Machinic Untimeliness I: Machine Becomings and Conceptual Machinations

Inatualidade maquínica I: Devires da máquina e maquinações conceituais

Inactualidad maquínica I: Devenires de la máquina y maquinaciones conceptuales

Abstract

The paper Machinic Untimeliness I: Machine Becomings and Conceptual Machinations aims to investigate the becomings of the concept of machine in Félix Guattari, with particular attention to the operation of constant transformation of its conceptual layers sedimented since the encounter with Gilles Deleuze. The collection of biographical, as well as analytical and conceptual elements regarding these conceptual transformations indicates the possibility of thinking the operation precisely in terms of the machination that Guattari, by machinating (with) Deleuze’s philosophy, leads on several levels. Among these levels, the paper focuses on 1) the machination of the Deleuzian concept of structure; 2) the machination of Nietzsche as developed in Nomadic Thought; 3) the passage from Anti-Oedipus’ desiring machines and schizoanalysis to assemblages and micropolitics. While presenting itself as an independent paper, it is also the first part of a more general work on the conceptual, ontological, techno-logical and political ecological status of Guattarian machines. The second part, Machinic Untimeliness II: Writing, Assemblages, Ontologies and Techno-politics, is written by another author and presented jointly with this article not as a simple linear continuation, but as a perspectival integration, with a particular focus on machinic ontology and its relationship with ecology and politics.

Keywords:
Structure and Machine; Machinic Unconscious; Machines and Machination; Writing and Nomadism; Micropolitics.

Resumo

O artigo Inatualidade maquínica I: Devires da máquina e maquinações conceituais tem como objetivo investigar os devires do conceito de máquina em Félix Guattari, com atenção especial à operação de transformação constante de suas camadas conceituais sedimentadas desde o encontro com Deleuze. O levantamento de elementos biográficos, mas também analíticos e conceituais sobre essas transformações conceituais indica a possibilidade de pensar a operação justamente a partir da maquinação que Guattari, ao maquinar (com) a filosofia de Deleuze, conduz em vários níveis. Dentre esses níveis, o artigo enfoca: 1) a maquinação do conceito deleuziano de estrutura; 2) a maquinação de Nietzsche desenvolvida no Pensamento Nômade; e 3) a passagem das máquinas desejantes e da esquizoanálise do Anti-Édipo aos agenciamentos e à micropolítica. Embora se apresente como um artigo independente, é também a primeira parte de um trabalho mais geral sobre o estatuto ecológico conceptual, ontológico, tecnológico e político das máquinas guattarianas. A segunda parte, Inatualidade Maquínica II. Escritua, Assemblages, Ontologies and Technopolitics, é escrito por outro autor e apresentado conjuntamente com este artigo não como uma simples continuação linear, mas como uma integração perspectiva, com foco particular na ontologia maquínica e sua relação com a ecologia e a política.

Palavras-chave:
Estrutura e máquina; Inconsciente maquínico; Máquinas e maquinações; Escritura e nomadismo; Micropolítica.

Resumen

El artículo Inactulidad maquínica I: Devenires de la máquina y maquinaciones conceptuales tiene como objetivo investigar los devenires del concepto de máquina en Félix Guattari, con especial atención a la operación de constante transformación de sus capas conceptuales sedimentadas desde el encuentro con Gilles Deleuze. La recopilación de elementos biográficos, así como analíticos y conceptuales sobre estas transformaciones, indica la posibilidad de pensar la operación precisamente en términos de la maquinación que Guattari, al maquinar (con) la filosofía de Deleuze, conduce en varios niveles. Entre estos niveles, el artículo se centra en 1) la maquinación del concepto de estructura deleuziano; 2) la maquinación de Nietzsche tal como se desarrolla en Pensamiento Nómada; 3) el paso de las máquinas deseantes del Antiedipo y el esquizoanálisis a los agenciamientos y la micropolítica. Si bien se presenta como un artículo independiente, también es la primera parte de un trabajo más general sobre el estado ecológico conceptual, ontológico, tecnológico y político de las máquinas guattarianas. La segunda parte, Inactualidad maquínica II: Ensamblajes escriturales, ontologías y tecnopolítica, es escrito por otro autor/a y se presenta junto con este artículo no como una simple continuación lineal, sino como una integración en perspectiva, con un enfoque particular en la ontología maquínica y su relación con la ecología y la política.

