VYTAUTO DIDŽIOJO UNIVERSITETAS

POLITIKOS MOKSLŲ IR DIPLOMATIJOS FAKULTETAS

SOCIALINĖS IR POLITINĖS TEORIJOS KATEDRA

Edvardas Giedraitis

ŠEIMOS SĄVOKOS KRITIKA IR PERFORMULAVIMAS REMIANTIS

GILLES DELEUZE IR FELIX GUATTARI ANTI-OEDIPUS

Magistro baigiamasis darbas

Socialinė ir politinė kritika, valstybinis kodas 621L20008

Politikos mokslai

Vadovas Doc. dr. Jay D Mininger _______________ _____________

(Moksl. Laipsnis, vardas, pavardė) (Parašas) (Data)

Apginta Prof. dr. Šarūnas Liekis _____________ ______________

(Fakulteto/studijų instituto dekanas/direktorius) (Parašas) (Data)

Kaunas, 2013.
Table of Contents
Summary....................................................................................................................................................3
Summary in Lithuanian..............................................................................................................................4
Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................................5
INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................................6
PART I......................................................................................................................................................11
Desire and love.........................................................................................................................................11
Family and love........................................................................................................................................12
Despotic machine.....................................................................................................................................16
Capitalist machine....................................................................................................................................19
Desire.......................................................................................................................................................21
Production of productions........................................................................................................................24
Body without organs (BWO)...................................................................................................................26
Production of recording...........................................................................................................................28
Production of identity...............................................................................................................................30
Three illegitimate uses of syntheses.........................................................................................................33
1. Connective synthesis............................................................................................................................33
2. Disjunctive synthesis............................................................................................................................35
3. Conjunctive synthesis..........................................................................................................................38
An-Oedipal desire...................................................................................................................................42
PART II....................................................................................................................................................51
Family becoming subject group...............................................................................................................52
Family becoming supermolecule.............................................................................................................56
Five strategic points for becoming ..........................................................................................................59
1. Stop the world......................................................................................................................................60
2. Cherish derelict spaces........................................................................................................................63
T.A.Z. (also, 3. Study camouflage)..........................................................................................................64
The subjectivity of T.A.Z. or band-family...............................................................................................66
4. Sidle and straddle.................................................................................................................................71
5. Come out..............................................................................................................................................72
Fractal family (part one)..........................................................................................................................76
Fractal family (part two)..........................................................................................................................82
Example 1 (human fractal-families):......................................................................................................85
Example 2 (non-human fractal families)..................................................................................................86
Active/reactive forces...............................................................................................................................87
Henry Miller.............................................................................................................................................90
Henry Miller on love and jealousy...........................................................................................................91
Henry Miller, after having sex with his ex-wife......................................................................................91
Aldous Huxley. Mind altering substances................................................................................................92
CONCLUSION........................................................................................................................................96
APPENDIX..............................................................................................................................................99
BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................................103
Summary

The Western contemporary notion of the secular family seems to be supported by the following
contradictory premises: on the one hand, the nuclear family is supposed to be based on love (between
husband and wife; between parents and children) that is expected to last ‘till death do us part'. On the
other hand, what ought to last – in the relation between a restricted set of love objects – is also known
to be an elusive and uncontrollable affect(ion), that seems to arise 'out of nowhere', and to disappear as
quickly. Further, the popular understanding of a loving relation goes hand in hand with a supporting
injunction to possess an object of love, which finds its ideological support in the contemporary ethos of
Capital's relations of production/reproduction, particularly in the notion of private property.
Several consequences ensue from these contradictions. Firstly, love gets compromised by fixing it
on an extremely restricted set of chosen members and becomes something one needs to 'work at' (in
case it 'fails') instead of a spontaneously arising force. It eventually becomes a 'promise' that is meant
always to fail; however, it generates a whole spectrum of industries that successfully cash in on the idea
of love, by selling love in what looks to be an unlimited variety of commodity forms (products, service,
affective services, etc.).
Secondly, the notion of love that is meant to correspond to a possession of its object is a product as
well as producer. This notion of love produces in its own turn the subjectivities that are expected to
establish their own image of an autonomous and self-possessing individuality, as well as to engage in a
relation with their love objects, which are meant to be possessed and privatized. The result of this
injunction of self-possessiveness is a subject that always ends up experiencing a lack in its love, hence
always striving to fill that lack—to ‘complete’ it— with something.
This thesis proposes a critique as well as a re-thinking of the concept of family—along the lines of
Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy—that would be based on an unrestricted set of love objects as well
as a notion of love (as desire) understood not as lack and a necessity to possess, but as a positive force
of production, in the broadest sense of the word. Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical method of
concept creation as well as their conceptual tools laid out in their works such as Anti-Oedipus, are
employed in the execution of the critique and re-conceptualization of the concept of family.
Further, new innovative concepts are created such as fractal family, supermolecular family or
monster family, that assist when thinking the concept of family. The purpose of this paper is not to
produce an alternative image of family, for it would necessarily end up in an attempt to represent
desire/love, and hence to capture it yet again in a restrictive set of object choices. The goal here is to
3
answer the question of how the concept of family would function given modified supportive notions of
love and group, or being-in-common. Thus the question pursued here is not what the family would be
like, but what and how it would always be becoming.

Summary in Lithuanian

Šiuolaikinė dominuojanti Vakarų šeimos samprata yra grindžiama darant prieštaringas prielaidas. Iš
vienos pusės, 'branduolinė šeima' turėtų būti paremta meile grįstais santykiais tarp žmonos ir vyro ir
tarp vaikų ir tėvų - iš kurių yra tikimasi kad ji (meilė) turi tęstis iki 'kol mirtis išskirs'. Iš kitos pusės, ko
yra reikalaujama ilgalaikio tęstinumo - tarp apribotų santykių su išskirtiniais (leistinais) meilės
objektais – yra afekto, kuris pasižymi nenuspėjamumu, praeinamumu ir nepasidavimu racionaliai
kontrolei. Ji (meilė) - kaip liaudies išmintis patvirtintų - kaip greitai ir nenuspėjamai 'ateina' taip pat
greitai ir nenuspėjamai 'išeina'. Be to, populiarus meilės supratimas yra palaikomas papildoma reakcine
geismo forma - pasisavinti, 'privatizuoti' meilės objektą, – atrandanti atgarsį ir palaikimą, šiuolaikinių
kapitalistinių santykių, grindžiamų privačia nuosavybę, etose.
Šie šeimos koncepto prieštaravimai turi bent kelias svarbias pasekmes. Visų pirmą, meilė yra
sukompromituojama nurodant konkrečius ir simboliškai griežtai apribotus šeimos subjektus kuriuos yra
leistina 'mylėti' ir tapatintis. Nepatenkinant šio meilės reikalavimo, 'meilės' pora yra skatinama 'dirbti'
su savo santykiais , tikintis jog meilė gali būti produkuota, o ne kylanti iš spontaniško afekto.
Galiausiai, meilės sąvoka tampa 'pažadu', kuris yra pasmerktas būti pastoviai neįgyvendinamas, bet
kuris, tuo pačiu sukuria nišą visam spektrui kapitalistinių industrijų kurti pridėtinę vertę, pardavinėjant
'meilės pažadus' įvairiausiomis formomis.
Visų antra, meilės supratimas, kuris taip pat grindžiamas meilės objekto pasisavinimu ir
privatizavimu kuria ir palaiko subjektus iš kurių yra tikimasi siekti savęs įvaizdžio, grindžiamo
individualios autonomijos fantazija, bei savęs valdymu ir kontrole. Rezultate, formuojamas subjektas,
kuris patiria pastovų stygių meilės objekte ir taip siekiantį be perstojo šį stygių užpildyti.
Šiuo darbu siekiama pateikti filosofinę šeimos koncepto kritiką, bei rekonceptualizaciją – remiantis
Gilles Deleuze ir Felix Guattari filosofija – neapribojama fiksuotai apibrėžta objekto-subjekto skirtimi.
Taip pat, meilės ir geismo samprata, grįsta ne stygiumi, o suprantamą kaip pozityvia ir produkuojančia
– plačiausia šio žodžio prasme – jėga 1. Šiems tikslams yra naudojamas Deleuze ir Guattari filosofinis
konceptų kūrimo metodas, bei konceptualiniai įrankiai pristatyti jų darbuose, kaip Anti-Oedipus.
Darbo antroje dalyje, inovatyvūs konceptualiniai įrankiai yra pasiūlomi apmąstant šeimos konceptą,
1 Angl.: Force
4
kaip antai: 'fraktalinė šeima', 'supermolekulinė šeima' ar 'šeima monstras'. Šio darbo tikslas nėra sukurti
alternatyvią ir griežtai apibrėžtą šeimos koncepciją, nes toks bandymas neišvengiamai baigtus dar
vienu bandymu reprezentuoti geismą/meilę, taip įkalinant ją reprezentaciniame modelyje su savo
apibrėžtais ir apibrėžiančiais fiksuotais objektais. Priešingai, šis darbas bando atsakyti į klausimą kaip
šeimos konceptas funkcionuoja, kada jo atraminės 'meilės' ir 'grupės' ar 'bendrabūvio' sąvokos yra
modifikuojamos pagal Deleuzo ir Guattari geismo filosofiją. Tikslas būtų užduoti klausimą ne kokia
šeima turėtu būti, bet kas ir kaip šeima būtų tampanti.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the following people for the invaluable insights provided in the
process of writing this work: Jurga Jonutyte and the Anti-Oedipus reading group, especially comrades
Arnas Stramskas and Lukas Sirutis. Mostly, I would like to express my gratitude to the supervisor of
this work J.D. Mininger, whose patience, constructive critique and invaluable support in editing I
cannot overestimate.

5
INTRODUCTION

The guiding impulse of this thesis - to investigate the contemporary concept of family, its
genealogy and its constituent notions such as love and being together in some form of a group - was
inspired by Laura Kipnis’ book Against Love2. The problems and central structural paradox of
contemporary family that Kipnis admirably captures is unveiled in summary form in the following
quote from her article, later to be extended into a full book:

This injunction to achieve maturity – synonymous in contemporary usage with 30-year

mortgages, spreading waistlines and monogamy – obviously finds its raison d'etre in modern
love's central anxiety, that structuring social contradiction the size of San Andreas Fault:
namely, the expectation that romance and sexual attraction can last lifetime of coupled
togetherness despite much hard evidence to the contrary.3

The central paradox that defines the contemporary secular family is the injunction that the family
has to be based on loving relationships among its legitimate members, at the same time demanding that
this by definition uncontrollable, unstable emotion should last a lifetime and exists only between the
fixed and accepted boundaries of the familial institution. In other words, when faced with this double
injunction, this family must eventually choose either to denounce and foreclose the whole spectrum of
emotional intensities, including objects of love, for the sake of upholding the familial institution, or the
family must be reconsidered in ways that would resolve this paradox. This amounts to retaining its
central notion of love, but effectively modifying the social character and structure of the institution of
the family.
However, upon closer inspection, one realizes that not only must the social institution of the family
be re-conceptualized, but one must also initially address its constituting notions of love and being-in-
common as a group. For if one takes the angle of defending love in-itself, then the moment of its
restriction, control and diminishment starts already in the midst of 'a couple' and the common
understanding that love goes together with a fear of losing its object; and hence the complementary
desire to possess the object immediately commences. Love in our contemporary Western society is a
process of privatising the other.
2 Kipnis, L. (2003). Against Love. A Polemic. New York: Vintage Books.
3 Kipnis, L. Love in The 21st Century; Against Love. New York Times. 2001 10 14. Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/magazine/love-in-the-21st-century-against-love.html; accessed: 2013 05 15.
6
 One of the most compelling philosophers of love, Spinoza, already in the seventeenth century
described and located the problem of this paradoxical combination of desire to love and to possess.
Cesare Casarino, in his introduction to In Praise of the Common, quotes Spinoza in describing this
possessive love:

Then it is to be noted that the sickness and misfortunes of the mind derive their origin chiefly
from an excessive love for a thing that is subject to many changes, and which we can never
possess [e.g., a thing such as money, as Marx might say!]. For no one is concerned or anxious
about any thing except one that he loves, nor do injuries, suspicions, enmities, etc. arise except
from love for things which no one can truly possess4.5

In Spinoza's time one might guess that love as desire related to its object through a belief in an
eternal, transcendent idea or being (God, Love, Truth, etc.), and that the notion of family had nothing to
do with the concept of desire. It is only in the eighteenth century (in Europe), that historians such as
Coontz locate the convergence of notions of family with the idea of love: “Until the late eighteenth
century, most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political
institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were
going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and transitory as love.”6
At least two trends seem to correlate with this convergence: secularization, and the rise of
capitalism and the dominant form of socio-economic production/reproduction, where the latter
accelerated the process of the former by Capital's powers of what Deleuze and Guattari call decoding
and deterritorializing social codes and traditions. Through the rise of industrialization, Capital's take-
over of the means of social production and reproduction that previously belonged to extended families
and peasant communities, caused the family to shrink to what is now usually referred to as a 'nuclear
family', as well as to become a primary locus of affective relations in the midst of Capital's alienated
social-production.
Hence the initial problematic and paradoxical nature that defines the family must result in
philosophical critique of the notion of love (and desire) as well as socio-political critique of the social
formation which ends up reducing affective social relations to the spheres such as the 'nuclear family',
in the hope that this would satisfy the social relations otherwise thoroughly alienated in the market

4 Casarino refers to: Spinoza's Scholium to Proposition 20 in Part V, Spinoza, Ethics, 301-2; Spinoza, Opera: Tomus
Primus, P. 258-60.
5 Casarino, C and Negri, A. In Praise of the Common. A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics. Minnesota: University
of Minessota Press, 2008. P. 34.
6 Coontz, S. Marriage, a history. How love conquered marriage. Second edition. New York. Penguin Books, 2005. P. 5.
7
economy. Herein lies the importance and significance of this undertaking of a critique and re-
conceptualization of the concept of family.
The critique of the bourgeois family as a symptom of the alienating processes of socio-economic
production/reproduction can be traced back to Marx and Engels, particularly Engels's The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State7, and the secular philosophical critique of desire and love can be
traced through the genealogical line of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Freud, just to name the most
noteworthy. However, in Anti-Oedipus, the co-authored work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, both of these otherwise discrete lines of critical inquiries converge and culminate.
As one of the most prominent commentators of Deleuze and Guattari, Eugene Holland observes,
even though undertakings similar to synthesizing Marx and Freud's theories had already been
developed by the Frankfurt school8, and the critique of normative models of psychiatry undertaken by
'Anglo-Amercian anti-psychiatry'9, Anti-Oedipus ends up being an original masterpiece by
ontologically grounding desire according to the Spinozian understanding of immanence, as well as by
making it a principle nodal point in furthering the critique of Capital and, hence, extending Marx
beyond Marx, as well as Nietzsche beyond Nietzsche and Freud beyond Freud: “I consider
schizoanalysis to draw principally on the three great materialists of the last century – Freud, Marx, and
Nietzsche” (Holland, viii). However, it would be too simplistic to reduce Anti-Oedipus, to merely a
philosophical synthesis of the former three canonical figures. As Holland observes:

..Anti-Oedipus is an extremely complicated work that draws on a prodigious range of

sources, not all of which can be treated adequately in a book of this scope. Indeed, to follow up
all or even most of Deleuze and Guattari's references to art and literature, anthropology and
ethnography, economics, psychology, physics, aesthetics, biology, philosophy, mathematics, and
so on, would require a book several times the size of Anti-Oedipus.10

Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of what ‘doing’ philosophy means—as theorized in their last
co-authored book, What is Philosophy?—conflicts deeply with very notion of 'synthesis'. As ferocious
critics of Hegelian dialectics, Deleuze and Guattari argue against any dualisms that end up synthesizing
in higher unities, and offer instead a methodology of singularities and irreducible multiplicities—a
methodology based in complication and invention.
7Marx, K. and Engels, F. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 2000, 4th. Edition. Accessed at:
<www.marxist.org>, accessed: 19 05 2013.
8 Holland, Eugene W. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Introduction to schizoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1999. P.
viii.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
8
 In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari profoundly rethink both desire (the love aspect) and social
production (the social institution aspect), developing unique analytic tools and concepts, such as
'desiring-production'. It is for this (and the aforementioned) reason(s) that this thesis turns to Anti-
Oedipus in pursuit of a critique and re-conceptualization of the concept of family. The methodology
that I use in this thesis is wholly immanent to the analytic tools provided in Anti-Oedipus. In other
words, this thesis re-conceptualizes the (concept of) family, following their own methodology; i.e.
transforming and developing Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts, while staying within their
conceptual apparatus. This philosophical methodology is defined in What is Philosophy?, as the
creation of concepts grounded in an ontology of immanence11.
From this, at least one very important methodological point follows: that truth-value is not
anchored in Cartesian logic and its double fallacy12, eventually incapable of saving reason from the
transcendent 'primal-mover'; instead, Deleuze and Guattari privilege becoming and base it on Spinoza's
approach of immanent causality as truth establishing an index for both itself and the false: “... just as
light manifests both itself and the darkness, so truth is the standard both of itself and of the false.” 13 It
follows that this particular theoretical undertaking, as well as the creation of concepts in general, does
not produce a truth guaranteed by a transcendent factor, but rather becomes a collective endeavour in
the creation of knowledge that is common, and, following Spinozian epistemology, perfect and
necessary in its own way (as opposed to being contingent).
In pursuit of the goal of this project, which is to critique and re-conceptualize the concept of family,
this thesis seeks to avoid producing a facile, statically oriented, propositionally based and defined new
concept of family. According to Deleuze and Guattari, any attempt to represent desire, and thus the
family, necessarily leads to its capture, and eventually to what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as desire
desiring its own repression. Hence, the DeleuzoGuattarian motto: instead of asking what the Family is
(or is supposed to be), it is far more commendable to pursue a creative philosophical endeavour to
propose answers to how the concept of family operates. This thesis takes the conceptual apparatus for
answering this question (how does family operate?) from Deleuze and Guattari's ontological re-
conceptualization of the notion of Desire —presenting it not as a Desire that lacks its object, but a
desire that positively produces. To answer how the Family would work is first of all to answer how it
would work as supported by the re-conceptualized notion of desire based on an ontological model of
immanence; thus it becomes relation oriented rather than object oriented.
The first part of this work sketches out a genealogy of the 'nuclear family', exposing shifts in its
11 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. What is Philosophy? Tr. By Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. London: Verso, 1994.
12 Kordela, K. Surplus. New York: University of New York Press, 2007. P. 28-30.
13 Spinoza, B. Ethics. ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. P. 150 (part II, prop. 43,
schol.)

9
conceptualization and in varying understandings (perceptions) of it, as well as noting its relation to
general socio-economic conditions. Parallel to this, this part also analyses the social fantasies that in
different eras have constructed specific social formations for (family) subjects to identify with. These
social fantasies effectively code desire by providing it with an object, as well as simultaneously
extracting a surplus (usually for the benefit of those who control the means of production) through
social production. This part closes with a presentation and elucidation of Deleuze and Guattari's
conception of desire as positive and producing—not driven by fantasy, but by reality (the
psychoanalytical ‘real’) itself.
The second part is dedicated to developing conceptual tools for thinking family according to the
DeleuzoGuattarian notion of desire. Different concepts, such as molecular family and/or fractal family
are deployed not as new definitions, but as conceptual guiding points, each of which, from their own
conceptual symbolic fields contributes to a ‘new’—transformed and transforming—conception of
family that in the end fails to assimilate itself to complete representation. Failure, however, should be
understood here not as a negative, but as the very motor of what, for Deleuze and Guattari, doing
philosophy means. Failure here is a kind of success: it is the opportunity of a positive, creative force,
because it generates new patterns of thinking and doing—hence the importance of keeping the concept
of family open, without full systematization. However, that said, this critique and re-conceptualization
of the concept of family sustains the concept’s consistency through its supportive, constructive notions
of love and being a group or being-in-common.
There have been recent projects with somewhat similarly related aims undertaken, for instance
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s philosophical trilogy Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. In
these works, the two philosophers develop concepts such as the “multitude' and the “common.” Similar
in some respects to my own conclusions, Negri and Hardt argue that:

The family is perhaps the primary institution in contemporary society for mobilizing the
common. For many people, in fact, the family is the principal if not exclusive site of collective
social experience, cooperative labor arrangements, caring ,and intimacy. It stands on the
foundation of the common but at the same time corrupts it by imposing a series of hierarchies,
restrictions, exclusions, and distortions.14

Whereas Hardt and Negri operate mostly within the socio-political register and engage with many
other institutions than just family, the purpose of this thesis aims to go beyond the socio-political
register to further support it by notions such as the 'non-human' family, which extends the socio-
14 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. Commonwealth. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009. P. 160
10
political conceptualization of family into the complementary register of the aesthetic.
Whereas the notion of the common seems to be gaining some attention in contemporary (theory)
discourses, there seems to be very little work done by way of theorizing the notion of family itself. It
seems that the popular move, apparent in the work by authors such as Brian Massumi, and Hardt and
Negri, is simply to get rid of the concept altogether and replace it with their own conceptual inventions.
This is understandable, especially given the symbolical weight and associations carried by the popular
notion of family. This thesis, however, prefers to take a risk: specifically, the risk of working out the
concept of family 'from within'. This approach pursues a maximizing of the concept’s exogenous
tensions within a symbolic universe and by modifying it, hopefully, ending up producing a linguistic
intellectual 'war-machine15' that is able to affect, as Hardt and Negri say, referring to Spinoza's notion
of affects, for the purpose of: “...[increasing] our powers to think and act together..” 16 Granted, that 'I' is
'many' as well…

PART I

Desire and love

The aim of this section is to define and establish connections between the notions of love and desire
and their relation to the concept of family. Since both of the notions refer to the multiple forms of
psychic intensities (although Deleuze and Guattari's notion of desire is not limited to psychic
phenomenon) that seem to have more than one quality, it is not my intention to survey the existing
categorizations of emotions here.
As helpful or as guiding such categories might be in other areas, I will be approaching these
concepts in line with DeleuzoGuattarian17 idea of what to do philosophy means: “...philosophy is the
art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts”18. This method of philosophy has been used by
Deleuze and Guattari themselves in Anti-Oedipus, when re-thinking the concept of desire. Concepts are
always open for modifications or, if not fitting for purpose – abandonment in general: “The philosopher
is expert in concepts and in the lack of them. He knows which of them are not viable, which are
arbitrary or inconsistent, which ones do not hold up for an instant.”19
15 For the Deleuze and Guattari's notion of war machine, see Deleuze, G and Guattari, F. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. 5th edition. London: Continuum Press, 1988. “Treatise on Nomadology”P.
387-468.
16 Hardt, M. and Negri. A. (2009). Op. Cit. P. 160
17 For abbreviation of Deleuze and Guattari I shall use the term DeleuzoGuattarian.
18 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994). Op. Cit. P, 3.
19 Ibid.
11
 Following Deleuze's & Guattari's reinvention of the concept of desire, I will investigate and attempt
at the re-creation of the common notion of love, as well as that of family that is premised on love. The
tasks that I set for the following section is to: establish the relations of family and love concepts;
present the Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of desire; establish connection between family and
DeleuzoGuattarian concept of desire through the linking concept of love.

Family and love

The relationship of family as a social institution and an affection towards the other, commonly
referred to as love, has been established historically only very lately. Whereas this development is
commonly perceived in Western world as an advancement in the freedoms of individual – the right to
marry and establish family with whom you love – the forged relation between marriage and love is
historically new invention and serves an ideological function, that has less to do with the freedom, but
rather with what Deleuze and Guattari call the codification of flows of desire, that has been liberated or
deterritorialized in previous social formations.
However, in order to keep this relation viable and stable throughout time (till the death sets us
apart) one has either to keep on adjusting an understanding of love (It was affectionate love now
intimate love, now matured love, etc..) or an understanding of family. I shall argue that family, being an
ideological tool is being sustained as-the-same for the price of either silently substituting the initial
principle of love – as an intensive mutual affection (the representations of which are endlessly
produced in Hollywood productions), or proposing other notions of love that suit the emerging crises of
marriages-out-of-love and family as an exclusive private depository unit of love affection.
As historian Stephanie Coontz argues throughout her book “Marriage, a History. How love
conquered marriage”, to base marriage and family primarily on the private choice of individuals that
are bound by love, has become a social norm in the western world only very recently: ”For most of
history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile
and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting
marriage.”20
In order to support her point, Coontz presents anthropological research material on social
formations of tribes, pointing to the fact that the equivalent rituals of marriage in tribes, had the very
precise function that had to do with:”..expanding the number of cooperating groups” 21 Due to the
nomadic mobility of tribes and impossibility to accumulate 'significant surplussess', Coontz points out,
the marriage ritual functions also as a form of 'rudimentary banking'22. In other words, the circulating

20 Coontz. (2005). Op. Cit. P. 15.

21 Ibid., P. 45
22 Ibid., P. 39
12
'debts' and 'credits' varied in forms of: “..women, consumer goods, ritual objects, rights, prestige,
status”23. What Coontz, in more sympathetic therms calls 'sharing beyond the immediate family or local
group'24, Deleuze and Guattari, name this practice a circulation of 'mobile debts', which in their account
achieves the same function as discussed by Coontz: “The flow deductions constitute a filiative stock in
the signifying chain; but inversely, the detachments from the chain constitute mobile debts of alliance
that guide and direct the flows”25.
For Deleuze and Guattari flows are understood in this context very broadly – as material and
symbolic wealth, including bodies as well. There are two circulatory cycles, one on the level of
alliances and the other on the level of filiations 26 . Contrary Levi Strauss, and in agreement with theses
of an anthropologist Leach, Deleuze and Guattari insists that filiation is not primary to alliances, but
both are determining each other: “At not time, therefore, does alliance derive from filiation, but both
form an essentially open cycle where socius acts on production, but also where production reacts on the
socius”27. The connective element between the two cycles of filiation and alliances are mobile debts.
However, where Coontz due to the nature of her work doesn't address the question of what supports the
mobile debts (what mechanisms assure the repayments in savage societies),
Deleuze and Guattari present a claim that the support lies in the 'territorial inscription' of the
members of the tribe.28 The notion of territory for Deleuze and Guattari has nothing to do with
geographical field, but rather with the symbolically coded field. Although for them, the notion of
territory extends beyond anthropological cultures 29, in the context of savage social formations, it stands
for symbolic unification of social unit, which is achieved by techniques of inscription of each of its
members that is literary inscribed on to the bodies themselves 30: “The social machine, in contrast, [to
the technical machine] has men for its parts, even if we view them with their machines, and integrate
them, internalize the in an institutional model at every stage of action, transmission, and motoricity.” 31
This inscription or coding, achieves few things: it assures the breaks and flows of circulation: of
symbolic, and material flows among filiative and alliance lines. It achieves and maintains group
synergy, which results in surplus production or what Deleuze and Guattari call “surplus value of
code”32; and most importantly it mobilizes and coded desire:”The sign is a position of desire; but the

23 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane. 4th edition. London: Continuum, 1984. P. 164.
24 Coontz, S. (2005). Op. Cit. P. 39.
25 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F (1984). Op. Cit. P. 164.
26 Ibid., P. 163
27 Ibid., 161
28 Ibid., P. 155.
29 See, Deleuze and Guattari. (1988) Op. Cit. p. 347 on the discussion of non-anthropological territories.
30 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984) Op. Cit. p. 159.
31 Ibid., P. 155.
32 Ibid., P. 165.
13
first signs are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies”33
Although I will be discussing Deleuze's and Guattari's notion of desire in later sections, for now it
is important to note that desire like love, is an intensity that functions through the psychic investments
into objects. It is one of the main fundamental thesis of psychoanalysis which Deleuze and Guattari
borrow. In the context of savage societies, desire of each member is intensively invested (coded) in the
production and reproduction of socius as the whole. In other words, when Deleuze and Guattari insist
that: “..desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production..” 34, however, add that they
are identical in nature but different in regime 35, in savage society desire is invested directly into the
whole socius, and dispersed throughout it. Hence, what is invested and 'loved' in the primitive socius, is
the symbolic territory and one's position within it.
Concerning the notion of family in the context of primitive societies, Deleuze and Guattari, as well
as Coontz, insist that it is never aligned only on filiative lines, but is always broken and extended
horizontally into the alliance formations. Coontz illustrates it in the resulting comical situations when
savage societal arrangements have been tried to be interpreted through the familial concepts of
Westerners:

One missionary warned a Naskapi man that if he did not impose tighter controls on his wife,
he would never know for sure which of the children she bore belonged to him. The Indian was
equally shocked that this mattered to Europeans. “You French people”, he replied, “love only
your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.”36

Deleuze and Guattari say that: “In these families [savage] the father the mother, and the sister
always also function as something other than father, mother, or sister.” 37 Also, by critiquing the
psychoanalytic reduction of mental formations as determined by family members (father, mother) and
pointing to the primitive societies, they state that: “On the contrary, it is evident that the individual in
the family [savage], however young, directly invests a social, historical, economic, and political field
that is not reducible to any mental structure or affective constellation.”38
Before concluding with the discussion of earliest social formations and their positioning of family
and love – concepts with their contemporary limits, retrospectively applied for the purpose of
expanding the possibilities of recreating these notions differently – it is important to stress, what

33 Ibid., P. 159
34 Ibid., P. 32.
35 Ibid., P. 61.
36 Coontz, S. (2005). Op. Cit. P. 29
37 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984) Op. Cit. p. 182
38 Ibid., P. 182
14
Deleuze and Guattari continuously remark themselves, that this is not the romantization of savage
society. Deleuze and Guattari are very straightforward about it: the primitive territorial inscription bears
history of very cruel techniques 39 that for the modern eye are repellent. Nevertheless - and this is why
for Deleuze and Guattari it is not just simply a historical overview of societal formations – it seems that
what Deleuze and Guattari point out is that in primitive territorial formations desire, although strictly
and ruthlessly coded, is aligned to a very high degree to the social production. Eugene Holland
commenting on savage machine states that: “In savagery, desire is bound so tightly to the socius that
the organization of social-production almost completely determines the organization of desiring
production..”40
Now, it doesn't mean that it is hermetically coded. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari throughout their
book insist that codes are porous systems that are constantly breached and that desire or the
mechanisms of the unconscious do not recognize codes as language, just points of investment, that
produce their deterritorializing trajectories.41 Nor does it mean that it is an uncreative coding, for as Ian
Buchanan rightly observes: “By codable Deleuze and Guattari mean capable of generating an
'equivalent' of some type, something that can supplement (in Derrida's sense) the original flow both in
the sense of taking its place and of multiplying it”. 42 If Buchanan is right then, the savage inscription
does not only rely on cruel technologies to code desire, but these are flexible and mutating codes, able
to create and thus account for changes and/or disturbances that cause deviations from general myth or
common laws.
Deleuze and Guattari in their book “Anti-Oedipus”, devote third part of the book for presenting
three qualitatively different modes of social inscription, of which the first one, the primitive territorial
machine, was discussed above. The next two are: 'The barbarian despotic machine' and 'The civilized
Capitalist machine'. Although these stages seem to some extent to refer to actual historical sequence of
different modes of production, Deleuze and Guattari's main purpose here is not so much a historical or
anthropological account, but rather the presentation of three major types of social formations with their
unique ways of getting hold of desire. One can thus follow them historically, but they insist that each
of these techniques of inscription are already latent or co-existing in within each other.
Therefore the barbarian despotic machine has not replaced the territorial coding, but rather has
'overcoded'43 it. And the civilized Capitalist machine is the one which decodes, deterritorializes, at the
same time as it reterritorializes using its mechanisms of axiomatics. It is not the purpose of this paper to
discuss in detail the mechanisms of each of these stages in Deleuze and Guattari. What Deleuze and
39 Ibid., P. 159
40 Ibid., P. 61
41 Ibid., P. 153
42 Buchanan. I. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum, 2008. P. 96.
43 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 217-237
15
Guattari is doing here is identifying different qualitative changes between desiring-production (desire)
and social production. For our purposes, given that desire is a constituent part for love and family
stands a social institute, in order to observe the changing relations between the two and how they work,
it is important to follow the next two social machines as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari. Stephanie
Coontz in her history of Marriage follows the traditional historical time-line of the West, identifying
'ancient world' (Greece, Rome) as the next qualitative stage. What follows is the close cross reading of
Deleuze Guattari and Coontz, discussing the Barbarian Despotic machine and in Coont'z – the Ancient
World, Classical World, and Medieval Europe.

