[3] The Subject and Enjoyment

There were at least two things in my post about the BwO that were too briefly discussed, or improperly emphasized. I'll briefly mention these things to begin this post. First, as I mentioned in our discussion, an understanding of morphogenesis is key to understanding the BwO. Manuel DeLanda defines the BwO (in the fifth section of the lecture series posted below) as "matter inhabited by pure intensities, capable without any prior organization—without any prior biological, physical, or even chemical organization—to express itself," (my emphasis added). This expression is born from the intensities that play themselves out on the surface of the body, from the the forces of repulsion and attraction; the form that the binary machines take is attributable to the analog expressive forces (such as temperature, speed, pressure, and concentration) of nature. This leads directly to the second improperly emphasized feature of my previous post: the notion of becoming. The depth of meaning in this word is at the heart of morphogenesis and Anti-Oedipus. Therefore I think it is best discussed later, and, I hope, at length.

[3] The Subject and Enjoyment

Once recorded, this sliding, rootless construct falls back on production—containing the vital energy of production of production. However, as a result of the disjunctive synthesis, the consumption phase following the recording process is now constituted by the production of recording. It is important to acknowledge the shift: consumption is now constituted in some way by the identity, not constitutive (as it was in production of production). This is the work of D&G's subject, as I understand it. A subject can be conceptualized because of the substance of its expression... constituted, how?. The subject has a face: the paranoic and miraculating machines adjacent to the amorphous flow, turned outward.

This subject, however, has a limited existence as it has thus far been described. It comes into existence only by "being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state"; it is not reified and consumable on its own, but under the influence of the signified. The attraction of a new machine shows the ambition of identity/signifier to be taken materially—on its own (the result of vital energy force in production of production being continually siphoned off and transformed). The addition of this machine to the face forms "a new alliance between desiring-machines and the body without organs so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism"; the signifier can now be taken literally. Enjoyment. The identity + celebate machine is able to pin down the signifier (Lacan, 1977), diverting more of the vital energy into reifying itself and its signifying capacity: "so it's...." The celebate machine, a.k.a. the bachelor machine, a.k.a. the spoke-maker (as I envision it) appropriates for the BwO various points of disjunction, expanding its signifying capacity to the maximum. I'll defer to D&G, page 20, to summarize this progression:

"...by means of the paranoic machine and the miraculating machine, the proportions of attraction and repulsion on the body without organs produce, starting at zero, a series of states in the celibate machine; ...the subject is born of each state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state that determines him at a given moment, consuming-consummating all these states that cause him to be born and reborn..."

An identity finishes itself in any new state not before it finishes the other. The fortuitousness of an identity, discussed on pg21, is theorized at length in "Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds" by Dorothy Holland & Friends. I'm running short of time, so perhaps somebody could pick up the baton here?

Quickly, I think it is interesting to note the differences in the applications of the word "center" and "circle" throughout section [3]. At times it contains a single machine, and at others it seems to contain all machines discussed thus far. This apparent ambiguity feeds their concept of the multiplicity, and buttresses my analogy of "movable skin."

later,
josh