Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.2 (Part 2)

Last: Part }{

The ruinous potential of technology, capital, and AI have been a consistent thread running through Land’s work.

In No Future (an unpublished conference talk from 1995, Land continues his use of nuclear catastrophic language from Meltdown, proclaiming: “The socius cancerizes a head, cephallic concentra­tion, rationalizing itself into nuclear capital.” (Land et al., 2012, p. 394). One example he gives is the dissolution of the Christian world: “What globalizes itself in reality - rather than in doctrine - is the collapse of Christendom positivized into communicable social disequilibrium, dropping you through unfathomable intensities of social decay.” (p. 395) Power, he says, recognizes the fact at the end of history, “theopolitical sociality” (p. 396) has to be ripped apart in a sort of Dionysian madness to the soundtrack of howling machines.

More recently, Land talks about this in a 2017 interview titled ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ (Bauer & Tomažin, 2017). When asked what he meant when he said ‘“What happened to America?” is the Cyberpunk question par excellence’, Land answered that:

“It’s sort of stolen from William Gibson, so it goes right back to the mid-1980s. I think you’re totally right to say that now is an excellent time to return to it. So what happened to America? If I was gonna say it in a nutshell: after roughly half a millennium during which the main driving force of global history has been to achieve the integration of larger and more powerful states, directed by a group of strongly universalist ideologists that basically think that the larger your aggregation and the larger the set of common rules that can be imposed on them, the better, we’re seeing a tidal reversal of truly historic scope. The basic tendency now is disintegrative. So what I see happening to America: holding itself together is going to become increasingly challenging.”

However, to gain a deeper understanding of what Land probably means when he speaks of the ‘social’ we must first turn to Deleuze and Guattari, and their concept of the ‘body’.

Within D&G’s theoretical framework, a ‘body’ is something like the sum total of desiring-production within any given system of human organization. There are two main classification of bodies, the ‘body with organs’ and the ‘body without organs’ (henceforth: BwO).

A very simplified definition of these two terms is that the body with organs is the manifest reality with its established rules and regimes while the BwO is the pure virtual potentiality inherent within a system. It is this latter which especially interesting to D&G and is associated with the concept of ‘deterritorialization’, which is of utmost weight to Land. One of the clearer definitions provided by D&G (1972/1977) explains the BwO in words that seem rather reminiscent of some Hindu traditions:

“The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects arc these degrees, these intensive parts that pro­duce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0. The body without organs is the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose one another.” (p. 326-327)

Perhaps instead of advaitins, it may make more sense to think of D&G as nirīśvaravādi viśiṣṭādvaitins.

In order to understand the kinds of forces the BwO unleashes in the uninterrupted process, they first establish a parallel between desiring-production and social production whose sole purpose is to point out that “the forms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972/1977). The association of desiring production and the socius is also primordial; in chapter three, ‘Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men’ they state:

“Desiring-production also exists from the beginning: there is desiring-production from the moment there is social production and reproduction. But in a very precise sense it is true that precapitalist social machines are inherent in desire: they code it, they code the flows of desire. To code desire—and the fear, the anguish of decoded flows—is the business of the socius.” (p. 139)

In accordance with their “universal history”, the socius can take three forms or ‘bodies’: “the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital.” (p. 10). Briefly put, D&G theorize a progressive narrative of social development that unfolds in three stages, each of which is associated with a specific type of body:

1) Body of the earth - Tribe: In in chapter three, D&G (1972/1977) describe the earth thus:

“The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production. For the earth is not merely the multiple and divided object of labor, it is also the unique, indivisible entity, the full body that falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them for its own as the natural or divine precondition. While the ground can be the productive element and the result of appropriation, the Earth is the great unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the common appropriation and utilization of the ground. It is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and means of labor are recorded, and the agents and the products distributed. It appears here as the quasi cause of production and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound to its own repression). The territorial machine is therefore the first form of socius, the machine of primitive inscription, the “megamachine” that covers a social field.” (p. 140-141)

In this stage, humans live in tribal organizations in which status and affiliation are literally inscribed upon their bodies in the form of tattoos, scars, piercings, or other markers. whose way of life is bound to a particular plot of land. Note how “the ground” can be compared to the cloaked bride of Zas, whereas “the Earth” is more akin to base matter or the uncloaked Chthoniê.

Despite this economic orientation, D&G (1972/1977) do state that the economic process actually seems to take a lesser priority in tribal societies, which instead focus on coding:

“The primitive territorial machine codes flows, invests organs, and marks bodies. To such a degree that circulating—exchanging—is a secondary activity in comparison with the task that sums up all the others: marking bodies, which are the earth’s products. The essence of the recording, inscribing socius, insofar as it lays claim to the productive forces and distributes the agents of production, resides in these operations: tattooing, excising, incising, carving, scarifying, mutilating, encircling, and initiating.” (p. 144)