Despotic machine
What distinguishes territorial from despotic machine is that in despotic machine, there appears a
figure of a despot – the establisher of a 'new alliance':

The founding of the despotic machine or the barbarian socius can be summarized in the
following way: a new alliance and direct filiation. The despot challenges that lateral alliances
and the extended filiations of the old community. He imposes a new alliance system and places
himself in direct filiation with the deity: the people must follow.44

The new alliance requires a transcendent term to allow the despot to step outside the community as
well as to stay as its legitimate representative, for the transcendent term. The alliance with mythical,
holy term, and flesh-and-body despot establishes direct filiation between the deity and the specific
kinship line. The direct link is established to God (vertical up) and through the direct filiation with its
kinship, connection (vertical down) is established to the people.45 The despot becomes an exceptional
member of the community to whom the incest is allowed. In the earlier, territorial machine, incest was
effectively forbidden since marriages between alliances never allowed one kinship group to dominate
With the despotic begins the importance of blood lines: “Whether they [rulers] claimed descent from
gods of from an earlier king or legendary hero, their legitimacy depended on the purity of their parents'
bloodlines and the validity of their parents' marriages.”46
The next important distinction between the despotic and territorial machine is the method of
inscription. If territorial machine relied on voice and grahpism as being independent coding
technologies from each other and accompanied by the third element – an eye 47, coupled with mobile
finite debts to sustain the circulation of flows; despotic machine's main invention is an alignment of
44 Ibid., P. 210
45 Ibid., P. 211
46 Coontz, S. (2005). Op. Cit. P. 54.
47 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 207.
16
voice unto the graphism, and graphism's subordination to the voice – the invention of writing.
Consequentially: “..the voice no longer sings but dictates, decrees; the graphy no longer dances, it
ceases to animate bodies, but is set into writing on tablets, stones, and books; the eye set itself to
reading.”48
The major outcome of the detached despot with his written decrees 'from on high' is the phenomena
of constant lack of meaning or the problem of exegesis: “It is perhaps at this juncture that the question
'What does it mean?' begins to be heard, and that the problems of exegesis prevail over the problems of
use and efficacy.49 From the perspective of the history of subjectivity, speaking in psychoanalytic
Lacanian terms it is the historical birthplace of the Big Other, which stands for a symbolic order,
however, the one which is always incomplete, always lacking meaning: 'what does he really want from
me'? In terms of desire, it becomes formally speaking geared solely towards the empty and permanent
'crack of meaning' in the symbolic order.
If a despot becomes a 'master signifier' – the origin of meaning, it follows that he also becomes a
'great paranoiac'50. For any appearing discrepancies, any variations from codes, can't be locally recoded
as in territorial machine, but have to refer to the master signifier. This is the moment of the instigation
of imperial law, which does not code, but overcode the existing territorial code systems. According to
Deleuze and Guattari, there are two outcomes of it: firstly: “punishment acquires new meaning, instead
of festivity, it becomes despotic vengeance 51, and secondly, a socius is overcoded by appropriating
mobile debts among alliances and establishing an eternal debt to the despot (in the form of tribute,
taxes) or in religious register – God. The despotic vengeance and monopoly of death knotted with
eternal debt to the despot are the two technologies that rewires the desire of territorial machine's subject
from the territorial network of meanings, where death was effectively en-coded, to the fear of death
which lacks meaning. The subject becomes preoccupied in answering the question what does he want,
so as to regains symbolic position within the order:

There occurs a detachment and elevation of the death instinct, which ceases to be coded in
the interplay of savage actions and reactions where fatalism was still something en-acted, in
order to become the somber agent of overcoding, the detached object that hover over each
subject, as though the social machine had come unstuck from its desiring-machines: death, the
desire of desire, the desire of the despot's desire, a latency inscribed in the bowels of the State
apparatus.52
48 Ibid., P. 223.
49 Ibid., P. 225.
50 Ibid., P. 213.
51 Ibid., P. 231
52 Ibid., P. 232
17
 As in another passage, Deleuze and Guattari, are right to observe that the despot's subject, becomes
a passive subject53. The permanent search of reference in the transcendent term, be it the God's desire,
the king's desire, or any despot's in general, reroutes desire and turns it eventually inward, by
internalizing the despot within oneself – the birth of Freudian superego. Here, desire in Nietzschean
sense becomes reactive. The Freudian death instinct – a will of its own death, is nothing but a desire of
despot's desire, which is effectively the desire of one's own submission, one's own death.
In evaluating the despotic machine in relation to the notion of love, it seems that this stage in the
history of desiring-machines and social-machines, produces subjects whose love objects become
transcendent signifiers (God, Law, Despot). Coontz in her own way brilliantly describes the
DeleuzoGuattarian understanding of overcoding by paraphrasing one of Greek’s tragedies:
They [Furies – 'goddesses who punish those, who shed the blood of kin'] 54 encourage
people to honor such traditional aristocratic virtues as kinship ties, ancestral gods, and
heroism in battle, but to do so in the service of the state rather than of family or personal
interests. Marriage is to be a private affair, marked by dominance of the husband and
subordination of the wife and producing orderly inheritance from father to son55
In terms of the family institute, what the overcoding achieves is the elimination and re-routing of
the 'social glue' of primitives – mobile debts and surplus of code and establishing the direct, albeit
transcendent relation with an abstract principle instead of immanent social relations. The filiative
lineages become less influenced by alliances, since they are now accountable primarily (through the
form of obedience and tribute paying) to the despot. The alliances still exist and function.
As Coontz observes about middle age peasantry: “Family farms in the medieval European
countryside could not survive without networks of mutual aid and communal accountability” 56 As well
as: “A striking feature of village life in northern Europe from Middle Ages to the early modern period
was the frequency with which people share labor and exchanged services with neighbors rather than
relatives”57
However, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, the symbolic functioning of alliances now is only
secondary, because the production of surplus that gets detached, get appropriated in the form of eternal
debt by the despot: “In place of mobile detachments from the signifying chain; in place of flow
selections, all the flows converge into a great river that constitutes the sovereign's consumption: a

53 Ibid.
54 Coontz, S. (2005). Op. Cit. P. 74
55 Ibid., P. 75.
56 Ibid., P. 111.
57 Ibid., P. 128
18
radical change of regimes in the fetish or the symbol.58
To conclude, tribal family becomes replaced by an extended filiative (blood based) family with its
new ethos: importance of rightful inheritance flows, domination over the other families, and one's
patriarchal domination (little private despot) over one's own familia: “Men were not in families; they
ruled over them.”59 The flows of affection and wealth start to circulate vertically up in the form of
affection-devotion-submittion for transcendent term coupled by the eternal payment of tribute, and
down by becoming the patriarch to be submitted to and devoted to (coupled with the flow of rightful
inheritance) by his family members but also including serfs and slaves, for as Coontz notes, familia in
Rome60 and Mitropoulos notes61, oikos in Greece, designated the household that included not only
blood relatives, but everyone that laboured in it.

Capitalist machine
Capitalist machine is the third machine of the social production discussed by Deleuze and Guattari.
However, it is a social machine that differs qualitatively from the other two. If territorial machine was
preoccupied with coding, and despotic machine with overcoding, the capitalist machine is functioning
by decoding the flows. However, as Deleuze and Guattari observe in order for capitalist machine to
function, it has to re-code the flows and thus re-establish its own internal and external limits.62
This operation of re-coding is not a creation of qualitatively different codes and thus coding the
socius anew, but rather producing what Deleuze and Guattari calls axioms that: “..maintains the energy
of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deteritorialized..” 63 It does so by
abstraction and quantification. In other words, everything becomes re-translated (decoded) into the
quantities of signs, that are abstract, and do not signify, but are: “..asignifying signs..fabricating new
unities, creating from nonfigurative figures configurations of images that form and then disintegrate.”64
One of the results of this massive decoding that concerns us here is the fact that alliances and
filiations - instead of being the praxis among social individuals determining their social field, or
establishing the relation with the transcendent term - become produced and reproduced through the
flows of capital: “The alliances and filiations no longer pass through people but through money; so the
family becomes a microcosm, suited to expressing what it no longer dominates.” 65 It is the direct
economic and political participation of the family that gets overtaken by capitalist relations, retaining
the family merely as a simulacra of the processes that once have been performed by it and in capitalist
58 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 212.
59 Coontz, S. (2005). Op. Cit. P. 79
60 Ibid., P. 79.
61 Mitropoulos, A. Contract & Contagion. From biopolitics to oikonomia. New York: Minor Compositions, 2012. P. 50.
62 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 288.
63 Ibid., P. 267.
64 Ibid., P. 265.
65 Ibid., P. 286.
19
formation are performed by the capital itself. Financial capital - establishing alliances and industrial
capital - operating according to formula proposed by Marx: M-C-M' 66 illustrating capital's filiation
lines. 6768
Family itself gradually shrinks to the size what today is known as a nuclear family, or another term
used by Deleuze and Guattari: the Oedipal family. It consist of three symbolic coordinates: father,
mother, child. It is also a private family: “Where once marriage had been seen as the fundamental unit
of work and politics, it was now viewed as a place of refuge from work, politics, and community
obligations.”69
It also becomes a place of destination for feelings of love and affection. Ideologically, family and
love converge only in capitalist formation. Furthermore - and this is the most important point for
Deleuze and Guattari throughout the whole book – family acquires a role of reducing the whole social
field to the images of its members and becomes both the departure point and the destination to be
reached for the Oedipal subject:
In the aggregate of departure there is the boss, the foreman, the priest, the tax collector,
the cop, the soldier, the worker, all the machines and territorialities, all the social images of our
society; but in the aggregate of destination, in the end, there is no longer anyone but daddy,
mommy, and me, the despotic sign inherited by daddy, the residual territoriality assumed by
mommy, and the divided, split, castrated ego.70
The effects of this change are numerous and discussed throughout the Anti-Oedipus. However, in
relation to the concepts of Love and Family they are the following: the objects of love are constantly
being reduced and/or referred to the familial identifications. Also, by becoming private, love in the
family and for the family gets exaggerated, monopolized. It is in the family according to Deleuze and
Guattari that decoding capitalist machine sets its internal limits to stop its flows from taking it to its
own limit, which would be its self-destruction: “The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private
territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism's efforts at social reterritorialization.”71
However, this 'social reterritorialization' is only the second order of simulacra: “Private persons are
therefore images of the second order, images of images – that it, simulacra that are thus endowed with
an aptitude for representing the first-order images of social persons.” 72 All of the social field with its
actual loves and hates, exploiters and the exploited, gets displaced and referred back to the private
66 Initial investment of Money M into the Capital C with the outcome of M+surplus. See: Marx, K. Capital: A Critique of
Political Economoy Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976.
67 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P 285.
68 Buchanan. (2008). Op. Cit. P. 54-55 and P. 107.
69 Coontz, S. (2005). Op. Cit. P. 146.
70 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 287
71 Ibid., P. 288.
72 Ibid., P. 286.
20
family. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this represses desire and stops it short from circulating. It
produces ascetic subjects that desire their own repression of desire.
To conclude, the three social formations seem exhibit three modes of family and love. The
territorial formation, where family is essentially spread and coextensive throughout the social field and
where love or desire is coded in accordance with the social production. The despotic formation, where
desire or love acquires transcendent object to invest in, together with a lack of ever possessing it.
Family in despotic machine gets directly filiated a despot's line and alliance is formed with a despot
(deity) himself through eternal debt. Finally, in capitalistic formation desire gets decoded, 'freed', while
at the same time referred to the familial objects of identification. Family becomes reduced to a
reproductive unit of humans, while closed off from the social reproduction of social machine.
The most important issue here is for Deleuze and Guattari that all the social formations
misrepresent desire. They need to do that in order to capture desiring production and submit it to social
production. In order to understand how the misrepresentation happens, and how desire works, I shall
turn to the next section in order to discuss the Deleuze and Guattari's conception of desire. Also, to ask
the question what is the relation between the desire and love – so far, taken as synonyms - which is the
binding premise of contemporary nuclear family.

Desire

To a certain degree, the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from the
very step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us choose between production
and acquisition. From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make
desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as
primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object.73

In Anti-Oedipus, the concept of desire plays a primary analytic role. To a large degree the critique
by authors against psychoanalysis is based on the incorrect conception of desire, which psychoanalysis
bases on lack. But also, traditional notion of desire is understood as a desire of something that at the
moment is lacking. What is lacking here is the object of desire that will deliver ultimate enjoyment,
happiness, etc. This pursuit unfolds by formulating interests, aims and attempting to acquire objects
(family, house, fast car, good look, prestige, honor, etc..) that are supposed to provide the happiness
sought. In Freudian terms it is the desire for mother, that gets postponed, while in the meantime,
perceiving the father as the primary rival for mother, the child starts to identify with the father, thus

73 Ibid., P. 26.
21
delaying the pleasure of mother, until one becomes like the father and acquires his own 'mother' in the
form of a wife. In Lacan's updated version of it the mother stands for the ultimate oneness of one's self,
that is perceived (through imaginary extrapolation) during the mirror stage, however, at the same time
one also perceives a lack of that unity which was witnessed in the mirror. The father in Lacan's theory
becomes the name of the father - the symbolic order through which the child pursues his lost unity,
however, having to undergo the symbolic castration. The unity sought on imaginary level becomes the
meaning sought in the symbolic universe, and the castration introduces the lack of not being able to
grasp the full meaning. Thus desire, according to the Lacanian schema, pursues to fill the gap, both on
imaginary level, by seeking one's own fullness or identity. And on symbolic register – by seeking the
final meaning of things.
Although Lacan admits that the primary imaginary identification is just an illusory extrapolation of
partial objects to the status of fully constituted objects (eg.. the mother is primarily not the full mother
but the breast, the eye, the smile and other partialities), desire for him is ultimately not accessible
directly but only through this pursuit of partial objects or what he calls 'objet petit a' and therefore as
Holland calls it an 'existential drama' for the subject for whom desire in itself is forever barred. 74 One
thus engages in a perpetual acquisition of objects, however, once acquired, they always prove to be dis-
satisfactory, since 'objet petit a' – the object of desire is a structural element of lack in the psyche and
not a particular object. It is also what structures the desire itself in the Lacanian schema of things.
This is precisely the representation of desire that Deleuze and Guattari set out to critique. For
Deleuze and Guattari desire itself knows no lack: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its
object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no
fixed subject unless there is no repression.” 75 In other words, what Deleuze and Guattari ask Lacan and
others is why they would take it as a matter of fact that the subject for some reason seeks its fullness.
Or to put it differently, what part pursues wholeness in the psyche composed of different drives. The
subject here appears as an effect only. Deleuze and Guattari insist that desire is always pre-subjective
and not represented negatively through the subject via the lack, but always positive, productive and
literal. That is one of the meanings why they often call it desiring-production or desiring machines. At
the beginning of Anti-Oedipus they describe it as follows:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It
breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere
it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: driving other machines, machines being driven by

74 Holland. (1999). Op. Cit. P. 45-54.

75 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 28.
22
 other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged
into an energy source machine: the one produces flow that the other interrupts.76

