing line passes not between
history and memory but between punctual "history-memory" systems and
diagonal or multilinear assemblages, which are in no way eternal: they have
to do with becoming; they are a bit of becoming in the pure state; they are
transhistorical. There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and
does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line.
Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or
superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity,
becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting as
opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as opposed
to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence). "The unhistorical
is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the
destruction of which it must vanish. . . . What deed would man be capable
of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhis-
torical?"86 Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached
themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they
assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in
punctual systems.
    When Boulez casts himself in the role of historian of music, he does so in
order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in each case,
invents a kind of diagonal running between the harmonic vertical and the
melodic horizon. And in each case it is a different diagonal, a different
technique, a creation. Moving along this transversal line, which is really a
line of deterritorialization, there is a sound block that no longer has a point
of origin, since it is always and already in the middle of the line; and no
longer has horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own coor-
dinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to
another, since it is in "nonpulsed time": a deterritorialized rhythmic block
that has abandoned points, coordinates, and measure, like a drunken boat
that melds with the line or draws a plane of consistency. Speeds and
slownesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes impelling it to
proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction,
sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once. The musician is in the best
position to say: "I hate the faculty of memory, I hate memories." And that is
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 297

because he or she affirms the power of becoming. The Viennese school is
exemplary of this kind of diagonal, this kind of line-block. But it can
equally be said that the Viennese school found a new system of territo-
rialization, of points, verticals, and horizontals that position it in History.
Another attempt, another creative act, came after it. The important thing
is that all musicians have always proceeded in this way: drawing their own
diagonal, however fragile, outside points, outside coordinates and
localizable connections, in order to float a sound block down a created, lib-
erated line, in order to unleash in space this mobile and mutant sound
block, a haecceity (for example, chromaticism, aggregates, and complex
notes, but already the resources and possibilities of polyphony, etc.).87
Some have spoken of "oblique vectors" with respect to the organ. The diag-
onal is often composed of extremely complex lines and spaces of sound. Is
that the secret of a little phrase or a rhythmic block? Undoubtedly, the
point now assumes a new and essential creative function. It is no longer
simply a question of an inevitable destiny reconstituting a punctual sys-
tem; on the contrary, it is now the point that is subordinated to the line, the
point now marks the proliferation of the line, or its sudden deviation, its
acceleration, its slowdown, its furor or agony. Mozart's "microblocks."
The block may even be reduced to a point, as though to a single note (point-
block): Berg's B in Wozzeck, Schumann's A. Homage to Schumann, the
madness of Schumann: the cello wanders across the grid of the orchestra-
tion, drawing its diagonal, along which the deterritorialized sound block
moves; or an extremely sober kind of refrain is "treated" by a very elabo-
rate melodic line and polyphonic architecture.
    In a multilinear system, everything happens at once: the line breaks free
of the point as origin; the diagonal breaks free of the vertical and the hori-
zontal as coordinates; and the transversal breaks free of the diagonal as a
localizable connection between two points. In short, a block-line passes
amid (au milieu des) sounds and propels itself by its own nonlocalizable
middle {milieu). The sound block is the intermezzo. It is a body without
organs, an antimemory pervading musical organization, and is all the
more sonorous: "The Schumannian body does not stay in place. . . . The
intermezzo [is] consubstantial with the entire Schumannian oeuvre.... At
the limit, there are only intermezzi. ... The Schumannian body knows
only bifurcations; it does not construct itself, it keeps diverging according
to an accumulation of interludes.... Schumannian beating is panic, but it
is also coded ... and it is because the panic of the blows apparently keeps
within the limits of a docile language that it is ordinarily not perceived.. . .
Let us imagine for tonality two contradictory (and yet concomitant) sta-
tuses. On the one hand . . . a screen, a language intended to articulate the
body.. .according to a known organization... .On the other hand, contra-
          298 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

dictorily... tonality becomes the ready servant of the beats within another
level it claims to domesticate."88
    Does the same thing, strictly the same thing, apply to painting? In effect,
the point does not make the line; the line sweeps away the deterritorialized
point, carries it off under its outside influence; the line does not go from
one point to another, but runs between points in a different direction that
renders them indiscernible. The line has become the diagonal, which has
broken free from the vertical and the horizontal. But the diagonal has
already become the transversal, the semidiagonal or free straight line, the
broken or angular line, or the curve—always in the midst of themselves.
Between the white vertical and the black horizontal lie Klee's gray,
Kandinsky's red, Monet's purple; each forms a block of color. This line is
without origin, since it always begins off the painting, which only holds it
by the middle; it is without coordinates, because it melds with a plane of
consistency upon which it floats and that it creates; it is without localizable
connection, because it has lost not only its representative function but any
function of outlining a form of any kind—by this token, the line has
become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a visual block; and under these
conditions the point assumes creative functions again, as a color-point or
 line-point.89 The line is between points, in their midst, and no longer goes
 from one point to another. It does not outline a shape. "He did not paint
things, he painted between things." There is no falser problem in painting
than depth and, in particular, perspective. For perspective is only a histori-
 cal manner of occupying diagonals or transversals, lines of flight [lignes de
fuite: here, the lines in a painting moving toward the vanishing point, or
point de fuite—Trans.], in other words, of reterritorializing the moving vis-
 ual block. We use the word "occupy" in the sense of "giving an occupation
 to," fixing a memory and a code, assigning a function. But the lines of
 flight, the transversals, are suitable for many other functions besides this
 molar function. Lines of flight as perspective lines, far from being made to
 represent depth, themselves invent the possibility of such a representation,
 which occupies them only for an instant, at a given moment. Perspective,
 and even depth, are the reterritorialization of lines of flight, which alone
 created painting by carrying it farther. What is called central perspective in
 particular plunged the multiplicity of escapes and the dynamism of lines
 into a punctual black hole. Conversely, it is true that problems of perspec-
 tive triggered a whole profusion of creative lines, a mass release of visual
 blocks, at the very moment they claimed to have gained mastery over them.
 Is painting, in each of its acts of creation, engaged in a becoming as intense
 as that of music?
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 299

    Becoming-Music. We have tried to define in the case of Western music
(although the other musical traditions confront an analogous problem,
under different conditions, to which they find different solutions) a block
of becoming at the level of expression, or a block of expression: this block of
becoming rests on transversals that continually escape from the coordi-
nates or punctual systems functioning as musical codes at a given moment.
It is obvious that there is a block of content corresponding to this block of
expression. It is not really a correspondence; there would be no mobile
"block" if a content, itself musical (and not a subject or a theme), were not
always interfering with the expression. What does music deal with, what is
the content indissociable from sound expression? It is hard to say, but it is
something: a child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a
bird arrives, a bird flies off. We wish to say that these are not accidental
themes in music (even if it is possible to multiply examples), much less imi-
tative exercises; they are something essential. Why a child, a woman, a
bird? It is because musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-
woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal that constitute its content.
Why does the child die, or the bird fall as though pierced by an arrow?
Because of the "danger" inherent in any line that escapes, in any line of
flight or creative deterritorialization: the danger of veering toward de-
struction, toward abolition. Melisande [in Debussy's opera, Pelleas et
Melisande—Trans.], a child-woman, a secret, dies twice ("it's the poor lit-
tle dear's turn now"). Music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times
it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying hap-
pily, being extinguished. Not as a function of a death instinct it allegedly
awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to its sound assemblage, to its
sound machine, the moment that must be confronted, the moment the
transversal turns into a line of abolition. Peace and exasperation.90 Music
has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage,
dislocation. Is that not its potential "fascism"? Whenever a musician
writes In Memoriam, it is not so much a question of an inspirational motif
or a memory, but on the contrary of a becoming that is only confronting its
own danger, even taking a fall in order to rise again: a becoming-child, a
becoming-woman, a becoming-animal, insofar as they are the content of
music itself and continue to the point of death.
    We would say that the refrain is properly musical content, the block of
content proper to music. A child comforts itself in the dark or claps its
hands or invents a way of walking, adapting it to the cracks in the sidewalk,
or chants "Fort-Da" (psychoanalysts deal with the Fort-Da very poorly
when they treat it as a phonological opposition or a symbolic component of
the language-unconscious, when it is in fact a refrain). Tra la la. A woman
sings to herself, "I heard her softly singing a tune to herself under her
          300 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

breath." A bird launches into its refrain. All of music is pervaded by bird
songs, in a thousand different ways, from Jannequin to Messiaen. Frr, Frr.
Music is pervaded by childhood blocks, by blocks of femininity. Music is
pervaded by every minority, and yet composes an immense power. Chil-
dren's, women's, ethnic, and territorial refrains, refrains of love and
destruction: the birth of rhythm. Schumann's work is made of refrains, of
childhood blocks, which he treats in a very special way: his own kind of
becoming-child, his own kind of becoming-woman, Clara. It would be pos-
sible to catalogue the transversal or diagonal utilizations of the refrain in
the history of music, all of the children's Games and Kinderszenen, all of
the bird songs. But such a catalogue would be useless because it would seem
like a multiplication of examples of themes, subjects, and motifs, when it is
in fact a question of the most essential and necessary content of music. The
motif of the refrain may be anxiety, fear, joy, love, work, walking, territory
. . . but the refrain itself is the content of music.
    We are not at all saying that the refrain is the origin of music, or that
music begins with it. It is not really known when music begins. The refrain
is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it. But
music exists because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the
refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms
a block with it in order to take it somewhere else. The child's refrain, which
is not music, forms a block with the becoming-child of music: once again,
this asymmetrical composition is necessary. "Ah, vous dirai-je maman"
("Ah, mamma, now you shall know") in Mozart, Mozart's refrains. A
theme in C, followed by twelve variations; not only is each note of the
theme doubled, but the theme is doubled internally. Music submits the
refrain to this very special treatment of the diagonal or transversal, it
uproots the refrain from its territoriality. Music is a creative, active opera-
tion that consists in deterritorializing the refrain. Whereas the refrain is
essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music makes it
a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of expression. Par-
don that sentence: what musicians do should be musical, it should be writ-
ten in music. Instead, we will give a figurative example: Mussorgsky's
"Lullaby," in Songs and Dances of Death, presents an exhausted mother sit-
ting up with her sick child; she is relieved by a visitor, Death, who sings a
lullaby in which each couplet ends with an obsessive, sober refrain, a repet-
itive rhythm with only one note, a point-block: "Shush, little child, sleep
my little child" (not only does the child die, but the deterritorialization of
the refrain is doubled by Death in person, who replaces the mother).
    Is the situation similar for painting, and if so, how? In no way do we
believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose
solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. To us, Art is a false concept, a
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 301

solely nominal concept; this does not, however, preclude the possibility of a
simultaneous usage of the various arts within a determinable multiplicity.
The "problem" within which painting is inscribed is that of the face-
landscape. That of music is entirely different: it is the problem of the
refrain. Each arises at a certain moment, under certain conditions, on the
line of its problem; but there is no possible structural or symbolic corre-
spondence between the two, unless one translates them into punctual sys-
tems. We have distinguished the following three states of the landscape
problem: (1) semiotic systems of corporeality, silhouettes, postures, colors,
and lines (these semiotic systems are already present in profusion among
animals; the head is part of the body, and the body has the milieu, the
biotope as its correlate; these systems already display very pure lines as, for
example, in the "grass stem" behavior); (2) an organization of the face,
white wall/black holes, face/eyes, or facial profile/sideview of the eyes (this
semiotic system of faciality has the landscape as its correlate: facialization
of the entire body and landscapification of all the milieus, Christ as the
European central point); (3) a deterritorialization effaces and landscapes,
in favor of probe-heads whose lines no longer outline a form or form a con-
tour, and whose colors no longer lay out a landscape (this is the pictorial
semiotic system: Put the face and the landscape to flight. For example,
what Mondrian correctly calls a "landscape": a pure, absolutely deterrito-
rialized landscape).
    For convenience, we presented three successive and distinct states, but
only provisionally. We cannot decide whether animals have painting, even
though they do not paint on canvas, and even when hormones induce their
colors and lines; even here, there is little foundation for a clear-cut distinc-
tion between animals and human beings. Conversely, we must say that
painting does not begin with so-called abstract art but recreates the silhou-
ettes and postures of corporeality, and is already fully in operation in the
face-landscape organization (the way in which painters "work" the face of
Christ, and make it leak from the religious code in all directions). The aim
of painting has always been the deterritorialization of faces and land-
scapes, either by a reactivation of corporeality, or by a liberation of lines or
colors, or both at the same time. There are many becomings-animal,
becomings-woman, and becomings-child in painting.
   The problem of music is different, if it is true that its problem is the
refrain. Deterritorializing the refrain, inventing lines of deterritorializa-
tion for the refrain, implies procedures and constructions that have noth-
ing to do with those of painting (outside of vague analogies of the sort
painters have often tried to establish). Again, it is not certain whether we
can draw a dividing line between animals and human beings: Are there not,
as Messiaen believes, musician birds and nonmusician birds? Is the bird's
          302 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

refrain necessarily territorial, or is it not already used for very subtle
deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight? The difference between
noise and sound is definitely not a basis for a definition of music, or even
for the distinction between musician birds and nonmusician birds. Rather,
it is the labor of the refrain: Does it remain territorial and territorializing,
or is it carried away in a moving block that draws a transversal across all
coordinates—and all of the intermediaries between the two? Music is pre-
cisely the adventure of the refrain: the way music lapses back into a refrain
(in our head, in Swann's head, in the pseudo-probe-heads on TV and radio,
the music of a great musician used as a signature tune, a ditty); the way it
lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few
notes, then takes it down a creative line that is so much richer, no origin or
end of which is in sight. ..
    Leroi-Gourhan established a distinction and correlation between two
poles, "hand-tool" and "face-language." But there it was a question of dis-
tinguishing a form of content and a form of expression. Here we are consid-
ering expressions that hold their content within themselves, so we must
make a different distinction: the face with its visual correlates (eyes) con-
cerns painting; the voice with its auditory correlates (the ear is itself a
refrain, it is shaped like one) concerns music. Music is a deterrito-
rialization of the voice, which becomes less and less tied to language, just as
painting is a deterritorialization of the face. Traits of vocability can indeed
be indexed to traits of faciality, as in lipreading; they are not, however, in
correspondence, especially when they are carried off by the respective
movements of music and painting. The voice is far ahead of the face, very
far ahead. Entitling a musical work Visage (Face) thus seems to be the
greatest of sound paradoxes.91 The only way to "line up" the two problems
of painting and music is to take a criterion extrinsic to the fiction of the fine
arts, to compare the forces of deterritorialization in each case. Music seems
to have a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once more intense and
much more collective, and the voice seems to have a much greater power of
deterritorialization. Perhaps this trait explains the collective fascination
exerted by music, and even the potentiality of the "fascist" danger we men-
tioned a little earlier: music (drums, trumpets) draws people and armies
into a race that can go all the way to the abyss (much more so than banners
and flags, which are paintings, means of classification and rallying). It may
be that musicians are individually more reactionary than painters, more
religious, less "social"; they nevertheless wield a collective force infinitely
greater than that of painting: "The chorus formed by the assembly of the
people is a very powerful bond..." It is always possible to explain this
force by the material conditions of musical emission and reception, but it
is preferable to take the reverse approach; these conditions are explained
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 303

by the force of deterritorialization of music. It could be said that from the
standpoint of the mutant abstract machine painting and music do not cor-
respond to the same thresholds, or that the pictorial machine and the musi-
cal machine do not have the same index. There is a "backwardness" of
painting in relation to music, as Klee, the most musicianly of painters,
observed.92 Maybe that is why many people prefer painting, or why aes-
thetics took painting as its privileged model: there is no question that it
"scares" people less. Even its relations to capitalism and social formations
are not at all of the same type.
   Doubtless, in each case we must simultaneously consider factors of
territoriality, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Animal and
child refrains seem to be territorial: therefore they are not "music." But
when music lays hold of the refrain and deterritorializes it, and deterrito-
rializes the voice, when it lays hold of the refrain and sends it racing off in
a rhythmic sound block, when the refrain "becomes" Schumann or
Debussy, it is through a system of melodic and harmonic coordinates by
means of which music reterritorializes upon itself, qua music. Con-
versely, we shall see that in certain cases even the animal refrain possesses
forces of deterritorialization much more intense than animal silhouettes,
postures, and colors. We must therefore take a number of factors into con-
sideration: relative territorialities, their respective deterritorializations,
and their correlative reterritorializations, several types of them (for
example, intrinsic reterritorializations such as musical coordinates, and
extrinsic ones such as the deterioration of the refrain into a hackneyed
formula, or music into a ditty). The fact that there is no deterrito-
rialization without a special reterritorialization should prompt us to
rethink the abiding correlation between the molar and the molecular: no
flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without
molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible
landmarks for the imperceptible processes.
   The becoming-woman, the becoming-child of music are present in the
problem of the machining of the voice. Machining the voice was the first
musical operation. As we know, the problem was resolved in Western
music in two different ways, in Italy and in England: the head voice of the
countertenor, who sings "above his voice," or whose voice operates inside
the sinuses and at the back of the throat and the palate without relying on
the diaphragm or passing through the bronchial tubes; and the stomach
voice of the castrati, "stronger, more voluminous, more languid," as if
they gave carnal matter to the imperceptible, impalpable, and aerial.
Dominique Fernandez wrote a fine book on this subject; he shows, fortu-
nately refraining from any psychoanalytic discussion of a link between
music and castration, that the musical problem of the machinery of the
          304 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

voice necessarily implies the abolition of the overall dualism machine, in
other words, the molar formation assigning voices to the "man or
woman."93 Being a man or a woman no longer exists in music. It is not cer-
tain, however, that the myth of the androgyne Fernandez invokes is ade-
quate. It is a question not of myth but of real becoming. The voice itself
must attain a becoming-woman or a becoming-child. That is the prodi-
gious content of music. It is no longer a question, as Fernandez observes, of
imitating a woman or a child, even if it is a child who is singing. The musi-
cal voice itself becomes-child at the same time as the child becomes-
sonorous, purely sonorous. No child could ever have done that, or if one
did, it would be by becoming in addition something other than a child, a
child belonging to a different, strangely sensual and celestial, world. In
short, the deterritorialization is double: the voice is deterritorialized in a
becoming-child, but the child it becomes is itself deterritorialized, unen-
gendered, becoming. "The child grew wings," said Schumann. We find the
same zigzag movement in the becomings-animal of music: Marcel More
shows that the music of Mozart is permeated by a becoming-horse, or
becomings-bird. But no musician amuses himself by "playing" horse or
bird. If the sound block has a becoming-animal as its content, then the ani-
mal simultaneously becomes, in sonority, something else, something abso-
lute, night, death, joy—certainly not a generality or a simplification, but a
haecceity, this death, that night. Music takes as its content a becoming-
animal; but in that becoming-animal the horse, for example, takes as its
expression soft kettledrum beats, winged like hooves from heaven or hell;
and the birds find expression in gruppeti, appoggiaturas, staccato notes
that transform them into so many souls.94 It is the accents that form the
diagonal in Mozart, the accents above all. If one does not follow the
accents, if one does not observe them, one falls back into a relatively
impoverished punctual system. The human musician is deterritorialized
in the bird, but it is a bird that is itself deterritorialized, "transfigured," a
celestial bird that has just as much of a becoming as that which becomes
with it. Captain Ahab is engaged in an irresistible becoming-whale with
Moby-Dick; but the animal, Moby-Dick, must simultaneously become an
unbearable pure whiteness, a shimmering pure white wall, a silver thread
that stretches out and supples up "like" a girl, or twists like a whip, or stands
like a rampart. Can it be that literature sometimes catches up with paint-
ing, and even music? And that painting catches up with music? (More cites
Klee's birds but on the other hand fails to understand what Messiaen says
about bird song.) No art is imitative, no art can be imitative or figurative.
Suppose a painter "represents" a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that
can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming
something else, a pure line and pure color. Thus imitation self-destructs,
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 305

since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates
with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates. One imi-
tates only if one fails, when one fails. The painter and musician do not imi-
tate the animal, they become-animal at the same time as the animal
becomes what they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with
Nature.95 Becoming is always double, that which one becomes becomes no
less than the one that becomes—block is formed, essentially mobile, never
in equilibrium. Mondrian's is the perfect square. It balances on one corner
and produces a diagonal that half-opens its closure, carrying away both
sides.
   Becoming is never imitating. When Hitchcock does birds, he does not
reproduce bird calls, he produces an electronic sound like a field of intensi-
ties or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a terrible threat
welling up inside us.96 And this applies not only to the "arts": Moby-Dick's
effect also hinges the pure lived experience of double becoming, and the
book would not have the same beauty otherwise. The tarantella is a strange
dance that magically cures or exorcises the supposed victims of a tarantula
bite. But when the victim does this dance, can he or she be said to be imitat-
ing the spider, to be identifying with it, even in an identification through an
"archetypal" or "agonistic" struggle? No, because the victim, the patient,
the person who is sick, becomes a dancing spider only to the extent that the
spider itself is supposed to become a pure silhouette, pure color and pure
sound to which the person dances.97 One does not imitate; one constitutes
a block of becoming. Imitation enters in only as an adjustment of the block,
like a finishing touch, a wink, a signature. But everything of importance
happens elsewhere: in the becoming-spider of the dance, which occurs on
the condition that the spider itself becomes sound and color, orchestra and
painting. Take the case of the local folk hero, Alexis the Trotter, who ran
"like" a horse at extraordinary speed, whipped himself with a short switch,
whinnied, reared, kicked, knelt, lay down on the ground in the manner of a
horse, competed against them in races, and against bicycles and trains. He
imitated a horse to make people laugh. But he had a deeper zone of proxim-
ity or indiscernibility. Sources tell us that he was never as much of a horse
as when he played the harmonica: precisely because he no longer needed a
regulating or secondary imitation. It is said that he called his harmonica his
"chops-destroyer" and played the instrument twice as fast as anyone else,
doubled the beat, imposed a nonhuman tempo.98 Alexis became all the
more horse when the horse's bit became a harmonica, and the horse's trot
went into double time. As always, the same must be said of the animals
themselves. For not only do animals have colors and sounds, but they do
not wait for the painter or musician to use those colors and sounds in a
painting or music, in other words, to enter into determinate becomings-
          306 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

color and becomings-sounds by means of components of deterrito-
rialization (we will return to this point later). Ethology is advanced enough
to have entered this realm.
   We are not at all arguing for an aesthetics of qualities, as if the pure
quality (color, sound, etc.) held the secret of a becoming without measure,
as in Philebus. Pure qualities still seem to us to be punctual systems: They
are reminiscences, they are either transcendent or floating memories or
seeds of phantasy. A functionalist conception, on the other hand, only
considers the function a quality fulfills in a specific assemblage, or in
passing from one assemblage to another. The quality must be considered
from the standpoint of the becoming that grasps it, instead of becoming
being considered from the standpoint of intrinsic qualities having the
value of archetypes or phylogenetic memories. For example, whiteness,
color, is gripped in a becoming-animal that can be that of the painter or of
Captain Ahab, and at the same time in a becoming-color, a becoming-
whiteness, that can be that of the animal itself. Moby-Dick's whiteness is
the special index of his becoming-solitary. Colors, silhouettes, and ani-
mal refrains are indexes of becoming-conjugal or becoming-social that
also imply components of deterritorialization. A quality functions only
as a line of deterritorialization of an assemblage, or in going from one
assemblage to another. This is why an animal-block is something other
than a phylogenetic memory, and a childhood block something other
than a childhood memory. In Kafka, a quality never functions for itself or
as a memory, but rather rectifies an assemblage in which it is deterritori-
alized, and, conversely, for which it provides a line of deterritori-
alization; for example, the childhood steeple passes into the castle tower,
takes it at the level of its zone of indiscernibility ("battlements that were
irregular, broken, fumbling"), and launches down a line of flight (as if one
of the tenants "had burst through the roof').99 If things are more compli-
cated and less sober for Proust, it is because for him qualities retain an air
of reminiscence or phantasy, and yet with Proust as well these are func-
tional blocks acting not as memories or phantasies but as a becoming-
child, a becoming-woman, as components of deterritorialization passing
from one assemblage to another.
   To the theorems of simple deterritorialization we encountered earlier
(in our discussion of the face),100 we can now add others on generalized
double deterritorialization. Theorem Five: deterritorialization is always
double, because it implies the coexistence of a major variable and a minor
variable in simultaneous becoming (the two terms of a becoming do not
exchange places, there is no identification between them, they are instead
drawn into an asymmetrical block in which both change to the same extent,
and which constitutes their zone of proximity). Theorem Six: in non-
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . . D 307

symmetrical double deterritorialization it is possible to assign a deter-
ritorializing force and a deterritorialized force, even if the same force
switches from one value to the other depending on the "moment" or aspect
considered; furthermore, it is the least deterritorialized element that
always triggers the deterritorialization of the most deterritorializing ele-
ment, which then reacts back upon it in full force. Theorem Seven: the
deterritorializing element has the relative role of expression, and the
deterritorialized element the relative role of content (as evident in the
arts); but not only does the content have nothing to do with an external sub-
ject or object, since it forms an asymmetrical block with the expression, but
the deterritorialization carries the expression and the content to a proxim-
ity where the distinction between them ceases to be relevant, or where the
deterritorialization creates their indiscernibility (example: the sound diag-
onal as the musical form of expression, and becomings-woman, -child,
-animal as the contents proper to music, as refrains). Theorem Eight: one
assemblage does not have the same forces or even speeds of deterrito-
rialization as another; in each instance, the indices and coefficients must
be calculated according to the block of becoming under consideration, and
in relation to the mutations of an abstract machine (for example, there is a
certain slowness, a certain viscosity, of painting in relation to music; but
one cannot draw a symbolic boundary between the human being and ani-
mal. One can only calculate and compare powers of deterritorialization).
   Fernandez demonstrates the presence of becomings-woman, becom-
ings-child in vocal music. Then he decries the rise of instrumental and
orchestral music; he is particularly critical of Verdi and Wagner for having
resexualized the voice, for having restored the binary machine in response
to the requirements of capitalism, which wants a man to be a man and a
woman a woman, each with his or her own voice: Verdi-voices, Wagner-
voices, are reterritorialized upon man and woman. He explains the prema-
ture disappearance of Rossini and Bellini (the retirement of the first and
death of the second) by their hopeless feeling that the vocal becomings of
the opera were no longer possible. However, Fernandez does not ask under
what auspices, and with what new types of diagonals, this occurs. To begin
with, it is true that the voice ceases to be machined for itself, with simple
instrumental accompaniment; it ceases to be a stratum or a line of expres-
sion that stands on its own. But why? Music crossed a new threshold of
deterritorialization, beyond which it is the instrument that machines the
voice, and the voice and instrument are carried on the same plane in a rela-
tion that is sometimes one of confrontation, sometimes one of compensa-
tion, sometimes one of exchange and complementarity. The lied, in
particular Schumann's lieder, perhaps marks the first appearance of this
pure movement that places the voice and the piano on the same plane of
          308 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

consistency, makes the piano an instrument of delirium, and prepares the
way for Wagnerian opera. Even a case like Verdi's: it has often been said
that his opera remains lyrical and vocal in spite of its destruction of the bel
canto, and in spite of the importance of orchestration in the final works;
still, voices are instrumentalized and make extraordinary gains in tessitura
or extension (the production of the Verdi-baritone, of the Verdi-soprano).
At any rate, the issue is not a given composer, especially not Verdi, or a
given genre, but the more general movement affecting music, the slow
mutation of the musical machine. If the voice returns to a binary distribu-
tion of the sexes, this occurs in relation to binary groupings of instruments
in orchestration. There are always molar systems in music that serve as
coordinates; this dualist system of the sexes that reappears on the level of
the voice, this molar and punctual distribution, serves as a foundation for
new molecular flows that then intersect, conjugate, are swept up in a kind
of instrumentation and orchestration that tend to be part of the creation
itself. Voices may be reterritorialized on the distribution of the two sexes,
but the continuous sound flow still passes between them as in a difference
of potential.
    This brings us to the second point: the principal problem concerning
this new threshold of deterritorialization of the voice is no longer that of a
properly vocal becoming-woman or becoming-child, but that of a
becoming-molecular in which the voice itself is instrumentalized. Of
course, becomings-woman and -child remain just as important, even take
on new importance, but only to the extent that they convey another truth:
what was produced was already a molecular child, a molecular woman .. .
We need only think of Debussy: the becoming-child and the becoming-
woman in his works are intense but are now inseparable from a molecu-
larization of the motif, a veritable "chemistry" achieved through orches-
tration. The child and the woman are now inseparable from the sea and the
water molecule (Sirens, precisely, represents one of the first complete
attempts to integrate the voice with the orchestra). Already Wagner was
reproached for the "elementary" character of his music, for its aquaticism,
or its "atomization" of the motif, "a subdivision into infinitely small
units." This becomes even clearer if we think of becoming-animal: birds
are still just as important, yet the reign of birds seems to have been replaced
by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, chirring,
rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping. Birds are vocal, but
insects are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and cymbals.101 A
becoming-insect has replaced becoming-bird, or forms a block with it. The
insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that all becomings are
molecular (cf. Martenot's waves, electronic music). The molecular has the
capacity to make the elementary communicate with the cosmic: precisely
          1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 309

because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse lon-
gitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which guar-
antees a continuum by stretching variation far beyond its formal limits.
Rediscover Mozart, and that the "theme" was a variation from the start.
Varese explains that the sound molecule (the block) separates into ele-
ments arranged in different ways according to variable relations of speed,
but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy irradiating the entire
universe, a headlong line of flight. That is how he populated the Gobi
desert with insects and stars constituting a becoming-music of the world, or
a diagonal for a cosmos. Messiaen presents multiple chromatic durations
in coalescence, "alternating between the longest and the shortest, in order
to suggest the idea of the relations between the infinitely long durations of
the stars and mountains and the infinitely short ones of the insects and
atoms: a cosmic, elementary power that... derives above all from the labor
of rhythm."102 The same thing that leads a musician to discover the birds
also leads him to discover the elementary and the cosmic. Both combine to
form a block, a universe fiber, a diagonal or complex space. Music dis-
patches molecular flows. Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the priv-
ilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains; the
question in music is that of a power of deterritorialization permeating
nature, animals, the elements, and deserts as much as human beings. The
question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what already is
musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the
same thing the ethologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly
at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual
systems. That is even the opposite of having an advantage; through
becomings-woman, -child, -animal, or -molecular, nature opposes its
power, and the power of music, to the machines of human beings, the roar
of factories and bombers. And it is necessary to reach that point, it is neces-
sary for the nonmusical sound of the human being to form a block with the
becoming-music of sound, for them to confront and embrace each other
like two wrestlers who can no longer break free from each other's grasp, and
slide down a sloping line: "Let the choirs represent the survivors. . . Faintly
one hears the sound of cicadas. Then the notes of a lark, followed by the
mockingbird. Someone laughs . . . A woman sobs . . . From a male a great
shout: WE ARE LOST! A woman's voice: WE ARE SAVED! Staccato cries: Lost!
Saved! Lost! Saved!"103
              11. 1837: Of the Refrain




Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922
Copyright © 1987 by Cosmopress, Geneva
Watercolor, pen and ink, 161A x 12" (without margins)
Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase


                                      310
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 311

I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under
his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients
himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a
calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Per-
haps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself
is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos
and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority
in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.
   II. Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to
draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited
space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and
marks of all kinds. This was already true of the previous case. But now the
components are used for organizing a space, not for the momentary deter-
mination of a center. The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possi-
ble, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or
a deed to do. This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extrac-
tion, in order to prevent the interior forces of the earth from being sub-
merged, to enable them to resist, or even to take something from chaos
across the filter or sieve of the space that has been drawn. Sonorous or vocal
components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with
some sonic bricks in it. A child hums to summon the strength for the
schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the
radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and televi-
sion sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories
(the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). For sublime deeds like the
foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or bet-
ter yet walks in a circle as in a children's dance, combining rhythmic vowels
and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the
differentiated parts of an organism. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or har-
mony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of
chaos, destroying both creator and creation.
   III. Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets some-
one in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens
the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in
another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended
on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shel-
ters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic
forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is
to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the
thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the
customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud "lines
                         312 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

of drift" with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and
sonorities.1
   These are not three successive moments in an evolution. They are three
aspects of a single thing, the Refrain (ritournelle). They are found in tales
(both horror stories and fairy tales), and in lieder as well. The refrain has
all three aspects, it makes them simultaneous or mixes them: sometimes,
sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in
which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one
organizes around that point a calm and stable "pace" (rather than a form):
the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a
breakaway from the black hole. Paul Klee presented these three aspects,
and their interlinkage, in a most profound way. He calls the black hole a
"gray point" for pictorial reasons. The gray point starts out as nonlocal-
izable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled bundle of
aberrant lines. Then the point "jumps over itself and radiates a dimen-
sional space with horizontal layers, vertical cross sections, unwritten cus-
tomary lines, a whole terrestrial interior force (this force also appears, at a
more relaxed pace, in the atmosphere and in water). The gray point (black
hole) has thus jumped from one state to another, and no longer represents
chaos but the abode or home. Finally, the point launches out of itself,
impelled by wandering centrifugal forces that fan out to the sphere of the
cosmos: one "tries convulsively to fly from the earth, but at the following
level one actually rises above i t . . . powered by centrifugal forces that tri-
umph over gravity."2
    The role of the refrain has often been emphasized: it is territorial, a terri-
torial assemblage. Bird songs: the bird sings to mark its territory. The
Greek modes and Hindu rhythms are themselves territorial, provincial,
regional. The refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional
or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth with it; it has a land
(sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation
to a Natal, a Native. A musical "nome" is a little tune, a melodic formula
that seeks recognition and remains the bedrock or ground of polyphony
(cantus firmus). The nomos as customary, unwritten law is inseparable
from a distribution of space, a distribution in space. By that token, it is
ethos, but the ethos is also the Abode.3 Sometimes one goes from chaos to
the threshold of a territorial assemblage: directional components, infra-
assemblage. Sometimes one organizes the assemblage: dimensional com-
ponents, intra-assemblage. Sometimes one leaves the territorial assem-
blage for other assemblages, or for somewhere else entirely: interassem-
blage, components of passage or even escape. And all three at once. Forces
of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other
and converge in the territorial refrain.
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 313

     From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born. This is the concern of very
 ancient cosmogonies. Chaos is not without its own directional compo-
 nents, which are its own ecstasies. We have seen elsewhere how all kinds of
 milieus, each defined by a component, slide in relation to one another, over
 one another. Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-
 time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus the
 living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of com-
 posing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of
 membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and
 actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by peri-
 odic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or
 transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one
 milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop
 another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the
 milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from
 one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are essen-
 tially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens
 them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos.
 What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between—between two
 milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos: "Between night and day, between
 that which is constructed and that which grows naturally, between muta-
 tions from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal
 to humankind, yet without this series constituting a progression ..." In
 this in-between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance
 to. Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus. There
 is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to
 another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogene-
 ous space-times. Drying up, death, intrusion have rhythm. It is well known
 that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there
 is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. The tom-tom is not 1 -2, the
 waltz is not 1, 2, 3, music is not binary or ternary, but rather forty-seven
 basic meters, as in Turkish music. Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a
 coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating
 milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is
 always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical;
 it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one
 milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by
 heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction. Bachelard is right to say that
 "the link between truly active moments (rhythm) is always effected on a dif-
ferent plane from the one upon which the action is carried out."4 Rhythm is
 never on the same plane as that which has rhythm. Action occurs in a
 milieu, whereas rhythm is located between two milieus, or between two
                        314 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

intermilieus, on the fence, between night and day, at dusk, twilight or
Zwielicht, Haecceity. To change milieus, taking them as you find them:
Such is rhythm. Landing, splashdown, takeoff.. . This easily avoids an
aporia that threatened to introduce meter into rhythm, despite all the dec-
larations of intent to the contrary: How can one proclaim the constituent
inequality of rhythm while at the same time admitting implied vibrations,
periodic repetitions of components? A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of
a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference
by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is
rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive
repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter. This is the "critical
solution of the antinomy."
   One case of transcoding is particularly important: when a code is not
content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and
instead takes or receives fragments of a different code as such. The first
case pertains to the leaf-water relation, the second to the spider-fly rela-
tion. It has often been noted that the spider web implies that there are
sequences of the fly's own code in the spider's code; it is as though the spi-
der had a fly in its head, a fly "motif," a fly "refrain." The implication may
be reciprocal, as with the wasp and the orchid, or the snapdragon and the
bumblebee. Jakob von Uexkull has elaborated an admirable theory of
transcodings. He sees the components as melodies in counterpoint, each of
which serves as a motif for another: Nature as music.5 Whenever there is
transcoding, we can be sure that there is not a simple addition, but the con-
stitution of a new plane, as of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane,
surplus value of passage or bridging. The two cases, however, are never
pure; they are in reality mixed (for example, the relation of the leaf, this
time not to water in general but to rain).
   Still, we do not yet have a Territory, which is not a milieu, not even an
additional milieu, nor a rhythm or passage between milieus. The territory
is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that "territorializes"
them. The territory is the product of a territorialization of milieus and
rhythms. It amounts to the same thing to ask when milieus and rhythms
become territorialized, and what the difference is between a nonterritorial
animal and a territorial animal. A territory borrows from all the milieus; it
bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to
intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus. It itself has an
exterior milieu, an interior milieu, an intermediary milieu, and an
annexed milieu. It has the interior zone of a residence or shelter, the exte-
rior zone of its domain, more or less retractable limits or membranes,
intermediary or even neutralized zones, and energy reserves or annexes. It
is by essence marked by "indexes," which may be components taken from
                          1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 315

any of the milieus: materials, organic products, skin or membrane states,
energy sources, action-perception condensates. There is a territory pre-
cisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimen-
sional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive.
There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness. What defines the
territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). Take the
example of color in birds or fish: color is a membrane state associated with
interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as long as
it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes
expressive, on the other hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a
spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a sig-
nature.6 The question is not whether color resumes its functions or fulfills
new ones in the territory. It is clear that it does, but this reorganization of
functions implies first of all that the component under consideration has
become expressive and that its meaning, from this standpoint, is to mark a
territory. The same species of birds may have colored and uncolored repre-
sentatives; the colored birds have a territory, whereas the all-white ones are
gregarious. We know what role urine and excrement play in marking, but
territorial excrement, for example, in the rabbit, has a particular odor
owing to specialized anal glands. Many monkeys, when serving as guards,
expose their brightly colored sexual organs: the penis becomes a rhythmic
and expressive color-carrier that marks the limits of the territory.7 A milieu
component becomes both a quality and a property, quale and proprium. It
has been remarked how quick this becoming is in many cases, the rapidity
with which a territory is constituted at the same time as expressive quali-
ties are selected or produced. The brown stagemaker (Scenopoeetes
dentirostris) lays down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks
from its tree, and then turning them upside down so the paler underside
stands out against the dirt: inversion produces a matter of expression.8
    The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the
mark that makes the territory. Functions in a territory are not primary;
they presuppose a territory-producing expressiveness. In this sense, the
territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of
territorialization. Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become
expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative. The
marking of a territory is dimensional, but it is not a meter, it is a rhythm. It
retains the most general characteristic of rhythm, which is to be inscribed
on a different plane than that of its actions. But now the distinction
between the two planes is between territorializing expressions and
territorialized functions. That is why we cannot accept a thesis like
Lorenz's, which tends to make aggressiveness the basis of the territory: the
territory would then be the product of the phylogenetic evolution of an
                          316 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

instinct of aggression, starting at the point where that instinct became
intraspecific, was turned against the animal's own kind. A territorial ani-
mal would direct its aggressiveness against members of its own species; the
species would gain the selective advantage of distributing its members
throughout a space where each would have its own place.9 This ambiguous
thesis, which has dangerous political overtones, seems to us to have little
foundation. It is obvious that the function of aggression changes pace when
it becomes intraspecific. but this reorganization of the function, rather
than explaining the territory, presupposes it. there are numerous reorgani-
zations within the territory, which also affect sexuality, hunting, etc.; there
are even new functions, such as building a place to live. These functions are
organized or created only because they are territorialized, and not the other
way around. The T factor, the territorializing factor, must be sought
elsewhere: precisely in the becoming-expressive of rhythm or melody, in
other words, in the emergence or proper qualities (color, odor, sound,
silhouette...).
   Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the
territory a result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary
stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from
that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is funda-
mentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz
says, coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the pos-
sessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily
appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being.10 Not in
the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they
delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces
them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is
not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a
domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the
chancy formation of a domain. Abodes have proper names, and are
inspired. "The inspired and their abodes . . ."; it is with the abode that
inspiration arises. No sooner do I like a color that I make it my standard or
placard. One puts one's signature on something just as one plants one's flag
on a piece of land. A high school supervisor stamped all the leaves strewn
about the school yard and then put them back in their places. He had
signed. Territorial marks are readymades. And what is called art brut in not
at all pathological or primitive; it is merely this constitution, this freeing, of
matters of expression in the movement of territoriality: the base or ground
of art. Take anything and make it a matter of expression. The stagemaker
practices art brut. Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their
own posters. Of course, from this standpoint art is not the privilege of
human beings. Messiaen is right in saying that many birds are not only vir-
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 317

tuosos but artists, above all in their territorial songs (if a robber "improp-
erly wishes to occupy a spot which doesn't belong to it, the true owner sings
and sings so well that the predator goes away.... If the robber sings better
than the true proprietor, the proprietor yields his place").11 The refrain is
rhythm and melody that have been territorialized because they have
become expressive—and have become expressive because they are
territorializing. We are not going in circles. What we wish to say is that
there is a self-movement of expressive qualities. Expressiveness is not
reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action in a
milieu: effects of that kind are subjective impressions or emotions rather
than expressions (as, for example, the temporary color a freshwater fish
takes on under a given impulse). On the other hand, expressive qualities,
the colors of the coral fish, for example, are auto-objective, in other words,
find an objectivity in the territory they draw.
    What is this objective movement? What does a matter do as a matter of
expression? It is first of all a poster or placard, but that is not all it is. It
merely takes that route. The signature becomes style. In effect, expressive
qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another
that "express" the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of
impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances. To express is not to depend
upon; there is an autonomy of expression. On the one hand, expressive
qualities entertain internal relations with one another that constitute terri-
torial motifs; sometimes these motifs loom above the internal impulses,
sometimes they are superposed upon them, sometimes they ground one
impulse in another, sometimes they pass and cause a passage from one
impulse to another, sometimes they insert themselves between them—but
they are not themselves "pulsed." Sometimes these nonpulsed motifs arise
in a fixed form, or seem to arise that way, but at other times the same ones,
or others, take on variable speed and articulation; it is as much their varia-
bility as their fixity that makes them independent of the drives they com-
bine or neutralize. "We know that our dogs go through motions of smelling,
seeking, chasing, biting, and shaking to death with equal enthusiasm
whether they are hungry or not."12 Another example is the dance of the
stickleback. Its zigzag is a motif in which the zig is tied to an aggressive
drive toward the partner, and the zag to a sexual drive toward the nest; yet
the zig and the zag are accented, or even oriented, differently. On the other
hand, expressive qualities also entertain other internal relations that pro-
duce territorial counterpoints: this refers to the manner in which they con-
stitute points in the territory that place the circumstances of the external
milieu in counterpoint. For example, an enemy approaches or suddenly
appears, or rain starts to fall, the sun rises, the sun sets... Here again, the
points or counterpoints are autonomous in their fixity or variability in
                         318 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

relation to the circumstances of the exterior milieu whose relation to the
territory they express. For this relation can be given without the circum-
stances being given, just as the relation to the impulses can be given with-
out the impulse being given. And even when the impulses and circum-
stances are given, the relation is prior to what it places in relation.
Relations between matters of expression express relations of the territory
to internal impulses and external circumstances: they have an autonomy
within this very expression. In truth, territorial motifs and counterpoints
explore potentialities of the interior or exterior milieu. Ethologists have
grouped these phenomena under the concept of "ritualization" and have
demonstrated the link between animal rituals and territory. But this word
is not necessarily appropriate for these nonpulsed motifs and nonlocalized
counterpoints, since it accounts for neither their variability nor their fixity.
It is not one or the other, fixity or variability; certain motifs or points are
fixed only if others are variable, or else they are fixed on one occasion and
variable on another.
    We should say, rather, that territorial motifs form rhythmic faces or char-
acters, and that territorial counterpoints form melodic landscapes. There is
a rhythmic character when we find that we no longer have the simple situa-
tion of a rhythm associated with a character, subject, or impulse. The
rhythm itself is now the character in its entirety; as such, it may remain con-
stant, or it may be augmented or diminished by the addition or subtraction
of sounds or always increasing or decreasing durations, and by an amplifi-
cation or elimination bringing death or resuscitation, appearance or disap-
pearance. Similarly, the melodic landscape is no longer a melody associ-
ated with a landscape; the melody itself is a sonorous landscape in
counterpoint to a virtual landscape. That is how we get beyond the placard
stage: although each expressive quality, each matter of expression consid-
ered in itself, is a placard or poster, the analysis of them is nevertheless
abstract. Expressive qualities entertain variable or constant relations with
one another (that is what matters of expression do); they no longer consti-
tute placards that mark a territory, but motifs and counterpoints that
express the relation of the territory to interior impulses or exterior circum-
stances, whether or not they are given. No longer signatures, but a style.
What objectively distinguishes a musician bird from a nonmusician bird is
precisely this aptitude for motifs and counterpoints that, if they are varia-
ble, or even when they are constant, make matters of expression something
other than a poster—a style—since they articulate rhythm and harmonize
melody. We can then say that the musician bird goes from sadness to joy or
that it greets the rising sun or endangers itself in order to sing or sings better
than another, etc. None of these formulations carries the slightest risk of
anthropomorphism, or implies the slightest interpretation. It is instead a
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 319

kind of geomorphism. The relation to joy and sadness, the sun, danger, per-
fection, is given in the motif and counterpoint, even if the term of each of
these relations is not given. In the motif and the counterpoint, the sun, joy
or sadness, danger, become sonorous, rhythmic, or melodic.13
    Human music also goes this route. For Swann, the art lover, Vinteuil's
little phrase often acts as a placard associated with the Bois de Boulogne
and the face and character of Odette: as if it reassured Swann that the Bois
de Boulogne was indeed his territory, and Odette his possession. There is
already something quite artistic in this way of hearing music. Debussy crit-
icized Wagner, comparing his leitmotifs to signposts signaling the hidden
circumstances of a situation, the secret impulses of a character. The criti-
cism is accurate, on one level or at certain moments. But as the work devel-
ops, the motifs increasingly enter into conjunction, conquer their own
plane, become autonomous from the dramatic action, impulses, and situa-
tions, and independent of characters and landscapes; they themselves
become melodic landscapes and rhythmic characters continually enrich-
ing their internal relations. They may then remain relatively constant, or
on the contrary grow or diminish, expand or contract, vary in the speed at
which they unfold: in both cases, they are no longer pulsed and localized,
and even the constants are in the service of variation; the more provisory
they are, the more they display the continuous variation they resist, the
more rigid they become.14 Proust was among the first to underscore this life
of the Wagnerian motif. Instead of the motif being tied to a character who
appears, the appearance of the motif itself constitutes a rhythmic character
in "the plenitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many strains, each
of which is a being."15 It is not by chance that the apprenticeship of the
Recherche pursues an analogous discovery in relation to Vinteuil's little
phrases: they do not refer to a landscape; they carry and develop within
themselves landscapes that do not exist on the outside (the white sonata
and red septet. ..). The discovery of the properly melodic landscape and
the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it ceases to
be a silent painting on a signboard. This may not be art's last word, but art
went that route, as did the bird: motifs and counterpoints that form an
autodevelopment, in other words, a style. The interiorization of the
melodic or sonorous landscape finds its exemplary form in Liszt and that
of the rhythmic character in Wagner. More generally, the lied is the musical
art of the landscape, the most pictorial, impressionist form of music. But
the two poles are so closely bound that in the lied as well Nature appears as
a rhythmic character with infinite transformations.
    The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the
same species: Mark your distance. What is mine is first of all my distance; I
possess only distances. Don't anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters
                         320 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on mat-
ters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of
chaos knocking at the door. Mannerism: the ethos is both abode and man-
ner, homeland and style. This is evident in territorial dances termed
baroque or mannerist, in which each pose, each movement, establishes a
distance of this kind (sarabands, allemandes, bourrees, gavottes.. .).16
There is a whole art of poses, postures, silhouettes, steps, and voices. Two
schizophrenics converse or stroll according to laws of boundary and terri-
tory that may escape us. How very important it is, when chaos threatens, to
draw an inflatable, portable territory. If need be, I'll put my territory on my
own body, I'll territorialize my body: the house of the tortoise, the hermit-
age of the crab, but also tattoos that make the body a territory. Critical dis-
tance is not a meter, it is a rhythm. But the rhythm, precisely, is caught up in
a becoming that sweeps up the distances between characters, making them
 rhythmic characters that are themselves more or less distant, more or less
 combinable (intervals). Two animals of the same sex and species confront
each other: the rhythm of the first one "expands" when it approaches its
territory or the center of its territory; the rhythm of the second contracts
when it moves away from its territory. Between the two, at the boundaries,
 an oscillational constant is established: an active rhythm, a passively
 endured rhythm, and a witness rhythm?17 Or else the animal opens its terri-
tory a crack for a partner of the opposite sex: a complex rhythmic character
 forms through duets, antiphonal or alternating singing, as in the case of
 African shrikes. Furthermore, we must simultaneously take into account
two aspects of the territory: it not only ensures and regulates the coexis-
 tence of members of the same species by keeping them apart, but makes
 possible the coexistence of a maximum number of different species in the
 same milieu by specializing them. Members of the same species enter into
 rhythmic characters at the same time as different species enter into
 melodic landscapes; for the landscapes are peopled by characters and the
 characters belong to landscapes. An example is Messiaen's Chrono-
 chromie, with its eighteen bird songs forming autonomous rhythmic char-
 acters and simultaneously realizing an extraordinary landscape in com-
 plex counterpoint, with invented or implicit chords.
    Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if
 art ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated
 conditions. It has often been noted that human art was for a long time
 bound up with work and rites of a different nature. Saying this, however,
 perhaps has no more weight than saying that art begins with human beings.
 For it is true that a territory has two notable effects: a reorganization of
functions and a regrouping offerees. On the one hand, when functional
 activities are territorialized they necessarily change pace (the creation of
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 321

new functions such as building a dwelling, or the transformation of old
functions, as when aggressiveness changes nature and becomes intra-
specific). This is like a nascent theme of specialization or professionalism:
if the territorial refrain so often passes into professional refrains, it is
because professions assume that various activities are performed in the
same milieu, and that the same activity has no other agents in the same ter-
ritory. Professional refrains intersect in the milieu, like merchants' cries,
but each marks a territory within which the same activity cannot be per-
formed, nor the same cry ring out. In animals as in human beings, there are
rules of critical distance for competition: my stretch of sidewalk. In short, a
territorialization of functions is the condition for their emergence as
"occupations" or "trades." Thus intraspecific or specialized aggressive-
ness is necessarily a territorialized aggressiveness; it does not explain the
territory since it itself derives from it. It is immediately apparent that all
activities within the territory adopt a new practical pace. But that is no rea-
son to conclude that art in itself does not exist here, for it is present in the
territorializing factor that is the necessary condition for the emergence of
the work-function.
    The situation is the same if we consider the other effect of territori-
alization. That other effect, which relates not to occupations but to rites
and religions, consists in this: the territory groups all the forces of the dif-
ferent milieus together in a single sheaf constituted by the forces of the
earth. The attribution of all the diffuse forces to the earth as receptacle or
base takes place only at the deepest level of each territory. "The surround-
ing milieu was experienced as a unity; it is very hard to distinguish in these
primal intuitions what belongs properly to the earth from what is merely
manifested through the earth: mountains, forests, water, vegetation."18
The forces of air and water, bird and fish, thus become forces of the earth.
Moreover, although in extension the territory separates the interior forces
of the earth from the exterior forces of chaos, the same does not occur in
"intension," in the dimension of depth, where the two types of force clasp
and are wed in a battle whose only criterion and stakes is the earth. There is
always a place, a tree or grove, in the territory where all the forces come
together in a hand-to-hand combat of energies. The earth is this close
embrace.19 This intense center is simultaneously inside the territory, and
outside several territories that converge on it at the end of an immense pil-
grimage (hence the ambiguities of the "natal"). Inside or out, the territory
is linked to this intense center, which is like the unknown homeland, terres-
trial source of all forces friendly and hostile, where everything is decided.20
So we must once again acknowledge that religion, which is common to
human beings and animals, occupies territory only because it depends on
the raw aesthetic and territorializing factor as its necessary condition. It is
                        322 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

this factor that at the same time organizes the functions of the milieu into
occupations and binds the forces of chaos in rites and religions, which are
forces of the earth. Territorializing marks simultaneously develop into
motifs and counterpoints, and reorganize functions and regroup forces. But
by virtue of this, the territory already unleashes something that will surpass
it.
    We always come back to this "moment": the becoming-expressive of
rhythm, the emergence of expressive proper qualities, the formation of
matters of expression that develop into motifs and counterpoints. We
therefore need a notion, even an apparently negative one, that can grasp
this fictional or raw moment. The essential thing is the disjunction notice-
able between the code and the territory. The territory arises in a free margin
of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differ-
ently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is perpetual transcoding
between milieus; the territory, on the other hand, seems to form at the level
of a certain decoding. Biologists have stressed the importance of these
determined margins, which are not to be confused with mutations, in other
words, changes internal to the code: here, it is a question of duplicated
genes or extra chromosomes that are not inside the genetic code, are free of
function, and offer a free matter for variation.21 But it is very unlikely that
this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations,
unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiply-
ing the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialization is
precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single spe-
cies and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of
differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territory
and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. Wherever
territoriality appears, it establishes an intraspecific critical distance
between members of the same species; it is by virtue of its own disjunction
in relation to specific differences that it becomes an oblique, indirect means
of differentiation. From all of these standpoints, decoding appears as the
"negative" of the territory, and the most obvious distinction between terri-
torial animals and nonterritorial animals is that the former are much less
coded than the latter. We have said enough bad things about the territory
that we can now evaluate all the creations that tend toward it, occur within
it, and result or will result from it.
    We have gone from forces of chaos to forces of the earth. From milieus to
territory. From functional rhythms to the becoming-expressive of rhythm.
From phenomena of transcoding to phenomena of decoding. From milieu
functions to territorialized functions. It is less a question of evolution than
of passage, bridges and tunnels. We saw that milieus continually pass into
one another. Now we see that the milieus pass into the territory. The
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 323

expressive qualities we term aesthetic are certainly not "pure" or symbolic
qualities but proper qualities, in other words, appropriative qualities, pas-
sages from milieu components to territory components. The territory itself
is a place of passage. The territory is the first assemblage, the first thing to
constitute an assemblage; the assemblage is fundamentally territorial. But
how could it not already be in the process of passing into something else,
into other assemblages? That is why we could not talk about the constitu-
tion of the territory without also talking about its internal organization.
We could not describe the infra-assemblage (posters or placards) without
also discussing the intra-assemblage (motifs and counterpoints). Nor can
we say anything about the intra-assemblage without already being on the
path to other assemblages, or elsewhere. The passage of the Refrain. The
refrain moves in the direction of the territorial assemblage and lodges itself
there or leaves. In a general sense, we call a refrain any aggregate of matters
of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and
landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). In the narrow
sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sonorous or "domi-
nated" by sound—but why do we assign this apparent privilege to sound?

   We are now in the intra-assemblage. Its organization is very rich and
complex. It includes not only the territorial assemblage but also assem-
bled, territorialized functions. Take the Troglodytidae, the wren family:
the male takes possession of his territory and produces a "music box
refrain" as a warning to possible intruders; he builds his own nests in his
territory, sometimes as many as a dozen; when a female arrives, he sits in
front of a nest, invites her to visit, hangs his wings, and lowers the inten-
sity of his song, reduced to a mere trill.22 It seems that the nesting function
is highly territorialized, since the nests are prepared by the male alone
before the arrival of the female, who only visits and completes them; the
"courtship" function is also territorialized, but to a lesser degree, since
the territorial refrain becomes seductive by changing in intensity. All
kinds of heterogeneous elements show up in the intra-assemblage: not
only the assemblage marks that group materials, colors, odors, sounds,
postures, etc., but also the various elements of given assembled behaviors
that enter into a motif. For example, a display behavior is composed of a
dance, clicking of the beak, an exhibition of colors, a posture with neck
outstretched, cries, smoothing of the feathers, bows, a refrain. .. The first
question to be asked is what holds these territorializing marks, territorial
motifs, and territorialized functions together in the same intra-assem-
blage. This is a question of consistency: the "holding together" of hetero-
geneous elements. At first, they constitute no more than a fuzzy set, a
discrete set that later takes on consistency.
                        324 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

   But another question seems to interrupt or cut across the first one. For
in many cases, a territorialized, assembled function acquires enough
independence to constitute a new assemblage, one that is more or less
deterritorialized, en route to deterritorialization. There is no need to
effectively leave the territory to go this route; but what just a minute ago
was a constituted function in the territorial assemblage has become the
constituting element of another assemblage, the element of passage to
another assemblage. As in courtly love, a color ceases to be territorial and
enters a "courtship" assemblage. The territorial assemblage opens onto
the courtship assemblage, which is a social assemblage that has gained
autonomy. That is what happens when it is specifically the sexual partner
or the members of a group that are recognized, rather than the territory:
The partner is then said to be a Tier mil der Heimvalenz, "an animal with
home value." There is therefore a distinction to be made between milieu
groups and couples (without individual recognition), territorial groups
and couples (in which there is only recognition inside the territory), and
finally social groups and love couples (when there is recognition indepen-
dent of place).23 Courtship, or the group, is no longer a part of the territor-
ial assemblage; a courtship or group assemblage takes on autonomy—
even though it may stay inside the territory. Conversely, in the new
assemblage there is a reterritorialization on the member of the couple or
members of the group that have-the-value-of (valence). This opening of
the assemblage onto other assemblages can be analyzed in detail, and var-
ies widely. For example, when the male does not make the nest and con-
fines himself to transporting materials or mimicking the construction of
a nest (as in Australian grass finches), he either courts the female holding
a piece of stubble in his beak (genus Bathildd), uses the grass stem only in
the initial stages of courtship or even beforehand (genera Aidemosyne and
Lonchura), or pecks at the grass without offering it (genus Emblema).24
It could always be said that these "grass stem" behaviors are merely archa-
isms, or vestiges of nesting behavior. But the notion of behavior itself
proves inadequate to this assemblage. For when the nest is no longer made
by the male, nesting ceases to be a component of the territorial
assemblage—it takes wing, so to speak, from the territory; furthermore,
courtship, which now precedes nesting, itself becomes a relatively autono-
mous assemblage. In addition, the matter of expression, "grass stem," acts
as a component of passage between the territorial assemblage and the
courtship assemblage. The fact that the grass stem has an increasingly
rudimentary function in certain species, the fact that it tends to cancel
out in the series under consideration, is not enough to make it a vestige,
much less a symbol. A matter of expression is never a vestige or a symbol.
The grass stem is a deterritorialized component, or one en route to
                          1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 325

deterritorialization. It is neither an archaism nor a transitional or part-
object. It is an operator, a vector. It is an assemblage converter. The stem
cancels out precisely because it is a component of passage from one assem-
blage to another. This viewpoint is confirmed by the fact that if the stem
cancels out, another relay component replaces it or assumes greater impor-
tance, namely, the refrain, which is not only territorial but becomes amo-
rous and social, and changes accordingly.25 The question of why, in the
constitution of new assemblages, the sound component "refrain" has a
stronger valence than the gestural component "grass stem" can be consid-
ered only later on. The important thing for now is to note this formation of
new assemblages within the territorial assemblage, and this movement
from the intra-assemblage to interassemblages by means of components of
passage and relay: An innovative opening of the territory onto the female,
or the group. Selective pressure proceeds by way of interassemblages. It is
as though forces of deterritorialization affected the territory itself, causing
us to pass from the territorial assemblage to other types of assemblages
(courtship or sexuality assemblages, group or social assemblages). The
grass stem and the refrain are two agents of these forces, two agents of
deterritorialization.
    The territorial assemblage continually passes into other assemblages.
Likewise, the infra-assemblage is inseparable from the intra-assemblage,
as is the intra-assemblage from interassemblages; yet these passages are
not necessary but rather take place "on a case-by-case basis." The reason
is simple: the intra-assemblage, the territorial assemblage, territorializes func-
tions and forces (sexuality, aggressiveness, gregariousness, etc.), and
in the process of territorializing them, transforms them. But these
territorialized functions and forces can suddenly take on an autonomy
that makes them swing over into other assemblages, compose other
deterritorialized assemblages. In the intra-assemblage, sexuality may
appear as a territorialized function, but it can just as easily draw a line of
deterritorialization that describes another assemblage; there are there-
fore quite variable relations between sexuality and the territory, as if sex-
uality were keeping "its distance." Profession, trade, and specialty imply
territorialized activities, but they can also take wing from the territory,
building a new assemblage around themselves, and between professions.
A territorial or territorialized component may set about budding, pro-
ducing: this is the case for the refrain, so much so that we should perhaps
call all cases of this kind refrains. This ambiguity between the territory
and deterritorialization is the ambiguity of the Natal. It is understood
much more clearly if it is borne in mind that the territory has an intense
center at its profoundest depths; but as we have seen, this intense center
can be located outside the territory, at the point of convergence of very
                         326 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

different and very distant territories. The Natal is outside. We may cite a
certain number of troubling and well-known, more or less mysterious,
cases illustrating prodigious takeoffs from the territory, displaying a vast
movement of deterritorialization directly plugged into the territories and
permeating them through and through: (1) pilgrimages to the source, as
among salmon; (2) supernumerary assemblies, such as those of locusts or
chaffinches, etc. (tens of millions of chaffinches near Thoune in 1950-
 1951); (3) magnetic or solar-guided migrations; (4) long marches, such as
those of the lobsters.26
    Whatever the causes of each of these movements, it is clear that the
nature of the movement is different. It is no longer adequate to say that
there is interassemblage, passage from a territorial assemblage to another
type of assemblage; rather, we should say that one leaves all assemblages
behind, that one exceeds the capacities of any possible assemblage, enter-
ing another plane. In effect, there is no longer a milieu movement or
rhythm, nor a territorialized or territorializing movement or rhythm; there
is something of the Cosmos in these more ample movements. The localiza-
tion mechanisms are still extremely precise, but the localization has
become cosmic. These are no longer territorialized forces bundled together
as forces of the earth; they are the liberated or regained forces of a
deterritorialized Cosmos. In migration, the sun is no longer the terrestrial
sun reigning over a territory, even an aerial one; it is the celestial sun of the
Cosmos, as in the two Jerusalems, the Apocalypse. Leaving aside these two
grandiose cases where deterritorialization becomes absolute while losing
nothing of its precision (because it weds cosmic variables), we must remark
that the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterrito-
rialization that are relative and may even occur in place, by which one
passes from the intra-assemblage to interassemblages, without, however,
leaving the territory or issuing from the assemblages in order to wed the
Cosmos. A territory is always en route to an at least potential deterrito-
rialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a reterritoriali-
zation (something that "has-the-value-of' home). We saw that the territory
constituted itself on a margin of decoding affecting the milieu; we now see
that there is a margin of deterritorialization affecting the territory itself.
There is a series of unclaspings. The territory is inseparable from certain
coefficients of deterritorialization (which can be evaluated in each case)
that place the relations of each territorialized function to the territory in
variation, as well as the relations of the territory to each deterritorialized
assemblage. It is the same "thing" that appears first as a territorialized
function taken up in the intra-assemblage, and again as a deterritorialized
or autonomous assemblage, as an interassemblage.
    Refrains could accordingly be classified as follows: (1) territorial
                          1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 327

refrains that seek, mark, assemble a territory; (2) territorialized function
refrains that assume a special function in the assemblage (the Lullaby that
territorializes the child's slumber, the Lover's Refrain that territorializes
the sexuality of the loved one, the Professional Refrain that territorializes
trades and occupations, the Merchant Refrain that territorializes distribu-
tion and products); (3) the same, when they mark new assemblages, pass
into new assemblages by means of deterritorialization-reterritorialization
(nursery rhymes are a very complicated example: they are territorial
refrains that are sung differently from neighborhood to neighborhood,
sometimes from one street to the next; they distribute game roles and func-
tions within the territorial assemblage; but they also cause the territory to
pass into the game assemblage, which tends to become autonomous);27 (4)
refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the territory, or in
order to go outside it (these are refrains of confrontation or departure that
sometimes bring on a movement of absolute deterritorialization:
"Goodbye, I'm leaving and I won't look back." At infinity, these refrains
must rejoin the songs of the Molecules, the newborn wailing of the funda-
mental Elements, as Millikan put it. They cease to be terrestrial, becoming
cosmic: when the religious Nome blooms and dissolves in a molecular pan-
theist Cosmos, when the singing of the birds is replaced by combinations of
water, wind, clouds, and fog. "Outside, the wind and the rain ..." The Cos-
mos as an immense deterritorialized refrain).
   The problem of consistency concerns the manner in which the compo-
nents of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the
manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of
passage and relay. It may even be the case that consistency finds the totality
of its conditions only on a properly cosmic plane, where all the disparate
and heterogeneous elements are convoked. However, from the moment
heterogeneities hold together in an assemblage or interassemblages a prob-
lem of consistency is posed, in terms of coexistence or succession, and both
simultaneously. Even in a territorial assemblage, it may be the most deter-
ritorialized component, the deterritorializing vector, in other words, the
refrain, that assures the consistency of the territory. If we ask the general
question, "What holds things together?", the clearest, easiest answer seems
to be provided by a formalizing, linear, hierarchized, centralized
arborescent model. Take Tinbergen's schema, which presents a coded link-
age of spatiotemporal forms in the central nervous system: a higher func-
tional center goes automatically into operation and releases an appetitive
behavior in search of specific stimuli (the migrational center); through the
intermediary of the stimulus, a second center that had been inhibited up to
this point is freed and releases a new appetitive behavior (the territorial
center); then other subordinate centers are activated, centers of fighting,
                         328 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

nesting, courtship . . . until stimuli are found that release the correspond-
ing executive acts.28 This kind of representation, however, is constructed of
oversimplified binarities: inhibition-release, innate-acquired, etc. Etholo-
gists have a great advantage over ethnologists: they did not fall into the
structural danger of dividing an undivided "terrain" into forms of kinship,
politics, economics, myth, etc. The ethologists have retained the integrality
of a certain undivided "terrain." But by orienting it along the axes of
inhibition-release, innate-acquired, they risk reintroducing souls and cen-
ters at each locus and stage of linkage. That is why even the authors who
stress the role of the peripheral and the acquired at the level of releasing
stimuli do not truly overturn the linear aborescent schema, even if they
reverse the direction of the arrows.
   It seems more important to us to underline a certain number of factors
liable to suggest an entirely different schema, one favoring rhizomatic,
rather than arborified, functioning, and no longer operating by these dual-
isms. First of all, what is called a functional center brings into play not only
a localization but also a distribution of an entire population of neurons
selected from throughout the central nervous system, as in a "cable net-
work." This being the case, in considering the system as a whole we should
speak less of automatism of a higher center than of coordination between
centers, and of the cellular groupings or molecular populations that per-
form these couplings: there is no form or correct structure imposed from
without or above but rather an articulation from within, as if oscillating
molecules, oscillators, passed from one heterogeneous center to another, if
only for the purpose of assuring the dominance of one among them.29 This
obviously excludes any linear relation from one center to another, in favor
of packets of relations steered by molecules: the interaction or coordina-
tion may be positive or negative (release or inhibition), but it is never
direct, as in a linear relation or chemical reaction; it always occurs between
molecules with at least two heads, and each center taken separately.30
   This represents a whole behavioral-biological "machinics," a whole
molecular engineering that should help increase our understanding of the
nature of problems of consistency. The philosopher Eugene Dupreel pro-
posed a theory of consolidation; he demonstrated that life went not from a
center to an exteriority but from an exterior to an interior, or rather from a
discrete or fuzzy aggregate to its consolidation. This implies three things.
First, that there is no beginning from which a linear sequence would derive,
but rather densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, injections,
showerings, like so many intercalary events ("there is growth only by inter-
calation"). Second, and this is not a contradiction, there must be an
arrangement of intervals, a distribution of inequalities, such that it is
sometimes necessary to make a hole in order to consolidate. Third, there is
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 329

a superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within of an
interrhythmicity, with no imposition of meter or cadence.31 Consolidation
is not content to come after; it is creative. The fact is that the beginning
always begins in-between, intermezzo. Consistency is the same as consoli-
dation, it is the act that produces consolidated aggregates, of succession as
well as of coexistence, by means of the three factors just mentioned: inter-
calated elements, intervals, and articulations of superposition. Architec-
ture, as the art of the abode and the territory, attests to this: there are
consolidations that are made afterward, and there are consolidations of the
keystone type that are constituent parts of the ensemble. More recently,
matters like reinforced concrete have made it possible for the architectural
ensemble to free itself from arborescent models employing tree-pillars,
branch-beams, foliage-vaults. Not only is concrete a heterogeneous matter
whose degree of consistency varies according to the elements in the mix,
but iron is intercalated following a rhythm; moreover, its self-supporting
surfaces form a complex rhythmic personage whose "stems" have different
sections and variable intervals depending on the intensity and direction of
the force to be tapped (armature instead of structure). In this sense, the lit-
erary or musical work has an architecture: "Saturate every atom," as Vir-
ginia Woolf said;32 or in the words of Henry James, it is necessary to "begin
far away, as far away as possible," and to proceed by "blocks of wrought
matter." It is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of
elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap
increasingly intense forces. What makes a material increasingly rich is the
same as what holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be het-
erogeneous. What holds them together in this way are intercalary oscilla-
tors, synthesizers with at least two heads; these are interval analyzers,
rhythm synchronizers (the word "synchronizer" is ambiguous because
molecular synchronizers do not proceed by homogenizing and equalizing
measurement, but operate from within, between two rhythms). Is not con-
solidation the terrestrial name for consistency? The territorial assemblage
is a milieu consolidation, a space-time consolidation, of coexistence and
succession. And the refrain operates with these three factors.
   The matters of expression themselves must present characteristics mak-
ing this taking on of consistency possible. We have seen that they have an
aptitude to enter into internal relations forming motifs and counterpoints:
the territorializing marks become territorial motifs or counterpoints, the
signatures and placards constitute a "style." These are the elements of a
discrete or fuzzy aggregate; but they become consolidated, take on consis-
tency. To this extent, they have effects, such as reorganizing functions and
gathering forces. To get a better grasp on the mechanism of this aptitude,
we may lay down certain conditions of homogeneity, beginning with marks
                        330 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

or matters of the same kind, for example, a set of sonorous marks, the song
of a bird. The song of the chaffinch normally has three distinct phases: the
first has from four to fourteen notes rising in crescendo but decreasing in
frequency; the second has from two to eight notes, lower than the first and
of constant frequency; the third ends with a complex "flourish" or "orna-
ment." From the standpoint of acquisition, this "full song" is preceded by a
"subsong" that under normal conditions already assumes possession of the
general tonal quality, overall duration and content of the stanzas, and even
a tendency to end on a higher note.33 But the organization into three stan-
zas, the order of the stanzas, the details and the ornament, are not pregiven;
it is precisely the articulations from within that are missing, the intervals,
the intercalary notes, everything making for motif and counterpoint. The
distinction between subsong and full song could thus be presented as fol-
lows: the subsong as mark or placard, the full song as style or motif, and the
aptitude to pass from one to the other, for one to consolidate itself in the
other. Clearly, artificial isolation will have very different effects depending
on whether it takes place before or after the acquisition of the components
ofthe subsong.
    Our present concern, however, is to find out what happens when these
components effectively develop into the motifs and counterpoints of the
full song. We must leave behind the conditions of qualitative homogeneity
we set for ourselves. For as long as we confine ourselves to marks, marks of
one kind coexist with marks of another kind, period: the sounds of an ani-
mal coexist with its colors, gestures, silhouettes; or else the sounds of a
given species coexist with the sounds of other species, perhaps quite differ-
ent but close in space. The organization of qualified marks into motifs and
counterpoints necessarily entails a taking on of consistency, or a capture of
the marks of another quality, a mutual branching of sounds-colors-
gestures, or a capture of sounds from different animal species, etc. Consis-
tency necessarily occurs between heterogeneities, not because it is the birth
of a differentiation, but because heterogeneities that were formerly content
to coexist or succeed one another become bound up with one another
through the "consolidation" of their coexistence and succession. The inter-
vals, intercalations, and articulations constitutive of motifs and counter-
points in the order of an expressive quality also envelop other qualities of a
different order, or qualities of the same order but of another sex or even
another species of animal. A color will "answer to" a sound. If a quality has
motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic characters and melodic
landscapes in a given order, then there is the constitution of a veritable
machinic opera tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities.
What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as
such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of expression, we say
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 331

that their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly
machinic "statement" or "enunciation." The varying relations into which
a color, sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species,
and in different species, form so many machinic enunciations.
   Let us return to the stagemaker, the magic bird or bird of the opera. He is
not brightly colored (as though there were an inhibition). But his song, his
refrain, can be heard from a great distance (is this a compensation, or on
the contrary the prime factor?). He sings perched on his singing stick, a
vine or branch located just above the display ground he has prepared by
marking it with cut leaves turned upside down to contrast with the color of
the earth. As he sings, he uncovers the yellow root of certain feathers under-
neath his beak: he makes himself visible at the same time as sonorous. His
song forms a varied and complex motif interweaving his own notes and
those of other birds that he imitates in the intervals.34 This produces a con-
solidation that "consists" in species-specific sounds, sounds of other spe-
cies, leaf hue, throat color: the stagemaker's machinic statement or
assemblage of enunciation. Many birds "imitate" the songs of other spe-
cies. But imitation may not be the best concept for these phenomena,
which vary according to the assemblage into which they enter. The subsong
contains elements that can enter into melodic and rhythmic organizations
distinct from those of the species under consideration, supplying the full
song with truly alien or added notes. If certain birds such as the chaffinch
seem impervious to imitation, it is because any alien sounds appearing in
their subsong are eliminated from the consistency of the full song. On the
other hand, in cases where added phrases do get included in the full song, it
may be because there is an interspecific assemblage of the parasitism type;
or it may be because the bird's assemblage itself effectuates the counter-
points to its melody. Thorpe is not wrong to say that the problem is one of
the occupation of frequency bands, as with radios (the sound aspect of ter-
ritoriality).35 It is less a question of imitating a song than of occupying cor-
responding frequencies; for there may be an advantage in being able to
restrict oneself to a very determinate zone in some circumstances, and in
others to widen or deepen the zone to assure oneself counterpoints and to
invent chords that would otherwise remain diffuse, as, for example, in the
rain forest, which is precisely where the greatest number of "imitative"
birds are found.
   From the standpoint of consistency, matters of expression must be con-
sidered not only in relation to their aptitude to form motifs and counter-
points but also in relation to the inhibitors and releasers that act on them,
and the mechanisms of innateness or learning, heredity or acquisition, that
modulate them. Ethology's mistake is to restrict itself to a binary distri-
bution of these factors, even, and especially, when it is thought necessary to
                         332 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

take both into account simultaneously, to intermix them at every level of a
"tree of behaviors." Instead, what should be done is to start from a positive
notion capable of accounting for the very particular character the innate
and the acquired assume in the rhizome, and which is like the principle of
their mixture. Such a notion cannot be arrived at in terms of behavior but
rather only in terms of assemblage. Some authors emphasize autonomous
developments encoded in centers (innateness); others emphasize acquired
linkages regulated by peripheral sensations (learning). But Raymond
Ruyer has demonstrated that the animal is instead prey to "musical
rhythms" and "melodic and rhythmic themes" explainable neither as the
encoding of a recorded phonograph disk nor by the movements of per-
formance that effectuate them and adapt them to the circumstances.36 The
opposite is even true: the melodic or rhythmic themes precede their per-
formance and recording. What is primary is the consistency of a refrain, a
little tune, either in the form of a mnemic melody that has no need to be
inscribed locally in a center, or in the form of a vague motif with no need to
be pulsed or stimulated. There is perhaps more to be learned from a musi-
cal and poetic notion such as the Natal—in the lied, or in Holderlin or
Thomas Hardy—than from the slightly vapid and foggy categories of the
innate and the acquired. For from the moment there is a territorial assem-
blage, we can say that the innate assumes a very particular figure, since it is
inseparable from a movement of decoding and passes to the margins of the
code, unlike the innate of the interior milieu; acquisition also assumes a
very particular figure, since it is territorialized, in other words, regulated
by matters of expression rather than by stimuli in the exterior milieu. The
natal is the innate, but decoded; and it is the acquired, but territorialized.
The natal is the new figure assumed by the innate and the acquired in the
territorial assemblage. The affect proper to the natal, as heard in the lied: to
be forever lost, or refound, or aspiring to the unknown homeland. In the
natal, the innate tends to be displaced: as Ruyer says, it is in some way prior
to or downstream from the act; it concerns less the act or the behavior than
the matters of expression themselves, the perception that discerns and
selects them, and the gesture that erects them, or itself constitutes them
(that is why there are "critical periods" when the animal valorizes an object
or situation, "is impregnated" by a matter of expression, long before being
able to perform the corresponding act). This is not to say, however, that
behavior is at the mercy of chance learning; for it is predetermined by this
displacement, and finds rules of assemblage in its own territorialization.
The natal, then, consists in a decoding of innateness and a territo-
rialization of learning, one atop the other, one alongside the other. The
natal has a consistency that cannot be explained as a mixture of the innate
and the acquired, because it is instead what accounts for such mixtures in
                        1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 333

territorial assemblage and interassemblages. In short, the notion of behav-
ior proves inadequate, too linear, in comparison with that of the assem-
blage. The natal stretches from what happens in the intra-assemblage all
the way to the center that has been projected outside; it cuts across all the
interassemblages and reaches all the way to the gates of the Cosmos.
   The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of
deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages. There
have been many studies on the influence of artificial conditions on bird
song, but the results vary both by species and according to the kind and
timing of the artifice. Many birds are receptive to the songs of other spe-
cies, if they are exposed to them during the critical period, and will repro-
duce the alien songs later on. The chaffinch, however, seems much more
devoted to its own matters of expression and retains an innate sense of its
own tonal quality even if exposed to synthetic sounds. The outcome also
depends on whether the birds are isolated before or after the critical period.
In the first case, chaffinches develop a nearly normal song; in the second,
the subjects in the isolated group (who cannot hear each other) develop an
abnormal, nonspecies-specific song that is nevertheless common to the
group (see Thorpe). In any event, it is necessary to consider the effects of
deterritorialization or denatalization on a given species at a given moment.
Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that
deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial condi-
tions), we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the distinction we
would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine is like a
set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing
deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are
no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend
on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed
through deterritorialization. What we call machinic statements are
machine effects that define consistency or enter matters of expression.
Effects of this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imagi-
nary; they always have a real value of passage or relay.
   As a general rule, a machine plugs into the territorial assemblage of a
species and opens it to other assemblages, causes it to pass through the
interassemblages of that species; for example, the territorial assemblage of
a bird species opens onto interassemblages of courtship and gregar-
iousness, moving in the direction of the partner or "socius." But the
machine may also open the territorial assemblage to interspecific assem-
blages, as in the case of birds that adopt alien songs, and most especially in
the case of parasitism.37 Or it may go beyond all assemblages and produce
an opening onto the Cosmos. Or, conversely, instead of opening up the
deterritorialized assemblage onto something else, it may produce an effect
                        334 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

of closure, as if the aggregate had fallen into and continues to spin in a kind
of black hole. This is what happens under conditions of precocious or
extremely sudden deterritorialization, and when specific, interspecific,
and cosmic paths are blocked; the machine then produces "individual"
group effects spinning in circles, as in the case of chaffinches that have been
isolated too early, whose impoverished, simplified song expresses nothing
more than the resonance of the black hole in which they are trapped. It is
important to bring up this "black hole" function again because it can
increase our understanding of phenomena of inhibition, and is in turn
capable of breaking with the overnarrow inhibitor-releaser dualism. We
saw earlier that an interassemblage could include lines of impoverishment
and fixation leading to a black hole but could still perhaps lead into a richer
and more positive line of deterritorialization (for example, the "grass
stem" component among Australian grass finches falls into a black hole
and leads into the "refrain" component).38 Thus the black hole is a
machine effect in assemblages and has a complex relation to other effects.
It may be necessary for the release of innovative processes that they first
fall into a catastrophic black hole: stases of inhibition are associated with
the release of crossroads behaviors. On the other hand, when black holes
resonate together or inhibitions conjugate and echo each other, instead of
an opening onto consistency, we see a closure of the assemblage, as though
it were deterritorialized in the void: young chaffinches. Machines are
always singular keys that open or close an assemblage, a territory. More-
over, finding the machine in operation in a given territorial assemblage is
not enough; it is already in operation in the emergence of matters of expres-
sion, in other words, in the constitution of the assemblage and in the vec-
tors of deterritorialization that ply it from the start.
   Thus consistency of matters of expression relates, on the one hand, to
their aptitude to form melodic and rhythmic themes and, on the other
hand, to the power of the natal. Finally, there is one other aspect: their very
special relation to the molecular (the machine starts us down this road).
The very words, "matters of expression," imply that expression has a pri-
mary relation to matter. As matters of expression take on consistency they
constitute semiotic systems, but the semiotic components are inseparable
from material components and are in exceptionally close contact with
molecular levels. The whole question is thus whether or not the molar-
molecular relation assumes a new figure here. In general, it has been possi-
ble to distinguish "molar-molecular" combinations that vary greatly
depending on the direction followed. First, individual atoms can enter into
probabilistic or statistical accumulations that tend to efface their individu-
ality; this already happens on the level of the molecule, and then again in
the molar aggregate. But they can become complicated in interactions and
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 335

retain their individuality inside the molecule, then in the macromolecule,
etc., setting up direct communications between individuals of different
orders.39 Second, it is clear that the distinction to be made is not between
the individual and the statistical. In fact, it is always a question of popula-
tions; statistics concerns individual phenomena, and antistatistical indi-
viduality operates only in relation to molecular populations. The distinc-
tion is between two group movements, as in Alembert's equation, in which
one group tends toward increasingly equilibrated, homogeneous, and
probable states (the divergent wave and the delayed potential), and the
other group tends toward less probable states of concentration (the conver-
gent wave and the anticipated potential).40 Third, the intramolecular inter-
nal forces that give an aggregate its molar form can be of two types: they are
either covalent, arborescent, mechanical, linear, localizable relations sub-
ject to chemical conditions of action and reaction or to linked reactions, or
they are indirect, noncovalent, machinic and nonmechanical, superlinear,
nonlocalizable bonds operating by stereospecific discernment or discrimi-
nation, rather than by linkage.41
   These are different ways of stating the same distinction, which seems
much broader than the one we are looking for: it is, in effect, a distinction
between matter and life, or rather, since there is only one matter, between
two states, two tendencies of atomic matter (for example, there are bonds
that immobilize the linked atoms in relation to one another, and other
bonds that allow free rotation). Stating the distinction in the most general
way, we could say that it is between stratified systems or systems of stratifi-
cation on the one hand, and consistent, self-consistent aggregates on the
other. But the point is that consistency, far from being restricted to com-
plex life forms, fully pertains even to the most elementary atoms and parti-
cles. There is a coded system of stratification whenever, horizontally, there
are linear causalities between elements; and, vertically, hierarchies of order
between groupings; and, holding it all together in depth, a succession of
framing forms, each of which informs a substance and in turn serves as a
substance for another form. These causalities, hierarchies, and framings
constitute a stratum, as well as the passage from one stratum to another,
and the stratified combinations of the molecular and molar. On the other
hand, we may speak of aggregates of consistency when instead of a regu-
lated succession of forms-substances we are presented with consolidations
of very heterogeneous elements, orders that have been short-circuited or
even reverse causalities, and captures between materials and forces of a dif-
ferent nature: as if a machinic phylum, a destratifying transversality, moved
through elements, orders, forms and substances, the molar and the molec-
ular, freeing a matter and tapping forces.
   Now if we ask ourselves where life fits into this distinction, we see that it
                        336 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

undoubtedly implies a gain in consistency, in other words, a surplus value
(surplus value o(destratification). For example, it contains a greater num-
ber of self-consistent aggregates and processes of consolidation and gives
them molar scope. It is destratifying from the outset, since its code is not
distributed throughout the entire stratum but rather occupies an emi-
nently specialized genetic line. But the question is almost contradictory,
because asking where life fits in amounts to treating it as a particular stra-
tum having its own order and befitting order, having its own forms and sub-
stances. It is true that it is both at once: a particularly complex system of
stratification and an aggregate of consistency that disrupts orders, forms,
and substances. As we have seen, the living thing performs a transcoding of
milieus that can be considered both to constitute a stratum and to effect
reverse causalities and transversals of destratification. The same question
can be asked when life no longer restricts itself to mixing milieus but
assembles territories as well. The territorial assemblage implies a decoding
and is inseparable from its own deterritorialization (two new types of sur-
plus value). "Ethology" then can be understood as a very privileged molar
domain for demonstrating how the most varied components (biochemical,
behavioral, perceptive, hereditary, acquired, improvised, social, etc.) can
crystallize in assemblages that respect neither the distinction between
orders nor the hierarchy of forms. What holds all the components together
are transversals, and the transversal itself is only a component that has
taken upon itself the specialized vector of deterritorialization. In effect,
what holds an assemblage together is not the play of framing forms or linear
causalities but, actually or potentially, its most deterritorialized compo-
nent, a cutting edge of deterritorialization. An example is the refrain: it is
more deterritorialized than the grass stem, but this does not preclude its
being "determined," in other words, connected to biochemical and molec-
ular components. The assemblage holds by its most deterritorialized com-
ponent, but deterritorialized is not the same as indeterminate (the refrain
may be narrowly connected to the presence of male hormones).42 A compo-
nent of this kind entering an assemblage may be among the most highly
determined, even mechanized, of components, but it will still bring "play"
to what it composes; it fosters the entry of new dimensions of the milieus by
releasing processes of discernibility, specialization, contraction, and accel-
eration that open new possibilities, that open the territorial assemblage
onto interassemblages. Back to the stagemaker: one of its acts consists in
discerning and causing to be discerned both sides of the leaf. This act is
connected to the determinism of the "toothed" beak. Assemblages are
defined simultaneously by matters of expression that take on consistency
independently of the form-substance relation; reverse causalities or
"advanced" determinisms, decoded innate functions related to acts ofdis-
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 337

cernment or election rather than to linked reactions; and molecular combi-
nations that proceed by noncovalent bonding rather than by linear
relations—in short, a new "pace" produced by the imbrication of the
semiotic and the material. From this standpoint, we may oppose the con-
sistency of assemblages to the stratification of milieus. But once again, this
opposition is only relative, entirely relative. Just as milieus swing between
a stratum state and a movement of destratification, assemblages swing
between a territorial closure that tends to restratify them and a deterrito-
rializing movement that on the contrary connects them with the Cosmos.
Thus it is not surprising that the distinction we were seeking was not
between assemblages and something else but between the two limits of any
possible assemblage, in other words, between the system of strata and the
plane of consistency. We should not forget that the strata rigidify and are
organized on the plane of consistency, and that the plane of consistency is
at work and is constructed in the strata, in both cases piece by piece, blow
by blow, operation by operation.

