A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 403-423
Machinic Phylum
“PROBLEM III. How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?
PROPOSITION VIII. Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism.” (403)
“Through this assemblage of speed [the man-animal-weapon assemblage], the ages of metal are marked by innovation” (404)
“There are so many gray areas, intermediaries, and combinations between an imperial army and a nomad war machine that is is often the case that things originate in the empire” (404)
“what defines a technological line or continuum, and its variable extension, from a given standpoint?” (405)
“metallurgy is inseparable from several lines of variation: variation between meteorites and indigenous metals; variation between ores and proportions of metal; variations 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” (405)
“All of these variables can be grouped under two overall rubrics: singularities or spatiotemporal haecceities … affective qualities or traits of expression” (405)
“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” (406)
“Each phylum has its own singularities and operations, its own qualities and traits, which determine the relation of desire to the technical element” (406)
“But it is always possible to situate the analysis on the level of singularities that are prolongable from one phylum to another, and to tie the two phyla together” (406)
“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, differentiating” (406)
“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” (406)
“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 continuity 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” (406)
“phylogenetic lines, travel long distances between assemblages of various ages and cultures” (407)
“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 different nature but of the same culture or age” (407)
“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” (407)
“[[André Leroi-Gourhan]] has done 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” (407)
“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 on draws it upon the phylum or inscribes it in the assemblages; but the two are inseparable” (407)
“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?” (407)
Commentator’s Note: Always [[Being and Motion]], the originary dual.
“an ambulant coupling, events-affects, which constitutes the vague corporeal essence” (408)
“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” (408)
“to the formed or formable matter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying singularities or haecceities that are already like implicit forms that are topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of deformation” (408)
“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” (408)
“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” (408)
“what Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model for is taking form and matter to be two terms defined separately” (409)
Metallurgy
“the machinic phylum is materiality, 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 matter-flow can only be followed” (409)
“We will therefore define the artisan as one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow or 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” (409)
“Why is the machinic phylum, the flow of matter, essentially metallic or metallurgical?” (410)
“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” (410)
“Matter and form have never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy,” for instance, in the “ingot-form,” and “yet the succession of forms tends to be replaced by the form of continuous development, and the variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous variation” (411)
“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’” (411)
“what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model” (411)
“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” (411)
“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” (411)
“Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs” (411)
“The first and primary itinerant is the artisan” (411)
“artisans are those who follow the matter-flow as pure productivity” (411)
“Because metal is the pure productivity of matter, those who follow metal are producers of objects par excellence” (412)
“Every mine is a line of flight that is in communication with smooth spaces—there are parallels today in the problems with oil” (412)
“Mines are a source of flow, mixture, and escape with few equivalents in history” (412)
“Smiths are ambulant, itinerant … their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth space of the nomad … They are caves dwellers not by nature but by artistry and need” (413)
Endnote 99: “Bloch demonstrates precisely that the distinction between sedentaries and nomads becomes secondary in connection with cave dwelling” (562)
“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 fantastic forms corresponding 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 hollowed 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’” (413)
Endnote 100: “[[Élie Faure]], Medieval Art, vol. 2 of History of Art, trans. Walter Pach (Garden City, N. Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 12-14” (563)
“Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the earth into swiss cheese” (413)
“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 raising. 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 megalithic agriculture” (414)
Commentator’s Note: As mentioned last time, [[GAME 340, Week 7]], the “beaker people” are the ancestors of the Celts, and [[A Web of Migration]] provides us with an excellent historical study of their forebears and descendants, with special focus on language and material culture. Manco delves even further into prehistory, charting the following cultural lineage (and indeed, through her material analysis, a phylogenetic line, i.e., a line between “ages or cultures”): Mal’ta–Buret’ culture > Samara culture > Dnieper-Donets I > Dnieper-Donets II > Yamnaya > Bell Beaker. And as cited last time, “Clan lineages are essentially segments in action; they meld and divide … 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’ (388).” That direct lineage above is one of pure temporality; the historical reality that Manco recounts is one defined by numerous meldings and divisions.
“It is in their specificity, it is by virtue of their itinerancy, by virtue of their inventing a holey space, that they [the smiths, metallurgists] necessarily communicate with the sedentaries and with the nomads” (415)
“They are in themselves double: a hybrid, an alloy, a twin formation” (415)
“we must imagine less separate segments than a chain of mobile workshops constituting, form hole to hole, a line of variation, a gallery” (415)
“This hybrid metallurgist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and with the nomads at the same time” (415)
“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” (415)
“the phylum simultaneously has two different modes of liaison: it is always connected to nomad space, whereas it conjugates with sedentary space” (415)
War
“AXIOM III. *The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.
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).” (415-416)
Deleuze and Guattari mention the “nonbattle” of guerrilla warfare, citing Brossollet, and others (416)
Commentator’s Note: I know of ‘nonbattle’ from Alexander Galloway’s blog, “Guy Brossollet’s ‘Non-battle,’ Culture and Communication, December 10, 2014, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/guy-brossollets-non-battle. I first cited this in my master’s thesis, [[Fiction in the Integrated Circuit]] (2018).
Endnote 104: “The texts of T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1935) and ‘The Science of Guerilla 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 ‘maneuver’; 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” (563)
“To the extent that wars … aims for the annihilation or capitulation or enemy forces, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object” (417)
“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” (417)
“war is the ‘supplement’ of the war machine” (417)
“Such, for example, was the adventure 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 little, 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 revelation of this supplement. And it will be Joshua, not Moses, who is charged with waging war” (417)
“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 becomes subordinated to the aims of the State” (418)
“Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated” (418)
“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” (419)
“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” (421)
In our contemporary present, we witness a “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 object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival” (421)
Commentator’s Note: This ‘world-machine’ is the subject of my [[Fiction in the Integrated Circuit]], and the dynamic of terror and totality (the global regime of ‘deterrence,’ or here, ‘survival’) was something I drew from Baudrillard.
“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” (421)
“the very conditions that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines” (422)
Commentator’s Note: We might add, terroristic machines.
Figures of these possibilities: the “Saboteur” and the “Deserter” (422)
“The war machine is not uniformly defined …at one pole, it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe … 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 composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space” (422)
“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 beginning all of the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition with the other pole, and swing toward it from the start” (422)
“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 a phylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement” (423)
“guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war … can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else” (423)
“The difference between the two poles is great, even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight 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 organization and domination” (423)
“We are constantly reminded that there is communication 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” (423)