For Deleuze and Guattari in line with Spinoza, there is no separation of body and mind. Both are
immanent. Therefore, when they speak of desire, in one sense they speak of it within a context of
psychic mechanisms, but in another, more broader sense, desire is 'everywhere' 7778. It is the ontological
life force that produces. It is important to understand it because it is not only drives in Freudian sense
that desire, but rather drives themselves are also constructions of desiring-machines. Also, that is why,
for Deleuze and Guattari, breast is an organ-machine and milk – desiring machine. 79 In terms of
human body, it is literary each cell operating as desiring machine. The body itself with its machines is
not a closed system but connects to other machines: “Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the
sky, alpine machines – all of them connected to those of his body.. The continual whirr of machines.”80
Desiring-machines function by production and interruption of flows. However, the flows
themselves are desiring machines.81 In one sense, they are linear, binary connections, however, when
perspective changed, when penetrated in depth, the processes start to happen in multi directions.
Deleuze and Guattari sometime call desiring machines as 'partial objects', which are: 'fragmentary and
fragmented.'82 Brian Massumi invokes the mathematical idea of fractals in the process of fractalization
to illustrate it.83 Partial objects, like fractals are fragmentary and fragmented. In other words, there is no
beginning or end image, no original full object. These are partial objects in motion of becoming.
Further, the only thing that makes them standstill, is the perspective of an observer – which is
temporarily fixed in space. That is why desiring machines and their three modes of: production of
productions, productions of recording and productions of consumptions – all are happening at the same
time 84, although in order to grasp them logically one is forced to arrange them mentally in sequence.
For that reason, Deleuze and Guattari might seem sometimes as not consistent, or downright illogical.
However, similarly to cubist painters, what they are trying to capture with concepts, is the description
of processes in time, space and depth - just to name a few coordinates here - that interact not only
laterally in extension as binaries (that we can observe), but simultaneously in depth as well. That is
why the idea of fractals (Mandelbrot image of fractal) is a helpful tool to begin thinking the multi-
76 Ibid. P. 1.
77 Ibid. P. 322
78 The concepts of Libido, Sexuality and Desire Deleuze and Guattari seem to use interchangeably to describe the same
thing-process.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid. P. 2.
81 Ibid. P. 6.
82 Ibid. 6.
83 Massumi, B. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.. London: MIT Press, 1992. P. 21-23; 35-39
84 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 4.
23
dimensionality in process.
It seems, however, that it requires to change the method of how one thinks. In a sense, one has to
start thinking fractally. The starting point here is, what Deleuze famously said, is that, one is always in
the middle of things. The same rule applies when Deleuze and Guattari try describe desiring machines.
One always inserts oneself as an observer in the middle of the process. This introduction of perspective,
this scission, will always be a fractal perspective.
Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari rely on the expression of language, and concepts - structures that in
the Philosophy have been cherished for their supposed ability to define, to fix meaning – in order to
speak of processes. Hence, for an inattentive reader it might look as a bundle of contradictory
statements. One quickly perceives that if one seeks for a fixed definition of their concepts, soon what
one notices is that concepts themselves start to mutate. However, if one starts thinking of partial objects
as being in process, the analytic tools laid out by Deleuze and Guattari in the first section of the book,
seem to make a perfect sense. It is beyond the topic of this work, however, it would be highly
interesting to propose a thesis, that Deleuze and Guattari are proposing a model of thinking that is
expanded by allowing the faculty of imagination to partake in the process of thought. Since, it seems
that imagination is a much more fluid process of thought, allowing associations to be made not only
linearly, causally, but also perception of simultaneity, and cross dimensionality.
Deleuze and Guattari assert that desire is always positive, it lacks nothing, it only produces.
Production here should be understood in a broadest sense of a word. Deleuze and Guattari separate
three modes or aspects of one and the same process of production: production of productions,
production of recording, and production of consumption85.

Production of productions
The desiring machines, engaging in the production of production are the machines forming binary
connections: “The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in
nature: 'and...' 'and then...' ”86 When machine connects to other machine it produces an outcome which
is another machine (an assemblage) capable of production. That is the meaning of production of
production. The product produced has always at least two other machines as its parts, producing it. It
also implies that no product stands outside the connections as a self sufficient cause: “..every machine
is a machine connected to another machine”87.
Each partial object/product presupposes its supporting energy machines, and in its own term it
attracts, connects with other forces/machines, to form new desiring machines. Deleuze and Guattari

85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., P. 5.
87 Ibid., P. 6.
24
give an example of an eye-machine. 88 The eye is capable of certain limited capture of reality, that is
defined through the eye's perspective. It 'interprets' everything in terms of sight, be it singing mouth,
naked body, steak on the plate. However, the connection established with ear-machine, produces a third
machine: eye-ear machine which as Deleuze and Guattari point out is a connection “along transverse
path”89 , meaning that the combination of both perceptions produce a third perception that is not
determined by either alone.
Similar process is described by Brian Massumi, relying on complexity theory, when discussing the
chemical reactions when heating the water molecules. The argument goes that in the process of heating
water molecules are confronted with two (for simplicity purposes) determinant and opposing forces:
gravity and heat. The molecules, when faced this tension produced temporary stability which did not
agree with the stability as understood in conventional way: as a consequence of minimum tension
under the determinant forces90. However, neither the law of gravity nor thermodynamics gets violated
in the process:
All the liquid has done is break the rule that maximum dissipation necessarily means
minimum systemic activity and differentiation. It has contravened the scientific wisdom that
there is no such thing as a spontaneous dissipative structure. It did this not by breaking natural
laws, but by combining them in such a way as to end up with more than the sum of their parts. It
exploited a differential between them.91
This 'differential' is what Deleuze and Guattari would call connection established 'along a
transverse path'92 We have gravity machine and heating machine, producing a third machine that is in
one sense the outcome of the other two, however, the one that exploited differential, and has become
something else: 'more than the sum of their parts'.
Deleuze and Guattari subdivide the production of production or what they later call the connective
synthesis into three separate terms: producing, product, identity. 93 The identity moment is when
organism is formed: when the machine is organized, when it becomes an organism: “Everything stops
dead for a moment, everything freezes in place – and then the whole process will begin all over
again.”94 However, there is something that suffers from being organized in a fixed and particular way.
This something is called by Deleuze and Guattari – the body without organs.

88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 See Appendix, Illustration 1.
91 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 59.
92 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P 6.
93 Ibid. P. 7.
94 Ibid. P. 8.
25
Body without organs (BWO)
The body without organs introduces the difference into the binary connections of the machines,
since it cannot endure the sameness, the organization. 95 It is a conceptual category that in actuality can
never be grasped, but it is used by Deleuze and Guattari to point out, the moment when the machine is
produced (stage 1) and the moment when it changes its own nature and becomes something else by
escaping its own determined position (its own identity). Body Without Organs has no image and no
organs (9). However, the Body Without Organs, although it is anti-productive in itself, is continually
reconnected to the production (9). In other words, the anti-production and production, for Deleuze and
Guattari are here immanent. They do not form an opposition. Massumi suggests that Body Without
Organs is the moment of the retreat to the virtual – another Deleuzian concept introduced in Difference
and Repetition96: “Think of the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised
for any action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality.” 97
Massumi compares virtuality to the degree of freedom/potential, with the highest degree being highest
virtuality and lowest - expression of matter-in-extension: “A return to the body without organs is
actually a return of fractality, a resurfacing of the virtual.”98
However, as mentioned above, there is a reconnection of the body without organs to the desiring
machines. Deleuze and Guattari separate out these stages of becoming BWO 99 as a repulsion of its
desiring machines, and as an attraction 100. Massumi names it as two different BWOs: “The
nonlimitative body without organs repels sacred organs, and the limitative body without organs attracts
them back, inducing the rebel vibrations to re-contract into a tame satisfaction.” 101 It neither allows for
an organism to form, not it stays in virtuality for long. It is a dynamic vibration between the virtual and
actual, and BWO stands here as a conductor. Massumi uses a thought (understood in Deleuzian sense
not as a habitual repetition, but as producing differences) as an example of this vibration:”Becoming is
bodily thought, beyond the realm of possibility, in the world of virtual. At once super-abstract and
infra-concrete, it grasps the environment of molarity common to different bodies from the perspective
of the potential curtailed. Thought is an unhinging of habit.”102
Massumi here illustrates well the threshold between actual, which is the habitual thought: the
patterns of thought the whole system of learned, synthesized action-reaction expectations we call
habits. However, whereas the biological, evolutionary habits are relatively rigid fractals, with low
95 Ibid.
96 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition. trans. by Paul Patton. 4th Edition. London: Continuum, 1994.
97 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 70.
98 Ibid. P. 85.
99 Abbreviation for :Body without organs
100 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 10-11.
101 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 74.
102 Ibid. P. 99.
26
degree of change as perceived from our limited perspective, the thinking process seems to be
potentially the most fluid process and thus points to the highest degree of virtuality that our humanoid
bodies can probably experience. For Deleuze as for Massumi it is by breaking thought habit, when real
thinking starts. In terms of fractals, it is by diving into the depth of the initial image of fractal (think of
a snowflake fractal patterns), and pursuing the complexity within the layers in depth. It is a trip towards
higher levels of intensity, towards BWO, the reverse trajectory movement away from the matter-in-
extension: “Intensity, which envelops distances, is explicated in extensity, while extensity develops,
exteriorises and homogenises the very distances” 103
Thus, desiring machine itself has dimensions in extension and forms a homogenised figure. But
BWO, is the moment of allowing differential intensities to resurface out of depth. As Deleuze would
say pulling foreground (figure) in to the background (depths) while pulling background into the
surface104. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze says that: “..the first dimension of extensity was a
power of limitation, while the second was a power of opposition”. 105 Thus when Massumi speaks of
nonlimitative BWO, he refers to what Deleuze calls: “The strangest alliance..between intensity and
depth, which carries each faculty to its own limit and allows it to communicate only at the peak of its
particular solitude: an alliance between Being and itself in difference” 106 On the body, thus appear only
intensities with, what Massumi would say, lowest degree of extension, and highest degree of virtuality
(or degree of freedom).
But this is only the first mode, the repulsion mode of BWO. It is also what Deleuze and Guattari
call the paranoiac mode. What follows, or to be more precise, happens at the same time, is the
attraction mode of BWO. The BWO attracts desiring machines, however, in a selective manner. No
longer a connective binary syntheses among desiring machine, but everything is organized through the
the third term, the anti-productive agent, the BWO. The BWO is the consumer of surplus (itself
unproductive), as well as the miraculated term, to which all desiring machines relay their production. It
is also the determining whole that is also a part: “..it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does
not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.”107

The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the
recording of the entire surface of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to
emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the
103 Deleuze. (1994). Op. Cit. P. 290.
104 Ibid. P. 274-275.
105 Ibid. P. 294.
106 Ibid. P. 290.
107 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 46.
27
 machines and the body without organ.108

It is important to stress, and Deleuze and Guattari insist on this point, that although the BWO is an
abstract category, it is not a metaphor. It is the phenomena appearing in the dynamism of life forms.
Human cultures, the primitive territorial machine, the despotic machine, the capitalist machine – are all
BWOs with different recording surfaces. For primitive machine, it is the earth that is miraculated and
through which all the desire is distributed. For despotic, it is the deity, the king, the despot who is the
miraculated principle, and who distributes desiring-machines/subjects. And for capitalist machine, it is
the body of the capital, the money, that is the miraculated body, which distributes all desiring-
machines. That is why for Deleuze and Guattari, desiring production and social production are identical
in nature, but differ only in the regime.109
The attraction of desiring machines by BWO is also called production of recording, or the
inscription. If production of production by the desiring machines operated according to connective
synthesis of: 'and...and...and' , the production of recording operates with disjunctive synthesis: 'or, or,
or..'110

Production of recording
Eugene Holland observes that the production of recording even though in its rigid forms (exclusive
disjunctions) can become repressive, from the point of view of desiring machines forming inclusive
disjunctions on the BWO - where the principle of 'or, or, or' is always open ended, it is a liberatory
force, that doesn't allow the fetishistic connections (repetition of the same) between desiring machines
to last, and introduces difference into the process:

..for taking pleasure in variation and ramification rather than in mechanical repetition
requires a complementary counter-force to the connective synthesis, which would otherwise
lock the organism into instinctual or habitual patterns of connection. Such a counter-force
would allow a given set of organ-machine connections to be broken and other connection made
in their place, only to be broken in their turn and replaced with others, and so on ad-
infinitum.111

Brian Massumi seem to take more sceptical approach toward disjunctive syntheses: “Not only is the
disjunctive synthesis fundamentally exclusive, it invades the connective syntheses, imposing limitative
108 Ibid. P. 12.
109 Ibid. P. 284.
110 Ibid. P. 5 and P. 13.
111 Holland. (1999). Op. Cit. P. 28.
28
usage on them. Once begun, the invasion tends to accelerate.” 112 An he concludes: “Exclusive usage
spreads like a cancer. It is not only reactive but imperialist by nature. 113 While Massumi is correct to
insist that disjunctive synthesis is limiting (or..or), however, to claim that it is fundamentally exclusive
is to downgrade the fact that it is the difference producing force. In other words, the connections on
their own produce sameness and can be seen also as imperialistic. Also, the machines that connect, the
initial point of perspective of the observer obscure their inner depth where they themselves underwent a
disjunctive synthesis, for otherwise a connection would not be possible, for they would be the same,
identical.
Nevertheless, Massumi rightly points out that disjunctive syntheses are more enduring combination
then connective, therefore, there is a sense in asserting that it might produce longer lasting repetitions
of the same pattern of disjunction. Deleuze and Guattari themselves assert, regarding the disjunctive
synthesis that it is already a method: “The process as process of production extends into the method as
method of inscription.”114 Massumi calls this change from passive to active synthesis.115 This apparent
opposite emphasis of Holland and Massumi on the liberatory or restrictive nature of disjunctive
synthesis can be solved if takes the disjunctive synthesis as an operator in matter-in-extension, or one
takes it as an ontological category, operating within the virtual as well. Massumi criticizes the former as
exclusive, and is probably right to the extent.
An example from evolutionary biology does say that patterns accumulate: “The ordered patterns
become even more striking at greater levels of magnification. At levels that betray the actual position of
atoms, the surface of a crystal is seen to have all the regularity of a machine-woven piece of
herringbone tweed.116 Dawkins himself is quick to add, that amongst these lines of seemingly identical
atoms, there appears a flaw, flaws. What for mineralogist or biologist might be enough to constitute the
fact of the flaw, for Deleuze and Guattari it would be a sign of deeper activities of which a visible flaw
is just de-facto image. If the 'flaws' are everywhere, and one could say that they signal the repelling
moment of BWO, than disjunctions must have also be continuously 'flawed', and thus non exclusive, or
to be more precise varying in spectrum from non-exclusive to the exclusive. This is where Holland and
Massumi seem to be talking about the same thing, but emphasizing different poles. For what is a
disjunctive synthesis at its radical non-exclusivity if not the connective synthesis itself – the 'or, or'
becomes 'and, and'.
To conclude, production of recording of desiring-machines indicates the shift of desiring machines'
circuits. In one sense, at the moment of anti-production, the BWO descends to a much more fluid
112 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 57.
113 Ibid.
114 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 14.
115 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 56-57.
116 Dawkins, R. The blind watchmaker. London: Penguin Books, 1986. P. 152
29
states, much more fluid machines, till it reaches the threshold of actual and virtual, and becomes of
intensity in extension – zero:

The BWO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is
itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies
space to a given degree – to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is non-
stratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing
negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities.117

In another sense, the moment of recording, establishes the surface and the network of connections
for desiring machines to produce, while achieving the surplus production, that gets re-distributed on the
body as a residual energy or as a third synthesis of consumption-consummation, whence the effect of
subjectivity or identity.