Palabras clave:
Estructura y máquina; Inconsciente maquínico; Máquinas y maquinaciones; Escritura y nomadismo; Micropolítica.

Introduction

It is well known that the concept of “desiring machine” - perhaps the most powerful of Anti-Oedipus - comes above all from Guattari’s long-term elaboration: Guattari closely followed Lacan’s seminars since the Fifties and was extremely interested in his theory of the objet petit a. Furthermore, in 1965, Guattari already spoke of a “living steam machine” with regard to the schizophrenic life experience and his vocabulary was already plenty of machinic elements (Dosse, 2010, p. 39). Nevertheless, it should be noted that in order to appreciate the effective theoretical completion of the Guattarian machine it is necessary to take into account Deleuze’s interpretation of structuralism. This is not meant to indicate a Deleuzian priority or theoretical authority, but precisely to emphasize Guattari’s original philosophical operation, which consisted in transforming some components of the Deleuzian concept of structure into the strategic features that constitute the desiring machine - this is perhaps the first “Guattari effect” (Alliez; Querrien, 2008) within Deleuze’s philosophy. In this sense, it seems legitimate to affirm that the Guattarian conceptual creation of the machine is based in its turn on a machination of the Deleuzian definition of structure, present above all in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. The theoretical stakes of such a machinic operation are transcendent to the extent that it is possible to glimpse the core features of the passage from structuralism to post-structuralism. A passage that required a crucial contribution from the outside of philosophy and that materialized between Anti-Oedipus and Nomadic Thought, and thus through an intensive, a-significant and precisely machinic rereading of Nietzsche, which was made possible by the encounter between Deleuze and Guattari. Such a rereading belongs to a kind of machinic turn that Deleuze impresses to the re-elaboration of his own previous essays, namely Marcel Proust and the Signs (Sauvagnargues, 2018) and, although more indirectly, Spinoza. Practical Philosophy (Hardt, 1993, pp. 60-110).

In this sense, the essay attempts to trace the genealogical lines that contributed to determine this theoretical passage within the relation between Deleuze and Guattari, by conceiving them as three different machinations: the machination of structuralism and the birth of the concept of desiring machine; the machination of Nietzsche that, albeit carried out concretely by Deleuze’s Nomadic Thought, expresses the transcendental contribution of Guattari's analytical methodology; the machination of Anti-Oedipus towards machinic assemblages and micropolitics. In addition, as a way to complete the genealogical journey, the essay briefly indicates the machination of Deleuze and Guattari themselves, carried out above all by Suely Rolnik and Eric Alliez through a deterritorialization of their concepts: this machination originated in Brazil and it later spread to the entire South American continent.

Machines and Machinations

Deleuze and Guattari began their epistolary correspondence in the spring of 1969, and they met in person in June of the same year. The desire for the exchange arose from a double theoretical and existential need: Deleuze lacked a professional knowledge of madness and psychosis, while Guattari, who was co-director of the La Borde clinic where he had worked since 1955, needed to connect with a thinker such as Deleuze in order to systematize his thoughts. Guattari had a background in the Freudian School of Paris, he attended from the beginning to the seminars of Lacan, he was a political militant of the radical left, as well as co-founder of the FGERCI group (later CERFI) and of the journal Recherches in 1966: yet in the previous years he had expressed the frustration of not being able to write at the theoretical level he wished to achieve. Deleuze, for his part, is already a recognized philosopher who feels the need to respond, from the side of philosophy, to the discursive hegemony of psychoanalysis (Dosse, 2010, pp. 1-7).

In this vein, Deleuze and Guattari represented, one for the other, a real “outside” that, as Anne Querrien recalls, needed a reciprocal “bifurcation”: “Gilles was physiologically exhausted by the mass of recently completed masterful works. Félix had been trying for some years to abandon the Leninist revolutionary model to take an interest in the investments of desire in everyday life, and in institutional psychotherapy [...]. The ‘desiring machines’ that he had derived from Lacan's ‘petit objet a’, and for which he had sought the latter's interest in vain, had immediately seduced Deleuze” (Querrien, 2002, p. 46). Likewise, the relationship with Guattari can also be perceived in the sense of a “chain of differences”, as Nadaud suggests in the preface to Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus writings (Guattari, 2006; Nadaud, 2006, p. 20), whereby the different singularities are not diluted but rather “machinated”.

