Again, it seems entirely necessary to return to what I previously termed the “subtle subversion.” Again, “madness” is danger. With the Black Hole and White Wall, as with the Body Without Organs, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the necessity of working within the system; the system which we are born into (189). For Deleuze and Guattari, we don’t attempt to get out of the black hole or white wall directly, as we will either go mad, find ourselves reterritorialized, or both (Deleuze 188). Instead, we launch the necessary threads of deterritorialization along and across the wall, or by means of the black hole.
Only across the wall of the signifier can you run lines of asignificance that void all memory, all return, all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion to 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 (189).
This form of subversion, is a trope that appears throughout the text; during discussions of means to destratify or to deterritorialize. Deleuze and Guattari make it clear that to attempt to dramatically empty the body of organs, is to miss the point entirely, or to risk the inherent danger related to that action. Similar attempts to escape the black hole or to break through the white wall will only result in “madness.” One must find a different means of encouraging positive deterritorialization. This suggests the next point.
While the abstract machine seemingly exists as solution, it is also the problem. The same is true of deterritorialization. There exist both negative and positive deterritorializations that might be overlooked. The distinction of negative and positive is an important point of consideraton. The abstract machine may allow for rapid positive deterritorialization, absolute deterritorialization, but the abstract machine is also responsible for faciality. The abstract machine has two states:
…sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about deterritorializations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations that are absolute but remain negative… (189-190)
This would be the means by which the abstract machine is related to faciality.
…sometimes it is developed on a plane of consistency giving it a “diagrammatic” function, a positive value of deterritorialization, the ability to form new abstract machines (190)
This is the means by which the abstract machine would allow one to achieve the Body Without Organs. This is the map or the “diagrammatic,” as it is advocated by Deleuze or Guattari. The abstract macine is both enemy and accomplice, positive and negative. I only introduce these binaries in order to identify the complexity of the machine. As Deleuze and Guattari suggested earlier, the most important question is never of right and wrong. The abstract machine is a weapon that subjects, as with the despotic, while simultaneously providing a means for escape.
Wonderful work!
Oh, and I know it’s just one of the abstract machines — but I wonder what you think about their treatment of faciality…? I wonder if Levinas doesn’t fit in here, with the full force and furor of the Marxist critique as well. The ethical relation of the face to face is an immanent alterity, productive and originating new planes of consistency — the origin of the diagram itself. Why is the face both a black hole and a white wall? In a sense the face is just a machine like any other — but before it is a machine, it is a machinic interface, right? The Other, exteriority, multipliticity, is an ally first (potentially, anyway.) One of the most important ‘abstract’ operations is completely materialistic, as it were: forging lateral alliances.
Thanks for this!
Joe