Production of identity
The production of identity, also called the synthesis of consumption-consummation is what arises
from the interrelations of the first two productions: production of production (connective syntheses)
and production of recording (disjunctive-syntheses). When discussing production of identity, Deleuze
and Guattari shift towards the mechanisms of the human unconscious specifically, since it directly
relates to the problematics of the Anti-Oedipus, however, all three syntheses, are ontological
descriptions of how desire works and should not be understood as limited only to the human psyche.
When discussing the disjunctive synthesis - the moment of recording on the surface of BWO -
Deleuze and Guattari note that the process of recording itself produces residual energy. 118 This energy
can only be appropriated by a third type of machine, which they name 'celibate machine': “..that
succeeds the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, forming a new alliance between the
desiring-machines and the body without organs so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious
organism.”119 The celibate machine for Deleuze and Guattari is a temporal form of subjectivity, that is
not the cause but the effect of primary forces of connections and disjunctions operating on the BWO
and that are in tension between attraction and repulsion. Ilia Prigogine, when discussing two different
states of balance120, states that in the 'stable' balance system, any slight disturbances to the initial
conditions, produce only slight effects, whereas in the system of unstable balance (metastable) any

117 Deleuze and Guattari. (1988). Op. Cit. P. 169.

118 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 17.
119 Ibid., P. 19.
120 See appendix, illustration 1.
30
slight disturbance of initial condition produces extreme effects.121 This unstable balance seems to be the
condition of the celibate machine:
..the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of
intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of final equilibrium of a
system, but consists, rather, of an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states, through
which the subject passes.”122
On the level of psyche it means that the subjectivity always appears as an unstable after effect, after
the recordings processes on the BWO. Not only it is unstable, but it is always changing, forming
alongside different intensities, and thus always as somebody not-the-same. 123 However, the subject -
being only as an 'appendix' to desiring machines 124, mis-recognizes their functionings as its own, and
thus declares: “..'So that's what it was!' and So it's me!'” 125 The residual energy that the subject
harnesses as his own, is the pleasure, produced which is the pleasure of experiencing of oneself as one:
“A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called auto-
erotic, or rather automatic, the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as
though erotics of the machine liberated other unlimited forces.”126
What Deleuze and Guattari call synthesis of consumption-consummation or production of identity
is similar to the Lacanian mirror stage. The child recognizes himself in the mirror as a whole and thus
achieves pleasure in contemplating it through the gaze. However, at the same time he necessarily mis-
recognizes as a whole what are partial investments which never achieve nor seek any wholeness on
their own. Thus, the child, according to the Lacanian schema, needs fantasy as a support of wholeness
and self-mastery. The self-creation-deception is rewarded by the residuum of pleasure that is the third
type of energy of libido – 'Voluptas' – energy of consumption-consummation. 127
However, differently from the psychoanalytic theory, which rests its 'curing practices' on re-
foundation of stable subjectivity, for Deleuze and Guattari it is the very instability that opens the
opportunities of experiencing different intensities of desire. Thus, they rhetorically ask: “How could
the conjunctive synthesis of 'Sot that's what it was! And 'So it's me' have been reduced to the endless,
dreary discovery of Oedipus: 'So it's my father, my mother'?..We merely see how very little the
consumption of pure intensities has to do with family figures, and how very different the connective
tissue of the 'So it's...' is fro the Oedipal tissue.” 128 Recognizing that subjectivity is always an effect of
121 Prigogine, I.. Tirkrumo Pabaiga. Laikas, chaosas ir nauji gamtos dėsniai. (eng: “The End of Certainty. Time, chaos and
the new laws of nature”). Tr. Ramutė Rybelienė. Vilnius: Margi Raštai, 2006. P. 46-47.
122 Ibid., P. 20.
123 Ibid., P. 21
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid., P. 19.
127 Ibid., P. 18.
128 Ibid., P. 21.
31
psychic processes and not their cause, Deleuze and Guattari aren't calling (what some inattentive critics
like to ascribe them of doing) for some permanent states of pre-subjectivity as a new model.
In fact, in Thousand Plateaus, they explicitly seem to warn against two dangers: of not being able
to identify at all and thus fall into the 'demented or suicidal collapse' 129 or of identifying only with an
exclusive objects which produces the 'totalitarian and fascist' BWO's'. 130 What they are, however,
insisting is the possibility of unlimited variety of identifications alongside the infinity of intensities
forming and re-forming on the BWO. That is why they perceive Psychoanalytic 'cure': of referring
everything back to familial identifications as extremely poor set of choices, to say the least.
These three modes of production – production of production, production of recording and
production of consumption – are, what Ian Buchanan assert to be, 'an analytic backbone' of Deleuze's
and Guattari's theory in Anti-Oedipus of how desire works. Since it functions by flows and brakes, by
'fits and starts'131 and is a process, they present three syntheses – synthesis of connection, synthesis of
disjunction and synthesis of conjunction-consummation – to explain how the breaks and flows work. At
the same time they also seem to propose a theory of the subject, that differently from the centrally
situated Freudian 'Ego' is always peripheral and always in the state of becoming. It is important to
understand that for Deleuze and Guattari desiring-production is not operating in the inside, but rather it
is always the relationship with the outside. The partial-objects are always outside, thus desire is always
pointing to the outside. It is the subject, the celibate machine, that 'finds' the inside by reflecting the self
as a whole. However, celibate machine is not the product of primary forces on BWO, but of social
forces of production/reproduction that co-determine the connections and disjunctions on the personal as
well as on a social body.
Although, BWO's repulsion of desiring machines on the psychic level Deleuze and Guattari call the
primary psychic repression, on its own, as we have seen it does not last, for repulsion and attraction
forces are in a perpetual tension resulting in differential intensities and unstable subjectivities. For the
true repression – the secondary social repression – is needed for the desire to desire its own oppression.
It is one of the most important claims in Anti-Oedipus that it is not a social repression that represents
psychic repression, but rather, the opposite: it is the social repression that limits the syntheses of
desiring production, and hence falls back on psychic repression, providing the image and the
coordinates of what and how to desire.
We have already analyzed different social forms of repression. Deleuze and Guattari explain the
social repression in the form of the illegitimate use of three syntheses. Illegitimacy here is proposed in
a sense that desire can become trapped in formations that limit its own immanent ways of functioning.
129 Deleuze and Guattari. (1988). Op. Cit. P. 178.
130 Ibid., P. 181.
131 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 1.
32
However, Deleuze and Guattari are clear, that it is still desire, and that it desires its own limitation,
hence the illegitimacy is immanent as well. Having said that, Deleuze and Guattari seem to take on a
political stance of insisting on desire's immanence and hence to critique the mechanisms of
transcendence, that are able to capture desire and limit it for the 'higher purposes'. For they agree with
Nietzsche132 that:

Things never proceeded without blood, torture, and victims, when man thought it
necessary to forge memory for himself. The most horrifying sacrifices and offerings (including
sacrifice of the first-born), the most repulsive mutilations (castrations, for example), the
cruellest rituals of all religious cults (and all religions are at their deepest foundations systems
of cruelty) all these things originate from the instinct which guessed that the most powerful aid
to memory was pain.”133

What Nietzsche calls forging of memory with violence, is the social inscription on the psychic
BWO. The recording is memory134. What is achieved with social organism[ation], is applied onto the
every individual BWO, forging organization that is based on exclusive syntheses, that Deleuze and
Guattari insist, are used illegitimately.

Three illegitimate uses of syntheses

1. Connective synthesis
Deleuze an Guattari define two uses of connective synthesis: “..global and specific use, and a
partial and non-specific use.”135 The former one has desire being invested in the 'global persons' by the
specific, symbolically situated Ego. The latter has desire being invested in partial objects, by the non-
specific, subjectivity.136 It is the global and specific use of the connective synthesis that Deleuze and
Guattari define as the illegitimate one from the perspective of the unconscious. It is because
extrapolations from partial objects to global persons is performed not through the unconscious
processes developing their representations - as conventional psychoanalytic theory would have it – but
require a transcendent procedure for it to accomplish. The transcendent procedure, according to

132 Ibid., P. 202,207,208.

133 Nietzsche, F. On the genealogy of morals. trans. by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. P. 42
134 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 202,207,208.
135 Ibid., P. 78.
136 Ibid., P. 78-79.
33
Deleuze and Guattari is based on the double movement of law principle: stating what is it that one
really desires, and at the same time forbidding this object of desire. The double movement produces the
subject of desire, and thus global person, who in turn is directed what is allowed for him to desire. 137
This procedure, according to psychoanalysis is performed initially in the familial sphere, through
the resolution of Oedipus complex, which as Freud had it, consisted in renouncing the desire for one's
mother, with a pact with one's father, that one will identify with one's father, so that one could become
like one's father, and eventually acquire one's own mother substitute. Subject thus is at once situated
within the social field through the differential relation to the object of desire (mother) and object of
identification (father), and acquires new object of desire, which he/she starts lacking.
However, as Deleuze and Guattari note, the triangular constitution of Oedipus (father-mother-I)
does not guarantee itself being reproduced. The missing link through which the familial triangle
extends into the social is the image of sister. 138 If father, mother, I triangle implied synthesis of
recording (assigning the position in the Symbolic order), then sister serve as an object to be exchanged
and thus serves for formation of alliance. As Deleuze and Guattari say: “..I have a moral obligation to
take as wife someone other than my sister, and an obligation to keep my sister for someone else..” 139
Thus, the constitution of the triangle through father-mother-I scheme, and reproduction of the triangle
through the exchange of a sister for wife, and bearing child, becomes: “..a new triangle whose inverted
vertex will be my child – which is called surmounting Oedipus, but reproducing it as well, transmitting
it rather than dying all alone, incestuous, homosexual, and a zombie.”140
At this point, Deleuze and Guattari say that they do not deny that this is how it all works, but rather that
that this is not the way the unconscious works.141
Unconscious connective syntheses always establish connections with partial objects. However,
whole persons (global) are only the extrapolations of the former. 142 And for extrapolation to be
legitimized a transcendent term must be introduced, that's why the formula of Oedipus is 3+1 (81).
Three symbolic differential positions and one unifying transcendent term (God, Nation, Truth,
Community, natural way,Equality, Justice, etc..) When one establishes connections between global
(abstract) persons, the partial objects seem to appear belonging to a global person. 143 The consequence
of this extrapolation is well described by the famous quote by Lacan: “I love you, but, because
inexplicably I love in you something more than you- the objet petit a – I mutilate you”.144 What one
137 Ibid., P. 79.
138 Ibid.
139 Ibid.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid., P. 82
142 Ibid., P. 80
143 Ibid.
144 Lacan, J. (The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Book XI. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. trans. by Alan
Sheridan. 2nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1981. P. 263.
34
loves is always a partial object (objet petit a), but since for global persons, partial objects are their
possessions – 'I am the master of myself, and you are the master of your charm' – one always seeks a
possession of a global person and not the connections of partial objects: “Instead of a connective
appropriation, partial objects become the possessions of a person and, when required, the property of
another person.145
The synthesis of connection that is legitimate from the point of view of the unconscious involves
non-specific connections of partial objects.146 The outcome if one re-thinks affectionate relationships as
well as the concept of family in line with legitimate connective syntheses would be revolutionary.
Firstly the relations are always forged not with persons, but with the desiring machines within the
persons, and among the different persons as well assemblages that include non-personal partial-objects.
The 'possession' becomes always partial and singular. And since by definition, the term possession
requires Ego who wishes to posses, itself and subsequently the other, desiring machines that connect
with partial objects cannot even be called possessing, but rather producing. In other words in
connective syntheses possession loses its meaning. Further consequences of connective synthesis to the
conception of affective relations and the concept of family will be expanded in the sections to come.

2. Disjunctive synthesis
As with connective synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two uses of a disjunctive
synthesis: restrictive and exclusive, and the other - non-restrictive and inclusive. 147 The former is based
on transcendent operation of exclusive disjunction: either/or. The latter performs immanent disjunction:
'Either..or...or..or'148 Deleuze and Guattari contra-poses two figures: Oedipal triangle or the process of
oedipalization as an example of the formation of exclusive disjunctions, and the figure of schizophrenic
as a subjectivity effectuating out of inclusive disjunctions. It is within the familial triangulation that one
is situated within exclusive disjunctions and assigned a particular position that both forms the fixed
subject (Ego) and subjects it exclusively: “..the familial triangulation represents the minimum condition
under which an 'ego' takes on the coordinates that differentiate it at one and the same time with regard
to generation, sex and vital state”149
However, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, coordinates do not mean full identification with the
familial objects of desire at all times. In fact, full identification is what is forbidden, thus the lack
resulting in desire, and the reproduction of Oedipus on the 'other side of the family' 150: “It [Oedipus]
desire to take as its objects the differentiated persons, and, brandishing the threats of the
145 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 80.
146 Ibid., P. 78.
147 Ibid., P. 84.
148 Ibid., P. 84,85.
149 Ibid., P. 84.
150 Ibid.. P. 87.
35
undifferentiated, prohibits the correlative ego from satisfying its desires with these persons, in the name
of the same requirements of differentiation.”151
Hence the Oedipal interdiction presents itself with a self-contradictory requirement: one has two
desire and identify only with and within the familial images , as well as one is forbidden to actually
identify or desire within family but must resolve the Oedipus complex and desire as well as identify the
familial substitutes outside the familial home. That is what Deleuze and Guattari call double bind - the
outcome of which is this swinging between the internalization and thus perceiving to know one's
generation, and vitality status (all transcendent, extrapolated categories) and neurosis – retreating
at the point of disjunction, and not knowing who one is in terms of generation, gender and vitality
(three major familial neuroses.152): “..Oedipus should be presented as a series, or an oscillation between
two poles: the neurotic identification, and the internalization that is said to be normative.153
The example of an inclusive disjunctive synthesis is found within the figure of schizophrenic.
Throughout the Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari insist that they use schizophrenia to describe the
process and not the disease. That is why their sources are primarily from literature either by persons
written who suffered from schizophrenia or authors who captured the schizophrenic process best. It
does not mean that the capabilities of inclusive disjunctions belongs exclusively to the schizophrenic
and are not accessible to the rest. In fact, whereas psychoanalysis uses neurosis as its point of departure
to arrive at generalizations about desire, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis uses psychosis as its
point of departure, to propose an alternative understanding how desire works, as well as strategies how
to desire – schizo being an extreme case, nevertheless serving as a glimpse of desiring production that
continuously escapes oedipalization.
When speaking of schizo’s relation to disjunctive syntheses, Deleuze and Guattari say that: “..he
does not abolish disjunction by identifying the contradictory elements by means of elaboration;
instead, he affirms it through a continuous overflight spanning an indivisible distance.” 154 Also, “..he
does not reduce two contraries to an identity of the same; he affirms their distance as that which relates
the two as different.”155 Thus, for schizo disjunctions are real. However, at each disjunction of either/or
he never chooses one as an exclusive. Thus the chosen one does not become the negative of the not
chosen one but simply an open option to choose at any time. There is no contradiction, just difference
between the terms of disjunctions. 156 The schizo affirms all disjunctions as different intensities on the
body without organs. For him, there is no one exclusive disjunction to get fixed upon, rather only

151 Ibid.
152 Ibid., P. 84.
153 Ibid., P. 88
154 Ibid., P. 85
155 Ibid.
156 Ibid.
36
distances between the disjunctive points through which he travels (85). Schizo is a 'faceless and trans-
positional subject'.157 Whereas oedipalised subject is allowed/forbidden to choose between two terms:
-either 'parent or child'; 'man or woman'; 'alive or dead' – stemming from Oedipal triangle, the schizo
not only identifies fully with these binary choices, but he never stops there. To illustrate the process,
D&G cite Nijinsky:

'I am God I was not God I am a clown of God; I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am a Red Indian. I am a
Negro. I am a Chinaman. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner, a stranger. I am a sea bird. I am a land
bird. I am the tree of Tolstoy. I am the roots of Tolstoy...I am husband and wife in one. I love my wife. I
love my husband.'158159

Some critics could point out that Deleuze and Guattari are advocating here either a promotion of
madness or represent the postmodern apologetic for contemporary capitalist consumer culture. The
subject who continuously differentiates himself from the others through the lifestyle, fashion, etc.
Regarding the madness, as was mentioned earlier, it is the process what matter and interest both
philosophers. The schizophrenic, they admit, suffer, but what he suffers from is nature itself as a
change : “..A harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as
possible to matter, to a burning, living centre of matter..” 160 Thus it is the schizophrenic experience that
is of utmost importance and not the statistical illness: “There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive
quantities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable – a celibate misery and glory
experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of
transition,state of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form.”161
For Deleuze and Guattari exclusive disjunctions, by forcing to chose either/or, illegitimately crush
and lure desire into the framework that is not its own. 162 The outcome is either normalcy and authority
abiding subjectivity or the neurotic suffering from not knowing what is required from him. These both
poles restrict desiring-production by telling what to desire and at the same time forbidding it.
The misinterpretation of Anti-Oedipus as a consumerist philosophy needs to be explained by the
difference of neurotic and schizophrenic figure. For, indeed, they share the common use of disjunctive
synthesis. However, for the consumer, the synthesis of disjunction, the possession of the commodity is
provided for to 'consume' as the means that will supposedly achieve intensive states of happiness; the

157 Ibid.
158 Nijinsky, V. Diary. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936. Pp. 20, J56.
159 Ibid., P. 86.
160 Ibid., P. 21.
161 Ibid., P. 20.
162 Ibid. P., 91.

