Machinic Point

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

~ by admin on March 26, 2009.