Part 1: Machines, Desire, Desiring-machines.

(A-O close reading notes 1)

“Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.” (2)

Immediately and without the possibility of adequate preparation, we are plunged into a weird and dense world of machines: production, desire, syntheses, processes, schizophrenia, and sunbeams in Judge Schreber’s ass. “Everything is a machine”(2). This is a book about processes, real processes. Dynamics of desire, production, repression, forces acting in the political and social realms no less than the psychological. And the language used to describe these processes is decidedly that of the machine. But why machines? What do the authors mean by machines? And what do they have to do with desire? The unnamed author of these reading notes (henceforth “Duke”) provides three very useful observations in this regard. 

Firstly, Deleuze and Guattari want to extricate the processes of production that constitute the real from any split or dichotomy between man on the one hand and nature on the other: “the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry”(4). This production or industry is the fundamental characteristic of the machinic as they use the term. Neither man nor nature, the actual productive machinery of being traverses the lines of such imagined categories. This is the first advantage of describing being as machinic: the separate categories of ‘man’ and ‘nature’ are obliterated in the continuity of all being as productive, connective machinery.

The second important feature of machines as Deleuze and Guattari use them is that as a process, they have no subject – “no doer behind the doing”, as Duke puts it, and no object: no set exterior goal. No “goal” at all in fact, but the process of production itself. The third feature of using machinic terminology I have already mentioned in passing, and it is the most important one: “to emphasize the productivity of being. ‘Everything is production’ (p. 4); or more conventionally being is becoming” (Duke).

So using the language of machines brings us into a conception of being that is first and foremost productive, but also asubjective, and functioning as a continuous process in and through domains we often think of as separate. Importantly, none of this is to say that the machinic is in any sense dead or mechanistic, operating as a deterministic closed system. I agree with duke that the most important reason for using the language of the machinic is to put us in the mode of the theme that we will return to over and over again throughout the book: production is primary. And in fact, this primacy of production will be our first definition of schizophrenia, the schizophrenic process: “there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; Schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as ‘the essential reality of man and nature’”(5). Here again the distinction between man and nature is done away with, and indeed in our first portrait of a schizophrenic, Lenz on his stroll is operating in a time “before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production” (2).

The machinic refers to a process of production in which “man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other … rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product” (4-5), and here is where desire comes in. This process of production itself “constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle”(5). There is our first definition of desire, and it is defined in terms of its relationship to production: production is immanent to desire. In other words, desire is immediately production. Desiring-production. Deleuze and Guattari will insist and continually demonstrate that desire is not the want or the lack of some object by some subject. Desire is machinic: it is immediately a process of production, without reference to a desiring subject or a desired object.  This basic identity of desire as a process of production is expressed directly in “desiring-production” as well as “desiring-machines”.

Deleuze and Guattari state three meanings of process as they use the term. The second of them we have covered already:  “that man and nature are one and the same essential reality”, meaning that process is continuous, it cannot be seen as divided into separate mutually independent categories like “man” and “nature”. The third meaning of process twofold: “it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself”, that is, it must not be turned into something static, a fixed aim, “nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself”, or as Steven Shaviro says, it must be “oriented towards becoming, rather than continuation”. Those are the second and the third, but the first meaning of process involves “incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, making them productions of one and the same process” (4). This meaning of process carries us into what will be called the three syntheses of the unconscious: the connective synthesis of production, the disjunctive synthesis of recording, and the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. But that, as a friend of mine would say, is opening another melon. A big, juicy, delicious melon that we will start digging into in the next post of this series.