37
Ego staying always intact. The schizo is exactly the opposite. He requires no mediation of commodity
whatsoever since he derives intensive states directly through connections and disjunctions that are on
his own BWO, while continuously losing and regaining his subjectivity on the peripheries of the
desiring machines.
To conclude, the difference between the restrictive disjunctive synthesis and an inclusive
disjunctive synthesis is once recorded on the BWO, whether desire is forced to be repeating the same
flow pattern, in our case, the Oedipal triangle, and thus capture and diminish desiring-production
through the repetition of the same, or the disjunctions remain open and desire is allowed to flow
through them producing intensive states of infinite fractalisaton and becoming of the subjectivity,
always at the periphery.

3. Conjunctive synthesis
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between 'the nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive
synthesis' and 'segregative and biunivocal use'.163 The polyvocal use implies that the subject that
appears as the after effect of the relationship between previous two syntheses on the BWO always stays
in the periphery of desiring production. What Eugene Holland describes as: “..series of lived subject-
states – but without necessarily culminating in a fixed subject, possessed of a specific identity.” 164
Taking schizophrenic process as an example, Deleuze and Guattari point that schizo is capable of
identifications with social and historical material, however, schizo identifies not with: “..races, peoples,
and persons in a theatre of representation, but proper names that identify races, peoples, and persons
with regions, thresholds, or effects in a production of intensive quantities.” 165 In other words, it is an
identification not with a particular persona or social aggregate, but with a particular intensity. That is
why Deleuze and Guattari reproach the popular examples of Schizophrenic as someone who thinks he
is Napoleon Bonaparte, for example. It is not the Napoleon, D&G insist, that the schizo identifies, but
with the intensities that are coupled to the name Napoleon (Louis XVII in D&G example).166
Also, it is not something that is consciously selected as an object of identification. The delirium and
hallucinations – thinking and feeling and being an 'x' – are always, according D&G secondary material
applied to the intensive quantities. The primary always are image-less intensities, feelings, emotions,
that serve for secondary process of 'differentiation of deliriums and hallucinations'. 167 When Deleuze
and Guattari remark that one problem that Schizo doesn't have is the problem of identification 168, they
mean that for Schizo, identification is not the imaginary ego, that one perpetually tries to live up to, as
163 Ibid., P. 115.
164 Holland. (1999). Op. Cit. P. 36.
165 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 95.
166 Ibid., P. 97.
167 Ibid., P. 93.
168 Ibid., P. 100.
38
well as not a symbolic position, one perpetually tries to represent, but rather, the naming of polyvocal
intensities that schizo experiences in the processes of desiring production.
The two different types or ways of identification – one operating as nomadic and polyvocal, and the
other as segregative and biunivocal – seem to refer to the difference in identifying with the intensities
as opposed to the symbolic positions that differentiate, divide and assign roles for social actors. Thus,
in the example of the identification with the Napoleon, the schizo would identify with the composite of
intensities that comes with the name (eg. bravery, cruelty, cunning, etc..), whereas the segregative use
of conjunction synthesis would identify with Napoleon's signifying position within the symbolic field.
The latter proceeds by hierarchies of oppositions: the victor and the enemy; the superior nation and
inferior nation; us and them – resulting in the identification with a model, and its necessary exteriorised
supporting 'other':

Fixed subjects of all kinds arise from an illegitimate use of the conjunctive synthesis that
segregates one set of subjectivities from all the others and demands that an otherwise nomadic
subjectivity (resulting from legitimate conjunctive syntheses) identify only with member of that
restricted set: whites rather than blacks; men rather than women; Christians rather than Jews,
and so forth.169

For the former, names refer only to intensive states that following the relationship of non-specific
connective syntheses and inclusive disjunctive syntheses result in a non-segregative, non-fixed
subjectivities. Thus for schizo, there is not 'us and them', but rather the mine becoming all of you, as
well as mine becoming that is forever inferior to you.170
Whereas segregative fixed identities - that proceed directly with the investment of desire into the
social field - is a feature of previous social formations, in capitalist formation they still function, albeit
in a displaced manner. Operating by decoding, capitalist formation does not by definition tolerate any
direct social investments, that would form subjectivities bypassing capitalist axiomatics. However, it is
a role of a family in a capitalist society to reduce all social tensions (class,race, gender, etc..) to the
familial images. The way the restrictive conjunctive synthesis works in capitalist formation is through
the Oedipal process of biunivocalization and application:

The Oedipal operation consists of establishing a constellation of biunivocal relations

between the agents of social production, reproduction, and anti-production on the one hand,

169 Holland. (1999). Op. Cit. P. 39.

170 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 95,115.
39
 and the agents of the so-called natural reproduction of the family on the other. This operation is
called an application. It is as if a tablecloth were being folded, as if its 4 (+n) corners were
reduced to 3 (+1, to designate the transcendent factor performing the operation). From that
moment it is a foregone conclusion that the collective agents will be interpreted as derivatives
of, or substitutes for parental figures, in a system of equivalence that rediscovers everywhere
the father, the mother, the ego.171

By the process of application, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the reduction of all social field to the
family as its Representative. The conjunctive motto: 'so it's me', becomes 'So it's the family – the father,
mother, child'. The fact that capital retains family, even though as an institution it no longer participates
in social reproduction, points to the fact that Oedipal family serves capital to displace its own,
otherwise schizophrenizing external limits: “Oedipus, the incomparable instrument of gregariousness, it
the ultimate private and subjugated territoriality of European man..” 172 It is Oedipus that is explained as
point of departure: 'So it's the father, the mother and I' and as a point of destination: 'the boss, the
doctor – is my father'. For this reduction to take place, the transcendent term is always required, thus:
3+1 formula of Oedipus, as well as the necessity of archaic elements: “Oedipus depends on this sort of
nationalistic, religious, racist sentiment, and not the reverse: it is not the father who is projected onto
the boss, but the boss who is applied to the father, either in order to tell us 'you will not surpass your
father,' or 'you will surpass him to find our forefathers'. “173
The point that Deleuze and Guattari makes is that social segregations come first, and Oedipal
family comes secondary as a point of application and not the reverse. In other words, the family
becomes an ideological pretext for social exploitations. It is for the family that good Oedipalized
subject goes to war; it is for the family that he performs meaningless tasks everyday in his job.
However, although Oedipal family seem to serve as an ideological image of sacred private world,
protected from capitalist machine or terrorists coming from the dessert, Deleuze and Guattari claim that
in reality it is a porous ideological fantasy, that is traversed all the time by flows that cut across the
Oedipal triangle. Deleuze and Guattari wittingly express it in the following quote:

A poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle, an exploded triangle from which the
flows of desire escape in the direction of other territories. It is strange that we had to wait for
the dreams of colonized people in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle,
mommy was dancing with the missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the
171 Ibid., P. 111.
172 Ibid., P. 112
173 Ibid., P. 114.
40
 self was being beaten a white man.174

To sum up, although the Oedipal family seem to be the point of departure and the point of
destination, and serve for capital as an internal limit, in itself it does not organize anything (does not
participate in social production/reproduction) but merely induct. 175 The Oedipal family is a pre-
conscious investment, and not the unconscious, which 'coexist, but does not necessarily coincide'. 176

The interest of a family is a preconscious investment, whereas the unconscious investments are made
on the social body itself, via the three illegitimate syntheses of connection, disjunction and conjunction.
“So its the family that I desire” - is exclaimed at the end, when all the exclusive disjunctions have been
created, and global persons established. As Deleuze and Guattari insist, there is never a private fantasy,
bus always a group fantasy.177 It follows that the preconscious investment in the family – the Oedipus
with its point of departure and return – is nothing but a displaced unconscious desire in the social
formation itself. It needs to be displaced, for it supports the real social segregations.

174 Ibid., P. 106.

175 Ibid., P. 101.
176 Ibid., P. 114.
177 Ibid., P. 113, 294.
41
 An-Oedipal desire

The desiring-machines produce and desire flows best when the criteria of three legitimate syntheses
is met. The unconscious desire functions by connections between non-specific and partial objects
(connective synthesis); non-exclusive disjunctions (disjunctive synthesis), and non-restrictive,
polyvocal conjunctive syntheses. Although Deleuze and Guattari claim that this is how desire works on
ontological level, it can also, however, serve for evaluating social formations and subjectivities as to
their degree of illegitimacy of the syntheses or what Brian Massumi would call the degree of 'body's
potential', the 'degree of freedom'. 178 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze distinguishes between the
repetition of the same - 'generality', and the repetition of difference. 179 The former is a perception of
equivalences and resemblances180, while the latter produces difference by repetition in relation to
'unique or singular'.181
It seems that, similarly, desire can be either continuously invested and re-invested into the state
(formation that seeks to stay the same) formations, thus causing the circulation of flows to close upon
itself and produce no difference, or it can invest in the formations and revolutionize (meaning turning
over) their circuits of flows by investing in emerging new social groups or by liberating its own flows
through the descent into the depths of the same formation: what Deleuze and Guattari would call –
molecular levels of the same social formation. The molecular level refers not the scale, as Massumi
observes, but rather to the high degree of heterogeneity and organizational inconsistency with unclear
fluid boundaries. 182
For Deleuze and Guattari desire can be evaluated as 'reactionary' or 'revolutionary'. 183
Consequently, there can be a preconscious 'revolution' that changes things on the level of social
formation: redistributing flows and agents, however, desiring-investments might stay as repressed as
before, or else, there can be an unconscious revolution occurring within the social formations
untouched on preconscious level.184 Since both are determining each other: “There are no desiring-
machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and not social machines
without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale”185, it would seem that the

178 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 70.

179 Deleuze, G. (1994). Op. Cit. P. 1.
180 Ibid.
181 Ibid.
182 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 55.
183 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 386.
184 Ibid., P. 381.
185 Ibid., P. 373.

42
revolutionary changes that would liberate flows can be brought about on both levels. Of course, it also
means that the danger of re-territorialisation or entrapment of desire is also happening on both levels.
Thus, Deleuze and Guattari point to historical examples when revolutionary groups become fascistic as
well as, contrary, when revolutionary desiring-flows form and effect the most rigid social formations.
Having established how desiring production works and interacts with social production, as
presented in Anti-Oedipus, I will set out to interrogate the concept of love, through Deleuze and
Guattari's perspective and its relation to desire. My starting thesis which I would like to propose would
be the following: if love and desire are related and, the desiring subject can be either a schizo type -
with desire always positive or the neurotic type where desire always lacks, then love could also be of
two types: the schizo or what I would call fractal, or the neurotic always lacking. In her historical
account of the institution of marriage, Coontz establishes that contemporary marriage institution, and
hence the formation of family unit depends primarily on the notion of love. Thus, if there can be
established the different conception of love, different conception of family would follow from it.
The concept of love seems to be used by Deleuze and Guattari as a synonym for desire. They start
Anti-Oedipus by explaining how desiring production works and use as an illustrative example
Buchner's literary character Lenz186, who being portrayed implicitly as schizophrenic, takes a walk in
the mountains, and experiences intense relation with the surroundings and the affected self. They
conclude the example that: “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on
the analyst's couch”.187 At the end of Anti-Oedipus, the schizo stroll is taken up again in relation to the
concept of love: “It is not the neurotic stretched out on the couch who speaks to us of love, of its force
and its despair, but the mute stroll of the schizo, Lenz's outing in the mountains and under the stars, the
immobile voyage in intensities on the body without organs.”188
Thus the concept of love is extended to and defined as nothing else as then the desiring-production
itself. The other two terms that Deleuze and Guattari employ at the end of the book and that are used
interchangeably speaking of the desire are: sexuality and libidinal investments. It seems that these
synonyms are used for applying DeleuzoGuattarian conception of desire, within the contemporary
discourses about it, and thus modify their concepts according to the DeleuzoGuattarian ontological
notion of desire. Therefore the introduction of the terms, that seem to describe the same desiring-
production, and that refer to different discourses, seem to have a political purpose of reaching out to
other discourses by pointing to the limits of their concepts as well as a potential for transformation
when evaluated through the prism of desiring-production.

186 Buchner, G. Complete Plays, Lenz and other writings. Edit. And trans. by John Reddick. London: Penguin Books, 1993.
P. 139-165.
187 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 2.
188 Ibid., P. 321.
43
 Love and desire for Deleuze and Guattari are not defined by its object, as the popular notion of love
would have it. For them, love and: “..desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire
surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined..” 189 In other
words, unconscious desire or love does not make an exclusive connections and disjunctions with a
specific object that is somehow autonomous from the surrounding (physical, social, historical, etc..),
but multiple connections are made and multiplicity of partial-objects participate.
Thus for example when somebody says that one has fallen in love with a particular person we
witness a reduction and abstraction of multiple connections to a single global person. It is the operation
of consciousness as the ability to reflect and intellectually constitute the fact of love that performs this
illegitimate reduction.190 From the perspective of the unconscious investments, however, the chosen
love object is just an effect, a manifest sign of real investments: “...our 'object choice' itself refers to a
conjunction of flows of life and society that this body and this person intercept, receive, and transmit,
always within a biological, social , and historical field where we are equally immersed or with which
we communicate.”191 To put it differently, where one thinks that 'there are only two of us', in fact,
Deleuze and Guattari would insist, there is a whole universe in its multiplicity that is participating and
making love. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say: “...we always make love with
worlds.”192
Desiring-production and social-production are identical in nature, but different in their regimes, the
former non-restrictive, inclusive, non-specific and the latter operating through capturing desire into
exclusive disjunctions, global persons and restrictive conjunctions. Deleuze and Guattari specify the
same two poles for love. In fact, they claim that it is not love itself that is either restrictive or liberatory.
Love choice itself is ambivalent: “...love-object choices occur at the meeting place of the two kinds of
machine [social and desiring], following lines of escape or integration”. 193 However, the form of love,
Deleuze and Guattari claim is always an index of either revolutionary or reactionary unconscious social
investment.194 Oedipus serves here as an exemplary model of reactionary investment. Even though one
can love their father, mother, partner, future wife/husband and this love in itself is neither revolutionary
nor reactionary, however the form of it is. The Oedipal exclusivity of choice and dedication to global
persons and exclusive disjunctions indicate the reactionary character of it.
For Deleuze and Guattari there are two types of investment: the preconscious – that is able to
formulate specific interests and aims, and the unconscious investment of desire that in-itself has no

