Machinic Point

The Embodied Machines page, which can be found here, will contain all essays, articles, and papers contributed towards the Embodied Machines project.  I am very pleased to be hosting the first paper entitled: ”Refracting ‘health’.  Deleuze, Guattari and Body/Self”, by Nick J Fox (University of Sheffield, UK).  This paper serves as a most lucid and informative introduction to some of Deleuze’s most fundamental terminologies and concepts, examined within a context of health and embodiment.  As such, it serves as a perfect introduction for newcomers, whilst also examining particular themes (health, embodiment), which will be most insightful for newcommers and those more well versed alike.

I am looking forward to posting more submissions from other authors, and shall do so upon their arrival/completion.

I have sent out numerous emails to those who I think would have interesting and thought provoking comments on the topic of Deleuze and embodiment.  My goal is to collect a variety of contributions examining the role of the body and the consequences of embodiment in juxtaposition with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism.  In this sense, the body and brain may be viewed as a zone, or medium, of intensity.  Below is an example of such an examination:

Within “What is Philosophy?”, Deleuze and Guatarri state that “Philosophy, art and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject, Thought brain.  They are the three planes, the rafts on which the brain plunges into chaos” (pg.210).  Our experience of reality is both mediated through and productive of, the body; the subject emerges from this ‘zone of intensity’ or mediation as an affect.  These affects include the production of the above three planes, or modes of thought, by a “non-objectifiable brain”.

In a chapter entitled “Sharing Technologies”, Maaike Bleeker contrasts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “non-objectifiable brain” with the work of Lakoff and Johnson, two major proponents of cognitive linguistics:

“According to them [Deleuze and Guattari], it is the brain that thinks and not man - the latter being only a ‘cerebral crystalization’.  Lakoff and Johnson search for this moment where subjectivity appears as a cerebral crystallization.  They look for it within the deepest synaptic fissures, and they come up with a model in which subjectivity is the effect of complex processes of inferences taking place between reasoning, conceptual thinking, perception and motor control” (pg.69).  Following this, Bleeker traces certain tenets of Lakoff and Johnson’s perspective on embodied cognition, starting with categorization, moving to the resultant structuring of concepts, and finally to the inferential capacity of concepts and the production of metaphor.

The above excerpt is just one example of a variety of different examinations which may be made detailing the consequences of embodiment in juxtaposition with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism.  May we conceive of ‘progressive differentiation’ under the principles of embodiment in order to extend the capacity to experience?  Are there methods which utilize, or apply an understanding of the function and structure of the embodied machine, that will lead to new styles of perception and becoming?

May we employ the body as a tool to transgress the limits of the self?  What importance does this have when considering Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’?

If you desire to contribute by way of difference and repetition, please contact me at joe.haskins[at]gmail.com.  All articles shall be credited to the author and accompanied by a link if desired.

*Eventually I’d like to start a discussion group on such topics.  These writings could possibly serve as starting points for future discussions.

What does the term “Machinic Point” mean?

I originally came across the term “Machinic Point” whilst reading a talk given by Deleuze, transcribed from a tape recording and published in the journal “Contretemps 2″ in May 2001.  The seminar itself took place on March 26, 1973.  The excerpt follows:

“There’s a book from which one can learn many things, entitled Sexual Life in Ancient China.  This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements.  That’s curious.  I ask myself: OK, how can we extract ourselves, at the same time, from a structuralist vision that seeks correspondences, analogies, and homologies, and from a Marxist vision that seeks determinants.  I indeed see one possible hypothesis, but it’s so confused… it’s perfect - it would consist in saying: at a given moment, for reasons that, of course, must still be determined, it is as if a social space were covered by what we would have to call an abstract machine.  We would have to give a name to this non-qualified abstract machine, a name that would
mark its absence of qualification, so that everything will be clear.  [...] At the same time, this abstract machine, at a given moment, will break with the abstract machine of the preceding epochs - in other words, it will always be at the cutting edge (a la pointe), thus it would receive the name machinic point (pointe machinique).  It would be the machinic point of a group or a given collectivity; it would indicate, within a group, and at a given moment, the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and at the same time, its power of innovation.  This is somewhat abstract at the moment, it’s like algebra.  It’s this abstract machine which, in conditions that will have to be determined…it’s this machinic point of deterritorialization that is reterritorialized in this or that machine, or in this or that military machine, amorous machine, productive of new statements. This is a possible hypothesis.”

So, the idea behind this site is to create a space where such an abstract machine may exist.  My writings focus on current positions within fields which address the notion of what it means to be human, including mind-body functioning, the relationship between mind-body and experience, and ultimately experience and reality.  I hope the ideas expressed here shall promote cognitive deterritorialization amongst you, my readership.  Engaging a reterritorialization upon newly emergent syntheses [mind, body, world, state, self, other].

I hope you may each, “progressively differentiate” [M. DeLanda] yourselves, via this explorative plan(e) of consistency.  As there is nothing other in the world than, ‘the (spontaneous) flow of becoming’.

“freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity”.  - Bey

- Joseph Jay Haskins