   We have gone from stratified milieus to territorialized assemblages and
simultaneously, from the forces of chaos, as broken down, coded, trans-
coded by the milieus, to the forces of the earth, as gathered into the assem-
blages. Then we went from territorial assemblages to interassemblages, to'
the opening of assemblages along lines of deterritorialization; and simulta-
neously, the same from the ingathered forces of the earth to the
deterritorialized, or rather deterritorializing, Cosmos. How does Paul Klee
present this last movement, which is not a terrestrial "pace" but instead a
cosmic "breakaway" [echappee: also "opening," "outlet," "vista"; in coun-
terpoint, "escape tone"—Trans.]? And why so enormous a word, Cosmos,
to discuss an operation that must be precise? Klee says that one "tries con-
vulsively to fly from the earth," and that one "rises above i t . . . powered by
centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity." He adds that the artist begins
by looking around him- or herself, into all the milieus, but does so in order
to grasp the trace of creation in the created, of naturing nature in natured
nature; then, adopting "an earthbound position,"43 the artist turns his or
her attention to the microscopic, to crystals, molecules, atoms, and parti-
cles, not for scientific conformity, but for movement, for nothing but
immanent movement; the artist tells him- or herself that this world has had
different aspects, will have still others, and that there are already others on
other planets; finally, the artist opens up to the Cosmos in order to harness
forces in a "work" (without which the opening onto the Cosmos would only
be a reverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the earth); this work
requires very simple, pure, almost childish means, but also the forces of a
people, which is what is still lacking. "We still lack the ultimate force....
                         338 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

We seek a people. We began over there in the Bauhaus.... More we cannot
do."44
   Classicism refers to form-matter relation, or rather a form-substance
relation (substance is precisely a matter endowed with form). Matter is
organized by a succession of forms that are compartmentalized, central-
ized, and hierarchized in relation to one another, each of which takes
charge of a greater or lesser amount of matter. Each form is like the code of
a milieu, and the passage from one form to another is a veritable
transcoding. Even the seasons are milieus. Two coexistent operations are
involved, one by which the form differentiates itself according to binary
distinctions, the other by which the formed substantial parts, milieus or
seasons, enter into an order of succession that can be the same in either
direction. But beneath these operations, the classical artist hazards an
extreme and dangerous adventure. He or she breaks down the milieus,
separates them, harmonizes them, regulates their mixtures, passes from
one to the other. What the artist confronts in this way is chaos, the forces
of chaos, the forces of a raw and untamed matter upon which Forms must
be imposed in order to make substances, and Codes in order to make
milieus. Phenomenal agility. That is why no one has ever been able to
draw a clear line between baroque and classical.45 All of baroque lies
brewing beneath classicism: the task of the classical artist is God's own,
that of organizing chaos; and the artist's only cry is Creation! Creation!
The Tree of Creation! An ancient wooden flute organizes chaos, but chaos
reigns like the Queen of the Night. The classical artist proceeds with a
One-Two: the one-two of the differentiation of form divided (man-
woman, masculine and feminine rhythms, voices, families of instru-
ments, all the binarities of the ars nova); and the one-two of the
distinction between parts as they answer each other (the enchanted flute
and the magic bell). The little tune, the bird refrain, is the binary unity of
creation, the differentiating unity of the pure beginning: "At first the
piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard
and answered it, as from a neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of
the world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on earth, or rather in
this world closed to all the rest, fashioned by the logic of a creator, in
which there would never be more than the two of them: this sonata."46
   If we attempt an equally summary definition of romanticism, we see
that everything is clearly different. A new cry resounds: the Earth, the terri-
tory and the Earth! With romanticism, the artist abandons the ambition of
de jure universality and his or her status as creator: the artist territorializes,
enters a territorial assemblage. The seasons are now territorialized. The
earth is certainly not the same thing as the territory. The earth is the intense
point at the deepest level of the territory or is projected outside it like a
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 339

focal point, where all the forces draw together in close embrace. The earth
is no longer one force among others, nor is it a substance endowed with
form or a coded milieu, with bounds and an apportioned share. The earth
has become that close embrace of all forces, those of the earth as well as of
other substances, so that the artist no longer confronts chaos, but hell and
the subterranean, the groundless. The artist no longer risks dissipation in
the milieus but rather sinking too deeply into the earth: Empedocles. The
artist no longer identifies with Creation but with the ground or foundation,
the foundation has become creative. The artist is no longer God but the
Hero who defies God: Found, Found, instead of Create. Faust, especially
the second Faust, is impelled by this tendency. Criticism, the Protestant-
ism of the earth, replaces dogmatism, the Catholicism of the milieus
(code). It is certain that the Earth as an intense point in depth or in projec-
tion, as ratio essendi, is always in disjunction with the territory; and the ter-
ritory as the condition of "knowledge," ratio cognoscendi, is always in
disjunction with the earth. The territory is German, the Earth Greek. And
this disjunction is precisely what determines the status of the romantic art-
ist, in that she or he no longer confronts the gaping of chaos but the pull of
the Ground (Fond). The little tune, the bird refrain, has changed: it is no
longer the beginning of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon the
earth. It is then no longer made of two consonant parts that seek and answer
one another; it addresses itself to a deeper singing that founds it, but also
strikes against it and sweeps it away, making it ring dissonant. The refrain is
indissolubly constituted by the territorial song and the singing of the earth
that rises to drown it out. Thus at the end of Das Lied von der Erde (The
song of the Earth) there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the
assemblages of the bird, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal
breathing of the earth. Mahler says that the singing of the birds, the color of
the flowers, and the fragrance of the forest are not enough to make Nature,
that the god Dionysus and the great Pan are needed. The Ur-refrain of the
earth harnesses all refrains whether territorial or not, and all milieu
refrains. By the end of [Berg's] Wozzeck, the lullaby refrain, military
refrain, drinking refrain, hunting refrain, child's refrain are so many admi-
rable assemblages swept up by the powerful earth machine and its cutting
edges: Wozzeck's voice, by which the earth becomes sonorous, Marie's
death cry moving over the pond, the repeated B note, when the earth
howled . . . It is owing to this disjunction, this decoding, that the romantic
artist experiences the territory; but he or she experiences it as necessarily
lost, and experiences him- or herself as an exile, a voyager, as deterrito-
rialized, driven back into the milieus, like the Flying Dutchman or King
Waldemar (whereas the classical artist inhabited the milieus). Yet this
movement is still under earth's command, the repulsion from the territory
                        340 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

is produced by the attraction of the earth. The signpost now only indicates
the road of no return. This is the ambiguity of the natal, as it appears in the
lied (as well as in symphony and opera): the lied is simultaneously the terri-
tory, the lost territory, and the earth vector. The intermezzo assumed
increasing importance because it played on all the disjunctions between
the earth and the territory, inserted itself into them, filled them after its
fashion, "between night and day," "noon-midnight." From this stand-
point, the fundamental innovations of romanticism can be said to be the
following: There were no longer substantial parts corresponding to forms,
milieus corresponding to codes, or a matter in chaos given order in forms
and by codes. The parts were instead like assemblages produced and dis-
mantled at the surface. Form itself became a greatform in continuous devel-
opment, a gathering of the forces of the earth taking all the parts up into a
sheaf. Matter itself was no longer a chaos to subjugate and organize but
rather the moving matter of a continuous variation. The universal had
become a relation, variation. The continuous variation of matter and the
continuous development of form. The assemblages thus placed matter and
form in a new relation: matter ceased to be a matter of content, becoming
instead a matter of expression, and form ceased to be a code subduing the
forces of chaos, becoming a force itself, the sum of the forces of the earth.
There was a new relation to danger, madness, limits: romanticism did not
go further than baroque classicism; it went elsewhere, with other givens
and other vectors.
    What romanticism lacks most is a people. The territory is haunted by a
solitary voice; the voice of the earth resonates with it and provides it per-
cussion rather than answering it. Even when there is a people, it is
mediatized by the earth, it rises up from the bowels of the earth and is apt to
return there: more a subterranean than a terrestrial people. The hero is a
hero of the earth; he is mythic, rather than being a hero of the people and
historical. Germany, German romanticism, had a genius for experiencing
the natal territory not as deserted but as "solitary," regardless of popula-
tion density; for the population is only an emanation of the earth, and has
the value of One Alone. The territory does not open onto a people, it half-
opens onto the Friend, the Loved One; but the Loved One is already dead,
and the Friend uncertain, disturbing.47 As in the lied, everything in the ter-
ritory occurs in relation to the One-Alone of the soul and the One-All of the
earth. That is why romanticism takes on an entirely different aspect and
even claims a different name, a different placard, in the Latin and Slavic
countries, where on the contrary everything is put in terms of the theme of
a people and the forces of a people. This time, it is the earth that is
mediatized by the people, and exists only through the people. This time,
the earth can be "deserted," an arid steppe, or a ravaged, dismembered ter-
                          1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 341

ritory; yet it is never solitary, it is always filled by a nomadic population
that divides or regroups, contests or laments, attacks or suffers. This time,
the hero is a hero of the people, and not of the earth; her is related to the One-
 Crowd, not the One-All. It certainly cannot be said that there is more or less
nationalism on one side or the other because nationalism is everywhere in
the figures of romanticism, sometimes as the driving force, sometimes as a
black hole (fascism used Verdi much less than nazism did Wagner). The
problem is a truly musical one, technically musical, and all the more politi-
cal for that. The romantic hero, the voice of the romantic hero, acts as a
subject, a subjectified individual with "feelings"; but this subjective vocal
element is reflected in an orchestral and instrumental whole that on the
contrary mobilizes nonsubjective "affects" and that reaches its height in
romanticism. It should not be thought that the vocal element and the
orchestral-instrumental whole are only in an extrinsic relation to one
another: the orchestration imposes a given role on the voice, and the voice
envelops a given mode of orchestration. Orchestration-instrumentation
brings sound forces together or separates them, gathers or disperses them;
but it changes, and the role of the voice changes too, depending on whether
the forces are of the Earth or of the People, of the One-All or the One-
Crowd. In the first case, it is a question of effecting grouping of powers, and
these are what constitute affects; in the second case, it is group
individuations that constitute affect and are the object of orchestration.
Groupings of power are fully diversified, but they are like the relations
proper to the Universal; we must use another word, the Dividual, to desig-
nate the type of musical relations and the intra- or intergroup passages
occurring in group individuation. The sentimental or subjective element
of the voice has a different role and even a different position depending on
whether it internally confronts nonsubjectified groupings of power or
nonsubjectified group individuation, the relations of the universal or the
relations of the "dividual." Debussy formulated the problem of the One-
Crowd well when he reproached Wagner for not knowing how to "do" a
crowd or a people: a crowd must be fully individuated, but by group
individuations that are not reducible to the individuality of the subjects
that compose the crowd.48 The people must be individualized, not accord-
ing to the persons within it, but according to the affects it experiences,
simultaneously or successively. The concepts of the One-Crowd and the
Dividual are botched if the people is reduced to a juxtaposition, or if it is
reduced to a power of the universal. In short, there are two very different
conceptions of orchestration, depending on whether one is seeking to
sonorize the forces of the Earth or the forces of the People. The simplest
example of this difference is doubtless Wagner-Verdi, in that Verdi puts
increasing emphasis on the relations between the voice and instrumenta-
                         342 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

tion and orchestration. Even today, Stockhausen and Berio outline a new
version of this difference, even though they are grappling with a musical
problem different from that of romanticism (in Berio there is a search for a
multiple cry, a cry of the population, in the dividual of the One-Crowd, and
not for a cry of the Earth in the universal of the One-All). The idea of an
Opera of the world, or cosmic music, changes drastically depending on
which pole of orchestration is in play.49 To avoid an oversimplified opposi-
tion between Wagner and Verdi, we would have to show how Berlioz had a
genius for passing from one pole to the other in his orchestration, or even
hesitating between them: a sonorous Nature or People. And how music like
Mussorgsky's was able to do a crowd (despite what Debussy says). And how
music like Bartok's was able to use popular, or population, airs to do popu-
lations, themselves sonorous, instrumental, and orchestral, which impose
a Dividual scale, a prodigious new chromaticism.50 And then there are all
the non-Wagnerian paths . . .
   If there is a modern age, it is, of course, the age of the cosmic. Paul Klee
declared himself anti-Faustian. "As for animals and all the other creatures,
I do not like them with a terrestrial cordiality; earthly things interest me
less than cosmic things." The assemblage no longer confronts the forces of
chaos, it no longer uses the forces of the earth or the people to deepen itself
but instead opens onto the forces of the Cosmos. All this seems extremely
general, and somewhat Hegelian, testifying to an absolute Spirit. Yet it is,
should be, a question of technique, exclusively a question of technique.
The essential relation is no longer matters-forms (or substances-attri-
butes); neither is it the continuous development of form and the continu-
ous variation of matter. It is now a direct relation material-forces. A
material is a molecularized matter, which must accordingly "harness"
forces; these forces are necessarily forces of the Cosmos. There is no longer
a matter that finds its corresponding principle of intelligibility in form. It is
now a question of elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces of
a different order: the visual material must capture nonvisible forces. Ren-
der visible, Klee said; not render or reproduce the visible. From this per-
spective, philosophy follows the same movement as the other activities;
whereas romantic philosophy still appealed to a formal synthetic identity
ensuring a continuous intelligibility of matter (a priori synthesis), modern
philosophy tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture
forces that are not thinkable in themselves. This is Cosmos philosophy,
after the manner of Nietzsche. The molecular material has even become so
deterritorialized that we can no longer even speak of matters of expression,
as we did in romantic territoriality. Matters of expression are superseded by
a material of capture. The forces to be captured are no longer those of the
earth, which still constitute a great expressive Form, but the forces of an
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 343

immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos. The painter Millet used to
say that what counts in painting is not, for example, what a peasant is carry-
ing, whether it is a sacred object or a sack of potatoes, but its exact weight.
This is the postromantic turning point: the essential thing is no longer
forms and matters, or themes, but forces, densities, intensities. The earth
itself swings over, tending to take on the value of pure material for a force of
gravitation or weight. Perhaps it is not until Cezanne that rocks begin to
exist uniquely through the forces of folding they harness, landscapes
through thermal and magnetic forces, and apples through forces of germi-
nation: nonvisual forces that nevertheless have been rendered visible.
When forces become necessarily cosmic, material becomes necessarily
molecular, with enormous force operating in an infinitesimal space. The
problem is no longer that of the beginning, any more than it is that of a
foundation-ground. It is now a problem of consistency or consolidation:
how to consolidate the material, make it consistent, so that it can harness
unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous forces. Debussy ... Music molecu-
larizes sound matter and in so doing becomes capable of harnessing
nonsonorous forces such as Duration and Intensity.51 Render Duration
sonorous. Let us recall Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return as a little ditty,
a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cos-
mos. We thus leave behind the assemblages to enter the age of the Machine,
the immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of forces to be
harnessed. Varese's procedure, at the dawn of this age, is exemplary: a
musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for repro-
ducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter,
and harnesses a cosmic energy.52 If this machine must have an assemblage,
it is the synthesizer. By assembling modules, source elements, and ele-
ments for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers), by
arranging microintervals, the synthesizer makes audible the sound process
itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other
elements beyond sound matter.53 It unites disparate elements in the mate-
rial, and transposes the parameters from one formula to another. The syn-
thesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground
in a priori synthetic judgment: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cos-
mic, material and force, not form and matter, Grundand territory. Philoso-
phy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer
functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the
Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).
   This synthesis of disparate elements is not without ambiguity. It has the
same ambiguity, perhaps, as the modern valorization of children's draw-
ings, texts by the mad, and concerts of noise. Sometimes one overdoes it,
puts too much in, works with a jumble of lines and sounds; then instead of
                         344 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

 producing a cosmic machine capable of "rendering sonorous," one lapses
back to a machine of reproduction that ends up reproducing nothing but a
 scribble effacing all lines, a scramble effacing all sounds. The claim is that
 one is opening music to all events, all irruptions, but one ends up reproduc-
 ing a scrambling that prevents any event from happening. All one has left is
 a resonance chamber well on the way to forming a black hole. A material
 that is too rich remains too "territorialized": on noise sources, on the
 nature of the objects . . . (this even applies to Cage's prepared piano). One
 makes an aggregate fuzzy, instead of defining the fuzzy aggregate by the
 operations of consistency or consolidation pertaining to it. For this is the
 essential thing: a fuzzy aggregate, a synthesis of disparate elements, is
 defined only by a degree of consistency that makes it possible to distinguish
 the disparate elements constituting that aggregate (discernibility).54 The
 material must be sufficiently deterritorialized to be molecularized and
 open onto something cosmic, instead of lapsing into a statistical heap. This
 condition is met only if there is a certain simplicity in the nonuniform
 material: a maximum of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate ele-
 ments and the parameters. The sobriety of the assemblages is what makes
 for the richness of the Machine's effects. People often have too much of a
 tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise. If this is done, one
fuzzifles instead of making the fuzzy aggregate consist, or harnessing cos-
 mic forces in the deterritorialized material. That is why it infuriated Paul
 Klee when people would talk about the "childishness" of his drawings (and
 Varese when they would talk about sound effects, etc.). According to Klee,
 what is needed in order to "render visible" or harness the Cosmos is a pure
 and simple line accompanied by the idea of an object, and nothing more: if
 you multiply the lines and take the whole object, you get nothing but a
 scramble, and visual sound effects.55 According to Varese, in order for the
 projection to yield a highly complex form, in other words, a cosmic distri-
 bution, what is necessary is a simple figure in motion and a plane that is
 itself mobile; otherwise, you get sound effects. Sobriety, sobriety: that is the
 common prerequisite for the deterritorialization of matters, the molecu-
 larization of material, and the cosmicization offerees. Maybe a child can
 do that. But the sobriety involved is the sobriety of a becoming-child that is
 not necessarily the becoming o/the child, quite the contrary; the becoming-
 mad involved is not necessarily the becoming o/the madman, quite the
 contrary. It is clear that what is necessary to make sound travel, and to
 travel around sound, is very pure and simple sound, an emission or wave
 without harmonics (La Monte Young has been successful at this). The
 more rarefied the atmosphere, the more disparate the elements you will
 find. Your synthesis of disparate elements will be all the stronger if you pro-
 ceed with a sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture, or extraction that
                          1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 345

works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, crea-
tively limited, selected. For there is no imagination outside of technique.
The modern figure is not the child or the lunatic, still less the artist, but the
cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb—it's very simple really, it's
been proven, it's been done. To be an artisan and no longer an artist, cre-
ator, or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the milieus and
the earth behind. The invocation to the Cosmos does not at all operate as a
metaphor; on the contrary, the operation is an effective one, from the
moment the artist connects a material with forces of consistency or
consolidation.
   Material thus has three principal characteristics: it is a molecularized
matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined by the
operations of consistency applied to it. Finally, it is clear that the relation to
the earth and the people has changed, and is no longer of the romantic type.
The earth is now at its most deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy,
but one galaxy among others. The people is now at its most molecularized:
a molecular population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interac-
tion. The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of
the earth and those of the people. The combat, if combat there is, has
moved. The established powers have occupied the earth, they have built
people's organizations. The mass media, the great people's organizations
of the party or union type, are machines for reproduction, fuzzification
machines that effectively scramble all the terrestrial forces of the people.
The established powers have placed us in the situation of a combat at once
atomic and cosmic, galactic. Many artists became aware of this situation
long ago, even before it had been installed (Nietzsche, for example). They
became aware of it because the same vector was traversing their own
domain: a molecularization, an atomization of the material, coupled with
a cosmicization of the forces taken up by that material. The question then
became whether molecular or atomic "populations" of all natures (mass
media, monitoring procedures, computers, space weapons) would con-
tinue to bombard the existing people in order to train it or control it or
annihilate it—or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip
into the first and give rise to a people yet to come. As Virilio says in his very
rigorous analysis of the depopulation of the people and the deterrito-
rialization of the earth, the question has become: "To dwell as a poet or as
an assassin?"56 The assassin is one who bombards the existing people with
molecular populations that are forever closing all of the assemblages, hurl-
ing them into an ever wider and deeper black hole. The poet, on the other
hand, is one who lets loose molecular populations in hopes that this will
sow the seeds of, or even engender, the people to come, that these popula-
tions will pass into a people to come, open a cosmos. Once again, we must
                         346 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

not make it seem as though the poet gorged on metaphors: it may be that the
sound molecules of pop music are at this very moment implanting here and
there a people of a new type, singularly indifferent to the orders of the
radio, to computer safeguards, to the threat of the atomic bomb. In this
respect, the relation of artists to the people has changed significantly: the
artist has ceased to be the One-Alone withdrawn into him- or herself, but
has also ceased to address the people, to invoke the people as a constituted
force. Never has the artist been more in need of a people, while stating most
firmly that the people is lacking—the people is what is most lacking. We
are not referring to popular or populist artists. Mallarme said that the Book
needed a people. Kafka said that literature is the affair of the people. Klee
said that the people is essential yet lacking. Thus the problem of the artist is
that the modern depopulation of the people results in an open earth, and by
means of art, or by means to which art contributes. Instead of being bom-
barded from all sides in a limiting cosmos, the people and the earth must be
like the vectors of a cosmos that carries them off; then the cosmos itself will
be art. From depopulation, make a cosmic people; from deterritorializa-
tion, a cosmic earth—that is the wish of the artisan-artist, here, there,
locally. Our governments deal with the molecular and the cosmic, and our
arts make them their affair also, with the same stakes, the people and the
earth, and with unfortunately incomparable, but nevertheless competi-
tive, means. Is it not of the nature of creations to operate in silence, locally,
to seek consolidation everywhere, to go from the molecular to an uncertain
cosmos, whereas the processes of destruction and conservation work in
bulk, take center stage, occupy the entire cosmos in order to enslave the
molecular and to stick it in a conservatory or a bomb?
   These three "ages," the classical, romantic, and modern (for lack of a
better term), should not be interpreted as an evolution, or as structures sep-
arated by signifying breaks. They are assemblages enveloping different
Machines, or different relations to the Machine. In a sense, everything we
attribute to an age was already present in the preceding age. Forces, for
example: it has always been a question offerees, designated either as forces
of chaos or forces of the earth. Similarly, for all of time painting has had the
project of rendering visible, instead of reproducing the visible, and music
of rendering sonorous, instead of reproducing the sonorous. Fuzzy aggre-
gates have been constituting themselves and inventing their processes of
consolidation all along. A freeing of the molecular was already found in
classical matters of content, operating by destratification, and in romantic
matters of expression, operating by decoding. The most we can say is that
when forces appear as forces of the earth or of chaos, they are not grasped
directly as forces but as reflected in relations between matter and form.
Thus it is more a question of thresholds of perception, or thresholds of
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 347

discernibility belonging to given assemblages. It is only after matter has
been sufficiently deterritorialized that it itself emerges as molecular and
brings forth pure forces attributable only to the Cosmos. It had been pres-
ent "for all of time," but under different perceptual conditions. New condi-
tions were necessary for what was buried or covered, inferred or con-
cluded, presently to rise to the surface. What was composed in an
assemblage, what was still only composed, becomes a component of a new
assemblage. In this sense, all history is really the history of perception, and
what we make history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject mat-
ter of a story. Becoming is like the machine: present in a different way in
every assemblage, passing from one to the other, opening one onto the
other, outside any fixed order or determined sequence.
   We are now ready to return to the refrain. We can propose a new classifi-
cation system: milieu refrains, with at least two parts, one of which answers
the other (the piano and the violin); natal refrains, refrains of the territory,
where the part is related to the whole, to an immense refrain of the earth,
according to relations that are themselves variable and mark in each
instance the disjunction between the earth and the territory (the lullaby,
the drinking song, hunting song, work song, military song, etc.); folk and
popular refrains, themselves tied to an immense song of the people,
according to variable relations of crowd individuations that simultane-
ously bring into play affects and nations (the Polish, Auvergnat, German,
Magyar, or Romanian, but also the Pathetic, Panicked, Vengeful, etc.);
molecularized refrains (the sea and the wind) tied to cosmic forces, the
Cosmos refrain. For the Cosmos itself is a refrain, and the ear also (every-
thing that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain). But precisely
why is the refrain eminently sonorous? Why this privileging of the ear,
when even animals and birds present us with so many visual, chromatic,
postural, and gestural refrains? Does the painter have fewer refrains than
the musician? Are there fewer refrains in Cezanne or Klee than in Mozart,
Schumann, or Debussy? Taking Proust's examples: Does Vermeer's little
yellow span of wall, or a painter's flowers, Elstir's roses, constitute less of a
refrain than Vinteuil's little phrase? There is surely no question here of
declaring a given art supreme on the basis of a formal hierarchy of absolute
criteria. Our problem is more modest: comparing the powers or coeffi-
cients of deterritorialization of sonorous and visual components. It seems
that when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more and more refined; it
becomes specialized and autonomous. Color clings more, not necessarily
to the object, but to territoriality. When it deterritorializes, it tends to
dissolve, to let itself be steered by other components. This is evident in
phenomena of synesthesia, which are not reducible to a simple color-sound
correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and induce colors that are
                         348 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

superposed upon the colors we see, lending them a properly sonorous
rhythm and movement.57 Sound owes this power not to signifying or
"communicational" values (which on the contrary presuppose that pow-
er), nor to physical properties (which would privilege light over sound),
but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound
and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not
happen without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us,
transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a
black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die. Since its
force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive
of reterritorializations, the most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy
and hypnosis. Colors do not move a people. Flags can do nothing without
trumpets. Lasers are modulated on sound. The refrain is sonorous par
excellence, but it can as easily develop its force into a sickly sweet ditty as
into the purest motif, or Vinteuil's little phrase. And sometimes the two
combine: Beethoven used as a "signature tune." The potential fascism of
music. Overall, we may say that music is plugged into a machinic phylum
infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line of selective pressure.
That is why the musician has a different relation to the people, machines,
and the established powers than does the painter. In particular, the estab-
lished powers feel a keen need to control the distribution of black holes and
lines of deterritorialization in this phylum of sounds, in order to ward off
or appropriate the effects of musical machinism. Painters, at least as com-
monly portrayed, may be much more open socially, much more political,
and less controlled from without and within. That is because each time
they paint, they must create or recreate a phylum, and they must do so on
the basis of bodies of light and color they themselves produce, whereas
musicians have at their disposal a kind of germinal continuity, even if it is
latent or indirect, on the basis of which they produce sound bodies. Two
different movements of creation: one goes from soma to germen, and the
other from germen to soma. The painter's refrain is like the flipside of the
musician's, a negative of music.
    So just what is a refrain? Glass harmonica: the refrain is a prism, a crys-
tal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light,
extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or
transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to
increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds
it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of
so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. The
refrain is therefore of the crystal or protein type. The seed, or internal
structure, then has two essential aspects: augmentations and diminutions,
additions and withdrawals, amplifications and eliminations by unequal
                         1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 349

values, but also the presence of a retrograde motion running in both direc-
tions, as "in the side windows of a moving streetcar." The strange ret-
rograde motion of Joke. It is of the nature of the refrain to become
concentrated by elimination in a very short moment, as though moving
from the extremes to a center, or, on the contrary, to develop by additions,
moving from a center to the extremes, and also to travel these routes in
both directions.58 The refrain fabricates time (du temps). The refrain is the
"implied tense" (temps) discussed by the linguist Gustave Guillaume. The
ambiguity of the refrain is more evident now: for if the retrograde motion
merely forms a closed circle, if the augmentations and diminutions are reg-
ular, proceeding, for example, by doubled or halved values, then this false
spatiotemporal rigor leaves the exterior aggregate all the fuzzier; that
aggregate now has only descriptive, indicative, or associative relations
with the seed. It is "a worksite of inauthentic elements for the formation of
impure crystals," rather than a pure crystal that harnesses cosmic forces.
The refrain remains a formula evoking a character or landscape, instead of
itself constituting a rhythmic character or melodic landscape. The refrain
has two poles. These poles hinge not only on an intrinsic quality but also on
a state of force on the part of the listener; thus the little phrase from
Vinteuil's sonata is associated with Swann's love, the character of Odette,
and the landscape of the Bois de Boulogne for a long time, until it turns
back on itself, opens onto itself, revealing until then unheard-of potentiali-
ties, entering into other connections, setting love adrift in the direction of
other assemblages. Here, Time is not an a priori form; rather, the refrain is
the a priori form of time, which in each case fabricates different times
[temps: also, "meters," "tempos"—Trans.].
   It is odd how music does not eliminate the bad or mediocre refrain, or
the bad usage of the refrain, but on the contrary carries it along, or uses it as
a springboard. "Ah, vous dirai-je maman" ("Ah, mamma, now you shall
know"), "Elle avait une jambe de bois" ("She had a wooden leg"), "Frere
Jacques." Childhood or bird refrain, folk song, drinking song, Viennese
waltz, cow bells: music uses anything and sweeps everything away. Not that
a folk song, bird song, or children's song is reducible to the kind of closed
and associative formula we just mentioned. Instead, what needs to be
shown is that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or
assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it,
producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic
refrain of a sound machine. Gisele Brelet, discussing Bartok, gives a good
formulation of the problem of the two types: beginning from popular and
territorial melodies that are autonomous, self-sufficient, and closed in
upon themselves, how can one construct a new chromaticism that places
them in communication, thereby creating "themes'" bringing about a devel-
                         350 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

opment of Form, or rather a becoming of Forces? The problem is a general
one because in many directions refrains will be planted by a new seed that
brings back modes, makes those modes communicate, undoes tempera-
ment, melds major and minor, and cuts the tonal system loose, slipping
through its net instead of breaking with it.59 We may say long live Chabrier,
as opposed to Schoenberg, just as Nietzsche said long live Bizet, and for the
same reasons, with the same technical and musical intent. We go from
modality to an untempered, widened chromaticism. We do not need to
suppress tonality, we need to turn it loose. We go from assembled refrains
(territorial, popular, romantic, etc.) to the great cosmic machined refrain.
But the labor of creation is already under way in the first type; it is there in
its entirety. Deformations destined to harness a great force are already
present in the small-form refrain or rondo. Childhood scenes, children's
games: the starting point is a childlike refrain, but the child has wings
already, he becomes celestial. The becoming-child of the musician is cou-
pled with a becoming-aerial of the child, in a nondecomposable block. The
memory of an angel, or rather the becoming of a cosmos. Crystal: the
becoming-bird of Mozart is inseparable from a becoming-initiate of the
bird, and forms a block with it.60 It is the extremely profound labor dedi-
cated to the first type of refrain that creates the second type, or the little
phrase of the Cosmos. In a concerto, Schumann requires all the assem-
blages of the orchestra to make the cello wander the way a light fades into
the distance or is extinguished. In Schumann, a whole learned labor, at
once rythmic, harmonic, and melodic, has this sober and simple result:
deterritorialize the refrain.^ Produce a deterritorialized refrain as the final
end of music, release it in the Cosmos—that is more important than build-
ing a new system. Opening the assemblage onto a cosmic force. In the pas-
sage from one to the other, from the assemblage of sounds to the Machine
that renders it sonorous, from the becoming-child of the musician to the
becoming-cosmic of the child, many dangers crop up: black holes, closures,
paralysis of the finger and auditory hallucinations, Schumann's madness,
cosmic force gone bad, a note that pursues you, a sound that transfixes you.
Yet one was already present in the other; the cosmic force was already pres-
ent in the material, the great refrain in the little refrains, the great maneu-
ver in the little maneuver. Except we can never be sure we will be strong
enough, for we have no system, only lines and movements. Schumann.
    12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology-
             The War Machine




  Nomad Chariot, Entirely of Wood, Altai, Fifth to Fourth Centuries B.C.


   AXIOM I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.
   PROPOSITION I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic,
     drama, and games.
Georges Dumezil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology,
has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the
magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman,
Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the
binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposi-
tion term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the
quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the "bond" and the
"pact," etc.1 But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in
alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted
in themselves a sovereign unity. "At once antithetical and complementary,
necessary to one another and consequently without hostility, lacking a
                                         351
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mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically calls
forth a homologous specification on another. The two together exhaust the
field of the function." They are the principal elements of a State apparatus
that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a
milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State appara-
tus into a stratum.
    It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. Either
the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war—
either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and
no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, "seizes" and
"binds," preventing all combat—or, the State acquires an army, but in a
way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of
a military function.2 As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreduc-
ible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law:
it comes from elsewhere. Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna
no less than to Mitral He can no more be reduced to one or the other than
he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a pure and immeas-
urable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power
of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings
& fur or to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against
the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the
apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incompre-
hensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he
unties bonds.. .).4 He bears witness, above all, to other relations with
women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming,
rather than implementing binary distributions between "states": a verita-
ble becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies out-
side dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In
every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature,
another origin than the State apparatus.
    Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the
State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and
Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the
pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the
emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal
nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations,
and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight,
a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement
endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a sub-
ject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game's form of
interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic
units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function:
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 353

"It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go
pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no
intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very dif-
ferent in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces
entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary's
pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has
only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constella-
tions, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such
as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an
entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so
diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regu-
lated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war
without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles
even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at
all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself,
thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum num-
ber of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question
of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the
possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one
point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, with-
out departure or arrival. The "smooth" space of Go, as against the "stri-
ated" space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos
against polls. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas
Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it
(make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the con-
struction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by
shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing,
by going elsewhere . ..). Another justice, another movement, another
space-time.
    "They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext. . ." "In
some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital.
At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of
them."5 Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same
schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator of public
works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to
the hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves. Mbidi's son, a man of
secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with that
inconceivable thing, an army. He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to build a
new State.6 "Between" the magical-despotic State and the juridical State
containing a military institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriv-
ing from without.
    From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his
       354 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity,
madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumezil analyzes the three "sins"
of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the
priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual trans-
gression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a
betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State).7 The warrior is in the
position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, or
of understanding nothing. It happens that historians, both bourgeois and
Soviet, will follow this negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan
understood nothing: he "didn't understand" the phenomenon of the city.
An easy thing to say. The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine
in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains diffi-
cult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is
external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving
the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State appa-
ratus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or
according to which we are in the habit of thinking. What complicates
everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under cer-
tain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the
State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the
State, at other times with the State's military institution. For instance, the
war machine invents speed and secrecy; but there is all the same a certain
speed and a certain secrecy that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily.
So there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the
two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these
two poles, with the power of war. Dumezil cites the lineage of the Roman
kings: there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series,
with variants and an alternation between these two types of equally legiti-
mate rulers; but there is also a relation with an "evil king," Tullus Hostilius,
Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a disquieting and illegit-
imate character.8 Shakespeare's kings could also be invoked: even violence,
murders, and perversion do not prevent the State lineage from producing
"good" kings; but a disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announc-
ing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its
line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, he claims a "secret close
intent"9 totally different from the conquest of State power, and another
—an other—relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war
power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets mud-
dled; the war machine can then be understood only through the categories
of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State. But,
returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of
another species, of another nature, of another origin. One would have to
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 355

say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two
articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other.
But "between" the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it
proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war machine of its own; it
can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will
continually cause it problems. This explains the mistrust States have
toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits
an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has a general sense of this
situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States par-
tially appropriate according to their political needs, and in relation to
which they are more or less good "conductors."
    Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war
seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury,
which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles,
then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from
Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes
to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the modern
State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles' arms, only to convert them to
other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State—not Ajax, who is con-
demned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned.10 No one
has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric and con-
demned, better than Kleist. In Penthesilea, Achilles is already separated
from his power: the war machine has passed over to the Amazons, a State-
less woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized
uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the Scythians, the Amazons spring
forth like lightning, "between" the two States, the Greek and the Trojan.
They sweep away everything in their path. Achilles is brought before his
double, Penthesilea. And in his ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to
prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or from loving Penthe-
silea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time.
Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek State that Pen-
thesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional relation of war with
him without herself betraying the collective law of her people, the law of the
pack that prohibits "choosing" the enemy and entering into one-to-one
relationships or binary distinctions.
   Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it
against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start. Doubt-
less Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the imper-
ial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman
State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and stands con-
demned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law of the State.
As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything more than
        356 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

banditry. Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to
be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disci-
plined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself, to
become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman?
Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a monster, and Kleist
has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that the most uncanny modernity
lies with him? It is because the elements of his work are secrecy, speed, and
affect.'' And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of
interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of
exteriority that is always external to itself. Similarly, feelings become
uprooted from the interiority of a "subject," to be projected violently out-
ward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible veloc-
ity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects.
And these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the
becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects transpierce
the body like arrows, they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization
velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg's, Pentheselea's) are externa-
lized, by a system of relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the
war machine. Broken rings. This element of exteriority—which dominates
everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to
invent—will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic
episodes or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catalonia is: "This affect
is too strong for me," and a flash is: "The power of this affect sweeps me
away," so that the Self (Moi) is now nothing more than a character whose
actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of
death. Such is Kleist's personal formula: a succession of flights of madness
and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains. There is
much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese fighter, interminably still, who
then makes a move too quick to see. The Go player. Many things in modern
art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist. Could it
be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by
the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into
thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal
vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State?
Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of
the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorpho-
sis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of
pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental
thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?
   PROBLEM I. Is there a way of warding off the formation of a State appara-
     tus (or its equivalents in a group)?
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 357

   PROPOSITION II. The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by
     ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).
   Primitive, segmentary societies have often been defined as societies
without a State, in other words, societies in which distinct organs of power
do not appear. But the conclusion has been that these societies did not
reach the degree of economic development, or the level of political differ-
entiation, that would make the formation of the State apparatus both
possible and inevitable: the implication is that primitive people "don't
understand" so complex an apparatus. The prime interest in Pierre
Clastres's theories is that they break with this evolutionist postulate. Not
only does he doubt that the State is the product of an ascribable economic
development, but he asks if it is not a potential concern of primitive socie-
ties to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand.
Warding off the formation of a State apparatus, making such a formation
impossible, would be the objective of a certain number of primitive social
mechanisms, even if they are not consciously understood as such. To be
sure, primitive societies have chiefs. But the State is not defined by the exis-
tence of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs
of power. The concern of the State is to conserve. Special institutions are
thus necessary to enable a chief to become a man of State, but diffuse, col-
lective mechanisms are just as necessary to prevent a chief from becoming
one. Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms, are a part of
chieftainship and keep an apparatus distinct from the social body from
crystallizing. Clastres describes the situation of the chief, who has no insti-
tuted weapon other than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, no
other rule than his sense of the group's desires. The chief is more like a
leader or a star than a man of power and is always in danger of being disa-
vowed, abandoned by his people. But Clastres goes further, identifying war
in primitive societies as the surest mechanism directed against the forma-
tion of the State: war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups,
and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits
leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death.12 Clastres
can thus invoke natural Law while reversing its principal proposition: just
as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the
State, and makes it impossible. It should not be concluded that war is a
state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state that wards off
and prevents the State. Primitive war does not produce the State any more
than it derives from it. And it is no better explained by exchange than by
the State: far from deriving from exchange, even as a sanction for its fail-
ure, war is what limits exchanges, maintains them in the framework of
       358 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

"alliances"; it is what prevents them from becoming a State factor, from
fusing groups.
   The importance of this thesis is first of all to draw attention to collective
mechanisms of inhibition. These mechanisms may be subtle, and function
as micromechanisms. This is easily seen in certain band or pack phenom-
ena. For example, in the case of gangs of street children in Bogota, Jacques
Meunier cites three ways in which the leader is prevented from acquiring
stable power: the members of the band meet and undertake their theft
activity in common, with collective sharing of the loot, but they disperse to
eat or sleep separately; also, and especially, each member of the band is
paired off with one, two, or three other members, so if he has a disagree-
ment with the leader, he will not leave alone but will take along his allies,
whose combined departure will threaten to break up the entire gang;
finally, there is a diffuse age limit, and at about age fifteen a member is
inevitably induced to quit the gang.13 These mechanisms cannot be under-
stood without renouncing the evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs
as a rudimentary, less organized, social form. Even in bands of animals,
leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the
strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a
fabric of immanent relations.14 One could just as easily compare the form
"high-society life" to the form "sociability" among the most highly evolved
men and women: high-society groups are similar to gangs and operate by
the diffusion of prestige rather than by reference to centers of power, as in
social groupings (Proust clearly showed this noncorrespondence of high-
society values and social values). Eugene Sue, a man of high society and a
dandy, whom legitimists reproached for frequenting the Orleans family,
used to say: "I'm not on the side of the family, I side with the pack." Packs,
bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type
that centers around organs of power. That is why bands in general, even
those engaged in banditry or high-society life, are metamorphoses of a war
machine formally distinct from all State apparatuses or their equivalents,
which are instead what structure centralized societies. We certainly would
not say that discipline is what defines a war machine: discipline is the char-
acteristic required of armies after the State has appropriated them. The
war machine answers to other rules. We are not saying that they are better,
of course, only that they animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior,
a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or
betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again,
impedes the formation of the State.
   But why does this argument fail to convince us entirely? We follow
Clastres when he demonstrates that the State is explained neither by a
development of productive forces nor by a differentiation of political
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 359

forces. It is the State, on the contrary, that makes possible the undertaking
of large-scale projects, the constitution of surpluses, and the organization
of the corresponding public functions. The State is what makes the distinc-
tion between governors and governed possible. We do not see how the State
can be explained by what it presupposes, even with recourse to dialectics.
The State seems to rise up in a single stroke, in an imperial form, and does
not depend on progressive factors. Its on-the-spot emergence is like a
stroke of genius, the birth of Athena. We also follow Clastres when he shows
that the war machine is directed against the State, either against potential
States whose formation it wards off in advance, or against actual States
whose destruction it purposes. No doubt the war machine is realized more
completely in the "barbaric" assemblages of nomadic warriors than in the
"savage" assemblages of primitive societies. In any case, it is out of the
question that the State could be the result of a war in which the conquerors
imposed, by the very fact of their victory, a new law on the vanquished,
because the organization of the war machine is directed against the State-
form, actual or virtual. The State is no better accounted for as a result of
war than by a progression of economic or political forces. This is where
Clastres locates the break: between "primitive" counter-State societies and
"monstrous" State societies whose formation it is no longer possible to
explain. Clastres is fascinated by the problem of "voluntary servitude," in
the manner of La Boetie: In what way did people want or desire servitude,
which most certainly did not come to them as the outcome of an involun-
tary and unfortunate war? They did, after all, have counter-State mecha-
nisms at their disposal: So how and why the State? Why did the State
triumph? The more deeply Clastres delved into the problem, the more he
seemed to deprive himself of the means of resolving it.'5 He tended to make
primitive societies hypostases, self-sufficient entities (he insisted heavily
on this point). He made their formal exteriority into a real independence.
Thus he remained an evolutionist, and posited a state of nature. Only this
state of nature was, according to him, a fully social reality instead of a pure
concept, and the evolution was a sudden mutation instead of a develop-
ment. For on the one hand, the State rises up in a single stroke, fully
formed; on the other, the counter-State societies use very specific mecha-
nisms to ward it off, to prevent it from arising. We believe that these two
propositions are valid but that their interlinkage is flawed. There is an old
scenario: "from clans to empires," or "from bands to kingdoms." But noth-
ing says that this constitutes an evolution, since bands and clans are no less
organized than empire-kingdoms. We will never leave the evolution
hypothesis behind by creating a break between the two terms, that is, by
endowing bands with self-sufficiency and the State with an emergence all
the more miraculous and monstrous.
       360 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

   We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite perfect,
quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more
empires they uncover. The hypothesis of the Urstaat seems to be verified:
"The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity." It is
hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact
with imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas. But of
greater importance is the inverse hypothesis: that the State itself has always
been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that
relationship. The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State
societies or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The
State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of
internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State,
but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is, to a
set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two
directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire
ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in
relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the "multi-
national" type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like
Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but
also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue
to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of
State power. The modern world can provide us today with particularly
well developed images of these two directions: worldwide ecumenical
machines, but also a neoprimitivism, a new tribal society as described by
Marshall McLuhan. These directions are equally present in all social
fields, in all periods. It even happens that they partially merge. For exam-
ple, a commercial organization is also a band of pillage, or piracy, for part
of its course and in many of its activities; or it is in bands that a religious
formation begins to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less than
worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that
this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and
polymorphous war machine. It is a nomos very different from the "law."
The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce itself,
remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable
within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition (there is no
masked State). But the war machine's form of exteriority is such that it
exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation
as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a
religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow
themselves to be appropriated by the State. It is in terms not of indepen-
dence, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interac-
tion, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 361

metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms,
megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in
States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against
States.
   PROPOSITION III. The exteriority of the war ma chine is also attested to by
     epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a
     "nomad"or "minor science."
   There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very dif-
ficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are
referring to are not "technologies" in the usual sense of the term. But nei-
ther are they "sciences" in the royal or legal sense established by history.
According to a recent book by Michel Serres, both the atomic physics of
Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked
by it.16 The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science would seem to
be the following:
    1. First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of
solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from
flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency.
   2. The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as
opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a "para-
dox" to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary charac-
teristic, a copy; in the Timaeus, Plato raises this possibility, but only in
order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal science. By con-
trast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity, and of passage or
becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the famed declination of
the atom. The clinamen, as the minimum angle, has meaning only between
a straight line and a curve, the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the
original curvature of the movement of the atom. The clinamen is the small-
est angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path.17 It is a passage to
the limit, an exhaustion, a paradoxical "exhaustive" model. The same
applies to Archimedean geometry, in which the straight line, defined as
"the shortest path between two points," is just a way of defining the length
of a curve in a predifferential calculus.
   3. One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar
or laminar flow,18 but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of
spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest
angle. From turba to turbo: in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to
the great vortical organizations.19 The model is a vortical one; it operates in
an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than
plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things. It is the difference
between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated
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(metric) space: in the first case "space is occupied without being counted,"
and in the second case "space is counted in order to be occupied."20
   4. Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures
are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them:
sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by specific
differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable
essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to
the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of
deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which
each figure designates an "event" much more than an essence; the square
no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature,
the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the
rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the meta-
morphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what
Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an "obstacle"; it is the surpass-
ing of the obstacle, a pro-jection, in other words, a war machine. All of this
movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as
much as possible the range of the "problem-element" and subordinates it
to the "theorem-element."21
   This Archimedean science, or this conception of science, is bound up in
an essential way with the war machine: \heproblemata are the war machine
itself and are inseparable from inclined planes, passages to the limit, vorti-
ces, and projections. It would seem that the war machine is projected into
an abstract knowledge formally different from the one that doubles the
State apparatus. It would seem that a whole nomad science develops
eccentrically, one that is very different from the royal or imperial sciences.
Furthermore, this nomad science is continually "barred," inhibited, or
banned by the demands and conditions of State science. Archimedes, van-
quished by the Roman State, becomes a symbol.22 The fact is that the two
kinds of science have different modes of formalization, and State science
continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad
science. State science retains of nomad science only what it can appropri-
ate; it turns the rest into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real
scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it. It is as if the "savants"
of nomad science were caught between a rock and a hard place, between the
war machine that nourishes and inspires them and the State that imposes
upon them an order of reasons. The figure of the engineer (in particular the
military engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of this situation.
Most significant are perhaps borderline phenomena in which nomad sci-
ence exerts pressure on State science, and, conversely, State science appro-
priates and transforms the elements of nomad science. This is true of the
art of encampments, "castrametation," which has always mobilized pro-
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 363

jections and inclined planes: the State does not appropriate this dimension
of the war machine without submitting it to civil and metric rules that
strictly limit, control, localize nomad science, and without keeping it from
having repercussions throughout the social field (in this respect, Vauban is
like a repeat of Archimedes, and suffers an analogous defeat). It is true of
descriptive and projective geometry, which royal science would like to turn
into a mere practical dependency of analytic, or so-called higher, geometry
(thus the ambiguous situation of Monge and Poncelet as "savants").23 It is
also true of differential calculus. For a long time, it had only parascientific
status and was labeled a "Gothic hypothesis"; royal science only accorded
it the value of a convenient convention or a well-founded fiction. The great
State mathematicians did their best to improve its status, but precisely on
the condition that all the dynamic, nomadic notions—such as becoming,
heterogeneity, infinitesimal, passage to the limit, continuous variation
—be eliminated and civil, static, and ordinal rules be imposed upon it
(Carnot's ambiguous position in this respect). Finally, it is true of the
hydraulic model, for it is certain that the State itself needs a hydraulic sci-
ence (there is no going back on Wittfogel's theses on the importance of
large-scale waterworks for an empire). But it needs it in a very different
form, because the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits,
pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain move-
ment to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and
measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed
by parallel, laminar layers. The hydraulic model of nomad science and the
war machine, on the other hand, consists in being distributed by turbu-
lence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space
and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in
a local movement from one specified point to another.24 Democritus,
Menaechmus, Archimedes, Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge,
Carnot, Poncelet, Perronet, etc.: in each case a monograph would be neces-
sary to take into account the special situation of these savants whom State
science used only after restraining or disciplining them, after repressing
their social or political conceptions.
    The sea as a smooth space is a specific problem of the war machine. As
Virilio shows, it is at sea that the problem of the fleet in being is posed, in
other words, the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement
that can rise up at any point. In this respect, the recent studies on rhythm,
on the origin of that notion, do not seem entirely convincing. For we are
told that rhythm has nothing to do with the movement of waves but rather
that it designates "form" in general, and more specifically the form of a
"measured, cadenced" movement.25 However, rhythm is never the same as
measure. And though the atomist Democritus is one of the authors who
       364 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

speak of rhythm in the sense of form, it should be borne in mind that he
does so under very precise conditions of fluctuation and that the forms
made by atoms are primarily large, nonmetric aggregates, smooth spaces
such as the air, the sea, or even the earth (magnae res). There is indeed such
a thing as measured, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river
between its banks or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a
rhythm without measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other
words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.
   This opposition, or rather this tension-limit between the two kinds of
science—nomad, war machine science and royal, State science—reap-
pears at different moments, on different levels. The work of Anne Querrien
enables us to identify two of these moments; one is the construction of
Gothic cathedrals in the twelfth century, the other the construction of
bridges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.26 Gothic architecture is
indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer and taller than the
Romanesque churches. Ever farther, ever higher . . . But this difference is
not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative change: the static relation,
form-matter, tends to fade into the background in favor of a dynamic rela-
tion, material-forces. It is the cutting of the stone that turns it into material
capable of holding and coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing
ever higher and longer vaults. The vault is no longer a form but the line of
continuous variation of the stones. It is as if Gothic conquered a smooth
space, while Romanesque remained partially within a striated space (in
which the vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars). But stone
cutting is inseparable from, on the one hand, a plane of projection at
ground level, which functions as a plane limit, and, on the other hand, a
series of successive approximations (squaring), or placings-in-variation of
voluminous stones. Of course, one appealed to the theorematic science of
Euclid in order to find a foundation for the enterprise: mathematical fig-
ures and equations were thought to be the intelligible form capable of orga-
nizing surfaces and volumes. But according to the legend, Bernard de
Clairvaux quickly abandoned the effort as too "difficult," appealing to the
specificity of an operative, Archimedean geometry, a projective and
descriptive geometry defined as a minor science, more a mathegraphy than
a matheology. His journeyman, the monk-mason Garin de Troyes, speaks
of an operative logic of movement enabling the "initiate" to draw, then hew
the volumes "in penetration in space," to make it so that "the cutting line
propels the equation" (le trait pousse le chiffre).21 One does not represent,
one engenders and traverses. This science is characterized less by the
absence of equations than by the very different role they play: instead of
being good forms absolutely that organize matter, they are "generated" as
"forces of thrust" (poussees) by the material, in a qualitative calculus of the
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 365

optimum. This whole current of Archimedean geometry was taken to its
highest expression, but was also brought to a temporary standstill, by the
remarkable seventeenth-century mathematician Desargues. Like most of
his kind, Desargues wrote little; he nevertheless exerted a great influence
through his actions and left outlines, rough drafts, and projects, all cen-
tered on problem-events: "Lamentations," "draft project for the cutting of
stones," "draft project for grappling with the events of the encounters of a
cone and a plane,. .. Desargues, however, was condemned by the
parlement of Paris, opposed by the king's secretary; his practices of per-
spective were banned.28 Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appro-
priates stone cutting by means of templates (the opposite of squaring),
under conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form,
mathematical figures, and measurement. Royal science only tolerates and
appropriates perspective if it is static, subjected to a central black hole
divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities. But the adventure,
or event, of Desargues is the same one that had already occurred among the
Gothic "journeymen" on a collective level. For not only did the Church, in
its imperial form, feel the need to strictly control the movement of this
nomad science (it entrusted the Templars with the responsibility of deter-
mining its locations and objects, governing the work sites, and regulating
construction), but the secular State, in its royal form, turned against the
Templars themselves, banning the guilds for a number of reasons, at least
one of which was the prohibition of this operative or minor geometry.
   Is Anne Querrien right to find yet another echo of the same story in the
case of bridges in the eighteenth century? Doubtless, the conditions were
very different, for the division of labor according to State norms was by
then an accomplished fact. But the fact remains that in the government
agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under a well-
centralized administration while bridges were still the object of active,
dynamic, and collective experimentation. Trudaine organized unusual,
open "general assemblies" in his home. Perronet took as his inspiration a
supple model originating in the Orient: The bridge should not choke or
obstruct the river. To the heaviness of the bridge, to the striated space of
thick and regular piles, he opposed a thinning and discontinuity of the
piles, surbase, and vault, a lightness and continuous variation of the whole.
But his attempt soon ran up against principled opposition; the State, in
naming Perronet director of the school, followed a frequently used proce-
dure that inhibited experimentation more than crowning its achieve-
ments. The whole history of the Ecole des Fonts et Chaussees (School of
Bridges and Roadways) illustrates how this old, plebeian "corps" was sub-
ordinated to the Ecole des Mines, the Ecole des Travaux Publics, and the
Ecole Polytechnique, at the same time as its activities were increasingly
        366 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

normalized.29 We thus come to the question, What is a collective body!
Undoubtedly, the great collective bodies of a State are differentiated and
hierarchical organisms that on the one hand enjoy a monopoly over a
power or function and on the other hand send out local representatives.
They have a special relation to families, because they link the family model
to the State model at both ends and regard themselves as "great families" of
functionaries, clerks, intendants, or farmers. Yet it seems that in many of
these collective bodies there is something else at work that does not fit into
this schema. It is not just their obstinate defense of their privileges. It is also
their aptitude—even caricatural or seriously deformed—to constitute
themselves as a war machine, following other models, another dynamism,
a nomadic ambition, over against the State. As an example, there is the
very old problem of the lobby, a group with fluid contours, whose position
is very ambiguous in relation to the State it wishes to "influence" and the
war machine it wishes to promote, to whatever ends.30
     A body (corps) is not reducible to an organism, any more than esprit de
corps is reducible to the soul of an organism. Spirit is not better, but it is
volatile, whereas the soul is weighted, a center of gravity. Must we invoke a
military origin of the collective body and esprit de corps? "Military" is not
the part that counts, but rather the distant nomadic origin. Ibn Khaldun
defines the nomad war machine by: families or lineages PLUS esprit de
corps. The war machine entertains a relation to families that is very differ-
ent from its relation to the State. In the war machine, the family is a band
vector instead of a fundamental cell; a genealogy is transferred from one
family to another according to the aptitude of a given family at a given time
to realize the maximum of "agnatic solidarity." Here, it is not the public
eminence of a family that determines its place in a State organism but the
reverse; it is the secret power (puissance), or strength of solidarity, and the
corresponding genealogical mobility that determine its eminence in a war
body.31 This has to do neither with the monopoly of an organic power
(pouvoir) nor with local representation, but is related to the potential (puis-
sance) of a vortical body in a nomad space. Of course, the great bodies of a
modern State can hardly be thought of as Arab tribes. What we wish to say,
rather, is that collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that recon-
stitute equivalents of the war machine—in sometimes quite unforeseen
forms—in specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals or
rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology
. . . A collective body of captains asserts its demands through the organiza-
tion of the officers and the organism of the superior officers. There are
always periods when the State as organism has problems with its own col-
lective bodies, when these bodies, claiming certain privileges, are forced in
spite of themselves to open onto something that exceeds them, a short revo-
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 367

lutionary instant, an experimental surge. A confused situation: each time it
occurs, it is necessary to analyze tendencies and poles, the nature of the
movements. All of a sudden, it is as if the collective body of the notary pub-
lics were advancing like Arabs or Indians, then regrouping and reorganiz-
ing: a comic opera where you never know what is going to happen next
(even the cry "The police are with us!" is sometimes heard).
   Husserl speaks of a protogeometry that addresses vague, in other words,
vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences. These essences are distinct
from sensible things, as well as from ideal, royal, or imperial essences.
Protogeometry, the science dealing with them, is itself vague, in the etymo-
logical sense of "vagabond": it is neither inexact like sensible things nor
exact like ideal essences, but anexactyet rigorous ("essentially and not acci-
dentally inexact"). The circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but round-
ness is a vague and fluent essence, distinct both from the circle and things
that are round (a vase, a wheel, the sun). A theorematic figure is a fixed
essence, but its transformations, distortions, ablations, and augmenta-
tions, all of its variations, form problematic figures that are vague yet rigor-
ous, "lens-shaped," "umbelliform," or "indented." It could be said that
vague essences extract from things a determination that is more than
thinghood (chos'eit'e), which is that of corporeality (corporeite), and which
perhaps even implies an esprit de corps.32 But why does Husserl see this as a
protogeometry, a kind of halfway point and not a pure science? Why does
he make pure essences dependent upon a passage to the limit, when any
passage to the limit belongs as such to the vague? What we have, rather, are
two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single
field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the
contents of vague or nomad science while nomad science continually cuts
the contents of royal science loose. At the limit, all that counts is the con-
stantly shifting borderline. In Husserl (and also in Kant, though in the
opposite direction: roundness as the "schema" of the circle), we find a very
accurate appreciation of the irreducibility of nomad science, but simulta-
neously the concern of a man of the State, or one who sides with the State,
to maintain a legislative and constituent primacy for royal science. When-
ever this primacy is taken for granted, nomad science is portrayed as a
prescientific or parascientific or subscientific agency. And most impor-
tant, it becomes impossible to understand the relations between science
and technology, science and practice, because nomad science is not a sim-
ple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the problem of
these relations is brought out and resolved in an entirely different way than
from the point of view of royal science. The State is perpetually producing
and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make
something round. Thus the specific characteristics of nomad science are
       368 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it
encounters and the interaction "containing" it.
   Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science.
Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough; it is
different. We know of the problems States have always had with journey-
men's associations, or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies
of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths, etc. Settling, seden-
tarizing labor power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, as-
signing it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of
organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the
spot (corvee) or among indigents (charity workshops)—this has always
been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer
both a band vagabondage and a body nomadism. Let us return to the exam-
ple of Gothic architecture for a reminder of how extensively the journey-
men traveled, building cathedrals near and far, scattering construction
sites across the land, drawing on an active and passive power (mobility and
the strike) that was far from convenient for the State. The State's response
was to take over management of the construction sites, merging all the divi-
sions of labor in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the
manual, the theoretical and the practical, modeled upon the difference
between "governors" and "governed." In the nomad sciences, as in the
royal sciences, we find the existence of a "plane," but not at all in the same
way. The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman is opposed to the
metric plane of the architect, which is on paper and off site. The plane of
consistency or composition is opposed to another plane, that of organiza-
tion or formation. Stone cutting by squaring is opposed to stone cutting
using templates, which implies the erection of a model for reproduction. It
can be said not only that there is no longer a need for skilled or qualified
labor, but also that there is a need for unskilled or unqualified labor, for a
dequalification of labor. The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the
intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a
strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is suf-
ficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or imple-
ment of all of their power (puissance). This does not shield the State from
more trouble, this time with the body of intellectuals it itself engendered,
but which asserts new nomadic and political claims. In any case, if the State
always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it
opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so
not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because
of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a division of
labor opposed to the norms of the State. The difference is not extrinsic: the
way in which a science, or a conception of science, participates in the
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 369

organization of the social field, and in particular induces a division of
labor, is part of that science itself. Royal science is inseparable from a
"hylomorphic" model implying both a form that organizes matter and a
matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema
derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into gover-
nors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. What
characterizes it is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form
passes into expression. It seems that nomad science is more immediately in
tune with the connection between content and expression in themselves,
each of these two terms encompassing both form and matter. Thus matter,
in nomad science, is never prepared and therefore homogenized matter,
but is essentially laden with singularities (which constitute a form of con-
tent). And neither is expression formal; it is inseparable from pertinent
traits (which constitute a matter of expression). This is an entirely different
schema, as we shall see. We can get a preliminary idea of this situation by
recalling the most general characteristic of nomad art, in which a dynamic
connection between support and ornament replaces the matter-form dia-
lectic. From the point of view of nomad science, which presents itself as an
art as much as a technique, the division of labor fully exists, but it does not
employ the form-matter duality (even in the case of biunivocal corre-
spondences). Rather, it follows the connections between singularities of
matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of these connec-
tions, whether they be natural or forced.33 This is another organization of
work and of the social field through work.
   It is instructive to contrast two models of science, after the manner of
Plato in the Timaeus.34 One could be called Compars and the other
Dispars. The compars is the legal or legalist model employed by royal sci-
ence. The search for laws consists in extracting constants, even if those con-
stants are only relations between variables (equations). An invariable form
for variables, a variable matter of the invariant: such is the foundation of
the hylomorphic schema. But for the dispars as an element of nomad sci-
ence the relevant distinction is material-forces rather than matter-form.
Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables but
of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation. If
there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential
equations irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible
intuition of variation. They seize or determine singularities in the matter,
instead of constituting a general form. They effect individuations through
events or haecceities, not through the "object" as a compound of matter
and form; vague essences are nothing other than haecceities. In all these
respects, there is an opposition between the logos and the nomos, the law
and the nomos, prompting the comment that the law still "savors of
        370 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

morality."35 This does not mean, however, that the legal model knows noth-
ing offerees, the play of forces. That it does is evident in the homogeneous
space corresponding to the compars. Homogeneous space is in no way a
smooth space; on the contrary, it is the form of striated space. The space of
pillars. It is striated by the fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity, the distri-
bution of matter into parallel layers, the lamellar and laminar movement
of flows. These parallel verticals have formed an independent dimension
capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other dimensions,
of striating all of space in all of its directions, so as to render it homoge-
neous. The vertical distance between two points provided the mode of
comparison for the horizontal distance between two other points. Univer-
sal attraction became the law of all laws, in that it set the rule for the
biunivocal correspondence between two bodies; and each time science dis-
covered a new field, it sought to formalize it in the same mode as the field of
gravity. Even chemistry became a royal science only by virtue of a whole
theoretical elaboration of the notion of weight. Euclidean space is founded
on the famous parallel postulate, but the parallels in question are in the
first place gravitational parallels, and correspond to the forces exerted by
gravity on all the elements of a body presumed to fill that space. It is the
point of application of the resultant of all of these parallel forces that
remains invariable when their common direction is changed or the body is
rotated (the center of gravity). In short, it seems that the force of gravity lies
at the basis of a laminar, striated, homogeneous, and centered space; it
forms the foundation for those multiplicities termed metric, or
arborescent, whose dimensions are independent of the situation and are
expressed with the aid of units and points (movements from one point to
another). It was not some metaphysical concern, but an effectively scien-
tific one, that frequently led scientists in the nineteenth century to ask if all
forces were not reducible to gravity, or rather to the form of attraction that
gives gravity a universal value (a constant relation for all variables) and
biunivocal scope (two bodies at a time, and no more). It is the form of
interiority of all science.
    The nomos, or the dispars, is altogether different. But this is not to say
that the other forces refute gravity or contradict attraction. Although it is
true that they do not go against them, they do not result from them either;
they do not depend on them but testify to events that are always supple-
mentary or of "variable affects." Each time a new field opened up in
science—under conditions making this a far more important notion than
that of form or object—it proved irreducible to the field of attraction and
the model of the gravitational forces, although not contradictory to them.
It affirmed a "more" or an excess, and lodged itself in that excess, that devi-
ation. When chemistry took a decisive step forward, it was always by add-
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 371

ing to the force of weight bonds of another type (for example, electric) that
transformed the nature of chemical equations.36 But it will be noted that
the simplest considerations of velocity immediately introduce the differ-
ence between vertical descent and curvilinear motion, or more generally
between the straight line and the curve, in the differential form of the
clinamen, or the smallest deviation, the minimum excess. Smooth space is
precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogene-
ity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of proximi-
ties is effected independently of any determined path. It is a space of
contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual
space like Euclid's striated space. Smooth space is a field without conduits
or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very
particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multipli-
cities that occupy space without "counting" it and can "be explored only by
legwork." They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a
point in space external to them; an example of this is the system of sounds,
or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidean space.
   When we oppose speed and slowness, the quick and the weighty,
Celeritas and Gravitas, this must not be seen as a quantitative opposition,
or as a mythological structure (although Dumezil has established the myth-
ological importance of this opposition, precisely in relation to the State
apparatus and its natural "gravity"). The opposition is both qualitative
and scientific, in that speed is not merely an abstract characteristic of
movement in general but is incarnated in a moving body that deviates,
however slightly, from its line of descent or gravity. Slow and rapid are not
quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified move-
ment, whatever the speed of the former or the tardiness of the latter.
Strictly speaking, it cannot be said that a body that is dropped has a speed,
however fast it falls; rather it has an infinitely decreasing slowness in accor-
dance with the law of falling bodies. Laminar movement that striates
space, that goes from one point to another, is weighty; but rapidity, celerity,
applies only to movement that deviates to the minimum extent and there-
after assumes a vortical motion, occupying a smooth space, actually draw-
ing smooth space itself. In this space, matter-flow can no longer be cut into
parallel layers, and movement no longer allows itself to be hemmed into
biunivocal relations between points. In this sense, the role of the qualita-
tive opposition gravity-celerity, heavy-light, slow-rapid is not that of a
quantifiable scientific determination but of a condition that is coextensive
to science and that regulates both the separation and the mixing of the two
models, their possible interpenetration, the domination of one by the
other, their alternative. And the best formulation, that of Michel Serres, is
indeed couched in terms of an alternative, whatever mixes or composi-
       372 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

tions there may be: "Physics is reducible to two sciences, a general theory of
routes and paths, and a global theory of waves."37
    A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific
procedures: one consists in "reproducing," the other in "following." The
first involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, involving
itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences. Itineration is too
readily reduced to a modality of technology, or of the application and veri-
fication of science. But this is not the case: following is not at all the same
thing as reproducing, and one never follows in order to reproduce. The
ideal of reproduction, deduction, or induction is part of royal science, at all
times and in all places, and treats differences of time and place as so many
variables, the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the law: for
the same phenomena to recur in a gravitational and striated space it is suf-
ficient for the same conditions to obtain, or for the same constant relation
to hold between the differing conditions and the variable phenomena.
Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that is exter-
nal to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following
is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just dif-
ferent. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the "singularities"
of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form; when
one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases
to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to
be carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous varia-
tion of variables, instead of extracting constants from them, etc. And the
meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is con-
stantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to
a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of
deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. "Go first to
your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By
now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made
by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then
find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the
devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later. . . you can
extend the size of your territory."38 There are itinerant, ambulant sciences
that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities
are scattered like so many "accidents" (problems). For example, why is
primitive metallurgy necessarily an ambulant science that confers upon
smiths a quasi-nomadic status? It could be objected that in these examples
it is still a question of going from one point to another (even if they are sin-
gular points) through the intermediary of channels, and that it is still possi-
ble to cut the flow into layers. But this is only true to the extent that
ambulant procedures and processes are necessarily tied to a striated
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 373

space—always formalized by royal science—which deprives them of their
model, submits them to its own model, and allows them to exist only in the
capacity of "technologies" or "applied science." As a general rule, a smooth
space, a vectorial field, a nonmetric multiplicity are always translatable,
and necessarily translated, into a "compars": a fundamental operation by
which one repeatedly overlays upon each point of smooth space a tangent
Euclidean space endowed with a sufficient number of dimensions, by
which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multipli-
city as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of
reproduction, instead of continuing to follow it in an "exploration by leg-
work."39 This is the triumph of the logos or the law over the nomos. But the
complexity of the operation testifies to the existence of resistances it must
overcome. Whenever ambulant procedure and process are returned to
their own model, the points regain their position as singularities that
exclude all biunivocal relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and
vortical motion that excludes any parallelism between vectors, and smooth
space reconquers the properties of contact that prevent it from remaining
homogeneous and striated. There is always a current preventing the ambu-
lant or itinerant sciences from being completely internalized in the repro-
ductive royal sciences. There is a type of ambulant scientist whom State
scientists are forever fighting or integrating or allying with, even going so
far as to propose a minor position for them within the legal system of sci-
ence and technology.
    It is not that the ambulant sciences are more saturated with irrational
procedures, with mystery and magic. They only get that way when they fall
into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also surround them-
selves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what becomes apparent
in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sci-
ences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to
have an autonomous development. They do not have the means for that
because they subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of
intuition and construction—following the flow of matter, drawing and
linking up smooth space. Everything is situated in an objective zone of
fluctuation that is coextensive with reality itself. However refined or rigor-
ous, "approximate knowledge" is still dependent upon sensitive and sensi-
ble evaluations that pose more problems than they solve: problematics is
still its only mode. In contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its
theorematic or axiomatic power, is to isolate all operations from the condi-
tions of intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or "categories."
That is precisely why deterritorialization, in this kind of science, implies a
reterritorialization in the conceptual apparatus. Without this categorical,
apodictic apparatus, the differential operations would be constrained to
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follow the evolution of a phenomenon; what is more, since the experimen-
tation would be open-air, and the construction at ground level, the coordi-
nates permitting them to be erected as stable models would never become
available. Certain of these requirements are translated in terms of "safety":
the two cathedrals at Orleans and Beauvais collapsed at the end of the
twelfth century, and control calculations are difficult to effect for the con-
structions of ambulant science. Although safety is a fundamental element
in the theoretical norms of the State, and of the political ideal, there is also
something else at issue as well. Due to all their procedures, the ambulant
sciences quickly overstep the possibility of calculation: they inhabit that
"more" that exceeds the space of reproduction and soon run into problems
that are insurmountable from that point of view; they eventually resolve
those problems by means of a real-life operation. The solutions are sup-
posed to come from a set of activities that constitute them as nonautono-
mous. Only royal science, in contrast, has at its disposal a metric power that
can define a conceptual apparatus or an autonomy of science (including
the autonomy of experimental science). That is why it is necessary to cou-
ple ambulant spaces with a space of homogeneity, without which the laws
of physics would depend on particular points in space. But this is less a
translation than a constitution: precisely that constitution the ambulant
sciences did not undertake, and do not have the means to undertake. In the
field of interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant sciences confine
themselves to inventing problems whose solution is tied to a whole set of
collective, nonscientific activities but whose scientific solution depends,
on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has transformed the prob-
lem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus and its organization of
work. This is somewhat like intuition and intelligence in Bergson, where
only intelligence has the scientific means to solve formally the problems
posed by intuition, problems that intuition would be content to entrust to
the qualitative activities of a humanity engaged in following matter.40
   PROBLEM II. Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?
   PROPOSITION IV. The exteriority of the war machine is attested to,
     finally, by noology.
   Thought contents are sometimes criticized for being too conformist.
But the primary question is that of form itself. Thought as such is already in
conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and
which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire
organon. There is thus an image of thought covering all of thought; it is the
special object of "noology" and is like the State-form developed in thought.
This image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty:
the imperium of true thinking operating by magical capture, seizure or
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 375

binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (mythos); a republic of
free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and
juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground (logos). These two
heads are in constant interference in the classical image of thought: a
"republic of free spirits whose prince would be the idea of the Supreme
Being." And if these two heads are in interference, it is not only because
there are many intermediaries and transitions between them, and because
the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the
first, but also because, antithetical and complementary, they are necessary
to one another. It is not out of the question, however, that in order to pass
from one to the other there must occur, "between" them, an event of an
entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place out-
side.41 But confining ourselves to the image, it appears that it is not simply
a metaphor when we are told of an imperium of truth and a republic of spir-
its. It is the necessary condition for the constitution of thought as principle,
or as a form of interiority, as a stratum.
    It is easy to see what thought gains from this: a gravity it would never
have on its own, a center that makes everything, including the State, appear
to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction. But the State gains just as
much. Indeed, by developing in thought in this way the State-form gains
something essential: a whole consensus. Only thought is capable of invent-
ing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to
the level of de jure universality. It is as if the sovereign were left alone in the
world, spanned the entire ecumenon, and now dealt only with actual or
potential subjects. It is no longer a question of powerful, extrinsic organiza-
tions, or of strange bands: the State becomes the sole principle separating
rebel subjects, who are consigned to the state of nature, from consenting
subjects, who rally to its form of their own accord. If it is advantageous for
thought to prop itself up with the State, it is no less advantageous for the
State to extend itself in thought, and to be sanctioned by it as the unique,
universal form. The particularity of States becomes merely an accident of
fact, as is their possible perversity, or their imperfection. For the modern
State defines itself in principle as "the rational and reasonable organiza-
tion of a community": the only remaining particularity a community has is
interior or moral (the spirit of a people), at the same time as the community
is funneled by its organization toward the harmony of a universal (absolute
spirit). The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that
interiority a form of universality: "The goal of worldwide organization is
the satisfaction of reasonable individuals within particular free States."
The exchange that takes place between the State and reason is a curious
one; but that exchange is also an analytic proposition, because realized rea-
son is identified with the de jure State, just as the State is the becoming of
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reason.42 In so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or
rational State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject.
The State must realize the distinction between the legislator and the sub-
ject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptu-
alize their identity. Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be
master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself...
Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving
the established powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto
the organs of State power. Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at
the center constituted by the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the
absolute. This was most notably the great operation of the Kantian "cri-
tique," renewed and developed by Hegelianism. Kant was constantly criti-
cizing bad usages, the better to consecrate the function. It is not at all
surprising that the philosopher has become a public professor or State
functionary. It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of
thought. With full reciprocity. Doubtless, the image itself assumes differ-
ent contours in accordance with the variations on this form: it has not
always delineated or designated the philosopher, and will not always delin-
eate him. It is possible to pass from a magical function to a rational func-
tion. The poet in the archaic imperial State was able to play the role of
image trainer.43 In modern States, the sociologist succeeded in replacing
the philosopher (as, for example, when Durkheim and his disciples set out
to give the republic a secular model of thought). Even today, psychoanaly-
sis lays claim to the role of Cogitatio universalis as the thought of the Law,
in a magical return. And there are quite a few other competitors and pre-
tenders. Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of
 images of thought, and their historicity. In a sense, it could be said that all
this has no importance, that thought has never had anything but laughable
 gravity. But that is all it requires: for us not to take it seriously. Because that
 makes it all the easier for it to think for us, and to be forever engendering
 new functionaries. Because the less people take thought seriously, the more
 they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the
 State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing—to be a thinker?
     But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their
 acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is mobile
 in history. These are the acts of a "private thinker," as opposed to the public
 professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell,
 it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche's Schopen-
 hauer as Educator is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the
 image of thought and its relation to the State. "Private thinker," however, is
 not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a
 question of outside thought.44 To place thought in an immediate relation
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 377

with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a
war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be
studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the
maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic State act or
sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from
a new external force, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize
it). There is another reason why "private thinker" is not a good expression.
Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude,
it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already
intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people,
existing only through it, though it is not yet here. "We are lacking that final
force, in the absence of a people to bear us. We are looking for that popular
support." Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State. And this
form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of
Anteriority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between different poles
or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought—the
force that is always external to itself, or the final force, the «th power—is
not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State
apparatus. It is, rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies,
the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating
thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth,
Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.). A "method" is the striated space of the
cogitatio universalis and draws a path that must be followed from one point
to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space
that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible
method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resur-
gences. Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a
model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from
one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other
point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of
the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the
architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers,
rather than a model society. "Nature propels the philosopher into mankind
like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But
countless times it misses and is depressed at the fact        The artist and the
philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the
means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom
of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike
home at everybody—and even these few are not struck with the force with
which the philosopher and artist launch their shot."45
    We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in
them thought is truly a pathos (an antilogos and an antimythos). One is a
       378 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Riviere, explaining that thought
operates on the basis of a central breakdown, that it lives solely by its own
incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a
material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a func-
tion of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossi-
ble to interiorize. The other is the text by Kleist, "On the Gradual
Formation of Ideas in Speech" ("Uber die allmachliche Verfertigung der
Gedanken beim Reden"), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority
of the concept as a means of control—the control of speech, of language,
but also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this
from thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dia-
logue, an antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before
knowing while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says,
is the thought of the Gemut, which proceeds like a general in a war machine
should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. "I mix
inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using apposi-
tions when they are unnecessary." Gain some time, and then perhaps
renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language, of
being a foreigner in one's own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself
and "bring something incomprehensible into the world." Such is the form
of exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the becoming-
woman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the Gemut that
refuses to be controlled, that forms a war machine. A thought grappling
with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, oper-
ating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity,
instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an essence-
thought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of taking
itself for a government ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a "thinker"
shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man
of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a
target or "aim"? Jacques Riviere does not hesitate to respond to Artaud:
work at it, keep on working, things will come out all right, you will succeed
in finding a method and in learning to express clearly what you think in
essence (cogitatio universalis). Riviere is not a head of State, but he would
not be the last in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to mistake himself for the
secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a State of right.
Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of all men of let-
ters a veritable man of the State. But that is not the worst of it: the worst is
the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended up becoming
monuments, inspiring a model to be copied—a model far more insidious
than the others—for the artificial stammerings and innumerable tracings
that claim to be their equal.
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 379

   The classical image of thought, and the striating of mental space it
effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two "universals,"
the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and
the Subject as the principle that converts being into being-for-us.461m-
perium and republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the
true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point of
view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a "universal method."
It is now easy for us to characterize the nomad thought that rejects this
image and does things differently. It does not ally itself with a universal
thinking subject but, on the contrary, with a singular race; and it does not
ground itself in an all-encompassing totality but is on the contrary de-
ployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or sea.
An entirely different type of adequation is established here, between
the race defined as "tribe" and smooth space defined as "milieu." A tribe
in the desert instead of a universal subject within the horizon of all-
encompassing Being. Kenneth White recently stressed this dissymmetrical
complementarity between a race-tribe (the Celts, those who feel they are
Celts) and a milieu-space (the Orient, the Gobi desert...). White demon-
strates that this strange composite, the marriage of the Celt and the Orient,
inspires a properly nomad thought that sweeps up English literature and
constitutes American literature.47 We immediately see the dangers, the
profound ambiguities accompanying in this enterprise, as if each effort
and each creation faced a possible infamy. For what can be done to prevent
the theme of a race from turning into a racism, a dominant and all-
encompassing fascism, or into a sect and a folklore, microfascisms? And
what can be done to prevent the oriental pole from becoming a phantasy
that reactivates all the fascisms in a different way, and also all the folklores,
yoga, Zen, and karate? It is certainly not enough to travel to escape phan-
tasy, and it is certainly not by invoking a past, real or mythical, that one
avoids racism. But here again, the criteria for making the distinction are
simple, whatever the de facto mixes that obscure them at a given level, at a
given moment. The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race,
and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior,
minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity
but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination.
Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race. Rimbaud said it all on
this point: only he or she can invoke race who says, "I have always been of
an inferior race... I am of an inferior race for all eternity. . . There I am on
the Breton shore . . . I am a beast, a nigger . . . I am of a distant race: my
ancestors were Norsemen."48 In the same way that race is not something to
be rediscovered, the Orient is not something to be imitated: it only exists in
the construction of a smooth space, just as race only exists in the constitu-
       380 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

tion of a tribe that peoples and traverses a smooth space. All of thought is a
becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and
the representation of a Whole.
   AXIOM II. The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is
     exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institu-
     tion). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic
     aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.
   PROPOSITION V. Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions
     of the war machine in space.
    The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from
one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling
points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a
principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the
points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they
determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water
point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and
exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-bet-
ween has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a
direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the ele-
ments of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is for-
ever mobilizing them.49 The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant;
for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the sec-
ond point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad
goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity;
in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and
migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their
causes and conditions are no less distinct for that (for example, those who
joined Mohammed at Medina had a choice between a nomadic or bed-
ouin pledge, and a pledge of hegira or emigration).50
    Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or cus-
tomary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which
is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and
regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory
does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one
that is indefinite and noncommunicating. The nomos came to designate
the law, but that was originally because it was distribution, a mode of distri-
bution. It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into
 shares, in a space without borders or enclosure. The nomos is the consis-
tency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to
the law or the polis, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague
expanse around a city ("either nomos or polis").51 Therefore, and this is the
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 381

third point, there is a significant difference between the spaces: sedentary
space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while
nomad space is smooth, marked only by "traits" that are effaced and dis-
placed with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each
other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a
smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial
principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee
is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he who does
not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become
amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want
to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where
the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response
to this challenge.52 Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is
only seated while moving (the Bedouin galloping, knees on the saddle, sit-
ting on the soles of his upturned feet, "a feat of balance"). The nomad
knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catato-
nia and rush, a "stationary process," station as process—these traits of
Kleist's are eminently those of the nomad. It is thus necessary to make a
distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast,
but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile,
yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement
designates the relative character of a body considered as "one," and which
goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute
character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth
space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any
point. (It is therefore not surprising that reference has been made to spiri-
tual voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity, in one
place: these are part of nomadism.) In short, we will say by convention that
only nomads have absolute movement, in other words, speed; vortical or
swirling movement is an essential feature of their war machine.
   It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land, even though
they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized
par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization after-
ward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary (the
sedentary's relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a prop-
erty regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is
deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a
degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is
the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with
a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground
(sot) or support. The earth does not become deterritorialized in its global
and relative movement, but at specific locations, at the spot where the for-
       382 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

est recedes, or where the steppe and the desert advance. Hubac is right to
say that nomadism is explainable less by universal changes in climate
(which relate instead to migrations) as by the "divagation of local cli-
mates."53 The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a
smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads
inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them
grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less
than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization. They add
desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose ori-
entation and direction endlessly vary.54 The sand desert has not only oases,
which are like fixed points, but also rhizomatic vegetation that is tempo-
rary and shifts location according to local rains, bringing changes in the
direction of the crossings.55 The same terms are used to describe ice deserts
as sand deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no inter-
mediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet
there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects
but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow
or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of
both). It is a tactile space, or rather "haptic," a sonorous much more than a
visual space.56 The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential
feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartogra-
phy. The nomad, nomad space, is localized and not delimited. What is both
limited and limiting is striated space, the relative global: it is limited in its
parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation to
one another, divisible by boundaries, and can interlink; what is limiting
(limes or wall, and no longer boundary) is this aggregate in relation to the
smooth spaces it "contains," whose growth it slows or prevents, and which
it restricts or places outside. Even when the nomad sustains its effects, he
does not belong to this relative global, where one passes from one point to
another, from one region to another. Rather, he is in a local absolute, an
absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local oper-
ations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice, sea.
    Making the absolute appear in a particular place—is that not a very gen-
eral characteristic of religion (recognizing that the nature of the appear-
ance, and the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the images that reproduce it are
open to debate)? But the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center
that repels the obscure nomos. The absolute of religion is essentially a hori-
zon that encompasses, and, if the absolute itself appears at a particular
place, it does so in order to establish a solid and stable center for the global.
The encompassing role of smooth spaces (desert, steppe, or ocean) in
monotheism has been frequently noted. In short, religion converts the
absolute. Religion is in this sense a piece in the State apparatus (in both of
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 383

its forms, the "bond" and the "pact or alliance"), even if it has within itself
the power to elevate this model to the level of the universal or to constitute
an absolute Imperium. But for the nomad the terms of the question are
totally different: locality is not delimited; the absolute, then, does not
appear at a particular place but becomes a nonlimited locality; the coup-
ling of the place and the absolute is achieved not in a centered, oriented
globalization or universalization but in an infinite succession of local oper-
ations. Limiting ourselves to this opposition between points of view, it may
be observed that nomads do not provide a favorable terrain for religion; the
man of war is always committing an offense against the priest or the god.
The nomads have a vague, literally vagabond "monotheism," and content
themselves with that, and with their ambulant fires. The nomads have a
sense of the absolute, but a singularly atheistic one. The universalist reli-
gions that have had dealings with nomads—Moses, Mohammed, even
Christianity with the Nestorian heresy—have always encountered prob-
lems in this regard, and have run up against what they have termed obsti-
nate impiety. These religions are not, in effect, separable from a firm and
constant orientation, from an imperial de jure State, even, and especially,
in the absence of a de facto State; they have promoted an ideal of sedentari-
zation and addressed themselves more to the migrant components than the
nomadic ones. Even early Islam favored the theme of the hegira, or migra-
tion, over nomadism; rather, it was through certain schisms (such as the
Khariji movement) that it won over the Arab or Berber nomads.57
    However, it does not exhaust the question to establish a simple opposi-
tion between two points of view, religion-nomadism. For monotheistic
religion, at the deepest level of its tendency to project a universal or spiri-
tual State over the entire ecumenon, is not without ambivalence or fringe
areas; it goes beyond even the ideal limits of the State, even the imperial
State, entering a more indistinct zone, an outside of States where it has the
possibility of undergoing a singular mutation or adaptation. We are refer-
ring to religion as an element in a war machine and the idea of holy war as
the motor of that machine. The prophet, as opposed to the state personality
of the king and the religious personality of the priest, directs the movement
by which a religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of
such a machine. It has often been said that Islam, and the prophet Moham-
med, performed such a conversion of religion and constituted a veritable
esprit de corps: in the formula of Georges Bataille, "early Islam, a society
reduced to the military enterprise." This is what the West invokes in order
to justify its antipathy toward Islam. Yet the Crusades were a properly
Christian adventure of this type. The prophets may very well condemn
nomad life; the war machine may very well favor the movement of
migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in general may very well
       384 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

compensate for its specific deterritorialization with a spiritual and even
physical reterritorialization, which in the case of the holy war assumes the
well-directed character of a conquest of the holy lands as the center of the
world. Despite all that, when religion sets itself up as a war machine, it
mobilizes and liberates a formidable charge of nomadism or absolute
deterritorialization; it doubles the migrant with an accompanying nomad,
or with the potential nomad the migrant is in the process of becoming; and
finally, it turns its dream of an absolute State back against the State-form.58
And this turning-against is no less a part of the "essence" of religion than
that dream. The history of the Crusades is marked by the most astonishing
series of directional changes: the firm orientation toward the Holy Land as
a center to reach often seems nothing more than a pretext. But it would be
wrong to say that the play of self-interest, or economic, commercial, or
political factors, diverted the crusade from its pure path. The idea of the
crusade in itself implies this variability of directions, broken and changing,
and intrinsically possesses all these factors or all these variables from the
moment it turns religion into a war machine and simultaneously utilizes
and gives rise to the corresponding nomadism.59 The necessity of main-
taining the most rigorous of distinctions between sedentaries, migrants,
and nomads does not preclude de facto mixes; on the contrary, it makes
them all the more necessary in turn. And it is impossible to think of the gen-
eral process of sedentarization that vanquished the nomads without also
envisioning the gusts of local nomadization that carried off sedentaries
and doubled migrants (notably, to the benefit of religion).
   Smooth or nomad space lies between two striated spaces: that of the for-
est, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with its grids
and generalized parallels, its now independent arborescence, its art of
extracting the tree and wood from the forest. But being "between" also
means that smooth space is controlled by these two flanks, which limit it,
oppose its development, and assign it as much as possible a communica-
tional role; or, on the contrary, it means that it turns against them, gnawing
away at the forest on one side, on the other side gaining ground on the culti-
vated lands, affirming a noncommunicating force or a force of divergence
like a "wedge" digging in. The nomads turn first against the forest and the
mountain dwellers, then descend upon the farmers. What we have here is
something like the flipside or the outside of the State-form—but in what
sense? This form, as a global and relative space, implies a certain number of
components: forest-clearing of fields; agriculture-grid laying; animal rais-
 ing subordinated to agricultural work and sedentary food production;
commerce based on a constellation of town-country (polis-nomos) com-
 munications. When historians inquire into the reasons for the victory of
the West over the Orient, they primarily mention the following characteris-
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 385

tics, which put the Orient in general at a disadvantage: deforestation rather
than clearing for planting, making it extremely difficult to extract or even
to find wood; cultivation of the type "rice paddy and garden" rather than
arborescence and field; animal raising for the most part outside the control
of the sedentaries, with the result that they lacked animal power and meat
foods; the low communication content of the town-country relation, mak-
ing commerce far less flexible.60 The conclusion is not that the State-form
is absent in the Orient. Quite to the contrary, a more rigid agency becomes
necessary in order to retain and reunite the various components plied by
escape vectors. States always have the same composition; if there is even
one truth in the political philosophy of Hegel, it is that every State carries
within itself the essential moments of its existence. States are made up not
only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals, and commodities.
There is a unity of composition of all States, but States have neither the
same development nor the same organization. In the Orient, the compo-
nents are much more disconnected, disjointed, necessitating a great immu-
table Form to hold them together: "despotic formations," Asian or African,
are rocked by incessant revolts, by secessions and dynastic changes, which
nevertheless do not affect the immutability of the form. In the West, on the
other hand, the interconnectedness of the components makes possible
transformations of the State-form through revolution. It is true that the
idea of revolution itself is ambiguous; it is Western insofar as it relates to a
transformation of the State, but Eastern insofar as it envisions the destruc-
tion, the abolition of the State.61 The great empires of the Orient, Africa,
and America run up against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them
and maintain gaps between their components (the nomos does not become
countryside, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-
scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.): the oriental State is in
direct confrontation with a nomad war machine. This war machine may
fall back to the road of integration and proceed solely by revolt and dynas-
tic change; nevertheless, it is the war machine, as nomad, that invents the
abolitionist dream and reality. Western States are much more sheltered in
their striated space and consequently have much more latitude in holding
their components together; they confront the nomads only indirectly,
through the intermediary of the migrations the nomads trigger or adopt as
their stance.62
    One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over
which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in
the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to
vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to
establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows
traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself
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from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities
or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in
well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation,
relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of sub-
jects and objects. That is why Paul Virilio's thesis is important, when he
shows that "the political power of the State ispolis, police, that is, manage-
ment of the public ways," and that "the gates of the city, its levies and
duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the
penetration power of migratory packs," people, animals, and goods.63
Gravity, gravitas, such is the essence of the State. It is not at all that the
State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fast-
est, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth
space, to become the relative characteristic of a "moved body" going from
one point to another in a striated space. In this sense, the State never ceases
to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed.
The State as town surveyor, converter, or highway interchange: the role of
the engineer from this point of view. Speed and absolute movement are not
without their laws, but they are the laws of the nomos, of the smooth space
that deploys it, of the war machine that populates it. If the nomads formed
the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being "synony-
 mous" with speed. And each time there is an operation against the State—
 insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act—it can be
 said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has
appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a man-
 ner of being in space as though it were smooth (Virilio discusses the impor-
tance of the riot or revolutionary theme of "holding the street"). It is in this
 sense that the response of the State against all that threatens to move
beyond it is to striate space. The State does not appropriate the war
 machine without giving even it the form of relative movement: this was the
 case with the model of the fortress as a regulator of movement, which was
 precisely the obstacle the nomads came up against, the stumbling block
 and parry by which absolute vortical movement was broken. Conversely,
 when a State does not succeed in striating its interior or neighboring space,
the flows traversing that State necessarily adopt the stance of a war
 machine directed against it, deployed in a hostile or rebellious smooth
 space (even if other States are able to slip their striations in). This was the
 adventure of China: toward the end of the fourteenth century, and in spite
 of its very high level of technology in ships and navigation, it turned its
 back on its huge maritime space, saw its commercial flows turn against it
 and ally themselves with piracy, and was unable to react except by a politics
 of immobility, of the massive restriction of commerce, which only
 reinforced the connection between commerce and the war machine.64
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 387

    The situation is much more complicated than we have let on. The sea is
perhaps principal among smooth spaces, the hydraulic model par excel-
lence. But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one attempts were
made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed
routes, constant directions, relative movements, a whole counterhydraulic
of channels and conduits. One of the reasons for the hegemony of the West
was the power of its State apparatuses to striate the sea by combining the
technologies of the North and the Mediterranean and by annexing the
Atlantic. But this undertaking had the most unexpected result: the multi-
plication of relative movements, the intensification of relative speeds in
striated space, ended up reconstituting a smooth space or absolute move-
ment. As Virilio emphasizes, the sea became the place of the fleet in being,
where one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space
beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a
vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion. This modern strategy
was communicated from the sea to the air, as the new smooth space, but
also to the entire Earth considered as desert or sea. As converter and
capturer, the State does not just relativize movement, it reimparts absolute
movement. It does not just go from the smooth to the striated, it reconsti-
tutes smooth space; it reimparts smooth in the wake of the striated. It is
true that this new nomadism accompanies a worldwide war machine
whose organization exceeds the State apparatuses and passes into energy,
military-industrial, and multinational complexes. We say this as a
reminder that smooth space and the form of exteriority do not have an irre-
sistible revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on
the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exer-
cis,e or establishment (for example, the way in which total war and popular
war, and even guerrilla warfare, borrow one another's methods).65
   PROPOSITION VI. Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical
     elements of a war machine.
   Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal
groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe to
assume the presence of a military organization. Is this not the way an army
deterritorializes its soldiers? An army is composed of units, companies,
and divisions. The Numbers may vary in function, in combination; they
may enter into entirely different strategies; but there is always a connection
between the Number and the war machine. It is a question not of quantity
but of organization or composition. When the State creates armies, it
always applies this principle of numerical organization; but all it does is
adopt the principle, at the same time as it appropriates the war machine.
For so peculiar an idea—the numerical organization of people—came
       388 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

from the nomads. It was the Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to
Egypt; and when Moses applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the
advice of his nomad father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite, and was done in such
a way as to constitute a war machine, the elements of which are described in
the biblical book of Numbers. The nomos is fundamentally numerical,
arithmetic. When Greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab
arithmetism, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable to
the logos: not that the nomads "do" arithmetic or algebra, but because
arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad influenced world.
    Up to now we have known three major types of human organization: lin-
eal, territorial, and numerical. Lineal organization allows us to define
so-called primitive societies. Clan lineages are essentially segments in
action; they meld and divide, and vary according to the ancestor consid-
ered, the tasks, and the circumstances. Of course, number plays an impor-
tant role in the determination of lineage, or in the creation of new
lineages—as does the earth, since a clan segmentarity is doubled by a tribal
segmentarity. The earth is before all else the matter upon which the
dynamic of lineages is inscribed, and the number, a means of inscription:
the lineages write upon the earth and with the number, constituting a kind
of "geodesy." Everything changes with State societies: it is often said that
the territorial principle becomes dominant. One could also speak of
deterritorialization, since the earth becomes an object, instead of being an
active material element in combination with lineage. Property is precisely
the deterritorialized relation between the human being and the earth; this
is so whether property constitutes a good belonging to the State,
superposed upon continuing possession by a lineal community, or whether
it itself becomes a good belonging to private individuals constituting a new
community. In both cases (and according to the two poles of the State),
something like an overcoding of the earth replaces geodesy. Of course, line-
ages remain very important, and numbers take on their own importance.
But what moves to the forefront is a "territorial" organization, in the sense
that all the segments, whether of lineage, land, or number, are taken up by
an astronomical space or a geometrical extension that overcodes them—
but certainly not in the same way in the archaic imperial State and in mod-
ern States. The archaic State envelops a spatium with a summit, a
differentiated space with depth and levels, whereas modern States (begin-
ning with the Greek city-state) develop a homogeneous extensio with an
immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and
reversible relations. Not only do the two models, the astronomical and the
geometrical, enter into intimate mixes, but even when they are supposedly
pure, both imply the subordination of lineages and numbers to this metric
power, as it appears either in the imperial spatium or in the political
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 389

extension Arithmetic, the number, has always had a decisive role in the
State apparatus: this is so even as early as the imperial bureaucracy, with
the three conjoined operations of the census, taxation, and election. It is
even truer of modern forms of the State, which in developing utilized all
the calculation techniques that were springing up at the border between
mathematical science and social technology (there is a whole social calcu-
lus at the basis of political economy, demography, the organization of
work, etc.). This arithmetic element of the State found its specific power in
the treatment of all kinds of matter: primary matters (raw materials), the
secondary matter of wrought objects, or the ultimate matter constituted by
the human population. Thus the number has always served to gain mastery
over matter, to control its variations and movements, in other words, to
submit them to the spatiotemporal framework of the State—either the
imperial spatium, or the modern extensio.61 The State has a territorial
principle, or a principle of deterritorialization, that links the number to
metric magnitudes (taking into account the increasingly complex metrics
effecting the overcoding). We do not believe that the conditions of inde-
pendence or autonomy of the Number are to be found in the State, even
though all the factors of its development are present.
    The Numbering Number, in other words, autonomous arithmetic organ-
ization, implies neither a superior degree of abstraction nor very large
quantities. It relates only to conditions of possibility constituted by
nomadism and to conditions of effectuation constituted by the war
machine. It is in State armies that the problem of the treatment of large
quantities arises, in relation to other matters; but the war machine operates
with small quantities that it treats using numbering numbers. These num-
bers appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of divid-
ing up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject.
The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of
abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied
without itself being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting
or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself that moves through
smooth space. There is undoubtedly a geometry of smooth space: but as we
have seen, it is a minor, operative geometry, a geometry of the trait. The
more independent space is from a metrics, the more independent the num-
ber is from space. Geometry as a royal science has little importance for the
war machine (its only importance is in State armies, and for sedentary for-
tification, but it leads generals to serious defeats).68 The number becomes a
principle whenever it occupies a smooth space, and is deployed within it as
subject, instead of measuring a striated space. The number is the mobile
occupant, the movable (meuble) in smooth space, as opposed to the
geometry of the immovable (immeuble) in striated space. The nomadic
       390 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

numerical unit is the ambulant fire, and not the tent, which is still too much
of an immovable: "The fire takes precedence over the yurt." The number-
ing number is no longer subordinated to metric determinations or geomet-
rical dimensions, but has only a dynamic relation with geographical
directions: it is a directional number, not a dimensional or metric one.
Nomad organization is indissolubly arithmetic and directional; quantity is
everywhere, tens, hundreds, direction is everywhere, left, right: the numer-
ical chief is also the chief of the left or the right.69 The numbering number is
rhythmic, not harmonic. It is not related to cadence or measure: it is only in
State armies, and for reasons of discipline and show, that one marches in
cadence; but autonomous numerical organization finds its meaning else-
where, whenever it is necessary to establish an order of displacement on the
steppe, the desert—at the point where the lineages of the forest dwellers
and the figures of the State lose their relevance. "He moved with the ran-
dom walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in
his passage would [indicate] that human flesh moved there. It was a way of
walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn't need to think about it.
The feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their pacing."70 In
the war machine and nomadic existence, the number is no longer num-
bered, but becomes a Cipher (Chiffre), and it is in this capacity that it con-
stitutes the "esprit de corps" and invents the secret and its outgrowths
(strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy, etc.).
    A ciphered, rhythmic, directional, autonomous, movable, numbering
number: the war machine is like the necessary consequence of nomadic
organization (Moses experienced it, with all its consequences). Some peo-
ple nowadays are too eager to criticize this numerical organization,
denouncing it as a military or even concentration-camp society where peo-
ple are no longer anything more than deterritorialized "numbers." But that
is false. Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people is certainly
no crueler than the lineal or State organizations. Treating people like num-
bers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geo-
metrical figures to shape and model. Moreover, the use of the number as a
numeral, as a statistical element, is proper to the numbered number of the
State, not to the numbering number. And the world of the concentration
camp operates as much by lineages and territories as by numeration. The
question is not one of good or bad but of specificity. The specificity of
numerical organization rests on the nomadic mode of existence and the
war machine function. The numbering number is distinct both from lineal
codes and State overcoding. Arithmetic composition, on the one hand,
selects, extracts from the lineages the elements that will enter into
nomadism and the war machine and, on the other hand, directs them
against the State apparatus, opposing a machine and an existence to the
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 391