189 Ibid., P. 322.

190 Ibid., P. 323.
191 Ibid.
192 Ibid.
193 Ibid., P. 391.
194 Ibid, P. 400.
44
interests nor aims. Thus, in the case of Oedipal love, there are preconscious investments into the
particular global persons, that are reactionary, however, the unconscious desire is invested into the
social machine as a whole. Therefore, there can also be a preconscious revolutionary love, however, on
the level of unconscious investment be totally reactionary.
The example could be gay/lesbian identity politics. Even though a lesbian person might break away
from male/female exclusive disjunction, assigning herself within the binary of homosexual-
heterosexual, she still invests unconsciously into the social aggregate that functions in terms of
illegitimate uses of syntheses, as the previous one. For Deleuze and Guattari, loves that would be
indices of revolutionary unconscious investment, would have to be rid of the: “..well defined figures,
the well-identified roles, the clearly distinct persons..the image models.” 195 Revolutionary love objects,
thus are always partial and non-representational. This form of love Deleuze and Guattari name non-
figurative: “...which does not concern objects, aims, or sources, but only machinistic forms or
indices.196 Oedipal love, on the other hand, re-enforces social aggregates and serves them. As with the
desire that lacks, this type of love invests in global person, that in turn it starts to lack it, and thus, tries
to possess it by any means that are at its disposal. Brian Massumi captures extraordinarily well the
image of this form of investment that is worth quoting in length:

Entropic equilibrium sets in. The vomit can speak now, but the breast is no longer a
mysterious entity, causing but uncaused – only a regressive plaything. The fervid praise lands
elsewhere (on a divinized man, of course, the better to solidify the balance of power). The
breast is doubly privatized. It belongs to a mother-substitute, and the mother-substitute is a
lawfully wedded wife belonging to a pious zombie. Redundancy. Everything is private, and
everything has a double assignation (yours and mine). Our possessions are dearer to us than
life itself, but we know how to share them with those we love. Love is conjugal. By definition.
Everywhere, wholly attractive couples dance ritual circles around each other like Newtonian
planets around an invisible sun. Everywhere, the lifeless promise of mutual possession. Bodies
mouthing the same touching refrains: 'I do,' I am yours,' 'If you touch him I'll kill you.' You will
see, if you turn on the TV.197

The preconscious interests and unconscious desire do not necessarily coincide.198 The investment of
interests and aims that are preconscious are only a cover up for reactionary or paranoiac investments

195 Ibid., P. 400.

196 Ibid.
197 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 78.
198 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 411.
45
into the social machine itself. Deleuze and Guattari state that the unconscious investment into the social
order has no rationality by itself, thus it is supported and rationalized by preconscious interests and
aims, that reproduce themselves.199 One of the main points that Deleuze and Guattari keep on implicitly
reiterating is that the investments into social formations aren't as Freud thought – sublimation of
libidinal desire and the change of its nature, but rather the very same libido directed and captured into
these formations. That is why for Deleuze and Guattari Hitler aroused people sexually; that is why:
“Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.”200
If the revolutionary preconscious investments may easily serve the unconscious investments into
the social formation – having a revolutionary outlook, but a reactionary spirit – so the opposite can be
said about reactionary preconscious investments, capable of serving the revolutionary unconscious
investments. It is by actively uncovering the rationalizing causes, aims and interests of social order and
getting to its irrational kernel that one is able then to pass to another - revolutionary pole of desiring
production:

… the bringing to light of the unconscious reactionary investment as if devoid of an aim,

would be enough transform it completely, to make it pass to the other pole of the libido, i.e., to
the schizo-revolutionary pole, since this action could not be accomplished without overthrowing
power, without reversing subordination, without returning production itself to desire: for it is
only desire that lives from having no aim.201

However, Deleuze and Guattari always insist that desiring production always happens within a
social production, and social production cannot exist without desiring production. In other words, these
are not structurally separated poles. Rather, the question should be posed in the following way: is
desiring-production subordinated to social production, and thus one has a 'disinterested love' for
machine202 or desiring-production uses social aggregates merely as tools for its schizo investments. 203

As in the processes on the Body Without Organs one oscillates between attraction and repulsion of the
desiring machines, so the processes of escaping the social aggregates and re-investing into other
aggregates are the same oscillating and vibrating processes. For Deleuze and Guattari every line of
escape is at the same time a positive line of creation; 204 the same way, as every time the body without
organs repels desiring machines, it reforms them to operate and produce in different arrangements.

199 Ibid.
200 Ibid., P. 322.
201 Ibid., P. 402.
202 Ibid., P. 409.
203 Ibid. P. 411.
204 Ibid.
46
 However, Deleuze and Guattari note that this oscillation is 'not equal'. 205 The paranoiac pole is
actual and the schizoid pole is potential.206 It follows, that as a status-quo,there is always a repetition
and re-production of the social formation or the so called reality principle. The passage to the schizoid
pole, thus, requires a real break with this principle: “..it is not enough to construct a new socius as full
body; one must also pass to the other side of this social full body, where the molecular formations of
desire that must master the new molar aggregate operate and are inscribed.”207
It is important to note that it is not an individual who invests himself either to one pole or the other.
Deleuze and Guattari are clear: both types of investment can coexist within the same individual and in
variety degrees and combinations.208 That is why for Deleuze and Guattari all investments, all loves are
social and pre-individual. The subjugated groups refer to a paranoiac investment and disinterested love
for the machine, while subject groups refer to the schizoid counter-investments that function in
accordance with the syntheses of desiring production.209
In other words, the groups consist not of individuals (although they might coincide), but of pre-
individual singularities, that coalesce in accordance with one or the other pole. It follows that loving
happens for Deleuze and Guattari not between persons but always between singularities (persons might
coincide or might not). Singularities by definition are trans-personal, thus positive (not lacking) loves
operate not according to images, global persons and egos (which is the image of oneself as global), but
according to the singular intensities. The project of Schizoanalysis as opposed to Psychoanalysis is
precisely to heal or rather, to empower by liberating desiring production:

The task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions;
liberating pre-personal singularities they enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows they would
be capable of transmitting, receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more
sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the
desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others. For everyone is a
little group (un groupuscule) and must live as such – or rather, like the Zen tea box broken
in a hundred places, whose every crack is repaired with cement made of gold, or like the
church tile whose every fissure is accentuated by the layers of paint or lime covering it (the
contrary of castration, which is unified, molarized, hidden, scarred, unproductive).210

205 Ibid.
206 Ibid.
207 Ibid., P. 412.
208 Ibid., P. 413.
209 Ibid., P. 407, 412.
210 Ibid., P. 296.
47
 Deleuze and Guattari seem to redefine love the way they have redefined the desire: it becomes
essentially positive, nothing lacking force that takes as it object partial objects, singularities that it finds
within the social, historical, biological fields. As it was shown earlier, desire gets trapped, coded,
axiomatized within a particular social formation. Thus, although, as Deleuze and Guattari note, love in-
itself is neither reactionary nor revolutionary, it is the object choice that is determined by social
formation: what and how it is allowed (encouraged) to love and what is forbidden (discouraged). It is
not the juridical law that forbids, but the very infrastructure of social-production, that distributes
desiring production through codes and axioms: “Repressing desire, not only for others but in oneself,
being the cop for others and for oneself – that is what arouses, and it is not ideology, it is economy.”211
The romantic love that seems to be an injunction and imperative today for a secular western
marriage and family is supported and represented by movie and entertainment industries, producing
endless variations of the same refrain, the same formula of love. It usually starts with two terms of the
relation and it builds its tension and guarantees its monetary success by introducing the tension through
the third term that is perceived as a threat to the other two (another man, another woman, God, duty, the
long not seen friend, etc..). Then there are tears, murders, awkward situations - all depending on genre
- with the culminating point where everything gets back to the equilibrium state: another series of
exclusive twos, another Oedipal triangle formed.
It is as if one extracts the pleasure of seeing what would be the outcome and/or punishment when
forbidden loves are practiced. This joy as pleasure of the law is what Deleuze and Guattari call the
disinterested love for the machine. When Massumi speaks of mutual possession of each other, it is the
junction of singularity of multiplicities that gets named (“I love you”, “I love you too”), and at the same
time demanded that the same singularity would reproduce itself as the same in the future. It is as if the
very phrase performs an act of naming the singularity, as well as - since it carries the global pronoun
“I”, “You”, demands the the singular to become repeatable in the future (the repetition of the same).
This debt of one self to the other, this promissory future note has been well described by Nietzsche:

Now this naturally forgetful animal, for whom oblivion represents a power, a form of strong
health, has created for itself an opposite power, that of remembering, by whose aid, in certain
cases, oblivion may be suspended – specifically in cases where it is a question of promises. By
this I do not mean a purely passive succumbing to past impressions, the indigestion of being
unable to be done with a pledge once made, but rather an active not wishing to be done with it,
a continuing to will what has once been willed, a veritable 'memory of the will'; so that,
between the original determination and the actual performance of the thing willed, a whole
211 Ibid., P. 380.
48
 world of new things, conditions, even volitional acts, can be interposed without snapping the
long chain of the will. But how much all this presupposes! A man who wishes to dispose of his
future in this manner must first have learned to separate necessary from accidental acts; to
think causally; to see distant things as though they were near at hand; to distinguish means
from ends. In short, he must have become not only calculating but himself calculable, regular
even to his own perception, if he is to stand pledge for his own future as a guarantor does.212

If Nietzsche speaks of a Man, Deleuze and Guattari speak of social formation, where the model of
debt, as exhibited in the first part of this section, serves as a method of coding the bodies. Debt created
territories in savage, barbarian and capitalist formations. The 'I love you' promissory phrase is
ambivalent in itself, since as Deleuze and Guattari have already explained, love appears at the junction
of desiring and social production.213 For, the initial 'I love you' is always real and intense. However, it is
as if the same magic words serve to inscribe these intensities within the confines of social coding:
couple, marriage, family: “The still relatively unpredictable part-objects are more successfully
regularized by being refocused on a higher level. Their allure attaches to whole bodies identified by
social category, rather than to organs on those bodies experienced as a matrices of transformational
potential. Connections are now person-to-person. The coordinates are set. The Entropic equilibrium
sets in.”214
To conclude, Deleuze and Guattari propose a conception of desire that re-situates it from object
oriented understanding to the relationships between partial-objects. This approach challenges subject-
object binary distinction. For Spinoza, as for Deleuze and Guattari, desire operates on the plane of
immanence. As Casarino comments on Spinoza, an objectless love that is immanent means that it is
self-causing, and consequently cannot produce a lack, and thus cannot fear losing an object of love:

Indeed, for Spinoza what we experience as love is most often an experience of love as
possession, which is haunted by the (past, present, or future) loss of that which we love. This is
love as an experience of privation, as an experience of lack. By contrast, when we experience
love without the concomitant loss of that which causes it, we experience love plus X, that is, we
experience love and its own surplus.. It goes without saying that this is no longer love as
possession (of that which we love as other than one-self) because its cause is now
immanent.”215

212 Nietzsche, F. (1996). Op. Cit. P. 39.

213 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 323.
214 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 78.
215Casarino and Negri (2008). Op. Cit. P. 34.

49
The lack, that serves as a defining descriptor of traditional understanding of desire, from the
perspective of immanence would be what Deleuze would call a fold of force upon itself –
topologically, the effect of interiority creating inside and outside, hence the effect of transcendence in
opposition to immanence.
The folds are, however, a secondary phenomenon. The primary for Deleuze and Guattari are pre-
extensive intensities, which lack nothing. Re-situating desire from lack based to the positive and
productive, forces one to re-think the conception of love as well. Love becomes for Deleuze and
Guattari a synonym of desire, for it exhibits two poles or two ways of unconscious syntheses. Love and
desire as paranoiac investment of the fixed ego towards the social machine: love and desire investing in
global connections, establishing exclusive disjunctions, and restrictive conjunctions. Or, the other pole:
love and desire as schizo investment of desiring machines towards the partial-objects with a peripheral
and singular subjectivities as a result of it: love and desire investing in local connections, establishing
inclusive disjunctions and arriving at non-restrictive subjectivities.
If the contemporary nuclear family has as its base romantic love, and contemporary capitalist
machine has nuclear family as its base of application and reduction of all social field to the familial
coordinates in order to displace its own schizophrenising tendencies and thus justify its own limits, then
the question to be asked is as follows: how could one re-think the contemporary understanding of
family based upon the DeleuzoGuattarian notion of Love/Desire? Specifically, what would be of a
family, that becomes re-situated in accordance with legitimate syntheses of unconscious production?
The task would be not to end up with another static and inverse representation, but to propose
strategies and tools for formation of lines of escape that form their own bodies without organs. The
concept of a tool, by definition, carries with it a multiplicity of potentialities of how to use it. Thus, the
strategies and tools to be described in the following section, always risk on being taken as
representations, and that would be a misunderstanding of this particular work, and Deleuze and
Guattari's project in general. As the authors say: “The unconscious poses no problem of meaning,
solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not 'What does it mean?' but rather 'How does it
work?' “216 Therefore, next, is the question not of what the new family according to the
DeleuzoGuattarian concept of desire looks like, but rather, how would it work: what would it include,
how would it distribute desire and how would it define and/or redefine itself – sustaining the capability
of self-critique.

216 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 119.

50
 PART II

In What is Philosophy?, when explaining what a concept is (or, when effectively defining the
concept of a concept), Deleuze and Guattari assert that concepts have 'components', and that every
concept usually has more than one component.217 One of the components of the concept 'family', as it is
understood today in western societies, seems to be 'love'. Thus, family engages in loving/desiring
relationships. Or rather, from the ontological position of dynamic reality: loving/desiring relationships
are a 'becoming-family'. To use a linguistic composite of 'becoming something' instead of 'being' is
Deleuze and Guattari's method of writing when theorizing processes, dynamism and not systems or
representations. The verb “is” usually describes, defines and totalizes: family was this and that,is this
and that and ought to be this and that. In contrast, 'becoming' linguistically acknowledges the
fragmented and mutating nature of both, the signifier and the signified.
In the first part we observed how the signifier 'family' when applied retrospectively to different
social formations, has been referring to very different sets and constellations of signifieds, as well as
the contemporary set of signifieds of the signifier 'family' seemed to refer to different sets of signifiers.
For example, an extended family as in the case of 16 th century English peasants' family has a very
different diagram of signifieds, than the royal family of the same period and than the nuclear family of
XX century, England. Similarly, the defining component of 'love' in contemporary family, was not a
part of the earlier history of the concept of family218.
However, every concept seems to portray a certain minimum level of consistency (e.g. 'family' does
not become a 'computer'): “The concept is defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency and
exoconsistency, but it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the same
time as it is created.”219 Endoconsistency seems to refer to a set of inner components of the concept.
We identified love/desire, as being one component of the concept of family that provides for it an
endoconsistency. The exoconsistency seems to refer to the differential relation between the
neighbouring concepts: 'family' supposed to be different from a 'couple' or from 'workmates'. However,
the important point for Deleuze and Guattari is that there is no fundamental reference for the concept to
be found in some fixed object. Philosophy as a creation of concepts first of all acknowledges their
fractal nature due to their referencing to partial-objects. It follows that concepts such as love can be
potentially reactionary or revolutionary indices of the unconscious investments into a social formation.
Like the concept of love, in-itself it is neutral, however, the way it is used always points to either the

217 Deleuze. and Guattari. (1994). Op. Cit. P. 16.

218 The following thesis developed throughout Stephanie Coontz (2005) book .
219 Deleuze. and Guattari. (1994). Op. Cit. P. 22.
51
desire to fix it and capture its meaning (all the exclusive syntheses) becoming the language of state or
'major language';220 or it is used machinically - as desiring machine – always producing and in-line
with the inclusive syntheses of the unconscious – becoming 'the minor language'.221
One of the main purposes of this work is therefore to engage in the 're-creation' of the concept of
family that would remain consistent through its endoconsistent relation with its components, however,
none of them being fixed and functioning in line with the three legitimate syntheses of desire. It
follows, that what will be challenged is the exoconsistency of the relations with other neighbouring
concepts and thus, the symbolic field of the social formation itself. For the exoconsistency is being
retained by an exclusive disjunctions between the concepts that support the formation, and that is why
the conceptual (re)creation is always a challenge of the actual world and thus a creative (academically
innovative) and act par-excellence.