The textual place of such a machination is the essay “Machine and Structure” that Guattari presented in a talk for the Freudian School of Paris in 1969¹, some months after his first meeting with Deleuze, and in the middle of the epistolary correspondence between the two that would bring to the publication of Anti-Oedipus in 1972. Regarding the machines previously conceptualized by Guattari - military machine, capitalist machine, logic, cybernetic machine, etc. - in “Machine and Structure” (Guattari, 2015) we find the first great operation of emancipation of the term from its technological image and the precise attempt to distinguish the machine from the structure. As Guattari points out, although a machine is inseparable from the structures and these are always dominated by machines (Guattari, 2015, p. 318), the machine breaks and tears apart the structural and symbolic order in which it is immersed. The machine is the breaking factor of the structures that is produced by repetition and the consequent detachment of the signifying element. This last one ceases to represent the established structural order because it becomes symbolically irreplaceable, thus escaping from the symbolic and standing on its own. Since the beginning of the text Guattari takes up the distinction between generality (of the order of the structure) and repetition (of the order of the machine) as outlined by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, as well as the definition of structure and its three determining “minimum conditions” described in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 50-51), though he transformed the third condition into the genetic principle of the machine. If the structure implies a system of exchanges or substitutions of particular elements 1) through at least two heterogeneous series of which one is defined as the signifier and the other as the signified and 2) in which these elements are valid only for the relations they maintain with one another, the machine appears when 3) the “two heterogenous series” converge “toward a paradoxical element, which is their differentiator” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 51; Guattari, 2015, p. 382). It is in this sense that the machine was already present in Deleuze’s structure, but still from a structuralist point of view, that is, as masked or hidden by the structure, which would have had the function of avoiding and abolishing any irruption of a differentiating and real “piece”. Conversely, Guattari’s essay transposes the two authors beyond structuralism, by presenting itself as a real germinal text of what is used to be called post-structuralism. Although structuralism would like to act as if machines did not exist, in reality every machine crosses several structures, to the point that every structural order “is thus surrounded on all sides by these systems of machines which it will never be able to control” (p. 326). In a few years the concept of machine becomes ready to be tested as the theoretical and desiring engine of Anti-Œdipus, a book that seems to perfectly synthesize the meaning of post-structuralism at the cross of philosophy and its outside.

In Anti-Œdipus, Deleuze and Guattari’s machine is directly framed in the reality of the unconscious, and it is desiring from the beginning, in the sense that it is at the heart of desire, neither as its object nor as an instance of consumption of jouissance, but as a production: the desiring machine is real and produces the real, before the appearance on the scene of the subject, who rather represents a rest of the production, and beyond the structural symbolic representation. There is indeed an ontological leap in the definition of the machine that also implies a focus on the molecular dimension of desire. If the operation of the desiring machines is “molecular” in their actual production of desire, Deleuze and Guattari define the structural order in which the machines act as “molar” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2000, pp. 91-93, 283-295). In this sense, the elements present in the flows produced, cut or collected by the machines can organize themselves in a molar or molecular way. The first modality is that of the representations, the reference systems, the stratifications, and the devices that fold the desiring production on the symbolic plane of the structures, while the molecular modality has to do with the machinic production and the intensities of the flows before the molar capture of form. With respect to the unconscious, the most emblematic case of the relationship between the molar and molecular dimensions is that of psychoanalytic familialism in its repressive function with respect to a machinic desire directly grafted onto world geopolitics. When flows and geopolitical assemblages of desire are folded into the family we can recognise a molar order, since this effectively removes, reduces, and represses the desiring production, by channeling it towards the family triangulation and the social repression of desire (ibid, pp. 51-55).