State apparatus, drawing a deterritorialization that cuts across both the lin-
eal territorialities and the territory or deterritoriality of the State.
    A first characteristic of the numbering, nomadic or war, number is that
it is always complex, that is, articulated. A complex of numbers every time.
It is exactly for this reason that it in no way implies large, homogenized
quantities, like State numbers or the numbered number, but rather pro-
duces its effect of immensity by its fine articulation, in other words, by its
distribution of heterogeneity in a free space. Even State armies do not do
away with this principle when they deal with large numbers (despite the
predominance of "base" 10). The Roman legion was a number made up of
numbers, articulated in such a way that the segments became mobile, and
the figures geometrical, changing, transformational. The complex or artic-
ulated number comprises not only men but necessarily weapons, animals,
and vehicles. The arithmetic base unit is therefore a unit of assemblage, for
example, man-horse-bow, 1 x 1 X 1, according to the formula that carried
the Scythians to triumph; and the formula becomes more complicated to
the extent that certain "weapons" assemble or articulate several men or
animals, as in the case of the chariot with two horses and two men, one to
drive and the other to throw, 2 X 1 X 2 = 1; or in the case of the famous
two-handled shield of the hoplite reform, which soldered together human
chains. However small the unit, it is articulated. The numbering number
always has several bases at the same time. It is also necessary to take into
account arithmetic relations that are external yet still contained in the
number, expressing the proportion of combatants among the members of a
lineage or tribe, the role of reserves and stocks, the upkeep of people,
things, and animals. Logistics is the art of these external relations, which
are no less a part of the war machine than the internal relations of strategy,
in other words, the composition of combat units in relation to one another.
The two together constitute the science of the articulation of numbers of
war. Every assemblage has this strategic aspect and this logistical aspect.
    But the numbering number has a second, more secret, characteristic.
Everywhere, the war machine displays a curious process of arithmetic rep-
lication or doubling, as if it operated along two nonsymmetrical and
nonequal series. On the one hand, the lineages are indeed organized and
reshuffled numerically; a numerical composition is superimposed upon
the lineages in order to bring the new principle into predominance. But on
the other hand, men are simultaneously extracted from each lineage to
form a special numerical body—as if the new numerical composition of
the lineage-body could not succeed without the constitution of a body
proper to it, itself numerical. We believe that this is not an accidental
phenomenon but rather an essential constituent of the war machine, a
necessary operation for the autonomy of the number: the number of the
       392 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

body must have as its correlate a body of the number; the number must be
doubled according to two complementary operations. For the social body
to be numerized, the number must form a special body. When Genghis
Khan undertook his great composition of the steppe, he numerically or-
ganized the lineages, and the fighters in each lineage, placing them under a
cipher and a chief (groups of ten with decurions, groups of one hundred
with centurions, groups of one thousand with chiliarchs). He also extracted
from each arithmetized lineage a small number of men who were to consti-
tute his personal guard, in other words, a dynamic formation comprising a
staff, commissars, messengers, and diplomats ("antrustions").71 One is
never without the other: a double deterritorialization, the second of which
is to a higher power. When Moses undertook his great composition of the
desert—where the influence he felt from the nomads was necessarily
stronger than that of Yahweh—he took a census of each tribe and or-
ganized them numerically; he also decreed a law according to which the
firstborn of each tribe at that particular time belonged by right to Yahweh.
As these firstborn were obviously still too young, their role in the Number
was transferred to a special tribe, the Levites, who provided the body of the
Number or the special guard of the ark; and as the Levites were less numer-
ous than the new firstborn of the tribes taken together, the excess firstborn
had to be bought back by the tribes in the form of taxes (bringing us back to
a fundamental aspect of logistics). The war machine would be unable to
function without this double series: it is necessary both that numerical
composition replace lineal organization and that it conjure away the ter-
ritorial organization of the State. Power in the war machine is defined ac-
cording to this double series: power is no longer based on segments and
centers, on the potential resonance of centers and overcoding of segments,
but on these relations internal to the Number and independent of quantity.
Tensions or power struggles are also a result of this: between Moses' tribes
and the Levites, between Genghis's "noyans" and "antrustions." This is
not simply a protest on the part of lineages wishing to regain their former
autonomy; nor is it the prefiguration of a struggle for control over a State
apparatus. It is a tension inherent in the war machine, in its special power,
and in the particular limitations placed on the power of the "chief."
    Thus numerical composition, or the numbering number, implies several
operations: the arithmetization of the starting aggregates or sets (the line-
ages); the union of the extracted subsets (the constitution of groups often,
one hundred, etc.); and the formation by substitution of another set in cor-
respondence with the united set (the special body). It is this last operation
that implies the most variety and originality in nomad existence. The same
problem arises even in State armies, when the war machine is appropriated
by the State. In effect, if the arithmetization of the social body has as its cor-
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE d 393

relate the formation of a distinct special body, itself arithmetic, this special
body may be constructed in several ways: (1) from a privileged lineage or
tribe, the dominance of which subsequently takes on a new meaning (the
case of Moses, with the Levites); (2) from representatives of each lineage,
who subsequently serve also as hostages (the firstborn; this would actually
be the Asian case, or the case of Genghis); (3) from a totally different ele-
ment, one exterior to the base society, slaves, foreigners, or people of
another religion (this was already the case as early as the Saxon regime, in
which the king used Prankish slaves to compose his special body; but Islam
is the prime example, even inspiring a specific sociological category, that of
"military slavery": the Mameluks of Egypt, slaves from the steppe or the
Caucasus who were purchased at a very early age by the sultan; or the Otto-
man Janissaries, who came from Christian communities).72
    Is this not the origin of an important theme, "the nomads as child
stealers"? It is clear, especially in the last example, how the special body is
instituted as an element determinant of power in the war machine. The war
machine and nomadic existence have to ward off two things simultane-
ously: a return of the lineal aristocracy and the formation of imperial
functionaries. What complicates everything is that the State itself has often
been determined in such a way as to use slaves as high functionaries. As we
shall see, the reasons for this varied, and although the two currents con-
verged in armies, they came from two distinct sources. For the power of
slaves, foreigners, or captives in a war machine of nomadic origin is very
different from the power of lineal aristocracies, as well as from that of State
functionaries and bureaucrats. They are "commissars," emissaries, diplo-
mats, spies, strategists, and logisticians, sometimes smiths. They cannot be
explained away as a "whim of the sultan." On the contrary, it is the possibil-
ity of the war chief having whims that is explained by the objective exis-
tence and necessity of this special numerical body, this Cipher that has
value only in relation to a nomos. There is both a deterritorialization and a
becoming proper to the war machine; the special body, in particular the
slave-infidel-foreigner, is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while
remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State. You
have to be born an infidel to become a believer; you have to be born a slave
to become a soldier. Specific schools or institutions are needed for this pur-
pose: the special body is an invention proper to the war machine, which
States always utilize, adapting it so totally to their own ends that it becomes
unrecognizable, or restituting it in bureaucratic staff form, or in the tech-
nocratic form of very special bodies, or in "esprit de corps" that serve the
State as much as they resist it, or among the commissars who double the
State as much as they serve it.
    It is true that the nomads have no history; they only have a geography.
       394 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

And the defeat of the nomads was such, so complete, that history is one
with the triumph of States. We have witnessed, as a result, a generalized cri-
tique dismissing the nomads as incapable of any innovation, whether tech-
nological or metallurgical, political or metaphysical. Historians, bourgeois
or Soviet (Grousset or Vladimirtsov), consider the nomads a pitiable seg-
ment of humanity that understands nothing: not technology, to which it
supposedly remained indifferent; not agriculture, not the cities and States
it destroyed or conquered. It is difficult to see, however, how the nomads
could have triumphed in war if they did not possess strong metallurgical
capabilities (the idea that the nomads received their technical weapons and
political counseling from renegades from an imperial State is highly im-
probable). It is difficult to see how the nomads could have undertaken to
destroy cities and States, except in the name of a nomad organization and a
war machine defined not by ignorance but by their positive characteristics,
by their specific space, by a composition all their own that broke with line-
ages and warded off the State-form. History has always dismissed the
nomads. Attempts have been made to apply a properly military category to
the war machine (that of "military democracy") and a properly sedentary
category to nomadism (that of "feudalism"). But these two hypotheses pre-
suppose a territorial principle: either that an imperial State appropriates
the war machine, distributing land to warriors as a benefit of their position
(cleroi and false fiefs), or that property, once it has become private, in itself
posits relations of dependence among the property owners constituting the
army (true fiefs and vassalage).73 In both cases, the number is subordinated
to an "immobile" fiscal organization, in order to establish which land can
be or has been ceded, as well as to set the taxes owed by the beneficiaries
themselves. There is no doubt that nomad organization and the war
machine deal with these same problems, both the level of land and of taxa-
tion (in which the nomadic warriors were great innovators, despite what is
said to the contrary). But they invent a territoriality and a "movable" fiscal
organization that testify to the autonomy of a numerical principle: there
can be a confusion or combination of the systems, but the specificity of the
nomadic system remains the subordination of land to numbers that are
displaced and deployed, and of taxation to relations internal to those num-
bers (already with Moses, for example, taxation played a role in the relation
between the numerical bodies and the special body of the number). In
short, military democracy and feudalism, far from explaining the numeri-
cal composition of the nomads, instead testify to what may survive of them
in sedentary regimes.
   PROPOSITION VII. Nomad existence has for "affects" the weapons of a
     war machine.
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 395

    A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the
basis of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). But although
this extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a tech-
nical object, it does not preclude a general convertibility between the two
groups, to the extent that it seems very difficult to propose an intrinsic dif-
ference between weapons and tools. The types of percussion, as defined by
Andre Leroi-Gourhan, are found on both sides. "For ages on end agricul-
tural implements and weapons of war must have remained identical."74
Some have spoken of an "ecosystem," not only situated at the origin, in
which work tools and weapons of war exchange their determinations: it
seems that the same machinicphylum traverses both. And yet we have the
feeling that there are many internal differences, even if they are not intrin-
sic, in other words, logical or conceptual, and even if they remain approxi-
mate. As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with
projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon,
and propulsion is its essential moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very
notion of the "problem" is related to the war machine. The more mecha-
nisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, poten-
tially or simply metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compen-
sating for the projective mechanisms they possess, or else they adapt them
to other ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, whether
projected or projecting, are only one kind among others; but even hand-
held weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that
required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts. The
tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares
a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to
appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a distance exists in both
cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in the other, centripetal. One
could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put
to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or
invented (the counterattack is in fact the precipitating and inventive factor
in the war machine, to the extent that it is not simply reducible to a quanti-
tative rivalry or defensive parade).
   Second, weapons and tools do not "tendentially" (approximately) have
the same relation to movement, to speed. It is yet another essential contri-
bution of Paul Virilio to have stressed this weapon-speed complemen-
tarity: the weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed invents the
weapon (the projective character of weapons is the result). The war
machine releases a vector of speed so specific to it that it needs a special
name; it is not only the power of destruction, but "dromocracy" (= nomos).
Among other advantages, this idea articulates a new mode of distinction
between the hunt and war. For it is certain not only that war does not derive
       396 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

from the hunt but also that the hunt does not promote weapons: either war
evolved in the sphere of indistinction and convertibility between weapons
and tools, or it used to its own advantage weapons already distinguished,
already constituted. As Virilio says, war in no way appears when man
applies to man the relation of the hunter to the animal, but on the contrary
when he captures the force of the hunted animal and enters an entirely new
relation to man, that of war (enemy, no longer prey). It is therefore not sur-
prising that the war machine was the invention of the animal-raising
nomads: animal breeding and training are not to be confused either with
the primitive hunt or with sedentary domestication, but are in fact the dis-
covery of a projecting and projectile system. Rather than operating by
blow-by-blow violence, or constituting a violence "once and for all," the
war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an entire economy of
violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable, even unlim-
ited. "Bloodletting, immediate killing, run contrary to the unlimited usage
of violence, that is, to its economy.... The economy of violence is not that of
the hunter in the animal raiser, but that of the hunted animal. In horseback
riding, one conserves the kinetic energy, the speed of the horse, and no
longer its proteins (the motor, and no longer the flesh).. . . Whereas in the
hunt the hunter's aim was to arrest the movement of wild animality
through systematic slaughter, the animal breeder [sets about] conserving it,
and, by means of training, the rider joins with this movement, orienting it
and provoking its acceleration." The technological motor would develop
this tendency further, but "horseback riding was the first projector of the
warrior, his first system of arms."75 Whence becoming-animal in the war
machine. Does this mean that the war machine did not exist before horse-
back riding and the cavalry? That is not the issue. The issue is that the war
machine implies the release of a Speed vector that becomes a free or inde-
pendent variable; this does not occur in the hunt, where speed is associated
primarily with the hunted animal. It is possible for this race vector to be
released in an infantry, without recourse to horseback riding; it is possible,
moreover, for there to be horseback riding, but as a means of transporta-
tion or even of portage having nothing to do with the free vector. In any
event, what the warrior borrows from the animal is more the idea of the
motor than the model of the prey. He does not generalize the idea of the
prey by applying it to the enemy; he abstracts the idea of the motor, apply-
ing it to himself.
   Two objections immediately arise. According to the first, the war
machine possesses as much weight and gravity as it does speed (the distinc-
tion between the heavy and the light, the dissymmetry between defense and
attack, the opposition between rest and tension). But it would be easy to
demonstrate that phenomena of "temporization," and even of immobility
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 397

and catatonia, so important in wars, relate in certain cases to a component
of pure speed. And the rest of the time, they relate to the conditions under
which State apparatuses appropriate the war machine, notably by arrang-
ing a striated space where opposing forces can come to an equilibrium. It
can happen that speed is abstracted as the property of a projectile, a bullet
or artillery shell, which condemns the weapon itself, and the soldier, to
immobility (for example, immobility in the First World War). But an equi-
librium offerees is a phenomenon of resistance, whereas the counterattack
implies a rush or change of speed that breaks the equilibrium: it was the
tank that regrouped all of the operations in the speed vector and recreated a
smooth space for movement by uprooting men and arms.76
   The opposite objection is more complex: it is that speed does indeed
seem to be as much a part of the tool as of the weapon, and is no way specific
to the war machine. The history of the motor is not only military. But per-
haps there is too much of a tendency to think in terms of quantities of
movement, instead of seeking qualitative models. The two ideal models of
the motor are those of work and free action. Work is a motor cause that
meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its
effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is
also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates
only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and contin-
ues from one moment to the next. Whatever its measure or degree, speed is
relative in the first case, absolute in the second (the idea of a perpetuum
mobile). In work, what counts is the point of application of a resultant force
exerted by the weight of a body considered as "one" (gravity), and the rela-
tive displacement of this point of application. In free action, what counts is
the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy
absolutely a nonpunctuated space. Weapons and weapon handling seem to
be linked to a free-action model, and tools to a work model. Linear dis-
placement, from one point to another, constitutes the relative movement
of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation of a space that constitutes the
absolute movement of the weapon. It is as though the weapon were moving,
self-propelling, while the tool is moved. This link between tools and work
remains obscured unless work receives the motor, or real, definition we
have just given it. The tool does not define work; just the opposite. The tool
presupposes work. It must be added that weapons, also, obviously imply a
renewal of the cause, an expending or even disappearance in the effect, the
encountering of external resistances, a displacement of force, etc. It would
be futile to credit weapons with a magical power in contrast to the con-
straints of tools: weapons and tools are subject to the same laws, which
define, precisely, their common sphere. But the principle behind all tech-
nology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract,
       398 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it
presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical
element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the
social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines
what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension,
comprehension, etc.
   It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the phylum selects,
qualifies, and even invents the technical elements. Thus one cannot speak
of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they pre-
suppose and enter into. This is what we meant when we said that weapons
and tools are not merely distinguished from one another in an extrinsic
manner, and yet they have no distinctive intrinsic characteristics. They
have internal (and not intrinsic) characteristics relating to the respective
assemblages with which they are associated. What effectuates a free-action
model is not the weapons in themselves and in their physical aspect but the
"war machine" assemblage as formal cause of the weapons. And what
effectuates the work model is not the tools but the "work machine" assem-
blage as formal cause of the tools. When we say that the weapon is insepara-
ble from a speed vector, while the tool remains tied to conditions of gravity,
we are claiming only to signal a difference between two types of assem-
blage, a distinction that holds even if in the assemblage proper to it the tool
is abstractly "faster," and the weapon abstractly "weightier." The tool is
essentially tied to a genesis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force
whose laws reside in work, while the weapon concerns only the exercise or
manifestation of force in space and time, in conformity with free action.
The weapon does not fall from the sky, and obviously assumes production,
displacement, expenditure, and resistance. But this aspect relates to the
common sphere of the weapon and the tool, and does not yet concern the
specificity of the weapon, which appears only when force is considered in
itself, when it is no longer tied to anything but the number, movement,
space, or time, or when speed is added to displacement.17 Concretely, a
weapon as such relates not to the Work model but to the Free-Action
model, with the assumption that the conditions of work are fulfilled else-
where. In short, from the point of view offeree, the tool is tied to a gravity-
displacement, weight-height system, and the weapon to a speed-perpetuum
mobile system (it is in this sense that it can be said that speed in itself is a
"weapons system").
   The very general primacy of the collective and machinic assemblage
over the technical element applies generally, for tools as for weapons.
Weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences. It has
often been remarked that a weapon is nothing outside of the combat organ-
ization it is bound up with. For example, "hoplite" weapons existed only by
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 399

virtue of the phalanx as a mutation of the war machine: the only new
weapon at the time, the two-handled shield, was created by this assem-
blage; the other weapons were preexistent, but in other combinations
where they had a different function, a different nature. 78 It is always the
assemblage that constitutes the weapons system. The lance and the sword
came into being in the Bronze Age only by virtue of the man-horse assem-
blage, which caused a lengthening of the dagger and pike, and made the
first infantry weapons, the morning star and the battle-ax, obsolete. The
stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new figure of the man-horse assemblage,
entailing a new type of lance and new weapons; and this man-horse-stirrup
constellation is itself variable, and has different effects depending on
whether it is bound up with the general conditions of nomadism, or later
readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism. The situation is
exactly the same for the tool: once again, everything depends on an organi-
zation of work, and variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing.
Thus the heavy plow exists as a specific tool only in a constellation where
"long open fields" predominate, where the horse tends to replace the ox as
draft animal, where the land begins to undergo triennial rotation, and
where the economy becomes communal. Beforehand, the heavy plow may
well have existed, but on the margins of other assemblages that did not
bring out its specificity, that left unexploited its differential character with
the scratch plow.79
    Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has
 nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no
 desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the efficiency, of
 an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into
 play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes
 them. Detienne has shown that the Greek phalanx was inseparable from a
 whole reversal of values, and from a passional mutation that drastically
 changed the relations between desire and the war machine. It is a case of
 man dismounting from the horse, and of the man-animal relation being
replaced by a relation between men in an infantry assemblage that paves
the way for the advent of the peasant-soldier, the citizen-soldier: the entire
Eros of war changes, a group homosexual Eros tends to replace the
 zoosexual Eros of the horseman. Undoubtedly, whenever a State appropri-
 ates the war machine, it tends to assimilate the education of the citizen to
the training of the worker to the apprenticeship of the soldier. But if it is
true that all assemblages are assemblages of desire, the question is whether
the assemblages of war and work, considered in themselves, do not funda-
mentally mobilize passions of different orders. Passions are effectuations
of desire that differ according to the assemblage: it is not the same justice or
the same cruelty, the same pity, etc. The work regime is inseparable from an
       400 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

organization and a development of Form, corresponding to which is the
formation of the subject. This is the passional regime of feeling as "the
form of the worker." Feeling implies an evaluation of matter and its resis-
tances, a direction (sens, also "meaning") to form and its developments, an
economy offeree and its displacements, an entire gravity. But the regime of
the war machine is on the contrary that of affects, which relate only to the
moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among ele-
ments. Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack,
whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects
are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools. There
is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in
mythology but also in the chanson degeste, and the chivalric novel or novel
of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons. From this stand-
point, the most absolute immobility, pure catatonia, is a part of the speed
vector, is carried by this vector, which links the petrification of the act to
the precipitation of movement. The knight sleeps on his mount, then
departs like an arrow. Kleist is the author who best integrated these sudden
catatonic fits, swoons, suspenses, with the utmost speeds of a war machine.
He presents us with a becoming-weapon of the technical element simulta-
neous to a becoming-affect of the passional element (the Penthesilea equa-
tion). The martial arts have always subordinated weapons to speed, and
above all to mental (absolute) speed; for this reason, they are also the arts of
suspense and immobility. The affect passes through both extremes. Thus
•the martial arts do not adhere to a code, as an affair of the State, but follow
 ways, which are so many paths of the affect; upon these ways, one learns to
 "unuse" weapons as much as one learns to use them, as if the power and cul-
tivation of the affect were the true goal of the assemblage, the weapon being
 only a provisory means. Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is
 proper to the war machine: the "not-doing" of the warrior, the undoing of
the subject. A movement of decoding runs through the war machine, while
 overcoding solders the tool to an organization of work and of the State (the
 tool is never unlearned; one can only compensate for its absence). It is true
 that the martial arts continually invoke the center of gravity and the rules
 for its displacement. That is because these ways are not the ultimate ones.
 However far they go, they are still in the domain of Being, and only trans-
 late absolute movements of another nature into the common space—those
 effectuated in the Void, not in nothingness, but in the smooth of the void
 where there is no longer any goal: attacks, counterattacks, and headlong
 plunges.80
    Still from the standpoint of the assemblage, there is an essential relation
 between tools and signs. That is because the work model that defines the
 tool belongs to the State apparatus. It has often been said that people in
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 401

primitive societies do not, strictly speaking, work, even if their activities
are very constrained and regulated; and the man of war, in his capacity as a
man of war, does not work either (the "labors" of Hercules assume submis-
sion to a king). The technical element becomes a tool when it is abstracted
from the territory and is applied to the earth as an object; but at the same
time, the sign ceases to be inscribed upon the body and is written upon an
immobile, objective matter. For there to be work, there must be a capture
of activity by the State apparatus, and a semiotization of activity by writ-
ing. Hence the affinity between the assemblages signs-tools, and signs of
writing-organization of work. Entirely different is the case of the weapon,
which is in an essential relation with jewelry. Jewelry has undergone so
many secondary adaptations that we no longer have a clear understanding
of what it is. But something lights up in our mind when we are told that
metalworking was the "barbarian," or nomad, art par excellence, and when
we see these masterpieces of minor art. These fibulas, these gold or silver
plaques, these pieces of jewelry, are attached to small movable objects; they
are not only easy to transport, but pertain to the object only as object in
motion. These plaques constitute traits of expression of pure speed, car-
ried on objects that are themselves mobile and moving. The relation
between them is not that of form-matter but of motif-support, where the
earth is no longer anything more than ground (sol), where there is no longer
even any ground at all because the support is as mobile as the motif. They
lend colors the speed of light, turning gold to red and silver to white light.
They are attached to the horse's harness, the sheath of the sword, the
warrior's garments, the handle of the weapon; they even decorate things
used only once, such as arrowheads. Regardless of the effort or toil they
imply, they are of the order of free action, related to pure mobility, and not
of the order of work with its conditions of gravity, resistance, and expendi-
ture. The ambulant smith links metalworking to the weapon, and vice
versa. Gold and silver have taken on many other functions but cannot be
understood apart from this nomadic contribution made by the war
machine, in which they are not matters but traits of expression appropriate
to weapons (the whole mythology of war not only subsists in money but is
the active factor in it). Jewels are the affects corresponding to weapons, that
are swept up by the same speed vector.
   Metalworking, jewelry making, ornamentation, even decoration, do not
form a writing, even though they have a power of abstraction that is in
every way equal to that of writing. But this power is assembled differently.
In the case of writing, the nomads had no need to create their own system;
they borrowed that of their sedentary imperial neighbors, who even fur-
nished them with a phonetic transcription of their languages.81 "The
goldsmith's and silversmith's is the barbarian art par excellence; filigree
       402 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

and gold and silver plating. . . . Scythian art, tied as it was to a nomadic and
warlike economy that both used and repudiated a commerce reserved for
foreigners, now moved toward this luxurious and decorative type of work.
The barbarians. .. did not need to possess or create a precise code, such as
for instance an elementary picto-ideographic one—still less a syllabic writ-
ing of their own, which would indeed have had to compete with the ones in
use among their more advanced neighbors. Toward the fourth and third
centuries B.C. the Scythian art of the Black Sea region thus tends naturally
toward a graphic schematization of its forms, which makes them more of a
linear ornamentation than a proto-writing."82 Of course, one may write on
jewelry, metal plaques, or even weapons, but only in the sense that one
applies a preexisting writing system to these matters. The case of runic writ-
ing is more troubling because its origins seem exclusively tied to jewelry,
fibulas, elements of metalworking, small movable objects. The point is
that in its early period runic writing had only a weak communication value
and a very restricted public function. Its secret character has led many to
interpret it as magical writing. Rather, it is an affective semiotic, compris-
ing in particular: (1) signatures, as marks of possession or fabrication, and
(2) short war or love messages. It constitutes a text that is "ornamental"
rather than scriptural, "an invention with little utility, half-aborted," a sub-
stitute writing. It only takes on the value of writing during a second period,
when monumental inscriptions appear, with the Danish reform of the
ninth century A.D., in connection with the State and work.83
    It may be objected that tools, weapons, signs, and jewelry in fact occur
everywhere, in a common sphere. But that is not the problem, any more
than it is to seek an origin in each case. It is a question of assigning assem-
blages, in other words, of determining the differential traits according to
which an element formally belongs to one assemblage rather than to
another. It could also be said that architecture and cooking have an appar-
 ent affinity with the State, whereas music and drugs have differential traits
that place them on the side of the nomadic war machine.84 // is therefore a
differential method that establishes the distinction between weapons and
 tools, from at least five points of view: the direction (sens) (projection-
 introception), the vector (speed-gravity), the model (free action-work), the
 expression (jewelry-signs), and the passional or desiring tonality (affect-
 feeling). Doubtless the State apparatus tends to bring uniformity to the
 regimes, by disciplining its armies, by making work a fundamental unit, in
 other words, by imposing its own traits. But it is not impossible for weap-
 ons and tools, if they are taken up by new assemblages of metamorphosis,
to enter other relations of alliance. The man of war may at times form peas-
 ant or worker alliances, but it is more frequent for a worker, industrial or
agricultural, to reinvent a war machine. Peasants made an important con-
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 403


tribution to the history of artillery during the Hussite wars, when Zizka
armed mobile fortresses made from oxcarts with portable cannons. A
worker-soldier, weapon-tool, sentiment-affect affinity marks the right
time, however fleeting, for revolutions and popular wars. There is a schizo-
phrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and toward free
action, a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for
peace, for obtaining peace. A counterattack and a resistance simultane-
ously. Everything is ambiguous. But we do not believe that Ernst Junger's
analyses are disqualified by this ambiguity when he portrays the "Rebel" as
a transhistorical figure drawing the Worker, on the one hand, and the Sol-
dier, on the other, down a shared line of flight where one says simultane-
ously "I seek a weapon" and "I am looking for a tool": Draw the line, or
what amounts to the same thing, cross the line, pass over the line, for the
line is only drawn by surpassing the line of separation.85 Undoubtedly,
nothing is more outmoded than the man of war: he has long since been
transformed into an entirely different character, the military man. And the
worker himself has undergone so many misadventures . . . And yet men of
war reappear, with many ambiguities: they are all those who know the use-
lessness of violence but who are adjacent to a war machine to be recreated,
one of active, revolutionary counterattacks. Workers also reappear who do
not believe in work but who are adjacent to a work machine to be recreated,
one of active resistance and technological liberation. They do not resusci-
tate old myths or archaic figures; they are the new figures of a transhistor-
ical assemblage (neither historical nor eternal, but untimely): the nomad
warrior and the ambulant worker. A somber caricature already precedes
them, the mercenary or mobile military adviser, and the technocrat or
transhumant analyst, CIA and IBM. But transhistorical figures must
defend themselves as much against old myths as against preestablished,
anticipatory disfigurations. "One does not go back to reconquer the myth,
one encounters it anew, when time quakes at its foundations under the
empire of extreme danger." Martial arts and state-of-the-art technologies
have value only because they create the possibility of bringing together
worker and warrior masses of a new type. The shared line of flight of the
weapon and the tool: a pure possibility, a mutation. There arise subterra-
nean, aerial, submarine technicians who belong more or less to the world
order, but who involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowl-
edge and action that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for
new assemblages. The borrowings between warfare and the military appa-
ratus, work and free action, always run in both directions, for a struggle that
is all the more varied.
  PROBLEM III. How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?
       404 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

  PROPOSITION VIII. Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily con-
    fluent with nomadism.
   The political, economic, and social regime of the peoples of the steppe
are less well known than their innovations in war, in the areas of offensive
and defensive weapons, composition or strategy, and technological ele-
ments (the saddle, stirrup, horseshoe, harness, etc.). History contests each
innovation but cannot succeed in effacing the nomad traces. What the
nomads invented was the man-animal-weapon, man-horse-bow assem-
blage. Through this assemblage of speed, the ages of metal are marked by
innovation. The socketed bronze battle-ax of the Hyksos and the iron
sword of the Hittites have been compared to miniature atomic bombs. It
has been possible to establish a rather precise periodization of the weapons
of the steppe, showing the alternation between heavy and light armament
(the Scythian type and the Sarmatian type), and their mixed forms. The
cast steel saber, often short and curved, a weapon for side attack with the
edge of the blade, envelops a different dynamic space than the forged iron
sword used for frontal attack with the point: it was the Scythians who
brought it to India and Persia, where the Arabs would later acquire it. It is
commonly agreed that the nomads lost their role as innovators with the
advent of firearms, in particular the cannon ("gunpowder overtook
them"). But it was not necessarily because they did not know how to use
them. Not only did armies like the Turkish army, whose nomadic tradi-
tions remained strong, develop extensive firepower, a new space, but addi-
tionally, and even more characteristically, light artillery was thoroughly
integrated into mobile formations of wagons, pirate ships, etc. If the can-
non marks a limit for the nomads, it is on the contrary because it implies an
economic investment that only a State apparatus can make (even commer-
cial cities do not suffice). The fact remains that for weapons other than fire-
arms, and even for the cannon, there is always a nomad on the horizon of a
given technological lineage***
    Obviously, each case is controversial, as demonstrated by the debates on
the stirrup.87 The problem is that it is generally difficult to distinguish
between what comes from the nomads as such, and what they receive from
the empire they communicate with, conquer, or integrate with. There are
so many gray areas, intermediaries, and combinations between an imper-
ial army and a nomad war machine that it is often the case that things origi-
nate in the empire. The example of the saber is typical, and unlike the
stirrup, there is no longer any doubt. Although it is true that the Scythians
were the propagators of the saber, introducing it to the Hindus, Persians,
and Arabs, they were also its first victims, they started off on the receiving
end; it was invented by the Chinese empire of the Ch'in and Han dynasties,
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 405

the exclusive master of steel casting or crucible steel.88 This is a good exam-
ple to illustrate the difficulties facing modern archaeologists and his-
torians. Even archaeologists are not immune from a certain hatred or
contempt for the nomads. In the case of the saber, where the facts already
speak sufficiently in favor of an imperial origin, the best of the commenta-
tors finds it fitting to add that the Scythians could not have invented it at
any rate—poor nomads that they were—and that crucible steel necessarily
came from a sedentary milieu. But why follow the very old, official Chinese
version according to which deserters from the imperial army revealed the
secrets to the Scythians? And what can "revealing the secret" mean if the
Scythians were incapable of putting it to use, and understood nothing of all
that? Blame the deserters, why don't you. You don't make an atomic bomb
with a secret, any more than you make a saber if you are incapable of repro-
ducing it, and of integrating it under different conditions, of transferring it
to other assemblages. Propagation and diffusion are fully a part of the line
of innovation; they mark a bend in it. On top of that, why say that crucible
steel is necessarily the property of sedentaries or imperial subjects, when it
is first of all the invention of metallurgists? It is assumed that these metal-
lurgists were necessarily controlled by a State apparatus; but they also had
to enjoy a certain technological autonomy, and social clandestinity, so that,
even controlled, they did not belong to the State any more than they were
themselves nomads. There were no deserters who betrayed the secret, but
rather metallurgists who communicated it and made its adaptation and
propagation possible: an entirely different kind of "betrayal." In the last
analysis, what makes the discussions so difficult (both in the controversial
case of the stirrup and in the definite case of the saber) are not only the prej-
udices about the nomads but also the absence of a sufficiently elaborated
concept of the technological lineage (what defines a technological line or
continuum, and its variable extension, from a given standpoint?).
    It would be useless to say that metallurgy is a science because it discovers
constant laws, for example, the melting point of a metal at all times and in
all places. For metallurgy is inseparable from several lines of variation: var-
iation between meteorites and indigenous metals; variation between ores
and proportions of metal; variation between alloys, natural and artificial;
variation between the operations performed upon a metal; variation
between the qualities that make a given operation possible, or that result
from a given operation (for example, twelve varieties of copper identified
and inventoried at Sumer by place of origin and degree of refinement).89
All of these variables can be grouped under two overall rubrics: singulari-
ties or spatiotemporal haecceities of different orders, and the operations
associated with them as processes of deformation or transformation;
affective qualities or traits of expression of different levels, corresponding to
       406 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

these singularities and operations (hardness, weight, color, etc.). Let us
return to the example of the saber, or rather of crucible steel. It implies the
actualization of a first singularity, namely, the melting of the iron at high
temperature; then a second singularity, the successive decarbonations; cor-
responding to these singularities are traits of expression—not only the
hardness, sharpness, and finish, but also the undulations or designs traced
by the crystallization and resulting from the internal structure of the cast
steel. The iron sword is associated with entirely different singularities
because it is forged and not cast or molded, quenched and not air cooled,
produced by the piece and not in number; its traits of expression are neces-
sarily very different because it pierces rather than hews, attacks from the
front rather than from the side; even the expressive designs are obtained in
an entirely different way, by inlay.90 We may speak of a machinic phylum, or
technological lineage, wherever we find a constellation of singularities,
prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations
converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression. If the singulari-
ties or operations diverge, in different materials or in the same material, we
must distinguish two different phyla: this is precisely the case for the iron
sword, descended from the dagger, and the steel saber, descended from the
knife. Each phylum has its own singularities and operations, its own quali-
ties and traits, which determine the relation of desire to the technical ele-
ment (the affects the saber "has" are not the same as those of the sword).
   But it is always possible to situate the analysis on the level of singulari-
ties that are prolongable from one phylum to another, and to tie the two
phyla together. At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single
machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the
flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits
of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as
natural: it is like the unity of human beings and Nature. But at the same
time, it is not realized in the here and now without dividing, differentiat-
ing. We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and
traits deducted from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a
way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage,
in this sense, is a veritable invention. Assemblages may group themselves
into extremely vast constellations constituting "cultures," or even "ages";
within these constellations, the assemblages still differentiate the phyla or
the flow, dividing it into so many different phylas, of a given order, on a
given level, and introducing selective discontinuities in the ideal continu-
ity of matter-movement. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct,
differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts
across them all, taking leave of one to pick up again in another, or making
them coexist. A certain singularity embedded in the flanks of the phylum,
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 407

for example, the chemistry of carbon, will be brought up to the surface by a
given assemblage that selects, organizes, invents it, and through which all
or part of the phylum passes, at a given place at a given time. We may distin-
guish in every case a number of very different lines. Some of them,
phylogenetic lines, travel long distances between assemblages of various ages
and cultures (from the blowgun to the cannon? from the prayer wheel
to the propeller? from the pot to the motor?); others, ontogenetic lines, are
internal to one assemblage and link up its various elements or else cause
one element to pass, often after a delay, into another assemblage of a differ-
ent nature but of the same culture or age (for example, the horseshoe, which
spread through agricultural assemblages). It is thus necessary to take into
account the selective action of the assemblages upon the phylum, and the
evolutionary reaction of the phylum as the subterranean thread that passes
from one assemblage to another, or quits an assemblage, draws it forward
and opens it up. Vital impulsel Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest
toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as
the model for technical evolution: a Universal Tendency, laden with all of
the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior
milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities
and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge,
invents.91 There is indeed a machinic phylum in variation that creates the
technical assemblages, whereas the assemblages invent the various phyla.
A technological lineage changes significantly according to whether one
draws it upon the phylum or inscribes it in the assemblages; but the two are
inseparable.
    So how are we to define this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this
matter-flow, this matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves
them? It is a destratified, deterritorialized matter. It seems to us that
Husserl brought thought a decisive step forward when he discovered a
region of vague and material essences (in other words, essences that are
vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed,
metric and formal, essences. We have seen that these vague essences are as
distinct from formed things as they are from formal essences. They con-
stitute fuzzy aggregates. They relate to a corporeality (materiality) that is
not to be confused either with an intelligible, formal essentiality or a sen-
sible, formed and perceived, thinghood. This corporeality has two char-
acteristics: on the one hand, it is inseparable from passages to the limit as
changes of state, from processes of deformation or transformation that oper-
ate in a space-time itself anexact and that act in the manner of events
(ablation, adjunction, projection . . .); on the other hand, it is inseparable
from expressive or intensive qualities, which can be higher or lower in
degree, and are produced in the manner of variable affects (resistance,
       408 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

hardness, weight, color . . .)• There is thus an ambulant coupling, events-
affects, which constitutes the vague corporeal essence and is distinct from
the sedentary linkage, "fixed essence-properties of the thing deriving
from the essence," "formal essence-formed thing." Doubtless Husserl had a
tendency to make the vague essence a kind of intermediary between the
essence and the sensible, between the thing and the concept, a little like the
Kantian schema. Is not roundness a schematic or vague essence, intermediary
between rounded sensible things and the conceptual essence of the circle? In
effect, roundness exists only as a threshold-affect (neither flat nor pointed)
and as a limit-process (becoming rounded), through sensible things and tech-
nical agents, millstone, lathe, wheel, spinning wheel socket, etc. But it is only
"intermediary" to the extent that what is intermediary is autonomous,
initially stretching itself between things, and between thoughts, to estab-
lish a whole new relation between thoughts and things, a vague identity
between the two.
    Certain distinctions proposed by Simondon can be compared to those
of Husserl. For Simondon exposes the technological insufficiency of the
matter-form model, in that it assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed
homogeneous. It is the idea of the law that assures the model's coherence,
since laws are what submit matter to this or that form, and conversely,
realize in matter a given property deduced from the form. But Simondon
demonstrates that the hylomorphic model leaves many things, active and
affective, by the wayside. On the one hand, to the formed or formable mat-
ter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying sin-
gularities or haecceities that are already like implicit forms that are
topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of
deformation: for example, the variable undulations and torsions of the
fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. On the other hand, to the
essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must
 add variable intensive affects, now resulting from the operation, now on the
contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous,
more or less elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrender-
ing to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a
materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses
is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos.
One addresses less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter
than material traits of expression constituting affects. Of course, it is
always possible to " translate" into a model that which escapes the model;
thus, one may link the materiality's power of variation to laws adapting a
fixed form and a constant matter to one another. But this cannot be done
without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables form the state of
continuous variation, in order to extract from them fixed points and con-
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 409

stant relations. Thus one throws the variables off, even changing the nature
of the equations, which cease to be immanent to matter-movement
(inequations, adequations). The question is not whether such a translation
is conceptually legitimate—it is—but what intuition gets lost in it. In
short, what Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model for is taking form
and matter to be two terms defined separately, like the ends of two half-
chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of
molding behind which there is a perpetually variable, continuous modula-
tion that it is no longer possible to grasp.92 The critique of the hylomorphic
schema is based on "the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of
medium and intermediary dimension," of energetic, molecular dimen-
sion—a space unto itself that deploys its materiality through matter, a
number unto itself that propels its traits through form.
    We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is ma-
teriality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in
movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and
traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-
flow can only be followed. Doubtless, the operation that consists in follow-
ing can be carried out in one place: an artisan who planes follows the wood,
the fibers of the wood, without changing location. But this way of following
is only one particular sequence in a more general process. For artisans are
obliged to follow in another way as well, in other words, to go find the wood
where it lies, and to find the wood with the right kind of fibers. Otherwise,
they must have it brought to them: it is only because merchants take care of
one segment of the journey in reverse that the artisans can avoid making
the trip themselves. But artisans are complete only if they are also prospec-
tors; and the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and arti-
sans already mutilates artisans in order to make "workers" of them. We will
therefore define the artisan as one who is determined in such a way as to
follow a flow of matter, a machinic phylum. The artisan is the itinerant, the
ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is
intuition in action. Of course, there are second-order itinerancies where it
is no longer a flow of matter that one prospects and follows, but, for exam-
ple, a market. Nevertheless, it is always a flow that is followed, even if the
flow is not always that of matter. And, above all, there are secondary
itinerancies, which derive from another "condition," even if they are nec-
essarily entailed by it. For example, a transhumant, whether a farmer or an
animal raiser, changes land after it is worn out, or else seasonally; but
transhumants only secondarily follow a land flow, because they undertake
a rotation meant from the start to return them to the point from which they
left, after the forest has regenerated, the land has rested, the weather has
changed. Transhumants do not follow a flow, they draw a circuit; they only
       410 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

follow the part of the flow that enters into the circuit, even an ever-wid-
ening one. Transhumants are therefore itinerant only consequentially, or
become itinerant only when their circuit of land or pasture has been
exhausted, or when the rotation has become so wide that the flows escape
the circuit. Even the merchant is a transhumant, to the extent that mercan-
tile flows are subordinated to the rotation between a point of departure and
a point of arrival (go get-bring back, import-export, buy-sell). Whatever
the reciprocal implications, there are considerable differences between a
flow and a circuit. The migrant, we have seen, is something else again. And
the nomad is not primarily defined as an itinerant or as a transhumant, nor
as a migrant, even though nomads become these consequentially. The pri-
mary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold a smooth space: it is
this aspect that determines them as nomad (essence). On their own
account, they will be transhumants, or itinerants, only by virtue of the
imperatives imposed by the smooth spaces. In short, whatever the de facto
mixes between nomadism, itinerancy, and transhumance, the primary
concept is different in the three cases (smooth space, matter-flow, rota-
tion). It is only on the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judg-
ment on the mix—on when it is produced, on the form in which it is
produced, and on the order in which it is produced.
    But in the course of the preceding discussion, we have wandered from
the question: Why is the machinic phylum, the flow of matter, essentially
metallic or metallurgical? Here again, it is only the distinct concept that
can give us an answer, in that it shows that there is a special, primary rela-
tion between itinerance and metallurgy (deterritorialization). However,
the examples we took from Husserl and Simondon concerned wood and
clay as well as metals. Besides, are there not flows of grass, water, herds,
which form so many phyla or matters in movement? It is easier for us to
answer these questions now. For it is as if metal and metallurgy imposed
upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried
in the other matters and operations. The difference is that elsewhere the
operations occur between two thresholds, one of which constitutes the
matter prepared for the operation, and the other the form to be incarnated
(for example, the clay and the mold). The hylomorphic model derives its
general value from this, since the incarnated form that marks the end of an
operation can serve as the matter for a new operation, but in a fixed order
marking a succession of thresholds. In metallurgy, on the other hand, the
operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic
materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deformation
or transformation overspills the form. 93 For example, quenching follows
forging and takes place after the form has been fixed. Or, to take another
example, in molding, the metallurgist in a sense works inside the mold. Or
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 411

again, steel that is melted and molded later undergoes a series of successive
decarbonations. Finally, metallurgy has the option of melting down and
reusing a matter to which it gives an ingot-form: the history of metal is
inseparable from this very particular form, which is not to be confused
with either a stock or a commodity; monetary value derives from it. More
generally, the metallurgical idea of the "reducer" expresses this double lib-
eration of a materiality in relation to a prepared matter, and of a transfor-
mation in relation to the form to be incarnated. Matter and form have
never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms
tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the var-
iability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous varia-
tion. If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not
only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to
bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of
form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a
widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy; the musical
smith was the first "transformer."94 In short, what metal and metallurgy
bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a mate-
rial vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or
covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model.
Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal
the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is
coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy.
Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are popu-
lated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is
everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter. The machinic phylum is
metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or
guidance device. And thought is born more from metal than from stone:
metallurgy is minor science in person, "vague" science or the phenom-
enology of matter. The prodigious idea of Nanorganic Life—the very same
idea Worringer considered the barbarian idea par excellence95—was the
invention, the intuition of metallurgy. Metal is neither a thing nor an
organism, but a body without organs. The "Northern, or Gothic, line" is
above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body. The relation
between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the sym-
bolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the
immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps
accompanying it.
   The first and primary itinerant is the artisan. But artisans are neither
hunters, farmers, nor animal raisers. Neither are they winnowers or pot-
ters, who only secondarily take up craft activity. Rather, artisans are those
who follow the matter-flow as pure productivity: therefore in mineral
       412 O 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

 form, and not in vegetable or animal form. They are not of the land, or of
the soil, but of the subsoil. Because metal is the pure productivity of matter,
those who follow metal are producers of objects par excellence. As demon-
 strated by V. Gordon Childe, the metallurgist is the first specialized arti-
 san, and in this respect forms a collective body (secret societies, guilds,
journeymen's associations). Artisans-metallurgists are itinerants because
 they follow the matter-flow of the subsoil. Of course metallurgists have
 relations with "the others," those of the soil, land, and sky. They have rela-
 tions with the farmers of the sedentary communities, and with the celestial
 functionaries of the empire who overcode those communities; in fact, they
 need them to survive, they depend on an imperial agricultural stockpile for
 their very sustenance.96 But in their work, they have relations with the for-
 est dwellers, and partially depend on them: they must establish their work-
 shops near the forest in order to obtain the necessary charcoal. In their
 space, they have relations with the nomads, since the subsoil unites the
ground (sol) of smooth space and the land of striated space: there are no
 mines in the alluvial valleys of the empire-dominated farmers; it is neces-
 sary to cross deserts, approach the mountains; and the question of control
over the mines always involves nomadic peoples. Every mine is a line of
flight that is in communication with smooth spaces—there are parallels
today in the problems with oil.
    Archaeology and history remain strangely silent on this question of the
 control over the mines. There have been empires with a strong metallurgi-
 cal organization that had no mines; the Near East lacked tin, so necessary
 for the fabrication of bronze. Large quantities of metal arrived in ingot
 form, and from very far away (for instance, tin from Spain or even from
 Cornwall). So complex a situation implies not only a strong imperial
bureaucracy and elaborate long-distance commercial circuits; it also
 implies a shifting politics, in which States confront an outside, in which
 very different peoples confront one another, or else reach some accommo-
 dation on particular aspects of the control of mines (extraction, charcoal,
 workshops, transportation). It is not enough to say that there are wars and
 mining expeditions; or to invoke "a Eurasian synthesis of the nomadic
 workshops from the approaches of China to the tip of Britanny," and
 remark that "the nomadic populations had been in contact with the princi-
 pal metallurgical centers of the ancient world since prehistoric times."97
 What is needed is a better knowledge of the nomads' relations with these
 centers, with the smiths they themselves employed or frequented, with
 properly metallurgical peoples or groups who were their neighbors. What
 was the situation in the Caucasus and in the Altai? In Spain and North
 Africa? Mines are a source of flow, mixture, and escape with few equiva-
 lents in history. Even when they are well controlled by an empire that owns
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 413

them (as in the Chinese and Roman empires), there is a major movement of
clandestine exploitation, and of miners' alliances either with nomad and
barbarian incursions or peasant revolts. The study of myths, and even eth-
 nographic considerations on the status of smiths, divert us from these
political questions. Mythology and ethnology do not have the right method
in this regard. It is too often asked how the others "react" to the smith, and
 as a result, one succumbs to the usual platitudes about the ambivalence of
feelings; it is said that the smith is simultaneously honored, feared, and
 scorned—more or less scorned among the nomads, more or less honored
 among the sedentaries.98 But this loses sight of the reasons for this situa-
tion, of the specificity of the smiths themselves, of the nonsymmetrical
relation they entertain with the nomads and the sedentaries, the type of
affects they invent (metallic affect). Before looking at the feelings of others
toward smiths, it is necessary to evaluate the smiths themselves as Other;
as such, they have different affective relations with the sedentaries and the
nomads.
    There are no nomadic or sedentary smiths. Smiths are ambulant, itiner-
ant. Particularly important in this respect is the way in which smiths live:
their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth
space of the nomad. Smiths may have a tent, they may have a house; they
inhabit them in the manner of an "ore bed" (gite, shelter, home, mineral
deposit), like metal itself, in the manner of a cave or a hole, a hut half or all
underground. They are cave dwellers not by nature but by artistry and
need." A splendid text by Elie Faure evokes the infernal progress of the
itinerant peoples of India as they bore holes in space and create the fantas-
tic forms corresponding to these breakthroughs, the vital forms of
nonorganic life: "There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain,
they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite;
in its shadows they lived, loved, worked, died, were born, and, three or four
centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed
the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hol-
lowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or
artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or
charming figures.. . . Here man confesses unresistingly his strength and his
nothingness. He does not exact the affirmation of a determined ideal from
form.... He extracts it rough from formlessness, according to the dictates
of the formless. He utilizes the indentations and accidents of the rock."100
Metallurgical India. Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them,
excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keep-
ing it smooth, turn the earth into swiss cheese. An image from the film
Strike [by Eisenstein] presents a holey space where a disturbing group of
       414 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE




  Holey Space

people are rising, each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field
mined in all directions. The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign
of the subsoil, passing through both the striated land of sedentary space
and the nomadic ground (sol) of smooth space without stopping at either
one, the vagabond sign of itinerancy, the double theft and double betrayal
of the metallurgist, who shuns agriculture at the same time as animal rais-
ing. Must we reserve the name Cainite for these metallurgical peoples who
haunt the depths of History? Prehistoric Europe was crisscrossed by the
battle-ax people, who came in off the steppes like a detached metallic
branch of the nomads, and the people known for their bell-shaped pottery,
the beaker people, originating in Andalusia, a detached branch of mega-
lithic agriculture.101 Strange peoples, dolicocephalics and brachycephalics
who mix and spread across all of Europe. Are they the ones who kept up the
mines, boring holes in European space from every direction, constituting
our European space?
   Smiths are not nomadic among the nomads and sedentary among the
sedentaries, nor half-nomadic among the nomads, half-sedentary among
sedentaries. Their relation to others results from their internal itinerancy,
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 415

from their vague essence, and not the reverse. It is in their specificity, it is
by virtue of their itinerancy, by virtue of their inventing a holey space, that
they necessarily communicate with the sedentaries and with the nomads
(and with others besides, with the transhumant forest dwellers). They are
in themselves double: a hybrid, an alloy, a twin formation. As Griaule says,
Dogon smiths are not "impure" but "mixed," and it is because they are
mixed that they are endogamous, that they do not intermarry with the
pure, who have a simplified progeny while they reconstitute a twin prog-
eny.102 Childe demonstrates that metallurgists are necessarily doubled,
that they exist two times, once as captured by and maintained within the
apparatus of the oriental empire, again in the Aegean world, where they
were much more mobile and much freer. But the two segments cannot be
separated, simply by relating each of them to their particular context. The
metallurgist belonging to an empire, the worker, presupposes a metallur-
gist-prospector, however far away; and the prospector ties in with a mer-
chant, who brings the metal to the first metallurgist. In addition, the metal
is worked on by each segment, and the ingot-form is common to them all:
we must imagine less separate segments than a chain of mobile workshops
constituting, from hole to hole, a line of variation, a gallery. Thus the met-
allurgists' relation to the nomads and the sedentaries also passes through
the relations they have with other metallurgists.103 This hybrid metallur-
gist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and
with the nomads at the same time. Holey space itself communicates with
smooth space and striated space. In effect, the machinic phylum or the
metallic line passes through all of the assemblages: nothing is more
deterritorialized than matter-movement. But it is not at all in the same
way, and the two communications are not symmetrical. Worringer, in the
domain of aesthetics, said that the abstract line took on two quite different
expressions, one in barbarian Gothic art, the other in the organic classical
art. Here, we would say that the phylum simultaneously has two different
modes of liaison: it is always connected to nomad space, whereas it conju-
gates with sedentary space. On the side of the nomadic assemblages and
war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean
passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the seden-
tary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put
the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate
together, plug the lines of flight, subordinate the technological operation to
the work model, impose upon the connections a whole regime of arbor-
escent conjunctions.
  AXIOM III. The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which
    itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.
       416 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE



                                  Content                 Expression

       Substance              Holey space                Smooth space
                            (machinic phylum
                             or matter-flow)

         Form                    Itinerant                Nomad war
                                 metallurgy                machine

  PROPOSITION IX. War does not necessarily have the battle as its object,
    and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as
    its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result
    (under certain conditions).
    We now come to three successive problems. First, is the battle the
"object" of war? But also, is war the "object" of the war machine? And
finally, to what extent is the war machine the "object" of the State appara-
tus? The ambiguity of the first two problems is certainly due to the term
"object," but implies their dependency on the third. We must nevertheless
approach these problems gradually, even if we are reduced to multiplying
examples. The first question, that of the battle, requires an immediate dis-
tinction to be made between two cases: when a battle is sought, and when it
is essentially avoided by the war machine. These two cases in no way coin-
cide with the offensive and the defensive. But war in the strict sense
(according to a conception of it that culminated in Foch) does seem to have
the battle as its object, whereas guerrilla warfare explicitly aims for the
nonbattle. However, the development of war into the war of movement,
and into total war, also places the notion of the battle in question, as much
from the offensive as the defensive points of view: the concept of the
nonbattle seems capable of expressing the speed of a flash attack, and the
counterspeed of an immediate response.104 Conversely, the development
of guerilla warfare implies a moment when, and forms under which, a bat-
tle must be effectively sought, in connection with exterior and interior
"support points." And it is true that guerrilla warfare and war proper are
constantly borrowing each other's methods and that the borrowings run
equally in both directions (for example, stress has often been laid on the
inspirations land-based guerrilla warfare received from maritime war). All
we can say is that the battle and the nonbattle are the double object of war,
according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the
defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare.
    That is why we push the question further back, asking if war itself is the
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 417

object of the war machine. It is not at all obvious. To the extent that war
(with or without the battle) aims for the annihilation or capitulation of
enemy forces, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object
(for example, the raid can be seen as another object, rather than as a partic-
ular form of war). But more generally, we have seen that the war machine
was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive
element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement
within this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its
sole and veritable positive object (nomos). Make the desert, the steppe,
grow; do not depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it
is because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of stri-
ation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as its
enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts as
its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine
becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form. The
Attila, or Genghis Khan, adventure clearly illustrates this progression
from the positive object to the negative object. Speaking like Aristotle, we
would say that war is neither the condition nor the object of the war
machine, but necessarily accompanies or completes it; speaking like
Derrida, we would say that war is the "supplement" of the war machine. It
may even happen that this supplementarity is comprehended through a
progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation. Such, for example, was the adven-
ture of Moses: leaving the Egyptian State behind, launching into the desert,
he begins by forming a war machine, on the inspiration of the old past of
the nomadic Hebrews and on the advice of his father-in-law, who came
from the nomads. This is the machine of the Just, already a war machine,
but one that does not yet have war as its object. Moses realizes, little by lit-
tle, in stages, that war is the necessary supplement of that machine, because
it encounters or must cross cities and States, because it must send ahead
spies (armed observation), then perhaps take things to extremes (war of
annihilation). Then the Jewish people experience doubt, and fear that they
are not strong enough; but Moses also doubts, he shrinks before the revela-
tion of this supplement. And it will be Joshua, not Moses, who is charged
with waging war. Finally, speaking like Kant, we would say that the relation
between war and the war machine is necessary but "synthetic" (Yahweh is
necessary for the synthesis).
   The question of war, in turn, is pushed further back and is subordinated
to the relations between the war machine and the State apparatus. States
were not the first to make war: war, of course, is not a phenomenon one
finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence. But war is not
the object of States, quite the contrary. The most archaic States do not even
seem to have had a war machine, and their domination, as we will see, was
       418 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

based on other agencies (comprising, rather, the police and prisons). It is
safe to assume that the intervention of an extrinsic or nomad war machine
that counterattacked and destroyed the archaic but powerful States was
one of the mysterious reasons for their sudden annihilation. But the State
learns fast. One of the biggest questions from the point of view of universal
history is: How will the State appropriate the war machine, that is, consti-
tute one for itself, in conformity with its size, its domination, and its aims?
And with what risks? (What we call a military institution, or army, is not at
all the war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by
the State.) In order to grasp the paradoxical character of such an undertak-
ing, we must recapitulate the hypothesis in its entirety. (1) The war
machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its primary
object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the
sense that it is determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and
city-form with which it collides. (2) When the State appropriates the war
machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is
afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else
expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes
exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it. (3) It is pre-
cisely after the war machine has been appropriated by the State in this way
that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its "analytic"
object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object). In short, it is at
one and the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war
machine, that the war machine takes war as its object, and that war be-
comes subordinated to the aims of the State.
    This question of appropriation is so varied historically that it is neces-
sary to distinguish between several kinds of problems. The first concerns
the possibility of the operation: it is precisely because war is only the sup-
plementary or synthetic object of the nomad war machine that it experi-
ences the hesitation that proves fatal to it, and that the State apparatus for
its part is able to lay hold of war and thus turn the war machine back against
the nomads. The hesitation of the nomad is legendary: What is to be done
with the lands conquered and crossed? Return them to the desert, to the
steppe, to open pastureland? Or let a State apparatus survive that is capa-
ble of exploiting them directly, at the risk of becoming, sooner or later, sim-
ply a new dynasty of that apparatus: sooner or later because Genghis Khan
and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrat-
ing themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time main-
taining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were
subordinated. That was their genius, the Pax Mongolica. It remains the
case that the integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one
of the most powerful factors of appropriation of the war machine by the
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 419

State apparatus: the inevitable danger to which the nomads succumbed.
But there is another danger as well, the one threatening the State when it
appropriates the war machine (all States have felt the weight of this danger,
as well as the risks this appropriation represents for them). Tamerlane is
the extreme example. He was not Genghis Khan's successor but his exact
opposite: it was Tamerlane who constructed a fantastic war machine
turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to
erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it
existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine.105 Turn-
ing the war machine back against the nomads may constitute for the State a
danger as great as that presented by nomads directing the war machine
against States.
   A second type of problem concerns the concrete forms the appropria-
tion of the war machine takes: Mercenary or territorial? A professional
army or a conscripted army? A special body or national recruiting? Not
only are these formulas not equivalent, but there are all the possible mixes
between them. Perhaps the most relevant distinction to make, or the most
general one, would be: Is there merely "encastment" of the war machine,
or "appropriation" proper? The capture of the war machine by the State
apparatus took place following two paths, by encasting a society of warri-
ors (who arrived from without or arose from within), or on the contrary
by constituting it in accordance with rules corresponding to civil society
as a whole. Once again, there is passage and transition from one formula
to another. Last, the third type of problem concerns the means of appro-
priation. We must consider from this standpoint the various data pertain-
ing to the fundamental aspects of the State apparatus: territoriality, work
or public works, taxation. The constitution of a military institution or an
army necessarily implies a territorialization of the war machine, in other
words, the granting of land ("colonial" or domestic), which can take very
diverse forms. But at the same time, fiscal regimes determine both the
nature of the services and taxes owed by the beneficiary warriors, and
especially the kind of civil tax to which all or part of society is subject for
the maintenance of the army. And the State enterprise of public works
must be reorganized along the lines of a "laying out of the territory" in
which the army plays a determining role, not only in the case of fortresses
and fortified cities, but also in strategic communication, the logistical
structure, the industrial infrastructure, etc. (the role and function of the
Engineer in this form of appropriation).106
   Let us compare this hypothesis as a whole with Clausewitz's formula:
"War is the continuation of politics by other means." As we know, this for-
mula is itself extracted from a theoretical and practical, historic and
transhistoric, aggregate whose parts are interconnected. (1) There is a pure
       420 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

concept of war as absolute, unconditioned war, an Idea not given in experi-
ence (bring down or "upset" the enemy, who is assumed to have no other
determination, with no political, economic, or social considerations
entering in). (2) What is given are real wars as submitted to State aims;
States are better or worse "conductors" in relation to absolute war, and in
any case condition its realization in experience. (3) Real wars swing
between two poles, both subject to State politics: the war of annihilation,
which can escalate to total war (depending on the objectives of the annihi-
lation) and tends to approach the unconditioned concept via an ascent to
extremes; and limited war, which is no "less" a war, but one that effects a
descent toward limiting conditions, and can de-escalate to mere "armed
observation."107
    In the first place, the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real
wars seems to us to be of great importance, but only if a different criterion
than that of Clausewitz is applied. The pure Idea is not that of the abstract
elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine that does not have
war as its object and that only entertains a potential or supplementary syn-
thetic relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to
us to be one case of real war among others, as in Clausewitz, but on the con-
trary the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its
own objects, space, and composition of the nomos. Nevertheless it is still
an Idea, and it is necessary to retain the concept of the pure Idea, even
though this war machine was realized by the nomads. It is the nomads,
rather, who remain an abstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual,
and for several reasons: first, because the elements of nomadism, as we
have seen, enter into de facto mixes with elements of migration, itinerancy,
and transhumance; this does not affect the purity of the concept, but intro-
duces always mixed objects, or combinations of space and composition,
which react back upon the war machine from the beginning. Second, even
in the purity of its concept, the nomad war machine necessarily effectuates
its synthetic relation with war as supplement, uncovered and developed in
opposition to the State-form, the destruction of which is at issue. But that is
exactly it; it does not effectuate this supplementary object or this synthetic
relation without the State, for its part, finding the opportunity to appropri-
ate the war machine, and the means of making war the direct object of this
turned-around machine (thus the integration of the nomad into the State is
a vector traversing nomadism from the very beginning, from the first act of
war against the State).
    The question is therefore less the realization of war than the appropria-
tion of the war machine. It is at the same time that the State apparatus
appropriates the war machine, subordinates it to its "political" aims, and
gives it war as its direct object. And it is one and the same historical ten-
        1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 421

dency that causes State to evolve from a triple point of view: going from fig-
ures of encastment to forms of appropriation proper, going from limited
war to so-called total war, and transforming the relation between aim and
object. The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to
capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital in equip-
ment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capi-
tal in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker
and as victim of war).108 Total war is not only a war of annihilation but
arises when annihilation takes as its "center" not only the enemy army, or
the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy. The fact that
this double investment can be made only under prior conditions of limited
war illustrates the irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to
develop total war.' °9 It is therefore true that total war remains subordinated
to State political aims and merely realizes the maximal conditions of the
appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus. But it is also true
that when total war becomes the object of the appropriated war machine,
then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the aim
enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction. This
explains Clausewitz's vacillation when he asserts at one point that total war
remains a war conditioned by the political aim of States, and at another
that it tends to effectuate the Idea of unconditioned war. In effect, the aim
remains essentially political and determined as such by the State, but the
object itself has become unlimited. We could say that the appropriation
has changed direction, or rather that States tend to unleash, reconstitute,
an immense war machine of which they are no longer anything more than
the opposable or apposed parts. This worldwide war machine, which in a
way "reissues" from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of
fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than
itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure
is that of a war machine that takes peace as its obj ect directly, as the peace of
Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now
claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itself is surpassed,
toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken
charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than
objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the point at which
Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say that poli-
tics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invert the
order of the words as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is neces-
sary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the States, hav-
ing appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to their aims,
reimpart a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates the
States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions.110
       422 D 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

   Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have
watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction
story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying
than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of
local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of
enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the "unspeci-
fied enemy"; we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place, so
that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice. Yet the very conditions
that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, con-
stant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital,
continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unfore-
seen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant
machines. The definition of the Unspecified Enemy testifies to this: "mul-
tiform, maneuvering and omnipresent... of the moral, political, subver-
sive or economic order, etc.," the unassignable material Saboteur or
human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."' The first theoretical
element of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied
meanings, and this is precisely because the war machine has an extremely
variable relation to war itself. The war machine is not uniformly defined,
and comprises something other than increasing quantities of force. We
have tried to define two poles of the war machine: at one pole, it takes war
for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the
universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here—limited war, total war,
worldwide organization—war represents not at all the supposed essence of
the war machine but only, whatever the machine's power, either the set of
conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so
far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of
which the States themselves are now only parts. The other pole seemed to be
the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower "quantities,"
has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the com-
position of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At
this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supple-
mentary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the
worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.
   We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the
nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that
the war machine as such was invented, even if it displayed from the begin-
ning all of the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition with the
other pole, and swing toward it from the start. However, in conformity with
the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an "ideological," scientific,
or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent
to which it draws, in relation to zphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative
       1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 423

line of flight, a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who
defines this constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation that
defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine. If
guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in
conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the
more necessary for being merely "supplementary": they can make war only
on the condition that they simultaneously create something else, if only new
nonorganic social relations. The difference between the two poles is great,
even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that
creates, or turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency that
constitutes itself, even piece by piece, or turns into a plan(e) of organiza-
tion and domination. We are constantly reminded that there is communi-
cation between these two lines or planes, that each takes nourishment from
the other, borrows from the other: the worst of the world war machines
reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the
earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its
smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth. The question is
not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of the quanti-
ties that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according
to the two poles. War machines take shape against the apparatuses that
appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they
bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses
of capture or domination.
     13. 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture




  PROPOSITION X. The State and its poles.
Let us return to Dumezil's theses: (1) Political sovereignty has two poles,
the fearsome magician-emperor, operating by capture, bonds, knots, and
nets, and the jurist-priest-king, proceeding by treaties, pacts, contracts (the
couples Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr, Wotan-Tiwaz, Uranus-Zeus, Romulus-
Numa . . .); (2) the war function is exterior to political sovereignty and is
equally distinct from both its poles (Indra or Thor or Tullus Hostilius. . .)•'
    1. The State apparatus is thus animated by a curious rhythm, which is
first of all a great mystery: that of the Binder-Gods or magic emperors,
One-Eyed men emitting from their single eye signs that capture, tie knots at
a distance. The jurist-kings, on the other hand, are One-Armed men who
raise their single arm as an element of right and technology, the law and the
tool. In the succession of men of State, look always for the One-Eyed and
the One-Armed, Horatius Codes and Mucius Scaevola (de Gaulle and
                                     424
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 425

Pompidou?). This is not to say that one has exclusive right to signs, the
other to tools. The fearsome emperor is already the master of large-scale
works; the wise king takes up and transforms the entire regime of signs.
What it means is that the combination, signs-tools, constitutes the differ-
ential trait of political sovereignty, or the complementarity of the State.2
    2. Of course, the two men of State are always getting mixed up in affairs
of war. But either the magic emperor sends to battle warriors who are not
his own, whom he takes into his service by capture; or, more important,
when he makes his appearance on the battlefield, he suspends the use of
weapons, he throws his net over the warriors, his single eye throws them
into petrified catatonia, "he binds without combat," he encasts the war
machine (this State capture is not to be confused with the captures of war:
conquests, prisoners, spoils).3 As for the other pole, the jurist-king is a great
organizer of war; but he gives it laws, lays out a field for it, makes it princi-
pled, imposes a discipline upon it, subordinates it to political ends. He
turns the war machine into a military institution, he appropriates the war
machine for the State apparatus.4 We should not be too hasty in speaking of
a softening, a humanization: on the contrary, this is perhaps when the war
machine has only one remaining object, that of war itself. Violence is found
everywhere, but under different regimes and economies. The violence of
the magic emperor: his knot, his net, his way of "making his moves once
and for all" ... The violence of the jurist-king: his way of beginning over
again every move, always with attention to ends, alliances, and laws... All
things considered, the violence of the war machine might appear softer and
more supple than that of the State apparatus because it does not yet have
war as its "object," because it eludes both poles of the State. That is why the
man of war, in his exteriority, is always protesting the alliances and pacts of
the jurist-king, as well as severing the bonds of the magic emperor. He is
equally an unbinder and a betrayer: twice the traitor.5 He has another econ-
omy, another cruelty, but also another justice, another pity. To the signs
and tools of the State, the man of war opposes his weapons and jewelry.
Once again, who could say which is better and which is worse? It is true that
war kills, and hideously mutilates. But it is especially true after the State
has appropriated the war machine. Above all, the State apparatus makes
the mutilation, and even death, come first. It needs them preaccom-
plished, for people to be born that way, crippled and zombielike. The myth
of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth and not a war myth. Muti-
lation is a consequence of war, but it is a necessary condition, a presupposi-
tion of the State apparatus and the organization of work (hence the native
infirmity not only of the worker but also of the man of State himself,
whether of the One-Eyed or the One-Armed type): "The brutal exhibition
of severed flesh shocked me.... Wasn't it an integral part of technical per-
                   426 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

fection and the intoxication of it. . . ? Mankind has waged wars since the
world began, but I can't remember one single example in the Iliad where
the loss of an arm or a leg is reported. Mythology reserved mutilation for
monsters, for human beasts of the race of Tantalus or Procrustes.... It is an
optical illusion to attribute these mutilations to accidents. Actually, acci-
dents are the result of mutilations that took place long ago in the embryo of
our world; and the increase in amputations is one of the symptoms bearing
witness to the triumph of the morality of the scalpel. The loss occurred long
before it was visibly taken into account."6 The State apparatus needs, at its
summit as at its base, predisabled people, preexisting amputees, the still-
born, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed.
   Thus there is a tempting three-part hypothesis: the war machine is
"between" the two poles of political sovereignty and assures the passage
from one pole to the other. It is indeed in that order, 1-2-3, that things seem
to present themselves in myth and history. Take two versions of the One-
Eyed and the One-Armed gods analyzed by Dumezil: (1) the god Odin, who
has a single eye, ties up the wolf of war and holds him in his magic bond; (2)
but the wolf is wary and has at its disposal all its power of exteriority; (3) the
god Tyr gives the wolf a legal security by leaving one of his hands in the
wolfs mouth so the wolf can bite it off if it does not succeed in extricating
itself from the bond. (1) Horatius Codes, the One-Eyed, using only his
face, his grimace and magic power, prevents the Etruscan commander
from attacking Rome; (2) the war commander then decides to lay siege; (3)
Mucius Scaevola takes a political tack, offering his hand as a security in
order to persuade the warrior that it would be best to abandon the siege and
conclude a pact.
   In an entirely different, historical, context, Marcel Detienne suggests an
analogous schema in three moments for ancient Greece: (1) The magic sov-
ereign, the "Master of Truth," has at his disposal a war machine that doubt-
less does not originate with him, and which enjoys a relative autonomy
within his empire; (2) this class of warriors has its own rules, defined by
"isonomy," an isotropic space, and a "milieu" (war spoils are in the middle
[au milieu], he who speaks places himself in the middle of the assembly);
this is another space, the rules are different from those of the sovereign,
who captures and speaks from on high; (3) the hoplite reform, the ground-
work for which was laid in the warrior class, spread throughout the social
body, promoting the formation of an army of citizen-soldiers; at the same
time, the last vestiges of the imperial pole of sovereignty were replaced by
the juridical pole of the city-state (with isonomy as its law, and isotropy as
its space).7 Thus in every case, the war machine seems to intervene
"between" the two poles of the State apparatus, assuring and necessitating
the passage from one to the other.
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 427

    We cannot, however, assign this schema a causal meaning (the authors
cited do not do so). In the first place, the war machine explains nothing; for
it is either exterior to the State, and directed against it; or else it already
belongs to the State, encasted and appropriated, and presupposes it. If the
war machine has a part in the evolution of the State, it is therefore necessar-
ily in conjunction with other internal factors. And this is the second point:
if there is an evolution of the State, the second pole, the evolved pole, must
be in resonance with the first, it must continually recharge it in some way,
and the State must have only one milieu of interiority; in other words, it
must have a unity of composition, in spite of all the differences in organiza-
tion and development among States. It is even necessary for each State to
have both poles, as the essential moments of its existence, even though the
organization of the two varies. Third, if we call this interior essence or this
unity of the State "capture," we must say that the words "magic capture"
describe the situation well because it always appears as preaccomplished
and self-presupposing; but how is this capture to be explained then, if it
leads back to no distinct assignable cause? That is why theses on the origin
of the State are always tautological. At times, exogenous factors, tied to war
and the war machine, are invoked; at times endogenous factors, thought to
engender private property, money, etc.; and at times specific factors,
thought to determine the formation of "public functions." All three of
these theses are found in Engels, in relation to a conception of the diversity
of the roads to Domination. But they beg the question. War produces the
State only if at least one of the two parts is a preexistent State; and the
organization of war is a State factor only if that organization is a part of the
State. Either the State has no war machine (and has policemen and jailers
before having soldiers), or else it has one, but in the form of a military insti-
tution or public function.8 Similarly, private property presupposes State
public property, it slips through its net; and money presupposes taxation. It
is even more difficult to see how public functions could have existed before
the State they imply. We are always brought back to the idea of a State that
comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the uncon-
ditioned Urstaat.
   PROPOSITION XI. Which comes first?
   We shall call the first pole of capture imperial or despotic. It corresponds
to Marx's Asiatic formation. Archaeology discovers it everywhere, often
lost in oblivion, at the horizon of all systems or States—not only in Asia,
but also in Africa, America, Greece, Rome. Immemorial Urstaat, dating as
far back as Neolithic times, and perhaps farther still. Following the Marxist
description: a State apparatus is erected upon the primitive agricultural
communities, which already have lineal-territorial codes; but it overcodes
                   428 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

them, submitting them to the power of a despotic emperor, the sole and
transcendent public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the stock,
the organizer of large-scale works (surplus labor), the source of public func-
tions and bureaucracy. This is the paradigm of the bond, the knot. Such is
the regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier. It is a system of
machinic enslavement the first "megamachine" in the strict sense, to use
Mumford's term. A prodigious success in a single stroke; other States will
be mere runts measured against this model. The emperor-despot is not a
king or a tyrant; these will come into existence only as a function of private
property once it has arisen.9 In the imperial regime, everything is public:
ownership of land is communal, each individual is an owner only insofar as
he or she is a member of the community; the eminent property of the des-
pot is that of the supposed Unity of the communities; and the functionaries
themselves have land only if it comes with their position (although the
position may be hereditary). Money may exist, notably in the form of the
tax that the functionaries owe the emperor, but it is not used for buying-
selling, since land does not exist as an alienable commodity. This is the
regime of the nexum, the bond: something is lent or even given without a
transfer of ownership, without private appropriation, and the compensa-
tion for it does not come in the form of interest or profit for the donor but
rather as a "rent" that accrues to him, accompanying the lending of some-
thing for another's use or the granting of revenue.10
   Marx, the historian, and Childe, the archaeologist, are in agreement on
the following point: the archaic imperial State, which steps in to overcode
agricultural communities, presupposes at least a certain level of devel-
opment of these communities' productive forces since there must be a
potential surplus capable of constituting a State stock, of supporting a spe-
cialized handicrafts class (metallurgy), and of progressively giving rise to
public functions. That is why Marx links the archaic State to a certain
"mode of production." However, the origin of these Neolithic States is still
being pushed back in time. What is at issue when the existence of near-
Paleolithic empires is conjectured is not simply the quantity of time; the
qualitative problem changes. Catal Hiiyiik, in Anatolia, makes possible a
singularly reinforced imperial paradigm: it is a stock of uncultivated seeds
and relatively tame animals from different territories that performs, and
makes it possible to perform, at first by chance, hybridizations and selec-
tions/ram which agriculture and small-scale animal raising arise.11 It is
easy to see the significance of this change in the givens of the problem. It is
no longer the stock that presupposes a potential surplus, but the other way
around. It is no longer the State that presupposes advanced agricultural
communities and developed forces of production. On the contrary, the
State is established directly in a milieu of hunter-gatherers having no prior
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 429

agriculture or metallurgy, and it is the State that creates agriculture, animal
raising, and metallurgy; it does so first on its own soil, then imposes them
upon the surrounding world. It is not the country that progressively creates
the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that pre-
supposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that
makes production a "mode." The last reasons for presuming a progressive
development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a
chance intermixing. The "state and urban revolution" may be Paleolithic,
not Neolithic as Childe believed.
   Evolutionism has been challenged in many different ways (zigzag move-
ments, stages skipped here or there, irreducible overall breaks). We have
seen in particular how Pierre Clastres tried to shatter the evolutionist
framework by means of the following two theses: (1) societies termed prim-
itive are not societies without a State, in the sense that they failed to reach a
certain stage, but are counter-State societies organizing mechanisms that
ward off the State-form, which make its crystallization impossible; (2)
when the State arises, it is in the form of an irreducible break, since it is not
the result of a progressive development of the forces of production (even
the "Neolithic revolution" cannot be defined in terms of an economic
infrastructure).12 However, one does not depart from evolutionism by
establishing a clean break. In the final state of his work, Clastres main-
tained the preexistence and autarky of counter-State societies, and attrib-
uted their workings to an overmysterious presentiment of what they
warded off and did not yet exist. More generally, one marvels at the bizarre
indifference that ethnology manifests for archaeology. It seems as though
ethnologists, fenced off in their respective territories, are willing to com-
pare their territories in an abstract, or structural, way, if it comes to that,
but refuse to set them against archaeological territories that would com-
promise their autarky. They take snapshots of their primitives but rule out
in advance the coexistence and superposition of the two maps, the
ethnographical and the archaeological. Catal Hiiyiik, however, would have
had a zone of influence extending two thousand miles; how can the ever-
recurring problem of the relation of coexistence between primitive socie-
ties and empires, even those of Paleolithic times, be left unattended to? As
long as archaeology is passed over, the question of the relation between eth-
nology and history is reduced to an idealist confrontation, and fails to
wrest itself from the absurd theme of society without history, or society
against history. Everything is not of the State precisely because there have
been States always and everywhere. Not only does writing presuppose the
State, but so do speech and language. The self-sufficiency, autarky, inde-
pendence, preexistence of primitive communities, is an ethnological
dream: not that these communities necessarily depend on States, but they
                  430 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

coexist with them in a complex network. It is plausible that "from the
beginning" primitive societies have maintained distant ties to one another,
not just short-range ones, and that these ties were channeled through
States, even if States effected only a partial and local capture of them.
Speech communities and languages, independently of writing, do not
define closed groups of people who understand one another but primarily
determine relations between groups who do not understand one another: if
there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the
same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communi-
cation. And in primitive societies there are as many tendencies that "seek"
the State, as many vectors working in the direction of the State, as there are
movements within the State or outside it that tend to stray from it or guard
themselves against it, or else to stimulate its evolution, or else already to
abolish it: everything coexists, in perpetual interaction.
   Economic evolutionism is an impossibility; even a ramified evolu-
tion, "gatherers—hunters—animal breeders—farmers-industrialists," is
hardly believable. An evolutionary ethnology is no better: "nomads—
seminomads—sedentaries." Nor an ecological evolutionism: "dispersed
autarky of local groups—villages and small towns—cities—States." All we
need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all of evolutionism
crumble; for example, it is the city that creates agriculture, without going
through small towns. To take another example, the nomads do not precede
the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects
sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads.
Griaznov has shown in this connection that the most ancient nomadism
can be accurately attributed only to populations that abandoned their
semiurban sedentarity, or their primitive itineration, to set off nomadiz-
ing.13 It is under these conditions that the nomads invented the war
machine, as that which occupies or fills nomad space and opposes towns
and States, which its tendency is to abolish. Primitive peoples already had
mechanisms of war that converged to prevent the State formation; but
these mechanisms change when they gain autonomy in the form of a spe-
cific nomadism machine that strikes back against the States. We cannot,
however, infer from this even a zigzag evolution that would go from primi-
tive peoples to States, from States to nomad war machines; or at least the
zigzagging is not successive but passes through the loci of a topology that
defines primitive societies here, States there, and elsewhere war machines.
And even when the State appropriates the war machine, once again chang-
ing its nature, it is a phenomenon of transport, of transfer, and not one of
evolution. The nomad exists only in becoming, and in interaction; the
same goes for the primitive. All history does is to translate a coexistence
of becomings into a succession. And collectivities can be transhumant,
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 431

semisedentary, sedentary, or nomadic, without by the same token being
preparatory stages for the State, which is already there, elsewhere or
beside.
    Can it at least be said that the hunter-gatherers are the "true" primitives
and remain in spite of it all the basis or minimal presupposition of the State
formation, however far back in time we place it? This point of view can be
maintained only at the price of a very inadequate conception of causality.
And it is true that the human sciences, with their materialist, evolutionary,
and even dialectical schemas, lag behind the richness and complexity of
causal relations in physics, or even in biology. Physics and biology present
us with reverse causalities that are without finality but testify nonetheless
to an action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past, for
example, the convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply
an inversion of time. More than breaks or zigzags, it is these reverse causal-
ities that shatter evolution. Similarly, in the present context, it is not ade-
quate to say that the Neolithic or even Paleolithic State, once it appeared,
reacted back on the surrounding world of the hunter-gatherers; it was
already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive socie-
ties warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not
reach without self-destructing. These societies simultaneously have vec-
tors moving in the direction of the State, mechanisms warding it off, and a
point of convergence that is repelled, set outside, as fast as it is approached.
To ward off is also to anticipate. Of course, it is not at all in the same way
that the State appears in existence, and that it preexists in the capacity of a
warded-off limit; hence its irreducible contingency. But in order to give a
positive meaning to the idea of a "presentiment" of what does not yet exist,
it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in
action, in a different form than that of its existence. Once it has appeared,
the State reacts back on the hunter-gatherers, imposing upon them agricul-
ture, animal raising, an extensive division of labor, etc.; it acts, therefore, in
the form of a centrifugal or divergent wave. But before appearing, the State
already acts in the form of the convergent or centripetal wave of the hunter-
gatherers, a wave that cancels itself out precisely at the point of convergence
marking the inversion of signs or the appearance of the State (hence the
functional and intrinsic instability of these primitive societies).14 It is nec-
essary from this standpoint to conceptualize the contemporaneousness or
coexistence of the two inverse movements, of the two directions of
time—of the primitive peoples "before" the State, and of the State "after"
the primitive peoples—as if the two waves that seem to us to exclude or suc-
ceed each other unfolded simultaneously in an "archaeological," micropo-
litical, micrological, molecular field.
    There exist collective mechanisms that simultaneously ward off and
                  432 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

anticipate the formation of a central power. The appearance of a central
power is thus a function of a threshold or degree beyond which what is
anticipated takes on consistency or fails to, and what is conjured away
ceases to be so and arrives. This threshold of consistency, or of constraint,
is not evolutionary but rather coexists with what has yet to cross it. More-
over, a distinction must be made between different thresholds of consis-
tency: the town and the State, however complementary, are not the same
thing. The "urban revolution" and the "state revolution" may coincide but
do not meld. In both cases, there is a central power, but it does not assume
the same figure. Certain authors have made a distinction between the pala-
tial or imperial system (temple-palace), and the urban, town system. In
both cases there is a town, but in one case the town is an outgrowth of the
palace or temple, and in the other case the palace, the temple, is a concre-
tion of the town. In one case, the town par excellence is the capital, and in
the other it is the metropolis. Sumer already attests to a town solution, as
opposed to the imperial solution of Egypt. But to an even greater extent, it
was the Mediterranean world, with the Pelasgians, Phoenicians, Greeks,
Carthaginians, that created an urban fabric distinct from the imperial
organisms of the Orient.15 Once again, the question is one not of evolution
but of two thresholds of consistency that are themselves coexistent. They
differ in several respects.
    The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function
of circulation, and of circuits; it is a remarkable point on the circuits that
create it, and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something
must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polariza-
tion of matter, inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass
through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of
transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with
other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization, because what-
ever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized enough to enter the
network, to submit to the polarization, to follow the circuit of urban and
road receding. The maximum deterritorialization appears in the tendency
of maritime and commercial towns to separate off from the backcountry,
from the countryside (Athens, Carthage, Venice). The commercial charac-
ter of the town has often been emphasized, but the commerce in question is
also spiritual, as in a network of monasteries or temple-cities. Towns are
circuit-points of every kind, which enter into counterpoint along horizon-
tal lines; they effect a complete but local, town-by-town, integration. Each
one constitutes a central power, but it is a power of polarization or of the
middle (milieu), of forced coordination. That is why this kind of power has
egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, demo-
cratic, oligarchic, aristocratic. Town power invents the idea of the magis-
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 433

trature, which is very different from the State civil-service sector (fonction-
nariat).16 Who can say where the greatest civil violence resides?
    The State indeed proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of intracon-
sistency. It makes points resonate together, points that are not necessarily
already town-poles but very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, lin-
guistic, moral, economic, technological particularities. It makes the town
resonate with the countryside. It operates by stratification; in other words,
it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines in
a dimension of depth. In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts off
their relations with other elements, which become exterior, it inhibits,
slows down, or controls those relations; if the State has a circuit of its own,
it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon resonance, it is a zone of
recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder of the network, even if in
order to do so it must exert even stricter controls over its relations with that
remainder. The question is not to find out whether what is retained is natu-
ral or artificial (boundaries), because in any event there is deterritorializa-
tion. But in this case deterritorialization is a result of the territory itself
being taken as an object, as a material to stratify, to make resonate. Thus
the central power of the State is hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service
sector; the center is not in the middle (au milieu), but on top, because the
only way it can recombine what it isolates is through subordination. Of
course, there is a multiplicity of States no less than of towns, but it is not the
same type of multiplicity: there are as many States as there are vertical
cross sections in a dimension of depth, each separated from the others,
whereas the town is inseparable from the horizontal network of towns.
Each State is a global (not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance
(not of frequency), an operation of the stratification of the territory (not of
the polarization of the milieu).
    It is possible to reconstruct how primitive societies warded off both
thresholds while at the same time anticipating them. Levi-Strauss has
shown that the same villages are susceptible to two presentations, one
segmentary and egalitarian, the other encompassing and hierarchized.
These are like two potentials, one anticipating a central point common to
two horizontal segments, the other anticipating a central point external to
a straight line.17 Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they
even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points
from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mecha-
nisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a
higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles
are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through
which to communicate.18 This is the sense in which primitive societies
have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold.
                   434 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