According to D&G, this becomes a founding act for that society. It is in this manner, they say, that a man who is thus marked as belonging to a particular tribe has his body and organs collectivized as belonging to the whole of the tribe, by which organs are “hewn into the socius” and “flows run over its surface”, transforming the man from a biological organism (which they explicitly state he ceases to be) into a full body of the earth. The use of the term organs is of great weight here because it leads directly to the term organization, which for D&G, is at this stage “a system of cruelty, a terrible alphabet” carved directly onto the bodies of men; at the same time, it is to them an unavoidable sacrifice that must be made in order to “breed a ‘nation of thinkers’!” (1972/1977). They redefine cruelty as “the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them. belaboring them” and call these markings “writing” which are prelinguistic and which make men capable of language, thereby consigning all our forefathers to the torturous hell of the philosopher’s basement and demonizing the sacred power of Speech. In the deleuzoguattarian historiography, the fact that our great preceptors, from the mists of antiquity and throughout the ages, struggled against darkness within and without to win the knowledge of Vedas and everything Divine is indistinguishable from the worst depredations of dasyus and mlecchas. This allows our foes to set up the narrative justification for pragati, vilifying them and subverting the last remnants of the civilization they established.

The particular mental illness that is its product is said to be hysteria.

2) Body of the despot - Empire: when they reach this stage of development, humans are metaphorically unearthed as they move about at the behest of an emperor, whose authority has come to supersede and erode previous localized ones. Now he assumes the form of the body in himself and other men figuratively become akin to his eyes, ears, and other limbs. It might be said, following Marxist historiography, that this breaks down into feudalist structures, thereby edlanding men into a stricter, land-bound form of organization, albeit on a different scale from the tribal society, though it is uncertain whether D&G would have agreed with this statement.

The particular mental illnesses that is its product are manic-depression and paranoia.

3) Body of capital - Capitalist Modernity: in chapter three, ‘Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men’, D&G state that the difference between the previous two stages and this one is that “precapitalist social machines are inherent in desire” and ‘code’ its flows, whereas “capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money”, but only under “social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution”, thus opposing the drive to its limit with ever-waning strength (1972/1977, p. 139-140). Basically, abstract, numerical systems of calculation are needed to recode flows that have broken away from traditional systems of organization bound to the land and particularities into a universal format able to be digested by the capitalist machine untethered to the “ground”.

Its product is said to be schizophrenia.

Presumably, the tension between these opposing tendencies of capitalism cause its limits to give way under the pressure, like a pipe fracturing at a joint. Finally, the capitalist machine burns itself out, and, no longer able to resist its own impulse towards self-destruction, reaches its limit, at which point “the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production” (1972/1977, p. 140). In some ways, it seems as though this “deterritorialized socius” has come full circle to the earliest state in which the social machine is inherent in desiring-production. The major difference here appears to be that the flows of desire are at this stage completely decoded, possibly permanently.

One curious aspect of the socius is that it appears to fulfill some of the same functions for these materialists that the Brahman does in Advaita Vedānta, in that various images of organization appear to be superimposed atop it by a sort of illusory power that obscures the deeper reality of the phenomena occurring:

“This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition. In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on (il se rabat sur) all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be “miraculated” (miracules) by it. In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface.” (p. 10).

However, as we saw in chapter one, D&G (1972/1977) actually appear to advance a kind of dvaita (dualism) which posits two co-eternal substances — the socius and desire:

“The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and no thing else.” (p. 29)

Still, it might be said that the two are inseparable, though they begin as two distinct yet inherent substances, but at the point at which the “deterritorialized socius” becomes the BwO, it is completely identified with the decoded flows of its desiring-production, thereby attaining a kind of kaivalya (‘onliness’). Indeed, in chapter three, D&G (1972/1977) explicitly refer to the full body of the earth as “Numen” — God:

“The full body of the earth is not without distinguishing characteristics. Suffering and dangerous, unique, universal, it falls back on production, on the agents and connections of production. But on it, too, everything is attached and inscribed, everything is attracted, miraculated. It is the basis of the disjunctive synthesis and its reproduction: a pure force of filiation or genealogy, Numen. The full body is the unengendered, but filiation is the first character of inscription marked on this body. And we know the nature of this intensive filiation, this inclusive disjunction where everything divides, but into itself, and where the same being is everywhere, on every side, at every level, differing only in intensity…it is inscribed on the cosmic egg of the full body of the earth. It has a mythical origin that is the One, or rather the primitive one-two.” (p. 154)

Although the French pair explicitly refer to religious ideas derived from ethnographic studies of the West African Dogon1 folk and their lokadharma, which talks at great length of successive generations of primordial twins, it is quite striking how the thoughts of a people so separated from ours in time and space nevertheless seem to share a certain degree of the sophisticated emanationism expounded in the Lakṣmī Tantra.

It is integral to keep in mind, however, that unlike what āstika darśaṇas (‘orthodox schools’) posit regarding the nature of Brahman, such as perfect consciousness (cit), this god of the deleuzoguattarians may well be a blind, dumb, and deaf machine-god, forever propagating novelties. It might very well be such a reading of the BwO, so akin to the idiot creator god of the Lovecraftian pantheon, Azathoth, that inspired Land’s own work on this matter. As Land (1993) pithily remarks in Machinic Desire: “the desiring-production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us).” The weightiness of desiring-production to Land’s worldview can be seen even earlier, in the essay Circuitries (1992a), where he claims that desiring production is “the impersonal pilot of history” which is beyond “the assumption that guidance proceeds from the side of the subject”.

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