If the concept of desiring machine is the most powerful of Anti-Oedipus, it is also that which had the biggest amount of problems in its reception, to the point that in a first phase it pushed the two authors to publish the text “Balance-Sheet for Desiring-Machines” as appendix of the second edition of the book (1973), and then to abandon completely the term in favor of the assemblage. The goal of the “Balance-Sheet” consisted, on the one hand, in specifying the ontological, social, and even cosmological status of desiring machines and, on the other hand, in making explicit the key role of literature and the arts in the creation of machinic lines of flight from the Oedipal channeling and triangulations (Deleuze; Guattari, 2009, pp. 98-109). In particular, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that in order to understand the theoretical and political implications of the concept of machine, be it desiring, a war-machine or an abstract machine it is necessary to put into brackets the current and typical meaning coming from common sense that leads us to use the term metaphorically, as a derivation of technical machines. In other words, the metaphorical use would come from an ideological abstraction that isolates the technical machine from the social conditions of its appearance, that is, from the system of extrinsic relationships, therefore machinic, between the elements involved (ibid, pp. 109-112). For Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, the technical machine comes to be the product of the social and desiring machines. This implies an inversion of the humanist anthropological scheme, which conceives the tool as an extension and projection of the organism. Instead of a mechanical, projective, and solipsistic line, Deleuze and Guattari propose the idea of a machinic phylum that develops alongside history, putting the different material elements in recurrent communication as pieces of the social machine (ibid, pp. 112-115).

Within such a machinic universe, desiring production is thought as the result of an endless network of machines, each one understood in turn as a production unit of the unconscious that essentially consists of a system of cuts, detachments, and withdrawals of material flows of all types, in direct and systematic connection with the other machines, with which it determines continuous exchanges of codes, decoding and recoding (Deleuze; Guattari, 2000, pp. 1-8). In this machinic system, which goes from the organ-machine to the capitalist social machine, the relations of production, external to the technical machine, are here thought as internal to the desiring machine as its gears and they ensure that desire is already part of the infrastructure.

Felix had talked to me about what he was already calling "desiring machines"; he had a whole theoretical and practical conception of the unconscious as a machine, of the schizophrenic unconscious. So I myself thought he'd gone further than I had. But for all his unconscious machinery, he was still talking in terms of structures, signifiers, the phallus, and so on. That was hardly surprising, since he owed so much to Lacan (just as I did). But I felt it would all work even better if one found the right concepts, instead of using notions that didn't even come from Lacan’s creative side but from an orthodoxy built up round him. Lacan himself says "I'm not getting much help." We thought we'd give him some schizophrenic help (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 13-14).

This passage from an interview published in Pourparlers expresses the complex Deleuzoguattarian operation of both differentiation from Lacan and criticism of his followers and of Lacanism, which bears witness to the intricate relationship between Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan himself in The Anti-Oedipus. In particular, in order to appreciate its complexity, as Marcelo Antonelli (2014, p. 9) points out, one should try to take the expression of giving a “schizophrenic help” literally, that is, applying the schizophrenic process to concepts that could function otherwise. And this is what the book tries to achieve, with a schizoid path that connects the unconscious with machines of all kinds, starting with the literary ones, and which has a series of ambitious objectives: 1) to denounce the repressive and functional character to capitalism of the psychoanalysis; 2) to release desire from the oedipal and family channels; 3) to overcome the structuralist trend that conceives desire as based on lack. It is here where the separation of the machine from the structure is strategic insofar as it allows the passage from the symbolic to the real, that is, from the representation of desire to its production, in the sense of a materialist psychiatry that introduces production into the desire as well as desire in production. In the eyes of Deleuze and Guattari, a double deconstruction is thus possible: 1) of the alternative between mechanism and vitalism in pursuit of a machinic cosmology, by conceiving nature as a continuous process of machine production; 2) of the structure/superstructure dichotomy, as the conception of economic production through social and technical machines is inseparable from the libidinal economy of desiring machines.

Furthermore, giving a “schizophrenic help” to Lacan means also pointing out to him a completely different unconscious and clinical trajectory through the schizoid model, as well as a radically different political dimension of analysis. What is at stake, indeed, is to replace the neurotic model of the unconscious with the schizophrenic model and to develop a schizoanalytic practice. Finally, if capitalism and schizophrenia have a common root in the decoding of flows, this means that, both for studying the unconscious and for developing a critique of political economy, psychoses should be taken as a reference, and not the neuroses (Deleuze, 2004, p. 232). The “schizophrenic help” thus implies to take machines seriously.