   If we now turn our attention to the two thresholds of consistency, it is
clear that they imply a deterritorialization in relation to the primitive ter-
ritorial codes. It is futile to ask which came first, the city or the State, the
urban or state revolution, because the two are in reciprocal presupposi-
tion. Both the melodic lines of the towns and the harmonic cross sections
of the States are necessary to effect the striation of space. The only ques-
tion that arises is the possibility that there may be an inverse relation at
the heart of this reciprocity. For although the archaic imperial State nec-
essarily included towns of considerable size, they remained more or less
strictly subordinated to the State, depending on how complete the State's
monopoly over foreign trade was. On the other hand, the town tended to
break free when the State's overcoding itself provoked decoded flows. A
decoding was coupled with the deterritorialization, and amplified it; the
necessary receding was then achieved through a certain autonomy of the
towns, or else directly through corporative and commercial towns freed
from the State-form. Thus towns arose that no longer had a connection to
their own land, because they assured the trade between empires, or better,
constituted on their own a free commercial network with other towns.
There is therefore an adventure specific to towns in the zones where the
most intense decoding occurs, for example, the ancient Aegean world or
the Western world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Could it not
be said that capitalism is the fruit of the towns, and arises when an urban
receding tends to replace State overcoding? This, however, was not the
case. The towns did not create capitalism. The banking and commercial
towns, being unproductive and indifferent to the backcountry, did not
perform a receding without also inhibiting the general conjunction of
decoded flows. If it is true that they anticipated capitalism, they in turn
did not anticipate it without also warding it off. They do not cross this
new threshold. Thus it is necessary to expand the hypothesis of mecha-
nisms both anticipatory and inhibiting: these mechanisms are at play not
only in primitive societies but also in the conflict of towns "against" the
State and "against" capitalism. Finally, it was through the State-form and
not the town-form that capitalism triumphed; this occurred when the
Western States became models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded
flows, and in that way resubjugated the towns. As Braudel says, there were
"always two runners, the state and the town"—two forms and two speeds
of deterritorialization—and "the state usually won. . . . everywhere in
Europe, it disciplined the towns with instinctive relentlessness, whether
or not it used violence.. . . [The states] caught up with the forward gallop
of the towns."19 But the relation is a reciprocal one: if it is the modern
State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus rea-
lized is an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single City,
                  7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 435

megalopolis, or "megamachine" of which the States are parts, or neigh-
borhoods.
    We define social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of
production (these on the contrary depend on the processes). Thus primi-
tive societies are defined by mechanisms of prevention-anticipation; State
societies are defined by apparatuses of capture; urban societies, by instru-
ments of polarization; nomadic societies, by war machines; and finally
international, or rather ecumenical, organizations are defined by the
encompassment of heterogeneous social formations. But precisely because
these processes are variables of coexistence that are the object of a social
topology, the various corresponding formations are coexistent. And they
coexist in two fashions, extrinsically and intrinsically. Primitive societies
cannot ward off the formation of an empire or State without anticipating it,
and they cannot anticipate it without its already being there, forming part
of their horizon. And States cannot effect a capture unless what is captured
coexists, resists in primitive societies, or escapes under new forms, as
towns or war machines. . . The numerical composition of the war machine
is superposed upon the primitive lineal organization and simultaneously
opposes the geometric organization of the State and the physical organiza-
tion of the town. It is this extrinsic coexistence—interaction—that is
brought to its own expression in international aggregates. For these obvi-
ously did not wait for capitalism before forming: as early as Neolithic
times, even Paleolithic, we find traces of ecumenical organizations that tes-
tify to the existence of long-distance trade, and simultaneously cut across
the most varied of social formations (as we have seen in the case of metal-
lurgy). The problem of diffusion, or of diffusionism, is badly formulated if
one assumes a center at which the diffusion would begin. Diffusion occurs
only through the placing in communication of potentials of very different
orders: all diffusion happens in the in-between, goes between, like every-
thing that "grows" of the rhizome type. An international ecumenical
organization does not proceed from an imperial center that imposes itself
upon and homogenizes an exterior milieu; neither is it reducible to rela-
tions between formations of the same order, between States, for example
(the League of Nations, the United Nations). On the contrary, it constitutes
an intermediate milieu between the different coexistent orders. Therefore
it is not exclusively commercial or economic, but is also religious, artistic,
etc. From this standpoint, we shall call an international organization any-
thing that has the capacity to move through diverse social formations
simultaneously: States, towns, deserts, war machines, primitive societies.
The great commercial formations in history do not simply have city-poles,
but also primitive, imperial, and nomadic segments through which they
pass, perhaps issuing out again in another form. Samir Amin is totally cor-
                   436 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

rect in saying that there can be no economic theory of international rela-
tions, even economic ones, because they sit astride heterogeneous forma-
tions.20 The point of departure for ecumenical organization is not a State,
even an imperial one; the imperial State is only one part of it, and it consti-
tutes a part of it in its own mode, according to its own order, which consists
in capturing everything it can. It does not proceed by progressive homoge-
nization, or by totalization, but by the taking on of consistency or the con-
solidation of the diverse as such. For example, monotheistic religion is
distinguished from territorial worship by its pretension to universality. But
this pretension is not homogenizing, it makes itself felt only by spreading
everywhere; this was the case with Christianity, which became imperial
and urban, but not without giving rise to bands, deserts, war machines of
its own.21 Similarly, there is no artistic movement that does not have its
towns and empires, but also its nomads, bands, and primitives.
   It might be objected that, at least in the case of capitalism, international
economic relations, and at the limit all international relations, tend toward
the homogenization of social formations. One could cite not only the cold
and concerted destruction of primitive societies but also the fall of the last
despotic formations, for example, the Ottoman Empire, which met capi-
talist demands with too much resistance and inertia. This objection, how-
ever, is only partially accurate. To the extent that capitalism constitutes an
axiomatic (production for the market), all States and all social formations
tend to become isomorphic in their capacity as models of realization: there
is but one centered world market, the capitalist one, in which even the
so-called socialist countries participate. Worldwide organization thus
ceases to pass "between" heterogeneous formations since it assures the
isomorphy of those formations. But it would be wrong to confuse
isomorphy with homogeneity. For one thing, isomorphy allows, and even
incites, a great heterogeneity among States (democratic, totalitarian, and,
especially, "socialist" States are not facades). For another thing, the
international capitalist axiomatic effectively assures the isomorphy of
the diverse formations only where the domestic market is developing and
expanding, in other words, in "the center." But it tolerates, in fact it
requires, a certain peripheral polymorphy, to the extent that it is not satu-
rated, to the extent that it actively repels its own limits;22 this explains the
existence, at the periphery, of heteromorphic social formations, which cer-
tainly do not constitute vestiges or transitional forms since they realize an
ultramodern capitalist production (oil, mines, plantations, industrial
equipment, steel, chemistry), but which are nonetheless precapitalist, or
extracapitalist, owing to other aspects of their production and to the forced
inadequacy of their domestic market in relation to the world market.23
When international organization becomes the capitalist axiomatic, it con-
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 437

tinues to imply a heterogeneity of social formations, it gives rise to and
organizes its "Third World."
   There is not only an external coexistence of formations but also an
intrinsic coexistence of machinic processes. Each process can also function
at a "power" other than its own; it can be taken up by a power correspond-
ing to another process. The State as apparatus of capture has a power of
appropriation; but this power does not consist solely in capturing all that it
can, all that is possible, of a matter defined as phylum. The apparatus of
capture also appropriates the war machine, the instruments of polariza-
tion, and the anticipation-prevention mechanisms. This is to say, con-
versely, that anticipation-prevention mechanisms have a high power of
transference: they are at work not only in primitive societies, but move into
the towns that ward off the State-form, into the States that ward off capital-
ism, into capitalism itself, insofar as it wards off and repels its own limits.
And they are not satisfied to switch over to other powers but form new focal
points of resistance and contagion, as we have seen in the case of "band"
phenomena, which have their own towns, their own brand of international-
ism, etc. Similarly, war machines have a power of metamorphosis, which of
course allows them to be captured by States, but also to resist that capture
and rise up again in other forms, with other "objects" besides war (revolu-
tion?). Each power is a force of deterritorialization that can go along with
the others or go against them (even primitive societies have their vectors of
deterritorialization). Each process can switch over to other powers, but
also subordinate other processes to its own power.
   PROPOSITION XII. Capture.
   Is it possible to conceive of an "exchange" between separate primitive
groups, independent of any reference to such notions as stock, labor, and
commodity? It seems that a modified marginalism provides a basis for a
hypothesis. For the interest of marginalism resides not in its economic the-
ory, which is extremely weak, but in a logical power that makes Jevons, for
example, a kind of Lewis Carroll of economics. Take two abstract groups,
one of which (A) gives seeds and receives axes, while the other (B) does the
opposite. What is the collective evaluation of the objects based on? It is
based on the idea of the last objects received, or rather receivable, on each
side. By "last" or "marginal" we must understand not the most recent, nor
the final, but rather the penultimate, the next to the last, in other words, the
last one before the apparent exchange loses its appeal for the exchangers, or
forces them to modify their respective assemblages, to enter another
assemblage. We will consider that the farmer-gatherer group A, which
receives axes, has an "idea" of the number of axes that would force it to
change assemblage; and the manufacturing group B, of the quantity of
                   438 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

seeds that would force it to change assemblage. We may say, then, that the
seed-ax relation is determined by the last quantity of seeds (for group B)
corresponding to the last ax (for group A). The last as the object of a collec-
tive evaluation determines the value of the entire series. It marks the exact
point at which the assemblage must reproduce itself, begin a new operation
period or a new cycle, lodge itself on another territory, and beyond which
the assemblage could not continue as such. This is indeed a next-to-the-
last, a penultimate, since it comes before the ultimate. The ultimate is
when the assemblage must change its nature: B would have to plant the
excess seeds. A would have to increase the rhythm of its own plantings and
remain on the same land.
    We can now posit a conceptual difference between the "limit" and the
"threshold": the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary
rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change.
It is an economic given of every enterprise to include an evaluation of the
limit beyond which the enterprise would have to modify its structure.
Marginalism claims to demonstrate the frequency of this penultimate
mechanism: it applies not only to the last exchangeable objects but also to
the last producible object, or the last producer him- or herself, the marginal
or limit-producer before the assemblage changes.24 This is an economics of
everyday life. For example, what does an alcoholic call the last glass? The
alcoholic makes a subjective evaluation of how much he or she can tolerate.
What can be tolerated is precisely the limit at which, as the alcoholic sees it,
he or she will be able to start over again (after a rest, a pause . . . ) . But
beyond that limit there lies a threshold that would cause the alcoholic to
change assemblage: it would change either the nature of the drinks or the
customary places and hours of the drinking. Or worse yet, the alcoholic
would enter a suicidal assemblage, or a medical, hospital assemblage, etc.
It is of little importance that the alcoholic may be fooling him- or herself, or
makes a very ambiguous use of the theme "I'm going to stop," the theme of
the last one. What counts is the existence of a spontaneous marginal crite-
rion and marginalist evaluation determining the value of the entire series
of "glasses." The same goes for having the last wordin a domestic-squabble
assemblage. Both partners evaluate from the start the volume or density of
the last word that would give them the advantage and conclude the discus-
sion, marking the end of an operation period or cycle of the assemblage,
allowing it to start all over again. Both calculate their words in accordance
with their evaluation of this last word, and the vaguely agreed time for it to
come. And beyond the last (penultimate) word there lie still other words,
this time final words that would cause them to enter another assemblage,
divorce, for example, because they would have overstepped "bounds." The
same could be said for the last love. Proust has shown how a love can be ori-
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 439

ented toward its own limit, its own margin: it repeats its own ending. A new
love follows, so that each love is serial, so that there is a series of loves.
But once again, "beyond" lies the ultimate, at the point where the assem-
blage changes, where the assemblage of love is superseded by an artis-
tic assemblage—the Work to be written, which is the problem Proust
tackles...
   Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the
value of the last receivable object (limit-object), and the apparent equiva-
lence derives from that. The equalization results from the two heterogene-
ous series, the exchange or communication results from two monologues
(palabre). There is neither exchange value nor use value but rather an eval-
uation of the last by both parties (a calculation of the risk involved in cross-
ing the limit), an anticipation-evaluation that takes into account the ritual
character as well as the utilitarian, the serial character as well as the
exchangist. The evaluation of the limit is there from the start in both
groups, and already governs the first "exchange" between them. Of course
there is groping in the dark; the evaluation is inseparable from a collective
feeling out. But it does not bear on the quantity of social labor but on the
idea of the last on both sides; the speed with which it is accomplished var-
ies, but it is always done faster than the time necessary effectively to arrive
at the last object, or even to pass from one operation to another.25 This is
the sense in which the evaluation is essentially anticipatory, that it is
already present in the first terms of the series. It can be seen that marginal
utility (pertaining to the last objects receivable on both sides) is relative not
to an abstractly posited stock but to the respective assemblages of the two
groups. Pareto was moving in this direction when he spoke of "ophelimity"
rather than of marginal utility.26 The issue is one of desirability as an assem-
blage component: every group desires according to the value of the last
receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage.
And every assemblage has two sides, the machining of bodies or objects,
and group enunciation. The evaluation of the last is the collective enuncia-
tion to which the entire series of objects corresponds; in other words, it is an
assemblage cycle or operation period. Exchangist primitive groups thus
appear to be serial groups. Theirs is a special regime, even with respect to
violence. For even violence can be submitted to a marginal ritual treat-
ment, that is, to an evaluation of the "last violence" insofar as it impreg-
nates the entire series of blows (beyond which another regime of violence
would begin). We previously defined primitive societies by the existence of
anticipation-prevention mechanisms. Now we can see more clearly how
these mechanisms are constituted and distributed: it is the evaluation of
the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards
off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage).
                   440 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

   The threshold comes "after" the limit, "after" the last receivable objects:
it marks the moment when the apparent exchange is no longer of interest.
We believe that it is precisely at this moment that stockpiling begins; be-
forehand, there may be exchange granaries, granaries specifically for
exchange purposes, but there is no stock in the strict sense. Exchange does
not assume a preexistent stock, it assumes only a certain "elasticity." Stock-
piling begins only once exchange has lost its interest, its desirability for
both parties. Additionally, conditions must exist giving stockpiling an
interest in its own right, a desirability of its own (otherwise, the objects
would be destroyed or depleted rather than stockpiled: depletion is the
means by which primitive groups ward off the stock and maintain their
assemblage). The stock depends on a new type of assemblage. The expres-
sions "after," "new," "to be superseded" are doubtless very ambiguous. The
threshold is in fact already there, but outside the limit, which is satisfied to
place the threshold at a distance, keep it at a distance. The problem is to
know what this other assemblage is that gives the stock an actual interest, a
desirability. The stock seems to us to have a necessary correlate: either the
coexistence of simultaneously exploited territories, or a succession of exploi-
tations on one and the same territory. It is at this point that the territories
form a Land, are superseded by a Land. This is the assemblage that neces-
sarily includes stockpiling, and which constitutes in the first case an exten-
sive system of cultivation, in the second case an intensive system of
cultivation (following Jane Jacobs's paradigm). The way in which the
stock-threshold differs from the exchange-limit is now clear: primitive
assemblages of hunter-gatherers have an operation period defined by the
exploitation of a territory; the law is one of temporal succession because
the assemblage perseveres only by switching territories at the conclusion of
each operation period (itinerancy, itineration); and within each operation
period there is a repetition or temporal series that tends toward the last
object as an "index," as the marginal or limit-object of the territory (this
iteration will govern the apparent exchange). On the other hand, in the
other assemblage, in the stock assemblage, the law is one of spatial coexis-
tence and concerns the simultaneous exploitation of different territories;
or, when the exploitation is successive, the succession of operation periods
bears on one and the same territory; and in the framework of each opera-
tion period or exploitation the force of serial iteration is superseded by a
power of symmetry, reflection, and global comparison. In solely descrip-
tive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant, or territorial
assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary, global, or Land
assemblages (which operate by overcoding).
    Ground rent, in its abstract model, appears precisely when a compari-
son is drawn between different simultaneously exploited territories, or
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 441

between the successive exploitations of the same territory. The worst land
(or the poorest exploitation) bears no rent, but it makes it so that the other
soils do bear rent, "produce" it in a comparative way.27 A stock is what per-
mits the yields to be compared (the same planting on different soils, or
various successive plantings on the same soil). The category of the last con-
firms once again its economic importance, but it has totally changed mean-
ing: it no longer designates the end point of a self-fulfilling movement but
the center of symmetry for two movements, one of which is descending and
the other ascending; it no longer designates the limit of an ordinal series
but the lowest element in a cardinal set, that set's threshold—the least fer-
tile land in the set of simultaneously exploited lands.28 Ground rent
homogenizes, equalizes different conditions of productivity by linking the
excess of the highest conditions of productivity over the lowest to a land-
owner: since the price (profit included) is established on the basis of the
least productive land, rent taps the surplus profit accruing to the best lands;
it taps "the difference between the product of two equal amounts of capital
and labor."29 This is the very model of an apparatus of capture, inseparable
from a process of relative deterritorialization. The land as the object of
agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people
being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed
among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility
of plots of equal surface area). That is why the earth, unlike other elements,
forms the basis of a striation, proceeding by geometry, symmetry, and com-
parison. The other elements, water, air, wind, and subsoil, cannot be stri-
ated and for that very reason bear rent only by virtue of their emplacement,
in other words, as a function of the land.30 The land has two potentialities
of deterritorialization: (1) its differences in quality are comparable to one
another, from the standpoint of a quantity establishing a correspondence
between them and exploitable pieces of land; (2) the set of exploited lands
is appropriable, as opposed to exterior unclaimed land, from the stand-
point of a monopoly that fixes the landowner or -owners.31 The second
potentiality is the necessary condition for the first. Both were warded off
by the territory's territorialization of the earth but are now effectuated in
the agricultural assemblage thanks to stockpiling, by means of a deter-
ritorialization of the territory. Land as compared and appropriated ex-
tracts from the territories a center of convergence located outside them; the
land is an idea of the town.
    Rent is not the only apparatus of capture. The stock has as its correlate
not only the land, from the double point of view of the comparison of lands
and the monopolistic appropriation of land; it has work as another corre-
late, from the double point of view of the comparison of activities and the
monopolistic appropriation of labor (surplus labor). Once again, it is by
                   442 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

virtue of the stock that activities of the "free action" type come to be com-
pared, linked, and subordinated to a common and homogeneous quantity
called labor. Not only does labor concern the stock—either its constitu-
tion, conservation, reconstitution, or utilization—but labor itself is stock-
piled activity, just as the worker is a stockpiled "actant." Moreover, even
when labor is clearly separated from surplus labor, they cannot be held to
be independent: there is no so-called necessary labor, and beyond that sur-
plus labor. Labor and surplus labor are strictly the same thing; the first term
is applied to the quantitative comparison of activities, the second to the
monopolistic appropriation of labor by the entrepreneur (and no longer
the landowner). As we have seen, even when they are distinct and separate,
there is no labor that is not predicated on surplus labor. Surplus labor is not
that which exceeds labor; on the contrary, labor is that which is subtracted
from surplus labor and presupposes it. It is only in this context that one
may speak of labor value, and of an evaluation bearing on the quantity of
social labor, whereas primitive groups were under a regime of free action or
activity in continuous variation. Since it depends on surplus labor and sur-
plus value, entrepreneurial profit is just as much an apparatus of capture as
proprietary rent: not only does surplus labor capture labor, and
landownership the earth, but labor and surplus labor are the apparatus of
capture of activity, just as the comparison of lands and the appropriation of
land are the apparatus of capture of the territory.32
   Finally, there is a third apparatus of capture in addition to rent and
profit: taxation. To understand this third form, and its creative range, we
must first determine the internal relation upon which the commodity
depends. Edouard Will has shown, in relation to the Greek city and in par-
ticular the Corinthian tyranny, that money derived not from exchange, the
commodity, or the demands of commerce, but from taxation, which first
introduces the possibility of an equivalence money = goods or services and
which makes money a general equivalent. In effect, money is a correlate of
the stock; it is a subset of the stock in that it can be constituted by any object
that can be preserved over the long term. In the case of Corinth, metal
money was first distributed to the "poor" (in their capacity as producers),
who used it to by land rights; it thus passed into the hands of the "rich," on
the condition that it not stop there, that everyone, rich and poor, pay a tax,
the poor in goods or services, the rich in money, such that an equivalence
money-goods and services was established.33 We will return to the signifi-
cance of this reference to rich and poor in the already late case of Corinth. But
beyond the context and particularities of this example, money is
always distributed by an apparatus of power under conditions of conserva-
tion, circulation, and turnover, so that an equivalence goods-services-
money can be established. We therefore do not believe in a succession.
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 443

according to which labor rent would come first, followed by rent in kind,
followed by money rent.34 It is directly in taxation that the equivalence and
simultaneity of the three develop. As a general rule, it is taxation that
monetarizes the economy; it is taxation that creates money, and it neces-
sarily creates it in motion, in circulation, with turnover, and also in a corre-
spondence with services and goods in the current of that circulation. The
State finds in taxation the means for foreign trade, insofar as it appropri-
ates that trade. Yet it is not from trade but from taxation that the money-
form derives.35 And the money-form thus derived from taxation makes
possible a monopolistic appropriation of outside exchange by the State
(monetarized trade). Everything is different in the regime of exchanges.
We are no longer in the "primitive" situation where exchange is carried out
indirectly, subjectively, through the respective equalization of the last
receivable objects (the law of demand). Of course, exchange remains what
it is in essence, that is to say, unequal, productive of an equalization result-
ing from inequality: but this time there is direct comparison, objective
pricing, and monetary equalization (the law of supply). It is through taxa-
tion that goods and services come to be like commodities, and the com-
modity comes to be measured and equalized by money. That is why, even
today, the meaning and impact of taxation appear in what is called indirect
taxation, in other words, a tax that is included in the price and influences
the value of the commodity, independent of and outside the market.36
However, the indirect tax is not simply an additional element that is tacked
onto prices and inflates them. It is only the index or expression of a deeper
movement, in which the tax constitutes the first layer of an "objective"
price, the monetary magnet to which the other elements—price, rent, and
profit—add on and adhere, converging in the same apparatus of capture. It
was a great moment in capitalism when the capitalists realized that taxa-
tion could be productive, that it could be particularly favorable to profits
and even to rents. But as with indirect taxation, this is a favorable case; it
should not obscure an even deeper and more archaic accord, a convergence
and essential identity between three aspects of a single apparatus. A three-
headed apparatus of capture, a "trinity formula" derived from that of
Marx (although it distributes things differently):37
                                  LAND
                          (as opposed to territory)
           a) Direct comparison of lands, dif-                Rent
              ferential rent;                            The Landowner
           b) Monopolistic appropriation of
              land, absolute rent.
                  444 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

                                  WORK
                          (as opposed to activity)
Stock      a) Direct comparison of activities,             Profit
              labor;                                  The Entrepreneur
           b) Monopolistic appropriation of
              labor, surplus labor.

                                 MONEY
                         (as opposed to exchange)
           a) Direct comparison of the objects
              exchanged, the commodity;                   Taxation
           b) Monopolistic appropriation of the          The Banker
              means of comparison, the issu-
              ance of currency.

    1. The stock has three simultaneous aspects: land and seeds, tools,
money. Land is stockpiled territory, the tool is stockpiled activity, and
money is stockpiled exchange. But the stock does not come from either ter-
ritories, activities, or exchanges. It marks another assemblage; it comes
from that other assemblage.
   2. That assemblage is the "megamachine," or the apparatus of capture,
the archaic empire. It functions in three modes, which correspond to the
three aspects of the stock: rent, profit, taxation. And the three modes con-
verge and coincide in it, in an agency of overcoding (or signifiance): the
despot, at once the eminent landowner, entrepreneur of large-scale proj-
ects, and master of taxes and prices. This is like three capitalizations of
power, or three articulations of "capital."
   3. What forms the apparatus of capture are two operations always
found in the convergent modes: direct comparison and monopolistic
appropriation. And the comparison always presupposes the appropria-
tion: labor presupposes surplus labor; differential rent presupposes abso-
lute rent; commercial money presupposes taxation. The apparatus of
capture constitutes a general space of comparison and a mobile center of
appropriation. This is a white wall/black hole system of the kind that, as we
have seen, constitutes the face of the despot. A point of resonance circu-
lates in a space of comparison and constitutes that space as it circulates.
That is what distinguishes the State apparatus from primitive mecha-
nisms, with their noncoexistent territories and nonresonating centers.
What begins with the State or the apparatus of capture is a general
semiology that overcodes the primitive semiotic systems. Instead of traits
of expression that follow a machinic phylum and wed it in a distribution of
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 445

singularities, the State constitutes a form of expression that subjugates the
phylum: the phylum or matter is no longer anything more than an equa-
lized, homogenized, compared content, while expression becomes a form
of resonance or appropriation. Apparatus of capture—the semiological
operation par excellence... (In this sense, the associationist philosophers
were not wrong in explaining political power by operations of the mind
dependent upon the association of ideas.)
    Bernard Schmitt has proposed a model of the apparatus of capture that
takes into account the operations of comparison and appropriation. This
model admittedly revolves around money as a capitalist economics. But it
seems to be based on abstract principles that transcend these limits.38
   A. The point of departure is an undivided flow that has yet to be ap-
propriated or compared, a "pure availability," "nonpossession and non-
wealth": this is precisely what occurs when banks create money, but taken
more generally it is the establishment of the stock, which is the creation of
an undivided flow.
    B. The undivided flow becomes divided to the extent it is allocated to
the "factors," distributed to the "factors." There is only one kind of factor,
the immediate producers. We could call them the "poor" and say that the
flow is distributed among the poor. But this would be inaccurate because
there are no preexistent "rich." What counts, the important thing, is that
the producers do not yet acquire possession of what is distributed to them,
and that what is distributed to them is not yet wealth: remuneration
assumes neither comparison and appropriation, nor buying-selling; it is
much more an operation of the nexum type. There is only equality between
set B and set A, between the distributed set and the undivided set. The dis-
tributed set could be called nominal wage; nominal wages are the form of
expression of the entire undivided set ("the entire nominal expression," or
as it is often put, "the expression of total national income"). This is the
point at which the apparatus of capture becomes semiological.
   C. Thus it cannot even be said that wages, conceived as distribution,
remuneration, constitute a purchase; on the contrary, purchasing power
derives from wages: "The remuneration of the producers is not a purchase,
it is the operation by which purchasing becomes possible in a second
moment, when money begins to exercise its new power." It is after it has
been distributed that set B becomes wealth, or acquires a comparative
power, in relation to something else entirely. This something else is the
determinate set of the goods that have been produced and are thus purchas-
able. At first heterogeneous to goods and products, money later becomes a
good homogeneous to the products it can buy; it acquires a purchasing
power that is extinguished with the real purchase. Or more generally,
between the two sets, the distributed set B and the set of real goods C, there
                  446 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

is established a correspondence, a comparison ("the power of acquisition is
created in direct conjunction with the set of real productions").
    D. This is where the mystery or the magic resides, in a kind of disjunc-
tion. For if we call B' the comparative set, in other words, the set placed in
correspondence with the real goods, we see that it is necessarily smaller
than the distributed set. B' is necessarily smaller than B: even if we assume
that purchasing power has available to it all of the objects produced during
a given period, the distributed set is always greater than the set that is used
or compared, meaning that the immediate producers are able to convert
only a portion of the distributed set. Real wages are only a portion of nomi-
nal wages; similarly, "useful" labor is only a portion of labor, and "utilized"
land is only a portion of the land that has been distributed. We shall call
Capture this difference or excess constitutive of profit, surplus labor, or the
surplus product: "Nominal wages include everything, but the wage-earners
retain only the income they succeed in converting into goods; they lose the
income siphoned off by the enterprises." It can be said that the whole was in
fact distributed to the "poor"; the poor, however, find themselves extorted
of everything they do not succeed in converting in the course of this strange
race: the capture effects an inversion of the wave or of the divisible flow. It
is precisely capture that is the object of monopolistic appropriation. And
this appropriation (by the "rich") does not come after: it is included in
nominal wages, while eluding real wages. It is between the two, it inserts
itself between the distribution without possession and the conversion by
correspondence or comparison; it expresses the difference in power
between the two sets, between B' and B. In the end, there is no mystery at
all: the mechanism of capture contributes from the outset to the constitution
of the aggregate upon which the capture is effectuated.
    This schema, according to its author, is very difficult to understand, and
yet it is operative. It consists in bringing into relief an abstract machine of
capture or of extortion by presenting a very specific "order of reasons." For
example, remuneration is not itself a purchase since purchasing power
derives from it. As Schmitt says, there is neither thief nor victim, for the
producer only loses what he does not have and has no chance of acquiring:
as in seventeenth-century philosophy, there are negations but not priva-
tion .. . And everything coexists in this logical apparatus of capture. Any
succession is purely logical: the capture in itself appears between B and C,
but exists as well between A and B, between C and A; it impregnates the
entire apparatus, it acts as a nonlocalizable liaison for the system. The
same goes for surplus labor: How could one specify its location since labor
presupposes it? Now the State—the archaic imperial State in any case—is
this very apparatus. It is always a mistake to appeal to a supplementary
explanation for the State: this pushes the State back behind the State, ad
                    7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 447

infinitum. It is better to leave it where it is from the start, for it exists punc-
tually, beyond the limit of the primitive series. It is enough for this point of
comparison and appropriation to be effectively occupied in order for the
apparatus of capture to function, an apparatus that overcodes the primi-
tive codes, substitutes sets for the series, or reverses the direction of the
signs. This point is necessarily occupied, effectuated, because it already
exists in the convergent wave that moves through the primitive series and
draws them toward a threshold at which, after passing their limits, the wave
itself changes direction. Primitive peoples have always existed only as ves-
tiges, already plied by the reversible wave that carries them off (vector of
deterritorialization). What is contingent upon external circumstances is
only the place where the apparatus is effectuated—the place where the
agricultural "mode of production" was able to arise: the Orient. It is in this
sense that the apparatus is abstract. But in itself, it marks not simply an
abstract possibility of reversibility but the real existence of a point of inver-
sion as an autonomous, irreducible phenomenon.
    Hence the very particular character of State violence: it is very difficult
to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as preaccom-
plished. It is not even adequate to say that the violence rests with the mode
of production. Marx made the observation in the case of capitalism: there
is a violence that necessarily operates through the State, precedes the capi-
talist mode of production, constitutes the "primitive accumulation," and
makes possible the capitalist mode of production itself. From a standpoint
within the capitalist mode of production, it is very difficult to say who is
the thief and who the victim, or even where the violence resides. That is
because the worker is born entirely naked and the capitalist objectively
"clothed," an independent owner. That which gave the worker and the capi-
talist this form eludes us because it operated in other modes of production.
It is a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is reac-
tivated every day.39 This is the place to say it, if ever there was one: the muti-
lation is prior, preestablished. However, these analyses of Marx should be
enlarged upon. For the fact remains that there is a primitive accumulation
that, far from deriving from the agricultural mode of production, precedes
it: as a general rule, there is primitive accumulation whenever an apparatus
of capture is mounted, with that very particular kind of violence that cre-
ates or contributes to the creation of that which it is directed against, and
thus presupposes itself.40 The problem then becomes one of distinguishing
between regimes of violence. We can draw a distinction between struggle,
war, crime and policing as so many regimes of violence. Struggle would be
like the regime of primitive violence (including primitive "wars"); it is a
blow-by-blow violence, which is not without its code, since the value of the
blows is fixed according to the law of the series, as a function of the value of
                   448 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

the last exchangeable blow, or of the last woman to conquer, etc. Thus there
is a certain ritualization of violence. War, at least when linked to the war
machine, is another regime, because it implies the mobilization and
autonomization of a violence directed first and essentially against the
State apparatus (the war machine is in this sense the invention of a primary
nomadic organization that turns against the State). Crime is something
else, because it is a violence of illegality that consists in taking possession of
something to which one has no "right," in capturing something one does
not have a "right" to capture. But State policing or lawful violence is some-
thing else again, because it consists in capturing while simultaneously
constituting a right to capture. It is an incorporated, structural violence
distinct from every kind of direct violence. The State has often been
defined by a "monopoly of violence," but this definition leads back to
another definition that describes the State as a "state of Law" (Rechts-
staat). State overcoding is precisely this structural violence that defines
the law, "police" violence and not the violence of war. There is lawful vio-
lence wherever violence contributes to the creation of that which it is used
against, or as Marx says, wherever capture contributes to the creation of
that which it captures. This is very different from criminal violence. It is
also why, in contradistinction to primitive violence, State or lawful violence
always seems to presuppose itself, for it preexists its own use: the State can
in this way say that violence is "primal," that it is simply a natural phenom-
enon the responsibility for which does not lie with the State, which uses
violence only against the violent, against "criminals"—against primitives,
against nomads—in order that peace may reign.
   PROPOSITION XIII. The State and its forms.
   We start with the archaic imperial State: overcoding, apparatus of cap-
ture, machine of enslavement. It comprises a particular kind of property,
money, public works—a formula complete in a single stroke but one that
presupposes nothing "private" and does not even assume a preexistent
mode of production since it is what gives rise to the mode of production.
The point of departure that the preceding analyses give us is well estab-
lished by archaeology. The question now becomes: Once the State has
appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve? What are its factors
of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation between evolved States
and the archaic imperial State?
   The principle of evolution is internal, whatever the external factors that
contribute to it. The archaic State does not overcode without also freeing a
large quantity ofdecodedflows that escape from it. Let us recall that "decod-
ing" does not signify the state of a flow whose code is understood (compris)
(deciphered, translatable, assimilable), but, in a more radical sense, the
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 449

state of a flow that is no longer contained in (compris dans) it own code,
that escapes it own code. On the one hand, when the primitive codes cease
to be self-regulating and are subordinated to the higher agency, flows that had
been coded in a relative way by the primitive communities find the
opportunity to escape. But on the other hand, the overcoding of the archaic
State itself makes possible and gives rise to new flows that escape from it. The
State does not created large-scale works without a flow of independent labor
escaping its bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in metallurgy). It does
not create the monetary form of the tax without flows of money escaping,
and nourishing or bringing into being other powers (notably in commerce
and banking). And above all, it does not created a system of public property
without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, then begin-
ning to pass beyond its grasp; this private property does not itself issue
from the archaic system but is constituted on the margins, all the more nec-
essarily and inevitably, slipping through the net of overcoding. It is
undoubtedly Tokei who has formulated the problem of an origin of private
property in the most serious way, in the context of a system that seems to
exclude it from every angle. For private property can arise neither on the
side of the emperor-despot not on the side of the peasants, whose auton-
omy is tied to communal possession, nor on the side of the functionaries
whose existence and income are based on that public communal form ("the
aristocrats can under these conditions become petty despots but not pri-
vate landowners"). Even the slaves belong to the community or the public
function. The question then becomes, Are there people who are consti-
tuted in the overcoding empire, but constituted as necessarily excluded
and decoded? Tokei's answer is the freed slaves. It is they who have no place.
It is their lamentations that are heard the length and breadth of the Chinese
Empire: the plaint (elegy) has always been a political factor. But it is also
they who form the first seeds of private property, who develop trade, and
with metallurgy invent a kind of private slavery in which they will be the
new master.41 We saw previously the role played by freed slaves in the war
machine, in the formation of the special body. It is in a different form, and
following entirely different principles, that they play an important role in
the State apparatus and in the evolution of that apparatus, this time in the
formation of a private body. The two aspects can combine, but they belong
to two different lines.
    What counts is not the particular case of the freed slave.What counts is
the collective figure of the Outsider. What counts is that in one way or
another the apparatus of overcoding gives rise to flows that are themselves
decoded—flows of money, labor, property. . . These flows are the correlate
of the apparatus. And the correlation is not only social, internal to the
archaic empire, it is also geographical. This would be the place to bring up
                  450 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

the confrontation between the East and the West. According to V. Gordon
Childe's great archaeological thesis, the archaic imperial State implies a
stockpiled agricultural surplus, which makes possible the maintenance of a
specialized body of mercantile and metallurgical artisans. Indeed, the sur-
plus as the content proper to overcoding must be not only stockpiled but
absorbed, consumed, realized. Doubtless, this economic requirement that
the surplus be absorbed is one of the principal aspects of the appropriation
of the war machine by the imperial State: The military institution is from
the start one of the most effective means of absorbing surplus. If, however,
we assume that the bureaucratic and military institutions are not enough,
the way is cleared for this specialized body of nonagricultural artisans,
whose labor will reinforce the sedentarization of agriculture. It was in Afro-
Asia and the Orient that all of these conditions were fulfilled and that the
State apparatus was invented: in the Middle East, Egypt, and Mesopota-
mia, but also in the valley of the Indus (and in the Far East). That was where
agricultural stock and its bureaucratic, military, but also metallurgical and
commercial concomitants came into being. But this oriental or imperial
"solution" is threatened by an impasse: State overcoding keeps the metal-
lurgists, both craft and mercantile, within strict bounds, under powerful
bureaucratic control, with monopolistic appropriation of foreign trade in
the service of a ruling class, so that the peasants themselves benefit little
from the State innovations. So it is indeed true that the State-form spreads
and that archaeology discovers it everywhere on the horizon of Western
history in the Aegean world. But not under the same conditions. Minos and
Mycenae are more a caricature of an empire, Agamemnon of Mycenae is
not the Chinese emperor or Egyptian pharaoh; the Egyptian can say to the
Greeks: "You will always be like children..." That is because the Aegean
peoples were both too far away to fall into the oriental sphere and too poor
to stockpile a surplus themselves, but neither far enough away nor impov-
 erished enough to ignore the markets of the Orient. Moreover, oriental
 overcoding itself assigned its merchants a long-distance role. Thus the
 Aegean peoples found themselves in a situation where they could take
 advantage of the oriental agricultural stock without having to constitute one
for themselves: they plundered it when they could, and on a more regular
 basis procured a share of it in exchange for raw materials (notably wood
 and metals), coming from as far away as Central and Western Europe. Of
 course, the Orient continually had to reproduce its stocks; but formally, it
 had made a move "once and for all," from which the West benefited with-
 out having to reproduce it. It follows that the metallurgical artisans and the
 merchants assumed an entirely different status in the West, since their exis-
 tence did not directly depend on a surplus accumulated by a local State
 apparatus: even if the peasant suffered an exploitation as bad as or worse
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 451

 than that of the Orient, the artisan and the merchant enjoyed a freer status
 and a more diversified market, prefiguring a middle class. Many metallur-
 gists and merchants from the Orient moved to the Aegean world, where
 they were to find freer, more varied and more stable conditions. In short,
 the same flows that are overcoded in the Orient tend to become decoded in
Europe, in a new situation that is like the flipside or correlate of the other.
 Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding) but becomes
 surplus value of flow. It is as if two solutions were found for the same prob-
 lem, the Oriental solution and then the Western one, which grafts itself
 upon the first and brings it out of the impasse while continuing to presup-
 pose it. The European metallurgist and merchant faced a much less thor-
 oughly coded international market, one not limited to an imperial house or
 class. And as Childe said, the Western and Aegean States were immersed in
 a supranational economic system from the start; they bathed in it, instead
 of containing it within the limits of their own net.42
     It is indeed another pole of the State that arises, one that could be
 defined in summary fashion as follows. The public sphere no longer charac-
 terizes the objective nature of property but is instead the shared means for
 a now private appropriation; this yields the public-private mixes constitu-
 tive of the modern world. The bond becomes personal; personal relations of
 dependence, both between owners (contracts) and between owned and
 owners (conventions), parallel or replace community relations or relations
 based on one's public function. Even slavery changes; it no longer defines
the public availability of the communal worker but rather private property
 as applied to individual workers.43 The law in its entirety undergoes a
 mutation, becoming subjective, conjunctive, "topical" law: this is because
the State apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in
 overcoding already coded flows than in organizing conjunctions of decoded
flows as such. Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects,
the operation of the imperial "signifier" has been superseded by processes
 of subjedification; machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime
 of social subjection. And unlike the relatively uniform imperial pole, this
 second pole presents the most diverse of forms. But as varied as relations of
personal dependence are, they always mark qualified and topical conjunc-
tions. It was the evolved empires, of the East and of the West, that first
developed this new public sphere of the private, through institutions such
 as the consilium and thefiscus in the Roman Empire (it was through these
institutions that freed slaves acquired a political power paralleling that of
the functionaries).44 But it was also the autonomous cities, the feudal sys-
tems. .. The question as to whether these last-mentioned formations still
answer to the concept of the State can be formulated only after certain cor-
relations have been taken into account. Every bit as much as the evolved
                   452 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

empires, the autonomous cities, and feudal systems presuppose an archaic
empire that served as their foundation; they were themselves in contact
with evolved empires that reacted back upon them; they actively prepared
the way for new forms of the State (for example, absolute monarchy as the
culmination of a certain kind of subjective law and a feudal process).45 In
effect, in the rich domain of personal relations, what counts is not the
capriciousness or variability of the individuals but the consistency of the
relations, and the adequation between a subjectivity that can reach the
point of delirium and qualified acts that are sources of rights and obliga-
tions. In a beautiful passage, Edgar Quinet underlines this coincidence
between "the delirium of the twelve Cesars and the golden age of Roman
law."46
   The subjectifications, conjunctions, and appropriations do not prevent
the decoded flows from continuing to flow, and from ceaselessly engender-
ing new flows that escape (we saw this, for example, at the level of a
micropolitics of the Middle Ages). This is where there is an ambiguity in
these apparatuses: they can only function with decoded flows, and yet they
do not let them stream together; they perform topical conjunctions that
stand as so many knots or recodings. This accounts for the historians'
impression that capitalism "could have" developed beginning at a certain
moment, in China, in Rome, in Byzantium, in the Middle Ages, that the
conditions for it existed but were not effectuated or even capable of being
effectuated. The situation is that the pressure of the flows draws capitalism
in negative outline, but for it to be realized there must be a whole integral of
decoded flows, a whole generalized conjunction that overspills and over-
turns the preceding apparatuses. And in fact when Marx sets about defin-
ing capitalism, he begins by invoking the advent of a single unqualified and
global Subjectivity, which capitalizes all of the processes of subjectifica-
tion, "all activities without distinction": "productive activity in general,"
"the sole subjective essence of wealth . . ." And this single Subject now
expresses itself in an Object in general, no longer in this or that qualitative
state: "Along with the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we
have now the universality of the object defined as wealth, viz. the product
in general, or labor in general, but as past, materialized labor."47 Circula-
tion constitutes capital as a subjectivity commensurate with society in its
entirety. But this new social subjectivity can form only to the extent that
the decoded flows overspill their conjunctions and attain a level of decod-
ing that the State apparatuses are no longer able to reclaim: on the one
hand, the flow of labor must no longer be determined as slavery or serfdom
but must become naked and free labor; and on the other hand, wealth must
no longer be determined as money dealing, merchant's or landed wealth,
but must become pure homogeneous and independent capital. And doubt-
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 453

less, these two becomings at least (for other flows also converge) introduce
many contingencies and many different factors on each of the lines. But it
is their abstract conjunction in a single stroke that constitutes capitalism,
providing a universal subject and an object in general for one another. Cap-
italism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth encounters the flow of
unqualified labor and conjugates with it.48 This is what the preceding con-
junctions, which were still topical or qualitative, had always inhibited (the
two principal inhibitors were the feudal organization of the countryside
and the corporative organization of the towns). This amounts to saying
that capitalism forms with a general axiomatic of decoded flows. "Capital is
a right, or, to be more precise, a relation of production that is manifested as
a right, and as such it is independent of the concrete form that it cloaks at
each moment of its productive function."49 Private property no longer
expresses the bond of personal dependence but the independence of a Sub-
ject that now constitutes the sole bond. This makes for an important differ-
ence in the evolution of private property: private property in itself relates
to rights, instead of the law relating it to the land, things, or people (this
raises in particular the famous question of the elimination of ground rent
in capitalism). A new threshold of deterritorialization. And when capital
becomes an active right in this way, the entire historical figure of the law
changes. The law ceases to be the overcoding of customs, as it was in the
archaic empire; it is no longer a set of topics, as it was in the evolved States,
the autonomous cities, and the feudal systems; it increasingly assumes the
direct form and immediate characteristics of an axiomatic, as evidenced in
our civil "code."50
    When the flows reach this capitalist threshold of decoding and deterri-
torialization (naked labor, independent capital), it seems that there is no
longer a need for a State, for distinct juridical and political domination, in
order to ensure appropriation, which has become directly economic. The
economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic, a "universal cosmopolitan
energy which overflows every restriction and bond,"51 a mobile and con-
vertible substance "such as the total value of annual production." Today we
can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates
through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States,
forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto
supranational power untouched by governmental decisions.52 But what-
ever dimensions or quantities this may have assumed today, capitalism has
from the beginning mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely sur-
passing the deterritorialization proper to the State. For since Paleolithic
and Neolithic times, the State has been deterritorializing to the extent that
it makes the earth an object of its higher unity, a forced aggregate of coexis-
tence, instead of the free play of territories among themselves and with the
                   454 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

lineages. But this is precisely the sense in which the State is termed "terri-
torial." Capitalism, on the other hand, is not at all territorial, even in its
beginnings: its power of deterritorialization consists in taking as its object,
not the earth, but "materialized labor," the commodity. And private prop-
erty is no longer ownership of the land or the soil, nor even of the means of
production as such, but of convertible abstract rights.53 That is why capital-
ism marks a mutation in worldwide or ecumenical organizations, which
now take on a consistency of their own: the worldwide axiomatic, instead
of resulting from heterogeneous social formations and their relations, for
the most part distributes these formations, determines their relations,
while organizing an international division of labor. From all these stand-
points, it could be said that capitalism develops an economic order that
could do without the State. And in fact capitalism is not short on war cries
against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its
superior deterritorialization.
    This, however, is only one very partial aspect of capital. If it is true that
we are not using the word axiomatic as a simple metaphor, we must review
what distinguishes an axiomatic from all manner of codes, overcodings,
and recodings: the axiomatic deals directly with purely functional ele-
ments and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immedi-
ately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other
hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between
qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity
(overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. The
immanent axiomatic finds in the domains it moves through so many mod-
els, termed models of realization. It could similarly be said that capital as
right, as a "qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively commensurable
element," is realized in sectors and means of production (or that "unified
capital" is realized in "differentiated capital"). However, the different sec-
tors are not alone in serving as models of realization—the States do too.
Each of them groups together and combines several sectors, according to
its resources, population, wealth, industrial capacity, etc. Thus the States,
in capitalism, are not canceled out but change form and take on a new
meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds
them. But to exceed is not at all the same thing as doing without. We have
already seen that capitalism proceeds by way of the State-form rather than
the town-form; the basis for the fundamental mechanisms described by
Marx (the colonial regime, the public debt, the modern tax system and
indirect taxation, industrial protectionism, trade wars) may be laid in the
towns, but the towns function as mechanisms of accumulation, accelera-
tion, and concentration only to the extent that they are appropriated by
States. Recent events tend to confirm this principle from another angle.
                  7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 455

For example, NASA appeared ready to mobilize considerable capital for
interplanetary exploration, as though capitalism were riding a vector tak-
ing it to the moon; but following the USSR, which conceived of extraterres-
trial space as a belt that should circle the earth taken as the "object," the
American government cut off funds for exploration and returned capital in
this case to a more centered model. It is thus proper to State deterrito-
rialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to
provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations. More generally,
this extreme example aside, we must take into account a "materialist"
determination of the modern State or nation-state: a group of producers in
which labor and capital circulate freely, in other words, in which the
homogeneity and competition of capital is effectuated, in principle with-
out external obstacles. In order to be effectuated, capitalism has always
required there to be a new force and a new law of States, on the level of the
flow of labor as on the level of the flow of independent capital.
   So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but
immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows. Once
again, our use of the word "axiomatic" is far from a metaphor; we find liter-
ally the same theoretical problems that are posed by the models in an axio-
matic repeated in relation to the State. For models of realization, though
varied, are supposed to be isomorphic with regard to the axiomatic they
effectuate; however, this isomorphy, concrete variations considered,
accommodates itself to the greatest of formal differences. Moreover, a sin-
gle axiomatic seems capable of encompassing polymorphic models, not
only when it is not yet "saturated," but with those models as integral ele-
ments of its saturation.54 These "problems" become singularly political
when we think of modern States.
    1. Are not all modern States isomorphic in relation to the capitalist axi-
omatic, to the point that the difference between democratic, totalitarian,
liberal, and tyrannical States depends only on concrete variables, and on
the worldwide distribution of those variables, which always undergo even-
tual readjustments? Even the so-called socialist States are isomorphic, to
the extent that there is only one world market, the capitalist one.
   2. Conversely, does not the world capitalist axiomatic tolerate a real
polymorphy, or even a heteromorphy, of models, and for two reasons? On
the one hand, capital as a general relation of production can very easily
integrate concrete sectors or modes of production that are noncapitalist.
But on the other hand, and this is the main point, the bureaucratic socialist
States can themselves develop different modes of production that only
conjugate with capitalism to form a set whose "power" exceeds that of the
axiomatic itself (it will be necessary to try to determine the nature of this
                   456 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

power, why we so often think of it in apocalyptic terms, what conflicts it
spawns, what slim chances it leaves u s . . .)•
    3. A typology of modern States is thus coupled with a metaeconomics:
it would be inaccurate to treat all States as "interchangeable" (even
isomorphy does not have that consequence), but it would be no less inac-
curate to privilege a certain form of the State (forgetting that polymorphy
establishes strict complementarities between the Western democracies
and the colonial or neocolonial tyrannies that they install or support in
other regions) or to equate the bureaucratic socialist States with the totali-
tarian capitalist States (neglecting the fact that the axiomatic can encom-
pass a real heteromorphy from which the higher power of the aggregate
derives, even if it is for the worse).
    What is called a nation-state, in the most diverse forms, is precisely the
State as a model of realization. And the birth of nations implies many arti-
fices: Not only are they constituted in an active struggle against the imper-
ial or evolved systems, the feudal systems, and the autonomous cities, but
they crush their own "minorities," in other words, minoritarian phenom-
ena that could be termed "nationalitarian," which work from within and if
need be turn to the old codes to find a greater degree of freedom. The con-
stituents of the nation are a land and a people: the "natal," which is not nec-
essarily innate, and the "popular," which is not necessarily pregiven. The
problem of the nation is aggravated in the two extreme cases of a land with-
out a people and a people without a land. How can a people and a land be
made, in other words, a nation—a refrain? The coldest and bloodiest
means vie with upsurges of romanticism. The axiomatic is complex, and is
not without passions. The natal or the land, as we have seen elsewhere,
implies a certain deterritorialization of the territories (community land,
imperial provinces, seigneurial domains, etc.), and the people, a decoding
of the population. The nation is constituted on the basis of these flows and
is inseparable from the modern State that gives consistency to the corre-
sponding land and people. It is the flow of naked labor that makes the peo-
ple, just as it is the flow of Capital that makes the land and its industrial
base. In short, the nation is the very operation of a collective subjecti-
fication, to which the modern State corresponds as a process of subjection.
It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible variations, that the
State becomes the model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic. This is
not at all to say that nations are appearances or ideological phenomena; on
the contrary, they are the passional and living forms in which the qualita-
tive homogeneity and the quantitative competition of abstract capital are
first realized.
    We distinguish machinic enslavement and social subjection as two sepa-
rate concepts. There is enslavement when human beings themselves are
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 457

constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and
with other things (animals, tools), under the control and direction of a
higher unity. But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the
human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an
animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a compo-
nent of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the
machine and no longer enslaved by the machine. This is not to say that the
second regime is more human. But the first regime does seem to have a spe-
cial relation to the archaic imperial formation: human beings are not sub-
jects but pieces of a machine that overcodes the aggregate (this has been
called "generalized slavery," as opposed to the private slavery of antiquity,
or feudal serfdom). We believe that Lewis Mumford is right in designating
the archaic empires megamachines, and in pointing out that, once again, it
is not a question of a metaphor: "If a machine can be defined more or less in
accord with the classic definition of Reuleaux, as a combination of resist-
ant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human control to
transmit motion and to perform work, then the human machine was a real
machine."55 Of course, it was the modern State and capitalism that brought
the triumph of machines, in particular of motorized machines (whereas
the archaic State had simple machines at best); but what we are referring to
now are technical machines, which are definable extrinsically. One is not
enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it. It would
appear, then, that the modern State, through technological development,
has substituted an increasingly powerful social subjection for machinic
enslavement. Ancient slavery and feudal serfdom were already procedures
of subjection. But the naked or "free" worker of capitalism takes subjection
to its most radical expression, since the processes of subjectification no
longer even enter into partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In
effect, capital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all
human beings as subjects; but some, the "capitalists," are subjects of enun-
ciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the
"proletarians," are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical
machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage regime can
therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point,
and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No,
human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we cer-
tainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital.. .
    Capitalism arises as a worldwide enterprise of subjectification by con-
stituting an axiomatic of decoded flows. Social subjection, as the correlate
of subjectification, appears much more in the axiomatic's models of real-
ization than in the axiomatic itself. It is within the framework of the
nation-State, or of national subjectivities, that processes of subjectifica-
                   458 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

tion and the corresponding subjections are manifested. The axiomatic
itself, of which the States are models of realization, restores or reinvents, in
new and now technical forms, an entire system of machinic enslavement.
This in no way represents a return to the imperial machine since we are now
in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a
formal Unity. But it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings
are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized
machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic
and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a gener-
alized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible "humans-machines
systems" replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of sub-
jection between the two elements; the relation between human and
machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on
usage or action.56 In the organic composition of capital, variable capital
defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the
principal framework of which is the business or factory. But with automa-
tion comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we
then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime
changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to
all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification
took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us
back to it. Attention has recently been focused on the fact that modern
power is not at all reducible to the classical alternative "repression or ideol-
ogy" but implies processes of normalization, modulation, modeling, and
information that bear on language, perception, desire, movement, etc.,
and which proceed by way of microassemblages. This aggregate includes
both subjection and enslavement taken to extremes, as two simultaneous
parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other. For example, one is
subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular
situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a
subject of enunciation ("you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it
is . . ."); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But
one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers
are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly
 "make" it, but intrinsic component pieces, "input" and "output," feedback
or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as
to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but trans-
 formations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical,
 others human. 57 The term "subjection," of course, should not be confined
to the national aspect, with enslavement seen as international or world-
wide. For information technology is also the property of the States that set
themselves up as humans-machines systems. But this is so precisely to the
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 459

extent that the two aspects, the axiomatic and the models of realization,
constantly cross over into each other and are themselves in communica-
tion. Social subjection proportions itself to the model of realization, just as
machinic enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic
that is effectuated in the model. We have the privilege of undergoing the
two operations simultaneously, in relation to the same things and the same
events. Rather than stages, subjection and enslavement constitute two
coexistent poles.
   We may return to the different forms of the State, from the standpoint of
a universal history. We distinguish three major forms: (1) imperial archaic
States, which are paradigms and constitute a machine of enslavement by
overcoding already-coded flows (these States have little diversity, due to a
certain formal immutability that applies to all of them); (2) extremely
diverse States—evolved empires, autonomous cities, feudal systems,
monarchies—which proceed instead by subjectification and subjection,
and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows; 3) the
modern nation-States, which take decoding even further and are models of
realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation of flows (these States
combine social subjection and the new machinic enslavement, and their
very diversity is a function of isomorphy, of the eventual heteromorphy or
polymorphy of the models in relation to the axiomatic).
   There are, of course, all kinds of external circumstances that mark pro-
found breaks between these types of States, and above all submit the
archaic empires to utter oblivion, a shrouding lifted only by archaeology.
The empires disappeared suddenly, as though in an instantaneous catas-
trophe. As in the Dorian invasion, a war machine looms up and bears down
from without, killing memory. Yet things proceed quite differently on the
inside, where all the States resonate together, appropriate armies for them-
selves, and exhibit a unity of composition in spite of their differences in
organization and development. It is evident that all decoded flows, of
whatever kind, are prone to forming a war machine directed against the
State. But everything changes depending on whether these flows connect
up with a war machine or, on the contrary, enter into conjunctions or a gen-
eral conjugation that appropriates them for the State. From this stand-
point, the modern States have a kind of transspatiotemporal unity with the
archaic State. The internal correlation between 1 and 2 appears most
clearly in the fact that the fragmented forms of the Aegean world presup-
pose the great imperial form of the Orient and find in it a stock or agricul-
tural surplus, which they consequently have no need to produce or
accumulate for themselves. And to the extent that the States of the second
age are nevertheless obliged to reconstitute a stock, if only because of exter-
nal circumstances—what State can do without one?—in so doing they
                   460 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

always reactivate an evolved imperial form. We find the revival of this
form in the Greek, Roman, and feudal worlds: there is always an empire on
the horizon, which for the subjective States plays the role of signifier and
encompassing element. And the correlation between 2 and 3 is no less pro-
nounced, for industrial revolutions are not wanting, and the difference
between topical conjunctions and the great conjugation of decoded flows is
so thin that one is left with the impression that capitalism was continually
being born, disappearing and reviving at every crossroads of history. And
the correlation between 3 and 1 is also a necessary one: the modern States
of the third age do indeed restore the most absolute of empires, a new
"megamachine," whatever the novelty or timeliness of its now immanent
form; they do this by realizing an axiomatic that functions as much by
machinic enslavement as by social subjection. Capitalism has reawakened
the Urstaat, and given it new strength.58
    Not only, as Hegel said, does every State imply "the essential moments
of its existence as a State," but there is a unique moment, in the sense of a
coupling of forces, and this moment of the State is capture, bond, knot,
nexum, magical capture. Must we speak of a second pole, which would
operate instead by pact and contract? Is this not instead that other force,
with capture as the unique moment of coupling? For the two forces are the
overcoding of coded flows, and the treatment of decoded flows. The con-
tract is a juridical expression of the second aspect: it appears as the pro-
ceeding of subjectification, the outcome of which is subjection. And the
contract must be pushed to the extreme; in other words, it is no longer con-
cluded between two people but between self and self, within the same
person—Ich = Ich—as subjected and sovereign. The extreme perversion
of the contract, reinstating the purest of knots. The knot, bond, capture,
thus travel a long history: first, the objective, imperial collective bond; then
all of the forms of subjective personal bonds; finally, the Subject that binds
itself, and in so doing renews the most magical operation, "a cosmopolitan,
universal energy which overflows every restriction and bond so as to estab-
lish itself instead as the sole bond."59 Even subjection is only a relay for the
fundamental moment of the State, namely, civil capture or machinic
enslavement. The State is assuredly not the locus of liberty, nor the agent of
a forced servitude or war capture. Should we then speak of "voluntary ser-
vitude"? This is like the expression "magical capture": its only merit is to
underline the apparent mystery. There is a machinic enslavement, about
which it could be said in each case that it presupposes itself, that it appears
as preaccomplished; this machinic enslavement is no more "voluntary"
than it is "forced."
   PROPOSITION XIV. Axiomatics and thepresentday situation.
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 461

   Politics is by no means an apodictic science. It proceeds by experimen-
tation, groping in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, retreats. The
factors of decision and prediction are limited. It is an absurdity to postu-
late a world supergovernment that makes the final decisions. No one is
even capable of predicting the growth in the money supply. Similarly, the
States are affected by all kinds of coefficients of uncertainty and unpredict-
ability. John Kenneth Galbraith and Francois Chatelet have formulated
the concept of constant and decisive errors, which make the glory of men of
State no less than their rare successful evaluations. But that is just one
more reason to make a connection between politics and axiomatics. For in
science an axiomatic is not at all a transcendent, autonomous, and
decision-making power opposed to experimentation and intuition. On the
one hand, it has its own gropings in the dark, experimentations, modes of
intuition. Axioms being independent of each other, can they be added, and
up to what point (a saturated system)? Can they be withdrawn (a "weak-
ened" system)? On the other hand, it is of the nature of axiomatics to come
up against so-called undecidable propositions, to confront necessarily
higher powers that it cannot master.60 Finally, axiomatics does not consti-
tute the cutting edge of science; it is much more a stopping point, a reorder-
ing that prevents decoded semiotic flows in physics and mathematics from
escaping in all directions. The great axiomaticians are the men of State of
science, who seal off the lines of flight that are so frequent in mathematics,
who would impose a new nexum, if only a temporary one, and who lay
down the official policies of science. They are the heirs of the theorematic
conception of geometry. When intuitionism opposed axiomatics, it was
not only in the name of intuition, of construction and creation, but also in
the name of a calculus of problems, a problematic conception of science
that was not less abstract but implied an entirely different abstract
machine, one working in the undecidable and the fugitive.61 It is the real
characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and pres-
ent-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense. But it is precisely for
this reason that nothing is played out in advance. From this standpoint, we
may present a summary sketch of the "givens."

   1. Addition, subtraction. The axioms of capitalism are obviously not
theoretical propositions, or ideological formulas, but operative statements
that constitute the semiological form of Capital and that enter as compo-
nent parts into assemblages of production, circulation, and consumption.
The axioms are primary statements, which do not derive from or depend
upon another statement. In this sense, a flow can be the object of one or
several axioms (with the set of all axioms constituting the conjugation of
the flows); but it can also lack any axioms of its own, its treatment being
                  462 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

only a consequence of other axioms; finally, it can remain out of bounds,
evolve without limits, be left in the state of an "untamed" variation in the
system. There is a tendency within capitalism continually to add more axi-
oms. After the end of World War I, the joint influence of the world depres-
sion and the Russian Revolution forced capitalism to multiply its axioms,
to invent new ones dealing with the working class, employment, union
organization, social institutions, the role of the State, the foreign and
domestic markets. Keynesian economics and the New Deal were axiom
laboratories. Examples of the creation of new axioms after the Second
World War: the Marshall Plan, forms of assistance and lending, transfor-
mations in the monetary system. It is not only in periods of expansion or
recovery that axioms multiply. What makes the axiomatic vary, in relation
to the States, is the distinction and relation between the foreign and domes-
tic markets. There is a multiplication of axioms most notably when an inte-
grated domestic market is being organized to meet the requirements of the
foreign market. Axioms for the young, for the old, for women, etc. A very
general pole of the State, "social democracy," can be defined by this ten-
dency to add, invent axioms in relation to spheres of investment and
sources of profit: the question is not that of freedom and constraint, nor of
centralism and decentralization, but of the manner in which one masters
the flows. In this case, they are mastered by the multiplication of directing
axioms. The opposite tendency is no less a part of capitalism: the tendency
to withdraw, subtract axioms. One falls back on a very small number of axi-
oms regulating the dominant flows, while the other flows are given a deriv-
ative, consequential status (defined by the "theorems" ensuing from the
axioms), or are left in an untamed state that does not preclude the brutal
intervention of State power, quite the contrary. The "totalitarianism" pole
of the State incarnates this tendency to restrict the number of axioms, and
operates by the exclusive promotion of the foreign sector: the appeal to for-
eign sources of capital, the rise of industries aimed at the exportation of
foodstuffs or raw materials, the collapse of the domestic market. The totali-
tarian State iS not a maximum State but rather, following Virilio's formula-
tion, the minimum State of anarcho-capitalism (cf. Chile). At the limit, the
only axioms that are retained concern the equilibrium of the foreign sector,
reserve levels and the inflation rate; "the population is no longer a given, it
has become a consequence." As for untamed evolutions, they appear
among other places in the variations in the employment level, in the phe-
nomena of exodus from the countryside, shantytown-urbanization, etc.
   The case of fascism ("national socialism") is distinct from totalitarian-
ism. It coincides with the totalitarian pole in the collapse of the domestic
market and the reduction in the number of axioms. However, the promo-
tion of the foreign sector does not at all take place through an appeal to for-
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 463

eign sources of capital and through export industries, but through a war
economy, which entails an expansionism foreign to totalitarianism and an
autonomous fabrication of capital. As for the domestic market, it is effec-
tuated in a specific production of the Ersatz. This means that fascism, too,
brings a proliferation of axioms, which explains why it has often been com-
pared to a Keynesian economy. Fascism, however, is a tautological or ficti-
tious proliferation, a multiplication by subtraction; this makes it a very
special case.62

    2. Saturation. Can we express the distribution of the two opposite ten-
dencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point of inver-
sion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. If Marx demonstrated the
functioning of capitalism as an axiomatic, it was above all in the famous
chapter on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism is indeed an
axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. It would like for us to
believe that it confronts the limits of the Universe, the extreme limit of
resources and energy. But all it confronts are its own limits (the periodic
depreciation of existing capital); all it repels or displaces are its own limits
(the formation of new capital, in new industries with a high profit rate).
This is the history of oil and nuclear power. And it does both at once: capi-
talism confronts its own limits and simultaneously displaces them, setting
them down again farther along. It could be said that the totalitarian ten-
dency to restrict the number of axioms corresponds to the confrontation
with the limits, whereas the social democratic tendency corresponds to the
displacement of the limits. But one does not come without the other, either
in two different but coexistent places or in two successive but closely linked
moments; they always have a hold on each other, or are even contained in
each other, constituting the same axiomatic. A typical example would be
present-day Brazil, with its ambiguous alternative "totalitarianism-social
democracy." As a general rule, the limits are all the more mobile if axioms
are subtracted in one place but added elsewhere.
   It would be an error to take a disinterested stance toward struggle on the
level of the axioms. It is sometimes thought that every axiom, in capitalism
or in one of its States, constitutes a "recuperation." But this disenchanted
concept is not a good one. The constant readjustments of the capitalist axi-
omatic, in other words, the additions (the enunciation of new axioms) and
the withdrawals (the creation of exclusive axioms), are the object of strug-
gles in no way confined to the technocracy. Everywhere, the workers' strug-
gles overspill the framework of the capitalist enterprises, which imply for
the most part derivative propositions. The struggles bear directly upon the
axioms that presi de over the State's public spending, or that even concern a
specific international organization (for example, a multinational corpora-
                   464 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

tion can at will plan the liquidation of a factory inside a country). The
resulting danger of a worldwide labor bureaucracy or technocracy taking
charge of these problems can be warded off only to the extent that local
struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise
point of their insertion in the field of immanence (the potential of the rural
world in this respect). There is always a fundamental difference between
living flows and the axioms that subordinate them to centers of control and
decision making, that make a given segment correspond to them, which
measure their quanta. But the pressure of the living flows, and of the prob-
lems they pose and impose, must be exerted inside the axiomatic, as much
in order to fight the totalitarian reductions as to anticipate and precipitate
the additions, to orient them and prevent their technocratic perversion.

   3. Models, isomorphy. In principle, all States are isomorphic; in other
words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of a sole
external world market. But the first question is whether isomorphy implies
a homogeneity or even a homogenization of States. The answer is yes, as
can be seen in present-day Europe with respect to justice and the police, the
highway code, the circulation of commodities, production costs, etc. But
this is true only insofar as there is a tendency toward a single integrated
domestic market. Otherwise, isomorphy in no way implies homogeneity:
there is isomorphy, but heterogeneity, between totalitarian and social dem-
ocratic States wherever the mode of production is the same. The general
rules regarding this are as follows: the consistency, the totality (I 'ensemble),
or unity of the axiomatic are defined by capital as a "right" or relation of
production (for the market); the respective independence of the axioms in
no way contradicts this totality but derives from the divisions or sectors of
the capitalist mode of production; the isomorphy of the models, with the
two poles of addition and subtraction, depends on how the domestic and
foreign markets are distributed in each case.
   But this is only a first bipolarity, applying to the States that are located
at the center and are under the capitalist mode of production. A second,
West-East, bipolarity has been imposed on the States of the center, that of
the capitalist States and the bureaucratic socialist States. Although this
new distinction may share certain traits of the first (the so-called socialist
States being assimilable to the totalitarian States), the problem lies else-
where. The numerous "convergence" theories that attempt to demon-
strate a certain homogenization of the States of the East and West are not
very convincing. Even isomorphism is not applicable: there is a real
heteromorphy, not only because the mode of production is not capitalist,
but also because the relation of production is not Capital (rather, it is the
Plan). If the socialist States are nevertheless still models of realization for
                  7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 465

the capitalist axiomatic, it is due to the existence of a single external
world market, which remains the deciding factor here, even above and
beyond the relations of production from which it results. It can even hap-
pen that the socialist bureaucraticplan(e) takes on a parasitic function in
relation to the plan(e) of capital, which manifests a greater creativity, of
the "virus" type.
    Finally, the third fundamental bipolarity is the center and the periphery
(North-South). In view of the respective independence of the axioms, we
can join Samir Amin in saying that the axioms of the periphery differ from
those of the center.63 And here again, the difference and independence of
the axioms in no way compromise the consistency of the overall axiomatic.
On the contrary, central capitalism needs the periphery constituted by the
Third World, where it locates a large part of its most modern industries; it
does not just invest capital in these industries, but is also furnished with
capital by them. The issue of the dependence of the Third World States is of
course an obvious one, but not the most important one (it was bequeathed
by the old colonialism). It is obvious that having independent axioms has
never guaranteed the independence of States; rather it ensures an interna-
tional division of labor. The important question, once again, is that of
isomorphy in relation to the worldwide axiomatic. To a large extent, there
is isomorphy between the United States and the bloodiest of the South
American tyrannies (or between France, England, and West Germany and
certain African States). The center-periphery bipolarity, States of the cen-
ter and States of the Third World, may well exhibit some of the distinguish-
ing traits of the two preceding bipolarities, but it also evades them, raising
other problems. Throughout a vast portion of the Third World, the general
relation of production is capital—even throughout the entire Third World,
in the sense that the socialized sector may utilize that relation, adopting it
in this case. But the mode of production is not necessarily capitalist, either
in the so-called archaic or transitional forms, or in the most productive,
highly industrialized sectors. This indeed represents a third case, included
in the worldwide axiomatic: when capital acts as the relation of production
but in noncapitalist modes of production. We may therefore speak of a
polymorphy of the Third World States in relation to the States of the center.
And this dimension of the axiomatic is no less necessary than the others; it
is even much more necessary, for the heteromorphy of the so-called social-
ist States was imposed upon capitalism, which digested it as best it could,
whereas the polymorphy of the Third World States is partially organized
by the center, as an axiom providing a substitute for colonization.
    We are always brought back to the literal question of the models of real-
ization of a worldwide axiomatic: there is in principle an isomorphy of the
States of the center, a heteromorphy imposed by the bureaucratic socialist
                   466 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

State, and a polymorphy organized by the Third World States. Once again,
it would be absurd to think that the insertion of popular movements is con-
demned in advance throughout this field of immanence, and to assume
that there are either "good" States that are democratic, social democratic
or at the other extreme socialist, or that on the contrary all States are equiv-
alent and homogeneous.

   4. Power (puissance). Let us suppose that the axiomatic necessarily mar-
shals a power higher than the one it treats, in other words, than that of the
aggregates serving as its models. This is like a power of the continuum, tied
to the axiomatic but exceeding it. We immediately recognize this power as
a power of destruction, of war, a power incarnated in financial, industrial,
and military technological complexes that are in continuity with one
another. On the one hand, war clearly follows the same movement as capi-
talism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps grow-
ing, war becomes increasingly a "war of materiel" in which the human
being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is
instead a pure element of machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and
this is the main point, the growing importance of constant capital in the
axiomatic means that the depreciation of existing capital and the forma-
tion of new capital assume a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the
route of a war machine now incarnated in the complexes: the complexes
actively contribute to the redistributions of the world necessary for the
exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. There is a continuous
"threshold" of power that accompanies in every instance the shifting of the
axiomatic's limits; it is as though the power of war always supersaturated
the system's saturation, and was its necessary condition.
   The classical conflicts among the States of the center (as well as periph-
eral colonization) have been joined, or rather replaced, by two great
conflictual lines, between West and East and North and South; these lines
intersect and together cover everything. But the overarmament of the West
and East not only leaves the reality of local wars entirely intact and gives
them a new force and new stakes; it not only founds the "apocalyptic" pos-
sibility of a direct confrontation along the two great axes; it also seems that
the war machine takes on a specific supplementary meaning: industrial,
political, judicial, etc. It is indeed true that the States, throughout their his-
tory, have repeatedly appropriated the war machine; and it was after the
war machine was appropriated that war, its preparation and effectuation,
became the exclusive object of the machine, but as a more or less "limited"
war. As for the aim, it remained the political aim of the States. The various
factors that tended to make war a "total war," most notably the fascist fac-
tor, marked the beginning of an inversion of the movement: as though the
                   7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 467

States, through the war they waged against one another, had after a long
period of appropriation reconstituted an autonomous war machine. But
this unchained or liberated war machine continued to have as its object war
in action, a now total, unlimited kind of war. The entire fascist economy
became a war economy, but the war economy still needed total war as its
object. For this reason, fascist war still fell under Clausewitz's formula,
"the continuation of politics by other means," even though those other
means had become exclusive, in other words, the political aim had entered
into contradiction with the object (hence Virilio's idea that the fascist State
was a "suicidal" State more than a totalitarian one). It was only after World
War II that the automatization, then automation of the war machine had
their true effect. The war machine, the new antagonisms traversing it con-
sidered, no longer had war as its exclusive object but took in charge and as
its object peace, politics, the world order, in short, the aim. This is where
the inversion of Clausewitz's formula comes in: it is politics that becomes
the continuation of war; // is peace that technologically frees the unlimited
material process of total war. War ceases to be the materialization of the war
machine; the war machine itself becomes materialized war. In this sense,
there was no longer a need for fascism. The Fascists were only child precur-
sors, and the absolute peace of survival succeeded where total war had
failed. The Third World War was already upon us. The war machine
reigned over the entire axiomatic like the power of the continuum that sur-
rounded the "world-economy," and it put all the parts of the universe in
contact. The world became a smooth space again (sea, air, atmosphere),
over which reigned a single war machine, even when it opposed its own
parts. Wars had become a part of peace. More than that, the States no
longer appropriated the war machine; they reconstituted a war machine of
which they themselves were only the parts.
    Of all the authors who have developed an apocalyptic or millenarian
sense, it is to Paul Virilio's credit to have emphasized these five rigorous
points: that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of
terror or deterrence; that it performs a technoscientific "capitalization";
that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that
it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the
real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed; that
this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity
with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the "unspecified
enemy," domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event,
world); that there arose from this a new conception of security as materia-
lized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, pro-
grammed catastrophe.64
                  468 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

   5. The included middle. No one has demonstrated more convincingly
than Braudel that the capitalist axiomatic requires a center and that this
center was constituted in the North, at the outcome of a long historical
process: "There can only be a world-economy when the mesh of the net-
work is sufficiently fine, and when exchange is regular and voluminous
enough to give rise to a central zone."65 Many authors believe on this
account that the North-South, center-periphery axis is more important
today than the West-East axis, and even principally determines it. This is
expressed in a common thesis, taken up and developed by Valery Giscard
d'Estaing: the more equilibrated things become at the center between the
West and the East, beginning with the equilibrium of overarmament, the
more they become disequilibrated or "destabilized" from North to South
and destabilize the central equilibrium. It is clear that in these formulas the
South is an abstract term designating the Third World or the periphery;
and even that there are Souths or Third Worlds inside the center. It is also
clear that this destabilization is not accidental but is a (theorematic) conse-
quence of the axioms of capitalism, principally of the axiom called unequal
exchange, which is indispensable to capitalism's functioning. This for-
mula is therefore the modern version of the oldest formula, which already
obtained in the archaic empires under different conditions. The more the
archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows
that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded
flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the
periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of resolving
or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the periphery).
   The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world
economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of
population, the flow of food, and the urban flow. The situation seems inex-
tricable because the axiomatic never ceases to create all of these problems,
while at the same time its axioms, even multiplied, deny it the means of
resolving them (for example, the circulation and distribution that would
make it possible to feed the world). Even a social democracy adapted to the
Third World surely does not undertake to integrate the whole poverty-
stricken population into the domestic market; what it does, rather, is to
effect the class rupture that will select the integratable elements. And the
States of the center deal not only with the Third World, each of them has
not only an external Third World, but there are internal Third Worlds that
rise up within them and work them from the inside. It could even be said in
certain respects that the periphery and the center exchange determina-
tions: a deterritorialization of the center, a decoding of the center in rela-
tion to national and territorial aggregates, cause the peripheral formations
to become true centers of investment, while the central formations
                  7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 469

peripheralize. This simultaneously strengthens and relativizes Samir
Amin's theses. The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry
and highly industrialized agriculture at the periphery, provisionally
reserving for the center so-called postindustrial activities (automation,
electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, overarma-
ment, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment
inside the center, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths. "Masses" of the
population are abandoned to erratic work (subcontracting, temporary
work, or work in the underground economy), and their official subsistence
is assured only by State allocations and wages subject to interruption. It is
to the credit of thinkers like Antonio Negri to have formulated, on the basis
of the exemplary case of Italy, the theory of this internal margin, which
tends increasingly to merge the students with the emarginati.66 These phe-
nomena confirm the difference between the new machinic enslavement
and classical subjection. For subjection remained centered on labor and
involved a bipolar organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat.
In enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital, on the other
hand, labor seems to have splintered in two directions: intensive surplus
labor that no longer even takes the route of labor, and extensive labor that
has become erratic and floating. The totalitarian tendency to abandon axi-
oms of employment and the social democratic tendency to multiply stat-
utes can combine here, but always in order to effect class ruptures. The
opposition between the axiomatic and the flows it does not succeed in mas-
tering becomes all the more accentuated.

   6. Minorities. Ours is becoming the age of minorities. We have seen sev-
eral times that minorities are not necessarily defined by the smallness of
their numbers but rather by becoming or a line of fluctuation, in other
words, by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a
redundant majority ("Ulysses, or today's average, urban European"; or as
Yann Moulier says, "the national Worker, qualified, male and over thirty-
five"). A minority can be small in number; but it can also be the largest in
number, constitute an absolute, indefinite majority. That is the situation
when authors, even those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great capitalist
warning cry: in twenty years, "whites" will form only 12 percent of the
world population. . . Thus they are not content to say that the majority will
change, or has already changed, but say that it is impinged upon by a
nondenumerable and proliferating minority that threatens to destroy the
very concept of majority, in other words, the majority as an axiom. And the
curious concept of nonwhite does not in fact constitute a denumerable set.
What defines a minority, then, is not the number but the relations internal
to the number. A minority can be numerous, or even infinite; so can a
                   470 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

majority. What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the rela-
tion internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite,
but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a non-
denumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes
the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the con-
nection, the "and" produced between elements, between sets, and which
belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The
axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas
the minorities constitute "fuzzy," nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets,
in short, "masses," multiplicities of escape and flux.
   Whether it be the infinite set of the nonwhites of the periphery, or the
restricted set of the Basques, Corsicans, etc., everywhere we look we see the
conditions for a worldwide movement: the minorities recreate "nationali-
tarian" phenomena that the nation-states had been charged with control-
ling and quashing. The bureaucratic socialist sector is certainly not spared
by these movements, and as Amalrik said, the dissidents are nothing, or
serve only as pawns in international politics, if they are abstracted from the
minorities working the USSR. It matters little that the minorities are inca-
pable of constituting viable States from the point of view of the axiomatic
and the market, since in the long run they promote compositions that do
not pass by way of the capitalist economy any more than they do the State-
form. The response of the States, or of the axiomatic, may obviously be to
accord the minorities regional or federal or statutory autonomy, in short,
to add axioms. But this is not the problem: this operation consists only in
translating the minorities into denumerable sets or subsets, which would
enter as elements into the majority, which could be counted among the
majority. The same applies for a status accorded to women, young people,
erratic workers, etc. One could even imagine, in blood and crisis, a more
radical reversal that would make the white world the periphery of a yellow
world; there would doubtless be an entirely different axiomatic. But what
we are talking about is something else, something even that would not
resolve: women, nonmen, as a minority, as a nondenumerable flow or set,
would receive no adequate expression by becoming elements of the major-
ity, in other words, by becoming a denumerable finite set. Nonwhites
would receive no adequate expression by becoming a new yellow or black
majority, an infinite denumerable set. What is proper to the minority is to
assert a power of the nondenumerable, even if that minority is composed of
a single member. That is the formula for multiplicities. Minority as a uni-
versal figure, or becoming-everybody/everything (devenir tout le monde).
Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-
white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.
   Once again, this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is
                  7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 471

without importance; on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse
levels: women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of
the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of
the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West.. .)• But there is
also always a sign to indicate that these struggles are the index of another,
coexistent combat. However modest the demand, it always constitutes a
point that the axiomatic cannot tolerate: when people demand to formu-
late their problems themselves, and to determine at least the particular
conditions under which they can receive a more general solution (hold to
the Particular as an innovative form). It is always astounding to see the
same story repeated: the modesty of the minorities' initial demands, cou-
pled with the impotence of the axiomatic to resolve the slightest corre-
sponding problem. In short, the struggle around axioms is most important
when it manifests, itself opens, the gap between two types of propositions,
propositions of flow and propositions of axioms. The power of the minori-
ties is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt
within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautolog-
ical criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-
denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable
sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they if imply new
axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all anarchy ver-
sus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calcu-
lus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the
axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its own com-
positions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds
not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of
minorities.

   7. Undecidablepropositions. It will be objected that the axiomatic itself
marshals the power of a nondenumerable infinite set: precisely that of the
war machine. It seems difficult, however, to use the war machine in the gen-
eral "treatment" of minorities without triggering the absolute war it is sup-
posed to ward off. We have seen the war machine institute quantitative and
qualitative processes, miniaturizations, and adaptations that enable it to
graduate its attacks or counterattacks, each time as a function of the nature
of the "unspecified enemy" (individuals, groups, peoples.. .). But under
these conditions, the capitalist axiomatic continually produces and repro-
duces what the war machine tries to exterminate. Even the organization of
famine multiplies the starving as much as it kills them. Even the organiza-
tion of camps, an area where the socialist sector has dreadfully distin-
guished itself, does not assure the radical solution of which power dreams.
The extermination of a minority engenders a minority of that minority.
                   472 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

However relentless the killing, it is relatively difficult to liquidate a people
or a group, even in the Third World, once it has enough connections with
elements of the axiomatic. In still other respects, it can be predicted that
the impending problems of the economy, which will consist in reforming
capital in relation to new resources (undersea oil, metallic nodules, food-
stuffs), will require not only a redistribution of the world that will mobilize
the worldwide war machine and train its parts on the new objectives; we
will also probably see the formation or re-formation of minoritarian aggre-
gates, in relation to the affected regions.
   Generally speaking, minorities do not receive a better solution of their
problem by integration, even with axioms, statutes, autonomies, inde-
pendences. Their tactics necessarily go that route. But if they are revolu-
tionary, it is because they carry within them a deeper movement that
challenges the worldwide axiomatic. The power of minority, of particu-
larity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat. But
as long as the working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by
a theoretically conquered State, it appears only as "capital," a part of cap-
ital (variable capital), and does not leave theplan(e) of capital. At best, the
plan(e) becomes bureaucratic. On the other hand, it is by leaving the
plan(e) of capital, and never ceasing to leave it, that a mass becomes
increasingly revolutionary and destroys the dominant equilibrium of the
denumerable sets.67 It is hard to see what an Amazon-State would be, a
women's State, or a State of erratic workers, a State of the "refusal" of
work. If minorities do not constitute viable States culturally, politically,
economically, it is because the State-form is not appropriate to them, nor
the axiomatic of capital, nor the corresponding culture. We have often
seen capitalism maintain and organize inviable States, according to its
needs, and for the precise purpose of crushing minorities. The minorities
issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of
constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine
by other means.
   If the two solutions of extermination and integration hardly seem possi-
ble, it is due to the deepest law of capitalism: it continually sets and then
repels its own limits, but in so doing gives rise to numerous flows in all
directions that escape its axiomatic. At the same time as capitalism is effec-
tuated in the denumerable sets serving as its models, it necessarily consti-
tutes nondenumerable sets that cut across and disrupt those models. It does
not effect the "conjugation" of the deterritorialized and decoded flows
without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the
axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them;
without their tending to enter into "connections" that delineate a new
Land; without their constituting a war machine whose aim is neither the
                  7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 473

war of extermination nor the peace of generalized terror, but revolutionary
movement (the connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable
aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything). This is
not a dispersion or a fragmentation: we are instead back at the opposition
between, on the one hand, a plane of consistency and, on the other, the plane
of organization and development of capital and the bureaucratic socialist
plane. There is in each case a constructivism, a "diagrammatism," operat-
ing by the determination of the conditions of the problem and by transver-
sal links between problems: it opposes both the automation of the capitalist
axioms and bureaucratic programming. From this standpoint, when we
talk about "undecidable propositions," we are not referring to the uncer-
tainty of the results, which is necessarily a part of every system. We are
referring, on the contrary, to the coexistence and inseparability of that
which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it fol-
lowing lines of flight that are themselves connectable. The undecidable is
the germ and locus par excellence of revolutionary decisions. Some people
invoke the high technology of the world system of enslavement; but even,
and especially, this machinic enslavement abounds in undecidable
propositions and movements that, far from belonging to a domain of
knowledge reserved for sworn specialists, provides so many weapons for
the becoming of everybody/everything, becoming-radio, becoming-
electronic, becoming-molecular.. ,68 Every struggle is a function of all of
these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections
in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic.
  14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated




  Quilt

Smooth space and striated space—nomad space and sedentary space—the
space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the
State apparatus—are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a sim-
ple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a
much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of
the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that
than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mix-
ture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a stri-
ated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a
smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second,
                                     474
                1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 475

the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously. But the
de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between
the two spaces. That there is such a distinction is what accounts for the fact
that the two spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way: it
is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de
facto mix and the direction or meaning of the mix (is a smooth space cap-
tured, enveloped by a striated space, or does a striated space dissolve into a
smooth space, allow a smooth space to develop?). This raises a number of
simultaneous questions: the simple oppositions between the two spaces;
the complex differences; the de facto mixes, and the passages from one to
another; the principles of the mixture, which are not at all symmetrical,
sometimes causing a passage from the smooth to the striated, sometimes
from the striated to the smooth, according to entirely different move-
ments. We must therefore envision a certain number of models, which
would be like various aspects of the two spaces and the relations between
them.

   The Technological Model. A fabric presents in principle a certain number
of characteristics that permit us to define it as a striated space. First, it is
constituted by two kinds of parallel elements; in the simplest case, there are
vertical and horizontal elements, and the two intertwine, intersect perpen-
dicularly. Second, the two kinds of elements have different functions; one
is fixed, the other mobile, passing above and beneath the fixed. Leroi-
Gourhan has analyzed this particular figure of "supple solids" in basketry
and weaving: stake and thread, warp and woof.' Third, a striated space of
this kind is necessarily delimited, closed on at least one side: the fabric can
be infinite in length but not in width, which is determined by the frame of
the warp; the necessity of a back and forth motion implies a closed space
(circular or cylindrical figures are themselves closed). Finally, a space of
this kind seems necessarily to have a top and a bottom; even when the warp
yarn and woof yarn are exactly the same in nature, number, and density,
weaving reconstitutes a bottom by placing the knots on one side. Was it not
these characteristics that enabled Plato to use the model of weaving as the
paradigm for "royal science," in other words, the art of governing people or
operating the State apparatus?
   Felt is a supple solid product that proceeds altogether differently, as an
anti-fabric. It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an
entanglement of fibers obtained by fulling (for example, by rolling the
block of fibers back and forth). What becomes entangled are the
microscales of the fibers. An aggregate of intrication of this kind is in no
way homogeneous: it is nevertheless smooth, and contrasts point by point
with the space of fabric (it is in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in
                476 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

every direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center; it does not assign
fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variation).
Even the technologists who express grave doubts about the nomads' pow-
ers of innovation at least give them credit for felt: a splendid insulator, an
ingenious invention, the raw material for tents, clothes, and armor among
the Turco-Mongols. Of course, the nomads of Africa and the Maghreb
instead treat wool as a fabric. Although it might entail displacing the oppo-
sition, do we not detect two very different conceptions or even practices of
weaving, the distinction between which would be something like the dis-
tinction between fabric as a whole and felt? For among sedentaries,
clothes-fabric and tapestry-fabric tend to annex the body and exterior
space, respectively, to the immobile house: fabric integrates the body and
the outside into a closed space. On the other hand, the weaving of the
nomad indexes clothing and the house itself to the space of the outside, to
the open smooth space in which the body moves.
    There are many interfacings, mixes between felt and fabric. Can we not
displace the opposition yet again? In knitting, for example, the needles pro-
duce a striated space; one of them plays the role of the warp, the other of the
woof, but by turns. Crochet, on the other hand, draws an open space in all
directions, a space that is prolongable in all directions—but still has a cen-
ter. A more significant distinction would be between embroidery, with its
central theme or motif, and patchwork, with its piece-by-piece construc-
tion, its infinite, successive additions of fabric. Of course, embroidery's
variables and constants, fixed and mobile elements, may be of extraordi-
nary complexity. Patchwork, for its part, may display equivalents to
themes, symmetries, and resonance that approximate it to embroidery.
But the fact remains that its space is not at all constituted in the same way:
there is no center; its basic motif ("block") is composed of a single element;
the recurrence of this element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from
the harmonies of embroidery (in particular, in "crazy" patchwork, which
fits together pieces of varying size, shape, and color, and plays on the tex-
ture of the fabrics). "She had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying
about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing
odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never
bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and
mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle-picture,
trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern out of them without using
her scissors, smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fin-
gers."2 An amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined
together in an infinite number of ways: we see that patchwork is literally a
Riemannian space, or vice versa. That is why very special work groups
were formed for patchwork fabrication (the importance of the quilting bee
                1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 477

in America, and its role from the standpoint of a women's collectivity). The
smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that "smooth" does
not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal
space prefiguring op art.
   The story of the quilt is particularly interesting in this connection. A
quilt comprises two layers of fabric stitched together, often with a filler in
between. Thus it is possible for there to be no top or bottom. If we follow
the history of the quilt over a short migration sequence (the settlers who
left Europe for the New World), we see that there is a shift from a formula
dominated by embroidery (so-called "plain" quilts) to a patchwork for-
mula ("applique quilts," and above all "pieced quilts"). The first settlers
of the seventeenth century brought with them plain quilts, embroidered
and striated spaces of extreme beauty. But toward the end of the century
patchwork technique was developed more and more, at first due to the
scarcity of textiles (leftover fabric, pieces salvaged from used clothes,
remnants taken from the "scrap bag"), and later due to the popularity of
Indian chintz. It is as though a smooth space emanated, sprang from a
striated space, but not without a correlation between the two, a recapitu-
lation of one in the other, a furtherance of one through the other. Yet the
complex difference persists. Patchwork, in conformity with migration,
whose degree of affinity with nomadism it shares, is not only named after
trajectories, but "represents" trajectories, becomes inseparable from
speed or movement in an open space.3

   The Musical Model. Pierre Boulez was the first to develop a set of simple
oppositions and complex differences, as well as reciprocal nonsymmetrical
correlations, between smooth and striated space. He created these con-
cepts and words in the field of music, defining them on several levels pre-
cisely in order to account for the abstract distinction at the same time as the
concrete mixes. In the simplest terms, Boulez says that in a smooth space-
time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated space-time one
counts in order to occupy. He makes palpable or perceptible the difference
between nonmetric and metric multiplicities, directional and dimensional
spaces. He renders them sonorous or musical. Undoubtedly, his personal
work is composed of these relations, created or recreated musically.4
   At a second level, it can be said that space is susceptible to two kinds of
breaks: one is defined by a standard, whereas the other is irregular and
undetermined, and can be made wherever one wishes to place it. At yet
another level, it can be said that frequencies can be distributed either in the
intervals between breaks, or statistically without breaks. In the first case,
the principle behind the distribution of breaks and intervals is called a
"module"; it may be constant and fixed (a straight striated space), or
                478 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

regularly or irregularly variable (curved striated spaces, termed focalized if
the variation of the module is regular, nonfocalized if it is irregular). When
there is no module, the distribution of frequencies is without break: it is
"statistical," however small the segment of space may be; it still has two
aspects, however, depending on whether the distribution is equal
(nondirected smooth space), or more or less rare or dense (directed smooth
space). Can we say that in the kind of smooth space that is without break or
module there is no interval? Or, on the contrary, has everything become
interval, intermezzo? The smooth is a nomos, whereas the striated always
has a logos, the octave, for example. Boulez is concerned with the commu-
nication between the two kinds of space, their alternations and superposi-
tions: how "a strongly directed smooth space tends to meld with a striated
space," how "a striated space in which the statistical distribution of the
pitches used is in fact equal tends to meld with a smooth space";5 how the
octave can be replaced by "non-octave-forming scales" that reproduce
themselves through a principle of spiraling; how "texture" can be crafted in
such a way as to lose fixed and homogeneous values, becoming a support
for slips in tempo, displacements of intervals, and son art transformations
comparable to the transformations of op art.
   Returning to the simple opposition, the striated is that which inter-
twines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of
distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical har-
monic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous devel-
opment of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the
production of properly rythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a
diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.

