Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.2 (Part 4)

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The next stage of development for the social machine, the empire, situated on the full body of the despot, is characterized primarily by its unlanding power. D&G (1972/1977) differentiate between the deleuzoguattarian idea of territoriality as exemplified by the tribal social society, which divides the people upon the indivisible body of the earth, and the conventional understanding territoriality, defined as the subdivision of land instead of the people and reorganization on the basis of geography instead of gens. The division of the earth can only be achieved through a sedentary bureaucratic class. Instead of seeing this as the peak of landing, D&G say that the the movement towards this kind of organization is actually “the effect of the first great movement of deterritorialization” (p. 146). The full body of the earth, which had an “immanent unity” (p. 146), is superseded by the full body of the Unengendered Despot who appropriates unto himself the entirety of production and fertility, from the rains in the sky to the fruits of the earth. Where men were once organs of the tribe they now serve as limbs of the Emperor, acting as his eyes, ears, and hands. In this way, he challenges the system of lateral alliances and extended filiation by establishing a “new alliance and direct filiation” (P. 192). The new dispensation is as theological as it is sociological, since it places the Despot in direct filiation with the deity and the people must follow. We can perhaps see this in the after-death godhood of (Julius) Caesar and Augustus’ claim to be his divine son (divi filius) prior to the civil war against Marcus Antonius, or how the Paraśú-kumāra and future “vaṁśa-kṛd rājā” (ŚB 9.2.33) of the Vaiśpatya Sāmrājya, Viśpati ‘Mahān’, devastated his Śastrikā-jana cousins under the leadership of Vanajantu and converted them to the Second Urianism.

In its breaking with the old order, the ‘barbarian despotic machine’ is referred to as a “strange machine, or rather a machine of the strange”, whose point of origin is explicitly identified as the desert (p. 192). If we are meant to take this literally, it is rather intriguing how the ideas elaborated by D&G seem to agree so closely with Malhotra’s dichotomy of ‘desert religions’ and ‘forest religions’: Malhotra characterizes the first as harsh, exacting, and intolerant—traits in-line with the essentially paranoiac nature of the deleuzoguattarian strange machine, as both are essentially inseparable from their “struggle with the old system” (p. 193), which has well earned them the label of ‘counter-religion’ by thinkers such as the blogger at mAnasa-taraMgiNI. While we ourself are not so strongly convinced of the universal synonymity of the two terms or the reductive characterization of all religious traditions of desert-dwellers worldwide (preferring instead the geographically-contextualized, historiographical argument of the ‘compression’ of an already comparatively small Kanānīya pantheon to favour the paratva of the Caturākṣari-bhūta as a result of historical events), we do still think there is a kernel of truth in this formulation, especially as applies the current ‘texture’ of the world-cloak.

D&G also express the nature of the new system in sexual terms, calling it a “glorious celibate machine, insofar as it exalts the triumph of the new alliance” (p. 193). In this manner, the conquering despotic machine, through the superficial appearance of its celibacy — that is, in its rejection of the old systems of kinship and lineage1 — obscures its own rapacity by conflating (Natural/Dharmic) ‘sexuality’2 with ‘incest’3. Celibates thus exist in a relationship of mutual excitement with Rapists4, and the despotic machine runs over the Sons of the Earth.

When D&G speak of paranoia as the defining characteristic (or perhaps, illness) of the despotic machine it is in the context of the imposition of new alliances and direct affiliation which are in stark contrast to the old system of lateral alliances and extended filiations:

“It is this force of projection that defines paranoia, this strength to start again from zero, to objectify a complete transformation: the subject leaps outside the intersections of alliance- filiation, installs himself at the limit, at the horizon, in the desert, the subject of a deterritorialized knowledge that links him directly to God and connects him to the people. For the first time, something has been withdrawn from life and from the earth that will make it possible to judge life and to survey the earth from above: a first principle of paranoiac knowledge. The whole relative play of alliances and filiations is carried to the absolute in this new alliance and this direct filiation.” (p. 194)

The probable cause of this paranoia is probably the fact that the ‘barbarian formation’ is always defined in its relation to the ‘savage primitive formation’ (whether this takes the form of a direct supercession, a breaking away from an older empire, or the establishment of a religious empire) that it supplants but also continues to be haunted by (p. 193-194)—which they relate to Marx’s concept of the Asian model of production, but which may better be understood in our day as the way in which the Indian elite remain haunted by the possibility of a renewed Hindavī Svarājya. Indeed, the reestablishment of a sacred polity of, for, and by Hindus, would be a matter of the greatest horror for those wretched mongrels who serve the vile archontic entities that govern the fates of Men and other beings in this era, hidden well beneath the bridal cloak of the earth for which they have flayed our Mother’s form.

Perhaps what one must keep in mind most of all is that while this stage of social formation is called the ‘barbarian despotic machine’, which implies an invasion from without, D&G mention that the invasions were not likely to have been successful were it not for weaknesses within that made the downfall of the preceding social structure all the more likely:

“The death of the primitive system always comes from without; history is the history of contingencies and encounters. Like a cloud blown in from the desert, the conquerors are there…But this death that comes from without is also that which was rising from within: the general irreducibility of alliance to filiation, the independence of the alliance groups, the way in which they serve as a conducting element for the political and economic relations, the system of primitive rankings, the mechanism of surplus value—all this already prefigured despotic formations and caste hierarchies…It is not always easy to know if one is considering a primitive community that is repressing an endogenous tendency, or one that is regaining its cohesion as best it can after a terrible exogenous adventure.”

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