What Deleuze Could Not (Alone): To Machinate Nietzsche

It is quite easy to see in Anti-Oedipus a way of machinating Kant and the transcendental, and in particular a Kant already monstrified by Deleuze so as to attempt "a kind of Critique of Pure Reason for the unconscious” (Deleuze, 2007, p. 309), by treating the latter as an impersonal transcendental field. In fact, beyond Kant, it is the whole history of philosophy - and also the philosophy of history, as Châtelet pointed out (1977, p. 124) - that finds itself parodied, contrived, and violated in its concepts, according to the method of “sodomy” or “immaculate conception” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 5) and the general machination plan suggested by Difference and repetition: “One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa” (Deleuze, 1994, p. xxi). Now, in this Deleuzian method there is an exception. Nietzsche is very present in the operation of emancipating the unconscious, and in this vein Anti-Oedipus can be considered not only a Nietzschean book, but rather an updating of Genealogy of Morality (Vignola, 2019a, pp. 558-561). Yet according to the French thinker it would be impossible to treat Nietzsche, like the other philosophers, with the practice of conceptual sodomy, which consists in “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”. By the way, Deleuze indicates that “it was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 6). All this would be impossible in Nietzsche’s case, to the extent that “you just can't deal with him in the same sort of way. He gets up to all sorts of things behind your back” (ibidem).

This may mean that although it is possible for Deleuze to machinate Nietzsche with the present time because of his untimeliness, it would be impossible to shift, slip, and dislocate him, that is to say, radically transform his philosophical traits - remove his mustaches, to continue with the images of Marx, Hegel, and the Mona Lisa. However, if we take a look at Nietzsche in Nomadic Thought, a contemporary text of Anti-Oedipus given by Deleuze at the Nietzsche aujourd'hui colloquium of Cerisy-la-Salle, we can have a firsthand experience of a true transformation in the perspective adopted by the French philosopher, for which he does seem to have managed to generate a kind of monstrous son. Our hypothesis is that it is the result of a subtle machination, carried out directly or indirectly by Guattari within the Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche.

By reading Nomadic Thought at the same time or after Anti-Oedipus, one can appreciate a new Deleuzian posture, in the sense that, from a methodological point of view, starting from these two texts the French philosopher literally stops interpreting. On the one hand, Anti-Oedipus proposes abandoning the psychoanalytic interpretation, in favour of the political maintenance of desire and the unconscious (instead of seeking the meaning of the unconscious, Deleuze proposes to understand how it works in its production), while Nomadic Thought points out the strategic meaning of Nietzsche’s aphorisms in a direct relation with the outside, that is to say, the historical-social field; instead of interpreting the aphorisms, it would be necessary to “machinate Nietzsche's text, to find out which actual external force will get something through, like a current of energy” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 256). Furthermore, just as in Anti-Oedipus the unconscious passes from the theatre to the factory, in the sense that it is no longer represented by structures or clinical interpretation, but produced by machines, in Nomadic Thought the focus on Nietzsche shifts from genealogy and the inversion of Platonism to the style and method of his writing. In this sense, just as an aphorism does not have intrinsic meanings and does not keep any spiritual interiority, but it rather awaits the force capable of removing it from the text, the machinic unconscious does not need to be interpreted and folded inwards: it explodes outwards, above all the social field, and it pulverizes the interiority of the self. The nomadism glimpsed in Nietzschean writing then consists of a departure from interiority and the fixity of representation, which are embodied by the history of philosophy, linguistics or psychoanalysis. Nietzsche the nomad is the one who treats writing as a machine of flows and intensities, of active or reactive forces, which disturbs codes and substitutes pathos for logos, thus deactivating, ante litteram, the power of the signifier (ibid, pp. 256-258).

Now, it seems interesting that in the two texts, despite their perfect convergence, one could find, if not two quite different Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, at least two different uses of his texts. As considered especially for his Genealogy of morality, Nietzsche in Anti-Oedipus still remains in the wake of the Deleuzian reading of the Sixties, both in its contents and in its concepts, while in Nomadic Thought, where Deleuze stops interpreting to start machining, the German thinker is mediated through and by the machines just developed in Anti-Oedipus. In this sense, rather than a commentary on Nietzsche, Nomadic Thought could be conceived as a textual machine to re-activate Nietzsche’s writing, orienting it towards the “outside” of philosophy and the present.