    The Maritime Model. Of course, there are points, lines, and surfaces in
striated space as well as in smooth space (there are also volumes, but we will
leave this question aside for the time being). In striated space, lines or tra-
jectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to
another. In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the
trajectory. This was already the case among the nomads for the clothes-
tent-space vector of the outside. The dwelling is subordinated to the jour-
ney; inside space conforms to outside space: tent, igloo, boat. There are
stops and trajectories in both the smooth and the striated. But in smooth
space, the stop follows from the trajectory; once again, the interval takes
all, the interval is substance (forming the basis for rhythmic values).6
    In smooth space, the line is therefore a vector, a direction and not a
dimension or metric determination. It is a space constructed by local oper-
ations involving changes in direction. These changes in direction may be
due to the nature of the journey itself, as with the nomads of the archipela-
                 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 479

goes (a case of "directed" smooth space); but it is more likely to be due to
the variability of the goal or point to be attained, as with the nomads of the
desert who head toward local, temporary vegetation (a "nondirected"
smooth space). Directed or not, and especially in the latter case, smooth
space is directional rather than dimensional or metric. Smooth space is
filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived
things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather
than optical perception. Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter,
in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is
an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures
and properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio. A Body without
Organs instead of an organism and organization. Perception in it is based
on symptoms and evaluations rather than measures and properties. That is
why smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and
sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice.7 The creaking
of ice and the song of the sands. Striated space, on the contrary, is can-
opied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriv-
ing from it.
    This is where the very special problem of the sea enters in. For the sea is a
smooth space par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the
demands of increasingly strict striation. The problem did not arise in prox-
imity to land. On the contrary, the striation of the sea was a result of naviga-
tion on the open water. Maritime space was striated as a function of two
astronomical and geographical gains: bearings, obtained by a set of calcula-
tions based on exact observation of the stars and the sun; and the map,
which intertwines meridians and parallels, longitudes and latitudes, plot-
ting regions known and unknown onto a grid (like a Mendeleyev table).
Must we accept the Portuguese argument and assign 1440 as the turning
point that marked the first decisive striation, and set the stage for the great
discoveries? Rather, we will follow Pierre Chaunu when he speaks of an
extended confrontation at sea between the smooth and the striated during
the course of which the striated progressively took hold.8 For before longi-
tude lines had been plotted, a very late development, there existed a com-
plex and empirical nomadic system of navigation based on the wind and
noise, the colors and sounds of the seas; then came a directional,
preastronomical or already astronomical, system of navigation employing
only latitude, in which there was no possibility of "taking one's bearings,"
and which had only portolanos lacking "translatable generalization"
instead of true maps; finally, improvements upon this primitive astronom-
ical navigation were made under the very special conditions of the lati-
tudes of the Indian Ocean, then of the elliptical circuits of the Atlantic
(straight and curved spaces).9 It is as if the sea were not only the archetype
                480 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

of all smooth spaces but the first to undergo a gradual striation gridding it
in one place, then another, on this side and that. The commercial cities par-
ticipated in this striation, and were often innovators; but only the States
were capable of carrying it to completion, of raising it to the global level of a
"politics of science."10 A dimensionality that subordinated directionality,
or superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly entrenched.
   This is undoubtedly why the sea, the archetype of smooth space, was
also the archetype of all striations of smooth space: the striation of the
desert, the air, the stratosphere (prompting Virilio to speak of a "vertical
coastline," as a change in direction). It was at sea that smooth space was
first subjugated and a model found for the laying-out and imposition of
striated space, a model later put to use elsewhere. This does not contradict
Virilio's other hypothesis: in the aftermath of striation, the sea reimparts a
kind of smooth space, occupied first by the "fleet in being," then by the per-
petual motion of the strategic submarine, which outflanks all gridding and
invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturb-
ing than the States, which reconstitute it at the limit of their striations. The
sea, then the air and the stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but, in
the strangest of reversals, it is for the purpose of controlling striated space
more completely.11 The smooth always possesses a greater power of
deterritorialization than the striated. When examining the new profes-
sions, or new classes even, how can one fail to mention the military techni-
cians who stare into screens night and day and live for long stretches in
strategic submarines (in the future it will be on satellites), and the apoca-
lyptic eyes and ears they have fashioned for themselves, which can barely
distinguish any more between a natural phenomenon, a swarm of locusts,
and an "enemy" attack originating at any given point? All of this serves as a
reminder that the smooth itself can be drawn and occupied by diabolical
powers of organization; value judgments aside, this demonstrates above all
that there exist two nonsymmetrical movements, one of which striates the
smooth, and one of which reimparts smooth space on the basis of the stri-
ated. (Do not new smooth spaces, or holey spaces, arise as parries even in
relation to the smooth space of a worldwide organization? Virilio invokes
the beginnings of subterranean habitation in the "mineral layer," which
can take on very diverse values.)
    Let us return to the simple opposition between the smooth and the stri-
ated since we are not yet at the point where we can consider the dis-
symmetrical and concrete mixes. The smooth and the striated are
distinguished first of all by an inverse relation between the point and the
line (in the case of the striated, the line is between two points, while in the
smooth, the point is between two lines); and second, by the nature of the
line (smooth-directional, open intervals; dimensional-striated, closed
                 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 481

intervals). Finally, there is a third difference, concerning the surface or
space. In striated space, one closes off a surface and "allocates" it according
to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one "distributes"
oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of
one's crossings (logos and nomos).n As simple as this opposition is, it is not
easy to place it. We cannot content ourselves with establishing an immedi-
ate opposition between the smooth ground of the nomadic animal raiser
and the striated land of the sedentary cultivator. It is evident that the peas-
ant, even the sedentary peasant, participates fully in the space of the wind,
the space of tactile and sonorous qualities. When the ancient Greeks speak
of the open space of the nomos—nondelimited, unpartitioned; the pre-
urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe—they oppose it not to
cultivation, which may actually be part of it, but to the polls, the city, the
town. When Ibn Khaldun speaks of badiya, bedouinism, the term covers
cultivators as well as nomadic animal raisers: he contrasts it to hadara, or
"city life." This clarification is certainly important, but it does not change
much. For from the most ancient of times, from Neolithic and even Paleo-
lithic times, it is the town that invents agriculture: it is through the actions of
the town that the farmers and their striated space are superposed upon the
cultivators operating in a still smooth space (the transhumant cultivator,
half-sedentary or already completely sedentary). So on this level we
reencounter the simple opposition we began by challenging, between farm-
ers and nomads, striated land and smooth ground: but only after a detour
through the town as a force of striation. Now not only the sea, desert,
steppe, and air are the sites of a contest between the smooth and the stri-
ated, but the earth itself, depending on whether there is cultivation in
nomos-space or agriculture in city-space. Must we not say the same of the
city itself? In contrast to the sea, the city is the striated space par excellence;
the sea is a smooth space fundamentally open to striation, and the city is
the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it back into opera-
tion everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside but also inside
itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of world-
wide organization, but also of a counterattack combining the smooth and
the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting
shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patch-
work, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even
relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the city, and corresponding to
Thorn's mathematical formula: "retroactive smoothing."13 Condensed
force, the potential for counterattack?
   In each instance, then, the simple opposition "smooth-striated" gives
rise to far more difficult complications, alternations, and superpositions.
But these complications basically confirm the distinction, precisely
                482 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

because they bring dissymmetrical movements into play. For now, it suf-
fices to say that there are two kinds of voyage, distinguished by the respec-
tive role of the point, line, and space. Goethe travel and Kleist travel?
French travel and English (or American) travel? Tree travel and rhizome
travel? But nothing completely coincides, and everything intermingles, or
crosses over. This is because the differences are not objective: it is possible
to live striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth
even in the cities, to be an urban nomad (for example, a stroll taken by
Henry Miller in Clichy or Brooklyn is a nomadic transit in smooth space;
he makes the city disgorge a patchwork, differentials of speed, delays and
accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations . . . The beat-
niks owe much to Miller, but they changed direction again, they put the
space outside the cities to new use). Fitzgerald said it long ago: it is not a
question of taking off for the South Seas, that is not what determines a voy-
age. There are not only strange voyages in the city but voyages in place: we
are not thinking of drug users, whose experience is too ambiguous, but of
true nomads. We can say of the nomads, following Toynbee's suggestion:
they do not move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, of
holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in
order to conquer and die. Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities,
even if they also develop in extension. To think is to voyage; earlier we tried
to establish a theo-noological model of smooth and striated spaces. In
short, what distinguishes the two kinds of voyages is neither a measurable
quantity of movement, nor something that would be only in the mind, but
the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space.
Voyage smoothly or in striation, and think the same w a y . . . But there are
always passages from one to the other, transformations of one within the
other, reversals. In his film, Kings of the Road, Wenders intersects and
superposes the paths of two characters; one of them takes a still educa-
tional, memorial, cultural, Goethean journey that is thoroughly striated,
whereas the other has already conquered smooth space, and only experi-
ments, induces amnesia in the German "desert." But oddly enough, it is the
former who opens space for himself and performs a kind of retroactive
smoothing, whereas striae reform around the latter, closing his space again.
Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at
that. It is not a question of returning to preastronomical navigation, nor to
the ancient nomads. The confrontation between the smooth and the stri-
ated, the passages, alternations and superpositions, are under way today,
running in the most varied directions.

   The Mathematical Model. It was a decisive event when the mathemati-
cian Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a
                 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 483

noun, "multiplicity." It marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a
typology and topology of multiplicities. Each multiplicity was defined by n
determinations; sometimes the determinations were independent of the
situation, and sometimes they depended upon it. For example, the magni-
tude of a vertical line between two points can be compared to the magni-
tude of a horizontal line between two other points: it is clear that the
multiplicity in this case is metric, that it allows itself to be striated, and that
its determinations are magnitudes. On the other hand, two sounds of equal
pitch and different intensity cannot be compared to two sounds of equal
intensity and different pitch; in this case, two determinations can be com-
pared only "if one is a part of the other and if we restrict ourselves to the
judgment that the latter is smaller than the former, without being able to
say by how much."14 Multiplicities of this second kind are not metric and
allow themselves to be striated and measured only by indirect means,
which they always resist. They are anexact yet rigorous. Meinong and
Russell opposed the notion of distance to that of magnitude.1* Distances
are not, strictly speaking, indivisible: they can be divided precisely in cases
where the situation of one determination makes it part of another. But
unlike magnitudes, they cannot divide without changing in nature each
time. An intensity, for example, is not composed of addable and displace-
able magnitudes: a temperature is not the sum of two smaller tempera-
tures, a speed is not the sum of two smaller speeds. Since each intensity is
itself a difference, it divides according to an order in which each term of the
division differs in nature from the others. Distance is therefore a set of
ordered differences, in other words, differences that are enveloped in one
another in such a way that it is possible to judge which is larger or smaller,
but not their exact magnitudes. For example, one can divide movement
into the gallop, trot, and walk, but in such a way that what is divided
changes in nature at each moment of the division, without any one of these
moments entering into the composition of any other. Therefore these mul-
tiplicities of "distance" are inseparable from a process of continuous varia-
tion, whereas multiplicities of "magnitude" distribute constants and
variables.
    That is why we consider Bergson to be of major importance (much more
so than Husserl, or even Meinong or Russell) in the development of the the-
ory of multiplicities. Beginning in Time and Free Will, he presents dura-
tion as a type of multiplicity opposed to metric multiplicity or the
multiplicity of magnitude. Duration is in no way indivisible, but is that
which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division
(Achilles' running is not divided into steps, his steps do not compose it in
the manner of magnitudes).16 On the other hand, in a multiplicity such as
homogeneous extension, the division can be carried as far as one likes
                484 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

without changing anything in the constant object; or the magnitudes can
vary with no other result than an increase or a decrease in the amount of
space they striate. Bergson thus brought to light "two very different kinds
of multiplicity," one qualitative and fusional, continuous, the other
numerical and homogeneous, discrete. It will be noted that matter goes
back and forth between the two; sometimes it is already enveloped in quali-
tative multiplicity, sometimes already developed in a metric "schema"
that draws it outside of itself. The confrontation between Bergson and
Einstein on the topic of Relativity is incomprehensible if one fails to place
it in the context of the basic theory of Riemannian multiplicities, as modi-
fied by Bergson.
    We have on numerous occasions encountered all kinds of differences
between two types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric; extensive and
qualitative; centered and acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic; numeri-
cal and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses and of packs; of magni-
tude and of distance; of breaks and of frequency; striated and smooth. Not
only is that which peoples a smooth space a multiplicity that changes in
nature when it divides—such as tribes in the desert: constantly modified
distances, packs that are always undergoing metamorphosis—but smooth
space itself, desert, steppe, sea, or ice, is a multiplicity of this type, non-
metric, acentered, directional, etc. Now it might be thought that the Num-
ber would belong exclusively to the other multiplicities, that it would
accord them the scientific status nonmetric multiplicities lack. But this is
only partially true. It is true that the number is the correlate of the metric:
magnitudes can striate space only by reference to numbers, and conversely,
numbers are used to express increasingly complex relations between mag-
nitudes, thus giving rise to ideal spaces reinforcing the striation and mak-
ing it coextensive with all of matter. There is therefore a correlation within
metric multiplicities between geometry and arithmetic, geometry and
algebra, which is constitutive of major science (the most profound authors
in this respect are those who have seen that the number, even in its simplest
forms, is exclusively cardinal in character, and the unit exclusively divisi-
ble).17 It could be said on the other hand that nonmetric multiplicities or
the multiplicities of smooth space pertain only to a minor geometry that is
purely operative and qualitative, in which calculation is necessarily very
limited, and the local operations of which are not even capable of general
translatability or a homogeneous system of location. Yet this "inferiority"
is only apparent; for the independence of this nearly illiterate, ametric
geometry is what makes possible the independence of the number, the sub-
sequent function of which is to measure magnitudes in striated space (or to
striate). The number distributes itself in smooth space; it does not divide
without changing nature each time, without changing units, each of which
                1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 485

represents a distance and not a magnitude. The ordinal, directional, no-
madic, articulated number, the numbering number, pertains to smooth
space, just as the numbered number pertains to striated space. So we may
say of every multiplicity that it is already a number, and still a unit. But the
number and the unit, and even the way in which the unit divides, are differ-
ent in each case. Minor science is continually enriching major science,
communicating its intuitions to it, its way of proceeding, its itinerancy, its
sense of and taste for matter, singularity, variation, intuitionist geometry
and the numbering number.
    But so far we have only considered the first aspect of smooth and
nonmetric multiplicities, as opposed to metric multiplicities: how the situ-
ation of one determination can make it part of another without our being
able either to assign that situation an exact magnitude or common unit, or
to discount it. This is the enveloping or enveloped character of smooth
space. But there is a second, more important, aspect: when the situation of
the two determinations precludes their comparison. As we know, this is the
case for Riemannian spaces, or rather, Riemannian patches of space:
"Riemann spaces are devoid of any kind of homogeneity. Each is charac-
terized by the form of the expression that defines the square of the distance
between two infinitely proximate points          It follows that two neighbor-
ing observers in a Riemann space can locate the points in their immediate
vicinity but cannot locate their spaces in relation to each other without a
new convention. Each vicinity is therefore like a shred of Euclidean space,
but the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not defined and can be
effected in an infinite number of ways. Riemann space at its most general
thus presents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed
but not attached to each other." It is possible to define this multiplicity
without any reference to a metrical system, in terms of the conditions of
frequency, or rather accumulation, of a set of vicinities; these conditions
are entirely different from those determining metric spaces and their
breaks (even though a relation between the two kinds of space necessarily
results).18 In short, if we follow Lautman's fine description, Riemannian
space is pure patchwork. It has connections, or tactile relations. It has
rhythmic values not found elsewhere, even though they can be translated
into a metric space. Heterogeneous, in continuous variation, it is a smooth
space, insofar as smooth space is amorphous and not homogeneous. We
can thus define two positive characteristics of smooth space in general:
when there are determinations that are part of one another and pertain to
enveloped distances or ordered differences, independent of magnitude;
when, independent of metrics, determinations arise that cannot be part of
one another but are connected by processes of frequency or accumulation.
These are the two aspects of the nomos of smooth space.
                486 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

    We are always, however, brought back to a dissymmetrical necessity to
cross from the smooth to the striated, and from the striated to the smooth.
If it is true that itinerant geometry and the nomadic number of smooth
spaces are a constant inspiration to royal science and striated space, con-
versely, the metrics of striated spaces (metron) is indispensable for the
translation of the strange data of a smooth multiplicity. Translating is not a
simple act: it is not enough to substitute the space traversed for the move-
ment; a series of rich and complex operations is necessary (Bergson was the
first to make this point). Neither is translating a secondary act. It is an oper-
ation that undoubtedly consists in subjugating, overcoding, metricizing
smooth space, in neutralizing it, but also in giving it a milieu of propaga-
tion, extension, refraction, renewal, and impulse without which it would
perhaps die of its own accord: like a mask without which it could neither
breathe nor find a general form of expression. Major science has a perpet-
ual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if
it did not confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements. Let
us take just two examples of the richness and necessity of translations,
which include as many opportunities for openings as risks of closure or
stoppage: first, the complexity of the means by which one translates inten-
sities into extensive quantities, or more generally, multiplicities of dis-
tance into systems of magnitudes that measure and striate them (the role of
logarithms in this connection); second, and more important, the delicacy
and complexity of the means by which Riemannian patches of smooth
space receive a Euclidean conjunction (the role of the parallelism of vectors
in striating the infinitesimal).19 The mode of connection proper to patches
of Riemannian space ("accumulation") is not to be confused with the
Euclidean conjunction of Riemann space ("parallelism"). Yet the two are
linked and give each other impetus. Nothing is ever done with: smooth
space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth
space, with potentially very different values, scope, and signs. Perhaps we
must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming
occurs in smooth space.
    Is it possible to give a very general mathematical definition of smooth
spaces? Benoit Mandelbrot's "fractals" seem to be on that path. Fractals
are aggregates whose number of dimensions is fractional rather than
whole, or else whole but with continuous variation in direction. An exam-
ple would be a line segment whose central third is replaced by the angle of
an equilateral triangle; the operation is repeated for the four resulting seg-
ments, and so on ad infinitum, following a relation of similarity—such a
segment would constitute an infinite line or curve with a dimension
greater than one, but less than a surface (= 2). Similar results can be
                     1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 487




                                              Sierpensky's sponge: more than a surface, less
   Von Koch's curve: more than a line, less   than a volume. The law according to which this
   than a surface. The middle third of        cube was hollowed can be understood intui-
   segment AE (1) is removed and              tively at a glance. Each square hole is sur-
   replaced with the traingle BCD (2). In     rounded by eight holes a third its size. These
   (3), this operation is repeated sepa-      holes are in turn surrounded by eight holes, also
   rately for each of the segments/IB, AC,    a third their size. And so on, endlessly. The illus-
   CD, andDE. This yields an angled line      trator could not represent the infinity of holes
   of equal segments (4), and so on, ad       of decreasing size beyond the fourth degree, but
   infinitum. The end result is a "curve"     it is plain to see that this cube is in the end infi-
   composed of an infinite number of          nitely hollow. Its total volume approaches zero,
   angled points that preclude any tan-       while the total lateral surface of the hollowings
   gent being drawn to any of their           infinitely grows. This space has a dimension of
   points. The length of the curve is infi-   2.7268. It therefore lies between a surface (with
   nite and its dimension is higher than      a dimension of 2) and a volume (with a dimen-
   one: it represents a space of 1.261859     sion of 3). "Sierpinsky's rug" is one face of this
   dimensions (log 4/log 3 exactly).          cube; the hollowings are then squares and the
                                              dimension of the "surface" is 1.2618. From
                                              Studies in Geometry by Leonard M. Blu-
                                              menthal and Karl Menger. Copyright © 1970
                                              W. H. Freeman and Company. Reprinted with
                                              permission.
Concerning Benoit Mandelbrot's "Fractals"

obtained by making holes, by cutting, "windows" into a circle, instead of
adding "points" to a triangle; likewise, a cube into which holes are drilled
according to the principle of similarity becomes less than a volume but
more than a surface (this is the mathematical presentation of the affinity
between a free space and a holey space). In still other forms, Brownian
motion, turbulence, and the sky are "fractals" of this kind.20 Perhaps this
provides us with another way of defining fuzzy aggregates. But the main
thing is that it provides a general determination for smooth space that
                 488 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

takes into account its differences from and relations to striated space: (1)
we shall call striated or metric any aggregate with a whole number of
dimensions, and for which it is possible to assign constant directions; (2)
nonmetric smooth space is constituted by the construction of a line with a
fractional number of dimensions greater than one, or of a surface with a
fractional number of dimensions greater than two; (3) a fractional number
of dimensions is the index of a properly directional space (with continuous
variation in direction, and without tangent); (4) what defines smooth
space, then, is that it does not have a dimension higher than that which
moves through it or is inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity, for
example, a line that fills a plane without ceasing to be a line; (5) space and
that which occupies space tend to become identified, to have the same
power, in the anexact yet rigorous form of the numbering or nonwhole
number (occupy without counting); (6) a smooth, amorphous space of this
kind is constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumula-
tion defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to "becoming" (more than a
line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface).

   The Physical Model. The various models confirm a certain idea of stria-
tion: two series of parallels that intersect perpendicularly, some of which,
the verticals, are more in the role of fixed elements or constants, whereas
the others, the horizontals, are more in the role of variables. This is roughly
the case for the warp and the woof, harmony and melody, longitude and lat-
itude. The more regular the intersection, the tighter the striation, the more
homogeneous the space tends to become; it is for this reason that from the
beginning homogeneity did not seem to us to be a characteristic of smooth
space, but on the contrary, the extreme result of striation, or the limit-form
of a space striated everywhere and in all directions. If the smooth and the
homogeneous seem to communicate, it is only because when the striated
attains its ideal of perfect homogeneity, it is apt to reimpart smooth space,
by a movement that superposes itself upon that of the homogeneous but
remains entirely different from it. In each model, the smooth actually
seemed to pertain to a fundamental heterogeneity: felt or patchwork rather
than weaving, rhythmic values rather than harmony-melody, Riemannian
space rather than Euclidean space—a continuous variation that exceeds
any distribution of constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does
not pass between two points, the formation of a plane that does not proceed
by parallel and perpendicular lines.
   The link between the homogeneous and the striated can be expressed in
terms of an imaginary, elementary physics. (1) You begin by striating space
with parallel gravitational verticals. (2) The resultant of these parallels or
forces is applied to a point inside the body occupying the space (center of
                1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 489

gravity). (3) The position of this point does not change when the direction
of the parallel forces is changed, when they become perpendicular to their
original direction. (4) You discover that gravity is a particular case of a uni-
versal attraction following straight lines or biunivocal relations between
two bodies. (5) You define a general notion of workas a force-displacement
relation in a certain direction. (6) You then have the physical basis for an
increasingly perfect striated space, running not only vertically and hori-
zontally, but in every direction subordinated to points.
   It is not even necessary to invoke this Newtonian pseudophysics. The
Greeks already went from a space striated vertically, top to bottom, to a
centered space with reversible and symmetrical relations in all directions,
in other words, striated in every direction in such a way as to constitute a
homogeneity. There is no question that these are like two models of the
State apparatus, the vertical apparatus of the empire and the isotropic
apparatus of the city-state.21 Geometry lies at the crossroads of a physics
problem and an affair of the State.
   It is obvious that the striation thus constituted has its limits: they are
reached not only when the infinite (either infinitely large or small) is
brought in, but also when more than two bodies are considered ("the three-
body problem"). Let us try to understand in the simplest terms how space
escapes the limits of its striation. At one pole, it escapes them by declina-
tion, in other words, by the smallest deviation, by the infinitely small devi-
ation between a gravitational vertical and the arc of a circle to which the
vertical is tangent. At the other pole, it escapes them by the spiral or vortex,
in other words, a figure in which all the points of space are simultaneously
occupied according to laws of frequency or of accumulation, distribution;
these laws are distinct from the so-called laminar distribution correspond-
ing to the striation of parallels. From the smallest deviation to the vortex
there is a valid and necessary relation of consequence: what stretches
between them is precisely a smooth space whose element is declination and
which is peopled by a spiral. Smooth space is constituted by the minimum
angle, which deviates from the vertical, and by the vortex, which overspills
striation. The strength of Michel Serres's book is that it demonstrates this
link between the clinamen as a generative differential element, and the for-
mation of vortices and turbulences insofar as they occupy an engendered
smooth space; in fact, the atom of the ancients, from Democritus to
Lucretius, was always inseparable from a hydraulics, or a generalized the-
ory of swells and flows. The ancient atom is entirely misunderstood if it is
overlooked that its essence is to course and flow. The theory of atomism is
the basis for a strict correlation between Archimedean geometry (very
different from the striated and homogeneous space of Euclid) and
Democritean physics (very different from solid or lamellar matter).22 The
                490 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

same coincidence means that this aggregate is no longer tied in any way to a
State apparatus, but rather to a war machine: a physics of packs, turbu-
lences, "catastrophes," and epidemics corresponding to a geometry of war,
of the art of war and its machines. Serres states what he considers to be
Lucretius's deepest goal: to go from Mars to Venus, to place the war
machine in the service of peace.23 But this operation is not accomplished
through the State apparatus; it expresses, on the contrary, an ultimate
metamorphosis of the war machine, and occurs in smooth space.
   Earlier we encountered a distinction between "free action" in smooth
space and "work" in striated space. During the nineteenth century a two-
fold elaboration was undertaken: of a physicoscientific concept of Work
(weight-height, force-displacement), and of a socioeconomic concept of
labor-power or abstract labor (a homogeneous abstract quantity applicable
to all work, and susceptible to multiplication and division). There was a
profound link between physics and sociology: society furnished an eco-
nomic standard of measure for work, and physics a "mechanical currency"
for it. The wage regime had as its correlate a mechanics of force. Physics
had never been more social, for in both cases it was a question of defining
the constant mean value of a force of lift and pull exerted in the most uni-
form way possible by a standard-man. Impose the Work-model upon every
activity, translate every act into possible or virtual work, discipline free
action, or else (which amounts to the same thing) relegate it to "leisure,"
which exists only by reference to work. We now understand why the Work-
model, in both its physical and social aspects, is a fundamental part of the
State apparatus. Standard-man began as the man of public works.24 It was
not in relation to pin manufacturing that the problems of abstract labor,
the multiplication of its results, and the division of its operations were first
formulated; it was in public construction and in the organization of armies
(not only the disciplining of men, but also the industrial production of
weapons). Nothing more normal. The war machine in itself did not imply
this normalization. But the State apparatus, in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, found a new way of appropriating the war machine: by
subjugating it before all else to the Work-model of the construction site and
factory, which were in the process of developing elsewhere, but more
slowly. The war machine was perhaps the first thing to be striated, to pro-
duce an abstract labor-time whose results could be multiplied and opera-
tions divided. That is where free action in smooth space must have been
conquered. The physicosocial model of Work pertains to the State appara-
tus, it is one of its inventions, and for two reasons. First, because labor
appears only with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labor that is not
devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labor (in the strict sense) begins only with
what is called surplus labor. Second, labor performs a generalized opera-
                 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 491

tion of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of
smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise
of the State, namely, its conquest of the war machine.
    Counterdemonstration: where there is no State and no surplus labor,
there is no Work-model either. Instead, there is the continuous variation of
free action, passing from speech to action, from a given action to another,
from action to song, from song to speech, from speech to enterprise, all in a
strange chromaticism with intense but rare peak moments or moments of
effort that the outside observer can only "translate" in terms of work. It is
true that it has been said of blacks through the ages that "they don't work,
they don't know what work is." It is true that they were forced to work, and
to work more than anyone else, in terms of abstract quantity. It also seems
to be true that the Indians had no understanding of, and were unsuited
for, any organization of work, even slavery: the Americans apparently
imported so many blacks only because they could not use the Indians, who
would rather die. Certain outstanding ethnologists have raised an essential
question. They have turned the problem around: so-called primitive socie-
ties are not societies of shortage or subsistence due to an absence of work,
but on the contrary are societies of free action and smooth space that have
no use for a work-factor, anymore than they constitute a stock.25 They are
not societies of sloth, even though their differences with work may be
expressed in the form of a "right to laziness." They are not without laws,
even though their differences with the law may be expressed in the guise of
"anarchy." What they have instead is a law of the nomos regulating a con-
tinuous variation of activity with a rigor and cruelty all its own (get rid of
whatever cannot be transported, the old, children . . .).
    If work constitutes a striated space-time corresponding to the State
apparatus, is this not especially true of its archaic or ancient forms? For it is
there that surplus labor is isolated, distinguished, in the form of tribute or
corvee. Consequently, it is there that the concept of labor appears at its
clearest, for example, in the large-scale works of the empires, the urban,
agricultural, or hydraulic works by which a "laminar" flow in supposedly
parallel layers (striation) is imposed upon the waters. It seems on the con-
trary that in the capitalist regime, surplus labor becomes less and less dis-
tinguishable from labor "strictly speaking," and totally impregnates it.
Modern public works have a different status from that of large-scale imper-
ial works. How could one possibly distinguish between the time necessary
for reproduction and "extorted" time, when they are no longer separated in
time? This remark certainly does not contradict the Marxist theory of sur-
plus value, for Marx shows precisely that surplus value ceases to be
localizable in the capitalist regime. That is even his fundamental contri-
bution. It gave him a sense that machines would themselves become
                492 n 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

productive of surplus value and that the circulation of capital would chal-
lenge the distinction between variable and constant capital. In these new
conditions, it remains true that all labor involves surplus labor; but surplus
labor no longer requires labor. Surplus labor, capitalist organization in its
entirety, operates less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding
to the physicosocial concept of work. Rather, it is as though human aliena-
tion through surplus labor were replaced by a generalized "machinic
enslavement," such that one may furnish surplus-value without doing any
work (children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc.). Not
only does the user as such tend to become an employee, but capitalism
operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process
bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the
entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling—every semiotic
system. It is as though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was
able to carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital neces-
sarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooth space in which the destiny
of human beings is recast. Striation, of course, survives in the most perfect
and severest of forms (it is not only vertical but operates in all directions);
however, it relates primarily to the state pole of capitalism, in other words,
to the role of the modern State apparatuses in the organization of capital.
On the other hand, at the complementary and dominant level of integrated
(or rather integrating) world capitalism, a new smooth space is produced in
which capital reaches its "absolute" speed, based on machinic components
rather than the human component of labor. The multinationals fabricate a
kind of deterritorialized smooth space in which points of occupation as
well as poles of exchange become quite independent of the classical paths
to striation. What is really new are always the new forms of turnover. The
present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making the
distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and cir-
culating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is instead the dis-
tinction between striated capital and smooth capital, and the way in which
the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across terri-
tories and States, and even the different types of States.

   The Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art. Several notions, both practical and the-
oretical, are suitable for defining nomad art and its successors (barbarian,
Gothic, and modern). First, "close-range" vision, as distinguished from
long-distance vision; second, "tactile," or rather "haptic" space, as distin-
guished from optical space. "Haptic" is a better word than "tactile" since it
does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather
invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical func-
tion. It was Alois Riegl who, in some marvelous pages, gave fundamental
                1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 493

aesthetic status to the couple, close vision-haptic space. But for the moment
we should set aside the criteria proposed by Riegl (then by Wilhelm
Worringer, and more recently by Henri Maldiney), and take some risks
ourselves, making free use of these notions.26 It seems to us that the Smooth
is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic
space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on
the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space—
although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity. Once
again, as always, this analysis must be corrected by a coefficient of transfor-
mation according to which passages between the striated and the smooth
are at once necessary and uncertain, and all the more disruptive. The law of
the painting is that it be done at close range, even if it is viewed from rela-
tively far away. One can back away from a thing, but it is a bad painter who
backs away from the painting he or she is working on. Or from the "thing"
for that matter: Cezanne spoke of the need to no longer see the wheat field,
to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space.
Afterward, striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, "stubborn
geometry," the "measure of the world," "geological foundations," "every-
thing falls straight down" . . . The striated itself may in turn disappear in a
"catastrophe," opening the way for a new smooth space, and another stri-
ated space...
   A painting is done at close range, even if it is seen from a distance. Simi-
larly, it is said that composers do not hear: they have close-range hearing,
whereas listeners hear from a distance. Even writers write with short-term
memory, whereas readers are assumed to be endowed with long-term
memory. The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that
its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it
operates step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local
spaces of pure connection. Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never
sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a dis-
tance; one is never "in front of," any more than one is "in" (one is "on" ...).
Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegeta-
tion, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of
reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an
inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary,
they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as "mon-
ads" but are instead nomads entertaining tactile relations among them-
selves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the
multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invari-
ant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give
rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.27 These ques-
tions of orientation, location, and linkage enter into play in the most
                494 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

famous works of nomad art: the twisted animals have no land beneath
them; the ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the
paws point in the opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the
body is turned upside down; the "monadological" points of view can be
interlinked only on a nomad space; the whole and the parts give the eye that
beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an
animality that can be seen only by touching it with one's mind, but without
the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye. (In a much cruder
fashion, the kaleidoscope has exactly the same function: to give the eye a
digital function.) Striated space, on the contrary, is defined by the require-
ments of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, in variance of dis-
tance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by
immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective. It is
less easy to evaluate the creative potentialities of striated space, and how it
can simultaneously emerge from the smooth and give everything a whole
new impetus.
   The opposition between the striated and the smooth is not simply that of
the global and the local. For in one case, the global is still relative, whereas
in the other the local is already absolute. Where there is close vision, space
is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function: no
line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is nei-
ther horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form
nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermedi-
ary. Like Eskimo space.28 In a totally different way, in a totally different
context, Arab architecture constitutes a space that begins very near and
low, placing the light and the airy below and the solid and heavy above.
This reversal of the laws of gravity turns lack of direction and negation of
volume into constructive forces. There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local
integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an
infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute
that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage,
which in nomad art merges with its manifestation. Here the absolute is
local, precisely because place is not delimited. If we now turn to the striated
and optical space of long-distance vision, we see that the relative global
that characterizes that space also requires the absolute, but in an entirely
different way. The absolute is now the horizon or background, in other
words, the Encompassing Element without which nothing would be global
or englobed. It is against this background that the relative outline or form
appears. The absolute itself can appear in the Encompassed, but only in a
privileged place well delimited as a center, which then functions to repel
beyond the limits anything that menaces the global integration. We can see
clearly here how smooth space subsists, but only to give rise to the striated.
                1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 495

The desert, sky, or sea, the Ocean, the Unlimited, first plays the role of an
encompassing element, and tends to become a horizon: the earth is thus
surrounded, globalized, "grounded" by this element, which holds it in
immobile equilibrium and makes Form possible. Then to the extent that
the encompassing element itself appears at the center of the earth, it
assumes a second role, that of casting into the loathesome deep, the abode
of the dead, anything smooth or nonmeasured that may have remained.29
The striation of the earth implies as its necessary condition this double
treatment of the smooth: on the one hand, it is carried or reduced to the
absolute state of an encompassing horizon, and on the other it is expelled
from the relative encompassed element. Thus the great imperial religions
need a smooth space like the desert, but only in order to give it a law that is
opposed to the nomos in every way, and converts the absolute.
   This perhaps explains for us the ambiguity of the excellent analyses by
Riegl, Worringer, and Maldiney. They approach haptic space under the
imperial conditions of Egyptian art. They define it as the presence of a
horizon-background; the reduction of space to the plane (vertical and hori-
zontal, height and width); and the rectilinear outline enclosing individual-
ity and withdrawing it from change. Like the pyramid-form, every side a
plane surface, against the background of the immobile desert. On the other
hand, they show how in Greek art (then in Byzantine art, and up to the Ren-
aissance), an optical space was differentiated from haptic space, one merg-
ing background with form, setting up an interference between the planes,
conquering depth, working with cubic or voluminous extension, organiz-
ing perspective, and playing on relief and shadow, light and color. Thus at
the very beginning they encounter the haptic at a point of mutation, in con-
ditions under which it already serves to striate space. The optical makes
that striation tighter and more perfect, or rather tight and perfect in a dif-
ferent way (it is not associated with the same "artistic will"). Everything
occurs in a striated space that goes from empires to city-states, or evolved
empires. It is not by chance that Riegl tends to eliminate the specific fac-
tors of nomad or even barbarian art; or that Worringer, when he introduces
the idea of Gothic art in the broadest sense, relates it on the one hand to the
Germanic and Celtic migrations of the North, and on the other to the
empires of the East. But between the two were the nomads, who are reduci-
ble neither to empires they confronted nor the migrations they triggered.
The Goths themselves were nomads of the steppe, and with the Sarmatians
and Huns were an essential vector of communication between the East and
the North, a factor irreducible to either of these two dimensions.30 On one
side, Egypt had its Hyksos, Asia Minor its Hittites, China its Turco-
Mongols; and on the other, the Hebrews had their Habiru, the Germans,
Celts, and Romans their Goths, the Arabs their Bedouins. The nomads
                496 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

have a specificity that is too hastily reduced to its consequences, by includ-
ing them in the empires or counting them among the migrants, assimilat-
ing them to one or the other, denying them their own "will" to art. Again,
there is a refusal to accept that the intermediary between the East and the
North had its own absolute specificity, that the intermediary, the interval,
played exactly this substantial role. Moreover, it does not have that role in
the guise of a "will"; it only has a becoming, it invents a "becoming-artist."
   When we invoke a primordial duality between the smooth and the stri-
ated, it is in order to subordinate the differences between "haptic" and
"optic," "close vision" and "distant vision" to this distinction. Hence we
will not define the haptic by the immobile background, by the plane and
the contour, because these have to do with an already mixed state in which
the haptic serves to striate, and uses its smooth components only in order
to convert them to another kind of space. The haptic function and close
vision presuppose the smooth, which has no background, plane, or con-
tour, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between parts. Con-
versely, the developed optical function is not content to take striation to a
new level of perfection, endowing it with an imaginary universal value and
scope; it is also capable of reinstating the smooth, liberating light and mod-
ulating color, restoring a kind of aerial haptic space that constitutes the
unlimited site of intersection of the planes.31 In short, the smooth and the
striated must be defined in themselves before the relative distinctions
between haptic and optical, near and distant, can be derived.
   This is where a third couple enters in: "abstract line-concrete line"
(in addition to "haptic-optical," "close-distant"). It is Worringer who
accorded fundamental importance to the abstract line, seeing it as the very
beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will. Art as abstract
machine. Once again, it will doubtless be our inclination to voice in
advance the same objections: for Worringer, the abstract line seems to
make its first appearance in the crystalline or geometrical imperial Egyp-
tian form, the most rectilinear of forms possible. It is only afterward that it
assumes a particular avatar, constituting the "Gothic or Northern line"
understood very broadly.32 For us, on the other hand, the abstract line is
fundamentally "Gothic," or rather, nomadic, not rectilinear. Conse-
quently, we do not understand the aesthetic motivation for the abstract line
in the same way, or its identity with the beginning of art. Whereas the recti-
linear (or "regularly" rounded) Egyptian line is negatively motivated by
anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, and erects the con-
stancy and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is abstract in an entirely
different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientation and passes
between points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated by the
smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to ward off
                 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 497

anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The abstract line is the affect of
smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation. Further-
more, although it is true that art begins only with the abstract line, the rea-
son is not, as Worringer says, that the rectilinear is the first means of
breaking with the nonaesthetic imitation of nature upon which the prehis-
toric, savage, and childish supposedly depend, lacking, as he thinks they
do, a "will to art." On the contrary, if prehistoric art is fully art it is precisely
because it manipulates the abstract, though nonrectilinear, line: "Primi-
tive art begins with the abstract, and even the prefigurative.... Art is
abstract from the outset, and at its origin could not have been otherwise."33
In effect, the line is all the more abstract when writing is absent, either
because it has yet to develop or only exists outside or alongside. When writ-
ing takes charge of abstraction, as it does in empires, the line, already
downgraded, necessarily tends to become concrete, even figurative. Chil-
dren forget how to draw. But in the absence of writing, or when peoples
have no need for a writing system of their own because theirs is borrowed
from more or less nearby empires (as was the case for the nomads), the line
is necessarily abstract; it is necessarily invested with all the power of
abstraction, which finds no other outlet. That is why we believe that the dif-
ferent major types of imperial lines—the Egyptian rectilinear line, the
Assyrian (or Greek) organic line, the supraphenomenal, encompassing
Chinese line—convert the abstract line, rend it from its smooth space, and
accord it concrete values. Still, it can be argued that these imperial lines are
contemporaneous with the abstract line; the abstract line is no less at the
"beginning," inasmuch as it is a pole always presupposed by any line capa-
ble of constituting another pole. The abstract line is at the beginning as
much because of its historical abstraction as its prehistoric dating. It is
therefore a part of the originality or irreducibility of nomad art, even when
there is reciprocal interaction, influence, and confrontation with the
imperial lines of sedentary art.
    The abstract is not directly opposed to the figurative. The figurative as
such is not inherent to any "will to art." In fact, we may oppose a figurative
line in art to one that is not. The figurative, or imitation and representa-
tion, is a consequence, a result of certain characteristics of the line when it
assumes a given form. We must therefore define those characteristics first.
Take a system in which transversals are subordinated to diagonals, diago-
nals to horizontals and verticals, and horizontals and verticals to points
(even when there are virtual). A system of this kind, which is rectilinear or
unilinear regardless of the number of lines, expresses the formal conditions
under which a space is striated and the line describes a contour. Such a line
is inherently, formally, representative in itself, even if it does not represent
anything. On the other hand, a line that delimits nothing, that describes no
                498 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 contour, that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes
between points, that is always declining from the horizontal and the verti-
cal and deviating from the diagonal, that is constantly changing direction,
a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or back-
ground, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation—
 such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes a smooth space. It is not
 inexpressive. Yet is true that it does not constitute a stable and symmetrical
form of expression grounded in a resonance of points and a conjunction of
lines. It is nevertheless accompanied by material traits of expression, the
effects of which multiply step by step. This is what Worringer means when
 he says that the Gothic line (for us, the nomadic line invested with abstrac-
tion) has the power of expression and not of form, that it has repetition as a
power, not symmetry as form. Indeed, it is through symmetry that rectilin-
ear systems limit repetition, preventing infinite progression and maintain-
 ing the organic domination of a central point with radiating lines, as in
reflected or star-shaped figures. It is free action, however, which by its
essence unleashes the power of repetition as a machinic force that multi-
plies its effect and pursues an infinite movement. Free action proceeds by
 disjunction and decentering, or at least by peripheral movement: dis-
joinj/ed polythetism instead of symmetrical antithetism.34 Traits of expres-
 sion describing a smooth space and connecting with a matter-flow thus
 should not be confused with striae that convert space and make it a form of
 expression that grids and organizes matter.
    Worringer's finest pages are those in which he contrasts the abstract
 with the organic. The organic does not designate something represented,
 but above all the form of representation, and even the feeling that unites
 representation with a subject (Einfuhlung, "empathy"). "Formal processes
 occur within the work of art which correspond to the natural organic ten-
 dencies in man."35 But the rectilinear, the geometrical, cannot be opposed
 to the organic in this sense. The Greek organic line, which subordinates
 volume and spatiality, takes over from the Egyptian geometrical line,
 which reduced them to the plane. The organic, with its symmetry and con-
 tours inside and outside, still refers to the rectilinear coordinates of a stri-
 ated space. The organic body is prolonged by straight lines that attach it to
 what lies in the distance. Hence the primacy of human beings, or of the
 face: We are this form of expression itself, simultaneously the supreme
 organism and the relation of all organisms to metric space in general. The
 abstract, on the contrary, begins only with what Worringer presents as the
 "Gothic" avatar. It is this nomadic line that he says is mechanical, but in
 free action and swirling; it is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for
 being inorganic. It is distinguished both from the geometrical and the
 organic. It raises "mechanical" relations to the level of intuition. Heads
                 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 499

(even a human being's when it is not a face) unravel and coil into ribbons in
a continuous process; mouths curl in spirals. Hair, clothes. . . This stream-
ing, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a
power of life that human beings had rectified and organisms had confined,
and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it.
If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized
but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short,
the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life
without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs,
everything that passes between organisms ("once the natural barriers of
organic movement have been overthrown, there are no more limits").36
Many authors have wished to establish a kind of duality in nomad art
between the ornamental abstract line and animal motifs, or more subtly,
between the speed with which the line integrates and carries expressive
traits, and the slowness or fixity of the animal matter traversed, between a
line of flight without beginning or end and an almost immobile swirling.
But in the end everyone agrees that it is a question of a single will, or a single
becoming.37 This is not because the abstract engenders organic motifs, by
chance or by association. Rather, it is precisely because pure animality is
experienced as inorganic, or supraorganic, that it can combine so well with
abstraction, and even combine the slowness or heaviness of a matter with
the extreme speed of a line that has become entirely spiritual. The slowness
belongs to the same world as the extreme speed: relations of speed and
slowness between elements, which surpass in every way the movement of
an organic form and the determination of organs. The line escapes geome-
try by a fugitive mobility at the same time as life tears itself free from the
organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind. This vital force specific to
the Abstraction is what draws smooth space. The abstract line is the affect
of smooth space, just as organic representation was the feeling presiding
over striated space. The haptic-optical, near-distant distinctions must be
subordinated to the distinction between the abstract line and the organic
line; they must find their principle in a general confrontation of spaces.
The abstract line cannot be defined as geometrical and rectilinear. What
then should be termed abstract in modern art? A line of variable direction
that describes no contour and delimits no form . . ,38

   Do not multiply models. We are well aware that there are many others: a
ludic model, which would compare games according to their type of space
and found game theory on different principles (for example, the smooth
space of Go versus the striated space of chess); and a noological model con-
cerned not with thought contents (ideology) but with the form, manner or
mode, and function of thought, according to the mental space it draws and
                500 D 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

from the point of view of a general theory of thought, a thinking of thought.
And so on. Moreover, there are still other kinds of space that should be
taken into account, for example, holey space and the way it communicates
with the smooth and the striated in different ways. What interests us in
operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combi-
nations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how
in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth
spaces. Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the
city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are
sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth
spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or dis-
placed in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles,
invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space
will suffice to save us.
15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and
       Abstract Machines




   Computer Einstein




                       501
    502 O CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

                                                                            S

                                                       Strata, stratification
    The strata are phenomena of thickening on the Body of the earth,
3   simultaneously molecular and molar: accumulations, coagulations,
    sedimentations, foldings. They are Belts, Pincers, or Articulations.
    Summarily and traditionally, we distinguish three major strata:
    physicochemical, organic, and anthropomorphic (or "alloplastic").
    Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus and formed
    substances. Forms and substances, codes and milieus are not really
    distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.
        A stratum obviously presents very diverse forms and substances, a
    variety of codes and milieus. It thus possesses both different formal
    Types of organization and different substantial Modes of develop-
    ment, which divide it into parastrata and epistrata, for example, the
    divisions of the organic stratum. The epistrata and parastrata subdi-
    viding a stratum can be considered strata themselves (so that the list
    is never exhaustive). A given stratum retains a unity of composition
    in spite of the diversity in its organization and development. The
    unity of composition relates to formal traits common to all of the
    forms or codes of a stratum, and to substantial elements, materials
    common to all of the stratum's substances or milieus.
        The strata are extremely mobile. One stratum is always capable
    of serving as the substratum of another, or of colliding with
    another, independently of any evolutionary order. Above all, be-
    ween two strata or between two stratic divisions, there are inter-
    stratic phenomena: transcodings and passages between milieus,
    intermixings. Rhythms pertain to these interstratic movements,
    which are also acts of stratification. Stratification is like the creation
    of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation. And the strata
    constitute the Judgment of God. Classical artists are like God, they
    make the world by organizing forms and substances, codes and
    milieus, and rhythms.
        Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double
    articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an
    expression. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, con-
    tent and expression are. Hjelmslev's net is applicable to the strata:
    articulation of content and articulation of expression, with content
    and expression each possessing its own form and substance. Between
    them, between content and expression, there is neither a correspon-
    dence nor a cause-effect relation nor a signified-signifier relation:
      CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 503

      there is real distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and only isomor-
      phy. But content and expression are not distinguished from each
      other in the same fashion on each stratum: the distribution of content
      and expression is not the same on the three major strata (there is, for
      example, a "linearization" of expression on the organic stratum, and
      a "superlinearity" of the anthropomorphic strata). That is why the
      molar and the molecular have very different combinations depend-
      ing on the stratum considered.
 3       What movement, what impulse, sweeps us outside the strata
and   (metastratd)! Of course, there is no reason to think that all matter is
 4    confined to the physicochemical strata: there exists a submolecular,
      unformed Matter. Similarly, not all Life is confined to the organic
      strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against itself in order
      to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more pow-
      erful for being anorganic. There are also nonhuman Becomings of
      human beings that overspill the anthropomorphic strata in all direc-
      tions. But how can we reach this "plane," or rather how can we con-
      struct it, and how can we draw the "line" leading us there? For outside
      the strata or in the absence of strata we no longer have forms or sub-
      stances, organization or development, content or expression. We are
      disarticulated; we no longer even seem to be sustained by rhythms.
      How could unformed matter, anorganic life, nonhuman becoming be
      anything but chaos pure and simple? Every undertaking of
      destratification (for example, going beyond the organism, plunging
      into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete rules of extreme
 6    caution: a too-sudden destratification may be suicidal, or turn can-
      cerous. In other words, it will sometimes end in chaos, the void and
      destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which
      become more rigid still, losing their degrees of diversity, differentia-
      tion, and mobility.

                                                                                A

                                                                   Assemblages
   Assemblages are already different from strata. They are produced in
11 the strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded: they
   begin by extracting a territory from the milieus. Every assemblage is
   basically territorial. The first concrete rule for assemblages is to dis-
   cover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one: in their
   trash can or on their bench, Beckett's characters stake out a territory.
   Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or animal:
  504 D CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

  "home." The territory is made of decoded fragments of all kinds,
  which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of
  "properties": even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains). The ter-
  ritory makes the assemblage. The territory is more than the organism
  and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the
  assemblage goes beyond mere "behavior" (hence the importance of
  the relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu
  animals).
      Inasmuch as they are territorial, assemblages still belong to the
  strata. At least they pertain to them in one of their aspects, and it is
  under this aspect that we distinguish in every assemblage content
4 from expression. It is necessary to ascertain the content and the
  expression of each assemblage, to evaluate their real distinction, their
  reciprocal presupposition, their piecemeal insertions. The reason
  that the assemblage is not confined to the strata is that expression in it
  becomes a semiotic system, a regime of signs, and content becomes a
  pragmatic system, actions and passions. This is the double articula-
  tion face-hand, gesture-word, and the reciprocal presupposition
  between the two. This is the first division of every assemblage: it is
  simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an
  assemblage of enunciation. In each case, it is necessary to ascertain
  both what is said and what is done. There is a new relation between
  content and expression that was not yet present in the strata: the
   statements or expressions express incorporeal transformations that
  are "attributed" as such (properties) to bodies or contents. In the
  strata, expressions do not form signs, nor contents pragmata, so this
  autonomous zone of incorporeal transformations expressed by the
  former and attributed to the latter does not appear. Of course,
  regimes of signs develop only in the alloplastic or anthropomorphic
  strata (including territorialized animals). But this does not mean that
  they do not permeate all of the strata, and overspill each of them.
  Assemblages belong to the strata to the extent that the distinction
  between content and expression still holds for them. We may also
  think of regimes of signs and pragmatic systems as strata in their own
  right, in the broad sense previously mentioned. But because the
  content-expression distinction assumes a new figure, we are already
  in a different element than that of the strata in the narrow sense.
      The assemblage is also divided along another axis. Its territoriality
  (content and expression included) is only a first aspect; the other
   aspect is constituted by lines of deterritorialization that cut across it
  and carry it away. These lines are very diverse: some open the territor-
  ial assemblage onto other assemblages (for example, the territorial
        CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 505

        refrain of the animal becomes a courtship or group refrain). Others
        operate directly upon the territoriality of the assemblage, and open it
        onto a land that is eccentric, immemorial, or yet to come (for exam-
        ple, the game of territory and the earth in the lied, or in the romantic
     11 artist in general). Still others open assemblages onto abstract and cos-
    and mic machines that they effectuate. The territoriality of the assem-
     4 blage originates in a certain decoding of milieus, and is just as
        necessarily extended by lines of deterritorialization. The territory is
        just as inseparable from deterritorialization as the code from decod-
        ing. Following these lines, the assemblage no longer presents an
        expression distinct from content, only unformed matters, destrati-
        fied forces, and functions. The concrete rules of assemblage thus
        operate along these two axes: On the one hand, what is the territorial-
        ity of the assemblage, what is the regime of signs and the pragmatic
        system? On the other hand, what are the cutting edges of deterritori-
        alization, and what abstract machines do they effectuate? The assem-
        blage is tetravalent: (1) content and expression; (2) territoriality and
        deterritorialization. That is why there were four aspects in the privi-
        leged example of Kafka's assemblages.

                                                                                 R

                                                                         Rhizome
    10 Not only strata, assemblages are complexes of lines. We can identify a
       first state of the line, or a first kind of line: the line is subordinated to
       the point; the diagonal is subordinated to the horizontal and vertical;
       the line forms a contour, whether figurative or not; the space it consti-
       tutes is one of striation; the countable multiplicity it constitutes
       remains subordinated to the One in an always superior or supplemen-
       tary dimension. Lines of this type are molar, and form a segmentary,
     9 circular, binary, arborescent system.
   and The second kind is very different, molecular and of the "rhizome"
     1 type. The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer
       forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It
       belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more dimen-
       sions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it consti-
       tutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency
     2 of its own. These are multiplicities of masses or packs, not of classes;
    10 anomalous and nomadic multiplicities, not normal or legal ones;
    12 multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities, not
and 14 countable elements and ordered relations; fuzzy, not exact aggre-
    506 D CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

    gates, etc. At the level of pathos, these multiplicities are expressed by
    psychosis and especially schizophrenia. At the level of pragmatics,
    they are utilized by sorcery. At the level of theory, the status of multi-
    plicities is correlative to that of spaces, and vice versa: smooth spaces
    of the type desert, steppe, or sea are not without people; they are not
    depopulated but rather are populated by multiplicities of this second
    kind (mathematics and music have gone quite far in the elaboration
    of this theory of multiplicities).
       It is not enough, however, to replace the opposition between the
    One and the multiple with a distinction between types of multiplici-
 9 ties. For the distinction between the two types does not preclude their
    immanence to each other, each "issuing" from the other after its fash-
    ion. It is not so much that some multiplicities are arborescent and
    others not, but that there is an arborification of multiplicities. That is
    what happens when the black holes scattered along a rhizome begin
    to resonate together, or when the stems form segments that striate
    space in all directions, rendering it comparable, divisible, homoge-
 12 neous (as we saw in particular in the case of the Face). That is also
    what happens when "mass" movements or molecular flows conjugate
    at points of accumulation or stoppage that segment and rectify them.
    But conversely, and without symmetry, the stems of the rhizome are
    always taking leave of the trees, the masses and flows are constantly
    escaping, inventing connections that jump from tree to tree and
    uproot them: a whole smoothing of space, which in turn reacts back
    upon striated space. Even, and especially, territories are perturbed by
    these deep movements. Or language: the trees of language are shaken
    by buddings and rhizomes. So that rhizome lines oscillate between
  8 tree lines that segment and even stratify them, and lines of flight or
and rupture that carry them away.
  9    We are therefore made of three lines, but each kind of line has its
    dangers. Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose
    upon us the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular
    lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally the lines of
    flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative poten-
    tialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a line of
    destruction pure and simple (fascism).

                                                                            C

                               Plane of Consistency, Body without Organs
    The plane of consistency or of composition (planomenon) is opposed
    CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 507

 10 to the plane of organization and development. Organization and
     development concern form and substance: at once the development
     of form and the formation of substance or a subject. But the plane of
     consistency knows nothing of substance and form: haecceities, which
     are inscribed on this plane, are precisely modes of individuation pro-
     ceeding neither by form nor by the subject. The plane consists
     abstractly, but really, in relations of speed and slowness between
     unformed elements, and in compositions of corresponding intensive
     affects (the "longitude" and "latitude" of the plane). In another sense,
     consistency concretely ties together heterogeneous, disparate ele-
 11 ments as such: it assures the consolidation of fuzzy aggregates, in
     other words, multiplicities of the rhizome type. In effect, consistency,
     proceeding by consolidation, acts necessarily in the middle, by the
     middle, and stands opposed to all planes of principle or finality.
     Spinoza, Holderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche are the surveyors of such a
     plane of consistency. Never unifications, never totalizations, but
     rather consistencies or consolidations.
 10     Inscribed on the plane of consistency are haecceities, events, incor-
     poreal transformations that are apprehended in themselves; nomadic
     essences, vague yet rigorous; continuums of intensities or continuous
4, 6 variations, which go beyond constants and variables; becomings,
1, 9 which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another
     into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed
     from within striated space. We will say that a body without organs, or
 6 bodies without organs (plateaus) comes into play in individuation by
and haecceity, in the production of intensities beginning at a degree zero,
 10 in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming or transforma-
     tion, and in the smoothing of space. A powerful nonorganic life that
 14 escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line
     without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy.
        Does the plane of consistency constitute the body without organs,
     or does the body without organs compose the plane? Are the Body
     without Organs and the Plane the same thing? In any event, composer
     and composed have the same power: the line does not have a dimen-
     sion superior to that of the point, nor the surface to that of the line,
 10 nor the volume to that of the surface, but always an anexact, frac-
and tional number of dimensions that constantly increase or decrease
 14 with the number of its parts. The plane sections multiplicities of vari-
     able dimensions. The question is, therefore, the mode of connection
     between the different parts of the plane: To what extent do the bodies
     without organs interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity
     extended? What is the order of the transformational series? What are
    508 D CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

    these alogical linkages always effected in the middle, through which
    the plane is constructed piece by piece in ascending or descending
    fractional order? The plane is like a row of doors. And the concrete
    rules for the construction of the plane obtain to the extent that they
    exercise a selective role. It is the plane, in other words, the mode of
    connection, that provides the means of eliminating the empty and
    cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs, of rejecting the
    homogeneous surfaces that overlay smooth space, and neutraliz-
    ing the lines of death and destruction that divert the line of flight.
    What is retained and preserved, therefore created, what consists, is
    only that which increases the number of connections at each level of
    division or composition, thus in descending as well as ascending
    order (that which is cannot be divided without changing in nature, or
    enter into a larger composition without requiring a new criterion of
    comparison...).

                                                                           D

                                                       Deterritorialization
    The function of deterritorialization: D is the movement by which
5   "one" leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight.
    There are very different cases. D may be overlaid by a compensatory
    reterritorialization obstructing the line of flight: D is then said to be
    negative. Anything can serve as a reterritorialization, in other
    words, "stand for" the lost territory; one can reterritorialize on a
    being, an object, a book, an apparatus or system.. . For example, it
    is inaccurate to say that the State apparatus is territorial: it in fact
    performs a D, but one immediately overlaid by reterritorializations
    on property, work, and money (clearly, that landowner ship, public
    or private, is not territorial but reterritorializing). Among regimes
    of signs, the signifying regime certainly attains a high level of D;
    but because it simultaneously sets up a whole system of reterri-
    torializations on the signified, and on the signifier itself, it blocks
    the line of flight, allowing only a negative D to persist. Another case
    is when D becomes positive—in other words, when it prevails over
    the reterritorializations, which play only a secondary role—but
    nevertheless remains relative because the line of flight it draws is
    segmented, is divided into successive "proceedings," sinks into
    black holes, or even ends up in a generalized black hole (catastro-
    phe). This is the case of the regime of subjective signs, with its
    passional and consciousness-related D, which is positive but only in
   CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 509

    a relative sense. It will be noted immediately that these two major
    forms of D are not in a simple evolutionary relation to each other:
    the second may break away from the first, or it may lead into it (nota-
    bly when the segmentations of converging lines of flight bring an
    overall reterritorialization or one benefiting a particular segment,
    thus arresting the movement of escape). There are all kinds of mixed
    figures, assuming highly varied forms of D.
        Is there absolute D, and what does "absolute" mean? We must
    first have a better understanding of the relations between D, the
    territory, reterritorialization, and the earth. To begin with, the terri-
    tory itself is inseparable from vectors of deterritorialization work-
  9 ing it from within: either because the territoriality is supple and
and "marginal," in other words, itinerant, or because the territorial
 13 assemblage itself opens onto and is carried off by other types of
 11 assemblages. Second, D is in turn inseparable from correlative
    reterritorializations. D is never simple, but always multiple and
    composite: not only because it participates in various forms at the
    same time, but also because it converges distinct speeds and move-
    ments on the basis of which one may assign at a given moment a
    "deterritorialized element" and a "deterritorializing element."
    Now, reterritorialization as an original operation does not express a
    return to the territory, but rather these differential relations inter-
 7 nal to D itself, this multiplicity internal to the line of flight (cf. "The-
and orems of D"). Finally, the earth is not at all the opposite of D: This
 10 can already be seen in the mystery of the "natal," in which the earth
    as ardent, eccentric, or intense focal point is outside the territory
 11 and exists only in the movement of D. More than that, the earth, the
    glacial, is Deterritorialization par excellence: that is why it belongs
 3 to the Cosmos, and presents itself as the material through which
    human beings tap cosmic forces. We could say that the earth, as
    deterritorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that
    D can be called the creator of the earth—of a new land, a universe,
    not just a reterritorialization.
        This is the meaning of "absolute." The absolute expresses nothing
    transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity
    that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a
    type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement. A
    movement is absolute when, whatever its quantity and speed, it
 7 relates "a" body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it
and occupies in the manner of a vortex. A movement is relative, whatever
 14 its quantity and speed, when it relates a body considered as One to a
    striated space through which it moves, and which it measures with
      510 D CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

      straight lines, if only virtual. D is negative or relative (yet already
      effective) when it conforms to the second case and operates either by
      principal reterritorializations that obstruct the lines of flight, or by
      secondary reterritorializations that segment and work to curtail
      them. D is absolute when it conforms to the first case and brings
      about the creation of a new earth, in other words, when it connects
      lines of flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line, or
      draws a plane of consistency. Now what complicates everything is
      that this absolute D necessarily proceeds by way of relative D, pre-
      cisely because it is not transcendent. Conversely, relative or negative
      D itself requires an absolute for its operation: it makes the absolute
      something "encompassing," something totalizing that overcodes the
      earth and then conjugates lines of flight in order to stop them, destroy
      them—rather than connecting them in order to create (it is in this
      sense that we have opposed conjunction to connection, although we
      have often treated them as synonyms from a very general point of
      view). Thus there is a limitative absolute already at work in properly
 9    negative, or even relative, D's. Above all, at this turning point the
and   lines of flight are not only obstructed or segmented but turn into lines
 14   of destruction or death. For the stakes here are indeed the negative
      and the positive in the absolute: the earth girded, encompassed,
11    overcoded, conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal
      organization surrounding it on all sides, or the earth consolidated,
      connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines
      of creation that cut across it as so many becomings (Nietzsche's
      expression: Let the earth become lightness . . .). There are thus at
      least four forms of D that confront and combine, and must be distin-
      guished from one another following concrete rules.

                                                                           M

                                 Abstract Machines (Diagram and Phylum)
   There is no abstract machine, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic
   Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate
   within concrete assemblages: They are defined by the fourth aspect of
   assemblages, in other words, the cutting edges of decoding and
11 deterritorialization. They draw these cutting edges. Therefore they
   make the territorial assemblage open onto something else, assem-
   blages of another type, the molecular, the cosmic; they constitute
   becomings. Thus they are always singular and immanent. Contrary to
   the strata, and the assemblages considered under their other aspects,
      CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 511

      abstract machines know nothing of forms and substances. This is
      what makes them abstract, and also defines the concept of the
      machine in the strict sense. They surpass any kind of mechanics.
      They are opposed to the abstract in the ordinary sense. Abstract
      machines consist of unformed matters and nonformal functions.
      Every abstract machine is a consolidated aggregate of matters-
 5    functions (phylum and diagram). This is evident on a technological
      "plane": such a plane is not made up simply of formed substances
      (aluminum, plastic, electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms (program,
      prototypes, etc.), but of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting
      only degrees of intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating, stretch-
      ing, speed or delay, induction, transduction . . .) and diagrammatic
      functions exhibiting only differential equations or, more generally,
      "tensors." Of course, within the dimensions of the assemblage, the
      abstract machine, or machines, is effectuated in forms and sub-
      stances, in varying states of freedom. But the abstract machine must
      first have composed itself, and have simultaneously composed a
      plane of consistency. Abstract, singular, and creative, here and now,
      real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated—that is why abstract
      machines are dated and named (the Einstein abstract machine, the
      Webern abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach, or the
      Beethoven, etc.). Not that they refer to people or to effectuating
      moments; on the contrary, it is the names and dates that refer to the
      singularities of the machines, and to what they effectuate.
          But if abstract machines know nothing of form and substance,
      what happens to the other determination of strata, or even of
      assemblages—content and expression? In a certain sense, it could be
      said that this distinction is also irrelevant to the abstract machine,
 3    precisely because it no longer has the forms and substances the dis-
      tinction requires. The plane of consistency is a plane of continuous
      variation; each abstract machine can be considered a "plateau" of
      variation that places variables of content and expression in continu-
      ity. Content and expression thus attain their highest level of relativ-
      ity, becoming "functives of one and the same function" or materials
      of a single matter [see 4, "November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguis-
      tics," note 21—Trans.]. But in another sense, it could be said that the
 4    distinction subsists, and is even recreated, on the level of traits: there
and   are traits of content (unformed matters or intensities) and traits of
 5    expression (nonformal functions or tensors). Here, the distinction
      has become entirely displaced, or even a different distinction, since it
      now concerns cutting edges of deterritorialization. Absolute deter-
      ritorialization implies a "deterritorializing element" and a "deterri-
     512 D CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

      torialized element," one of which in each case is allocated to expres-
      sion, the other to content, or vice versa, but always in such a way as to
      convey a relative distinction between the two. Thus both content and
      expression are necessarily affected by continuous variation, but it
      still assigns them two dissymmetrical roles as elements of a single
      becoming, or as quanta of a single flow. That is why it is impossible to
      define a continuous variation that would not take in both the content
      and the expression, rendering them indiscernible, while simultane-
      ously proceeding by one or the other, determining the two mobile and
      relative poles of that which has become indiscernible. For this reason,
      one must define both traits or intensities of content and traits or ten-
 1, 2 sors of expression (indefinite article, proper name, infinitive, and
4, 10 date), which take turns leading one another across the plane of con-
      sistency. Unformed matter, the phylum, is not dead, brute, homo-
  12 geneous matter, but a matter-movement bearing singularities or
      haecceities, qualities, and even operations (itinerant technological
      lineages); and the nonformal function, the diagram, is not an in-
      expressive metalanguage lacking a syntax, but an expressivity-
      movement always bearing a foreign tongue within each language and
   4 nonlinguistic categories within language as a whole (nomad poetic
      lineages). One writes, then, on the same level as the real of an
      unformed matter, at the same time as that matter traverses and
      extends all of nonformal language: a becoming-animal like Kafka's
  10 mouse [p. 243], Hofmannsthal's rats [p. 240], Moritz's calves [p.
      240]? A revolutionary machine, all the more abstract for being real. A
      regime that no longer operates by the signifier or the subjective.
          That covers singular and immanent abstract machines. What we
      have said does not preclude the possibility of "the" abstract machine
      serving as a transcendent model, under very particular conditions.
      This time the concrete assemblages are related to an abstract idea of
      the Machine and, depending on how they effectuate it, are assigned
      coefficients taking into account their potentialities, their creativity.
      The coefficients that "quantify" assemblages bear on the varying
      assemblage components (territory, deterritorialization, reterritori-
      alization, earth, Cosmos), the various entangled lines constituting
      the "map" of an assemblage (molar lines, molecular lines, lines of
      flight), and the different relations-between the assemblage and the
      plane of consistency (phylum and diagram). For example, the "grass
      stem" component may have different coefficients in assemblages of
  11 animal species that are nevertheless closely related [p. 324-25]. As a
      general rule, an assemblage is all the closer to the abstract machine
      the more lines without contour passing between things it has, and the
    CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 513

 4 more it enjoys a power of metamorphosis (transformation and trans-
and substantiation) corresponding to the matter-function: cf. The Waves
 10 machine [p. 252].
        We have considered in particular two great alloplastic and anthro-
     pomorphic assemblages, the war machine and the State apparatus.
     These two assemblages not only differ in nature but are quantifiable
     in relation to "the" abstract machine in different ways. They do not
     have the same relation to the phylum, the diagram; they do not have
     the same lines, or the same components. This analysis of the two
 12 assemblages and their coefficients demonstrates that the war ma-
and chine does not in itself have warfor its object, but necessarily adopts it
 13 as its object when it allows itself to be appropriated by the State appa-
     ratus. At this very precise point, the line of flight and the abstract vital
     line it effectuates turn into a line of death and destruction. Hence the
     name war "machine," which is much closer to the abstract machine
     than is the State apparatus, which divests the war machine of its
     power of metamorphosis. Writing and music can be war machines.
     The more an assemblage opens and multiplies connections and draws
     a plane of consistency with its quantifiers of intensities and of consol-
1, 4 idation, the closer it is to the living abstract machine. But it strays
5, 9 from it to the extent that it replaces creative connections with con-
 12 junctions causing blockages (axiomatics), organizations forming
and strata (stratometers), reterritorializations forming black holes
 14 (segmentometers), and conversions into lines of death (deleometers).
     Thus there is a whole process of selection of assemblages according to
     their ability to draw a plane of consistency with an increasing number
     of connections. Schizoanalysis is not only a qualitative analysis of
     abstract machines in relation to the assemblages, but also a quantita-
     tive analysis of the assemblages in relation to a presumably pure
     abstract machine.
        There is one last point of view, that of typological analysis. For
     there exist general types of abstract machines. The abstract machine
     or machines of the plane of consistency do not exhaust or dominate
     the entirety of the operations that constitute the strata and even the
     assemblages. The strata "take" on the plane of consistency itself,
     forming areas of thickening, coagulations, and belts organized and
     developing along the axes of another plane (substance-form, content-
  3 expression). This means that each stratum has a unity of consistency
     or of composition relating above all to substantial elements and for-
     mal traits, and testifying to the existence of a properly stratic abstract
     machine presiding over this other plane. And there is a third type: on
     the alloplastic strata, which are particularly propitious for the assem-
    514 D CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

     blages, there arise abstract machines that compensate for deterritori-
 9 alizations with reterritorializations, and especially for decodings
     with overcodings or overcoding equivalents. We have seen in particu-
     lar that if abstract machines open assemblages they also close them.
4, 7 An order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine
and overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement
 8 overcodes or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but
     real machinic effects. We can no longer place the assemblages on a
     quantitative scale measuring how close or far they are from the plane
     of consistency. There are different types of abstract machines that
     overlap in their operations and qualify the assemblages: abstract
     machines of consistency, singular and mutant, with multiplied con-
     nections; abstract machines of stratification that surround the plane
 5 of consistency with another plane; and axiomatic or overcoding
and abstract machines that perform totalizations, homogenizations, con-
 13 junctions of closure. Every abstract machine is linked to other
     abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political,
     economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affec-
     tive, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic—but because their vari-
     ous types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent.
     Mechanosphere.
Notes
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                                        Notes




                                 Translator's Foreword
     1. Gilles Deleuze, in Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977;
forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press), p. 10.
     2. Gilles Deleuze, interview with Catherine Clement, L'Arc, no. 49 (revised ed., 1980),
p. 99.
     3. Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought," in The New Nietzsche, ed. Donald B. Allison
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 148. Semiotext(e), Nietzsche's Return 3,1 (1978),
p. 20.
     4. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 20. On the relationship between philosophy and
the State, see also pp. 351-473 of the present work. Deleuze develops an extended critique of
rationalist philosophy in Difference et repetition (Paris: PUF, 1968); see especially, "L'Image
de la pensee," pp. 169-217.
     5. Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," trans. Janis Forman, Semiotext(e), Anti-
Oedipus 2, 3 (1977), p. 12 (translation modified).
     6. "What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic" (ibid).
     7. Ibid.
     8. See Deleuze's discussion with Michel Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," in
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1977), pp. 205-217.
     9. Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," p. 113.
    10. Felix Guattari, "Sur les rapports infirmiers-medecins" (1955), in Psychanalyse et
transversalite (Paris: Maspero, 1972), p. 11.
    11. Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalite, pp. 40, 173n, 288-289. The journal Re-
cherches, of which Guattari was an editor, was the mouthpiece of the institutional analysis
movement.
    12. Uneasy because Guattari believed that Laing's communitarian solution reconsti-
tuted an extended Oedipal family (La Revolution moleculaire, [Paris: Editions Recherches,
                                             517
                                518 D NOTES TO PP. xi-10

1977], p. 121), and because he was critical of Basaglia's assimilation of mental illness and
social alienation and his rejection of any kind of institutions for the insane (Psychanalyse et
transversalite, p. 264).
    13. In 1973, Guattari was tried and fined for committing an "outrage to public decency"
by publishing an issue ofRecherches on homosexuality. All copies were ordered destroyed (La
Revolution moleculaire, p. 1 lOn).
    14. Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
    15. La Revolution moleculaire, p. 144. The disintegration of the Left into dogmatic
"groupuscules" and the amoeba-like proliferation of Lacanian schools based on personality
cults confirmed the charge of bureaucratism but belied the potency of the mix. Guattari him-
self began his political life in the early 1950s with stormy attempts at membership in two
Trotskyist splinter parties (Psychanalyse et transversalite, pp. 268-271).
    16. Differenced repetition, pp. 49-55, 337-349.
    17. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
pp. 32-33.
    18. Jurgen Habermas's notion of "consensus" is the updated, late-modern version.
    19. Interview with Gilles Deleuze, Liberation, October 23, 1980, p. 16.
    20. See Foucault's essay on Blanchot, often quoted by Deleuze: "The Thought from Out-
side," in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault
(New York: Zone Books, 1987).
    21. Deleuze's books on cinema (Cinema I: The Movement-Image [Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1986], and Cinema II: The Time-Image [forthcoming from Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press]) and on painting (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation [Paris: Ed.
de la Difference, 1981 ]) are not meant as exercises in philosophical expansionism. Their proj-
ect is not to bring these arts to philosophy, but to bring out the philosophy already in them.
    22. The terms "smooth space" and "striated space" were in fact coined by Pierre Boulez.
See p. 361-62 of the present work and note 20.
    23. Interview with Gilles Deleuze, Liberation, October 23, 1980, p. 17.
    24. See page 158 of the present work and note.
    25. On style in literature, see Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 142-150.
    26. Deleuze and Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," p. 208.

                                 1. Introduction: Rhizome
      1. [TRANS: U. Weinreich, W. Labov, and M. Herzog, "Empirical Foundations for a The-
ory of Language," in W. Lehmann and Y. Malkeiel, eds., Directions for Historical Linguistics
(1968), p. 125; cited by Francoise Robert, "Aspects sociaux du changement dans une
grammaire generative," Langages, no. 32 (December 1973), p. 90.]
      2. Bertil Malmberg, New Trends in Linguistics, trans. Edward Garners (Stockholm:
Lund, 1964), pp. 65-67 (the example of the Castilian dialect).
      3. Ernst Jiinger, Approches; drogues et ivresse (Paris: Table Ronde, 1974), p. 304,
sec. 218.
      4. Remy Chauvin in Entretiens sur la sexualite, ed. Max Aron, Robert Courrier, and
Etienne Wolff (Paris: Plon, 1969), p. 205.
      5. On the work of R. E. Benveniste and G. J. Todaro, see Yves Christen, "Le role des
virus dans 1'evolution," La Recherche, no. 54 (March 1975): "After integration-extraction in a
cell, viruses may, due to an error in excision, carry off fragments of their host's DNA and
                                  NOTES TO PP. 10-17 D 519

transmit them to new cells: this in fact is the basis for what we call 'genetic engineering.' As a
result, the genetic information of one organism may be transferred to another by means of
viruses. We could even imagine an extreme case where this transfer of information would go
from a more highly evolved species to one that is less evolved or was the progenitor of the more
evolved species. This mechanism, then, would run in the opposite direction to evolution in
the classical sense. If it turns out that this kind of transferral of information has played a major
role, we would in certain cases have to substitute reticular schemas (with communications
between branches after they have become differentiated) for the bush or tree schemas currently
used to represent evolution" (p. 271).
      6. Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon,
 1973), pp. 291-292, 311 (quote).
      7. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), p. 88.
      8. Pierre Boulez, Conversations with CelestinDeIiege(London: Eulenberg Books, 1976):
"a seed which you plant in compost, and suddenly it begins to proliferate like a weed" (p. 15);
and on musical proliferation: "a music that floats, and in which the writing itself makes it
impossible for the performer to keep in with a pulsed time" (p. 69 [translation modified]).
      9. See Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1961): the
role of war maps in Richard's activities. [TRANS: Deleuze and Guattari, with Claire Parnet and
Andre Scala, analyze Klein's Richard and Freud's Little Hans in "The Interpretation of
Utterances," in Language, Sexuality and Subversion, trans. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris
(Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978), pp. 141-157.]
    10. Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de I'immuable, vol. 1, Voix et voir, Recherches, no. 8
(April 1975).
     11. See Dieter Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, situation d'enonciation et Deixis," in
Langages, no. 26 (June 1972), pp. 50ff.: MacCawley, Sadock, and Wunderlich's attempts to
integrate "pragmatic properties" into Chomskian trees.
    12. Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 76; on memory, see
pp. 185-219.
    13. See Julien Pacotte, Le reseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pensee (Paris:
Hermann, 1936). This book analyzes and develops various schemas of the arborescent form,
which is presented not as a mere formalism but as the "real foundation of formal thought." It
follows classical thought through to the end. It presents all of the forms of the "One-Two," the
theory of the dipole. The set, trunk-roots-branches, yields the following schema:




More recently, Michel Serres has analyzed varieties and sequences of trees in the most diverse
scientific domains: how a tree is formed on the basis of a "network." La traduction (Paris:
Minuit, 1974), pp. 27ff.; Feux et signaux de brume (Paris: Grasset, 1975), pp. 35ff.
    14. Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, "Automate asocial et systemes acentres," Com-
munications, no. 22 (1974), pp. 45-62. On the friendship theorem, see Herbert S. Wilf, The
Friendship Theorem in Combinatorial Mathematics (Welsh Academic Press); and on a simi-
lar kind of theorem, called the theorem of group indecision, see Kenneth J. Arrow, Social
Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1963).
    15. Rosenstiehl and Petitot, "Automate asocial." The principal characteristic of the
acentered system is that local initiatives are coordinated independently of a central power,
                                 520 D NOTES TO PP. 17-24

with the calculations made throughout the network (multiplicity). "That is why the only place
files on people can be kept is right in each person's home, since they alone are capable of filling
in the description and keeping it up to date: society itself is the only possible data bank on peo-
ple. A naturally acentered society rejects the centralizing automaton as an asocial intrusion"
(p. 62). On the "Firing Squad Theorem," see pp. 51-57. It even happens that generals, dream-
ing of appropriating the formal techniques of guerrilla warfare, appeal to multiplicities "of
synchronous modules ... based on numerous but independent lightweight cells" having in
theory only a minimum of central power and "hierarchical relaying"; see Guy Brossollet,
Essai surla non-bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975).
     16. On Western agriculture of grain plants and Eastern horticulture of tubers, the opposi-
tion between sowing of seeds and replanting of offshoots, and the contrast to animal raising,
see Andre Haudricourt, "Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement
d'autrui," L'Homme, vol. 2, no. 1 (January-April 1962), pp. 40-50, and "Nature et culture
dans la civilisation de 1'igname: 1'origine des clones et des clans," L'Homme, vol. 4, no. 1
(January-April 1964), pp. 93-104. Maize and rice are no exception: they are cereals "adopted
at a late date by tuber cultivators" and were treated in a similar fashion; it is probable that rice
"first appeared as a weed in taro ditches."
     17. Henry Miller, in Henry Miller and Michael Fraenkel, Hamlet (New York: Carrefour,
 1939), pp. 105-106.
     18. See Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day,
 1968). This book contains a fine analysis of geography and its role in American mythology
and literature, and of the reversal of directions. In the East, there was the search for a specifi-
cally American code and for a receding with Europe (Henry James, Eliot, Pound, etc.); in the
South, there was the overcoding of the slave system, with its ruin and the ruin of the planta-
tions during the Civil War (Faulkner, Caldwell); from the North came capitalist decoding
(Dos Passes, Dreiser); the West, however, played the role of a line of flight combining travel,
hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of
frontiers, the rhizome (Ken Kesey and his "fog machine," the beat generation, etc.). Every
great American author creates a cartography, even in his or her style; in contrast to what is
done in Europe, each makes a map that is directly connected to the real social movements
crossing America. An example is the indexing of geographical directions throughout the work
of Fitzgerald.
     19. [TRANS: Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1957).]
    20. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p.
 113. It will be noted that the word "plateau" is used in classical studies of bulbs, tubers, and
rhizomes; see the entry for "Bulb" in M. H. Baillon, Dictionnaire de botanique (Paris:
Hachette, 1876-1892).
    21. For example, Joe'lle de La Casiniere, Absolument necessaire. The Emergency Book
(Paris: Minuit, 1973), a truly nomadic book. In the same vein, see the research in progress at
the Montfaucon Research Center.
     22. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken,
 1948), p. 12.
    23. Marcel Schwob, The Children's Crusade, trans. Henry Copley (Boston: Small,
Maynard, 1898); JersyAndrzejewski,Lesp0rtesdwparafife(Paris:Gallimard, 1959);Armand
Farrachi, La dislocation (Paris: Stock, 1974). It was in the context of Schwob's book that Paul
Alphandery remarked that literature, in certain cases, could revitalize history and impose
upon it "genuine research directions"; La chretiente et I'idee de croisade (Paris: Albin Michel,
 1959), vol. 2, p. 116.
    24. See Paul Virilio, "Vehiculaire," in Nomades et vagabonds, ed. Jacques Bergue (Paris:
                                 NOTES TO PP. 24-47 D 521

Union Generale d'Editions, 1975), p. 43, on the appearance of linearity and the disruption of
perception by speed.
    25. See Jean-Cristophe Bailly's description of movement in German Romanticism, in his
introduction to La legende dispers'ee. Anthologie du romantisme allemand (Paris: Union
Generale d'Editions, 1976), pp. 18ff.

                           2.1914: One or Several Wolves?
     1. Sigmund Freud, Papers on Metapsychology, vol. 14, Standard Edition, trans. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 200.
     2. [TRANS: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1925), p. 11).]
     3. E. A. Bennet, What Jung Really Said (New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 74.
     4. Ruth Mack Brunswick, "A Supplement to Freud's History of an Infantile Neurosis,"
in The Wolf-Man, ed. Muriel Gardiner (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 268.
     5. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1963),
pp. 29-30, 93ff. Some of the distinctions mentioned here are noted by Canetti.
     6. [TRANS: Ibid., p. 93.]
     7. Letter cited by Roland Jaccard, L'homme aux loups (Paris: Ed. Universitaires, 1973),
p. 113.

                        3.10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals
      1. Roland Omnes, L'univers et ses metamorphoses (Paris: Hermann, 1973), p. 164: "A
star that has collapsed so far that its radius has fallen below the critical point becomes what is
called a black hole (an occluded star). This expression means that nothing sent in the direction
of such an object will ever come back. It is therefore perfectly black since it does not emit or
reflect any light."
      2. Marcel Griaule, Dieu d'eau (Paris: Fayard, 1975), pp. 38-41.
      3. For a general treatment of the two aspects of morphogenesis, see Raymod Ruyer, La
genese de formes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), pp. 54ff., and Pierre Vendryes, Vie et
probabilite (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945). Vendryes analyzes the role of the articulatory relation
and articulated systems. On the two structural aspects of protein, see Jacques Monod, Chance
and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 90-95.
      4. Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York: Pantheon,
1973), pp. 269-270 [translation modified].
      5. Francois Jacob, "Lemodelelinguistique en biologie/'Cri^He, no. 322 (March 1974),
p. 202: "Genetic material has two roles: it must be reproduced in order to be transmitted to
the following generation, and it must be expressed in order for it to determine the organism's
structures and functions."
      6. Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 60.
      7. See Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Principes de philosophic zoologique (Paris: Picton et
Didier, 1830), which quotes extracts from the debate with Cuvier; and Notions synth'e-
tiques, historiques et physiologiques de philosophic naturelle (Paris: Denain, 1838), in
which Geoffroy sets forth his molecular conception of combustion, electrification, and
attraction. Karl Ernest von Baer, Uber Entwicklungsgeschichte der Thiere (Konigsberg:
Beiden Gehrudern Borntrager, 1828-88), and "Biographic de Cuvier," inAnnales des sci-
ences naturelles (1908). Vialleton, Membres et ceintures des vertebr'es t'etrapodes (Paris:
Doin, 1924).
                                522 D NOTES TO PP. 48-62

      8. Edmond Perrier deserves a place, although not a decisive one, in this long history.
He returned to the problem of unity of composition, updating the work of Geoffrey with
the aid of Darwin, and especially Lamarck. Perrier's entire work is organized around two
themes: animal colonies or multiplicities, and the speeds necessary to account for het-
erodox degrees and foldings ("tachygenesis"). For example, the brain of a vertebrate may
come to occupy the position of the mouth of an annelid, in the "fight between the mouth
and the brain." See Les colonies animates et la formation des organismes (Paris: G. Mas-
son, 1881), and "L'origine des embranchements du regne animal," Scienta (May-June
 1918). Perrier wrote a history entitled Philosophic zoologique avant Darwin (Paris: Alcan,
 1884), which includes excellent chapters on Geoffroy and Cuvier.
      9. Georges Canguilhem et al., "Du developpement a 1'evolution au XIXe siecle," Thales
(1960), p. 34.
     10. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1950).
     11. Gilbert Simondon, L'individu et sa gen'ese physico-biologique(Paris: PUF, 1964). On
the interior and exterior in the crystal and the organism, and on the role of the limit or mem-
brane, see pp. 107-114 and 259-264.
     12. J. H. Rush, The Dawn of Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1957), p. 165:
"Primitive organisms lived, in some sense, in a state of suffocation. Life had been born, but it
had not yet begun to breathe."
     13. Jakob Johann von Uexkiill, Mondes animaux et monde humain (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).
     14. See Pia Laviosa-Zambotti, Origini e diffusione della civilita (Milan: C. Marzorati,
 1947): her use of the notions of strata, substratum, and parastratum (although she does not
define the last.)
     15. Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 290-292, 310-312, and what Remy Chauvin calls
"aparallel evolution."
     16. See Laviosa-Zambotti, Origini: her conception of waves and flows from center to
periphery, and of nomadism and migrations (nomadic flows).
     17. On phenomena of resonance between different orders of magnitude, see Simondon,
L 'individu, pp. 16-20, 124-131, and passim.
     18. Claude Popelin, Le taureau et son combat (Paris: Julliard, 1981): see chapter 4 on the
 problem of human and bull territories inside the arena.
     19. See Simondon, L'individu, on orders of magnitude and the establishment of reso-
nance between them; actions of the "mold," "modulation," and "modeling" types; and exte-
rior forces and intermediate states.
     20. Obviously there is a multiplicity of sequences or lines. But that does not preclude the
 "order of order" being unilinear (see Jacob, The Logic of Life, p. 286, and "Le modele
 linguistique en biologie," pp. 199-203).
     21. On the respective independence of proteins and nucleic acids, and their reciprocal
 presupposition, see Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 304-306, and Jacques Monod, Chance and
 Necessity, pp. 96-98, 107-109, 114-115, and 142-144.
     22. On the notion of transduction, see Simondon, L'individu, pp. 18-21 (however, he
 takes the word in its most general sense and uses it to refer to the entire system). On the mem-
 brane, see pp. 259ff.
     23. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, vol. 1, of Technique et langage (Paris:
 Albin Michel, 1964), p. 161.
     24. On all of these problems (the free hand, the supple larynx, the lips, and the role of the
 steppe as factors of deterritorialization), see Emile Devaux's fine book, Trois problemes:
 I'espece, I'instinct, I'homme (Paris: Le Francois, 1933), part 3 (chapter 7: "The anthropoid,
 severed from the forest, retarded in its development, infantilized, had to acquire free hands
                                 NOTES TO PP. 62-77 D 523

and a supple larynx"; and chapter 9: "The forest made the monkey, the cave and the steppe
made the human").
    25. Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 278,289-290,298. Jacob and Monod sometimes use the
word "translation" for the genetic code, but only for reasons of convenience. As Monod points
out, "The code can be translated only by products of translation."
    26. Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, pp. 269-275.
    27. [TRANS: A reference to the work of Julia Kristeva. On the chora, see Kristeva, Revolu-
tion in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press,
 1984), pp. 25-30.]
    28. That is why we consider Hjelmslev, despite his own reservations and vacillations, to
be the only linguist to have actually broken with the signifier and the signified. Many other lin-
guists seem to make this break deliberately and without reservations, but retain the implicit
presuppositions of the signifier.
    29. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vin-
tage, 1975). Already in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault outlines his theory of the two kinds of multiplicities, multi-
plicities of expression or statements and multiplicities of contents or objects. He shows that
they are irreducible to the signifier-signified couple. He also explains why the title of one of
his earlier books, Les mots et les chases [Words and Things, translated as The Order of Things
(New York: Vintage, 1970)], must be understood negatively (pp. 48-49).
    30. [TRANS: Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 9.]
    31. Simondon, L'individu, pp. 139-141.
    32. H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," in The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 168, 217-218.

