Primordial: An Abstraction

44

Violence begets violence. Ultraviolence is another matter. Hermeneutics of suspicion vary like words for snow in Eskaleut. And while violence in its pure form is certainly variable, it’s not as volatile. This includes physical violence as much as the violence of Psyche and especially Rhetoric. Consider this climatic passage from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s The War Machine:

The first theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings, and this is precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable relation to war itself. The war machine is not uniformly defined, and comprises something other than increasing quantities of force. We have tried to define two poles of the war machine: at one pole, it takes war for its object, and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here — limited war, total war, worldwide organization — war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war machine, but only, whatever the machine’s power (puissance), either the set of conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of which the States themselves are no longer but parts. The other pole seemed to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” has as its object not war, but the tracing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.

Then, in the final sentence of the book, Deleuze & Guattari’s thesis ignites like gunpowder: “War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture and domination.”

To adequately process this data, one requires an expansive knowledge of D&G’s entire oeuvre, at which point the theoretical duo’s enigmatic deployment of word-bombs becomes utterly ordinary, if not banal.

More compelling, perhaps, is a disembowelment of this material from the gutsack of everyday life. For instance, I get this text from my wife:

“Please go to the Dollar Store and pick up some buttwipes for the baby.”

But my phone has turned against me.

Also, as I remind my wife in an encrypted font: “I’m not home. I’m at school.”