As Anne Sauvagnargues highlights, such a strategic importance of the machine is also reflected in the two successive editions (1970 and 1976) of Marcel Proust and the Signs, in which Deleuze moves from interpretation to machinic experimentation (Sauvagnargues, 2018). If we consider that Nietzsche and Proust in regard to philosophy and literature respectively are the two pillars of Deleuze’s great theoretical elaboration of the critique of the dogmatic image of thought, then the power of the machination carried out by Guattari in the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy becomes undoubtedly evident - a machination that aims to impose itself where Deleuze could not or did not want to do it alone. If in Difference and Repetition Deleuze managed to machinate the eternal return of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in order to elaborate his transcendental empiricism (Vignola, 2019a), he did nothing but follow the path already traced by Nietzsche. In the case of Nomadic Thought, if it is true that Deleuze achieved the great parable of his reading of Nietzsche (Meziane, 2019, p. 6), it could be said that it is rather the influence of the Guattarian machines that transformed Nietzschean aphorisms in “a war-machine of thought”, “a nomadic power” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 260), thus generating his monstrous son - Nietzsche's deleuzoguattarian son².

Machinating Anti-Oedipus: Towards Micropolitics

The publication of Anti-Oedipus was an event that unleashed a heterogeneous range of comments and criticism, as well as great expectations regarding the successive publications of the two authors (Dosse, 2010, pp. 207-218). The risk sensed by Deleuze and Guattari themselves had to do with a possible institutional or even capitalist recovery of this book, which was so revolutionary in its contents and in the way of presenting problems. However, shortly after the publication, they already had a strategy that they will apply later in A Thousand Plateaus:

Our book will be probably be reclaimed if we make another book somewhat similar to it in the same direction. It won't be if we are able to continue our work and do something together, Felix and I, that is completely new in relation to Anti-Oedipus. At that point, Anti-Oedipus will become unreclaimable because, by nature, it would be completely surpassed, both by what Felix and I do next and by what others will do on their end. (Deleuze, 2020, p. 198).

For the two authors there is also another way to avoid the ideological recovery of the book, that is, treating it as a machine that sends back to the outside of political and psychic situations, instead of hermeneutically searching for its meaning: “A machine that doesn't work, you need another outlet or another machine. Our book is like that” (ibid, p. 209). The book has to become a philosophical war machine. And this is what will become explicit, and even programmatic in Rhizome (Deleuze; Guattari, 1987, p. 8-11).

With regards to the concepts developed in Anti-Oedipus, the books published later undoubtedly manifest some forceful transformations, precisely inasmuch as the side of machines is concerned. From Kafka. For a Minor Literature, in order to account for desire, the desiring machine is replaced by the assemblage, just as the war machine and the abstract machine also come into play. The machine goes from being conceived essentially as a productive system of connections and cuts -the desiring machineto being determined as a power of variation of assemblages, that is to say, the abstract machine of A Thousand Plateaus, from which the war machine, in case it is not captured by the State, turns out to be the assemblage that best embodies this power (Holland, 2007).

The functions of decoding and improbable connection that Anti-Oedipus attributed to desiring machines are thus transferred to abstract machines, as a molecular pole of variation of assemblages. Ultimately, the abstract machine must be conceived as a threshold of the assemblage, which it reaches by tracing a plane of consistency capable of detaching itself from the stratum to which it belongs: “The more an assemblage opens and multiplies connections and draws a plane of consistency with its quantifiers of intensities and of consolidation, the closer it is to the living abstract machine” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1987, p. 513). In turn, abstract machines can always become machines of stratification: “If abstract machines open assemblages they also close them. An order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine and overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes or axiomatizes the earth” (514). Schizoanalysis, then, extends its task from the maintenance of desiring machines to the simultaneous mechanospheric analysis of abstract machines and assemblages.

Another new concept, which could be conceived in turn as a machination of schizoanalysis itself, is that of micropolitics, which is intimately linked to abstract machines and assemblages, and which comes primarily from the Guattarian theoretical elaboration developed at La Borde clinic. As Guattari recalls in “On machines”, La Borde is

a machine of subjectification which itself is composed of n-sub-wholes of subjectification. From the moment the patient arrives at the clinic, these relationships of subjectification have to function between patient and doctor. Further relationships will then be set up not only with patients and their counsellors, but with animals and machines as well (Guattari, 1995, p. 12).