                 4. November 20,1923: Postulates of Linguistics
      1. [TRANS: Mot d'ordre: in standard French, "slogan," (military) "password." Deleuze
and Guattari are also using the term literally: "word of order," in the double sense of a word or
phrase constituting a command and a word or phrase creative of order.]
      2. GeorgesDarien, L'epaulette(Paris: 10/18, l973),p.435.OrZo\a,LaBeteHumaine,
trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 148: "She was saying this not to con-
vince him, but solely to warn him that she had to be innocent in the eyes of the world at large."
This type of phrase seems to us to be much more characteristic of the novel in general than the
informational phrase, "the marquess went out at five o'clock."
      3. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York:
Knopf, 1932), p. 54 [translation modified].
      4. Brice Parain, Sur la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). Parain develops a theory of
"supposition" or the presupposed in language in relation to the orders given to life; but he sees
this less as a power in the political sense than a duty in the moral sense.
      5. Two authors in particular have brought out the importance of indirect discourse, espe-
cially in its so-called free form, from the viewpoint of a theory of enunciation that goes beyond
the traditional categories of linguistics: V. N. Volosinov (for Russian, German, and French),
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin in the French edi-
tion cited by the authors—TRANS], trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Part 3, "Toward a History of Forms and Utterance in
Language Constructions," pp. 109-200; Pier Paolo Pasolini (for Italian), L'experience
heretique (Paris: Payot, 1976), part 1. We have also referred to an unpublished study by J.-P.
Bamberger, "Les formes du discours indirect dans le cinema, muet et parlant."
      6. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek
                                   524 D NOTES TO PP. 77-82

(Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 53: "There is no indication, for
example, that a bee goes off to another hive with the message it has received in its own hive.
This would constitute a kind of transmission or relay."
      7. William Labov has clearly shown the contradiction, or at least paradox, created by the
distinction between language and speech: language is defined as the "social part" of language,
and speech is consigned to individual variations; but since the social part is self-enclosed, it
necessarily follows that a single individual would be enough to illustrate the principles of lan-
guage, without reference to any outside data, whereas speech could only be studied in a social
context. The same paradox recurs from Saussure to Chomsky: "The social aspect of language
is studied by observing any one individual, but the individual aspect only by observing lan-
guage in its social context"; Labov, SociolinguisticPatterns (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1972), p. 186.
      8. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, part 4 ("Man and Language"); on the
elimination of the illocutionary, see pp. 237-238.
      9. Oswald Ducrot, Dire et nepas dire (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 70-80, and "De Saus-
sure a la philosophic du langage," preface to the French translation of S. R. Searle's Speech
Acts, Actes de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972). Ducrot challenges the notions of linguistic
information and code, and communication and subjectivity. He develops a theory of "linguis-
tic presupposition" or nondiscursive implicitness, as opposed to concluded and discursive
implicitness still referring to a code. He constructs a pragmatics covering all of linguistics and
moves toward a study of assemblages of enunciation, considered from a "juridical," "polemi-
cal," or "political" point of view.
     10. Bakhtin and Labov have stressed the social character of enunciation, in different
ways. They are consequently in opposition not only to subjectivism but also to structuralism,
to the extent that the latter ties the system of language to the understanding of an ideal indi-
vidual, and social factors to actual individuals as speakers.
     11. Ducrot, Dire et nepas dire, p.11'. "To qualify an action as criminal (theft, fraud, black-
mail, etc.) is not, in our sense of the term, to present it as an act since the legal situation of guilt,
which defines a crime, is supposed to derive from other given consequences of the activity
described: the activity is considered punishable because it is harmful to another person, to
order, to society, etc. The judge's statement of a sentence can, on the other hand, be consid-
ered a juridical act because there is no intervening effect between the speech of the judge and
the transformation of the accused into a convict."
     12. John Kenneth Galbraith, Money (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), chapter 12, "The
Ultimate Inflation": "On November 20, 1923, the curtain was rolled down. As in Austria a
year earlier, the end came suddenly. As with the milder French inflation, the end came with
astonishing ease. Perhaps it ended simply because it could not go on. On November 20, the
old reichsmark was declared to be no longer money. A new currency, the rentenmark, was
introduced . . . . The new rentenmark was declared to be backed by a first mortgage on all the
land and other physical assets of the Reich. This idea had its ancestry in the assignats; it was,
however, appreciably more fraudulent [Galbraith means to say 'deterritorialized'—Au.]. In
France in 1789, there was extant, visible land freshly taken from the church for which cur-
rency initially could be exchanged; any German seeking to exercise rights of foreclosure on
German property with his rentenmarks would have been thought mentally unstable. Never-
theless, it worked. Circumstances helped.... If, after 1923, the previous claims on the Ger-
man budget had continued—the reparations claims and the cost of passive resistance—
nothing would have saved the mark and [the head of the Reichsbank's] reputation"; pp. 159,
 161.
     13. Volosinov [Bakhtin], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 110. And on
"symbolic relations of force" as variables internal to enunciation, see Pierre Bourdieu,
                                 NOTES TO PP. 82-91 D 525

"L'economie des echanges linguistiques," in Linguistique et sociolinguistlque, Langue
Francaise, May 1977, pp. 18-21.
     14. The very notion of the proletarian class hinges on the question, Does the proletariat
already exist at a given moment, and if so as a body? (Or, does it still exist?) It is evident that
Marxists use it in an anticipatory sense, as, for example, when they speak of an "embryonic
proletariat."
     15. [TRANS: V. I. Lenin, "On Slogans," Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
 1975), vol. 3, p. 148.]
     16. Quoted by David Cooper, The Language of Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p.
34. Cooper comments that "the language of 'hearing voices' . . . means that one becomes
aware of something that exceeds the consciousness of normal [i.e., direct] discourse and
which therefore must be experienced as 'other'" (p. 34).
     17. Elias Canetti is one of the rare authors who has dealt with the psychological mode of
action of the order-word, or "command": Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New
York: Viking Press, 1963), pp. 303-333. He hypothesizes that an order inflicts a kind of sting
on the soul, which forms a cyst, a hardening that never goes away. When this happens, the
only way to find relief is to pass it on to others as quickly as possible, to "massify," even
though the mass may turn back against the emitter of the order-word. In addition, the fact
that the order-word is like a foreign body within the body, an indirect discourse within
speech, explains the extraordinary forgetting that occurs: "The person who carries out a
command. . . does not accuse himself, but the sting: this is the true culprit, whom he carries
with him everywhere.... It is his permanent witness that it was not he himself who perpe-
trated a given wrong. He sees himself as its victim and thus has no feeling left for the real vic-
tim. It is true, therefore, that people who have acted on orders can feel entirely guiltless,"
making it all the easier for them to move on to other order-words (p. 332). This provides a
profound explanation for the Nazis' feeling of innocence, or for the capacity of forgetfulness
displayed by old Stalinists, whose amnesia worsens the more they invoke their memory and
past in order to claim the right to follow new and even more insidious order-words—"sting
mania." In this respect, Canetti's analysis seems essential. However, it presupposes the exis-
tence of a very particular psychic faculty in the absence of which the order-word would not
have this mode of action. The whole classical rationalist theory—of "common sense," of
universally shared good sense based on information and communication—is a way to cover
up or hide, and to justify in advance, a much more disturbing faculty, that of order-words.
This singularly irrational faculty is best safeguarded by gracing it with the name of pure rea-
son, by saying that it is nothing but pure reason . . .
    18. See Emile Brehier's classic study, La theorie des incorporels dans I'ancien stoicisme
(Paris: Vrin, 1970). On "the knife cuts the flesh" and "the tree turns green," see pp. 12 and 20.
     19. [TRANS: Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976),
P- 12.]
    20. [TRANS: Kafka, "The Stoker," chapter 1 of Amerika, trans. Edwin Muir (Norfolk,
Conn.: New Directions, 1940.]
    21. Stalin, in his famous text on linguistics [Marxism and Linguistics (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1951)—Trans.], claims to identify two neutral forms serving all of soci-
ety, all classes, and all regimes equally: instruments and machines as pure means of
production of goods, and language as a pure means of information and communication.
Even Bakhtin defines language as the form of ideology, but he specifies that the form of ide-
ology is not itself ideological.
    22. On these problems, see J. M. Sadock, "Hypersentences" (Diss. University of Illinois,
1968); Dieter Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, situation d'enonciation et Deixis," Langages, no.
36 (June 1972), pp. 34-58; and especially S. K. Saumjan, "Aspects algebriques de la gram-
                                 526 D NOTES TO PP. 91-99

maire applicative," Langages, no. 33 (March 1974), pp. 95-122. Saumjan proposes a model of
abstract objects based on the operation of application called AGM (applicative generative
model). He cites Hjelmslev as an influence; Hjelmslev's strength is to have conceived of the
form of expression and the form of content as two entirely relative variables on one and the
same plane, as "functives of one and the same function," Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory
of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
This advance toward a diagrammatic conception of the abstract machine is, however, coun-
teracted by the fact that Hjelmslev still conceives the distinction between expression and con-
tent in the signifier-signified mode and therefore retains the subordination of the abstract
machine to linguistics.
    23. See Herbert Brekle, Semantique (Paris: A. Colin, 1974), pp. 94-104, on the idea of a
universal pragmatics and of "universals of dialogue."
    24. On this budding and various representations of it, see Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, sit-
uation d'enonciation et Deixis."
    25. Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility. Based on Conversations with Mitsou
Ronat, trans. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 53-55.
    26. William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns, especially pp. 187-190. It will be noted that
Labov at times limits himself to statements that have approximately the same meaning and at
other times disregards this condition in order to follow a sequence of complementary but het-
erogeneous statements.
    27. [TRANS: This is a phrase from Proust's Time Regained in Remembrance of Things
Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1981), vol. 3, p. 905 (vol. 3, p. 872, in the French "Pleiade" edition). See Deleuze,
Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 59-60.]
    28. This is indeed how Labov tends to define his notion of "optional or variable rules," as
opposed to constant rules: not simply an observed frequency, but a specific quantity express-
ing the probability of the frequency or the application of the rule. See Language in the Inner
City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 94ff.
    29. See Gilbert Rouget's article, "Un chromatisme africain," in L'Homme, vol. 1, no. 3
(September-December 1961), pp. 32-46 (this issue comes with a recording of ritual chants of
Dahomey).
    30. Gherasim Luca, Le chant de la carpe (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), and the recording put
out by Givaudan, on which Luca recites the poem "Passionnement."
    31. [TRANS: See Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: Minuit, 1979).
Forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e).]
    32. "And" has an especially important role in English literature, as a function not only of
the Old Testament but also of the "minorities" at work on the language: one case in point is J.
M. Synge (see Francois Regnault's remarks on coordination in Anglo-Irish in the French
translation of Playboy of the Western World, Baladin du monde occidental [Paris: Biblio-
theque du Graphe]). It should not be thought adequate to analyze the "and" as a conjunction;
rather, "and" is a special form of every possible conjunction and brings into play a logic of lan-
guage. Jean Wahl's works contain profound reflections on this sense of "and," on the way it
challenges the primacy of the verb "to be."
    33. Hjelmslev, Language: An Introduction, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1970), pp. 39ff.
    34. Nicolas Ruwet, "Parallelisme et deviations en poesie," in Langue, discours, societe.
Pour Emile Benveniste, ed. Julia Kristeva, Nicolas Ruwet, and Jean-Claude Milner (Paris:
Seuil, 1975). Ruwet analyzes Poem 29 in Cummings's Fifty Poems (New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, 1940); he gives a restricted and structuralist interpretation of this phenomenon of
variation, invoking the notion of parallelism; in other texts, he minimizes the importance of
                                 NOTES TO PP. 99-106 D 527

these variations, treating them as marginal exercises irrelevant to true changes in language;
still, his comments seem to us to transcend all of these interpretive restrictions.
     35. See Vidal Sephiha, "Introduction a 1'etude de 1'intensif," Langages, no. 29 (March
 1973). This is one of the first studies of the atypical tensions and variations of language, par-
ticularly as they appear in so-called minor languages.
     36. On the expansion and diffusion of states of language, in the "patch of oil" mode or the
"paratrooper" mode, see Bertil Malmberg, New Trends in Linguistics, trans. Edward Garners
(Stockholm: Lund, 1964), chapter 3 (which uses N. Lindqvist's important studies on dialect).
What are needed now are comparative studies of how homogenizations and centralizations of
given major languages take place. In this respect, the linguistic history of French is not at all
the same as that of English; neither is their relation to writing as a form of homogenization the
same. For French, the centralized language par excellence, one may refer to the analysis of
Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue (Paris:
Gallimard, 1975). The analysis covers a very brief period at the end of the eighteenth century,
focusing on Abbot Gregory, and notes two distinct periods: one in which the central language
opposed the rural dialects, just as the town opposed the countryside, and the capital the prov-
inces; and another in which it opposed "feudal idioms," as well as the language of the emigres,
just as the Nation opposes everything that is foreign to it, an enemy of it (pp. 160ff.: "It is also
obvious that the rejection of the dialects resulted from a technical inability to grasp stable
laws in regional speech patterns").
     37. See Michel Lalonde, Change, no. 30 (March 1977), pp. 100-122, where the poem,
"Speak White," quoted in text, appears, along with a manifesto on the Quebecois language
("La deffense et illustration de la langue quebecqoyse").
     38. On the complex situation of Afrikaans, see Breyten Breytenbach's fine book, Feu
Froid (Paris: Bourgois, 1976); G. M. Lory's study (pp. 101-107) elucidates Breytenbach's
project, the violence of his poetic treatment of the language, and his will to be a "bastard, with
a bastard language."
     39. On the double aspect of minor language, poverty-ellipsis, and overload-variation, one
may refer to a certain number of exemplary studies: Klauss Wagenbach's study of the German
of Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century (Franz Kafka. Eine Biographic seiner
Jugend [Bern: Francke, 1958]); Pasolini's study demonstrating that Italian was not con-
structed on the basis of a new standard or mean, but exploded in two simultaneous directions,
"upward and downward," in other words, toward simplified material and expressive exagger-
ation (L'experience her'etique, pp. 46-47); J. L. Dillard's study bringing out the double ten-
dency of Black English on the one hand to omit, lose, disencumber, and on the other to
overload, to develop "fancy talk" (Black English [New York: Random House, 1972]). As
Dillard notes, there is no inferiority to the standard language; instead there is a correlation
between two movements that necessarily escape from the standard level of language. Still on
the topic of Black English, LeRoi Jones shows the extent to which the two conjoined direc-
tions approximate language to music (Blues People [New York: William Morrow, 1963], pp.
30-31 and all of chapter 3). On a more general level, one will recall Pierre Boulez's analysis of a
double movement in music, dissolution of form, and dynamic overload or proliferation: Con-
versations with Celestin Deliege, (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976), pp. 20-22.
    40. Yann Moulier, preface to Mario Tronti, Owners et Capital (Paris: Bourgois, 1977),
p. 6.
    41. Pasolini, L 'experience her'etique, p. 62
    42. See the "Strategy Collective" manifesto on the Quebecois language in Change, no. 30
(March 1977): it denounces the "myth of subversive language," which implies that simply
being in a minority is enough to make one a revolutionary ("this mechanist equation derives
from a populist conception of language.... Speaking the language of the working class is not
                               528 D NOTES TO PP. 106-120

what links an individual to the positions of that class.... The argument that Joual has a sub-
versive, countercultural force is entirely idealistic"; p. 188).
    43. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (see the two essential chapters corresponding to the
two aspects of the order-word, "The Command" and "Transformation"; especially pp. 313-
314, describing the pilgrimage to Mecca and its two coded aspects, mortifying petrification
and panicked flight).
    44. [TRANS: Translated as "prohibitions of transformation" in the English version of
Crowds and Power. Enantio- is from the Greek, "to oppose."]
    45. [TRANS: Canetti, Crowds and Power, pp. 378, 380.]
    46. As we have seen, Hjelmslev imposes a restrictive condition, that of assimilating the
plane of content to a kind of "signified." Certain authors are therefore correct in objecting
that the analysis of content he proposes has less to do with linguistics than other disciplines,
such as zoology (for example, Andre Martinet, with the collaboration of Jeanne Martinet and
HenrietteWalter,Lalinguistique. Guidealphabetique[Paris: Danoel, 1969],p. 353).Itseems
to us, however, that this objection applies only to Hjelmslev's restrictive condition.
    47. [TRANS: See 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," pp. 351-423.]
    48. See the details of the text of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lettres du voyageur a son retour,
trans. Jean-Claude Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901.

               5. 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs
      1. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Introduction a 1'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss," in Marcel Mauss,
Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1973), pp. 48-49 (later in this text Levi-Strauss brings
out another aspect of the signified). On this first aspect of the atmospheric continuum, see the
Binswanger's and Arieti's psychiatric descriptions.
      2. See Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp.
209ff. (an analysis of the two cases).
      3. Levi-Strauss, preface to Don C. Talayesva, SoleilHopi (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. vi [trans-
lation of Sun Chief, ed. Leo W. Simmons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942)].
      4. For example, in Bantu myth the first founder of the State shows his face and eats and
drinks in public, whereas the hunter, subsequently the warrior, invents the art of secrecy. See
Luc de Heusch, Le roi ivre ou I'origine de I'Etat (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 20-25. Heusch
sees the second moment as proof of a more "refined" civilization; to us, on the other hand, it is
a different semiotic system, that of war rather than public works.
      5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vin-
tage, 1975), p. 29 [translation modified].
      6. See A. J. Greimas, "Pratiques et langagesgestuels," in Conditions d'une semiotique du
monde naturel, Langages, no. 10 (June 1968), pp. 3-35. Greimas, however, relates this
semiotic to categories such as "the subject of the statement" and the "subject of enunciation,"
which seem to us to belong to other regimes of signs.
      7. On cannibalism as a way of protecting against the souls or names of the dead, and on
its semiotic function as "calendar," see Pierre Clastres, Chronique des Indiens Guayaki (Paris:
Plon, 1972), pp. 332-340.
      8. The foregoing expressions concerning the number are borrowed from Julia Kristeva.
Kristeva, however, uses them in an analysis of literary texts based on the hypothesis of the
"signifier": Semiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 294ff., 317.
      9. See Paul Serieux and Joseph Capgras, Lesfolies raisonnantes (Paris: Alcan, 1909), and
Gatian Clerambault, Oeuvre psychiatrique, rpt. (Paris: PUF, 1942). Capgras believes in an
essentially mixed or polymorphous semiotic; Clerambault abstractly analyzes two pure
semiotics, although he does recognize that they form de facto mixes. The principal texts on
                               NOTES TO PP. 120-125 D 529

the origin of the distinction between two groups of delusions are Jean Esquirol, Des maladies
mentales(Brussels: J. B. Tircher, 1838) (to what extent is "monomania" distinguishable from
mania?); and Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatric. Ein Lehrbuch fur Studierende undArtze, 8th ed.
(Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1920) [English translation, Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, rpt., ed.
Thomas Johnstone (New York: Hafner, 1968)] (to what extent is "querulous delusion" distin-
guishable from paranoia?). The question of the second group of delusions, or the passional
delusions, was broached and analyzed historically by Jacques Lacan, De la psychose
parandiaque (Paris: Seuil, 1975), and by Daniel Lagache, La jalousie amoureuse (Paris: PUF,
 1947).
     10. See Serieux and Capgras, Lesfolies raisonnantes, pp. 340ff., and Clerambault, Oeuvre
psychiatrigue, pp. 369ff.: people with passional delusion are overlooked, even in the asylum,
because they are calm and cunning, "suffering from a limited enough delusion that they know
how we judge them." This makes it all the more necessary to keep them confined; "such
patients must not be questioned, but rather maneuvered, and the only way to maneuver them
is to move them emotionally."
     11. Esquirol suggests that monomania is a "disease of civilization" and has a social evolu-
tion: it begins religious but tends to become more and more political, tracked by the police
(Des maladies mentales, vol. 1, p. 400). See also the remarks of Emmanuel Regis, Les regicides
dans I'histoire et dans le present (Lyons: A. Storck, 1890).
     12. Deuteronomy 1:12. In the "Pleiade" edition of the Bible (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol.
 1, p. 510, editor Edouard Dhorme specifies: "Your grievance, literally your proceeding."
     13. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (New York: Viking, 1932), pp. 93-94.
     14. See Edouard Dhorme, La religion des Hebreux nomades (Brussels: Nouvelle
Societe d'Editions, 1937), and Zecharia Mayani, Les Hyksos et le monde de la Bible (Paris:
Payot, 1956). The author emphasizes the connections between the Hebrews and the Ha-
biru (nomadic warriors) and Kenites (nomadic metal workers); what is specific to Moses is
not the principle of numerical organization, which was borrowed from the nomads, but
the idea of an always revocable convention-proceeding, contract-proceeding. This idea,
according to Mayani, derives neither from the rooted farmers nor from the nomadic warri-
ors, nor even from the migrants, but from a tribe on the march that thinks of itself in terms
of subjective destiny.
     15. See Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken,
 1968). The painter Titorelli originates the theory of indefinite postponement. Aside from def-
inite acquittal, which does not exist, Titorelli differentiates the two juridical regimes of
"ostensible acquittal" and "indefinite postponement"; the first is circular and linked to a
semiotic of the signifier, whereas the second is linear and segmentary, linked to the passional
semiotic(pp. 152-162).
     16. [TRANS: The King James Bible reads "to flee . . . from the presence of the Lord."
Jonah 1:3.]
     17. Jerome Lindon was the first to analyze the relation between Jewish prophetism and
betrayal, in the exemplary case of Jonah. Jonas (Paris: Minuit, 1955).
     18. Friedrich Holderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe (Paris: Union Generate d'Edition, 1965).
Holderlin already puts limits on the character of this "slow and difficult" death; see Jean
Beaufret's fine discussion of the nature of this death and its relation to betrayal: "Man must
match the categorical turning away of the god, now no more than Time, by himself turning
away as a traitor."
     19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin-
tage, 1967), sec. 9.
     20. [TRANS: See 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense ...," note 10.]
     21. [TRANS: "Buggers," from the Middle French for "Bulgarians," originally referred to a
                                530 D NOTES TO PP. 125-141

sect of heretics from Bulgaria suspected of 'unnatural' practices, and later became a general
term for heretics before taking on its modern meaning.]
    22. On the nature of the epic "library" (its imperial character, the role of priests, the circu-
lation between sanctuaries and cities), see Charles Autran, Homere et les origines sacerdotales
de I'epop'ee grecque, 3 vols. (Paris: Denoel, 1938-1944).
    23. See the techniques for the interpretation of books in the Middle Ages, and the extreme
attempt by Joachim de Flore, who, on the basis of similarities between the two Testaments,
induces from within a third state or proceeding. L 'Evangile eternel (Paris: Rieder, 1928).
    24. For example, Exodus 19:2: "For they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to
the desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness, and there Israel camped before the
mount."
    25. Henry Miller, Sexus (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 250.
    26. Louis Althusser, "Ideologic et appareils ideologiques d'Etat," La pensee, no. 151
(May-June 1970), pp. 29-35.
    27. In Problems of General Linguistics, trans Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.:
University of Florida Press, 1971), pp. 217-222, Emile Benveniste speaks of a proceeding, or
process (proces).
    28. One aspect of Strindberg's genius was to elevate the couple, and the domestic squab-
ble, to an intense semiotic level, and to make it a creative factor in the regime of signs. This was
not the case with Jouhandeau. Klossowski, on the other hand, was able to invent new sources
and conflicts for the passional cogito for two, from the standpoint of a general theory of signs;
Les lots de I'hospitalite (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
    29. See also Dostoyevsky's The Double.
    30. On these two forms of redundancy, see the entry on "Redondance" in Andre Martinet,
La linguistique. Guide alphab'etique (Paris: Danoel, 1969), pp. 331-333.
     31. Henry Miller, Sexus, p. 229. The theme of the idiot is itself quite diverse. It is an
explicit part of the cogito according to Descartes, and feeling according to Rousseau. Russian
literature, however, takes it down other paths, beyond consciousness or passion.
     32. Gherasim Luca, Le chant de la carpe (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), pp. 87-94.
     33. For example, when the whites introduced money to the Siane of New Guinea, the lat-
ter started off by translating the bills and coins into two categories of nonconvertible goods.
See Maurice Godelier, "Economic politique et anthropologie economique," L'Homme, vol.
 14, no. 3 (September-December 1964), p. 123.
     34. On these translations-transformations, see LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York:
Morrow, 1963), chapters 3-7.
     35. Miller, Sexus, pp. 479-480.
     36. Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through
Madness (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 233. The failure of the antipsychi-
atry experiment of Kingsley Hall apparently was due as much to these internal factors as to
external circumstances.
     37. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 14.
     38. "Generative" and "transformational" are Chomsky's terms. For him, the transforma-
tional is precisely the best and most profound way of realizing the generative; we, however, are
using the terms in a different sense.
     39. Michel Foucault has developed, in successive levels, a theory of statements addressing
all of these problems. (1) In The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault distinguishes two kinds of "multiplicities," of content and of
expression, which are not reducible to relations of correspondence or causality, but are in
reciprocal presupposition. (2) In Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Vintage, 1975), he looks for an agency capable of accounting for the two imbricated,
                                NOTES TO PP. 141-153 D 531

heterogeneous forms, and finds it in assemblages of power, or micropowers. (3) But these col-
lective assemblages (school, army, factory, hospital, prison, etc.) are only degrees or singulari-
ties in an abstract "diagram," which for its part has only matter and function (the unspecified
multiplicity of human beings to be controlled). (4) TheHistory of Sexuality. Vol. LAnlntro-
duction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), takes yet another direction since
assemblages are no longer related to and contrasted with a diagram, but rather to a "biopoli-
tics of population" as an abstract machine. Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are
the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power
but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the
assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which
are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of cre-
ation and deterritorialization.
    40. Louis Hjelmslev proposed a very important conception of "matter" or "purport"
(sens) as unformed, amorphous, or formless: Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans.
Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), sec. 13, pp. 47-60, and
Essais linguistiques (Paris: Minuit, 1971), pp. 58ff. (see also the preface by Francois Rastier,
p. 9).
    41. The distinction between indexes, icons, and symbols comes from C. S. Peirce, Col-
lected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1931-1958). But his distinctions are based on signifier-signified relations (contiguity
for the index, similitude for the icon, conventional rule for the symbol); this leads him to make
the "diagram" a special case of the icon (the icon of relation). Peirce is the true inventor of
semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First,
indexes, icons, and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by territoriality-deterritorializa-
tion relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the diagram as a result seems to have a
distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol. On Peirce's fundamental distinc-
tions and the complex status of the diagram, one may refer to Jakobson's analysis, "A la
recherche de 1'essence du langage," in Problemes du langage, ed. Emile Benveniste (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966).

   6. November 28,1947: How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs
      1. [TRANS: Antonin Artaud, "To Have Done With the Judgement of God," Selected Writ-
ings, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 571.]
      2. [TRANS: Jules Cotard, Etard sur les maladies cerebrates et mentales (Paris: Brail-
liere, 1891).]
      3. [TRANS: Dr. Schreber's Memoirs, quoted by Sigmund Freud, Notes on a Case ofPara-
noia,vo\. 12, Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 17.]
      4. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 131.
      5. The opposition program-phantasy appears clearly in the work of Michel de M'uzan,
in relation to a case of masochism. See M'uzan in La sexualit'e perverse, ed. Isle and Robert
Barande et al. (Paris: Payot, 1972), p. 36. Although he does not specifically discuss this
opposition, M'uzan uses the notion of the program to question the themes of Oedipus, anxi-
ety, and castration.
      6. See Kurt Lewin's description of the flow of meat in the American family, "Psychologi-
cal Ecology," Field Theory in Social Science, ed. Dorwin Cartwright (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1951), pp. 170-187.
      7. Albert Dalcq, L'oeufet son dynamisme organisateur (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941), p.
95: "Forms are contingent upon kinematic dynamism. It is secondary whether or not an ori-
fice forms in the germ. All that counts is the process of immigration itself; what yields an ori-
                                532 D NOTES TO PP. 153-170

fice fissure or primitive line is not invagination, but pure chronological and quantitative
variations."
      8. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 8.
      9. Ibid., pp. xlv-xlvi.
    10. [TRANS: Jouissance: "pleasure, enjoyment, orgasm." In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the
object of desire is irrevocably lost and the subject eternally split. Jouissance is doubly impossi-
ble: life is a manque-a-jouir, read as "lack of enjoyment," because the true object of desire is
unattainable; and it is a manque-a-jouir, read as "a lack to be enjoyed," because Jouissance as
the orgasmic plenitude of union with a substitute object means the annulment of the constitu-
tionally split subject. One of the necessary terms, the subject or the object, is always missing.]
    11. Roger Dupouy, "Du masochisme," Annales medico-psychologiques, series 12, vol. 2
(1929), p. 405.
    12. Ibid.
    13. On courtly love, and its radical immanence rejecting both religious transcendence
and hedonist exteriority, see Rene Nelli, L'erotique des troubadours (Paris: Union Generate
d'Editions, 1974), in particular, vol. l,pp. 267, 316, 358, and 370, and vol. 2, pp. 47, 53, and
75. (Also vol. 1, p. 128: one of the major differences between chivalric love and courtly love is
that for "knights the valor by which one merits love is always external to love," whereas in the
system of courtly love, the test is essentially internal to love; war valor is replaced by "senti-
mental heroism." This is a mutation in the war machine.)
    14. Robert Van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1961); and Jean-
Francois Lyotard's discussion of it, Economie libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 241 -251.
    15. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972),
p. 113.
    16. Artaud, H'eliogabale, in Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 50-51. It is true
that Artaud still presents the identity of the One and the Multiple as a dialectical unity, one
that reduces the multiple by gathering it into the One. He makes Heliogabalus a kind of
Hegelian. But that is a manner of speaking, for from the beginning multiplicity surpasses all
opposition and does away with dialectical movement.
    17. [TRANS: Artaud, "The Body Is the Body," trans. Roger McKeon, Semiotext(e), Anti-
Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), p. 59.]
    18. Artaud, The Peyote Dance (translation of Les Tarahumaras), trans. Helen Weaver
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 38-39 [translation modified].
    19. [TRANS: Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974),
p. 125.]
    20. [TRANS: Ibid., p. 183.]
    21. [TRANS: Ibid., p. 161.]
    22. See Cause commune, no. 3 (October 1972).

                                  7. Year Zero: Faciality
     1. Josef von Sternberg, Fw«/« a Chinese Laundry (New York: MacMillan, 1965), p. 324.
[TRANS: The English version of this phrase reads "merciful darkness."]
     2. [TRANS: "Blumfeld. An Elderly Gentleman." The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, ed.
Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), pp. 183-205.]
     3. On this ballet, see Jean Barraque's Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), which cites the text of
the argument, pp. 166-171.
     4. See Otto Isakower, "Contribution a la psychopathologie des phenomenes associes a
rendormissement," Nouve/le revue de psychanalyse, no. 5 (Spring 1972), pp. 197-210;
Bertram D. Lewin, "Le sommeil, la bouche et 1'ecran du reve," ibid., pp. 211-224; and Rene
                                 NOTES TO PP. 170-183 D 533

Spitz, with the collaboration of W. Godfrey Cobliner, The First Year of Life (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1965), pp. 75-82.
      5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 121-123.
      6. Klaatsch, "L'evolution du genre humain," in Kreomer, L'Univers et I'humanite, vol.
2: "In vain, we tried to find a trace of red edging around the lips of live, young chimpanzees,
which resemble man so closely in all other respects.... How would the face of the most gra-
cious young woman look if her mouth was a stripe between two white borders?... In addition,
the pectoral region of the anthropoid possesses the two nipples of the mammary glands, but
folds of fat comparable to the breasts never form." And Emile Devaux's formula in Trois
problemes: I'espece, {'instinct, l'homme(Pa.m: Le Francois, 1933), p. 264: "The child made the
woman's breast, and the mother the child's lips."
      7. Face exercises play an essential role in the pedagogical principles of J.-B. de la Salle.
Even Ignacio de Loyola integrated his teaching landscape exercises or "compositions of
place" relative to the life of Christ, hell, the world, etc. As Barthes points out, this involves
skeletal images subordinated to a language, but also active schemas to be completed, colored
in, like those found in catechisms and devotional handbooks [Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans.
Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)—Trans.]
      8. Chretien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, trans. Robert White Linker (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1952), pp. 88-89. A similar scene, dominated by the
"machinery" of the boat, is found in Malcolm Lowry's novel Ultramarine (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1962), pp. 159-172: a pigeon drowns in waters infested by sharks, "as if a red leaf
should fall on a white torrent" (p. 170), and this inevitably evokes the image of a bloody face.
Lowry's scene is imbedded in such different elements and is so particularly organized that
there can be no question of influence by Chretien de Troyes's scene, only confluence with it.
This makes it an even better confirmation of the existence of a veritable black hole or red
mark-white wall abstract machine (snow or water).
      9. [TRANS: Continued in 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense ...," pp. 232-309]
    10. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian
Books, 1957), p. 195-199: "'The kettle began i t . . . " Thus Dickens opens his Cricket on the
Hearth. ... What could be further from films!... But, strange as it may seem, movies also
were boiling in that kettle.... As soon as we recognize this kettle as a typical close-up, we
exclaim:'... of course this is the purest Griffith.'... Certainly, this kettle is a typical Griffith-
esque close-up. A close-up saturated, we now become aware, with typically Dickens-esque
'atmosphere,' with which Griffith, with equal mastery, can envelop the severe face of life in
 Way Down East, and the icy cold moral face of his characters, who push the guilty Anna onto
the shifting surface of a swirling ice-break" (the white wall again).
    11. Jacques Lizot, Le cercle desfeux (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 34ff.
    12. On the stranger grasped as Other, see Andre Haudricourt, "Nature et culture dans la
civilisation de 1'igname: 1'origine des clones et des clans," L'Homme vol. 4, no. 1 (January-
April 1964), pp. 98-102. And Robert Jaulin, Gens de soi, gens de I'autre (Paris: Union
Generate d'Editions, 1973), preface, p. 20.
    13. Maurice Ronai demonstrates that the landscape, the reality as well as the notion, is
tied to a very particular semiotic system and very particular apparatuses of power: this is one
of the sources of geography, as well as a principle behind its political subordination (the land-
scape as "the face of the fatherland or nation"). See "Paysages," in Herodote, no. 1 (January-
March 1976), pp. 125-159.
    14. See Jacques Mercier, Ethiopian Magic Scrolls, trans. Richard Pevear (New York:
Braziller, 1979). And "Les peintures des rouleaux protecteurs ethiopiens," Journal of Ethio-
pian Studies, vol. 14, fasc. 2 (Summer 1974), pp. 89-106 ("The eye stands for the face which
stands for the body.... The pupils are drawn in the inner spaces.... That is why we must
                                534 D NOTES TO PP. 183-197

speak of directions of magic meaning based on eyes and faces, with the use of traditional
decorative motifs such as cross-hatching, check patterns, four-pointed stars, etc."). The power
of Negus, with his ancestry going back to Solomon and his court of magicians, was based on
his ember-eyes, operating like a black hole, angelic or demonic. Mercier's analyses in their
entirety constitute an essential contribution to the analysis of facial functions.
    15. For Eisenstein's own distinction between his conception of the close-up and
Griffith's, see Film Form and Film Sense.
    16. This is a recurring theme in horror novels and science fiction: the eyes are in the black
hole, not the opposite ("I see a luminous disk emerging from the black hole, resembling eyes").
Comic books, Circus No. 2, for example, depict black holes populated by faces and eyes, and
the traversing of that black hole. On the relation of eyes to holes and walls, see the texts and
drawing of Jean-Luc Parant, in particular, Les yeux MMDVI (Paris: Bourgois, 1976).
    17. See Jean Paris's analyses, L'espace et le regard (Paris: Seuil, 1965), vol. 1, chapter 1
(also, the evolution of the Virgin and the variation in the relations between her face and that of
the infant Jesus: vol. 2, chapter 2).
    18. D. H. Lawrence, "Melville's 'Typee' and 'Omoo,'" Studies in Classic American Litera-
ture (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 197. Lawrence's essay begins with a lovely distinc-
tion between terrestrial and maritime eyes.
    19. Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, p. 239.
    20. Ibid., p. 63.
    21. Ibid., pp. 63-64.
    22. Wilhelm Reich's Character-Analysis, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1970), considers the face and faciality traits to be among the first pieces
of character "armor" and the first ego resistances (the "occular ring," followed by the "oral
ring"). The organization of these rings occurs on planes perpendicular to the "orgonotic
streaming" and oppose the free movement of this streaming throughout the body. Hence the
importance of eliminating the armor and "dissolving the rings." See pp. 370ff.
    23. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 200.
    24. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: William Heinemann, 1964), p. 339.

                 8.1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"
       1. See Jules Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly, The Diaboliques, trans. Ernest Boyd (New
 York: Knopf, 1925). Of course, the work of Maupassant is not limited to tales; he also wrote
 novellas, or novels containing elements of the novellas. For example, the episode of Lison in
chapter 4 of Une vie: "It was at the time of Aunt Lison's sudden impulse       It was never spo-
 ken of again, and remained as though enveloped in fog. One evening, Lise, then twenty, threw
 herself into the water without anyone having an inkling why. Nothing in her life or manners,
 could have allowed one to predict this act of madness."
      2. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin:
 University of Texas Press, 1968).
      3. Marcel Arland, Le Promeneur (Paris: Pavois, 1944).
      4. [TRANS: "In the Cage," The Novels and Tales of Henry James (Fairiield, N. J.: Augustus
 M. Kelley, 1979), vol. 11, p. 469.]
      5. Nathalie Sarraute, in "Conversation and Sub-conversation," The Age of Suspicion,
 trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), shows how Proust analyzes the smallest move-
 ments, glances, or intonations. However, he apprehends them through memory, he assigns
 them a "position," he thinks of them as a sequence of causes and effects; "he rarely... tried to
 relive them and make them relive for the reader in the present, while they were forming and
                                NOTES TO PP. 197-211 D 535

developing, like so many tiny dramas, each one of which has its adventures, its mystery and its
unforeseeable ending" (p.92).
      6. [TRANS: The French translation consulted by the authors reversed the meaning of this
passage. The original reads: "She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense
of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctions—it all bounded out." In the
Cage, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 11, p. 472.]
      7. S0ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 46ff.
      8. [TRANS: Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected
Pieces, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), p.69.]
      9. [TRANS: Ibid., pp. 82, 84.]
      10. Pierrette Fleutiaux, Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette et autres nouvelles (Paris: Jul-
liard, 1976), pp. 9-50.
      11. In another novella in the same collection, "Le dernier angle de transparence" (The
last angle of transparency). Fleutiaux distinguishes three lines of perception, but without
applying a preestablished schema. The hero has molar perception, which takes in overall
aggregates and clear-cut elements, well-distributed areas of fullness and emptiness (this per-
ception is coded, inherited, and overcoded by the walls: Don't miss you chair, etc.). But he
is also caught up in a molecular perception composed of fine and shifting segmentations and
autonomous traits, where holes appear in what is full and microforms in emptiness, between
two things, where everything "teems and stirs" with a thousand cracks. The hero's problem
is that he cannot make up his mind between the two lines and constantly jumps from one to
the other. Will he be saved by a third line of perception, the perception of escape, a "hypothet-
ical direction barely hinted at" by the angle of the two others, the "angle of transparency"
opening a new space?
      12. Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de I'immuable, vol. 1, Voix et voir, Recherches, no. 8
(April 1975).
      13. Henri Laborit wrote a book "in praise of flight," Eloge de lafuite (Paris: Laffont,
1976). In it, he demonstrates the biological importance of lines of flight among animals, but
his approach is too formalistic; among human beings, he thinks flight is associated with val-
ues of the imaginary functioning to increase one's "information" about the world.
      14. [TRANS: See pp. 188-89.]
      15. Leon Shestov, Chekhov and Other Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966),
pp. 8-9 [translation modified to agree with the French edition cited by the authors—Trans].

                     9.1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity
       1. Jacques Lizot, Le cercle des Feux (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 118
       2. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke
Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963): "Do Dual Organizations Exist?" pp.
132-163.
      3. See two exemplary studies in African Political Systems, ed. Meyer Frotes and E. E.
Evans-Pritchard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): Fortes, "The Political System of
the Tellensi of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast," pp. 239-271, and Evans-
Pritchard, "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan," pp. 272-296.
      4. Georges Balandier analyzes the ways in which ethnologists and sociologists define
this opposition: Political Anthropology, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon,
1970), pp. 137-143.
      5. On the initiation of a shaman and the role of the tree among the Yanomami Indians, see
Jacques Lizot, Le cercle des feux, pp. 127-135: "Between his legs a hole is hastily dug in
                                536 D NOTES TO PP. 211-217

which they place the base of the pole they erect there. Turaewe draws imaginary lines on the
ground radiating in all directions. He says, 'These are the roots.' "
      6. The State, therefore, is not defined solely by the type of public powers it has, but also
as a resonance chamber for private as well as public powers. It is for this reason that Althusser
says: "The distinction between public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law,
and valid in the subordinate domains where bourgeois law exercises its powers. The domain
of the State eludes it because it is beyond Law.... It is on the contrary the foundation for any
distinction between the public and the private." "Ideologic et appareils ideologiques d'Etat,"
LaPens'ee, no. 151 (June 1970), pp. 29-35.
      7. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe etpens'ee chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1971-1974), vol.
1, part 3 ("When it becomes communal, when it is erected in the public and open space of the
agora and no longer inside private residences.. . the hearth [foyer: also, focus, focal point—
Trans.] expresses the center as common denominator of all of the houses constituting the
polis";p. 210).
      8. Paul Virilio, L'insecurit'e du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), pp. 120, 174-175. On
"castrametation": "Geometry is the necessary foundation for a calculated expansion of
State power in space and time; conversely, this supplies the State with an ideal, sufficient fig-
ure, provided that the figure is ideally geometrical. . .. But Fenelon, voicing his opposition
to the State policies of Louis XIV, exclaimed: 'Beware the bewitchments and diabolical
attributes of geometry!"'
      9. Meyer Fortes analyzes the difference among the Tellensi between "guardians of the
earth" and chiefs. This distinction between powers is fairly widespread among primitive soci-
eties; but the important thing is that it is organized in such a way as to prevent the powers from
resonating. For example, according to Louis Berthe's analysis of the Baduj of Java, the power
of the guardian of the earth, on the one hand, is considered to be passive and feminine but, on
the other hand, is assigned to the eldest son: this is not an "intrusion of kinship into the politi-
cal order" but on the contrary "a requirement of a political order translated in kinship terms"
in order to prevent the establishment of a resonance leading to private property. See Berthe,
"Aines et cadets, 1'alliance et la hierarchic chez les Baduj," L'Homme, vol. 5, nos. 3/4 (July-
December 65), pp. 189-223.
    10. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976),
especially chapter 15 (Barnabas's statements [the phrase quoted is on p. 228—Trans]). The
parable of the two offices—molar and molecular—does not just have a physical interpreta-
tion, as in Eddington, but a properly bureaucratic one as well.
    11. The strength of Jean-Pierre Faye's book, Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann,
1972), is that it illustrates the multiplicity of these focuses, both practical and semiotic, on the
basis of which Nazism was constituted. That is why Faye is the first both to do a rigorous anal-
ysis of the concept of the totalitarian State (in its Italian and German origins) and to refuse to
define Italian fascism and German Nazism by that concept (which operates on a different
plane than the "subjacent process"). Faye goes into all of these points in La critique du langage
et son economic (Paris: Galilee, 1973).
     12. On the complementarity between the "macropolitics of security" and the "micropoli-
tics," see Virilio, L'insecurit'e du territoire, pp. 96, 130, 228-235. The microorganization of
permanent stress in large modern cities has frequently been noted.
     13. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, speech of June 1, 1976, before the Institut des Hautes
Etudes de Defense Nationale (complete text in Le Monde, June 4, 1976).
     14. On the "flow with mutant power" and the distinction between the two kinds of money,
see Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profits (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 236, 275-277.
    15. Michel Lelart, Le dollar. Monnaie Internationale (Paris: Albatros, 1975), p. 57.
    16. Take Foucault's analysis, in Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
                                NOTES TO PP. 217-224 D 537

York: Vintage, 1975), of what he calls the "microphysics of power." First, it is indeed a ques-
tion of miniaturized mechanisms, or molecular focuses operating in detail or in the infinitely
small and forming any number of "disciplines" in the school, army, factory, prison, etc. (see
pp. 138ff.). But second, these segments themselves, and the focuses operating within them at
the molecular level, present themselves as the singularities of an "abstract" diagram coexten-
sive with the entire social field, or as quanta deducted from a flow of a nonspecific nature—
the nonspecific flow being defined by "a multiplicity of individuals" to be controlled (see pp.
205ff. [translation modified]).
     17. On "quantitative sinfulness," quanta, and the qualitative leap, one may refer to the
microtheology constructed by Sdren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter
Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).
    18. According to Tarde, psychology is quantitative, but only insofar as it studies the desire
and belief components of sensation. And logic is quantitative when it does not restrict itself to
forms of representation, but extends to degrees of belief and desire, and their combinations;
see La logique sociale (Paris: Alcan, 1893).
     19. On all of these points, see especially Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of
Capitalism, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), and Georges Duby, The
Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to Twelfth
Century, trans. Howard E. Clarke (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).
    20. Rosa Luxemburg, in "Social Reform or Revolution," and "Mass Strike, Party and
Trade Unions," in Selected Political Writings, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review,
 1971), formulated the problem of the differences and relations between masses and classes,
but from a still-subjective point of view: masses as the "instinctual basis of class conscious-
ness" (see Nicolas Boulte and Jacques Moiroux, "Masse et Parti," Partisans, no. 45, Rose
Luxemburg vivante [December-January 1969], pp. 29-38. Alain Badiou and Francois Balmes
advance a more objective hypothesis: masses are "invariants" that oppose the State-form in
general and exploitation, whereas classes are the historical variables that determine the con-
crete State, and, in the case of the proletariat, the possibility of its effective dissolution; De
I'ideologie [Paris: Maspero, 1976]). But it is difficult to see, first of all, why masses are not
themselves historical variables, and second, why the word is applied only to the exploited (the
"peasant-plebeian" mass), when it is also suitable for seigneurial, bourgeois masses—or even
monetary masses.
    21. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France au seizieme siecle in Oeuvres Completes, vol. 7, ed.
Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971-).
    22. Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. Bernard Miall (New York:
Norton, 1939), p. 22.
    23. See Emile Felix Gautier, Genseric, roi des Vandales (Paris: Payot, 1932). ("Precisely
because they were the weakest, eternally being pushed from behind, they were forced to go
the farthest.")
    24. Totalitarianism is not defined by the size of the public sector because in many cases
there is still a liberal economy. What defines it is the artificial constitution of "closed vessels,"
particularly monetary and industrial. It is primarily in this sense that Italian fascism and Ger-
man Nazism were totalitarian States, as demonstrated by Daniel Guerin in Fascism and Big
Business, trans. Frances and Mason Merrill (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), chapter 9.
    25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27: "These relations go right down into the depths
of society, they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the
frontier between classes and they do not merely reproduce... the general form of the law or
government... .They define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each
of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggle, and of an at least temporary inversion of the
power relation."
                               538 D NOTES TO PP. 225-237

    26. [TRANS: Kafka, The Castle, pp. 233, 238.]
    27. On these aspects of banking power, see Suzanne de Brunhoff, L 'offre de monnaie. Cri-
tique d'un concept (Paris: Maspero, 1971), especially pp. 102-131.
    28. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), pp. 57-60.
    29. Maurice Blanchot, L'amitie(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 232.
    30. F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other UncollectedPieces,
ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), pp. 77-78, 81.
    31. [TRANS: See 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," Proposition IX, pp. 416-423.]
    32. Klaus Mann, Mephisto, trans. Robin Smith (New York: Random House, 1977), pp.
202-204. This kind of declaration abounds, at the very moment when the Nazis were succeed-
ing. See Goebbels's famous formulations: "In the world of absolute fatality in which Hitler
moves, nothing has meaning any longer, neither good nor bad, time nor space, and what other
people call success cannot be used as a criterion.... Hitler will probably end in catastrophe";
Hitler parle a ses generaux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964). This catastrophism can be reconciled
with considerable satisfaction, good conscience and comfortable tranquillity. There is a
whole bureaucracy of catastrophe. On Italian fascism, one may consult, in particular, the
analysis of Maria-Antonietta Macciochi, "Sexualite feminine dans 1'ideologie fasciste," Tel
Quel, no. 66 (Summer 1976), pp. 26-42: the women's death squad, the public display of wid-
ows and mothers in mourning, the slogan (mots d'ordre) "Coffins and Cradles."
    33. Paul Virilio, L 'ins'ecurite du territoire, chapter 1. Although Hannah Arendt identifies
Nazism and totalitarianism, she expressed this principle of Nazi domination: "Their idea of
domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve,
but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion"; The Origins of Totalitarianism (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 326; even the war, and the danger of losing the
war, acted as accelerators (pp. 325-326, 394ff., 41 Off., 462ff.).


                 10.1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,
                           Becoming-Imperceptible
       1. On the complementarity between series and structure, and how it differs from evolu-
tionism, see Henri Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck. Les classes zoologiques et I'idee de serie
animale, vol. 2 of Etudes d'histoire des sciences naturelles (Paris: Alcan, 1926); and Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970).
       2. See Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Harper,
1962), and Gaston Bachelard, Lautreamont (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1939).
       3. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press,
1963), p. 78.
       4. Jean-Pierre Vernant in Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et
societ'es, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 15-16.
       5. On the opposition between sacrificial series and totemic structure, see Levi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 223-228. Despite all of his
severity toward the series, Levi-Strauss recognizes the compromise between the two themes:
structure itself implies a very concrete feeling for affinities (pp. 37-38) and is based on two
series between which it organizes homologies of relations. In particular, "becoming-
historical" can bring complications or degradations that replace these homologies with
resemblances and identifications between terms (see pp. 115ff., and what Levi-Strauss calls
the "flipside of totemism").
       6. Jean Duvignaud, L'anomie. Her'esie et Subversion (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1973).
                                NOTES TO PP. 240-247 D 539

       7. [TRANS: H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," in The Dream-Quest
of Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 191-192.]
       8. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lettres du voyageur a son retour, trans. Jean-Claude
Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901.
       9. A nton Reiser (extracts) in La legende disperses. A nthologie du romantisme allemand
(Paris: Union Generate d'Editions, 1976), pp. 36-43.
      10. [TRANS: A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New
York: Dutton, 1972); Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, Manual de zoologia
fantastica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957), p. 9. The lobizbn is a fantastic
creature of Uruguayan folklore to which many shapes are attributed.]
      11. On the man of war, his extrinsic position in relation to the State, the family, and reli-
gion, and on the becomings-animal, becomings-wild animal he enters into, see Dumezil, in
particular, Mythes et dieux des Germains (Paris: E. Leroux, 1939); Horace et les Curiaces
(Paris: Gallimard, 1942); The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1970); Mythe et epopee (Paris: Gallimard, 1968-1973), vol. 2. One may
also refer to the studies on leopard-man societies, etc., in Black Africa; it is probable that these
societies derive from brotherhoods of warriors. But after the colonial State prohibited tribal
wars, they turned into crime associations, while still retaining their territorial and political
 importance. One of the best studies on this subject is Paul Ernest Joset, Les societ'es secretes
des hommes-l'eopards en Afrique noire (Paris: Payot, 1955). The becomings-animal proper to
these groups seem to us to be very different from the symbolic relations between human and
 animal as they appear in State apparatuses, but also in pre-State institutions of the totemism
 type. Levi-Strauss clearly demonstrates that totemism already implies a kind of embryonic
State, to the extent that it exceeds tribal boundaries (The Savage Mind, pp. 157ff).
      12. [TRANS: Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," in The Complete Stories of
Franz Kafka, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983).]
      13. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R.
 Fawcett, intro. Michel Foucault (Boston: Reidel, 1978), pp. 73-74.
      14. D. H. Lawrence: "I am tired of being told there is no such animal.... If I am a giraffe,
and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me and say they know me are nice well-behaved
dogs, there it is, the animals are different.... You don't love me. The animal that I am you
instinctively dislike"; The Collected Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. Harry T. Moore
(New York: Viking, 1962), letter to J. M. Murry, May 20, 1929, p. 1154.
      15. [TRANS: Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck."]
      16. Rene Thorn, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, trans. D. H. Fowler (Reading,
Mass.: Benjamin Fowler/Cummings, 1975), p. 319.
      17. Edward Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (New York: Humanities Press, 1971),
pp. 18-25.
      18. [TRANS: Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, Hugues-le-loup (Paris: J.
Bonaventure, n.d.).]
      19. [TRANS: Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, p. 18.]
     20. See Jacques Lacarriere, Les hommes ivres de dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975).
     21. Pierre Gordon, in Sex and Religion, trans. Renee and Hilda Spodheim (New York:
Social Science Publishers, 1949), studied the role of animal-men in rites of "sacred
defloration." These animal-men impose a ritual alliance upon filiative groups, themselves
belong to brotherhoods that are on the outside or on the fringes, and are masters of contagion
and epidemic. Gordon analyzes the reaction of the villages and cities when they begin to fight
the animal-men in order to win the right to perform their own initiations and order their alli-
ances according to their respective filiations (for example, the fight against the dragon). We
find the same theme, for example, in Genevieve Calame-Griaule and Z. Ligers, "L'homme-
                                540 D NOTES TO PP. 247-261

hyene dans la tradition soudanaise," L'Homme, 1, 2 (May-August 1961), pp. 89-118: the
hyena-man lives on the fringes of the village, or between two villages, and can keep a lookout
in both directions. A hero, or even two heroes with a fiancee in each other's village, triumphs
over the man-animal. It is as though it were necessary to distinguish two very different states
of alliance: a demonic alliance that imposes itself from without, and imposes its law upon all
of the filiations (a forced alliance with the monster, with the man-animal), and a consensual
alliance, which is on the contrary in conformity with the law of filiations and is established
after the men of the villages have defeated the monster and have organized their own rela-
tions. This sheds new light on the question of incest. For it is not enough to say that the prohi-
bition against incest results from the positive requirements of alliance in general. There is
instead a kind of alliance that is so foreign and hostile to filiation that it necessarily takes the
position of incest (the man-animal always has a relation to incest). The second kind of alliance
prohibits incest because it can subordinate itself to the rights of filiation only by lodging itself,
precisely, between two distinct filiations. Incest appears twice, once as a monstrous power of
alliance when alliance overturns filiation, and again as a prohibited power of filiation when
filiation subordinates alliance and must distribute it among distinct lineages.
      22. [TRANS: See Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected
Pieces, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956). The allusion to Faust is to
Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 1323-1324.]
      23. Richard Matheson and Isaac Asimov are of particular importance in this evolution
(Asimov extensively develops the theme of symbiosis).
      24. Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 159.
      25. [TRANS: Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," p. 197.]
      26. See D. H. Lawrence, the first and second poems of Tortoises (New York: T.
Selzer, 1921).
      27. [TRANS: Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931),
p. 139.]
      28. See the Inquisition manual, Le marteau des sorciers (1486), ed. H. Institoris and J.
Sprengler (Paris: Plon, 1973), vol. l,p. 10,andvol. 2, p. 8. The first and simplest case is that of
Ulysses' companions, who believed themselves, and were believed to have been, transformed
into pigs (or again, King Nebuchadnezzar, transformed into an ox). The second case is more
complicated: Diomedes' companions do not believe they have been changed into birds, since
they are dead, but demons take over birds' bodies and pass them off as those of Diomedes'
companions. The need to distinguish this more complex case is explained by phenomena of
transfer of affects; for example, a lord on a hunting excursion cuts off the paw of a wolf and
returns home to find his wife, who had not left the house, with a hand cut off; or a man strikes
cats, and the exact wounds he inflicts turn up on women.
      29. On the problem of intensities in the Middle Ages, the proliferation of theses on this
topic, the constitution of kinetics and dynamics, and the particularly important role of
Nicholas Oresme, see Pierre Duhem's classic work, Le systeme du monde (Paris: A. Hermann
& Fils, 1913-1959), vols. 7-9 (La physiqueparisienne au XlVesiede).
      30. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Principes dephilosophic zoologique(Paris: Picton et
Didier, 1930). And on particles and their movements, Notions synthetiques, historiques et
physiologiques dephilosophic naturelle (Paris: Denain, 1838).
      31. Vladimir Slepian, "Fils de chien," Minuit, no. 7 (January 1974). We have given a
very simplified presentation of this text.
      32. See Roger Dupouy, "Du masochisme," Annales Medico-psychologiques, series 12,
vol. 2 (1929), p. 405.
      33. This is sometimes written "eccei ty," deriving the word from ecce, "here is." This is an
error, since Duns Scotus created the word and the concept from haec, "this thing." But it is a
                                NOTES TO PP. 261-265 D 541

fruitful error because it suggests a mode of individuation that is distinct from that of a thing or
a subject.
      34. Michel Tournier, Les meteores (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), chapter 23, "L'ame deployee."
      35. [TRANS: On Aeon versus chronos, see Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969),
especially series 23, pp. 190-197.]
      36. Pierre Boulez, Conversations with C'elestin Deliege (London: Eulenberg Books,
 1976), pp. 68-71 ("It is not possible to introduce phenomena of tempo into music that has
been calculated only electronically, in ... lengths expressed in seconds or microseconds"; p.
70).
      37. Ray Bradbury, The Machineries of Joy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 53.
      38. [TRANS: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace and World,
 1925), p. 11.]
      39. Gustave Guillaume has proposed a very interesting conception of the verb. He dis-
tinguishes between an interior time, enveloped in the "process," and an exterior time per-
taining to the distinction between epochs (Epoques et niveaux temporels dans lesysteme de
la conjugation francaise, Cahiers de linguistique structurale [Universite de Laval, Quebec],
no. 4 [1955]). It seems to us that these two poles correspond respectively to the infinitive-
becoming, Aeon, and the present-being, Chronos. Each verb leans more or less in the direc-
tion of one pole or the other, not only according to its nature, but also according to the
nuances of its modes and tenses, with the exception of "becoming" and "being," which cor-
respond to both poles. Proust, in his study of Flaubert's style, shows how the imperfect tense
in Flaubert takes on the value of an infinitive-becoming: Chroniques (Paris: Gallimard,
 1927), pp. 197-199.]
      40. On the problem of proper names (in what sense is the proper name outside the limits
of classification and of another nature, and in what sense is it at the limit and still a part of
classification?), see Alan Henderson Gardiner, The Theory of Proper Names, 2nd ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1957), and Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, chapter 7 ("Time
Regained"), pp. 217-244.
     41. We have already encountered this problem of the indifference of psychoanalysis to
the use of the indefinite article or pronoun among children: as early as Freud, but more espe-
cially in Melanie Klein (the children she analyzes, in particular, Little Richard, speak in terms
of "a," "one," "people," but Klein exerts incredible pressure to turn them into personal and
possessive family locutions). It seems to us that Laplanche and Pontalis are the only ones in
psychoanalysis to have had any inkling that indefinites play a specific role; they protested
against any overrapid interpretive reduction: "Fantasme originaire," Les temps modernes,
no. 215 (April 1964), pp. 1861, 1868.
     42. See the subjectivist or personalist conception of language in Emile Benveniste, Prob-
lems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of
Miami Press, 1971), chapters 20 ("Subjectivity in Language," pp. 223-230) and 21 ("Analyti-
cal Philosophy and Language," pp. 231-238), especially pp. 220-221 and 225-226.
     43. The essential texts of Maurice Blanchot serve to refute the theory of the "shifter" and
of personology in linguistics. See L'entretien inflni (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 556-567.
And on the difference between the two propositions, "I am unfortunate" and "he is unfortu-
nate," or between "I die" and "one dies," see La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp.
29-30, and The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1982), pp. 90, 122, 126. Blanchot demonstrates that in all of these cases the indefinite has
nothing to do with "the banality of daily life," which on the contrary would be on the side of
the personal pronoun.
     44. [TRANS: These quotes, the first from Nietzsche, the second from Kafka, are quoted
more fully in 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," p. 353.]
                               542 D NOTES TO PP. 265-274

     45. For example, Francois Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing, trans. Donald A. Riggs and
Jerome P. Seaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), his analysis of what he calls
"the passive procedures," pp. 23-42.
     46. See the statements of the "repetitive" American musicians, particularly Steve Reich
and Philip Glass.
     47. Nathalie Sarraute, in The Age of Suspicion, trans. Marie Jolas (New York: Braziller,
1963), shows how Proust, for example, is torn between the two planes, in that he extracts from
his characters "the infinitesimal particles of an impalpable matter," but also glues all of the
particles back into a coherent form, slips them into the envelope of this or that character. See
pp. 50, 94-95.
     48. See the distinction between the two Planes in Artaud. One of them is denounced as
the source of all illusions: The Peyote Dance (translation ofLes Tarahumaras), trans. Helen
Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 12-13.
     49. Robert Rovini, introduction to FriedrichHoldeilin, Hyperion (Paris: 10/18,1968).
     50. We have referred to an unpublished study of Kleist by Mathieu Carriere.
     51. "Where did the title of your second book, A Year From Monday, come from?" "From
a plan a group of friends and I made to meet each other again in Mexico 'a year from next
Monday.' We were together on a Saturday. And we were never able to fulfil that plan. It's a
form of silence.... The very fact that our plan failed, the fact we were unable to meet does not
mean that everything failed. The plan wasn't a failure"; John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the
Birds (Boston: Marion Boyers, 1981), pp. 116-117.
     52. That is why we were able to take Goethe as an example of a transcendental plane.
Goethe, however, passes for a Spinozist; his botanical and zoological studies uncover an
immanent plane of composition, which allies him to Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (this resem-
blance has often been pointed out). Nonetheless, Goethe retains the twofold idea of a devel-
opment of form and a formation-education of the Subject; for this reason, his plane of
immanence has already crossed over to the other side, to the other pole.
     53. On all of these points (proliferations-dissolutions, accumulations, indications of
speed, the affective and dynamic role), see Pierre Boulez, Conversations with C'elestin
Deliege, pp. 21 -22, 68-71. In another text, Boulez stresses a little-known aspect of Wagner:
not only are the leitmotifs freed from their subordination to the scenic characters, but the
speeds of development are freed from the hold of a "formal code" or a tempo ("Le temps
re-cherche," in Das Rheingold Programmheft, vol. I [Bayreuth, 1976], pp. 3-11). Boulez
pays homage to Proust for being one of the first to understand this floating and
transformable role of Wagnerian motifs.
     54. The themes of speed and slowness are most extensively developed in The Captive:
"To understand the emotions which they arouse, and which others even better-looking do not,
we must realise that they are not immobile, but in motion, and add to their person a sign corre-
sponding to that which in physics denotes speed... to such beings, such fugitive beings, their
own nature and our anxiety fasten wings"; vol. 3 of Remembrance oj"Things Past, trans. C. K.
Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), pp.
86-87, 88.
     55. [TRANS: The word translated as "proximity" is voisinage, which Deleuze and Guattari
draw from set theory. The corresponding mathematical term in English is "neighborhood."]
     56. Louis Wolfson, Leschizo et les langues, preface by Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Gallimard,
1970).
     57. Rene Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem, Co-ire, Recherche, no. 22 (1976), pp. 76-82:
see their critique of Bettelheim's thesis, which considers the becomings-animal of the child
merely an autistic symbolism that expresses the anxiety of the parents more than any reality
of the child. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress (New York: Free Press, 1967).
                                NOTES TO PP. 274-287 D 543

      58. Philippe Gavi, "Les philosophes du fantastique," Liberation, March 31, 1977. For
the preceding cases, what we must arrive at is an understanding of certain so-called neurotic
behaviors as a function of becomings-animal, instead of relegating becomings-animal to a
psychoanalytic interpretation of behaviors. We saw this in relation to masochism (and Lolito
explains that the origin of his feats lies in certain masochistic experiences; a fine text by Chris-
tian Maurel conjugates a becoming-monkey and a becoming-horse in a masochistic pairing).
Anorexia would also have to be understood from the point of view of becoming-animal.
      59. See Newsweek, May 16, 1977, p. 57.
      60. See Trost, Visible et invisible (Paris: Arcanes) and Librement mecanique (Paris:
Minotaure): "She was simultaneously, in her sensible reality and in the ideal prolongation of
her lines, like the projection of a human group yet to come."
      61. See the examples of structural explanation proposed by Jean-Pierre Vernant, in
Problem.es de la guerre en Grece ancienne, pp. 15-16.
      62. On transvestism in primitive societies, see Bruno Bettelheim (who offers an
identificatory psychological interpretation), Symbolic Wounds (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
 1954), and especially Gregory Bateson (who proposes an original structural interpretation),
Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New
Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of Views, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1958).
      63. Francois Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing, p. 13.
      64. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980),
vol. 3, p. 209: "The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every
atom." On all of these points, we make use of an unpublished study on Virginia Woolf by
Fanny Zavin.
      65. [TRANS: Sdren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 104.]
      66. Ibid., .p. 49. Fear and Trembling seems to us to be Kierkegaard's greatest book
because of the way it formulates the problem of movement and speed, not only in its content,
but also in its'style and composition.
      67. [TRANS: Fear and Trembling, p. 61.]
      68. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 297ff.
      69. Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day,
 1968). Fiedler explains the secret alliance of the white American with the black or the Indian
by a desire to escape the molar form and ascendancy of the American woman.
      70. Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle: Mescaline, trans. Louise Varese (San Francisco:
City Lights, 1963), p. 87: "The horror of it was that I was nothing but a line. In normal life one
is a sphere, a sphere that surveys panoramas.... Now only a line... the accelerated line I had
become." See Michaux's line drawings. In the first eighty pages of The Major Ordeals of the
Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974), Michaux further develops the analysis of speeds, molecular perceptions,
and "microphenomena" or "microoperations."
      71. [TRANS: A rewriting of Freud's famous phrase, "Where id was, there ego shall be"
(New Introductory Lectures, Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 80), and Lacan's earlier rewriting of
it in "The Freudian Thing," Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 128-
129,136.]
      72. Artaud, The Peyote Dance, pp. 12-14.
      73. Michaux, Miserable Miracle ("Remaining Master of One's Speeds," pp. 87-88).
      74. On the possibilities of silicon, and its relation to carbon from the point of view of
organic chemistry, see the article, "Silicium," in the Encyclopedia Universalis.
      75. Luc de Heusch shows that it is the man of war who brings the secret: he thinks, eats,
                               544 D NOTES TO PP. 287-293

loves, judges, arrives in secret, while the man of the State proceeds publicly. See Le mi ivre ou
I'origine de I'Etat (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). The idea of the State secret is a late one and
assumes that the war machine has been appropriated by the State apparatus.
      76. In particular, Georg Simmel. See The Sociology ofGeorg Simmel, trans. Kurt H.
Wolff (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950), chapter 3.
      77. Paul Ernest Joset clearly notes these two aspects of the secret initiatory society, the
Mambela of the Congo: on the one hand, its relation of influence over the traditional political
leaders, which gets to the point of a transfer of social powers; and on the other hand, its de
facto relation with the Anioto, as a secret hindsociety of crime or leopard-men (even if the
Anioto are of another origin than the Mambela). See Les societes secretes des hommes-
leopards en Afrique noire, chapter 5.
      78. On the psychoanalytic conceptions of the secret, see Du secret, Nouvelle revue de
psychanalyse, no. 14 (Fall 1976); and for the evolution of Freud on this subject, the article by
Claude Girard, "Le secret aux origines," pp. 55-83.
      79. Bernard Pingaud shows, on the basis of the exemplary text of Henry James, "The
Figure in the Carpet" [The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: C. Scribner's Sons,
 1907-1917), vol. 15—Trans.], how the secret jumps from content to form, and escapes both:
Du secret, pp. 247-249. This text has been frequently commented upon from the viewpoint of
psychoanalysis; above all, J.-B. Pontalis, Apres Freud (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). But psycho-
analysis remains prisoner to a necessarily disguised content and a necessarily symbolic form
(structure, absent cause ...), at a level that defines both the unconscious and language. That is
why, in its aesthetic or literary applications, it misses the secret in an author, as well as the
secret o/an author. The same goes for the secret of Oedipus: they concern themselves with the
first two kinds of secret but not with the second, which is nevertheless the most important.
      80. On the fogginess of the idea of majority, see Kenneth Arrow's two famous themes,
"the Condorcet effect" and the "theorem of collective decision."
      81. See William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Vintage, 1948), p. 216. Speak-
ing of Southern whites after the Civil War (not only the poor but also the old monied families),
Faulkner writes, "We are in the position of the German after 1933 who had no other alterna-
tive but to be a Nazi or a Jew."
      82. The subordination of the line to the point is clearly evident in the arborescent
schemas: see Julien Pacotte, Le reseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pensee (Paris:
Hermann, 1936), and the status of centered or hierarchical systems according to Pierre
Rosenthiehl and Jean Petitot, "Automate asocial et systemes acentres," Communications, no.
22 (1974), pp. 45-62. The arborescent schema of majority could be presented as follows:




     83. A line of becoming, in relation to the localizable connection of A and B (distance), or
in relation to their contiguity:
                               NOTES TO PP. 293-298 D 545




     84. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, p. 236 (Wednesday, November 28, 1928). The
same thing applies to the works of Kafka, in which childhood blocks function as the opposite
of childhood memories. Proust's case is more complicated because he performs a mixture of
the two. The situation of the psychoanalyst is to grasp memories or phantasies, but never
childhood blocks.
     85. For example, in the system of memory, the formation of a memory implies a diago-
nal that turns present A into representation A' in relation to the new present B, and into A" in
relation to C, etc.:




See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin
Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill, intro. Calvin O. Schrag (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1964), pp. 48-50.
     86. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,"
sec. 1, pp. 63-64.
     87. On all of these themes, see Pierre Boulez. (1) On how transversals always tend to
escape horizontal and vertical coordinates of music, sometimes even drawing "virtual lines,"
see Notes of an Apprenticeship, ed. Paule Thevenin, trans. Robert Weinstock (New York:
Knopf, 1968), pp. 231 -232,295-301,382-383. (2) On the idea of the sound block or "block of
duration," in relation to this transversal, see Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw
and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 55-59. (3) On
the distinction between points and blocks, "punctual sets," and "aggregative sets" with vary-
ing individuality, see "Senate que me veux-tu?", Mediations, no. 7 (1964). The hatred of
memory appears frequently in Boulez; see "Eloge de 1'amnesie," Musique enjeu, no. 4 (1971),
pp. 5-14, and "J'ai horreur du souvenir," in Roger Desormiere et son temps, ed. Denise Mayer
and Pierre Souvtchinsky (Monaco: Ed. du Rocher, 1966). Confining ourselves to contempo-
rary examples, one finds analogous declarations in Stravinsky, Cage, Berio. Of course, there is
a musical memory that is tied to coordinates and is exercised in social settings (getting up,
going to bed, beating a retreat). But the perception of a musical "phrase" appeals less to mem-
ory, even of the reminiscence type, than to an extension or contraction of perception of the
encounter type. It should be studied how each musician sets in motion veritable blocks of for-
getting: for example, what Jean Barraque calls "slices of forgetting" and "absent develop-
ments" in the work of Debussy; Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 169-171. One can refer to a
general study by Daniel Charles, "La musiqueetl'oubli," Traverses, no.4 (1977), pp. 14-23.
      88. Roland Barthes, "Rasch," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp. 300-302, 308-309.
      89. There are many differences among painters, in all respects, but also a common
                               546 D NOTES TO PP. 298-305

movement: see Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane in vol. 2 of Complete Writings on
Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Verge (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 524-700; and Paul
Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966). The
aim of statements like those of Mondrian on the exclusive value of the vertical and the hori-
zontal is to show the conditions under which the vertical and horizontal are sufficient to cre-
ate a transversal, which does not even have to be drawn; for example, coordinates of unequal
thickness intersect inside the frame and extend outside the frame, opening a "dynamic axis"
running transversally (see Michel Butor's comments in Repertoire [Paris: Minuit, 1960- ], vol.
3, "Le carre et son habitant"). One can also consult Michel Fried's article on Pollock's line,
Three American Painters (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), and Henry Miller's
discussion of Nash's line, On Turning Eighty (London: Village Press, 1973).
      90. "There was something tense, exasperated to the point of intolerable anger, in his
good-humored breast, as he played the finely-spun peace-music. The more exquisite the
music, the more perfectly he produced it, in sheer bliss; and at the same time, the more intense
was the maddened exasperation within him"; D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod (New York:
Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 16.
      91. Although Luciano Berio indicates otherwise, it seems to us that his work, Visage, is
composed according to the three states of faciality: first, a multiplicity of sound bodies and
silhouettes, then a short symphonic and dominant organization of the face, and finally a
launching of probe-heads in all directions. However, there is no question here of music "imi-
tating" the face and its avatars, or of the voice constituting a metaphor. Instead, the sounds
accelerate the deterritorialization of the face, giving it a properly acoustical power, and the
face reacts musically by in turn inducing a deterritorialization of the voice. This is a molecu-
lar face, produced by electronic music. The voice precedes the face, itself forms the face for
an instant, and outlives it, increasing in speed—on the condition that it is unarticulated,
asignifying, asubjective.
      92. Will Grohman, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.): "Somewhat paradoxi-
cally he remarked that perhaps it had been his good fortune to develop painting, at least on the
formal plane, to the stage reached in music by Mozart" (p. 71).
      93. Dominique Fernandez, La rose des Tudors (Paris: Julliard, 1976) (and the novel
Porporino [Paris: Grasset, 1974]). Fernandez cites pop music as a timid return to great English
vocal music. It would be necessary to take into consideration techniques of circular breathing,
in which one sings breathing in as well as out, or of sound filtering using zones of resonance
(nose, forehead, cheekbones—a properly musical use of the face).
      94. Marcel More, Le dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
      95. As we have seen, imitation can be conceived either as a resemblance of terms culmi-
nating in an archetype (series), or as a correspondence of relations constituting a symbolic
order (structure); but becoming is not reducible to either of these. The concept of mimesis is
not only inadequate, it is radically false.
      96. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967): "I took the dra-
matic licence of not having the birds scream at all" (p. 224).
      97. See Ernesto de Martino, La terredu remords (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 142-170.
Martino, however, retains an interpretation based on the archetype, imitation, and
identification.
      98. Jean Claude Larouche, Alexis le trotteur (Montreal: Ed. du Jour, 1971). They quote
this account: "He didn't play music with his mouth like one of us; he had a huge harmonica we
couldn't even play. . . . When he played with us, he would decide all of a sudden to double us.
In other words, he doubled the beat; in the time we played one beat, he played two, which
required extraordinary wind" (p. 95).
                                NOTES TO PP. 306-315 D 547

      99. [TRANS: See Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf,
1976).]
     100. [TRANS: See 7, "Year Zero: Faciality," pp. 167-191.]
     101. Andre Tetry, Les outils chez les etres vivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), the chapter on
"musical instruments," with bibliography. An animal's movement or labor may make noise,
but we speak of a musical instrument whenever animals use apparatuses whose sole function
is to produce various sounds (the musical character, to the extent that it is determinable, is
quite variable, as is the case with the vocal apparatus of birds; there are veritable virtuosos
among insects). From this standpoint, we distinguish: (1) stridulatory apparatuses, of the
stringed instrument type: the rubbing of a rigid surface against another surface (insects, crus-
taceans, spiders, scorpions, pedipalps); (2) percussive apparatuses, of the drum, cymbal, or
xylophone type: direct application of muscles to a vibratory membrane (crickets and certain
fish). Not only is there an infinite variety of apparatuses and sounds, but the same animal
varies its rhythm, tonality, intensity according to still more mysterious urgencies. "It then be-
comes a song of anger, anxiety, fear, triumph, love. When there is keen excitation, the rhythm
of the stridulation varies: in Crioceris lilii, the frequency of the rubbing goes from 228 strokes
per minute to 550 or more."
     102. Gisele Brelet, "Musique contemporaine en France," in Histoire de la musique, ed.
Roland Manuel, "Pleiade" (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 1166.
     103. A text by Henry Miller for Varese, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New York: New
Directions, 1945), pp. 176-177.

                                 11.1837: Of the Refrain
     1. Fernand Deligny, Voix et Voir, Recherches, no. 8 (April 1975), on the way in which,
among autistic children, a "line of drift" deviates from the customary path and begins to
"vibrate," "toss about," "yaw."
     2. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber,
1966), p. 43 [translation modified to agree with the French version cited by the authors]. See
Henri Maldiney's comments in Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1973),
pp. 149-151.
     3. On the musical nome, the ethos, and the ground or land, notably in polyphony, see
Joseph Samson in Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland Manuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol.
2, pp. 1168-1172. One may also refer to the role in Arab music of the "maqam," which is
both a modal type and a melodic formula: Simon Jargy, La musique arabe (Paris: PUF,
1971), pp. 55ff.
     4. Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la duree (Paris: Bovin, 1936), pp. 128-129.
Emphasis added.
     5. Jakob Johann von Uexkull, Mondesanimauxet mondehumain (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).
     6. "Their glorious dress is constant.... The coloring of coral fish is distributed in large,
sharply contrasting areas of the body. This is quite different from the color patterns not only
of most fresh-water fish but of nearly all less aggressive and less territorial fish.... Like the
colors of the coral fish, the song of the nightingale signals from a distance to all members of its
species that a territory has found an owner." Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie
Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 19-20.
     7. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, trans. Erich Klinghammer (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1975): on monkeys, p. 487; on rabbits, p. 346; on birds, p. 171: "Zebra
finches with colorful plumage maintain a certain distance from one another, while all-white
birds of the same species perch much closer together."
                               548 D NOTES TO PP. 315-325

      8. W. H. Thorpe, Learning and Instinct in Animals (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 364
(Fig. 2).
      9. Lorenz has a constant tendency to present territoriality as an effect of intraspecific
aggression; see OnAgression, pp. 38-39, 42-43, 53-54, 161-162.
     10. On the aesthetic and vital primacy of "having," see Gabriel Tarde, L'opposition
universelle (Paris: Alcan, 1897).
     11. Details on Messiaen's conceptions of bird song, his evaluation of its aesthetic quali-
ties, and his methods for both reproducing it and using it as a material are to be found in
Claude Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen, trans. Felix Aprahamian (London:
Stainer and Bell, 1976), and in Antoine Golea, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris:
Julliard, 1961). In particular, on why Messiaen does not use a tape recorder or sonograph as
ornithologists usually do, see Samuel, pp. 61-63.
     12. [TRANS: Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 87.]
     13. On all of these points, see Claude Samuel, Conversations, chapter 4. On the "rhythmic
character," see pp. 36-39.
     14. Pierre Boulez, "Le temps re-cherche," in Das Rheingold Programmheft, vol. 1
(Bayreuth, 1976), pp. 5-15.
     15. [TRANS: Proust, The Captive, vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott
Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 156.
Translation modified.]
     16. On mannerism and chaos, baroque dances, and the relation of schizophrenia to man-
nerism and dance, see Evelyne Sznycer, "Droit de suite baroque," in Schizophrenic et art, ed.
Leo Navratil (Paris: Ed. Complexe, 1978).
     17. Lorenz, On Aggression, pp. 39-40. On the three rhythmic personages defined respec-
tively as active, passive, and witness, see Messiaen and Golea, Rencontres, pp. 90-91.
     18. [TRANS: Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed
(New York: World, 1963), pp. 242-243.]
     19. [TRANS: This "close embrace" of energies recalls Proust's description of Vinteuil's lit-
tle phrase; The Captive, p. 262.]
     20. On "the primary intuition of the earth as a religious form" (p. 242), see Eliade, Pat-
terns in Comparative Religion, pp. 245ff; on the center of the territory, see pp. 374ff. Eliade
makes it clear that the center is simultaneously outside the territory, very difficult to attain,
and inside the territory, within our immediate reach.
     21. Biologists have often made a distinction between two factors of transformation: those
of the mutation type, and processes of isolation or separation, which may be genetic, geo-
graphical, or even psychical. Territoriality would be a factor of the second type. See Lucien
Cuenot, L'espece(Paris: G. Doin, 1936).
     22. Paul Geroudet, Lespassereaux, 3 vols. (Paris: Delachaux et Niestle, 1951-1957), vol.
2, pp. 88-94.
     23. In On Aggression, Lorenz makes a clear distinction between "anonymous flocks" such
as schools of fish, which form milieu blocks; "local groups," where recognition occurs only
inside the territory and, at its strongest, between "neighbors"; and finally, societies founded
on an autonomous "bond."
     24. K. Immelmann, Beitrage zu einer vergleichenden Biologic australischer Prachtflnken,
 Zoologische Jahrbucher; Abteilung fur Systematik, Okologie und Geographic de Tiere, 90
 (1962).
     25. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 225: "Carrying nesting material for nest building evolved
 into the male courtship actions using grass stems. This was again secondarily reduced in some
 species and became rudimentary, while at the same time the song, which originally served the
function of staking out a territory, also underwent a change in function. These animals are gre-
                                NOTES TO PP. 325-329 D 549

garious and are not really territorial. Instead of courting with grass stems, these males sing
softly while sitting next to the females." Eibl-Eibesfeldt, however, interprets the grass-stem
behavior as a vestige.
     26. See L'Odyssee sous-marine de I'equipe Cousteau, film no. 36, La marche des
langoustes (L. R. A.), commentary by Cousteau-Diole: spiny lobsters along the northern coast
of the Yucatan Peninsula sometimes leave their territories. They assemble, at first in small
groups, before the first winter storm, and before any sign detectable by human instruments.
When the storm comes, they form long march processions, in single file, with a leader that is
periodically relieved and a rearguard (the speed of the march is five-eighths of a mile per hour,
for sixty miles or more). This migration does not seem to be associated with egg laying, which
does not take place until six months later. Hernnkind, a lobster specialist, hypothesizes that
this is a "vestige" from the last ice age (more than 10,000 years ago). Cousteau leans toward a
more current interpretation, even mentioning the possibility that it is a premonition of a new
ice age. The factual issue is that in this exceptional case the lobsters' territorial assemblage
opens onto a social assemblage, and that this social assemblage is connected to cosmic forces,
or, as Cousteau says, "pulsations of the earth." But "the enigma remains entirely unsolved,"
all the more so because this lobster procession occasions a slaughter by fishermen, and also
because lobsters cannot be tagged since they shed their shells.
     27. The best book of nursery rhymes, and on nursery rhymes, seems to be Les complines
de langue francaise, with the commentary by editors Jean Beaucomot, Franck Guibat, et al.
(Paris: Seghers, 1970). The territorial character of nursery rhymes appears in such privileged
examples as "Pimpanicaille," two distinct versions of which exist in Gruyeres on "the two
sides of the street" (pp. 27-28); but it is a nursery rhyme in the strict sense only when there is a
distribution of specialized roles in a game, and the formation of an autonomous game assem-
blage that reorganizes the territory.
    28. Nikolaas Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969).
    29. On the one hand, the experiments of W. R. Hess have shown that there is not a cere-
bral center but instead points that are concentrated in one zone and disseminated in another,
and are capable of inciting the same effect; conversely, the effect may change according to the
duration and intensity of the excitation of a point. On the other hand, E. von Hoist's experi-
ments on "deafferented" fish demonstrate the importance of central nervous coordination in
fin rhythms; Tinbergen's schema takes these interactions into account only secondarily. The
hypothesis of a "population of oscillators" or a "pack of oscillating molecules" forming sys-
tems of articulation from the inside, independent of any common measure, is most compel-
ling in view of the problem of circadian rhythms. See A. Reinberg, "La chronobiologie,"
Sciences, vol. 1(1970); and T. van den Dreissche and A. Reinberg, "Rythmes biologiques," in
Encyclopedia Universalis, vol. 14, p. 572: "It does not seem possible to reduce the mechanism
of circadian rhythmicity to a simple sequence of elementary processes."
    30. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vin-
tage, 1972): on indirect interactions and their nonlinear character, pp. 69-71 and 76-77; on
corresponding molecules that are least two-headed, pp. 68-69; on the inhibiting or releasing
character of these interactions, pp. 63-67. Circadian rhythms also depend on these character-
istics (see the chart in the Encyclopedia Universalis under "Rhythmes biologiques").
    31. Eugene Dupreel elaborated a set of original notions, "consistency" (in relation to
"precariousness"), "consolidation," "interval," "intercalation." See Theorie de la consolida-
tion: La cause et I'intervalle (Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1933); La consistance et la probabilit'e
objective (Brussels: Academic Royale de Belgique, 1961); Esquisse d'une philosophie des
valeurs (Paris: Alcan, 1939); Bachelard, in La dialectique de la duree, draws on Dupreel.
    32. [TRANS: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press,
1980), vol. 3, p. 209.]
                                550 D NOTES TO PP. 330-342

    33. On the song of the chaffinch, and the distinction between the "subsong" and "full
song," see Thorpe, Learning and Instinct, pp. 420-426.
    34. Alexander James Marshall, Bower-Birds (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1954).
    35. Thorpe, Learning and Instinct, p. 426. In this respect, songs present an entirely differ-
ent problem than calls, which are often not very differentiated, and quite similar from species
to species.
    36. Raymond Ruyer, Lagenesedesformes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), chapter 7.
    37. In particular, on widow birds (Viduinae), parasitic birds whose territorial song is
species-specific and whose courtship song is learned from their adoptive host, see J. Nicolai,
Der Brutparasitismus der Viduinae, Z. Tierps., vol. 21 (1964).
    38. The participation of a black hole in an assemblage appears in numerous examples of
inhibition, or fascination-ecstasy, notably in the peacock: "The male peacock spreads his tail
feathers.... Then he bends the spread-out tail forward and points downward with his beak,
while his head is still upright. As a result, the female runs in front of him and pecks in a search-
ing manner on the ground in the focal point of the concave mirrorlike shape of the fanned tail.
The male peacock points, so to speak, with his fanned-out tail toward imaginary food," Eibl-
Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 116. But the peacock's focal point is no more imaginary than the
finch's grass stem is a vestige or symbol; it is an assemblage converter, the passage to a court-
ship assemblage, in this instance, effected by a black hole.
    39. Ruyer, La genese des formes vivantes, pp. 54ff.
    40. Francow Meyer, Probl'ematique de revolution (Paris: PUF, 1954).
    41. Monod, Chance and Necessity.
    42. Female birds, which do not normally sing, start singing when they are administered
male sex hormones, "and they will sing the song of the species on which they have become
imprinted." Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 265.
    43. [TRANS: Klee, On Modern Art, p. 43. Translation modified to agree with the French
translation cited by the authors.]
    44. Klee, On Modern Art, p. 55 [translation modified—Trans.].
    45. See Renaissance, manierisme, baroque, Actes du Xle stage international de Tours
(Paris: Vrin, 1972), part 1, "Periodizations."
    46. Proust, Swann's Way, in vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past, p. 382 [translation
modified—Trans.].
    47. See the ambiguous role of the friend at the end of Das Lied von der Erde. Or Eichen-
dorff s poem in Schumann's lied, Zwielicht(\n Opus 39): "If you have a friend in this world, do
not trust him at this hour, for even if he is kind in eye and mouth, he dreams of war in deceitful
peace." (On the problem of the One-Alone, or "solitary Being," in German romanticism, see
Holderlin, "Le cours et la destination de 1'homme en general," trans. Emmanuel Marineau,
Po'esie, no. 4 [1978], pp. 6-22.)
    48. "The people in Mussorgsky's Boris do not form a true crowd; at times one group sings,
then another, and then a third, each in turn, and most often in unison. As for the people in
Mditres chanteurs, it is not a crowd but an army that is powerfully organized in the German
manner and marches in rows. What I would like is something sparser, more divided, more
relaxed, more impalpable, something in appearance inorganic and yet at bottom ordered."
Quoted by Jean Barraque, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 159. This problem—how to do a
crowd—obviously recurs in other arts also, painting, cinema, etc. One may refer in particular
to the films of Eisenstein, which proceed by this type of very special group individuation.
    49. On the relations between the cry, the voice, the instrument, and music as "theater," see
Berio's statements introducing his records. One will recall the eminently musical Nietzschean
theme of a multiple cry of all superior men, at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
                                 NOTES TO PP. 342-350 D 551

    50. On Bartok's chromaticism, see Gisele Brelet's study in Histoire de la musique, vol. 2,
pp. 1036-1072.
    51. In his book on Debussy, Barraque analyzes the "dialogue of the wind and the sea" in
terms offerees instead of themes: pp. 153-154. See Messiaen's statements on his own works:
sounds are no longer anything more "than vulgar means of expression intended to make dura-
tions measurable."
    52. Odile Vivier describes Varese's procedures for treating sound matter, in Varese (Paris:
Seuil, 1973): the use of pure sounds acting as a prism (p. 36); mechanisms of projection onto a
plane (pp. 45 and 50); non-octave-forming scales (p. 75); the "ionization" procedure (pp.
98ff.); the theme of sound molecules, the transformations of which are determined by forces
or energies (passim).
    53. See the interview with Stockhausen on the role of synthesizers and the effectively
"cosmic" dimension of music, in Le Monde, July 21,1977: "Work with very limited materials
and integrate the universe into them through a continuous variation." Richard Pinhas has
written an excellent analysis of the possibilities of synthesizers in this regard, in relation to
pop music: "Input, Output," inAlem, no. 10 (1977).
    54. The definition of fuzzy aggregates brings up all kinds of problems because one cannot
appeal to a local determination: "The set of all objects on this table" is obviously not a fuzzy
set. Mathematicians concerned with the question speak only of "fuzzy subsets" because the
reference set must always be an ordinary set. See Arnold Kaufmann, Introduction to the The-
ory of Fuzzy Subsets, foreword L. A. Zadeh, trans. D. L. Swanson (New York: Academic Press,
 1975), and Hourya Sinacoeur, "Logique et mathematique du flou," Critique, no. 372 (May
 1978), pp. 512-525. In considering fuzziness as the characteristic of certain sets, our point of
departure was a functional, as opposed to a local, definition: sets of heterogeneous elements
that have a territorial, or rather territorializing, function. But this is a nominal definitiion that
does not take "what happened" into account. The real definition can come only at the level of
processes affecting the fuzzy set; a set is fuzzy if its elements belong to it only by virtue of spe-
cific operations of consistency and consolidation, which themselves follow a special logic.
    55. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, p. 53: "The legend of the childishness of my drawing must
have originated from those linear compositions of mine in which I tried to combine a concrete
image, say that of a man, with the pure representation of the linear element. Had I wished to
present man 'as he is,' then I should have had to use such a bewildering confusion of lines that
pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have
been vagueness beyond recognition."
    56. Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 49. Henry Miller devel-
ops this theme in The Time of the Assassins. A Study ofRimbaud(NoTfo\k, Conn.: J. Laughlin,
1956), and in the text he wrote for Varese, "Lost! Saved!" (The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
[New York: New Directions, 1945]). It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure
of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in Sexus.
    57. On the relation of colors to sound, see Messiaen and Samuel, Conversations, pp.
15-17. Messiaen faults drug users for oversimplifying the relation, which they make into a
relation between a noise and a color, instead of isolating complexes of sounds-durations and
complexes of colors.
    58. On the crystal, or the crystalline type, added and subtracted values, retrograde
motion, see also Messiaen's texts in Samuel, Conversations, and those of Paul Klee in his
diary, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. and intro. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1964).
    59. See Roland-Manuel's article, "L'evolution de 1'harmonie en France et le renouveau de
1880" (pp. 867-879), and the article by Delage on Chabrier (pp. 831-840), in Histoire de la
musique, vol. 2. And especially, Brelet's article on Bartok: "Are not the difficulties learned
                                552 D NOTES TO PP. 350-355

music experiences in utilizing popular music due to this antinomy between melody and
theme? Popular music is melody, in its fullest sense, melody persuading us that it is self-
sufficient and is in fact synonymous with music itself. How could it not refuse to bend to the
learned development of a musical work pursuing its own ends? Many symphonies inspired by
folklore are only symphonies about a popular theme, to which the learned development
remains alien and exterior. The popular melody could never constitute a true theme; and that
is why, in popular music, the melody is the entire work, and why once it is over it has no other
resource than to repeat itself. But can't the melody transform itself into a theme? Bartok
solves this problem, which was thought insoluble" (p. 1056).
    60. Marcel More, LedieuMozart etlemondedes oiseaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 168.
And, on the crystal, pp. 83-89.
    61. See Alban Berg's famous analysis of "Reverie" in Ecrits (Paris: Ed. du Rocher, 1957),
pp. 44.64.