Such a description is already a definition of micropolitics. More in general, the “micropolitical” perspective intends to account for what moves molecularly under representative and institutional politics, which would be molar in the sense of the great divisions between groups, classes, nations, etc., and which considers that such a molecular movement is precisely what contributes both to institutional concretizations and to historical transformations (molars). In A Thousand Plateaus, the molar and the molecular are applied to the micropolitical cartographies of the (molars) segments and the (molecular) lines, in a conception of social reality that is no longer a movement of contradictions, but a tangle of molar segments, molecular lines of deterritorialization and lines of flight. These cartographic elements, which allow to diagnose microfascism in several aspect of social life (Genosko, 2017), come from the clinical work of Guattari and his colleagues, including Ferdinand Deligny, an “avant-garde” educator in the field of clinical child pedagogy, whose approach was close to the schizoanalytic methods of La Borde clinic, where he was hosted for professional collaborations between 1965 and 1967 on the invitation of Guattari and Oury (Dosse, 2010, pp. 71-75).

In particular, the very notion of cartography adopted by Deleuze and Guattari come directly from the educational practice elaborated by Deligny in the three issues of the Cahiers de l'Immuable, published by the journal Recherches between 1975 and 1976. These texts describe the experience of the laboratory-community that involved children diagnosed with autism or significant linguistic-cognitive deficits. The laboratory-community was conceived and implemented by Deligny in '68 in the Cevennes mountains, in the south of France, where both the processes of subjectivation of children and the educational processes were developed and reflected in the cartographies of transhumance, that is, through the mapping of the movements made between the different camps and shelters (Deligny, 2013). It is in this context that Deligny develops the concept of “lines of drift” [lignes d'erre], which, by expressing the pre-eminence of space and existential territories over linguistic representation, intends to give a voice to those who are outside of language. Furthermore, in fact, there is undoubtedly Deligny behind one of the most emphatic definitions of the rhizomatic, a-signifying, and non-representative writing in A Thousand Plateaus: “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1987, p. 5-6).

By taking into account the weight of the concept of micropolitics and its clinical components, in primis “La Borde machine”, as much as its assemblages with other machines such as those of Deligny, or even the Palestinian struggle that drive the concept of war-machine (Zourabichvili, 2003, p. 48), it can be affirmed that A Thousand Plateaus fulfils the purpose of escaping any kind of recovery announced after Anti-Oedipus. Such an escape consists in gathering forces and elements outside the text, once again outside of philosophy, to outline the features of a practical philosophy in the Spinozian sense, that is, experimental.

Micropolitical and Geophilosophical Machines

After A Thousand Plateaus for Guattari the “winter years” arrive but also the opportunity for a dissemination and deterritorialization of his concepts in Brazil and Latin America that will become one of the most powerful existential and political reasons for the French thinker. If until the publication of A Thousand Plateaus Guattari was the great protagonist of the machinations of the texts with the outside, at the beginning of the Eighties a phenomenon that we could define as “collective machination” began to be generated around his works and those of Deleuze. Beyond the famous schizoanalysis seminar that would lead to the establishment of Chimères, the journal founded by Guattari and Deleuze themselves in 1987, it is worth noting the role that Suely Rolnik played in the political, intellectual, and existential experience of the psychiatrist from La Borde in Brazil: Guattari went seven times to the Ibero-American country in just over a decade. Thus, between 1979 and 1992, Guattari extended his political commitment abroad, maintaining relations with exponents of social and union struggles, including the then president of the PT and recently elected governor of São Paulo, Lula da Silva: Guattari saw the movement lead by Lula as the possible push towards something close to his own idea of a molecular revolution, after decades of military dictatorship (Dosse, 2010, p. 293, 485).

As a Brazilian militant exiled in Paris in the early Seventies and a Vincennes student from its very beginning, Rolnik immediately met Guattari and began to collaborate with him (Dosse, 2010, pp. 483-485). Towards the end of the decade, Rolnik returns to Brazil, where she applies the concepts of micropolitics in his clinical psychology work in Sao Paulo, she translates part of La révolution moleculaire, and she leads seminars on the texts of Deleuze and Guattari. The result is the generation of a great political (geo)philosophical rhizome, a perfect space for Guattarian experimentation. In fact, the initiatives carried out by Rolnik represent the preliminary step for the realization of the book, first published in Portuguese, Micropolítica. Cartografias do desejo (Guattari; Rolnik, 1986) which is to achieve great popularity and above all to work as a conceptual spring for the revolutionary and counter-hegemonic political and social movements of the last decades. Published in 1986, Micropolitics is a book designed as a blog that collects, metabolizes, and reworks hundreds of transcripts of debates, discussions, and interviews with Rolnik and Guattari during their trips around the country in 1982. The book also incorporates more theoretical texts, as well as notes and letters from the two friends, with the result of producing an emblematic example of what a “rhizome-book” can be: a kind of machine that articulates the collective assemblages of enunciation with the machinic assemblages of political, militant, and visionary desire.

The Brazilian moment, along with the status of the concept according to Deleuze and Guattari, had a formidable “exo-consistency”, represented by the great resonance of Micropolitics throughout the continent, as well as an “endo-consistency”, in the sense that it powerfully contributed to the imaginary of Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy and therefore to the virtual relationship between the two authors: though their actual relationship underwent a drastic rarefaction, it continued through other means, for example through their collaborators and friends. An emblematic testimony of such a Brazilian pursuit of machination with other means is that of Eric Alliez - Deleuze’s great alumnus and very active participants in Guattari's seminar but also collaborator of Rolnik - who personally contributed to the creation of the Colégio International de Estudos Filosoficos Transdisciplinares, inspired by the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Among its activities, the Colégio Internacional of Rio de Janeiro organized in 1992 the presentation carried out by Guattari himself of What is philosophy? and Chaosmosis (Dosse, 2010, pp. 485-486). And Alliez once again, always from Brazil, organizes the great tribute colloquium for Deleuze, one year after his death, “Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique” (Alliez, 1998). In 1996, thus, albeit without the presence of the two great thinkers who have already disappeared, the collective machination was definitively set in motion (Alliez, 1996).

Conclusions

The brief presentation of Guattari's machines and machinations in this paper has the function of showing their theoretical and methodological relevance on two complementary philosophical levels: the level of the “manufacturing secret” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1991) of the concepts forged together with Deleuze, and that one of the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. In the first case, we wanted to highlight the complex relationship of necessary co-conception of the desiring machine and the other machines that populate the project of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, in order to help dispel the belief in a Deleuzian theoretical hierarchy or philosophical purity, which would be stained by the clinical empiricism of Guattari. Far from endorsing such a point of view, we argue that the Guattarian concept of the machine arises from a very original machination of the Deleuzian concept of structure, just as the micropolitics of A Thousand Plateaus arises from the machination of the schizoanalysis of Anti-Oedipus.

In the second case, we wanted to show how the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism originates precisely from the first exchanges between Deleuze and Guattari (which are reflected in “Machine and Structure”) and it reaches full maturity with Nomadic Thought, and thus with the revolution internal to the Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche which leads to the machination of Nietzschean aphorisms with the outside of contemporary politics. Such a revolution, as we saw, was made possible only thanks to the machinic and schizoanalytic turn taken by Deleuze, whereby Nietzsche no longer becomes only a Deleuzian (Mengue, 2000, p. 177; Vignola, 2019b), but also a Guattarian, just as philosophy becomes post-structuralist only on condition of facing the very outside where Deleuze and Guattari meet and machinate themselves.

• Como citar: VIGNOLA, Paolo. Machinic Untimeliness I: Machine Becomings and Conceptual Machinations. Revista de Filosofia Aurora, Curitiba: Editora PUCPRESS, v. 36, e202430364, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/2965-1557.036.e202430364.
• 1
  The text of the conference was commissioned by Lacan, who also facilitated the meeting, for the journal Scilicet, but after a period of procrastination he decided not to publish it. The text was then published in the issue 12 of Change and subsequently in Psychanalise et transversalité.
• 2
  One can find a symptom of the Guattarian influence in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche by reading the answer Deleuze gave to Mieke Taat’s question, about the opposition between surface and depth, during the discussion of Deleuze’s talk at the Nietzsche Aujourd’hui conference: “I've undergone a change. The surface-depth opposition no longer concerns me. What interests me now is the relationships between a full body, a body without organs, and flows that migrate” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 261).

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  30 Aug 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  10 May 2023
• Accepted
  19 June 2024