             12.1227: Treatise on Nomadology—the War Machine
       1. Georges Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna (Paris: Gallimard, 1948 [forthcoming in English
translation from Zone Books]). On nexum and mutuum, the bond and the contract, see pp.
 118-124.
       2. "The first pole of the State (Varuna, Uranus, Romulus) operates by magic bond, sei-
zure, or immediate capture: it does not wage battles, and has no war machine, it binds, and
that is all." Its other pole (Mitra, Zeus, Numa) appropriates an army but imposes upon it
juridical and institutional rules that become nothing more than a piece in the State apparatus:
thus Mars-Tiwaz is not a warrior god, but a god who is a "jurist of war." See Dumezil, Mitra-
 Varuna, pp. 113ff., 148ff., 202ff.
       3. Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: University of
Chicaga Press, 1970).
       4. For the role of the warrior as one who "unties" and opposes both the magic bond and
the juridical contract, see Dumezil, Mitra-Varuna, pp. 124-132. See also the analysis of furor
in the works of Dumezil.
       5. [TRANS: The first quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, sec-
ond essay, sect. 17, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967),
p. 86; the second is from Franz Kafka, "An Old Manuscript," The Complete Stories, ed.
Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), p. 416.]
       6. Luc de Heusch emphasizes the public nature of Nkongolo's actions, in contrast to
the secrecy of the actions of Mbidi and his son; in particular, the former eats in public, whereas
the others hide during their meals. Later, we will see the essential relation of the war machine
with the secret, which is as much a matter of principle as a result: espionage, strategy, diplo-
 macy. Commentators have often underlined this link. Le roi ivre ou I'origine de I'Etat (Paris:
 Gallimard, 1972).
       7. For an analysis of the three sins in the cases of the Indian god Indra, the Scandina-
 vian hero Starcatherus, and the Greek god Hercules, see Dumezil, Mythe et epopee, vol. 2, pp.
 17-19 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See also Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior.
       8. Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, p. 13 5. Dumezil analyzes the dangers and causes of the con-
 fusion, which could be due to economic variables. See pp. 153, 159.
       9. [TRANS: Richard III, act I, scene i, line 158.]
      10. On Ajax and the tragedy of Sophocles, see the analysis of Jean Starobinski, Trois
Fureurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Starobinski explicitly raises the question of war and the
State.
                                NOTES TO PP. 356-362 D 553

      11. These themes are analyzed by Mathieu Carriere in an as yet unpublished study of
Kleist.
      12. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Uri-
zen, 1977), and "Archeologie de la violence: la guerre dans les societes primitives" and
"Malheur du guerrier sauvage" in Recherches d'anthropologie politique (Paris: Seuil,
1980), pp. 171-208, 209-248. In the last text, Clastres depicts the destiny of the warrior in
primitive society and analyzes the mechanism that prevents the concentration of power
(in the same way that Mauss demonstrated that the potlatch was a mechanism preventing
the concentration of wealth).
      13. Jacques Meunier, Les gaminsde Bogota (Paris: Lattes, 1977), p. 159 ("blackmail for
dispersion") and p. 17 7: if necessary, "it is the other street children who, by means of a compli-
cated interplay of humiliations and silence, get the idea across that he must leave the gang."
Meunier emphasizes the degree to which the fate of the ex-gang member is jeopardized: not
only for health reasons, but because he finds it hard to integrate himself into the criminal
underworld, a society too hierarchical, too centralized, too centered on organs of power for
him to fit into (p. 178). On child gangs, see also the novel by Jorge Amado, Capitaes de areia
(Sao Paolo: Livraria Martins, 1944).
      14. See I. S. Bernstein, "La dominance sociale chez les primates" in La Recherche, no. 91
(July 1978).
      15. Clastres, Society against the State, p. 169: "The emergence of the State brought about
the great typological division between Savage and Civilized man; it created the unbridgeable
gulf whereby everything was changed, for, on the other side, Time became History." In order
to account for this emergence, Clastres cites first a demographic factor ("but there is no ques-
tion of replacing an economic determinism with a demographic determinism"; p. 180), then
the possibility of a warring machine (?) running amok; he also cites, more unexpectedly, the
indirect role of a certain mode of prophetic speech, which, directed first against the "chiefs,"
produces a formidable new kind of power. But one obviously cannot prejudge more elabo-
rated solutions Clastres might have found for this problem. On the possible role of prophetic
speech, refer to Helene Clastres, La terre sans mat, leproph'etisme tupi-guarani (Paris: Edi-
tions du Seuil, 1975).
      16. Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbu-
lences (Paris: Minuit, 1977). Serres was the first to make the first three points given in the text;
the fourth seems to follow from them.
      17. [TRANS: According to Serres, the dinamen, or declination of the atom, is the "mini-
mal angle leading to the formation of a vortex, and appears by chance in a laminar flow" (La
naissance de la physique, p. 14). The dinamen is the angle between a curve and its tangent, or
"the smallest [angle] one can make, preventing anything from coming between the two lines
which form it        In other words, the angle appears at the same time as curvature" (p. 18).
"The dinamen is a differential" (p. 11).]
      18. [TRANS: A flow is laminar when, "no matter how small we make the layers (or lamel-
lae) into which we divide the flow, they remain strictly parallel to one another in their move-
ments"; Serres, ibid., p. 12.]
      19. [TRANS: Turba "designates a multitude, a large population, confusion and tumult."
Turbo "is a round form in movement... a revolving cone or vortical spiral." "The origin of
things and the beginning of order consists simply in the subtle passage from turba to turbo";
Serres, ibid., pp. 38-39.]
      20. This is the distinction Pierre Boulez makes between two kinds of space-time in
music: in striated space, the measure can be irregular or regular, but it is always assignable; in
smooth space, the partition, or break, "can be effected at will." Boulez on Music Today, trans.
                                554 D NOTES TO PP. 362-366

Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971),
p. 85.
     21. Greek geometry is thoroughly marked by the opposition between these two poles,
the theorematic and problematic, and by the relative triumph of the former: in his Commen-
tary of the First Book of Euclid's Elements, trans, and intro. Glenn R. Murrow (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), Proclus analyzes the difference between the poles,
taking the Speusippus-Menaechmus opposition as an example. Mathematics has always been
marked by this tension also; for example, the axiomatic element has confronted a proble-
matic, "intuitionist," or "constructivist" current emphasizing a calculus of problems very dif-
ferent from axiomatics, or any theorematic approach. See Georges Bouligand, Le declin des
absolus mathematico-logiques (Paris: Ed. d'Enseignement Superieur, 1949).
     22. Paul Virilio, L'insecurite duterritoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 120: "We know that
the youth of geometry, geometry as free, creative investigation, came to an end with Ar-
chimedes. . .. The sword of a Roman soldier cut the thread, tradition says. In killing geo-
metrical creation, the Roman State lay the foundation for the geometrical imperialism of
the West."
     23. With Monge, and especially Poncelet, the limits of sensible, or even spatial, repre-
sentation (striated space) are indeed surpassed, but less in the direction of a symbolic power
(puissance) of abstraction than toward a transspatial imagination, or a transintuition (conti-
nuity). See Leon Brunschvicg's commentary on Poncelet, Les etapes de la philosophic
mathematique (Paris: PUF, 1947).
     24. Michel Serres (La naissance de la physique, pp. 105-107) analyzes the opposition
d'Alembert-Bernoulli from this point of view. More generally, what is at issue is the difference
between two models of space: "In the Mediterranean basin there is a shortage of water, and he
who harnesses water rules. Hence that world of physics in which the conduit is essential, and
the dinamen seems like freedom because it is precisely a turbulence that rejects forced flow.
Incomprehensible to scientific theory, incomprehensible to the master of the waters....
Hence the great figure of Archimedes: the master of floating bodies and military machines"
(p. 106).
     2 5. See Ben veniste, "The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression" in Problems in
General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami
Press, 1971), pp. 281-288. This text, often considered decisive, seems ambiguous to us
because it invokes Democritus and atomism without dealing with the hydraulic question, and
because it treats rhythm as a "secondary specialization" of the form of the body (p. 286).
     26. Anne Querrien, Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de I'Etat (Paris: Cerfi). We have
drawn from this book, as well as from unpublished studies by Anne Querrien.
     27. See Raoul Vergez, Les illumines de I'art royal. Huit siecles de compagnonnages
(Paris: Julliard, 1976), p. 54. [TRANS: In the present context, trait refers to the cutting line fol-
lowed by the artisan and to the working sketch of the construction under way. Vergez gives the
following definition: "The Trait is a kind of graphic poem derived from geometry, which indi-
cates the building plan in sketches drawn with precision on the ground, showing sections, ele-
vations and all other projections, the three dimensions of a volume"; p. 86.]
     28. Gerard Desargues, Oeuvres (Paris: Leiber, 1864). See also the text by Michel Chasles
 [Apercu historique sur I'origine et le developpement de methodes en geometric... (Brussels:
M. Hayez, 1837)—Trans.], which establishes a continuity between Desargues, Monge, and
Poncelet as the "founders of a modern geometry."
     29. Anne Querrien, Devenirfonctionnaire, pp. 26-27: "Is the State founded upon the col-
lapse of experimentation?. . . The State is not under construction, its construction sites must
be short-lived. An installation is made to function, not to be socially constructed: from this
                                 NOTES TO PP. 366-371 D 555

point of view, the State involves in the construction only those who are paid to implement or
command, and who are obliged to follow the model of a preestablished experimentation."
       30. On the question of the "Colbert lobby," see Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Journet,
"Le Lobby Colbert. Un royaume, ou une affaire de famille?" Annales, 30, no. 6 (November-
December 1975), pp. 1303-1336.
       31. See Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz
Rosenthal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). One of the essential themes of
this masterpiece is the sociological problem of the esprit de corps, and its ambiguity. Ibn
Khaldun contrasts bedouinism (the bedouin life-style, not the ethnic group) with sedentarily
or city living. The first aspect of this opposition is the inverted relation between the public and
the secret: not only is there a secrecy of the bedouin war machine, as opposed to the publicity
of the State city dweller, but in the first case "eminence" is based on a secret solidarity, while in
the second case the secret is subordinated to the demands of social eminence. Second,
bedouinism brings into play both a great purity and a great mobility of the lineages and their
genealogy, whereas city life makes for lineages that are very impure, and at the same time rigid
and fixed: Solidarity has a different meaning at either pole. Third, and this is the main point,
bedouin lineages mobilize an esprit de corps and integrate into it, as a new dimension: this is
asablyah, or ikhtilat, from which the Arabic word for socialism is derived (Ibn Khaldun
stresses the absence of any "power" residing in the tribal chief, who has no State constraints at
his disposal). On the other hand, in city living the esprit de corps becomes a dimension of
power and is adapted for "autocracy."
       32. The principal texts of Husserl are Ideas, trans. W. R. Gibson (New York: Humanities
Press, 1976), part 1, sec. 74, and Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction,
trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., ed. David B. Allison (Stoney Brook, N.Y.: N. Hayes, 1978) (with
Derrida's very important commentary, pp. 118-132). On the issue of a vague yet rigorous sci-
ence, we may refer to the formula of Michel Serres, in his commentary on the geometrical fig-
ure called the salinon: "It is rigorous, anexact. And not precise, exact or inexact. Only a
metrics is exact" (Naissance de la physique, p. 29). Gaston Bachelard's book Essai sur la
connaissance approch'ee (Paris: Vrin, 1927) remains the best study of the steps and procedures
constituting a rigor of the anexact, and of their creative role in science.
       33. Gilbert Simondon has contributed much to the analysis and critique of the hylo-
morphic schema and of its social presuppositions ("form corresponds to what the man in
command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he gives his
orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible"). To the form-matter schema, Simondon
opposes a dynamic schema, that of matter endowed with singularities-forces, or the ener-
getic conditions at the basis of a system. The result is an entirely different conception of the
relations between science and technology. See L'individu et sa genese physico-biologique
(Paris: PUF, 1964).
       34. In Timaeus, 28-29, Plato entertains for an instant the thought that Becoming is not
simply the inevitable characteristic of copies or reproductions, but could itself be a model
rivaling the Identical and the Uniform. He states this hypothesis only in order to reject it; for
it is true that if becoming is a model, not only must the duality of the model and the copy, of
the model and reproduction, disappear, but the very notions of model and reproduction tend
to lose all meaning. [TRANS: Deleuze develops this point in "Plato and the Simulacrum," trans.
Rosalind Krauss, October, 21 (Winter 1983), pp. 45-56. See especially p. 53.]
       3 5. [TRANS: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage, 1968), sec. 630(1885), p. 336.]
       36. The situation is in fact more complex than that, and gravity is not the only feature of
the dominant model: there is heat in addition to gravity (already in chemistry, combustion is
coupled with weight). Even so, the problem was to know to what extent the "thermal field"
                               556 D NOTES TO PP. 371-379

deviated from gravitational space, or on the contrary was integrated with it. Monge is a typical
example; he began by grouping heat, light, and electricity as "variable affections of bodies,"
the concern of "specific physics," while general physics would deal with extension, gravity,
and movement. It was only later that Monge unified all of the fields under general physics
(Anne Querrien).
      37. Serres, La naissance de la physique, p. 65.
      38. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), p. 88.
      39. Albert Lautman has shown quite clearly how Riemann spaces, for example, admit a
Euclidean conjunction making it possible at all times to define the parallelism of two neigh-
boring vectors; this being the case, instead of exploring a multiplicity by legwork, the multipli-
city is treated as though "immersed in a Euclidean space with a sufficient number of
dimensions." See Les schemas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23-24, 43-47.
      40. In Bergson, the relations between intuition and intelligence are very complex, and
they are in perpetual interaction. Bouligand's theme is also relevant here: the dualism of the
two mathematical elements, the "problem" and the "global synthesis," is developed only
when they enter a field of interaction in which the global synthesis defines the "categories"
without which the problem would have no general solution. See Le d'eclin des absolus
mathematico-logiques.
      41. Marcel Detienne, in Les maltres de verite dans la Grece archdique (Paris: Maspero,
 1973), clearly articulates these two poles of thought, which correspond to the two aspects of
sovereignty according to Dumezil: the magico-religious speech of the despot or of the "old
man of the sea," and the dialogue-speech of the city. Not only are the principal character types
of Greek thought (the Poet, the Physicist, the Philosopher, the Sophist, etc.) situated in rela-
tion to these poles, but Detienne interposes between the two poles a distinct group, the Warri-
ors, which brings about transition or evolution.
      42. There exists a Hegelianism of the right that lives on in official political philosophy
and weds the destiny of thought to the State. Alexandre Kojeve ("Tyranny and Wisdom," in
Leo Strauss, On Tyranny [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963]) and Eric Weil (Hegel et
I'Etat. Philosophicpolitique [Paris: Vrin, 1974]) are its recent representatives. From Hegel to
Max Weber there developed a whole line of reflection on the relation of the modern State to
Reason, both as rational-technical and as reasonable-human. If it is objected that this ration-
ality, already present in the archaic imperial State, is the optimum of the governors them-
selves, the Hegelians respond that the rational-reasonable cannot exist without a minimum of
participation by everybody. The question, rather, is whether the very form of the rational-
reasonable is not extracted from the State, in a way that necessarily makes it right, gives it
"reason" (lui donner n'ecessairement "raison").
      43. On the role of the ancient poet as a "functionary of sovereignty," see Dumezil,
Servius et la Fortune (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 64ff., and Detienne, Les maitres de verite,
pp. 17ff.
      44. See Michel Foucault's analysis of Maurice Blanchot and the form of exteriority of
thought: "La pensee du dehors," Critique, no. 229 (June 1966), pp. 523-548.
      45. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 177-178.
      46. A curious text of Karl Jaspers, entitled Descartes und die Philosophic (Berlin: W. de
Gruyter, 1956), develops this point of view and accepts its implications.
      47. Kenneth White, Intellectual Nomadism. The title of the second volume of this
unpublished work is Poetry and Tribe.
      48. [TRANS: Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varese (Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1952), pp. 9, 13, 17, 39.]
                                NOTES TO PP. 380-384 D 557

      49. Anny Milovanoff, "La seconde peau du nomade," Nouvelles litt'eraires, no. 2646
(July 27, 1978), p. 18: "The Larbaa nomads, on the border of the Algerian Sahara, use the
word triga, which generally means road or way, to designate the woven straps serving to rein-
 force the cords holding the tent to the stakes.... In nomad thought, the dwelling is tied not to a
territory but rather to an itinerary. Refusing to take possession of the land they cross, the
nomads construct an environment out of wool and goat hair, one that leaves no mark at the
temporary site it occupies          Thus wool, a soft material, gives nomad life its unity....
Nomads pause at the representation of their journeys, not at a figuration of the space they
 cross. They leave space to space.... Woolly polymorphism."
      50. See W. Montgomery Watt, Mohammed at Medina (London: Oxford University
Press, 1956), pp. 85-86, 242.
      51. Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la ratine "Nem " en grec ancien (Paris: Klincksieck,
 1949). The root "Nem" indicates distribution, not allocation, even when the two are linked.
In the pastoral sense, the distribution of animals is effected in a nonlimited space and implies
no parceling out of land: "The occupation of shepherd, in the Homeric age, had nothing to do
with a parceling of land; when the agrarian question came to the foreground, in the time of
Solon, it was expressed in an entirely different vocabulary." To take to pasture (nemo) refers
not to a parceling out but to a scattering, to a repartition of animals. It was only after Solon
that Nomos came to designate the principle at the basis of the laws and of right (Thesmo'i and
Dike), and then came to be identified with the laws themselves. Prior to that, there was instead
an alternative between the city, or polis, ruled by laws, and the outskirts as the place of the
nomos. A similar alternative is found in the work of Ibn Khaldun: between hadara as city liv-
ing, and badiya as nomos (not the town, but the preurban countryside, the plateau, steppe,
mountain, or desert).
      52. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947),
abridged by D. C. Somerwell, vol. 1, pp. 164-186: "They flung themselves upon the Steppe,
not to escape beyond its bounds but to make themselves at home on it" (p. 168).
      53. See Pierre Hubac, Les nomades (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1948), pp. 26-29
(although Hubac tends to confuse nomads and migrants).
      54. On the nomads of the sea, or of the archipelago, Jose Emperaire writes: "They do not
grasp an itinerary as a whole, but in a fragmentary manner, by juxtaposing in order its various
successive stages, from campsite to campsite in the course of the journey. For each of these
stages, they estimate the length of the crossing and the successive changes in direction mark-
ing it." Les nomades de la mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 225.
      55. Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), pp. 112-113,
 125, 165-166.
      56. See the two admirable descriptions, of the sand desert by Wilfred Thesiger and of the
ice desert by Edmund Carpenter, in Eskimo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964): the
winds, and tactile and sound qualities; the secondary character of visual data, particularly the
indifference of the nomads to astronomy as a royal science; and yet the presence of a whole
minor science of qualitative variables and traces.
      57. EmileFelixGautier,Le passe del'AfriqueduNord(Paris: Payot, 1952), pp. 267-316.
      58. From this perspective, Clastres's analysis of Indian prophetism can be generalized:
"On one side, the chiefs, on the other, and standing against them, the prophets. . . . And the
prophetic machine worked perfectly well since the karai were able to sweep astonishing
masses of Indians along behind them            the insurrectional act of the prophets against the
chiefs conferred on the former, through a strange reversal of things, infinitely more power
than was held by the latter." Society against the State, pp. 184-185.
      59. One of the most interesting themes of the classic work by Paul Alphandery (La
chr'etient'e et I'id'ee de croisade [Paris: Albin Michel, 1959] is his demonstration that the
                                558 D NOTES TO PP. 384-386

changes in course, the pauses, the detours were an integral part of the Crusade: "this army of
crusaders that we envision as a modern army, like those of Louis XIV or Napoleon, marching
with absolute passivity, obeying the will of a diplomatic officer and staff. Such an army knows
where it is going, and when it makes a mistake, it is not for lack of reflection. A history more
attentive to differences accepts a more realistic image of the army of the Crusade. The army of
the Crusade was freely, sometimes anarchically alive. ... This army was motivated from
within, as a function of a complex coherence by virtue of which nothing happened by chance.
It is certain that the conquest of Constantinople had its reason, necessity and a religious char-
acter, like the other deeds of the Crusades" (vol. 2, p. 7). Alphandery shows in particular that
the idea of a battle against the Infidel, at any point, appeared early on, along with the idea of
liberating the Holy Land (vol. 1, p. 219).
       60. Modern historians have been inspired to fine analyses by this confrontation between
the East and the West, which began in the Middle Ages (and is tied to the question, Why did
capitalism develop in the West and not elsewhere?). See especially Fernand Braudel, Capital-
ism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967),
pp. 97-108; Pierre Chaunu, L'expansion europeenne du XIHe au XVe siecle (Paris: PUF,
 1969), pp. 334-339 ("Why Europe? Why not China?"); Maurice Lombard, Espaces et reseaux
du hautMoyen Age (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), chapter 8 (and p. 219: "What is called defor-
estation in the East is named clearing in the West. The first deep cause of the shift of the domi-
nant centers from the East to the West is therefore a geographical reason: forest-clearing
proved to have more potential than desert-oasis").
      61. Marx's observations on the despotic formations of Asia have been confirmed by the
African analyses of Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
1959): at the same time immutability of form and constant rebellion. The idea of a "transfor-
mation" of the State indeed seems to be a Western one. And that other idea, the "destruction"
of the State, belongs much more to the East and to the conditions of a nomad war machine.
Attempts have been made to present the two ideas as successive phases of revolution, but
there are too many differences between them and they are difficult to reconcile; they reflect
the opposition between the socialist and anarchist currents of the nineteenth century. The
Western proletariat itself is perceived from two points of view: as having to seize power and
transform the State apparatus (the point of view of labor power), and as willing or wishing for
the destruction of the State (this time, the point of view of nomadization power). Even Marx
defines the proletariat not only as alienated (labor) but as deterritorialized. The proletariat, in
this second perspective, appears as the heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did
many anarchists invoke nomadic themes originating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above all
were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a city haunted by nomads
(see Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of
the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellenck [New York: H. Fertig, 1973], pp. 362-366).
      62. See Lucien Mussel, Les invasions. Le secondassaut (Paris: PUF, 1965), for example,
the analysis of the Danes' three "phases," pp. 135-137.
      63. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e],
 1986), pp. 12-13 and passim. Not only is the "town" unthinkable apart from the exterior flows
with which it is in contact, and the circulation of which it regulates, but specific architectural
aggregates, the fortress, for example, are veritable transformers, by virtue of their interior
spaces, which allow an analysis, prolongation, or restitution of movement. Virilio concludes
that the issue is less confinement than the management of the public ways, or the control of
movement. Foucault was already moving in this direction with his analysis of the naval hospi-
tal as operator and filter; see Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York:
Vintage, 1975), pp. 143-146.
      64. On Chinese, and Arab, navigation, the reasons behind their failure, and the impor-
                                NOTES TO PP. 386-390 D 559

tance of this question in the East-West "dossier," see Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life,
pp. 300-309, and Chaunu, L'expansion europeenne, pp. 145-147.
      65. Virilio gives a very good definition of the fleet in being and its historical conse-
quences: "The fleet in being... is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able
to strike no matter where and no matter when . . . it is a new idea of violence that no longer
comes from direct confrontation... but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evalu-
ation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification
of their dynamic efficiency... .Henceforth it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or
an ocean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates . . . the
notion of displacement without destination in space and time.... The strategic submarine
has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain
invisible . . . the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves
neither departure nor arrival... .If, as Lenin claimed,'strategy means choosing which points
we apply force to,' we must admit that these 'points', today, are no longer geostrategic
strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it might
be... geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value, and, inversely,
that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent
movement"; Speed and Politics, pp. 38,40-41,134-135. Virilio's texts are of great importance
and originality in every respect. The only point that presents a difficulty for us is his assimila-
tion of three groups of speed that seem very different to us: (1) speeds of nomadic, or revolu-
tionary, tendency (riot, guerrilla warfare); (2) speeds that are regulated, convened, appropri-
ated by the State apparatus (management of the public ways); (3) speeds that are reinstated by
a worldwide organization of total war, or planetary overarmament (from the fleet in being to
nuclear strategy). Virilio tends to equate these groups on account of their interactions and
makes a general case for the "fascist" character of speed. It is, nevertheless, his own analyses
that make these distinctions possible.
      66. Jean-Pierre Vernant in particular has analyzed the connection between the Greek
city-state and a homogeneous geometrical extension, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs (Paris:
Maspero, 1971 -1974), vol. 1, part 3. The problem is necessarily more complicated in relation
to the archaic empires, or in relation to formations subsequent to the classical city-state. That
is because the space in question is very different. But it is still the case that the number is sub-
ordinated to space, as Vernant suggests with regard to Plato's ideal state. The Pythagorean or
Neoplatonic conceptions of number envelop imperial astronomical spaces of a type other
than homogeneous extension, but they maintain the subordination of the number; that is why
Numbers become ideal, but not strictly speaking "numbering."
     67. Dumezil stresses the role played by the arithmetic element in the earliest forms of
political sovereignty. He even tends to make it a third pole of sovereignty. See Servius et la For-
tune and Le troisieme souverain (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1949). But the role of this arithmetic
element is, rather, to organize a matter; in so doing it submits that matter to one or the other of
the two principal poles.
     68. Karl von Clausewitz stresses the secondary role of geometry, in tactics and in strat-
egy: On War, trans. Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 214-216 ("The Geometrical Factor").
     69. See one of the most profound ancient texts relating the number and direction to the
war machine, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, The Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Burton Watson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 155-193 ("The Account of the
Hsiung-nu").
     70. Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (New York: Berkley Books, 1977), p. 212. One may
refer to the characteristics proposed by Julia Kristeva to define the numbering number.
                                560 D NOTES TO PP. 390-399

"arrangement," "plural and contingent distribution," "infini-point," "rigorous approxima-
tion," etc. Semeiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 293-297.
      71. Boris lakovlevich Vladimirtsov, Le regime social des Mongols, trans. Michel Carsow
(Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948). The term used by Vladimirtsov, "antrustions," is borrowed from
the Saxon regime, in which the king's company, or "trust," was composed of Franks.
      72. A particularly interesting case is that of a special body of smiths among the Tuareg,
called the Enaden (the "Others"); the Enaden are thought to have been originally Sudanese
slaves, Jewish settlers in the Sahara, or descendants of the knights of Saint Louis. See Rene
Pettier, "Les artisans sahariens du metal chez les Touareg," in Techniques et civilisations, vol.
1 (M'etaux et civilisations), no. 2 (1945), pp. 31-40.
      73. Feudalism is no less a military system than so-called military democracy; but both
systems assume an army integrated into some kind of State apparatus (for feudalism, it was
the Carolingian land reform). It is Vladimirtsov who developed a feudal interpretation of the
nomads of the steppe, whereas Mikhail Griaznov, The Ancient Civilization of Southern
Siberia, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), leans toward military democracy.
But one of Vladimirtsov's main arguments is that the organization of the nomads becomes
feudal precisely to the extent that it is in disintegration, or is integrated into the empires it
conquers. He himself remarks that in the beginning the Mongols did not organize the seden-
tary land they took over into fiefs, true or false.
      74. J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945),
p. 5.
      75. Paul Virilio, "Metempsychose du passager," Traverses, no. 8 (May 1977), pp. 11-19.
Virilio, however, asserts that there was an indirect transition from hunting to war: when
women served as "portage or pack" animals, which already enabled the hunters to enter into a
relation of "homosexual duel" transcending the hunt. But it seems that Virilio himself invites
us to make a distinction between speed, as projector and projectile, and displacement, as
transport and portage. The war machine is defined from the first point of view, while the sec-
ond relates to the public sphere. The horse, for example, is not a part of the war machine if it
serves only to transport men who dismount to do battle. The war machine is defined by
action, not transport, even if the transport reacts upon the action.
      76. J. F. C. Fuller, Armaments and History, pp. 137ff., shows that the First World War
was first conceived as an offensive war of movement based on artillery. But artillery was
turned against artillery, forcing immobility. It was not possible to reinstate mobility in the war
through "ever-increasing shell fire" (p. 138) since the craters made the terrain all the harder to
negotiate. The solution, to which the English, and General Fuller in particular, made decisive
contributions, came in the form of the tank: the tank, a "landship" (p. 139), reconstituted a
kind of maritime or smooth space on land, and "superimposed naval tactics on land warfare"
(p. 140). As a general rule, military response is never in kind: the tank was the response to artil-
lery, the helicopter to the tank, etc. This makes for an innovation factor in the war machine
that is very different from innovation in the work machine.
      77. On this general distinction between the two models, "work-free action," "consum-
ing force/conserving force," "real effect/formal effect," etc., see Martial Gueroult's expo-
sition, Dynamique et metaphysique leibniziennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), pp. 55,
 119 ff., 222-224.
      78. Marcel Detienne, "La phalange, problemes et controverses," in Problemes de la
guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The
Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 119-143: "Technology is in a way internal to the social and the
mental," (p. 134).
      79. On the stirrup and the plow, see Lynn Townsend White, Jr., Medieval Technology and
Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), chapters 1 and 2. Similarly, it has
                                NOTES TO PP. 399-406 D 561

been shown in the case of dry rice cultivation in Asia that the digging stick, the hoe, and the
plow depend upon collective assemblages that vary according to population density and the
fallow period. This enables Braudel to conclude: "The tool, according to this theory, is the
result and no longer the cause"; Capitalism and Material Life, p. 116.
      80. Treatises on martial arts remind us that the Ways, which are still subject to the laws of
gravity, must be transcended in the void. Kleist's About Marionettes, trans. Michael Lebeck
(Mindelheim: Three Kings Press, 1970), without question one of the most spontaneously ori-
ental texts in Western literature, presents a similar movement: the linear displacement of the
center of gravity is still "mechanical" and relates to something more "mysterious" that con-
cerns the soul and knows nothing of weight.
      81. See Paul Pelliot, "Les systemes d'ecriture en usage chez les anciens Mongols," Asia
Major 2 (1925), pp. 284-289: The Mongols used the Uighur script, with the Syriac alphabet (it
was the Tibetans who produced a phonetic theory of Uighur writing); the two versions of the
Secret History of the Mongols that have been passed down to us are a Chinese translation and a
phonetic transcription in Chinese characters.
      82. Georges Charriere, Scythian Art (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), p.
185 [translation modified].
      83. See Lucien Mussel, Introduction a la runologie (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1965).
      84. There are, of course, forms of cooking and architecture that are part of the nomad
war machine, but they fall under a different "trait," one distinguishing them from their seden-
tary form. Nomad architecture, for example, the Eskimo igloo orthe Hunnish wooden palace,
is a derivative of the tent: its influence on sedentary art came by way of domes and half-
domes, and above all of space starting very low, as in a tent. As for nomad cooking, it consists
literally of break-fast (the paschal tradition is nomadic). And it is under this trait that it can be
part of a war machine: for example, the Janissaries used a cooking pot as their rallying point;
there were different ranks of cooks, and their hat had a wooden spoon through it.
      85. Itisinthe Traitedu rebelle (Paris: Bourgois, 1981) that lunger takes his clearest stand
against national socialism and develops certain points contained in DerArbeiter: a concep-
tion of the "line" as an active escape passing between the two figures of the old Soldier and the
modern Worker, carrying both toward another destiny in another assembly (nothing of this
remains in Heidegger's notion of the Line, although it is dedicated to Jiinger).
      86. Lynn White, Jr., who is actually not inclined to ascribe much power of innovation
to the nomads, sometimes establishes extensive technological lineages with surprising
origins: he traces hot-air and turbine technologies to Malaya (Medieval Technology and
Social Change, p. 95 and note): "Thus a chain of technological stimuli may be traced back
from some of the major figures of early modern science and technology through the later
Middle Ages to the jungles of Malaya. A second, and related, Malay invention, the fire pis-
ton, may have had significant influence upon the European understanding of air pressure
and its applications."
      87. On the particularly thorny question of the stirrup, see Lynn White, Jr., Medieval
Technology and Social Change, chapter 1.
      88. See the fine article by A. Mazaheri, "Le sabre centre 1'epee," Annales 13, no. 4
(October-December 1958), pp. 669-686.
      89. Henri Limet, Le travail du metal au pays de Sumer au temps de la life dynastie d'Ur
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960), pp. 33-40.
      90. Along these lines, Mazaheri effectively demonstrates that the saber and sword
belong to two distinct technological lineages. In particular, damasking (damassage), which
does not come from Damascus at all, but rather from the Greek or Persian word for diamond,
designates the treatment of cast steel that makes it as hard as a diamond and the designs in this
steel resulting from the crystallization of the cement ("true damask was made in the centers
                                  562 D NOTES TO PP. 406-414

that had never experienced Roman domination"). But on the other hand, damascening
(damasQuinage), which did come from Damascus, designates only inlay in metal (or in fab-
ric), intentional designs imitating damasking using entirely different means.
      91. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945), pp. 356ff.
Gilbert Simondon, discussing short series, takes up the question of the "absolute origins of a
technological lineage," or of the creation of a "technical essence": Du mode d'existence des
objects techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 41-49.
      92. On the mold-modulation relation, and the way in which molding hides or contracts
an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, Du mode
d'existence, pp. 2 8-50 ("modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable man-
ner"; p. 42). Simondon clearly shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to the
technological operation but to the social model of work subsuming that operation (pp.
47-49).
      93. Simondon feels no special attraction for the problems of metallurgy. His analysis is
not, in fact, historical and prefers to deal with examples drawn from electronics. But, histori-
cally, there is no electronics without metallurgy. Thus Simondon pays homage to metallurgy:
"Metallurgy does not entirely accommodate itself to an analysis using the hylomorphic
schema. The fixing of the form is not accomplished visibly in a single stroke, but in several
successive operations; the forging and quenching of steel are anterior and posterior, respec-
tively, to the fixing of the form in the strict sense; forging and quenching are, nevertheless,
operations that constitute objects" (L'individu, p. 59).
      94. Not only must myths be taken into account, but also positive history, for example,
the role of "the brass" in the evolution of musical form; or again, the constitution of a "metal-
lic synthesis" in electronic music (Richard Pinhas).
      95. Wilhelm Worringer defines Gothic art in terms of a geometrical line that is "primi-
tive" but has taken on life. But this vitality is not organic, as it will be in the classical world: this
line "embodies no organic expression.. .it is nevertheless of the utmost vitality... .Since this
line is lacking in all organic timbre, its expression of life must, as an expression, be divorced
from organic life.. . The pathos of movement which lies in this vitalized geometry—a pre-
lude to the vitalized mathematics of Gothic architecture—forces our sensibility to an effort
unnatural to it." Form in Gothic (London: Putnam's and Sons, 1927), pp. 41-42.
       96. This is one of the essential points of V. Gordon Childe's argument in The Prehistory
of European Civilization (London: Cassell, 1962): the metallurgist is the first specialized arti-
san, whose sustenance is made possible by the formation of an agricultural surplus. The rela-
tion of the smith to agriculture has to do not only with the tools smiths manufacture but also
with the food they take or receive. The Dogon myth, as analyzed in its variants by Griaule, can
be seen as marking this relation, in which the smith receives or steals grains, and hides them in
his mallet.
      97. Maurice Lombard, Les metauxdans I'ancien mondedu Veau XIesiecle(The Hague:
Mouton, 1974), pp. 75, 255.
       98. The social position of the smith has been the object of detailed studies; for Africa in
particular see the classic study by W. B. Cline, "Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa," Gen-
eral Series in Anthropology, no. 5 (1937); and Pierre Clement, "Le forgeron en Afrique noire,"
Revue de geographie humaine et d'ethnologie, no. 2 (April-June 1948), pp. 35-58. But these
 studies are hardly conclusive; the better defined the principles invoked—"reaction of con-
 tempt," "of approbation," "of apprehension"—the hazier and more overlapping the results,
 as seen in Clement's tables.
       99. See Jules Bloch, Les Tziganes, Que sais-je?, no. 580 (Paris: PUF, 1969). Bloch dem-
 onstrates precisely that the distinction between sedentaries and nomads becomes secondary
in connection with cave dwelling.
                                NOTES TO PP. 414-421 D 563

     100. Elie Faure, Medieval Art, vol. 2 of History of Art, trans. Walter Pach (Garden City,
N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 12-14.
     101. On these peoples and their mysteries, see the analyses of V. Gordon Childe, The Pre-
history of European Society, chapter 7 ("Missionaries, Traders and Warriors of Temperate
Europe"), and The Dawn of European Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1958).
     102. Maurice Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le renard pale, vol. 1 (Paris: Institut
d'ethnologie, 1965), p. 376.
     103. The book by Robert James Forbes, Metallurgy in Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1950),
analyzes the different ages of metallurgy, as well as the types of metallurgists that existed in the
"ore stage": the "miner," who did the prospecting and mining; the "smelter" [who produced
the crude metal or alloy]; the "blacksmith" [who manufactured mass products from crude
metals]; and the "metalworker" [who produced smaller objects; includes gold- and silver-
smiths] (pp. 74-76). The specialization system becomes more complicated in the Iron Age,
with attendant variations in the nomad-itinerant-sedentary distribution.
     104. The texts of T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York: Doubleday,
Doran, 1935) and "The Science of Guerrilla War," in Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed.
(1929), vol. 10, pp. 950-953, remain among the most significant works on guerrilla warfare;
they present themselves as an "anti-Foch" theory and elaborate the notion of the nonbattle.
But the nonbattle has a history that is not entirely dependent on guerrilla warfare: (1) the
traditional distinction between the "battle" and the "maneuver" in war; see Raymon Aron,
Penser la guerre. Clausewitz (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 122-131; (2) the way in
which the war of movement places the role and importance of the battle in question (as early
as Marshal de Saxe, and the controversial question of the battle during the Napoleonic
Wars); (3) finally, more recently, the critique of the battle in the name of nuclear arms, which
play a deterrent role, with conventional forces now having a role only in "testing" or "man-
euver"; see the Gaullist conception of the nonbattle, and Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la non-
bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975). The recent return to the notion of the battle cannot be
explained simply by technological factors such as the development of tactical nuclear arms,
but implies political considerations—it is upon these that the role assigned to the battle (or
nonbattle) in war depends.
     105. On the fundamental differences between Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, see Rene
Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1970), pp. 417-419.
     106. See Armees etfiscalite dans le monde antique, ed. A. Chastagnol, C. Nicolet, and
H. van Effenterre (Paris: CNRS, 1977); this colloquium best covers the fiscal aspect but
deals with the other two as well. The question of the distribution of land to soldiers and the
families of soldiers comes up in every State and plays an essential role. In one particular form,
it lay the foundation for fiefs and feudalism. But it already lay at the basis of "false fiefs"
around the world, most notably of the cleros and cleruchy in Greek civilization. Claire
Preaux, L'economie royale des Lagides (Brussels: Ed. de la Fondation Egyptologique Reine
Elisabeth, 1939), pp. 463ff.
     107. Clausewitz, On War, especially book 8, and the commentary on these three theses by
Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, vol. 1 (particularly pp. 139 ff., "Pourquoi les guerres de la
deuxieme espece?").
     108. Erich Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorff Verlag, 1935), notes that
the evolution has been toward attributing more and more importance to the "people" and
"domestic policies" in war, whereas Clausewitz still puts the emphasis on armies and foreign
policy. This criticism is true overall, despite certain texts of Clausewitz. The same criticism is
also made by Lenin and the Marxists (although they obviously have a totally different concep-
tion of the people and domestic policy than Ludendorff). Certain authors have convincingly
                                564 D NOTES TO PP. 421-428

demonstrated that the proletariat is as much of military origin, naval in particular, as of indus-
trial origin; see, for example, Virilio, Speed and Politics, pp. 38, 40-41, 134-35.
    109. As John Ulric Nef shows, it was during the great period of "limited war" (1640-1740)
that the phenomena of concentration, accumulation, and investment emerged—the same
phenomena that were later to determine "total war." See War and Human Progress (New
York: Norton, 1968). The Napoleonic code of war represents a turning point that brought
together the elements of total war: mobilization, transport, investment, information, etc.
    110. On this "transcending" of fascism, and of total war, and on the new point of inversion
of Clausewitz's formula, see Virilio's entire analysis in L'insecurite du territoire, especially
chapter 1.
    111. Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la non-bataille, pp. 15-16. The axiomatic notion of the
"unspecified enemy" is already well developed in official and unofficial texts on national
defense, on international law, and in the judicial or police spheres.


                         13. 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture
      1. The principal book in this respect is Mitra-Varuna (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) (it also
contains the analysis of the "One-Eyed" and the "One-Armed" gods).
      2. The theme of the Binder-God and the magic knot has been the object of general stud-
ies in mythology, notably Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, trans. Philip Mairet (Kansas
City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1961), chapter 3. But these studies are ambiguous
because they use a syncretic and archetypal method. Dumezil's method, on the other hand, is
differential: the theme of capture or of the bond only groups various data together under a dif-
ferential trait, which is constituted precisely by political sovereignty. On the opposition
between these two methods, one can refer to Edmond Ortigues, Le discours et le symbole
(Paris: Aubier, 1962).
      3. Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 113-114, 151, 202-203.
      4. Ibid., p. 150: "There are many ways of being a god of war, and Tiwaz defines one that is
very badly expressed by the labels warrior god, god of combat... . Tiwaz is something else: the
jurist of war, and at the same time a kind of diplomat" (the same applies for Mars).
      5. Ibid., pp. 124-132.
      6. Ernst Junger, The Glass Bees, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York:
Noonday Press, 1960), p. 112 [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited
by the authors].
      7. Marcel Detienne, Les maitres de verite dans la Grece archdique (Paris: Maspero,
 1973), and "Le phalange, problemes et controverses," in Problemes de la guerre en Grece
ancienne (Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton,
 1968). See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, N. Y: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1982).
      8. Jacques Harmand cites an "enterprise using extensive manpower exceptionally
directed by a functionary, Ouni, under the Pharaoh Pepi I toward 1400 B.C."; La guerre
 antique (Paris: PUF, 1973), p. 28. Even the military democracy Morgan described does not
 explain, but presupposes, an archaic State of the imperial type (the work of Detienne and
 Vernant establishes this). This imperial State itself functions first with jailers and police, and
 not warriors: see Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 200-204.
      9. The idea itself of an Asiatic despotic formation appeared in the eighteenth century,
 notably in Montesquieu, but was used to describe an evolved state of the empires and corre-
 sponded to absolute monarchy. Entirely different is the viewpoint of Marx, who recreates the
 notion in order to define the archaic empires. The principal texts in this regard are Marx,
                                NOTES TO PP. 428-433 D 565

Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 471-514; Karl Wittfogel,
Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957); and Pierre Vidal-
Naquet's preface to the first French edition, Le despotisme oriental (Paris: Minuit, 1964),
which was surpressed in the second edition at Wittfogel's request; Ferenc Tokei, Essays on the
Asiatic Mode of Production (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1979); and the studies in CERM,
Sur le mode de production asiatique (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1969).
     10. Varron made a famous pun on nexum and nee suumfit ( = the thing does not become
the property of he who receives it). In effect, the nexum is a fundamental form of archaic
Roman law, according to which it is not an accord between contracting parties that creates an
obligation, but the borrower's or donor's word, in a magico-religious mode. This is not a con-
tract (mancipatio), and it involves no buying-selling, even deferred, and no interest, although
it seems to us that it may involve a kind of rent. See in particular Pierre Noailles, Fas et Jus
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948); and Dumezil, who stresses the connection between the
nexum and the magic bond, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 118-124.
     11. See the excavations and studies of James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations in the Near
East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) and CatalHuyuk(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). The
urbanist Jane Jacobs has drawn on this work in proposing an imperial model she calls "New
Obsidian" (after the name of the lava used to make tools), which may go back to the beginning
of Neolithic times, or even much further into the past. She stresses the "urban" origin of agri-
culture and the role of hybridizations occurring in the urban grain stocks: It is agriculture that
presupposes the stock, and not the reverse. In an as yet unpublished study, Jean Robert ana-
lyzes Mellaart's theses and Jacobs's hypothesis, applying them to new perspectives
(Decoloniser I'espace).
    12. Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Urizen, 1977).
We have seen that, according to Clastres, primitive war is one of the principal mechanisms
warding off the State in that it maintains the opposition and dispersion of small segmentary
groups. But also, from this viewpoint, primitive war remains subordinated to these preven-
tive mechanisms and does not become autonomous as a machine, even when it comprises a
specialized body.
    13. According to Griaznov, it was the sedentary farmers who went out on the steppe and
became nomadic, during the Bronze Age: This is a case of a zigzag movement in evolution. See
The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles,
1969), pp. 97-98, 131-133.
    14. Jean Robert develops this notion of an "inversion of signs and messages": "In a first
phase, information circulates principally from the periphery toward the center, but at a cer-
tain critical point, the town begins to emit, in the direction of the rural world, increasingly
imperative messages"; the town becomes an exporter (Decoloniser I'espace).
    15. On Chinese towns and their subordination to the imperial principle, see Etienne
Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans. H. M. Wright (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1964), p. 410: "The social structures in both India and China automatically
rejected the town and offered, as it were, refractory, substandard material to it. It was because
society was well and truly frozen in a sort of irreducible system, a previous crystallization."
    16. From all of these standpoints, Francois Chatelet questions the classical notion of the
city-state and doubts that the Athenian city can be equated with any variety of State: "La
Grece classique, la Raison, 1'Etat," in Alberto Asor Rosa et al., En marge. L 'Occident etses
"autres", (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978). Islam was to confront analogous problems, as
would Italy, Germany, and Flanders beginning in the eleventh century; in these cases, politi-
cal power does not imply the State-form. An example is the community of Hanseatic towns,
which lacked functionaries, an army, and even legal status. The town is always inside a net-
work of towns, but, precisely, "the network of towns" does not coincide with "mosaic of
                                566 D NOTES TO PP. 433-439

States." On all of these points, see the analyses of Francois Fourquet and Lion Murard, Les
equipements de pouvoir. ville, territoires et equipements collectifs (Paris: 10/18, 1976), pp.
79-106.
     17. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans Claire Jacobson and Brooke
Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 150-151.
     18. Louis Berthe analyzes a specific example of the need for a "third village" to prevent
the directional circuit from closing: "Ames et cadets, 1'alliance et la hierarchic chez les Baduj,"
L'Homme, vol. 5, no. 3/4 (July-December 1965), pp. 214-215.
     19. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan
(New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 60), pp. 398,405,411. Emphasis added. (On town-State
relations in the West, see pp. 396-406.) And as Braudel notes, one of the reasons for the victory
of the States over the towns from the beginning of the fifteenth century was that the State
alone had the ability fully to appropriate the war machine: by means of the territorial recruit-
ment of men, material investment, the industrialization of war (it was more in the arms facto-
ries than in the pin factories that mass production and mechanical division appeared). The
commercial towns, on the other hand, required wars of short duration, resorted to mercenar-
ies, and were only able to encast the war machine.
    20. This theme is frequently developed by Samir Amin: "Since the theory of relations
between different social formations cannot be an economistic one, international relations,
which belong precisely to this context, cannot give rise to an economic theory." Unequal
Development, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 146.
    21. See Jacques Lacarriere, Les hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975).
    22. [TRANS: On capitalism repelling its limits, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), pp. 230-232.]
    23. Samir Amin analyzes this particularity of the "peripheral formations" of the Third
World and distinguishes two principal types, the oriental and African, and the American:
"The Americas, Asia and the Arab world, and Black Africa were not transformed in the same
way because they were not integrated at the same stage of capitalist development at the center
and therefore did not fulfill the same function in development." Unequal Development, p.
 295. See also Accumulation on a Worldscale, vol. 2, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1974), pp. 390-394. We shall see, however, that under certain conditions the
center and the periphery are determined in such a way as to exchange their characteristics.
    24. Gaetan Pirou, Economie liberate et economic dirigee, vol. 1 (Paris: Ed. Sedes, 1946-
 1947), p. 117: "The productivity of the marginal worker determines not only that worker's
wage but that of all the others, in the same way that, when it was a question of commodities,
the utility of the last bucket of water or last sack of wheat governed the value not only of that
bucket or that sack but of all the other buckets and all the other sacks." (Marginalism seeks to
quantify the assemblage, when in fact all kinds of qualitative factors are at work in the evalua-
tion of the "last.")
    25. On the importance of the theory of evaluation and feeling out for marginalism, see
Jacques Fradin's critical discussion, Les fondements logiques de la theorie neoclassique de
I'echange (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976). For Marxists, there is also a
groping evaluation, but one that can bear only on the quantity of socially necessary labor;
Engels speaks of this precisely in the context of precapitalist societies. He invokes "a process
of zig-zag approximation, often groping back and forth in the dark," which is governed more
or less by the "need for each person to have a rough idea of his costs" (one may wonder if this
last part of the phrase does not reinstate a sort of marginalist criterion). Engels, "Supplement
to Volume Three of Capital," in Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vin-
tage, 1981), p. 1036.
                                NOTES TO PP. 439-443 D 567

     26. [TRANS: "Ophelimity" (from the Greek for "useful," "serviceable") was introduced by
Vilfredo Pareto in his Cows d'economie politique (1896), ed. G.-H. Bousquet and G. Busino
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964), pp. 2-16. The first portion of this discussion is translated in
Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings, ed. and intro. S. E. Fine, trans. Derick Mirtin (New
York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 97-102.]
     27. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, in The Works and Correspon-
dence of David Ricardo, vol. 1, ed. Piero Sraffa (London: Cambridge University Press,
 1962), chapter 2. See also Marx's analysis of the two forms of "differential rent," Capital,
vol. 3, part 6.
     28. Of course, the least fertile land is also in theory the most recent or the last in a series
(which allows many commentators to say that Ricardo prefigured marginalism in his theory
of rent). But this is not even a rule, and Marx shows that an "increasing sequence" is just as
possible as a "decreasing sequence" and that a better soil can "take the lowest place instead of
that which was formerly the worst." Capital, vol. 3, p. 798.
     29. [TRANS: Capital, vol. 3, p. 788.]
     30. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, p. 75: "If air, water, the elasticity of
steam, and the pressure of the atmosphere, were of different qualities; if they could be appro-
priated, and each quality existed only in moderate abundance, they, as well as the land, would
afford a rent, as the successive qualities were brought into use."
     31. The two forms of differential rent are based on comparison. But Marx maintains the
existence of another form, unknown to the theorists (Ricardo), but with which the practition-
ers, he says, are quite familiar: absolute rent, based on the special character of landed property
as monopoly. In effect, land is not a commodity like the others because it is not reproducible at
the level of a determinable aggregate. There is therefore monopoly, which is not the same as
"monopoly price" (monopoly price, and the eventual corresponding rent, are totally different
questions). In the simplest terms, differential rent and absolute rent can be distinguished in
the following manner: since the price of the product is calculated on the basis of the worst soil,
the entrepreneur with the best soil would have a surplus profit if the latter were not trans-
formed into differential rent accruing to the landowner; but on the other hand, since agricul-
tural surplus value is proportionally greater than industrial surplus value (?), the agricultural
entrepreneur in general would have a surplus profit if the latter were not transformed into
absolute rent accruing to the landowner. Rent is thus a necessary element in the equalization
and adjustment of profit: whether it be the equalization of the agricultural profit rate (differ-
ential rent), or the equalization of this rate and the rate of industrial profit (absolute rent).
Certain Marxist economists have proposed an entirely different schema of absolute rent, but
one that maintains Marx's necessary distinction. [TRANS: On absolute rent, see Marx, Capital,
vol. 3, part 6, chapter 45, pp. 895-899.]
     32. Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profit (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 289-290,
distinguishes between two forms of capture or "harnessing," which correspond moreover to
the two principal figures of the hunt, waiting and pursuit. Rent would be a residual or
waiting kind of capture because it depends on external forces and operates by transfer;
profit would be a capture of pursuit or conquest because it derives from a specific action and
requires a force of its own or a "creation." This holds true, however, only in relation to differ-
ential rent; as Marx noted, absolute rent represents the "creative" aspect of landed property
(Capital, vol. 3, p. 889).
     33. Edouard Will, Korinthiaka (Paris: Ed. De Boccard, 1955), pp. 470ff., analyzes a late,
but exemplary, case, that of the tyrant Cypselos's reform in Corinth: (1) a portion of the land
belonging to the hereditary aristocracy was confiscated and distributed to the poor peasants;
(2) but at the same time a metallic stock was constituted, through seizure of the property of
proscribed persons; (3) this money itself was distributed to the poor, but in order for them to
                                568 D NOTES TO PP. 443-449

 give it to the old owners as an indemnity; (4) the old owners from then on paid their taxes in
 money, so as to ensure a circulation or turnover of the currency, and an equivalence between
 money, goods, and services. We already find analogous figures directly inscribed in the
 archaic empires, independently of the problems of private property. For example, land is dis-
tributed to the functionaries in their capacity as functionaries, and they exploit or lease it. But
 if the functionary thereby receives a rent in labor or in kind from it, he owes the emperor a tax
payable in money. Hence the necessity of "banks," which, under complex conditions, ensure
the equivalence, conversion, and circulation of goods-money throughout the economy; see
 Guillaume Cardascia, "Armee et fiscalite dans la Babylone achemenide," in Armees et
fiscalit'e dans le monde antique (Paris: CNRS, 1977).
      34. [TRANS: On these three forms of rent, see Marx, Capital, vol. 3, part 6, chapter 47,
 pp. 925-938.]
      35. Authors like Will and Gabriel Ardant have demonstrated that the commercial func-
 tion does not account for the origin of money, tied to ideas of "payment," "settlement," "tax-
 ation." Will proves this in particular for the Greek and Western worlds; but even in the
 oriental empires, we think that the monopoly over monetarized trade assumes monetary
taxation. See Edouard Will, "Reflexions et hypotheses sur les origines du monnayage,"
Revue numismatique, vol. 17 (1955), pp. 3-24; Gabriel Ardant, Histoire flnanciere de
 I'antiquite a nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 28ff.: "The milieus that gave rise to taxa-
tion also gave rise to money."
      36. On this aspect of indirect taxation, see Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, trans.
Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 1-2, 228-236 (in relation to for-
eign trade). Concerning the relations taxation-trade, a particularly interesting case is that of
mercantilism, analyzed by Eric Alliez (Capital et pouvoir, unpublished manuscript).
      37. [TRANS: Marx presents his trinity formula (capital-profit, land-ground rent, labor-
wages) in Capital, vol. 3, chapter 48.]
      38. Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profits.
      39. Marx often emphasizes the following points, particularly in his analysis of primitive
accumulation: (1) Primitive accumulation precedes the mode of production and makes it pos-
sible. (2) It therefore implies specific action by the State and the law, which are not opposed to
violence but, on the contrary, promote it ("These methods depend in part on brute force....
But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society."
 Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage, 1977], chapter 31, p. 915). (3) This
lawful violence appears first in its raw form but ceases to be conscious to the degree that the
mode of production becomes established; it seems to be a fact of nature pure and simple
("direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases"; ibid., p.
 899). (4) A movement such as this is explained by the particular character of this violence,
which is in no case reducible to theft, crime, or illegality (see Notes surAdolph Wagner in Oeu-
 vres de Karl Marx, "Pleiade" edition, vol. 2, ed. Maximilien Rubel [Paris: Gallimard, 1968]):
what is taken away from the worker is not something surface level; the capitalist "does not
limit himself to taking away or stealing, but extorts the production of a surplus value, in other
 words, he first contributes to the creation of that from which he takes away.... A part of the
value created without the labor of the capitalist can be appropriated legally by the capitalist,
in other words, without violating the corresponding right to the exchange of commodities."
      40. Jean Robert thoroughly demonstrates, in this context, that primitive accumulation
implies the violent construction of a homogenized, "colonized" space ("Decoloniser
1'espace," unpublished manuscript).
      41. Ferenc Tokei, "Les conditions de la propriete fonciere dans la Chine de 1'epoque
Tcheou," Acta Antiqua, vol. 6 (1958), pp. 245-300. Marx and Engels already noted that the
 Roman plebs (partially composed of freedmen) alone had the right to the "transfer of property
                               NOTES TO PP. 449-453 D 569

 out of the ager publicus" (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 477): the plebeians became private owners of
 landed property, and also of commercial and industrial wealth, precisely insofar as they were
 "excluded from all public rights" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
 State [New York: International Publishers, 1972], p. 190).
     42. See the two great books by V. Gordon Childe, The Most Ancient East (London: K.
 Paul, Trench, Triibner, 1928) and especially The Prehistory of European Civilization (London:
 Cassell, 1962). In particular, archaeological analysis permits Childe to conclude that nowhere
 in the Aegean world were there accumulations of wealth or food comparable to those of the
 Orient (The Prehistory of European Civilization, pp. 106-110).
     43. On the differences between "generalized slavery" in the archaic empire, and private
 slavery, feudal corvee, etc., see Charles Parain, "Protohistoire mediterraneenne et mode de
 production asiatique," in CERM, Sur le mode de production asiatique, pp. 170-173.
     44. Gerard Boulvert, Domestique et fonctionnaire sous le haul-empire romain (Paris: Les
 Belles Lettres, 1974). More generally, Paul Veyne has analyzed the formation of "subjective
 law" in the Roman Empire, the corresponding institutions, and the new meaning of the public
 and private. He demonstrates that Roman law is a "law without concepts" that proceeds by
 "topics," and in this sense differs from the modern, "axiomatic" conception of the law. See
 Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris: Seuil, 1976), chapters 3 and 4, and p. 744.
     45. See Francois Hincker, "La monarchic absolue francaise," in CERM, Sur lefeodalisme
 (Paris: Ed. Sociaies, 1971).
     46. Edgar Quinet, La genie des religions, vol. 1 of Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Hachette,
 ca. 1899).
     47. Marx, "Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy," in A Contribution to the
 Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), p. 298
 [translation modified].
     48. On the historical independence of the two series, and their "encounter," see Etienne
 Balibar in Althusser and Balibar, Lirele Capital, vol. 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 286-289.
     49. Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, pp. 13-14, and the following passage he cites
 from Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press,
 1942), p. 338: "'Capital' is not simply another name for means of production; it is means of
 production reduced to a qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively measurable fund of
 value" (whence the equalization of profit). In his analysis of the primitive accumulation of
 capital, Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, rev. ed. [New York: Inter-
 national Publishers, 1964], pp. 177-186) effectively demonstrates that primitive accumula-
 tion bears not on the means of production but on "rights or titles to wealth" (p. 177; modified
 to agree with the French translation cited by the authors), which, depending on the circum-
 stances, are convertible into means of production.
     50. See the distinction certain jurists make between Roman, "topical," law, and modern,
 "axiomatic," law of the civil-code type. We may define certain fundamental ways in which the
 French Civil Code is closer to an axiomatic than to a code: (1) the predominance of the
 enunciative form over the imperative and over affective formulas (damnation, exhortation,
 admonishment, etc.); (2) the code's pretension that it forms a complete and saturated rational
 system; (3) but at the same time the relative independence of the propositions, which permit
 axioms to be added. On these aspects, see Jean Ray, Essai sur la structure logique du code civil
francais (Paris: Alcan, 1926). It has been established that the systematization of Roman law
 took place very late, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
     51. [TRANS: Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. and intro. Dirk J.
 Struik, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 129.]
     52. See Jean Saint-Geours, Pouvoir et finance (Paris: Fayard, 1979). Saint-Geours is one
                               570 D NOTES TO PP. 453-463

of the best analysts of the monetary system, as well as of "private-public" mixes in the modern
economy.
     53. On the tendency toward the elimination of ground rent in capitalism, see Samir Amin
and Kostas Vergopoulos, La question paysanne et le capitalisme (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974).
Amin analyzes the reasons why ground rent and rent of mines keep or assume a present-day
meaning in the peripheral regions, although in different ways; The Law of Value and Historical
Materialism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), chapters 4 and 6.
     54. Introductory books on the axiomatic method emphasize a certain number of prob-
lems. For example, Robert Blanche's fine book, L'axiomatique (Paris: PUF, 1959) [abridged
and translated by G. B. Keeneas^4jc/o/r)<3i/cj(NewYork: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962)]. There
is first of all the question of the respective independence of the axioms, and whether or not the
system is saturated, or "strongly complete" (sec. 14 and 15). Second, there is the question of
"models of realization," their heterogeneity, but also their isomorphy in relation to the axio-
matic system (sec. 12). Then there is the possibility of a polymorphy of models, not only in a
nonsaturated system, but even in a saturated axiomatic (sec. 12, 15, and 26). Then, once
again, there is the question of the "undecidable propositions" an axiomatic confronts (sec.
20). Finally, there is the question of "power," by which nondemonstrable infinite sets exceed
the axiomatic (sec. 26 and "the power of the continuum"). The comparison of politics to an
axiomatic is based on all of these aspects.
     55. Lewis Mumford, "The First Megamnchine," Diogenes, no. 55 (July-September 1966),
p. 3. [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors].
     56. Ergonomics distinguishes between "human-machine" systems (or work posts) and
"humans-machines" systems (communicational aggregates composed of human and
nonhuman elements). But this is not only a difference of degree; the second point of view is
not a generalization of the first: "The notion of information loses its anthropocentric aspect,"
and the problems are not of adaptation but of the choice of a human or nonhuman element
depending on the case. See Maurice de Montmollin, Les systemes hommes-machines (Paris:
PUF, 1967). The issue is no longer to adapt, even under violence, but to localize: Where is your
place? Even handicaps can be made useful, instead of being corrected or compensated for. A
deaf-mute can be an essential part of a "humans-machines" communicational system.
     57. One of the basic themes of science fiction is to show how machinic enslavement com-
bines with processes of subjection, but exceeds and differs from them, performing a qualita-
tive leap. Take Ray Bradbury: television not as an instrument located at the center of the
house, but as forming the walls of the house.
     58. See Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power,-vol. 2 of The Myth of the Machine (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 236-360 (a comparison of the "old megama-
chine" and the modern one; despite writing, the old megamachine notably suffered from dif-
ficulties in "communication").
     59. Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, p. 129.
     60. Historically, these have been the major problems in axiomatics: "undecidable" prop-
ositions (contradictory statements are also nondemonstrable); the powers of infinite sets,
which by nature elude axiomatic treatment ("the continuum, for example, cannot be con-
ceived axiomatically in its structural specificity since every axiomatization one can give it
will rely on a denumerable model"). See Blanche, L'axiomatique, p. 80.
     61. The "intuitionist" school (Brouwer, Heytig, Griss, Bouligand, etc.) is of great impor-
tance in mathematics, not because it asserted the irreducible rights of intuition, or even
because it elaborated a very novel constructivism, but because it developed a conception of
problems, and of a calculus of problems that intrinsically rivals axiomatics and proceeds by
other rules (notably with regard to the excluded middle).
     62. In our opinion, one of the best analyses of the Nazi economy is Jean-Pierre Faye's
                                 NOTES TO PP. 463-472 D 571

Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 664-676. Faye shows that Nazism is indeed
a totalitarianism, precisely because of its minimal State, its refusal of any statification of the
economy, its reduction of wages, its hostility toward large-scale public works. But at the same
time, he shows that Nazism carries out the creation of domestic capital, strategic construc-
tion, and the building of an arms industry, which makes it rival or sometimes even meld with
an economy of socialist leaning ("something that seems to resemble the Swedish loans praised
by Myrdal with a view to large-scale projects, but which is in fact and immediately its oppo-
site, the writing of an arms economy and a war economy," and the corresponding difference
between "the public works entrepreneur" and the "army supplier"; pp. 668, 674).
    63. See the critical list of the axioms of the periphery presented by Samir Amin, Accumu-
lation on a Worldscale, pp. 390-394.
    64. Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975); Speed and Politics, trans.
Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986); Defense populaire et luttes ecologiques
(Paris: Galilee, 1978), forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e) as Popular
Defense and Ecological Struggles: it is precisely beyond fascism and total war that the war
machine finds its complete object, in the menacing peace of nuclear deterrence. It is there that
the reversal of Clausewitz's formula takes on a concrete meaning, at the same time as State
politics tends to wither and the war machine takes over a maximum of civil functions ("place
the whole of civil society under the regime of military security," "disqualify the whole of the
planet's habitat by stripping the peoples of their quality of inhabitant," "erase the distinction
between wartime and peacetime"; see the role of the media in this respect). Certain European
police forces could be taken as an example, when they claim the right to "shoot on sight": they
cease to be a cogwheel in the State apparatus and become pieces in a war machine.
    65. Braudel shows how this center of gravity formed in northern Europe, but at the out-
come of movements that, starting in the ninth and tenth centuries, put the European spaces of
the North and the South in competition or rivalry with one another (this problem is not to be
confused with that of the town-form and State-form, but does intersect with it). See
"Naissance d'une economie-monde," Urbi, no. 1 (September 1979), pp. 3-20.
    66. A movement in Marxist research formed on the basis of the work of Mario Tronti
(Operai e capitate [Turin: G. Einaudi, 1971]; French translation, Owners et capital [Paris:
Bourgois, 1977]), then that of Italian autonomy and Antonio Negri, whose aim was to analyze
the new forms of work and the struggle against work. It was a question of showing simultane-
ously: (1) that the struggle against work is not an accidental or "marginal" phenomenon in
capitalism, but one essential to the composition of capital (the growth in the proportion of
constant capital), and, (2) that this phenomenon engenders a new type of worldwide
struggle—workers' struggles, popular struggles, ethnic struggles—in every domain. See
Antonio Negri, especially Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming,
trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizion Viano (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and
Garvey, 1984); Karl Heinz Roth, Die "andere" Arbeiterbewegung (Munich: Trikont, 1974);
and the current work in France of Yann Moulier, Alain and Daniele Guillerm, Benjamin
Coriat, etc. [TRANS: The best sources on the autonomy movement in English are Italy:
Autonomia. Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e), vol. 3, no. 3 (1980) and Autonomy and the
Crisis. Italian Marxist Texts of 'the Theory and Praxis oj'a Class Movement: 1964-1979 (Lon-
don: Red Notes and CSE Books, 1979). Marx Beyond Marx includes a lengthy epilogue by
Michael Ryan summarizing Negri's major works and a bibliography of writings on the Italian
movement available in English.]
    67. This is one of the essential theses of Tronti, who defined the new conceptions of the
"mass-worker" and of the relation to work: "To struggle against capital, the working class must
fight against itself insofar as it is capital; this is the maximal stage of contradiction, not forthe
workers, but for the capitalists.... The plan of capital begins to run backward, not as a social
                                572 D NOTES TO PP. 472-481

development, but as a revolutionary process." See Ouvriers et capital, p. 322; this is what Negri
has called the "crisis of the planning state" (Crisi dello Stato-plano [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974]).
    68. This is another aspect of the present-day situation: in addition to the new struggles
tied to work and the evolution in work, there is the entire domain of what are called "alterna-
tive practices" and the construction of such practices (pirate radio stations would be the
simplest example; other examples are urban community networks, the alternative to psychia-
try, etc.). On all these points, and the link between the two aspects, see Franco Berardi Bifo,
Finalemente il cielo e caduto sulla terra (Milan: Squilibri, 1978); and Les Untorelli, Re-
cherches, no. 30 (1977) (special issue on autonomia).

                       14.1440: The Smooth and the Striated
      1. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, L'homme et la matiere (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971), pp. 244ff.
(and the opposition between fabric and felt).
      2. William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 151.
      3. On the history of the quilt and patchwork in American immigration, see Jonathan
Holstein, American Pieced Quilts (New York: Viking, 1973) (with reproductions and bibliog-
raphy). Holstein does not claim that the quilt is the principal source of American art, but he
does note the extent to which the "white on white" of plain quilts and patchwork composi-
tions inspired or gave impetus to certain tendencies in American painting: "We can see in
many [quilts] such phenomena as 'op' effects, serial images, use of 'color fields,' deep under-
standing of negative space, mannerisms of formal abstraction and the like," (p. 13).
      4. Pierre Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 83ff. We provide a summary of
Boulez's analysis in the following paragraph.
      5. [TRANS: Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, p. 87. Translation modified.]
      6. On this indexing of the inside and the outside among the nomads of the desert, see
Annie Milovanoff, "La seconde peau du nomade," Nouvelles litteraires, no. 2646 (July 27,
1978), p. 18. And on the relations between the igloo and the outside among the nomads of the
ice, see Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1964).
      7. See the two convergent descriptions of the space of ice and the space of sand: Edmund
Carpenter, Eskimo, and Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London: Longmans, Green, 1959).
(In both cases, there is an indifference to astronomy.)
      8. See Pierre Chaunu's study, L'expansion europeenne du XHIe au XVe siecle (Paris:
PUF, 1969), pp. 288-305.
      9. See in particular Paul Adam, "Navigation primitive et navigation astronomique," in
Les aspects internationaux de la d'ecouverte oceanique aux XVe et XVIe siecles. Ve Collogue
international d'histoire maritime, ed. Michel Mollat and Paul Adam (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960),
pp. 91-112. (See the operative geometry of the pole star.)
    10. Guy Beaujouan, "Science livresque et nautique au XVe siecle," Les aspects interna-
tionaux de la d'ecouverte oceanique, pp. 61-90.
    11. See Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), on how the sea
reconstitutes a smooth space with the "fleet in being," etc.; and how a vertical smooth
space of aerial and stratospheric domination springs up (especially chapter 4, "Le littoral
vertical," pp. 93-109).
     12. Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la racine "Nem " en grec ancien (Paris: Klincksieck,
 1949), clearly notes the difference between the ideas of distribution and allocation, between
the two linguistic groups concerned, between the two kinds of space, between the "province"
pole and the "city" pole.
     13. This expression is found in Rene Thorn, who applies it to a continuous variation in
                               NOTES TO PP. 481-493 D 573

which the variable reacts upon its antecedents: Modeles math'ematiques de la morphogenese
(Paris: 10/18, 1974), pp. 218-219.
     14. On Riemann's and Helmholtz's presentations of multiplicity, see Jules Vuillemin,
Philosophic de I'algebre (Paris: PUF, 1962), pp. 409ff.
    15. See Bertrand Russell, The Principles of'Mathematics (New York: Norton, 1964), chap-
ter 31. The following discussion does not conform to Russell's theory. An excellent analysis of
the notions of distance and magnitude according to Meinong and Russell may be found in
Albert Spaier, Lapens'ee et la quantit'e (Paris: Alcan, 1927).
     16. Beginning in chapter 2 of Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Bergson repeatedly uses the
noun "multiplicity," under conditions that should attract the attention of commentators; that
there is an implicit reference to Riemann seems beyond doubt. Later, in Matter and Memory,
trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Humanities Press, 1978), he
explains that Achilles' stride can be divided perfectly into "submultiples" that differ in
nature, however, from that which they divide; the same goes for the tortoise's stride; and the
submultiples, "in both cases," themselves differ in nature.
    17. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 82: if a multiplicity "implies the possibility of
treating any number whatever as a provisional unit which can be added to itself, inversely the
units in their turn are true numbers which are as big as we like, but are regarded as provision-
ally indivisible for the purpose of compounding them with one another."
    18. Albert Lautman, Les sch'emas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23, 34-35.
    19. On this properly Euclidean conjunction (which is very different from the process of
accumulation), see Lautman, ibid., pp. 45-48.
    20. Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension (San Francisco: W. H.
Freeman, 1977).
    21. On these two kinds of space, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pens'ee chez les Grecs,
vol. 1 (Paris: Maspero, 1971-1974), pp. 174-175.
    22. Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbu-
lences (Paris: Minuit, 1977): "Physics is based much more on a vectorial space than on a met-
ric space" (p. 79). On the hydraulic problem, see pp. 104-107.
    23. Serres, La naissance de la physique, pp. 35, 135ff.
    24. Anne Querrien has clearly demonstrated the importance of the Ecole des Ponts et
Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways) in this elaboration of the concept of work. For
example, Navier, an engineer and professor of mechanics, wrote in 1819: "We must establish a
mechanical currency with which to estimate the quantities of work used to accomplish every
kind of fabrication."
    25. It is a commonplace of missionaries' narratives that there is nothing corresponding to
the category of work, even in transhumant agriculture, with its laborious ground-clearing
activities. Marshall Sahlins is not content to remark the briefness of the time devoted to the
labor necessary for maintenance and reproduction, but goes on to stress qualitative factors:
the continuous variation that regulates activity, and the mobility or freeness of movement,
which excludes stockpiling and is measured in terms of the "convenience of transporting the
object." "La premiere societe d'abondance," Les temps modernes, no. 268 (October 1968),
pp. 654-656, 662-663, 672-673.
    26. The principal texts are Alois Riegl, Die Spatromische Kunstindustrie (Vienna:
Staatdruckerei, 1927); Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy; A Contribution to the
Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press,
 1963); Henri Maldiney, Regard, parole, espace(Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1973), especially
"L'art et le pouvoir du fond," and Maldiney's discussion of Cezanne.
    27. All of these points already relate to Riemannian space, with its essential relation to
                               574 D NOTES TO PP. 493-498

"monads" (as opposed to the unitary Subject of Euclidean space): see Gilles Chatelet, "Sur
une petite phrase de Riemann," Analytiques, no. 3 (May 1979). Although the "monads" are no
longer thought to be closed upon themselves, and are postulated to entertain direct, step-by-
step local relations, the purely monadological point of view proves inadequate and should be
superseded by a "nomadology" (the ideality of striated space versus the realism of smooth
space).
    28. See Edmund Carpenter's description in Eskimo of ice space, and of the igloo: "There
is no middle distance, no perpecti ve, no outline, nothing the eye can cling to except thousands
of smokey plumes of snow... a land without bottom or edge ... a labyrinth alive with the
movements of crowded people. No flat static walls arrest the ear or eye ... and the eye can
glance through here, past there" (no pagination).
    29. These two aspects, the Encompassing Element and the Center, figure in Jean-Pierre
Vernant's analysis of space in Anaximander; Mythe et pens'eee chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero,
 1971-1974), vol. 1, part 3. From another perspective, the entire history of the desert concerns
the possibility of its becoming the encompassing element, and also of being repelled, rejected
by the center, as though in an inversion of movement. In a phenomenology of religion like that
of Van der Leeuw, the nomos itself does indeed appear as the encompassing-limit or ground,
and also as that which is repelled, excluded, in a centrifugal movement.
    30. Whatever interactions there may be, the "art of the steppes" had a specificity that was
communicated to the migrating Germans; in spite of his many reservations about nomad cul-
ture, Rene Grousset makes this point in The Empire of the Steppes, trans. Naomi Walford
(New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970). pp. 11 -25. He notes the irreducibility
of Scythian art to Assyrian art, Sarmatian art to Persian art, and Hunnic art to Chinese art. He
even points out that the art of the steppes influenced more than it borrowed (see in particular
the question of Ordos art and its relations to China).
    31. On this question of light and color, in particular in Byzantine art, see Henri Maldiney,
Regard, parole, espace, pp. 203ff., 239ff.
    32. The correlation, "haptic-close-abstract," was already suggested by Riegl. But it
was Worringer who developed the theme of the abstract line. Although he conceives of it
essentially in its Egyptian form, he describes a second form in which the abstract assumes
an intense life and an expressionist value, all the while remaining inorganic: Abstraction
and Empathy, chapter 5, and especially Form in Gothic (London: Putnam's and Sons,
 1927), pp. 38-55.
    33. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Legesteet la parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964-1965), vol. 1,
 Technique et langage, pp. 263ff.; vol. 2, La memoire et les rythmes, pp. 219ff. ("Rhythmic
marks are anterior to explicit figures.") Worringer's position is very ambiguous; thinking that
prehistoric art is fundamentally figurative, he excludes it from Art, on the same grounds as he
excludes the "scribblings of a child" (Abstraction and Empathy, pp. 51-55). Then he advances
the hypothesis that the cave dwellers were the "ultimate result" of a series he says began with
the abstract (p. 130). But would not such a hypothesis force Worringer to revise his conception
of the abstract, and to cease identifying it with Egyptian geometricism?
    34. Worringer establishes an opposition between the power of repetition, which is
mechanical, multiplying, and without fixed orientation, and the force of symmetry, which is
organic, additive, oriented, and centered. He sees this as the fundamental difference between
Gothic ornamentation and Greek or classical ornamentation: Form in Gothic, pp. 53-55
("The Ceaseless Melody of the Northern Line"). In a fine book, Esthetiques d'Orient et
d'Occident (Paris: E. Leroux, 1937), Laura Morgenstern develops a particular example, dis-
tinguishing the "symmetrical antithetism" of Sassanid Persian art from the "disjointed
antithetism" of the art of the prdto-Iranian nomads (Sarmatians). Many authors, however,
have stressed the centered and symmetrical motifs in barbarian or nomad art. Worringer
                                NOTES TO PP. 498-499 D 575

anticipated this objection: "Instead of the regular and invariably geometrical star or rosette or
similar restful forms, in the North we find the revolving wheel, the turbine or the so-called sun
wheel, all designs which express violent movement. Moreover, the movement is peripheral
and not radial" (Form in Gothic, p. 54). The history of technology confirms the importance of
the turbine in the life of the nomads. In another, bio-aesthetic, context, Gabriel Tarde opposes
repetition as indefinite potential (puissance) to symmetry as limitation. With symmetry, life
constituted an organism for itself, taking a star-shaped or reflected, infolded form (the radiata
and mollusks). It is true that in doing so it unleashed another type of repetition, external
reproduction; see L 'opposition universelle (Paris: Alcan, 1897).
    35. [TRANS: Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 33]
    36. [TRANS: Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 42]
    37. On all of these points, see Georges Charriere's very intuitive book, Scythian Art (New
York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), which includes a great number of reproductions. It
is doubtless Rene Grousset who has most effectively emphasized "slowness" as a dramatic
pole of nomad art: The Empire of the Steppes, pp. 13-14.
    38. Dora Vallier, in her preface to the French translation of Abstraction and Empathy
(Abstraction et Einfuhlung [Paris: Klincksieck, 1978]), is right to note Worringer and
Kandinsky's independence from one another, and the differences between the problems they
were addressing. However, she maintains that there is still convergence and resonance
between them. In a sense, all art is abstract, with the figurative springing from certain types of
abstraction. But in another sense, since there are very different types of lines (Egyptian-
geometrical, Greek-organic, Gothic-vital, etc.), the question then becomes one of determin-
ing which line remains abstract, or realizes abstraction as such. It is doubtful that it is the
geometrical line, since it still draws a figure, even though an abstract and nonrepresentative
one. Rather, the abstract line is that defined by Michael Fried in relation to certain works by
Pollock: multidirectional, with neither inside nor outside, form nor background, delimiting
nothing, describing no contour, passing between spots or points, filling a smooth space, stir-
ring up a close-lying haptic visual matter that "both invites the act of seeing on the part of the
spectator yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all," (Three American Painters
[Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965], p. 14). In Kandinsky himself, abstraction is
realized not so much by geometrical structures as by lines of march or transit that seem to
recall Mongolian nomadic motifs.
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Bibliography
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                               Bibliography




                          (compiled by Brian Massumi)

I before an entry indicates an interview.
P before an entry indicates a preface, postface, introduction, or afterword.

                       by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

                                        English
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Preface by Michel Foucault. Trans. Robert
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Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. DanaPolan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Nomadology: The War Machine. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.
   Translation of Chapter \2ofMillePlateaux.
On the Line. Trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Translation of "Rhizome"
   (the final version published in Mille plateaux) and "Politics" (Chapter 6 of Dialogues).
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
   University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Translation of Mille Plateaux.
"Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring-Machines." Trans. Robert Hurley. Semiotext(e), Anti-
    Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 5 (1977), pp. 117-135. Translation of "Bilan-programme pour
   machines desirantes."
"Becoming-Woman." Trans. Brian Massumi. Subjects/Objects, no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp.
   24-32. Extracts from Chapter 10 of Mille Plateaux.
"A Bloated Oedipus." Trans. Rachel McComas. Semiotext(e), Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1
                                           579
                                 580 D BIBLIOGRAPHY

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"City-State." Trans. Brian Massumi. Zone, no. 1II (1985), pp. 195-199. Extract from Chapter
    13 ofMille Plateaux.
"Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines." Trans. Charles Stivale. Sub/Stance, vol. 13, nos.
   3/4 (1984), pp. 7-19. Translation of Chapter \^i of Mille Plateaux.
"How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs." Trans. Suzanne Guerlac. Semiotext(e),
   Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1(1981), pp. 265-270. Abridged translation of "Comment se faire
   un corps sans organes," first version.
"The Interpretation of Utterances." With Claire Parnet and A. Scala. Trans, and ed. Paul Foss
   and Meaghan Morris. In Language, Sexuality and Subversion. Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan
   Morris. Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 141-157. Papers delivered at the Milan con-
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"One or Several Wolves?" Trans. Mark Seem. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977),
   pp. 137-147. Translation of "Un seul ou plusieurs loups?", first version.
"Nomad Art." Trans. Brian Massumi. Art and Text, no. 19 (Oct.-Dec. 1985), pp. 16-24.
   Extracts from Chapter 14 ofMille Plateaux.
"Rhizome." Trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton. In Ideology and Consciousness, no. 8 (Spring
    1981), pp. 49-71. Translation of Rhizome (the first version, published as a separate book).
   "What Is a Minor Literature?" Trans. Robert Brinkley. Mississippi Review, vol. 2, no. 3
   (Winter/Spring 1983), pp. 13-33. Translation of Chapter 3 of Kafka.

                                          French
1'Anti-Oedipe.Vol. 1 of Capitalisme et schizophrenic. Paris: Minuit, 1972; 2nd ed., 1973, with
   added appendix, "Bilan-Programme pour machines desirantes."
Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975.
Mille Plateaux. Vol. 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrenic. Paris: Minuit, 1980.
Politique et psychanalyse. Alencon: Bibliotheque des Mots Perdues, 1977. Texts from the
   Milan conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics (May 1973). Contains: "La place du
   signifiant dans 1'institution," Guattari (revised version reprinted in La revolution
   moleculaire, and included in the English edition); "Psychanalyse et politique," Guattari;
   "Quatre propositions sur la psychanalyse," Deleuze; and "L'interpretation des enonces,"
   Deleuze, Guattari, Claire Parnet, and Andre Scala.
Rhizome. Paris: Minuit, 1976. Modified and reprinted as the introduction to Mille Plateaux.
"Bilan-Programme pour machines desirantes." Minuit, no. 2 (January 1973), pp. 1-25.
   Reprinted as appendix to second edition of I'Anti-Oedipe.
Discussions, in Francois Fourquet and Lion Murard, Les equipements de pouvoir (Paris:
    10/18,1976), pp. 39-47,161-195,212-227. Revised version of Recherches, no. 13[Decem-
   ber 1973], Les equipements collectifs.
"Le nouvel arpenteur. Intensites et blocs d'enfance dans 'le Chateau.'" Critique, vol. 29, no.
    318 (November 1973), pp. 1046-1054.
"La synthese disjonctive." L'Arc, Klossowski, no. 43 (1970), pp. 54-62. Modified and
    reprinted as Chapter 2, part 4 of I'Anti-Oedipe.
"Un seul ou plusieurs loups?" Minuit, no. 5 (Sept. 1973), pp. 2-16. Modified and reprinted as
   Chapter 2 ofMille Plateaux.
                                 BIBLIOGRAPHY D 581

                                   by Gilles Deleuze

                                         English
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneap-
   olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Translation of Cinema I: L'image-mouvement.
Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis:
   University of Minnesota Press, 1984. With preface to the English edition. Translation of
   La philosophic critique de Kant.
Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. Trans Jean McNeil. New York:
   Braziller, 1971. With the text of Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Translation
   of Presentation de Sacher-Masoch.
Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press,
    1983. Translation of Nietzsche et la philosophic.
Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Braziller, 1972. Translation of Proust et
   les signes, 2nd ed.
"Active and Reactive." Trans. Richard Cohen. In The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison.
   Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, pp. 80-106. Translation of Chapter 2 of Nietzsche et
   la philosophie.
"Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis." Trans. Meaghan Morris. In Language, Sexuality and
   Subversion. Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sidney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 134-
    140. Translation of "Quatre propositions sur la psychanalyse" in Deleuze and Guattari,
   Politique et psychanalyse.
"I Have Nothing to Admit." Trans. Janis Forman. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3
   (1977), pp. 111-116. Translation of "Lettre a Michel Cressole."
"Intellectuals and Power." Discussion with Michel Foucault in Foucault, Language, Counter-
   Memory, Practice. Ed. and trans. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
   Press, 1977, pp. 205-217. Also trans. Mark Seem, Telos 16 (Summer 1973), pp. 103-109.
   Translation of "Les intellectuals et le pouvoir."
"On Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy." Preface to
   Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy.
"Open Letter to Negri's Judges." Trans. Committee April 7, London. Semiotext(e), Italy:
   Autonomia, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 182-184. From La Repubblica.
"Nomad Thought." Trans. Jacqueline Wallace. Semiotext(e), Nietzsche's Return, vol. 3, no. 1
   (1978), pp. 12-20. Translation of "Pensee nomade." Also trans. David B. Allison in The
   New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 198 5), pp. 142-149.
"Plato and the Simulacrum." Trans. Rosalind Krauss. October, no. 16 (Winter 1983), pp.
   45-56. Translation of "Platon et le simulacre." "The Rise of the Social." Foreword to
   Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon,
    1979, pp. ix-xvii. Translation of "L'ascension du social."
"The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud."
   In Textual Strategies. Ed. and trans. Josue Harari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
    1979, pp. 277-295. Translation of "Le schizophrene et le mot." Reprinted in Literature
   and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips. New York: Columbia Uni-
   versity Press, 1983.
"Three Group Problems." Trans. Mark Seem. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977),
   pp. 99-109. Translation of "Trois problemes de groupe."
                                    582 D BIBLIOGRAPHY

                                             French
  Le Bergsonisme. Paris: PUF, 1966.
  Bergson. M'emoire et vie. Paris: PUF, 1957. Extracts from Bergson selected by Deleuze.
  Cinema I: L'image-mouvement. Paris: Minuit, 1983.
  Cinema II:L'image-temps. Paris: Minuit, 1985.
  David Hume, la vie, son oeuvre. Paris: PUF, 1952. Extracts from Hume with an introduction
      by Deleuze and Andre Cresson.
  Dialogues. With Claire Parnet. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.
  Difference et Repetition. Paris: PUF, 1968.
  Empirisme et subjectivite. Paris: PUF, 1953. 3rded., 1980.
  Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986.
  Francis Bacon. Logique de la Sensation. 2 vols. Paris: Ed. de la Difference, 1981.
  Instincts et Institutions. Paris: Hachette, 1953. Texts selected by Deleuze.
  Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969.
  Nietzsche. Paris: PUF, 1965. Extracts from Nietzsche with an introduction by Deleuze.
  Nietzsche et la philosophic. Paris: PUF, 1962. 4th ed., 1973.
  Un nouvel archiviste. Illustrations by d'Ipoustiguy. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972. Reprint
      of "Un nouvel archiviste."
  La philosophie critique de Kant. Paris: PUF, 1963.
  Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Rpt. Paris: 10/18, 1971. Lengthy intro-
      duction by Deleuze with the text of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's La Venus a lafourrure.
  Proust et les signes. Paris: PUF, 1964. Augmented 2nd ed., 1970.
  Spinoza et le probleme de I'expression. Paris: Minuit, 1968.
  Spinoza. Philosophie pratique. Paris: PUF, 1970. Augmented 2nded. Paris: Minuit, 1981.
  Superpositions. With Carmelo Bene. Paris: Minuit, 1979. The play, Richard HI, by Bene with
      an essay on Bene by Deleuze entitled "Un manifeste de moins."
I "A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d'un probleme plus general." Le Monde, June 19-20,
       1977, p. 16. Reprinted Recherches, Les Untorelli, no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 179-184.
      Interview from June 5, 1977.
P "L'ascension du social." Postface to Jacques Donzelot, La police des families. Paris: Minuit,
       1977, pp. 220.
  "Capitalisme et schizophrenic." L'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 47-55.
      Interview with Catherine Bakis-Clement from March 2, 1972.
  "La conception de la difference chez Bergson." Etudes bergsoniennes, vol. 4(1956), pp. 79-112.
  "Deux regimes de fous." In Psychanalyse et Semiotique. Actes du Collogue de Milan, 1974.
      Ed. Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10/18, 1975, pp. 165-186. Presentation by Deleuze
      with discussion.
  "Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe." Critique, no. 343 (December 1975), pp. 1207-1227.
      Review of Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish). Modified and
      reprinted as "Un nouveau cartographe" in Foucault, pp. 31-51.
  "En quoi la philosophie peut servir a des mathematiciens ou meme a des musiciens, meme et
      surtout quand elle ne parle pas de musique ou de mathematiques," in Vincennes, ou le
      desir d'apprendre. Ed. Pierre Merlin. Paris: Alain, Moreau, 1979, pp. 120-121.
  "Faille et feux locaux. Kostas Axelos." Critique no. 275 (April 1970), pp. 344-351.
  "Grandeur de Yasser Arafat." Revue d'EtudesPalestiniennes, no. 10 (Winter 1984), pp. 41-43.
  "L'Homme: une existence douteuse." Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 81 (June 1-7, 1966), pp.
      32-34. Review of Michel Foucault, Les mots et les chases (The Order of Things).
I "Huit ans apres." L'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 99-102. Interview with
      Catherine Clement from 1980.
                                     BIBLIOGRAPHY D 583

  "Hume." In La philosophic, ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 2, pp. 226-239.
I "Les intellectuals et le pouvoir." L 'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 3-10. Dis-
      cussion with Michel Foucault.
I Interview. Liberation. October 23, 1980, pp. 16-17.
I Interview. Liberation. October 3, 1983, pp. 30-31.
I Interview. Le Monde. October 6, 1983, pp. 1,17.
I Interview. L'autre journal, no. 8 (October 1985), pp. 12-22.
I Interview. Liberation. September 2, 1986, pp. 27-28 and September 3, 1986, p. 38.
P "Introduction a 'La Bete humaine' de Balzac." In Oeuvres Completes d'Emile Zola. Paris:
      Cercle du Livre Precieux, 1967. Vol. 6, pp. 13-21. Modified and reprinted under the title
      "Zola et la felure" as an appendix to Logique du sens.
P Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, Legaisavoir. Lesfragments posthumes (1881-82). Trans.
      Pierre Klossowski. Vol. 5 of Oeuvres philosophiques completes. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, pp.
      i-iv. With Michel Foucault.
P Introduction to Johann Malfatti von Monteregio, Etudes sur la mathese, ou anarchie et
      hierarchic de la science. Paris: Ed. du Griffon d'Or, 1946, pp. ix-xxiv.
  "Klossowski et le corps-langage." Critique, no. 214 (March 1965), pp. 199-219. Modified and
     reprinted as an appendix to Logique du sens.
  "Lettre a Michel Cressole," in Michel Cressole, Deleuze. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973,
     pp. 107-118. Translated as "I Have Nothing to Admit."
  "Lucrece et le naturalisme." Etudes philosophiques, series 16, no. 1 (Jan.-March 1961), pp.
      19-29. Modified and reprinted under the title "Lucrece et le simulacre" as an appendix to
     Logique du sens.
  "Lucrece et le simulacre." See "Lucrece et le naturalisme."
  "Methode de dramatisation." Bulletin de la Soci'ete Francaise de Philosophic, vol. 61, no. 3
     (July-September 1967), pp. 89-118. Presentation followed by discussion.
  "Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui." See "Une theorie d'Autrui."
  "Mystere d'Ariane." Etudes nietzscheennes (1963).
  "Nous croyons au caractere constructiviste de certaines agitations de gauche." Recherches,
     Les Untorelli, no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 149-150. Statement on repression in Italy writ-
     ten by Deleuze and signed by a number of French Intellectuals, September 20, 1977.
  "Un nouvel archiviste." Critique, no. 274 (March 1970), pp. 195-209. Review of Michel
     Foucault, L'arch'eologie du savoir. Modified and reprinted in Foucault, pp. 11-30.
  "Penseenomade." In Nietzscheaujourd'hui?Vol. I.Paris: 10/18, 1973, pp. 159-190. Presen-
     tation by Deleuze to the Colloque de Cerisy (1972), with discussion.
  "Philosophic et minorite." Critique, no. 369 (February 1978), pp. 154-155.
  "Laphotographic est deja tireedansleschoses," Cahiersdu Cinema, no. 352 (October 1983),
     pp. 35-40. Interview with Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni.
  "Platon et le simulacre." See "Renverser le platonisme."
P Preface to Antonio Negri, L 'anomaliesauvage. Puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza. Paris: PUF,
      1981, pp. 9-12.
P Preface to Guy Hocquenghem. L'apres-mai desfaunes. Paris: Grasset, 1974, pp. 7-17.
P "Qu'est-ce que c'est, tes 'machines desirantes' a toi?" Les Temps Modernes, no. 316
     (November 1972), pp. 854-856. Introduction to Pierre Benichou, "Saint Jackie, Come-
     dienne et Bourreau."
  "A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?" In La philosophie. Ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris:
     Hachette, 1979. Vol. 4, pp. 293-339. (Abridged version ofHistoire de la philosophie. 8 vol-
     umes. Paris: Hachette, 1972-1973.)
  "Renverser le platonisme (les simulacres)," Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 71, no. 4
                                     584 D BIBLIOGRAPHY

     (October-December 1967), pp. 426-438. Modified and reprinted under the title "Platon et
     le simulacre" as an appendix to Logique du sens.
  "De Sacher Masoch au masochisme." Arguments, vol. 5, no. 21 (Jan.-April 1961), pp. 40-46.
P "Schizologie." Preface to Louis Wolfson, Le schizo et les langues. Paris: Gallimard, 1970,
     pp. 5-23.
  "Le schizophrene et le mot." Critique, no. 255/256 (August-September 1968), pp. 731-746.
     Modified and reprinted in Logique du sens, series 2 and 13.
  "Schizophrenic et societe" in Encyclopaedia Universalis (1985), vol. 16, pp. 524-527.
     "Sens et valeurs." Arguments, vol. 3, no. 15 (Sept.-Dec. 1959), pp. 20-28. Modified and
     reprinted in Chapter 1 of Nietzsche et la philosophic.
  "Spinoza et la methode generate de M. Gueroult." Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol.
     74, no. 2 (April-June 1970), pp. 426-437.
  "Spinoza et nous." Revue de Synthese, 3rd series, nos. 89-91 (January-September 1978).
     Reprinted as Chapter 6 of Spinoza. Philosophic pratique, 2nd ed.
  "Une theorie d'Autrui. Michel Tournier." Critique, no. 241 (June 1967), pp. 503-525. Modi-
     fied and reprinted under the title "Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui" as an appen-
     dix to Logique du sens. Reprinted as the postface to Tournier, Vendredi, ou les limbes du
     Paciflque. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
P "Trois problemes de groupe." Preface to Felix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalite. Paris:
     Maspero, 1972, pp. i-xi.
  "Unite de 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.'" Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 68, no.
     4 (Oct.-Dec. 1963), pp. 427-442.
  "Sur la volonte de puissance et 1'eternel retour." In Nietzsche. Cahiers de Royaumont. Paris:
     Minuit, 1967, pp. 275-287.
  "Zola et la felure." See "Introduction a 'la Bete humaine' de Balzac."

                                       by Felix Guattari

                                             English
    Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. New York: Penguin,
        1984. A selection of essays from Psychanalyse et transversalite and the two versions of La
        revolution moleculaire, with a previously unpublished essay, "Capitalistic Systems,
        Structures and Processes" (with Eric Alliez), later published in French in Guattari, Les
       annees d'hiver.
    "Becoming-Woman." Trans. Rachel McComas and Stamos Metzidakis. Semiotext(e),
       Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1(1981), pp. 86-88. Also translated as "Becoming a Woman" by
        Rosemary Sheed in Guattari, Molecular Revolution, pp. 233-235. Translation of "Devenir
       femme," La revolution moleculaire (both editions).
    "Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist." Trans. Suzanne Fletcher. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol.
        2, no. 3(1977), pp. 87-98.
    "Freudo-Marxism." Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3(1977), pp. 73-75. Intended for
       Le Nouvel Observateur but never published in French.
    "Genet Regained." Trans. Brian Massumi. LAICA Journal, vol. 5, no. 47 (Spring 1987).
I   Interview with Felix Guattari by Mark Seem. Diacritics, vol. 4, no. 3 (Fall 1974), pp. 38-41.
    "Like an Echo of a Collective Melancholy." Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Semiotext(e), The Ger-
        man Issue, vol. 4, no. 2 (1982), pp. 102-110. Translation of "Comme un echo de la
        melancholic collective," in La revolution moleculaire (10/18 edition).
I   "The New Alliance." Interview with Sylvere Lotringer. Impulse, vol. 10, no. 2 (Winter 1982),
       pp. 41-44.
                                     BIBLIOGRAPHY D 585

  "The Proliferation of Margins." Trans. Richard Gardner and Sybil Walker. Semiotext(e),
     Italy: Autonomia, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 108-111.
  "Psychoanalysis and Politics." Trans. Paul Foss. Language, Sexuality and Subversion. Ed.
     Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 125-133. Transla-
     tion of "Psychanalyse et politique," first published in Politique et psychanalyse. Revised
     and published in La revolution moleculaire under the title "Les luttes du desir et la
     psychanalyse"; translated in The Molecular Revolution as "Psychoanalysis and the Strug-
     gles of Desire."
  "Psycho-Analysis and Schizo-Analysis." Trans. Janis Forman. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol.
     2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 77-85. Extracts from an interview about Anti-Oedipus with Arno
     Munster originally published in the Frankfurter Rundschau (January 17,1973). Other por-
     tions of this interview were published as "La fin de fetichismes," La revolution moleculaire.
  Response to questionnaire on the city. Trans. Bruce Henderson. Zone, no.l/2(1985),p.460.
I "Why Italy?" Trans. John Johnston. Semiotext(e), Italy: Autonomia, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp.
     234-237. Interview, unpublished in French.

                                              French
  Les annees d'hiver. Paris: Barrault, 1986. Collected essays 1980-1985.
  L'inconscient moleculaire. Essais deSchizo-analyse. Paris: Recherches, 1979.
  Les nouveaux espaces de liberte. With Toni Negri. Followed by Guattari, "Des libertes en
      Europe," and Negri, "Lutte archeoligique." Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985.
  Psychanalyse et transversalit'e. Preface by Gilles Deleuze ("Trois problemes de groupe").
      Paris: Maspero, 1972. Collected essays 1965-1970.
  La revolution moleculaire. Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977. Essays 1971-1977. La
      revolution moleculaire. Paris: Union Generate d'Editions (10/18), 1980. Essays 1972-1979.
  NOTE: The two collections entitled La revolution moleculaire are substantially different. The
      Recherches edition includes a section on cinema and extensive selections on semiotics
      that do not appear in the 10/18 version; the 10/18 version deals extensively with the Italian
      Autonomia movement.
I Interview. L'Autre Journal, no. 5 (May 1985), pp. 6-22.
  "Masses et minorites a la recherche d'une nouvelle strategic." Recherches, Les Untorelli, no.
      30 (November 1977), pp. 113-122.
  "Semiologies signifiantes et semiologies asignifiantes," in Psychanalyse et semiotique. Actes
      du Colloque de Milan, 1974. Ed. Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10/18, 1975, pp. 151-163.
This page intentionally left blank
Index
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                                          Index




                             Compiled by Hassan Melehy

Adam, Paul: 572 n. 9                                  segmentarity, 211-12; and territorial
Aesthetics: and smooth and striated space,            assemblage, 327-28; of thought, 15-17;
  492-99. See also Art; Epistemology                  and tracing, 15, 20; and writing, 5-7. See
Affect: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and              also Rhizome; State apparatus;
  body, 260-61; definition of, xvi; and               Stratification
  haeccity, 261-62; and war machine, 400.           Archimedes: and nomad science, 361-63
  See also Spinoza, Baruch                          Architecture: and consistency, 329; and
Afrikaans: as major language, 102                     State science, 364-65. See also
Agriculture: West as, 18                              Geometry; Science
Aguirre, the Wrath of God: 126                      Ardant, Gabriel: 568 n. 35
A la recherche du temps perdu: 271-72, 289,         Ardant, Will: 568 n. 35
   319                                              Aristotle: and war machine, 417
Alembert's equation: 335                            Arithmetic: see Mathematics
Alliez, Eric: 568 n. 36                             Arland, Marcel: 195
Alphandery, Paul: 520 n. 23, 557-58 n. 59           Aron, Raymond: 563 nn. 104, 107
Althusser, Louis: 130, 536 n. 6                     Arrow, Kenneth: 519 n. 14, 544 n. 80
Amado, Jorge: 553 n. 13                             Art: and becoming, 316-17; and nomad,
Amalrik, Andrei: 470                                  401-2; salvation through, 185-87; and
America: as flow, 20; as rhizome, 19                  smooth and striated space, 492-99; and
Amin, Samir: 566 n. 23, 570 n. 53; and                territory, 320-21
  capitalist axiomatic, 465, 469; and social        Artaud: 542 n. 48; and body without
  formation, 435-36                                   organs, 150, 158-59, 160, 162-63; and
Analogy: and representational thinking,               drugs, 285; and nomad thought, xiii; and
  xi-xii; and resemblance, 236-37. See also           thought, 377-78
  Representation                                    Artisan: and flow of matter, 409; and
"And": and linguistic variation, 99; vs. "to          metallurgy, 411-12
  be," 25, 98                                       Artist: and population, 345-46. See also Art
Anti-Oedipus: xi, 3, 566 n. 22                      Asimov, Isaac: 540 n. 23
Aphorism: as plateau, 23                            Assemblage: and becoming, 306; and
Arborescent schema: and becoming,                     becoming-animal, 242, 257-60; and body
   293-94; critique of, xii-xiii; of evolution,       without organs, 156, 157-58; book as, 4;
   10-11; as hierarchy, 16-17; of language,           collective, of enunciation, 80, 85, 88; and
  92-95; and line and point, 293-94; and              consistency, 331-34; and content and
  rhizome, 6-7, 20, 34, 328-29, 506; and              expression, 88-89, 504-5; and

                                                  589
                                      590 INDEX

 deterritorialization, 333-34, 504-5; of      Bartok, Bela: 342; and refrain, 349-50
 enunciation, 83, 87; and exchange,           Basaglia, Franco: x
  437-41; and faciality, 180-81; and form     Bataille, Georges: 383
 and matter, 340; and haeccity, 262-63;       Bateson, Gregory: 543 n. 62; and intensity,
 and incorporeal transformation, 82; and        158; and plateau, iv, 21-22
  language, 109-10; libidinal, 37; and        Battle: and war machine, 416-23. See also
  linguistic variation, 99-100; and             War
  machine, 343-44, 510-14; molecular,         Beaufret, Jean: 529 n. 18
  213; and multiplicity, 8, 22-23, 34; and    Beaujouan, Guy: 572 n. 10
  order-word, 108-10; and refrain, 312,       Beckett, Samuel: 97-98, 199; and faciality,
  323-27; and regime of signs, 119, 121-22,     173; and territorial assemblage, 503
  140-41; and State apparatus, 513; and       Becoming: and abstract machine, 252; and
  stratification, 503-5; and subject,           arborescence, 293-94; and assemblage,
  264-65; and subjedification, 130, 134;        306; and causality, 283-84; and
  territorial, 323-27, 332-34, 503-5; and       deterritorialization, 291-92, 306-7; and
  unconscious, 35; and war machine,             drugs, 282-86; and haeccity, 280; and
  398-403, 406-7, 513. See also Machine;        heterogeneity, 10; of major and minor
  Machinic assemblage; Multiplicity;            languages, 104-6; and majority and
  Plane of consistency                          minority, 291-93; and man, 291-93; and
Atomic bomb: and war machine, 404-5.            memory, 291-98; molecular nature of,
  See also Weapon                               292-93; and music, 299-309; and plane
Attila: and war machine, 417                    of consistency, 251-52, 507; and
Aurevilly, Barbey d': 193-94                    pragmatics, 251; and refrain, 350; and
Austin, J. L.: 77                               rhizome, 238-39, 251, 294; and
Autran, Charles: 530 n. 22                      schizoanalysis, 251; and secret, 287-90;
Axiomatic: capitalist, 454-73 passim; and       and sexuality, 275-79; and stratification,
  diagrammatic, 143-44; and State               502-3; and structuralism, 237-38; and
  apparatus, 460-73 passim; and                 transformation, 250-51; and war
  stratification, 57. See also Capitalism;      machine, 277-78
  State apparatus                             Becoming-animal: and assemblage, 242-43,
                                                257-59; of child, 14; and faciality,
Bach, Johann Sebastian: 511                      115-16, 176, 187; and line, 245; and
Bachelard,Gaston:236,238,313,555n.32            masochism, 155-56; and molecule,
Badiou, Alain: 537 n. 20                        272-75; and multiplicity, 239-52 passim;
Baer, Karl Ernst von: 46-47, 53, 254            and music, 304-5, 308-9; and plane of
Baillon, M. H.: 520 n. 20                       consistency, 258-59; and psychoanalysis,
Bailly, Jean-Christophe: 521 n. 25              259-60; and resemblance, 233-35; and
Bakhtin, Mikhail: 82, 523 n. 5, 524 n. 10,      State apparatus, 242-43; and
  525 n. 21                                     stratification, 53; and transformation,
Balandier, Georges: 535 n. 4                    252-53; and war machine, 242-43,
Balazs, Etienne: 565 n. 15                      247-48, 396; and writing, 240
Balibar, Etienne: 569 n. 48                   Beethoven, Ludwig van: 95, 270, 511; and
Balmes, Francois: 537 n. 20                     refrain, 348
Balzac, Honore de: 266                        Being: and State philosophy, xii-xiii
Bamberger, J.-R: 523 n. 5                     Bellini, Vincenzo: 307
Bantu dialects: 102                           Bene, Carmelo: and linguistic variation, 98
Barnes, Mary: 138                             Bennet, E. A.: 521 ch. 2 n. 3
Barrague, Jean: 532 n. 3, 545 n. 87, 550 n.   Benveniste, Emile: xviii, 78, 82, 130, 541
  48,551 n. 51                                  n. 42, 554 n. 25
Barthes, Roland: 533 n. 7, 545 n. 88          Benveniste, R. E.: 10
                                       INDEX 591

Berg, Alban: 339, 552 n. 61                       becoming-animal, 156; and
Bergson, Henri: x, 237-39, 374, 483-84,           becoming-woman, 276-77; and
  486, 573 n. 17                                  deterritorialization, 156-57, 161; and
Berio, Luciano: 96,342,545 n. 87,546 n. 91        faciality, 171-72; and God, 150, 158-59;
Berlioz, Hector: 342                              and intensity, 153, 157-58, 161, 164-65;
Bernoulli: and State science, 363                 and line, 203; and map, 12, 163-64; and
Bernstein, I. S.: 553 n. 14                       metallurgy, 411; and multiplicity, 30,
Berthe, Louis: 536 n. 9, 566 n. 18                154; and organism, 4, 30, 158-59; and
Bettelheim, Bruno: 542 n. 57, 543 n. 62           plane of consistency, 72, 154-55, 158,
Bible, the: and book, 127; King James, 529        159, 165-66, 270, 506-8; and plateau,
  n. 16; numbers in, 118; and reality, 129;       158; and psychoanalysis, 151, 165; and
  and subjectification, 131. See also             schizoanalysis, 165; and signifiance,
  Christ; Christianity; Religion                  159-61; and smooth space, 479; and
Bifo, Franco Berardi: 572 n. 68                   stratification, 56, 159-63; and
Binary relations: and arborescent schema,         subjectification, 134, 159-61; and
  5; and faciality, 176-80; and multiplicity,     unconscious, 30; and Wolf-Man, 31. See
  5; and segmentarity, 210                        also Organ; Organism
Biochemistry: and stratification: 45-46,        Bolero:271
  49-50                                         Bolsheviks: 38, 88, 100, 139
Biology: and stratification, 46-48. See also    Bonnard, Pierre: 175
  Science                                       Book: American and European, 19; and
Bizet, Georges: 269; and refrain, 350             arborescent schema, 5-7; and
Black English: 93-94, 102-5                       assemblage, 22-23; classical, 5;
Black hole: and assemblage, 333-34; and           composition of, 3-4; and
  consciousness, 133; and faciality, 167-91       deterritorialization, 3-4, 11, 126-27;
  passim; and line of flight, 224; and            modern, 5-6; and multiplicity, 9; and
  refrain, 312; and segmentarity, 211; and        plateau, 22; and representation, 22-23;
  stratification, 40, 56; and                     and rhizome, 11, 22-23; and signifiance,
  subjectification, 167-68. See also White        126-27; and tracing, 24; and world, 5-6,
  wall                                            11. See also Writing
Black Panthers: and becoming, 291               Borderline: and becoming, 245-46, 249-53.
Blanche, Robert: 570 nn. 54, 60                   See also Line
Blanchot, Maurice: xiii, 265, 538 n. 29, 541    Borges, Jorge Luis: 125, 241
  n. 43, 556 n. 44                              Boulez, Pierre: 262, 267, 269, 296, 518 n.
Bloch, Jules: 562 n. 99                           22, 519 n. 8, 527 n. 39, 541 n. 36, 548 n.
Block: and becoming, 294, 299; and                14, 553-54 n. 20; and smooth and
  content and expression, 299. See also           striated space, 477-78
  Flow; Line of flight                          Bouligand, Georges: 554 n. 21, 556 n. 40,
"Blumfeld": 169                                   570 n. 61
Body: and affect, 256-57; and cartography,      Boulte, Nicolas: 537 n. 20
  260-61; and faciality, 115-16, 170-72,        Boulvert, Gerard: 569 n. 44
   176, 181; and haeccity, 260-61; and          Bourdieu, Pierre: 524-25 n. 13
  language, 80, 86; and machinic                Bradbury, Ray: 541 n. 37, 570 n. 57
  assemblage, 89, 90; and number, 391-92;       Brain: as population, 64; as rhizome,
  and order-word, 107-8; and                      15-16. See also Consciousness; Thought
  representation, 86; and State apparatus,      Braudel, Fernand: 434, 468, 558 n. 60,
  366-67. See also Faciality; Organ;              558-59 n. 64, 561 n. 79
  Organism                                      Brehier, Emile: 525 n. 18
Body without organs: 149-66 passim; and         Brekle, Herbert: and linguistic competence,
  assemblage, 4, 157-58; and                      92
                                       592 INDEX

Brelet, Gisele: 547 n. 102, 551 n. 50; and       Carroll, Lewis: 76, 437
  refrain, 349-50                                Cartography: and body, 260-61; and
Breytenbach, Breyten: 527 n. 38                    rhizome, 12-15. See also Map
Broglie, Louis de: 143                           Castaneda, Carlos: 138-39, 227-28, 248-49,
Bronte, Charlotte: 261                             282, 519 n. 7, 556 n. 38; and body
Brossolet, Guy: 520 n. 15, 563 n. 104, 564         without organs, 161-62
  n. 1ll                                         Castle, The: 132
Brouwer, L. E. J.: 570 n. 61                     Causality: and evolution, 431; and plane of
Brownian motion: and crowd, 30; as                 consistency, 283-84
  fractal, 487; and multiplicity, 33. See also   Cellular chemistry: and double
  Mathematics; Physics; Science                    articulation, 42; and stratification,
Brunhoff, Suzanne de: 538 n. 27                    58-60. See also Science
Brunschvicg, Leon: 554 n. 23                     Center: and multiplicity, 17-18; and
Brunswick, Ruth Mack: and Wolf-Man, 26,            segmentarity, 209-10; and stratification,
  31, 35. See also Freud, Sigmund;                 50-52. See also Circle
  Psychoanalysis                                 Certeau, Michel de: 527 n. 36
Buchner, Georg: 25                               Cezanne, Paul: 343, 347, 493
Buddha: and rhizome, 20. See also Religion       Chabrier, Emmanuel: and refrain, 350
Bureaucracy: of East and West, 19-20; and        Charles, Daniel: 542 n. 51, 545 n. 87
  segmentarity, 210, 214; and                    Charriere, Georges: 561 n. 82, 575 n. 37
  subjectification, 132; and tracing, 15. See    Chasles, Michel: 554 n. 28
  also State apparatus                           Chatelet, Francois: 461, 565-66 n. 16
Burroughs, William S.: 6, 152, 531 n. 14,        Chatelet, Gilles: 574 n. 27
  532 n. 8                                       Chatrian, Alexandre: 246
Butor, Michel: 546 n. 89                         Chaunu, Pierre: 558 n. 60; and smooth
                                                   space, 479-80
Cage, John: 267, 269, 344, 545 n. 87             Chauvin, Remy: 10, 522 n. 15
Calame-Griaule, Genevieve: 539-40 n. 21          Chekhov, Anton: 206
Caldwell, Erskine: 520 n. 18                     Cheng, Francois: 280, 542 n. 45
Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew,         Chevalier, Louis: 558 n. 61
  The: 185                                       Childe, V. Gordon: 563 n. 101; and
Canetti, Elias: 33-34, 107-8, 214, 525 n. 17       metallurgy, 412, 415; and State
Canguilhem, Georges: 522 n. 9, 539 n. 13           apparatus, 428-29, 450-51
Cannibalism: and presignifying regime,           Chomsky, Noam: 524 n. 7, 530 n. 38; and
  118                                              Black English, 102; and grammatical
Capgras, Joseph: 119-20                            tree, 5, 7, 12, 15,91,92, 101, 148; and
Capitalism: axiomatic of, 454-73 passim;           Labov, 93-94; and minor language, 103;
  and deterritorialization, 453-56; and            and regime of signs, 141
  rhizome, 20; and social formation,             Chopin, Frederic: 271
  436-37; and smooth and striated space,         Christ: 124, 301, 533 n. 7; and faciality,
  490-92; and State apparatus, 434-35,             176-79, 182, 184-85, 187, 189; and
  447-48, 452-59; and war, 421. See also           incorporeal transformation, 81. See also
  Axiomatic; State apparatus                       Bible, the; Christianity; Religion
Capture: and State apparatus, 424-73             Christen, Yves: 518-19n. 5
  passim                                         Christianity: semiotic of, 125; translation
Cardascia, Guillaume: 568 n. 33                    of, 137. See also Christ; Religion
Carnot, Nicolas: and State science, 363          Chromaticism: and linguistics, 95-100. See
Carpenter, Edmund: 557 n. 56, 572 nn. 6-7,         also Music; Painting
  574 n. 28                                      Chronochromie: 320
Carriere, Mathieu: 542 n. 50, 553 n.l 1          Church: and becoming-animal, 247-48;
                                      INDEX 593

  and segmentarity, 218. See also                Subjectivity; Thought
  Christianity; Religion                       Consistency: and assemblage, 327-28,
CIA: and war machine, 403                        331-34; and deterritorialization, 336-37;
Ciguri: 160                                      and expression, 329-33; and
Cinema I: 518 n. 21                              heterogeneity, 328-31; and music, 343;
Cinema II: 518 n. 21                             and plateau, xiv; and State apparatus,
Circle: and segmentarity, 208-11; and sign,      431-32, 434-35; and stratification,
   117. See also Center; Geometry                335-37. See also Assemblage;
City: and smooth and striated space, 481.        Heterogeneity;-Multiplicity; Plane of
  See also Town                                  consistency; Stratification
Cixous, Helene: xii                            Constant: linguistic, 92, 93-94; and minor
Clairvaux, Bernard de: 364                       language, 101-10. See also Linguistics;
Classicism: and form and substance, 338          Variation
Clastres, Helene: 553 n. 15                    Content: and abstract machine, 511-12;
Clastres, Pierre: 528 n. 7, 557 n. 58; and       and articulation, 44, 64; and assemblage,
  evolutionism, 429; and war machine,            88-89, 504-5; and block, 299; and
  357-59                                         deterritorialization, 87-89, 108-10, 307;
Clausewitz, Karl von: 218, 559 n. 68, 571        and diagrammatic, 142-45; and
  n, 64; and State apparatus, 355; and war,      expression, 44-45, 111; and form, 43-44;
  419-21,467                                     and language, 85-91; molecular nature
Cleisthenes: and State apparatus, 211-12         of, 57-58; and nomad science, 369; and
Clement, Catherine: Deleuze's interview          sign, 117; and stratification, 43, 57,
  with, 517n. 2                                  60-73 passim, 502-3; and variation, 94.
Clement, Pierre: 562 n. 98                       See also Expression, Form; Linguistics;
Clerambault, Gatian: 119-20, 128                 Matter; Substance
Cline, W. B.: 562 n. 98                        Cooper, David: 525 n. 16
Coding: and articulation, 41; and faciality,   Coriat, Benjamin: 571 n. 66
  170; and music, 11-12; and rhythm,           Cosmos: and deterritorialization, 326-27,
  313-14; and segmentarity, 222-24; and          337; and modernity, 342-43
  State apparatus, 427-28, 434, 448-51,        Cotard, Jules: 531 n. 2
  459-60; and stratification, 40, 52-55; and   Courtship: and territory, 324-25. See also
  substance, 41; and territory, 322; and         Love; Sexuality
  tools, 60-61; and translation, 52-53. See    Cousteau, Jacques: 549 n. 26
  also Language; Signifiance                   "Crack-up, The": 198-200
Cogito: and subjectivity, 128, 130-32. See     Cricket on the Hearth, The: 175
  also Self(Moi)                               Cromwell, Oliver: 125
Communication: and language, 75-79, 85.        Crowd: and multiplicity, 30; and
  See also Information; Information              romanticism, 341
  science                                      Crusades, the: and assemblage, 89; and
Compars: and royal science, 369-70. See          flow, 220-21; and history, 23-24; and war
  also Dispars                                   machine, 383-84. See also Christianity;
Composition: see Consistency                     Religion
Computer science: and arborescent              Crystallization: and stratification, 49-50;
  schema, 16. See also Information               57-60
  science; Science; Technology                 Cuenot, Lucien: 548 n. 21
Concept: and identity, xi; line as, 22; and    Cummings, E. E.: and linguistic variation,
  State philosophy, xii-xiii. See also           99
  Epistemology; Idea; Thought                  Cuvier, Georges: 46-47, 53, 254
Consciousness: and subjectification,
  131-32, 134. See also Epistemology;          Daisy Miller: 290
                                     594 INDEX

Dalcq, Albert: 531-32 n. 7                       141-43, 508; and rhizome, 9-10, 21; and
Dali, Salvador: 27                              science, 372; and segmentarity, 222-24;
Darien, Georges: 523 n. 2                       and semiotic, 135, 138-39; and sign,
Darius: 122                                     67-68, 112, 113, 115-17, 121-23; and
Darwin, Charles: 46-49, 234. See also           State apparatus, 432-34; and
 Evolution                                      stratification, 53-57; and
Daudin, Henri: 538 n. 1                         subjectification, 133; and substance, 41;
Debussy, Claude: 270-71, 299, 319, 341-43,      and variation, 99-100; and war machine,
  545 n. 87; and becoming, 308; and             353. See also Line of flight; Nomads;
  faciality, 169; and refrain, 303, 347         Territory
Decalcomania: and rhizome, 12-15. See         Detienne, Marcel: 399, 426, 556 n. 41, 560
  also Map; Tracing                             n. 78
Decoding: see Coding                          Devaux, Emile: 522-23 n. 24, 533 n. 6
Deconstruction: and feminism, xii             Devil, the: and becoming-animal, 239,
Delage, Roger: 551-52 n. 59                     252-53
Deleuze, Gilles: ix-x; and Guattari, xi-xv    Dhorme, Edouard: 529 n. 12
Deligny, Fernand: 14, 202-3, 547 n. 1         Diaboliques: 194
Democritus: 361; and smooth space,            Diagrammatic: 141 -48. See also Axiomatic
  363-64, 489; and State science, 363. See    Dialect: and major language, 101-3
 also Lucretius; Molecule                     Dialogues: 517
De Niro, Robert: and becoming-animal,         Dickens, Charles: 175
  274                                         Dieterlen, Germaine: 563 n. 102
Derrida, Jacques: xi, 555 n. 32; and war      Difference et repetition: x, 517 n. 4
  machine, 417                                Dillard, J. L.: 527 n. 39
Desargues, Gerard: 363, 365                   Dimension: and becoming, 251-52; of
Descartes, Rene: 128, 530 n. 32                 multiplicity, 8-9. See also Geometry;
Desire: and assemblage, 399-400; and body       Space
 without organs, 154-55, 165; and             Discourse: direct, 84; indirect, 76-77, 80,
 psychoanalysis, 13; and segmentarity,          84, 99-100. See also Language;
 215. See also Libido; Love; Sexuality          Linguistics
Despot: as flow, 19-20; and signifying        Dislocation, La: 23-24
  regime, 116-17. See also State apparatus    Dispars: and nomad science, 370-71. See
Dessert, Daniel: 555 n. 30                      also Compars
Detective novel: as literary genre, 192-93    DNA: and evolution, 10
Deterritorialization: and abstract machine,   Dobb, Maurice: 537 n. 19, 569 n. 49
  142-45; and assemblage, 333-34, 504-5;      Domination: and language, 101, 105-6
  and becoming, 291-92, 306-7; and body       Dos Passos, John: 520 n. 18
  without organs, 156-57, 161; and book,      Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: 196, 257, 530 n. 29
  126; and capitalism, 453-56; and            Double articulation: and diagrammatic,
  consistency, 336-37; and content and           142-43; and stratification, 40-74 passim,
  expression, 87-89, 108-10, 307; and           502-3. See also Content; Expression
  faciality, 172, 174-91 passim; and flow,    Doyle, Arthur Conan: 40
  219-21, 226; and language, 61-63; and       Dream: and multiplicity, 30; and
 line, 203-5; and line of flight, 510; and      representation, 29-30. See also
  map tracing, 15; and multiplicity, 9, 32,     Unconscious
  33; and music, 301-3; and nomads,           Dreiser, Theodore: 520 n. 18
  381-84; and novella, 195-200; and plane     Dreissche, T. van den: 549 n. 29
  of consistency, 70-71, 270, 272; and        Drugs: and perception, 282-86
 population, 123-25, 345-46; and refrain,     Dualism: and becoming, 276-77; and map
  300-302, 347-48; and regime of signs,         tracing, 13-14; and multiplicity, 20. See
                                       INDEX 595

 also Double articulation                       Ethnology: and State apparatus, 429-30
Duby, Georges: 537 n. 19                        Ethology: and consistency, 336
Duccio: 185                                     Euclid: and State science, 109, 364; and
Ducrot, Oswald: 77, 78, 80                        striated space, 371, 489
Duhem, Pierre: 540 n. 29                        Euclidean space: and multiplicity, 485-86;
Dumas, Alexandre: 250                             and stratification, 47. See also
Dumezil, Georges: 556 nn. 41, 43, 559 n.          Geometry; Space
 67, 564 n. 8,565 n. 10; and                    Evans-Pritchard, E. E.: 535 n. 3
 becoming-animal, 242-43; and State             Evolution: and becoming, 238-39; and
 apparatus, 351-52, 371, 424-26; and war          heterogeneity, 10-11; and representation,
 machine, 354                                     10; and State apparatus, 429-31; and
Duns Scotus, John: 540-41 n. 33                   stratification, 47-49
Dupouy, Roger: 532 n. 11, 540 n. 32             Exchange: and assemblage, 437-41; and
Dupreel, Eugene: and consistency, 328-29          territory, 440. See also Capitalism
Durkheim, Emile: 218-19, 376                    Experimentation: and body without
Duvignaud, Jean: 237                              organs, 149-51, 161-62, 164; and
                                                  interpretation, 162
Earth: and deterritorialization, 40; and        Expression: and abstract machine, 511-12;
  romanticism, 338-42. See also                   and articulation, 44, 64; and assemblage,
  Deterritorialization; Territory                 88-89, 504-5; and block, 299; and
Ecce Homo: 269                                    consistency, 329-33; and content, 43-45;
Ecumenon: and stratification, 50, 52, 55,         and deterritorialization, 87-89, 108-10,
  56, 72-73. See also Planomenon                  307; and diagrammatic, 142-45; and
Ego: Freudian, xviii. See also                    faciality, 179-80; and language, 85-91;
  Psychoanalysis; Self (Moi); Subjectivity        molar nature of, 57-58; and nomad
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus: 547 n. 7, 548-49 n.     science, 369; and order-word, 108-9; and
  25, 550n.38                                     regime of signs, 111,140-41; and sign,
Eichendorff, Joseph: 550 n. 47                    117; and stratification, 43, 57, 60-73
Einstein, Albert: 484, 501, 511                   passim, 502-3; and territory, 317-18; and
Eisenstein, Sergei: 413-14, 533 n. 10, 550        variation, 94. See also Content; Double
  n. 48; and faciality, 184                       articulation; Form
Eliade, Mircea: 548 n. 18, 564 n. 2             Exteriority: and assemblage, 23; and
Eliot, T. S.: 520 n. 18                           multiplicity, 9; and nomad thought,
Emmanuel, Arghiri: 568 n. 36, 569 n. 49           xii-xii, 377; and stratification, 49-52,
Emperaire, Jose: 557 n. 54                        57-58; and territory, 317-18; and war
Engels, Friedrich: 427, 566 n. 25, 568-69 n.      machine, 24, 351-80 passim. See also
  41                                              Interiority
English: as major language, 102
Enunciation: and assemblage, 7, 22, 37;         Fabric: and smooth and striated space,
  and incorporeal transformation, 82-83;          475-77
  and nomadology, 23; and order-word,           Faciality: and abstract machine, 168-70,
  107; social character of, 79-80; subject        174-91 passim; and assemblage, 180-81;
  of, 129. See also Linguistics; Statement        and becoming, 292-93; and
Epistemology: and war machine, 361-74             becoming-animal, 176, 187; and body
  passim. See also Concept; Idea;                 without organs, 171-72; and Christ,
  Subjedification; Subjectivity; Thought          176-79, 182, 184-85, 187, 189; and
Erckmann, Emile: 246                              coding, 170; and deterritorialization,
Ernst, Max: and faciality, 182                    61-62, 172, 174-91; and expression,
Esquirol, Jean: 119-20                            179-80; and language, 60-62; and line of
Ethics: 153, 257                                  flight, 188; and multiplicity, 182-83; and
                                       596 INDEX

  refrain, 301; and rhizome, 190-91; and          passim; and variation, 95. See also
  schizoanalysis, 188;and semiotic,               Content; Matter
   180-82; and sign, 117; and signifiance,      Fort-Da: and refrain, 299. See also Freud,
   115-16, 179-82; and subjectification,          Sigmund; Psychoanalysis
   179-82. See also Body                        Fortes, Meyer: 535 n. 3, 536 n. 9
Farachi, Armand: 23                             Foucault, Michel: xi, xviii, 517 n. 8, 518 n.
Fascism: and capitalist axiomatic, 462-63;        20, 528 n. 5, 530-31 n. 39, 536-37 n. 16,
  andsegmentarity, 214-15;and State               538 n. 1, 556 n. 44; and language, 66-67;
  apparatus, 230-31; as suicidal State, 231.      and nomad thought, xiii; and
  See also State apparatus; Totalitarianism       order-word, 87; and power, xvii, 224; and
Faulkner, William: 261, 292, 520 n. 18, 572       regime of signs, 140
  n.2                                           Fourquet, Francois: 566 n. 16
Faure, Elie: 413                                Fractal: and multiplicity, 486-88. See also
Faye, Jean-Pierre: 82, 139, 536 n.l 1,            Mathematics; Number
  5 70-7 I n . 62                               Fradin, Jacques: 566 n. 25
Feminism: and deconstruction, xii; and          Francis, Saint: 178
  psychoanalysis, xi                            Francis Bacon: 518 n. 21
Ferenczi, Sandor: and becoming-animal,          Francois I: 221-22
  259                                           "Franglais": 102
Fernandez, Dominique: 303-4, 307                Freud, Sigmund: 5, 14, 18, 29-30, 125, 127,
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: and State                241, 284, 519 n. 9, 541 n. 41, 544 n. 78;
  philosophy, xii                                 and becoming-animal, 259; and body
Fiedler, Leslie: 282-83, 520 n. 18                without organs, 164; and multiplicity, 31;
Film: and becoming-animal, 233; and               and Wolf-Man, 26-38 passim. See also
  faciality, 168, 172, 175, 184; and              Psychoanalysis
  movement, 281                                 Fried, Michael: 546 n. 89, 575 n. 38
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: 194, 198-200, 206,        Friendship theorem: 17
  229, 520 n. 18; and becoming, 248, 260,       Fuller, J. F. C.: 560
  279; and smooth space, 482
Flaubert, Gustave: 541 n. 39                    Gaelic: as minor language, 102
Fleutiaux, Pierrette: 200-202                   Galbraith, John Kenneth: 461, 524 n. 12
Flore, Joachim de: 530 n. 23                    Galileo: 511
Flow: and book, 3-4; and capitalist             Galois, Evariste: 142
  axiomatic, 468-69; and                        Game theory: and State apparatus, 352-53
  deterritorialization, 11; and matter,         Gardiner, Alan Henderson: 541 n. 40
  409-10; and nomads, 363, 404-15               Gaulle, Charles de: and May 1968, 216;
  passim; and segmentarity, 217-21,               and State apparatus, 424-25
  225-26; and State apparatus, 448-49,          Gautier, Emile Felix: 537 n. 23, 557 n. 57
  452-53, 456, 459-60. See also Line of         Gavi, Philippe: 274
  flight; Rhizome                               Gay rights movement: and psychoanalysis,
Foch, Ferdinand: and war, 416                     xi
Focus: 291-92                                   Genesis, Book of: 87. See also Bible, the
Forbes, Robert James: 563 n. 103                Genetics: and stratification, 53; and
Form: and abstract machine, 511; and             language, 62-63
  articulation, 41; and becoming-animal,        Genghis Khan: 226; and war machine, 354,
  252-53; and classicism, 338; and content        392-93,417-19
  and expression, 89; and intensity, 253;       Genseric: 226
  and language, 85-86; and matter, 407-9;       Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Etienne: 45-48, 55,
  of State, 448-60 passim; and                    254-55, 542 n. 52
  stratification, 43, 51-52, 54, 59-60, 60-73   Geology: and stratification, 40
                                       INDEX D 597

Geometry: and nomad science, 367; and             becoming, 276-77, 280; and individual,
  State apparatus, 212, 362-65. See also          253; and linguistics, 263-65; and plane of
  Mathematics; Number; Space                      consistency, 266-72, 507; and
Geroudet, Paul: 548 n. 22                         psychoanalysis, 264; and science, 369;
Giotto: 178                                       and subjectivity, 261-65. See also
Girard, Claude: 544 n. 78                         Individual; Molecule
Giscard d'Estaing, Valery: 216, 468             Haptic space: and nomad art, 492-99
Glass, Philip: 542 n. 46                        Hardy, Thomas: 186-87, 332
Glossalalie (Speaking in tongues): 96           Harmand, Jacques: 564 n. 8
Gluckman, Max: 558 n. 61                        Haudricourt, Andre: 18, 533 n. 12
God: and body without organs, 150,              Hegel, G. W. E: 269, 556 n. 42; and
  158-59; and book, 127; as cause, 3; in          Deleuze's philosophy, x; and Kleist, 268,
  East and West, 18; and prophetism,              356; and State, 385, 460
  123-24; and stratification, 40, 43-44, 58;    Heidegger, Martin: 125, 561 n. 85
  and subjectification, 128, 130. See also      Helioglobale: 158
  Religion                                      Helmholtz, Hermann von: 573 n. 14
Godard, Jean-Luc: 25, 97-98, 267; and           Herbert, Frank: 559-60 n. 70
  faciality, 172                                Herzog, Werner: 110, 126
Godelier, Maurice: 530 n. 33                    Hess, W. R.: 549 n. 29
Goethe, Johann von: 269, 540 n. 22, 542 n.      Heterogeneity: and becoming, 250; and
  52; and Kleist, 268-69, 356; and smooth         consistency, 328-31; of language,
  and striated space, 482; and State              100-101; and nomad thought, xiii, 24,
  apparatus, 378; and war machine, 24             361; and rhizome, 7-8; of social
Golea, Antoine: 548 n. 11                         formation, 435-37. See also Assemblage;
Gordon, Pierre: 539 n. 21                         Consistency; Multiplicity; Plane of
Gorz, Andre: 215-16                               consistency
Gould, Glenn: 8                                 Heusch, Luc de: 353, 528 n. 4, 543-44 n. 75
Grammar: and language instruction, 75-76.       Heyting, A.: 570 n. 71
  See also Language; Linguistics                Hierarchy: and rhizome, 21
Grammaticality: and homogeneity, 93-94;         Hilbert, David: and diagrammatic, 143
  and power, 101; and variation, 99             Hincker, Francois: 569 n. 45
Gravity: and striated space, 370                History: and memory, 295-96; natural, and
Greimas, A. J.: 528 n. 6                          evolutionism, 233-34; and nomads,
Griaule, Marcel: 415, 521 ch. 3 n. 2              23-24, 393-94; and segmentarity, 221-22;
Griaznov, Mikhail: 430, 560 n. 73                 and State apparatus, 23
Griffith, D. W.: and faciality, 175, 183, 184   Hitchcock, Alfred: 305
Grohman, Will: 546 n. 92                        Hitler, Adolf: 214, 231
Grousset, Rene: 394, 563 n. 105, 574 n. 30,     Hjelmslev, Louis: 523 n. 28, 526 n. 22, 531
  575 n. 37                                       n. 40; and content and expression, 108;
Guattari, Felix: x-xi; and Deleuze, xi-xv         and double articulation, 45, 402; and
Guerin, Daniel: 214, 537 n. 24                    stratification, 43; and variation, 99
Gueroult, Martial: 560 n. 77                    Hobbes, Thomas: and State apparatus, 357
Guerrero, Margarita: 539 n. 10                  Hocquenghem, Guy: 273
Guillaume, Gustave: 349, 541 n. 39              Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: and abstract
Guillerm, Alain: 571 n. 66                        machine, 512; and becoming-animal,
Guillerm, Daniele: 571 n. 66                      240, 258, 275; and order-word, 110
Gulik, Robert van: 532 n. 14                    Holderlin, Friedrich: 125, 268, 332, 507,
                                                  550 n. 47
Habermas, Jiirgen: 518 n. 18                    Hoist, E. von: 549 n. 29
Haeccity: and assemblage, 262-63; and           Holstein, Jonathan: 572 n. 3
                                       598 D INDEX

Homogeneity: of language, 92, 100-101;             75-76, 78-79, 85; and signifiance, 79. See
  and smooth and striated space, 488-89.           also Communication
  See also Consistency; Heterogeneity           Information science: 5, 16, 79, 179-80. See
Horticulture: East as, 18-19                       also Computer science
Hubac, Pierre: 382                              Intensity: and assemblage, 4; and body
Hugues-le-loup: 246                                without organs, 31, 153, 157-58, 161,
Human beings: and art, 320-21, 498-99;             164-65; and form, 253; and language,
  and becoming-animal, 238, 252-53;                109-10; and map, 15; and multiplicity,
 enslavement of, 456-57; and faciality,            33; and plane of consistency, 70; and
  170-71, 190-91; and music, 309. See also         plateau, xiv, 22; and pleasure, 157. See
  Man                                              also Consistency; Plane of consistency
Humboldt, Wilhelm von: and State                Interiority: and pleasure, 156-57; and State
  philosophy, xii                                  philosophy, xii-xiii; and stratification,
Hume, David: as minor philosopher, x               49-52; and territory, 317-18; of thought,
Hunt: and war, 395-96                              377. See also Exteriority
Husserl, Edmund: 192-93, 545 n. 85; and         Interpretation: and book, 127; and
  geometry, 367; and formed matter,                experimentation, 162; and faciality, 115;
  407-8, 410; and multiplicity, 483                and signifiance, 114; and
Hylomorphic model: see Matter, and form            subjectification, 138
Hyperion: 268                                   "In the Cage": 195-98
                                                Irigaray, Luce: xii
"I": and subjectification, 130. See also        Irish English: 102
   Consciousness; Self (Moi); Subjectivity      Isakower, Otto: 169
IBM: and war machine, 403                       Isomorphy: and capitalist axiomatic,
Ibn Khaldun, (Abd al-Rahman: 366, 481,             464-66; and stratification, 46. See also
   557 n. 51                                       Form
Icon: and sign, 112; and stratification, 65.
   See also Index; Linguistics; Symbol          "Jackals and Arabs": 37
Idea: and resemblance, 235; and State           Jackson, George: 204
   philosophy, xii; and war, 420. See also      Jacob, Francois: 10-11, 42, 62, 522 n. 15
   Concept; Thought                             Jacobs, Jane: 440, 565 n. 11
Identity: and State philosophy, xii-xiii; and   Jakobson, Roman: 531 n. 41
   subject and object, xi; and word, 28         James, Henry: 195-98, 290, 329, 520 n. 18
Ideology: and assemblage, 4; and content        Janequin, Clement: 300
   and expression, 68, 89-90                    Jargy, Simon: 547 n. 3
Iliad: 426                                      Jaspers, Karl: 556 n. 46
Illusion: and abstract machine, 63, 65          Jaulin, Robert: 533 n. 12
Immanence: and faith, 282; and line, 205;       Jevons, W. Stanley: 437
   and plane of consistency, 154, 266-67;       Jewish people: and becoming, 291-92; as
   and pleasure, 156-57;and rhizome, 18,20        subject, 128, 130. See also Bible, the;
Immelmann, K.: 548 n. 24                          Moses
Incorporeal transformation: and language,       Joan of Arc: 176; and becoming-woman, 277
   85; and order-word, 108-9. See also          Jones, LeRoi: 527 n. 39, 530 n. 34. See also
   Transformation                                 Black English
Index: and sign, 112; and stratification, 65.   Joset, Paul Ernst: 539 n. 11, 544 n. 77
   See also Icon; Linguistics; Symbol           Jouhandeau, Marcel: 530 n. 28
Individual: and form, 253, 254; and             Jouissance: and body without organs, 154
   haeccity, 261-62; and multiplicity, 254.     Journet, Jean-Louis: 555 n. 30
   See also Haeccity                            Joyce, James: 6, 53, 105, 127, 200, 209
Information: genetic, 10-11; and language,      Judgment: and representational thinking,
                                       INDEX D 599

   xi-xii. See also Aesthetics                   490-92; surplus, as apparatus of capture,
Julia, Dominique: 527 n. 36                      441-42. See also Capitalism; Capture;
Julien, Florence: 202                            Marx, Karl
Jung, Carl: 30, 235-36, 238, 241, 259, 411.    Laborit, Henri: 535 n. 13
   See also Freud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis     Labov, William: 93-94, 103, 524 nn. 7, 10,
Jiinger, Ernst: 403, 518 n. 3, 564 n. 6          526 n. 28
                                               Lacan, Jacques: x, 26, 171, 529 n. 9, 543 n.
Kafka, Franz: xvii, 15, 36, 37, 76, 97-98,       71. See also Psychoanalysis
  122, 225, 346, 520 n. 22, 529 n. 15,541      Lacarriere, Jacques: 539 n. 20, 566 n. 21
  n. 44, 545 n. 84, 552 n. 5; and abstract     La Casiniere, Joelle de: 520 n. 21
  machine, 512; and assemblage, 88-89,         Lagache, Daniel: 529 n. 9
  505; and becoming-animal, 243-44; and        Laing, R. D.: x
  bureaucracy, 4, 34, 214; and                 Lalonde, Michel: 527 n. 37
  deterritorialization, 306; and faciality,    Lamarck, Chevalier de: 522 n. 8
  169; and subjectification, 132; and          Land: and refrain, 347-48. See also
  variation, 94; and war machine, 24             Territory
Kandinsky, Vasili: 295, 298, 575 n. 38         Landscape: and faciality, 172-73; and
Kant, Immanuel: x, 367, 376, 417                 music, 319; and refrain, 301
Kaufmann, Arnold: 551 n. 54                    Language: and abstract machine, 148; and
Kerouac, Jack: 19,280                            deterritorialization, 61-63; and faciality,
Kesey, Ken: 520 n. 18                            60-62; and genetics, 62-63; and haeccity,
Keynesian economics: and capitalist              263-65; as heterogeneous reality,
  axiomatic, 462                                 100-101; and incorporeal
Kierkegaard, Suren: 197, 279, 281, 282,          transformation, 82; and line, 202-3;
  376, 537 n. 17                                 major and minor, 7-8, 101-10; and map
Kings of the Road: 482                           tracing, 77; and music, 95-97;
Kipling, Rudyard: 31                             philosophy of, 86; and plane of
Klaatsch, Hermann: 533 n. 6                      consistency, 91; and regime of signs,
Klee, Paul: 295, 298, 303, 304, 310, 312,        140-41, 148; and speech, 78, 92; and
  337, 342, 344, 346, 347, 551 nn. 55, 58        State apparatus, 82-83, 429-30; and
Klein, Melanie: 13-14, 541 n. 41. See also       stratification, 60-70; and subjectivity, 78.
  Freud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis                 See also Coding; Linguistics; Semiotic;
Kleist, Heinrich von: and haeccity, 268;         Sign; Signifiance
  and multiplicity, 9; and nomads, 378,        Laplanche, Jean: 541 n. 41
  381; and plane of consistency, 507; and      Laroche, Emmanuel: 557 n. 51, 572 n. 12
  rhizome, 25; and smooth and striated         Larouche, Jean Claude: 546 n. 98
  space, 482; and war machine, 4, 24,          Lautman, Albert: 485, 556 n. 39
  355-56, 400                                  Lautreamont, le Conte de: 236
Klossowski, Pierre: 131-32, 530 n. 28          Laviosa-Zambotti, Pia: 522 n. 14
Kojeve, Alexandre: 556 n. 42                   Law: and science, 369-70. See also State
Koran, the: and book, 127. See also              apparatus
  Mohammed; Religion                           Lawrence, D. H.: 186-87, 188-89, 197, 205,
Kraepelin, Emil: 119                             244, 251-52, 276, 546 n. 90
Krishna: and body without organs, 151.         Lawrence, T. E.: 563 n. 104
  See also Religion                            Leach, Edward: 246-47
Kristeva, Julia: 523 n. 27, 528 n. 8, 559-60   League of Nations: and State apparatus, 435
  n. 70                                        Leaves of Grass: 19
                                               Leclaire, Serge: and Wolf-Man, 26
La Boetie, Etienne de: 359                     Leeuw, Gerardus van der: 574 n. 29
Labor: and smooth and striated space,          Lelart, Michel: 536 n. 15
                                      600 D INDEX

Lenin, V. I.: 83, 100, 563 n. 108                schema, 5; and content and expression,
Lenz, Friedrich Walther: 25, 378                 90-91; and incorporeal transformation,
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre: 60, 64, 302, 395,          82; and power, 7-8, 18; and pragmatics,
   407,475, 574 n. 33                            85, 90-91, 97-98; and rhizome, 6-7; as
Letter to Hitler: 163-64                         science, 100-110. See also Coding;
Levi-Strauss, Claude: 112, 113, 209, 210,        Language; Semiotic; Sign; Signifiance
   236-37, 433, 539 n. 11, 541 n. 40           Liszt, Franz: 319
Lewin, Kurt: 152-53, 169                       Little Hans: 14, 256-59. See also Freud,
Libidinal economy: of West, xiv                  Sigmund
Libido: and body without organs, 37; and       Lizot, Jacques: 176, 209, 535-36 n. 5
   flow, 31; and machinic assemblage, 36;      Logique du sens: x, 541
   and multiplicity, 31; and unconscious,      Logos: and nomos, 369-73; and State
   35. See also Desire; Psychoanalysis;          apparatus, xiii
   Sexuality                                   Lombard, Maurice: 558 n. 60, 562 n. 97
Lied von der Erde, Das (The song of the        Lorca, Federico: 261
   earth): 339                                 Lorenz, Konrad: 34, 239, 315-16, 547 n.
Life of Saint Francis, The: 178                  46, 548 nn. 9, 12,17,23
Ligers, Z: 5 39-40 n. 21                       Lory, G. M.: 527 n. 38
Limet, Henri: 561 n. 89                        Losey, Joseph: 291-92
Lindon, Jerome: 529 n. 17                      Louis XIV: 558 n. 59
Lindqvist, N.: 527 n. 36                       Love: and body without organs, 151; and
Line: and arborescent schema, 293-94; and        marginalism, 438-39; and
   becoming, 279-80; and                         subjectification, 131-32, 134. See also
   becoming-animal, 245; and body without        Desire; Sexuality
   organs, 203; and deterritorialization,      Lovecraft, H. P.: 240, 245, 248, 251, 523 n.
   203-5; and diagrammatic, 144-45; and          32
   language, 202-3; and map, 202-3; and        Lowie, Robert: 113
   nomad art, 496-98; and novella,             Lowry, Malcolm: 533 n. 8
    195-202; and rhizome, 8, 21, 203, 505-6;   Loyola, Ignacio de: 533 n. 7
   and schizoanalysis, 202-3; and              Luca, Gherasim: 97-98, 530 n. 32
   segmentarity, 9, 202-7, 209, 211-12, 217,   Lucretius: x, 361, 489-90. See also
   222-26; and smooth space, 478-79; and         Democritus; Molecule
   State apparatus, 204; and                   Ludendorff, Erich: 563 n. 108
   subjectification, 131-32. See also          Luke, Gospel according to: 124. See a/so
   Geometry; Line of flight; Plane; Space        Bible, the
Lineage: and organization, 388, 391-92;        Lulu:\S4
   and phylum, 406-7; State apparatus, 393     Luther, Martin: 126
Line of flight: and assemblage, 88-89; and     Luxemburg, Rosa: 537 n. 20
   becoming, 277; and book, 3-4; and           Lyotard, Jean-Francois: 518 n. 17,532 n. 14
   deterritorialization, 510; and faciality,
    188; and map tracing, 14-15; and           Macciochi, Maria-Antonietta: 538 n. 32
   multiplicity, 9, 32; and plane of           Machine: and assemblage, 4, 343-44,
   consistency, 270; and point, 298; and        346-47; and capitalism, 456-59; and
   rhizome, 9, 11,21; and signifying            consistency, 330-31; and diagrammatic,
   regime, 116, 121-22; and stratification,     141-48; and multiplicity, 34; and music,
   55; and subjectification, 133-34; and war    343; and organ, 256; and segmentarity,
   machine, 422-23; and writing, 24-25. See     212-13; and social formation, 435-36;
   also Deterritorialization; Line              and voice, 303-4, 307-8. See also
Linguistics: 75-110 passim; and abstract        Assemblage; Multiplicity
   machine, 511-12; and arborescent            Machinic assemblage: and body, 88-90; and
                                     INDEX D 601

 diagrammatic, 145; and enunciation, 7,       Mathematics: nomadic nature of, 24; and
 36-37; and multiplicity, 34; and              smooth and striated space, xiii, 482-88.
 nomadology, 23; and plane of                  See also Geometry; Number; Science
 consistency, 71-73; and power, 17; and       Matheson, Richard: 279, 540 n. 23
 rhizome, 22; and stratification, 41-42,      Matter: and abstract machine, 511; and
 56-57, 68. See also Assemblage;               body without organs, 43, 153; of book, 3;
 Multiplicity                                  and now, 409-10; and form, 407-9; and
McLuhan, Marshall: 360                         plane of consistency, 43, 45; and
Mahler, Gustav: 339                            stratification, 43. See also Form;
Maldiney, Henri: 547 n. 32, 574 n. 31; and     Substance
 nomad art, 493, 495                          Matthew, Gospel according to: 124. See
Mallarme, Stephane: 127, 346                   also Bible, the
Malmberg, Bertil: 101, 518 n. 2               Maupassant, Guy de: 193
Man: as molar entity, 292-93; white, and      Maurel, Christian: 543 n. 58
 faciality, 176-79. See also Human beings     May 1968: and philosophy, x; and
Mandelbrot, Benoit: 486-87                     psychoanalysis, xi; and segmentarity, 216
Mann, Daniel: 233                             Mayani, Zacharia: 529 n. 14
Mann, Klaus: 230-31                           Mazaheri, A.: 561 n. 88
Mann, Thomas: and music, 97                   Mechanosphere: and stratification, 71, 74
Mannerism: and territory, 320. See also       Meinong, A.: on multiplicity, 32-33, 483
 Painting                                     Mellaart, James: 565 n. 11
Manual de zoologiafantastica: 241             Melville, Herman: 186-89, 199, 205, 539 n.
Mao Tse-tung: 5, 20, 226                        15
Map: and body without organs, 163-64;         Memory: and becoming, 291-98; and
 and line, 202-3; and regime of signs, 119;    deterritorialization, 293-94; and line and
 and representation, 12; and rhizome,          point, 293-98; and music, 295-98; and
 12-15, 19-20; and segmentarity, 222; and      rhizome, 15-16; and tracing, 16. See also
 tracing, 12-15. See also Cartography;         Epistemology; Thought
 Tracing                                      Menaechmus: and State science, 363
Marcel, Gabriel: 362                          Meneur de hups: 250
Mark, Gospel according to: 124. See also      Mephisto: 230-31
 Bible, the                                   Mercier, Jacques: 533-34 n. 14
Marshall, Alexander James: 550 n. 34          Messiaen, Olivier: 94, 300, 301, 304, 309,
Marshall Plan: and capitalist axiomatic,       316-17,320,551 nn. 51,57-58
 462                                          Metallurgy: and flow, 410-11; and nomads,
Martinet, Andre: 64, 528 n. 46, 530 n. 30      404-15 passim. See also Flow; Science;
Martino, Ernesto de: 546 n. 97                 Technology
Marx, Karl: 558 n. 61, 567 nn. 27-28,         Meunier, Jacques: 358
 31-32, 568 n. 34, 568-69 n. 41, 570 n. 59;   Meyer, Francois: 550 n. 40
 and book, 127; and capitalist axiomatic,     Michaux, Henri: 283, 285, 286
 454, 463; and capture, 443; and State        Michelet, Jules: 221-22
 apparatus, 427-28, 447-48; and               Micropolitics: 208-31 passim. See also
 subjectivity, 453; and surplus value,         Axiomatic; Molecule; Segmentarity;
 491-92. See also Capitalism; State            State apparatus
 apparatus                                    Milieu: definition of, xvii; of rhizome, 21;
Marxism: and major language, 105; and          and rhythm, 313-16; of stratification,
 State apparatus, xi                           49-52, 54-55; and territory, 317-18,
Masochism: and becoming-animal, 155-56,        321-23
 260; and body without organs, 150, 152,      Miller, Arthur: 291-92
 155-56                                       Miller, Henry: 18-19, 147, 166, 186-87,
                                     602 D INDEX

 248, 260, 276, 286, 482, 530 nn. 25, 31,     Mr. Klein: 291-292
 35, 533 n. 5, 546 n. 89, 551 n. 56           Mrs. Dalloway: 263
Millet, Jean Francois: 343                    Multiplicity: and arborescent schema,
Millikan, Robert: 327                           16-17, 33; and assemblage, 8, 22-23, 34;
Milovanoff, Annie: 557 n. 49, 572 n. 6         and becoming-animal, 239-52 passim;
Minority: and capitalist axiomatic, 469-73;    and body without organs, 30, 154; and
 and language, 105-6                           book, 4-7; and crowd, 30, 33-34; and
Minor literature: 105                          evolution, 48-49; and faciality, 182-83;
Minor science: 108-9, 361-74 passim,           and individual, 254; and intensity, 33;
 485-86                                        and language, 66-67; and map, 15;
Moby-Dick: 243-45, 248-50, 304, 305            molecular, 27-28; and music, 11-12; and
Mohammed: and nomads, 380, 383. See            nomad thought, xiii; and proper name,
 also Koran, the; Religion                      37-38; and psychoanalysis, 34-35; and
Moiroux, Jacques: 537 n. 20                     rhizome, 6-9, 22, 30, 33, 505-6; and
Molecule: and articulation, 34; and            smooth space and striated space, 371,
 becoming, 248-50, 272-86 passim; and          482-88; and stratification, 43, 52-53; and
 deterritorialization, 345-46; and music,      unconscious, 35; and unity, 8-9, 32-33.
 308-9; and rhizome, 328-29; and               See also Assemblage; Consistency;
 stratification, 45, 52, 57-60. See also       Machine; Plane of consistency
 Becoming                                     Mumford, Lewis: 428, 457, 570 n. 58
Mondrian, Piet: 295, 301, 305, 546 n. 89      Murard, Lion: 566 n. 16
Monet, Claude: 298                            Music: and becoming, 299-309; and
Money: and capture, 442-43; and flow,          consistency, 329-33, 343; and
 226-27. See also Capitalism                   deterritorialization, 296-97, 301-3; and
Monge, Gaspard: 363, 554 n. 28, 556 n. 36      faciality, 186; and line of flight, 11-12;
Monod, Jacques: 49, 521 ch. 3 n. 3, 522 n.     and metallurgy, 411; and molecule,
 21, 549 n. 30, 550 n. 41                       308-9; and painting, 300-303; and plane
Monsieur Zero: 279                             of consistency, 267, 270-72; and refrain,
Montesquieu: 564 n. 9                           347-50; and rhizome, 11-12; and smooth
Montmollin, Robert: 570 n. 56                  and striated space, xiii, 477-78; and
Morand, Paul: 279                              subjectification, 137; and territory,
More, Marcel: 304, 552 n. 60                   318-19; and variation, 95-97, 104. See
Morgenstern, Laura: 574 n. 34                  also Refrain
Moritz, Karl Philipp: 240, 512                Mussel, Lucien: 558 n. 62, 561 n. 83
Morphogenesis: and double articulation,       Mussorgsky, Modest: 342, 550 n. 48; and
 42. See also Form                             refrain, 300
Moses: 122-24, 226; and book, 127; and        M'uzan, Michel de: 531 n. 5
 nomads, 118, 383; as subject, 128, 130;      Myrdal, Gunnar: 571 n. 62
 and taxation, 394; and war machine,          Myth: and becoming, 237
 388, 390, 392-93, 417. See also Bible,
 the; Religion                                Napoleon: 47, 558 n. 59
Moulier, Yann: 469, 527 n. 40, 571 n. 66      NASA: and capitalism, 455
Movement: and becoming, 280-81; and           Nash, Paul: 546 n. 89
 deterritorialization, 282, 326-27; and       Nature: and multiplicity, 5, 254; and plane
 nomads, 381; and plane of consistency,        of consistency, 266; and resemblance,
 281-82; and smooth and striated space,        234-35. See also Spinoza, Baruch;
 498-99; and State apparatus, 386. See         Substance
 also Slowness; Speed                         Nef, John Ulric: 564 n. 109
Mozart, Wolfgang: 297, 304, 309, 350, 546     Negri, Antonio: and capitalist axiomatic,
 n. 92; and refrain, 300, 347                  469
                                     INDEX D 603

Nelli, Rene: 532 n. 13                       Optical space: and nomad art, 493-99
Nicolai, J.: 550 n. 37                       Order-word: and content and expression,
Nietzsche, Friedrich: 23, 125, 227, 257,       108-9; and death, 107-8, 110; and
  296, 342-43, 345, 541 n. 44, 552 n. 5,       incorporeal transformation, 80-81,
  555 n. 35; and book, 6; and                  108-9; and indirect discourse, 84; and
  deterritorialization, 510; and haeccity,     major and minor language, 106; and
  268, 269; as minor philosopher, x; and       sign, 87; and speech acts, 79; and
  nomad thought, xiii, 376-77; and power,      statement, 107; and variation, 94-95. See
  xvii; and plane of consistency, 507; and     also Linguistics
  refrain, 350                               Oresme, Nicholas: 540 n. 29
Nijinsky, Vaslav: 169, 257                   Organ: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and
Noailles, Pierre: 565 n. 10                    machine, 256. See also Body; Body
Nomadology: 315-423 passim; and history,       without organs
  23-34; and stratification, 43              Organism: and assemblage, 4; and body,
Nomads: and art, 492-99; and                   41; and body without organs, 4, 30,
  deterritorialization, 53-54, 381-84; and     158-63; and double articulation, 41-42;
  evolutionism, 48-49; and flow, 404-15        and faciality, 171-72; and nomad art,
  passim; and religion, 382-84; and            498-99; and State apparatus, 366-67; and
  semiotic, 118; and smooth space, 380-81,     stratification, 43-44, 50-54. See also
  384-85, 410, 413-15, 474-500passim;          Body; Body without organs
  and State apparatus, 384-85, 430-31; and   Organization: see Stratification
  war machine, 351-423passim. Seealso        Orgasm: as orientation of Western thought,
  Deterritorialization; Smooth space; War      xiv, 22. See also Sexuality
  machine                                    Orient, the: as rhizome, 18-19; and State
Nomad science: and royal science, 367-69,      apparatus, 384-85; 450-51
  373-74; and war machine, 361-74            Orlando: 294.
  passim. See also Pragmatics; Science       Ortigues, Edmond: 564 n. 2
Nomos: and logos, 369-73; and nomad, xiii,   Oury, Jean: x
  370-71, 380-81; and number, 388; and       Overcoding: and language, 62; and novella,
  polls, 353                                   200-201; and rhizome, 8-9; and
Noology: and war machine, 374-80. See          stratification, 63. See also Coding;
  also Thought                                 Language; Linguistics
Novel: and faciality, 173-74; as literary
  genre, 192-93                              Pacotte, Julien: 519 n. 13, 544 n. 82
Novella: as literary genre, 192-207 passim   Painting: and deterritorialization, 301; and
Number: and measurement, 8; and                faciality, 172-73, 178-79, 184-85; and
  multiplicity, 484-85; semiotic of, 118;      line and point, 298; and memory, 295;
  and war machine, 387-94. See also            and music, 300-303; and refrain, 347-48.
  Geometry; Mathematics                        See also Faciality
Numbers, Book of: 388. See also Bible, the   Parain, Brice: 523 n. 4
                                             Parain, Charles: 569 n. 43
Object: and book, 3; in Western              Parant, Jean-Luc: 534 n. 16
  metaphysics, xi. See also Epistemology;    Pareto, Vilfredo: 439
  Subjectivity                               Paris, Jean: 184-85
Omnes, Roland: 521 ch. 3 n. 1                Parnet, Claire: 517 nn. 1, 4
"On Slogans": 83                             Pasolini, Pier Paolo: 106,523 n. 5,527n. 39
"On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in        "Passionement" (Passionately): 98
  Speech" ("Uber die allmahliche             Peirce, C. S.: 531 n. 41
  Verfertigung der Gedanken beim             Pelleas et Melisande: 299
  Reden"): 378                               Pelliot, Paul: 561 n. 81
                                       604 D INDEX

Penthesilea: 355                                Point: and arborescent schema, 293-94;
Perrier, Edmond: 46, 255, 522 n. 8                and line of flight, 298; and nomads, 380;
Perronet, Jean: and State science, 363, 365       and rhizome, 8; of subjectification, 129.
Petitot, Jean: 16-18, 544 n. 82                   See also Geometry; Line; Plane; Space
Phallogocentrism: as model of identity, xii     Politics: and axiomatics, 461; and
Phantasy: and body without organs, 151;           language, 82-83, 100-110; and line, 204;
  and psychoanalysis, 154-55                      and war, 419-21, 467. See also
Philebus: 306                                     Axiomatic; Capitalism; State apparatus
Philosophy: modern, 128, 342-43; and            Pollock, Jackson: 546 n. 89, 575 n. 38
  nomad thought, x, xiii; and State             Polyvocality: and faciality, 179-81
  apparatus, ix-x, 375-76. See also Thought     Pompidou, Georges: and May 1968, 216;
Phylum: machinic, 409-10; and weapon,             and State apparatus, 424-25
  406-7                                         Poncelet, Jean: 363, 554 n. 23
Physics: and smooth and striated space,         Pontalis, J.-B.: 541 n. 41, 544 n. 79
  488-92. See also Science                      Popelin, Claude: 522 n. 18
Pingaud, Bernard: 544 n. 79                     Population: and deterritorialization,
Pinhas, Richard: 551 n. 53, 562 n. 94             345-46; and stratification, 52-53. See
Pink Panther. 11,25                               also Crowd; Multiplicity
Pirenne, Henri: 222                             Fortes du paradis, Les: 23-24
Pirou, Gae'tan: 566 n. 24                       Poststructuralism: and State philosophy,
Plane: definition of, xvii; and haeccity,         xi-xii
  265-72 passim; of organization, 265-66.       Potemkin: 184
  See also Geometry; Line; Point; Space         Pettier, Rene: 560 n. 72
Plane of consistency: and abstract              Pound, Ezra: 105, 176, 200, 520 n. 18
  machine, 70-73, 513-14; and becoming,         Power (pouvoir): arborescent structure, of,
  251-52; and becoming-animal, 258-59;            17; definition of, xvii; and faciality, 175;
  and body without organs, 154-55, 158,           and language, 7, 75-76, 95, 101, 105-6;
  159, 165-66, 270, 506-8; and book, 4; of        and minor philosophy, x; and
  brain, 15; and deterritorialization, 70-71,     psychoanalysis, x-xi; and segmentarity,
  270, 272; and diagrammatic, 144-45; and         224-27; and State apparatus, 227,
  haeccity, 266-72; and intensity, 70; and        431-32. See also State apparatus
  language, 65, 91, 109; and line of flight,    Power (puissance): and capitalist axiomatic,
  270; and map, 12; and machinic                  466-67; definition of, xvii; and faciality,
  assemblage, 71-73; and multiplicity, 9;         175; and language, 95, 106; and war
  and music, 270-71; and regime of signs,         machine, 392. See also Consistency; War
  141-42; and rhizome, 21; and                    machine
  stratification, 40, 49-50, 56-57, 69-73,      Pragmatics: and becoming, 251; generative
  269-70; and subjectification, 134; and          and transformational, 139-40; and
  war machine, 422-23; and writing,               incorporeal transformation, 82-83; and
  268-69. See also Assemblage;                    language, 77-78, 92; and linguistics, 85,
  Consistency; Heterogeneity; Line;               90-91, 97-98; and map, 15, 146-47; and
  Rhizome                                         nomad thought, xiii; as schizoanalysis,
Planomenon: and stratification, 50, 56, 73.       146; and State philosophy, xv; and
  See also Ecumenon                               stratification, 43. See also Nomad
Plateau: and body without organs, 158; and        science; Schizoanalysis
  book, ix; and chapter, 22; and rhizome,       Preaux, Claire: 563 n. 106
  21-22; and smooth space, xiv-xv. See also     Primitive society: and segmentarity,
  Intensity; Nomads; Rhizome                      209-13; and State apparatus, 357-61,
Plato: xi, xii, 559 n. 66; and royal science,     429-31, 433. See also Evolution
  361,369,475                                   Princesse de Cleves, La: 173-74
                                       INDEX D 605

Prison: and language, 66-67                      apparatus, 375-76
Proclus: 554                                   Recherches: 517 n. 11
Profit: as apparatus of capture, 441-42. See   Refrain: 310-50 passim; and assemblage,
  also Capitalism                                312, 323-27; and becoming, 350; and
Proper name: and abstract machine, 142;          deterritorialization, 300-302; and music,
  and body without organs, 35; and               299-302; and plateau, xiv-xv; and
  haeccity, 263-64; and intensity, 27-28;        territory, 317, 321. See also Music
  and multiplicity, 27-28, 37-38; and          Regime of signs: and abstract machine,
  order-word, 84; and variation, 100; of          141-42; and assemblage, 119, 121-22,
  Wolf-Man, 26-27. See also Subjectivity          140-41; authoritarian and despotic,
Property: and deterritorialization, 388; and      121-22; and deterritorialization, 141-43,
  State apparatus, 428, 449. See also            508; and enunciation, 7; and incorporeal
  Capitalism                                     transformation, 88; and map, 119; and
Propp, Vladimir: 194                             order-word, 83-84; and plane of
Proust, Marcel: 196, 266, 358, 526 n. 27,        consistency, 141-42; and rhizome, 21;
  541 n. 39, 542 n. 47, 545 n. 84, 548 nn.       and semiotic, 11, 136; and stratification,
  15, 19, 550 n. 46; and becoming-woman,         63, 68; and subjectification, 130. See
  277; and deterritorialization, 306; and        also Language; Linguistics; Semiotic;
  faciality, 185-86; and haeccity, 271-72;       Sign
  and marginalism, 438-39; and music,          Regis, Emmanuel: 529 n. 11
  319; and proper name, 37; and refrain,       Regnault, Francois: 526 n. 32
  347; and secret, 290; and variation, 98      Reich, Steve: 542 n. 46
Proust and Signs: 518 n. 25, 526 n. 27         Reich, Wilhelm: 534 n. 22
Psychanalyse et transversalit'e: 517 n. 10     Reinberg, A.: 549 n. 29
Psychiatry: and delusion, 119-21, 128          Religion: and State apparatus, 382-84; and
Psychoanalysis: and arborescent schema,          territory, 321-22
  17-18; and becoming-animal, 259-60;          Rent: as apparatus of capture, 440-41
  and body without organs, 151, 165; and       Representation: and arborescent schema,
  causality, 283-84; and haeccity, 264; and       12; and assemblage, 23; and body, 86;
  multiplicity, 34-35, 38; and phantasy,         and book, 5-7; and heterogeneity, 10
  154-55; and politics, x-xi; as priesthood,   Reterritorialization: see
  154-55; and schizoanalysis, 17-18; and          Deterritorialization
  secret, 288-89; semioticof, 125; and         Reuleaux, Franz: 457
  subjectification, 130-31; as tracing,        Revel, Jacques: 527 n. 36
  12-15. See also Freud, Sigmund;              Revolution moleculaire, La: 517-18 n. 12
  Schizoanalysis; Unconscious                  Rhizome: as antigenealogy, 10-11, 21; and
Public sphere: and private property, 451-52      arboresent schema, xii, 6-7, 20, 34,
                                                 328-29, 506; and becoming, 25, 238-39,
Quebecois: as minor language, 101-2, 104         294; and book, 6-7, 11, 22-23; and
Querrien, Anne: 364-66,556 n. 36,573 n. 24       evolution, 10-11; and faciality, 190-91;
Quinet, Edgar: 452                               and language, 109-10; and line, 203,
                                                 505-6; and linguistics, 7-8, 91, 92; and
Race: and faciality, 178; and nomad              map, 20; and multiplicity, 6-9, 30, 505-6;
  thought, 379-80. See also Man                  and nomads, 415; and novella, 199; and
Ravel, Maurice: 270-71                           segmentarity, 211; and smooth and
Ray, Jean: 29, 569 n. 50                         striated space, 371, 506; and
Reality: and representation, 23; and             stratification, 53, 74; and
  subjectification, 129-30. See also             subjectification, 134; as unconscious, 18;
  Epistemology                                   and variation, 95-96; and writing, 24-25.
Reason: as law, xii-xiii; and State              See also Arborescent schema; Flow;
                                        606 D INDEX

  Nomads; Plane of consistency                Scherer, Rene: 273
Rhythm: and consistency, 328-29; and          Schizoanalysis: and abstract machine, 513;
  milieu, 313-16; and refrain, 313-14; and      and becoming, 251; and body without
  territory, 318-20. See also Music             organs, 165; and faciality, 188; and line,
Ricardo, David: 567 nn. 27-28, 30-31            202-3; and map, 13; and nomad thought,
"Rideau cramoisi, Le": (The crimson             xiii; and pragmatics, 146; and
  curtain): 193                                 psychoanalysis, 17-18; and stratification,
Riegl, Alois: 574 n. 32; and nomad art,         43. See also Pragmatics; Psychoanalysis
  492-93, 495                                 Schleiermacher, August: xii
Riemann, Georg: 142, 573 n. 16; and           Schmitt, Bernard: 445-46, 536 n. 14, 567 n.
  multiplicity, 32, 482-83                      32
Riemannian space: 476, 485-86. See also       Schnebel, Dieter: 96
  Geometry; Space                             Schoenberg, Arnold: and refrain, 350
Rimbaud, Arthur: 379                          Schopenhauer as Educator: 376
Riviere, Jacques: Artaud's correspondence     Schreber, Daniel Paul: 5, 120, 288-89, 531
  with, 377-78                                  n. 3
Robert, Jean: 565 n. 11, 568 n. 40            Schumann, Robert: 270, 297-98, 304,
Romanticism: and territory, 338-42              307-8, 550 n. 47; and refrain, 300, 303,
Ronai, Maurice: 533 n. 13                       347, 350
Rorschach test: and faciality, 180            Schwob, Marcel: 23-24
Rose, Steven: 519 n. 12                       Science: and assemblage, 22-23; and
Rosenstiehl, Pierre: 16-18, 544 n. 82           axiomatic, 461; and deterritorialization,
Rossini, Gioacchino: 307                        372; and diagrammatic, 143-44; major
Roth, Karl Heinz: 57 I n . 66                   and minor, 108-9, 361-74; and nomads,
Rouget, Gilbert: 526 n. 29                      24. See also Mathematics; Nomad
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 81-96                   science; Technology
Roussel, Raymond: 288-89                      Searle, John: 524 n. 9
Rovini, Robert: on Holderlin, 268             Secret: and content and form, 286-89; and
Royal science: and nomad science, 367-68,       line, 205; and novella, 193-94, 196-97;
   373-74. See also Science; State              and paranoia, 288-89; and perception,
  apparatus                                     286-87; and sexuality, 289-90; and war
"Ruse, Une" (An artifice): 193                  machine, 287-88
Rush, J. H.: 522 n. 12                        Sedentary: and nomad, 414-15
Russell, Bertrand: and logic, 148; and        Segmentarity: and coding, 222-24; and
  multiplicity, 33, 483                         deterritorialization, 222-24; and line,
Ruwet, Nicolas: 99                              206-7, 209, 211 -12, 217, 222-26; and line
Ruyer, Raymond: 332, 521 ch. 3 n. 3, 550        of flight, 216, 223-24; molar and
   n. 36                                        molecular, 213, 215-17, 224-25, 228; and
Ryan, Michael: 571 n. 66                        novella, 195-202; and rhizome, 211;
                                                rigid, 212; and State apparatus, 218,
Sadock, J. M.: 525 n. 22                        222-27; supple, 213. See also
Sahlins, Marshall: 573 n. 25                    Consistency; State apparatus;
Saint-Geours, Jean: 569-70 n. 52                Stratification; Striated space
Salle, J. B. de la: 533 n. 7                  Self (Moi): definition of, xvii-xviii; and
Samson, Joseph: 547 n. 3                        order-word, 84; and subjedification,
Samuel, Claude: 548 n. 13                        132, 133; and war machine, 356. See also
Sarraute, Nathalie: 196-97,267                  Subjectivity
Sartre, Jean-Paul: and faciality, 171         Semantics: and speech acts, 77-78. See also
Saumjan, S. K.: 525-26 n. 22                    Linguistics
Saussure, Ferdinand de: 524 n. 7              Semiology: and regime of signs, 111-12.
                                      INDEX D 607

  See also Language; Linguistics; Sign;        Smith, Patti: 19
  Signifiance                                  Smooth space: and aesthetics, 492-99; and
Semiotic: and deterritorialization, 135; and     body without organs, 479; and
  faciality, 180-82; and regime of signs,        capitalism, 490-92; and minor science,
   136; and State apparatus, 135;                361-62; and multiplicity, 482-88; and
  transformation of, 136-39. See also            nomads, 380-81,384-85, 410,413-15;
  Language; Linguistics; Regime of signs;        and number, 389; and thought, xiii,
  Sign; Signifiance                              379-80; and plateau, xiv-xv; and
Sephiha, Vidal: 527 n. 35                        rhizome, 506; and State apparatus,
Serieux, Paul: 119-20                            489-92; and striated space, 353, 369-73,
Serres, Michel: 361, 371-72, 489-90, 519 n.      387, 474-500 passim; and war machine,
   13, 554 n. 24, 555 n. 32                      363-64, 422-23, 489-92. See also
Sexuality: and becoming, 246, 275-79; and        Consistency; Nomads; Plane of
  rhizome, 18. See also Desire; Love             consistency; Rhizome; Space; Striated
Shakespeare, William: 125-26, 354                space
Shestov, Leon: 206, 376                        Society: and segmentarity, 208-31 passim.
Shrinking Man: 279                               See also Politics; State apparatus
Sign: and assemblage, 504; and book, 4;        Solomon: 122, 123, 534 n. 14. See also
  and content and expression, 117; and           Bible, the; Jewish people
  deterritorialization, 67-68, 87, 112-13,     Solon: 557 n. 51
   115-17, 121; and faciality, 123; and        Songs and Dances of Death: 300
  order-word, 87; and Signifiance, 112;        "Son of Sam": 80
  signifying regime of, 112; and State         Sorcery: and becoming-animal, 239-52
  apparatus, 118; and stratification, 64-69;     passim
  and thing and word, 66-67; and tool,         Space: and haeccity, 261-63; holey, 413-15;
  400-402. See also Language; Linguistics;       and refrain, 311-12; and State apparatus,
  Regime of signs; Semiotic; Signifiance         388-89. See also Geometry; Smooth
Signature: and territory, 316                    space; Striated space
Signifiance: and abstract machine, 91; and     Spaier, Albert: 573 n. 15
  arborescent schema, 16; and body             Speech: and action, 77-78; and language,
  without organs, 159-61; definition of,         78, 92. See also Language; Linguistics
  xviii; and faciality, 179-82; and            Speed: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and
  information, 79; and interpretation, 114;      body, 260-61; and book, 3-4; and form,
  and regime of signs, 68; and subjectifi-       254; and haeccity, 261-62; and nomads,
  cation, 167-68; and writing, 22. See also      381, 499; and plane of consistency,
  Language; Linguistics; Semiotic; Sign          270-71; and science, 371-72; and State
Signified: see Sign                              apparatus, 386; and stratification, 56.
Signifier: see Sign                              See also Movement; Slowness
Simmel, Georg: 544 n. 76                       Speed: 152
Simondon, Gilbert: 408-10, 522 nn. 11, 19,     Spengler, Oswald: 76
  523 n. 31, 555 n. 33                         Spinoza, Baruch: x, xiii, xvi, 123, 153-54,
Simpson, George Gaylord: 522 n. 10               158, 253-54, 256-57, 260-61, 507
Sin: and segmentarity, 218                     Spinozism: 253-60
Sinacoeur, Hourya: 551 n. 54                   Spirit: Hegelian, and Cosmos, 342
Sirens: 308                                    Spitz, Rene: 169-70
Slepian, Vladimir: and becoming-animal,        Ssu-ma Ch'ien: 559 n. 69
  258-60, 274                                  Stalin, Joseph: 525 n. 21
Slowness: and form, 254; and science,          Stalinism: and segmentarity, 214-15. See
  371-72; and stratification, 56. See also       also State apparatus; Totalitarianism
  Movement; Speed                              Starobinski, Jean: 552 n. 10
                                      608 D INDEX

State apparatus: and abstract machine,            369-73, 413-15, 474-500 passim; and
  223; and assemblage, 513; and                  State apparatus, xiii, 385-87, 489-92; and
  axiomatic, 460-73 passim; and                  thought, 379-80; and war machine,
  becoming-animal, 242-43, 247-48; and           489-92. See also Nomads; Smooth space;
  book, 24; and capitalism, 434-35,              Space; State apparatus; Stratification
  452-59; and capture, 444-45; and coding,     Strike: 413-14
  434, 448-51, 459-60; and consistency,        Strindberg, August: 115,132, 278
  431-32, 434-35; and deterritorialization,    Structuralism: and binary logic, 5; and
  432-34; and flow, 448-49, 452-53,              resemblance, 235-36; and rhizome, 12.
  459-60; form of, 448-60 passim; and            See also Linguistics
  history, 23; and line, 204; and nomads,      Structure: and linguistics, 92-101
  384-85; and number, 388-94; and              Subjectification: and abstract machine,
  philosophy, ix-xii, 375-76; poles of,           134; and arborescent schema, 16; and
  424-26; and power, 227; and primitive          body without organs, 134, 159-61; and
  society, 357-61; and religion, 382-84; and     deterritorialization, 133, 134; and
  segmentarity, 208-31 passim; and sign,         faciality, 179-82; and interpretation, 138;
   116-18, 135; and smooth and striated          and line of flight, 134; and plane of
  space, 385-87, 489-92; and social              consistency, 134; and postsignifying
  formation, 435-37; and stratification,         regime, 119; and regime of signs, 130,
  68-69, 433; and subjectivity, 375-76,           132-33; and signifiance, 167-68; and
  460; and thought, 24; and violence,            stratification, 134; and writing, 22. See
  447-48; and war machine, 24, 229-31,           also Signifiance
  351-423 passim, 416-27, 430-31; and          Subjectivity: and assemblage, 264-65; and
  writing, 401-2. See also Axiomatic;            book, 3-4; and capitalism, 456-59; and
  Capitalism; Nomads; Stratification;            haeccity, 261-65; and language, 78; and
  Striated space; War machine                    multiplicity, 8-9; and property, 451-53;
Statement: and action, 77, 79, 86;               and representation, 23; and State
  definition of, xviii; and order-word, 107;     apparatus, 375-76, 460; and State
  and speech act, 79; subject of, 129. See       philosophy, xii-xiii; and thought, 379-80;
  also Enunciation; Linguistics                   in Western metaphysics, xi
Sternberg, Josef von: 532 n. 1                 Substance: and abstract machine, 511; and
Stockhausen, Karlheinz: 266,342,551 n. 53        articulation, 41; and body without
Stoics: and incorporeal transformation, 86       organs, 153-54; and form, 43; and
"Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass, The":      stratification, 43, 52. See also Form;
  200-202                                         Matter; Spinoza, Baruch
Stratification: 40-74 passim; and              Sue, Eugene: 358
  assemblage, 503-5; and body without          Swann's Love (L'Amour de Swann): 185-86
  organs, 159-63; and book, 3-4; and           Symbol: and sign, 112, and stratification,
  consistency, 335-37; and content and            65. See also Icon; Index; Linguistics
  expression, 502-3; and diagrammatic,         Synge, J. M: 526 n. 32
   142-45, 148; and plane of consistency,      Synthesizer: and language, 109; and
  269-70; and State apparatus, 433; and          machine, 343; and musical variation,
  subjectification, 134. See also                 95-96. See also Music
  Segmentarity; State apparatus; Striated      Sznycer, Evelyne: 548 n. 16
  space                                        Szondi test: and faciality, 180
Stravinsky, Igor: 545 n. 87
Striated space: and aesthetics, 492-99; and    Tale: as literary genre, 192-95
  capitalism, 490-92; and minor science,       Tales of Power: 162
  361-62; and multiplicity, 482-88; and        Tamerlane: and war machine, 419
  rhizome, 506; and smooth space, 353,         Tao: and pleasure, 157. See also Religion
                                      INDEX a 609

Tarahumaras, Les: 158                          Tournier, Michel: 261
Tarde, Gabriel: 216, 218-19, 548 n. 10, 575    Town: and State apparatus, 432-34. See
  n. 34                                          also City
Taxation: as apparatus of capture, 442-43;     Toynbee, Arnold J.: and nomads, 381, 482
  and number, 394. See also Money; State       Tracing: and arborescent schema, 20; book
  apparatus                                      as, 24; and map, 12-15; and rhizome,
Technology: and stratification, 60-61; and        12-15. See also Map
  weapon, 404-7. See also Science              Transfiguration, The: 17.8
Tel Quel: xi                                   Transformation: analogical, 136-37; and
Territory: and art, 316-17, 320-21; and          becoming, 250-53; incorporeal, 80-83,
  assemblage, 323-27, 332-34, 503-5; and         85-88; and pragmatics, 139-40. See also
  coding, 322; and expression, 317-18; and       Incorporeal transformation
  milieu, 317-18, 321-23; and multiplicity,    Translation: and multiplicity, 486; of
  33; and novella, 195; and organization,        semiotic, 136-39; 486; and stratification,
  388-89; and refrain, 312, 317, 321; and        62-63. See also Language
  rhythm, 314-16, 320; and segmentarity,       Tree: see Arborescent schema
  212-13; and stratification, 40, 53-57; and   Trial, The: xvii
  substance, 41; and war machine, 419. See     Tronti, Mario: 571 n. 66, 571-72 n. 67
  also Deterritorialization                    Troyes, Chretien de: 174, 533 n. 8
Tetry, Andre: 547 n. 101                       Troyes, Garin de: 364
Theology: and becoming-animal, 252-53.         Trudaine: 365
  See also Religion                            Truffaut, Francois: 546 n. 96
Thesiger, Wilfred: 557 n. 55-56, 572 n. 7      TV: and machinic enslavement, 458. See
Third World: and capitalist axiomatic, 465,      also Technology
  468-69                                       Typee: 188-89
Thorn, Rene: 481,539 n. 16
Thorpe, W. H.: 333, 548 n. 8, 550 n. 33        Uexkull, Jacob von: 51, 257, 315
Thought: and arborescent schema, 15-17;        Unconscious: and arborescent schema, 18;
  and smooth and striated space, 379-80;         and body without organs, 30; and
  and State apparatus, 374-80; and               causality, 284; and multiplicity, 29-32,
  subjectivity, 379-80; and war machine,         35; and pack, 35; and resemblance, 235;
  376-78                                         as rhizome, 12-15, 18. See also Freud,
Timaeus: 361, 369                                Sigmund; Psychoanalysis
Time: and haeccity, 261-63; and literary       "Unconscious, The": 27-28
  genre, 193-94                                United Nations: and State apparatus, 435
Time and Free Will: 483                        Universal History of Infamy, A: 241
Tinbergen, Nikolaas: 327
Titian: and faciality, 173                     Vallier, Dora: 575 n. 38
Titorelli, Painter: 529 n. 15                  Varese, Edgar: 309, 343, 344, 551 n. 56
To Be Done with the Judgment of God: 163       Variation: and abstract machine, 511-12;
Todaro, G. J.: 10                                and deterritorialization, 99; in language,
Tokei, Ferenc: 449, 565 n. 9                     93-95, 97-100; and matter, 408-9; and
Tool: and machinic assemblage, 90; and           minor language, 101-10; and royal
  sign, 400-402; and State apparatus,            science, 369-70. See also Constant;
  400-403; and stratification, 60-61; and        Linguistics
  weapon, 395-403. See also Technology         Varron: 565 n. 10
Totalitarianism: and capitalist axiomatic,     Vauban, Marquis de: 363
  462; and segmentarity, 214-15; and State     Vendryes, Pierre: 521 n. 3
  apparatus, 230-31. See also Fascism;         Verdi, Giuseppe: 307-8, 341-42
  State apparatus                              Vergez, Raoul: 554 n. 3
                                      610 a INDEX

Vergopoulos, Kostas: 570 n. 53                 Weapon: and nomads, 403-15 passim; and
Vermeer, Jan: 347                               tool, 395-403. See also Technology; War
Vernant, Jean-Pierre: 236, 536 n. 7, 543 n.    Weber, Max: 5 56 n. 42
  61, 559 n. 66, 564 nn. 7-8, 573 n. 21, 574   Webern, Anton von: 142, 511
  n. 29                                        Weinreich, U.: 7
Veyne, Paul: 569 n. 44                         Wenders, Wim: 482
Vialleton, Louis: 46-47                        What Maisie Knew: 290
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre: 565 n. 9                 White, Kenneth: 379
Virilio, Paul: 231, 395-96, 520-21 n. 24,      White, Lynn Townsend, Jr.: 560 n. 79, 561
  536 nn. 8, 12, 554 n. 22, 564 n. 10; and      n. 86
  capitalist axiomatic, 462; and               White wall: and faciality, 167-91; and
  deterritorialization, 345; and smooth         signifiance, 167-68. See also Black hole
  space, 480; and State apparatus, 212,        Wilf, Herberts.: 519 n. 14
  386-87; and war machine, 467                 Will, Edouard: 442, 568 n. 35
Visage (Face): 96, 302                         Will to Power, The: 269
Vivier,Odile:551n. 52                          Willard: 233, 243
Vladimirtsov, Boris: 394, 560 n. 71            William the Conqueror: 19
Vuillard, Jean Edouard: 175                    Wilson, Robert: 98
Vuillemin, Jules: 573 n. 14                    Wittfogel, Karl: 19, 363, 565 n. 9
                                               Wolf-Man, the: 26-38 passim, 239, 249,
Wagenbuch, Klauss: 527 n. 39                    250. See also Freud, Sigmund
Wagner, Richard: 127, 142, 269, 270,           Wolfson, Louis: 273
 307-8,319,341-42                              Woolf, Virginia: 29, 239, 252, 263, 276-77,
Wahl, Jean: 526 n. 32                           280, 294, 329
War: and capitalism, 421, 466, 467; and        Worringer, Wilhelm: 411, 575; and nomad
 hunt, 395-96; and politics, 467; and war       art, 415, 492-93, 495-99
 machine, 416-23. See also State               Wozzeck: 339
 apparatus                                     Writing: and abstract machine, 65; and
War machine: and assemblage, 406-7, 513;        becoming-animal, 240; and
 and becoming, 277-78; and                      deterritorialization, 11; and dualism, 20;
 becoming-animal, 242-43, 247-48, 396;          and measurement, 4-5; and memory, 16;
 and body, 366-67; and capitalist               and nomad art, 497; and plane of
 axiomatic, 466-67, 471-73; and                 consistency, 268-69; and rhizome, 23*25;
 diagrammatic, 144; and line of flight,         and State apparatus, 401-2; and
 422-23; and nomads, 351-423 passim;            subjectification, 22. See also Book;
 and plane of consistency, 422-23; and          Language
 religion, 383-84; and secret, 287-88; and     Wunderlich, Dieter: 519 n. 11, 525 n. 22,
 segmentarity, 218, 222-27; semiotic of,         526 n. 24
  118; and smooth and striated space,
  363-64, 422-23, 489-92; and State
                                               Yoga: and body without organs, 151
 apparatus, 24, 229-30, 351-427 passim,
                                               Young, La Monte: 344
 430-31; and thought, 376-78. See also
 Nomads; Smooth space; State apparatus
Watt, W. Montgomery: 557 n. 50                 Zavin, Fanny: 543 n. 64
Waves, The: 252, 513                           Zola, Emile: 523 n. 2
                          Illustrations




Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor. By permission of
   G. Ricordi, Milan. Copyright 1970 by G. Ricordi E. C. SPA.           3
Photo Boyer, Wolf Tracks on Snow. Viollet Collection.                  26
Photo Boyer, Lobster. Collection Viollet.                              39
Fritz Lang, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (bullet-ridden dummie of
   Dr. Mabuse).                                                        75
The Ark of the Covenant with the Column of Fire and the Cloud. Musee
   des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, Viollet Collection.                    111
M. Griaule and G. Dieterlan, The Pale Fox. Institut d'ethnologie,
   Musee de 1'Homme, Paris (the first Yala of Amma's egg).            149
Duccio, The Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew. Bulloz Collection,
   New York.                                                          167
Faces from Jacques Mercier, Rouleaux magiques ethiopiens. Seuel. 183
R. F. Outeceault, Buster Brown, le petit facteur. Librairie Hachette. 192
Fermand Leger, Men in the Cities, 1919. Copyright 1987 by ARS,
   N.Y./SPADEM.                                                       208
Wolf-Man, Cerveteri Etruscan Amphora. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo
   by Chuzeville.                                                     232
Etruscan Plate. Etruscan National Museum, Rome.                       232
Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922. Water color, pen and ink, 16'A x
   12". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
   Copyright 1987 by Cosmopress, Geneva.                              310
Drawing of a Wooden Chariot. Hermitage Museum, Leningrad.             351
Chomel, Dictionnaire economique, 1732. Entry for "Perdrix" Partridge. 424
Crazy in Stripes, Vermont 1865. From Jonathan Holstein, American
   Pieced Quilts (New York: Viking, 1973).                            474
Computer Einstein.                                                    501
Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris
at Vincennes. English translations of Deleuze's work include Kant's
Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, Cinema I: Image/
Movement (both published by Minnesota) and Nietzsche and Philoso-
phy. Felix Guattari, a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political
activist, worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental
psychiatric clinic. He was an active participant in the European
Network for alternatives to Psychiatry. Together, Deleuze and Guattari
coauthored Anti-Oedipus and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, also
available in translation from Minnesota.

Brian Massumi received his Ph.D. in French at Yale University, and is
currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Massumi
translated Jacques Attali's Noise, Michel de Certeau's Heterologies,
and (with Geoff Bennington) Jean-Francois Lyotard's Postmodern
Condition—all published by Minnesota.