Family becoming subject group

Besides 'love' component in the concept of 'family', there seems to be another crucial component
concept of generic 'group' that supports the concept of 'family'. I would like to argue that 'group' is a
concept that could be compared to the Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of Body Without Organs. The
concept 'group' seem to refer to an ambivalent multiplicity, if it is not supported with some other
qualifying term as for example: 'a group of some things/bodies'. On its own, however, it is a potential
multiplicity, that seems to sustain its consistency only by the signifier itself: 'group'. When it becomes
qualified and 'named', it becomes a group with a subjectivity or a subject group. Similarly, the body
without organs sustains a multiplicity of partial objects and desiring machines that is nothing else than
a multiplicity of infinite potential relations supported on the surface of the body without organs.
However, during the conjunctive synthesis, a form of subjectivity appears as a residue of
disjunctive and connective syntheses on BWO. As we already know from the previous part, there can
be distinguished two regimes of subjectivities, depending on the legitimate or illegitimate nature of
syntheses on the BWO. The legitimate syntheses result in a subject that has: “..no fixed identity,
wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-
machines..being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state.” 222 Whereas,
illegitimate syntheses result in a subjectivity that is segregative and: “..brings about the feeling of
'indeed being one of us,' of being part of a superior race threatened by enemies from outside.” 223 The
subjectivity of a 'group' can be evaluated as well in terms of its inclusivity or exclusivity. In his studies
220 Thoburn, N. Deleuze, Marx and Politics. London: Routledge, 2003. P. 21.
221 Ibid.
222 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 17.
223 Ibid., P. 114.
52
of institutional groups within a context of mental hospital, Guattari distinguishes as well two types of
groups that seem to refer to the two types of syntheses. First of all he suggests that groups are not only
the intentional groups defined by their status, power and interests, but also, and in-line with the ideas in
Anti-Oedipus, a group is defined by its unconscious desire, and therefore it is not intentionally formed:

I think it convenient further to distinguish, in groups, between the 'manifest content' – that
is, what is said and done, the attitudes of the different members, the schisms, the appearance of
leaders, of aspiring leaders, scapegoats and so on – and the 'latent content', which can be
discovered only by interpreting the various escapes of meaning in the order of phenomena. We
may define this latent content as 'group desire': it must be articulated with the group's specific
form of love and death instincts.224

The 'specific form of love and death instincts' that Guattari refers here, seem to coincide with the
moments of attraction and repulsion on the surface of BWO. Thus the group desires its own
perpetuation, as well as it suffers from its own limitation of form and therefore desires its own death.
As we already know, this repulsion on BWO is a primary repression and is ambivalent in its nature,
whereas what really allows to distinguish between two types of groups is a secondary - social
repression. Guattari distinguishes between a subject group and subjected group: “..the subject group has
for its vocation, to manage its own relations to external determination and to its internal law as much as
possible.
While subjected group tends to be manipulated by all sorts of external determinations and to be
dominated by its own internal law (the Superego)”225 External determination here is the social BWO or
the social formation itself. The subject group unfolds in between two determinations: the internal self-
definition and external determinations, ending in becoming that is unstable and a singular. The group's
self-definition or the subjectivity on BWO surface is shifting and unstable due to the active relations
with external determinations. However, external 'laws' aren't fully incorporated into the group, hence
the group being 'active'.
The 'subjected' group, on the other hand, enjoys a passive stability of internal law of Superego,
which is nothing else but an internalization of external determinations and laws. In the institutional
setting, for example, the subjected group is always reinforced from the outside through the specific and
rigidly defined roles (the role of a particular warden, is reinforced by a symbolic general position of a
warden). The defined roles or the social repression, reinforces the becoming-state on personal level in
224 Guattari, F. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. trans. by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Penguin, 1984. P. 15.
225 Guattari, F. The Anti-Oedipus Papers. Edited by Stephane Nadaud. trans. by Kelina Gotman. New York: Semiotexe,
2006. P. 420.
53
the structure and centrality of Ego agency.
The subject group is always singular in time and space. It moves at the intersection between two
conjunctive syntheses: the subjectivity and role in the social formation and its alter-subjectivity –
defined negatively in relation to the former. The latter is only an inverse mirror of the former. Thus the
subject group can be defined by the continuous active re-invention of its subjectivity within the social
formations themselves, using them as tools and thus managing not to internalize them in the form of
Superego. This movement in-between Guattari calls transversality: “Transversality in the group is a
dimension opposite and complementary to the structures that generate pyramidal hierarchization and
sterile ways of transmitting messages.”226
The question to be asked is whether 'subject group' and its characteristic of transversality is
consciously formed or is it beyond the reach of consciousness, where one finds and recognizes oneself
in it only de-facto, as the 'effect' of what just happened. For, Guattari notes that the group fantasy
usually becomes internalized and displaced as individual fantasy and a pleasure of unity:

Experience of institutional therapeutics makes it clear that individual fantasizing never

respects the particular nature of this symbolic plane of group fantasy. On the contrary, it tries to
absorb it, and to overlay it with particular imaginings that are 'naturally' to be found in the
various roles that could be structured by using the signifiers circulated by the collective.227

However, what Guattari also seem to note implicitly is that internalization is never equally achieved
among the members of the group. Similarly, when Deleuze and Guattari talk about packs in Thousand
Plateaus – there is always topologically a centre and always a periphery with an intense dynamics
happening between the two. This is how Deleuze and Guattari describe this position in Thousand
Plateaus by citing Franny's dream:

I am on the edge of the crowd [group], at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to
it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be,
that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the centre of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go
of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these
beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm.
They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the
same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high

226 Guattari. (1984), Op. Cit. P. 22.

227 Ibid., P. 15.
54
 level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous happiness.' 228229

It seems that in order to stay on the edge of the group it would require the same transversal mode
within one's own self-consciousness (subjectivity) and one's unconscious desiring-machines. In other
words, to answer the question it seems that a consciousness has an important role: to sustain one at the
periphery, for otherwise, we would end up in some kind of determinism of the dark forces of the
unconscious. One could say that transversality is the perpendicular line between conscious
formulations and unconscious desire in its highest tensions allowing a singular subjectivity to appear.
Guattari answers himself this question as follows:

It is my hypothesis that there is nothing inevitable about the bureaucratic self-mutilation of

a subject-group, or its unconscious resort to mechanisms that militate against its potential
transversality. They depend, from the first moment, on an acceptance of the risk – which
accompanies the emergence of any phenomena of real meaning – of having to confront
irrationality, death, and the otherness of the other.230

According to Guattari, the acceptance of risk and the confrontation of death is what suspends the
subject-group from regressing to the subjected-group. It is important to note that Guattari here does not
suggest any deterministic causal link between individual fantasies and group fantasies. Otherwise, the
determining group fantasy would imply that the personal fantasy is fully determined, and no internal
deviation within a group would be possible. However, he is well aware (it is accentuated both in Anti-
Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus) that subject groups form always against all odds. Maximum tension
means also the maximum risk. After giving 'subject-group' concept its own name – 'supermolecule ' 231,
Brian Massumi expresses the same importance of tension and risk as follows:

Supermolecularity. Individuation at its most intense. As always, it involves an increase in

'sensitivity' (lucidity), and a multiplication of strategic options. As well as raising the stakes.
The degree of danger increases apace with the degree of freedom. There is no invention without
a commensurate dose of instability.232

Massumi takes up the concept of a 'subject-group' and through the concept of supermolecule elaborates
228 [Trans: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925), p. 11).]
229 Deleuze and Guattari. (1988). Op. Cit. P. 32.
230 Guattari. (1984), Op. Cit. P. 23.
231 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 63.
232 Ibid., P. 85.
55
it. It is at this juncture, that we will be turning to the family becoming 'supermolecule'.

Family becoming supermolecule

Massumi establishes a term supermolecule to describe a process and a becoming of subjectivity

when confronted between two or more determining forces. He uses an example (that has been already
briefly discussed earlier in this work) of water molecules during the process of heating the liquid. The
molecules face two opposing and attracting forces – Massumi names them 'attractor states'. 233 When
molecules get confronted by these two forces, the outcome, Massumi notes, is neither an
undifferentiated chaotic behaviour, nor a stable and inactive state. 234 Rather, the combination causes a
metastability: “When the liquid combined their requirements, it became stable and active – each in a
new sense. Stability no longer meant maximum systemic homogeneity, but order – sustained
patterning, differentiation. Activity no longer meant increased molecular chaos, but an ability to change
patterning by responding systemically to further disturbance.” 235 This state is singular, and if one of the
determining forces is reduced or complemented by other forces, the system falls back into a passive
determination by the dominating attractor.
Massumi notes that in reality there are more than two attractors operating. Also, the attractors that
he presented, are treated as being whole (unitary). Thus, he goes on further to make a distinction
between whole attractors and fractal attractors: “A whole attractor can be visualized as a distinct point
at the end of a line.” 236 In other words, when the observer observes only a unitary force that determines
– be it abstract heat or abstract law he treats it as a unitary attractor and thus, is able to use it for
reductionist causal explanations. However, Massumi observes that naming whole attractors always
escapes far more complex reality.237 The symptom of it always reasserts itself in a form of irrupted
indeterminacy.238
Fractal attractor hence is not a single and representative term, but: “..must be visualized as a mixed
set of points – 'dense points', infinitely dense points.” 239 It means that at every moment there might be
different point attracting in its own differential manner. This of course makes even a supposedly stable
attractors act in a non-deterministic and fractal way on their deeper level. Thus, it is not only in an
experimentally controlled environment that supermolecules form, but they are actually the very fabric
of reality itself: “If life is an infinite fractal, it must have one monstrous fractal attractor.” 240 Massumi
233 Ibid., P. 60.
234 Ibid.
235 Ibid.
236 Ibid., P. 64.
237 Ibid.
238 Ibid.
239 Ibid.
240 Ibid.
56
concludes then that whole attractors are in fact exception and not a rule: “It is so special that it only
exists as the objective illusion of a line of adequate causality that is always in fact deflected into co-
causality by interference.”241
The other property that supermolecule acquires is the one of increased sensitivity. By sensitivity
Massumi means that instead of sensing one dominating force, by moving in-between two forces,
supermolecule increases its perception by the combination of the two different sensations. 242 The
outcome is 'new level of sensitivity'.243
So far, we can summarize supermolecularity as a process of becoming by an exploitation of the
[quasi]deterministic forces, that allow for the formation of metastable, active and undecidable
subjectivity. It is not the defiance of deterministic attractors, but rather contra-posing different attractors
in order to come out in the zone of high tension and indeterminacy which allows for the formations
that are in excess of determining attractors/formations. This causes also the increased level of
sensitivity, and thus a new level of body's potentiality, or what Massumi calls, increase in power and
degree of freedom.244 Note, that it is not a formation of a new identity as a 'global person' or molar
subjectivity since high tensions cause hyper-differentiation, where one cannot be caught in any system
of representation or binary reductions: “The 'heteroclite', rather than being undifferentiated, is
hyperdifferentiated. It is the realm of supermolecular individuality. The operative distinctions made by
its rules of formation are too fine to be caught in the mesh of binary abstraction: they are
'indeterminate' by its measures .245
And finally, if the supposedly whole attractors are only abstracted images of fractal attractors, then
the supermolecular formations aren't only being determined by attractors, but should be capable of
acting back upon its initial attractors. Acknowledging that they are dense points, one can imagine that a
formed supermolecule can act back upon a particular point and thus cause the attractor itself to become
(in)tense and thus supermolecular.
If we would transpose now the concept of supermolecule to the context of Oedipal family, and
entertain supermolecular state with an analogy of supermolecular family, one of the questions to be
asked is what would be the attractors of Oedipal family, and where could be the points where tensions
might be sought for Oedipal family becoming supermolecule.
As Deleuze and Guattari assert in Anti-Oedipus, the Oedipal triangulation establishes three minimum
binaries for the stable Ego to appear.246 These are the earlier mentioned three axes of potential familial

241 Ibid.
242 Ibid., P. 60.
243 Ibid.
244 Ibid., P. 70.
245 Ibid., P. 91.
246 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 84.
57
neuroses: gender (man/woman), generation (child, parent) and vitality (dead or alive). If the 'successful'
Oedipus complex resolution has to guarantee an entropic stability within a fixed position in each of
these binaries, then the opposite – the tension caused between each of the two might produce two
following reactions. It can either produce a neurotic reaction, and a will to achieve a stability - stable
and inactive equilibrium247, or it can initiate hyperdifferentiation process and complicate each binary,
producing new forms and configurations of family that becomes in excess of the Oedipal matrix.
Supermolecular family thus becomes fractal. The particular symbolic mandates aren't disregarded, but
rather, they are brought into the varieties of tensions, both with the symbolic mandates that are
available throughout the socius, as well as inner hyperdifferentiation of the initial mandate one is
carrying: “..supermolecularity involves a capacity to superpose states that are 'normally' mutually
exclusive.”248
The supermolecular family, therefore, seems to engage in the same tensions as a neurotic, however,
instead of perceiving the tension as a lack of balance and instability, it perceives it as an opportunistic
event in a Deleuzian sense where one becomes something else, meanwhile increasing its potential and
power to affect and be affected. Thus, supermolecular family complicates the categories of gender,
generation and vitality and by traversing them, forms not only hybrid states, but rather, as Massumi
says: “..[obeying] the terms laid down for it by its attractors and at the same time [transcending] them.
It [supermolecule] redefines the terms of its existence (within certain limits), effecting a synthesis that
places it in irreducible excess of the causal principle governing its own genesis.” 249 If Massumi states
that: “Normality is a degree zero of monstrosity” 250, then supermolecular family becomes a monster
family as well.
The monstrosity, however, is perceived always from the perspective of molarity or normality.
Greeks, Negri observes, developed a metaphysical concept of “Eugenia” meaning 'well-born',
'beautiful', 'good'251 in order to justify its own political-economy of slavery: “...'eugenic' form of the
universal that does not include but excludes, that does not produce equality but rather intrinsically
legitimates slavery.”252 Monstrosity is never a structural opposition with its 'us', and 'them' and where
all the rest of binary coordinates are clear. The peculiar quality of the monster is that it exhibits at the
same time what should belong to the different categories or exclusive binary disjunctions. That is why
the figure of monster has also to have a degree of similarity to the 'good ones', 'the normal' ones. At
bottom, what is really monstrous about the monster from the perspective of molarity, is the difference
247 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 60.
248 Ibid., P. 87.
249 Ibid., P. 61.
250 Ibid., P. 93.
251Casarino and Negri (2008). Op. Cit. P. 193.

252 Ibid.
58
he exhibits, that cannot be represented as a variation of normality. It is an un-assimilated difference that
is truly 'scary' and haunts the imagination of the eugenic types. The madman, the zombie and the
transvestite setting sails through the popular imagination.. What is really at stake is not a
physical/spiritual threat - that gets usually declared and becomes the reason of all kinds of appertheids,
burnings at stake and mass executions - but a threat of the imaginary identity with its corollary
definitions of 'normal' and consequential legitimized deviations of different, but tolerant other. That is
why supermolecular family unable of being represented by molar structures, exhibiting simultaneously
both, the aspects of similarity, as well as the difference that escapes representation, always induces the
uncanny feeling of it being a monster family – the usual line being: 'something is not right with them.'
The only way to neutralize the monster is to name it, and thus include it as 'different, but one of us' or
excluded, however, structurally, nevertheless, included as: 'the enemy', 'the sinner', “'he criminal', 'the
pervert'.
What perpetually escapes in being included and thus represented by molar structures is the always
becoming different or other. That is why supermolecular family with its unstable balance is a
becoming-other.253 That is why monster family refuses of being assimilated simply by being in excess
of what is defined as meaningful and rational. This non assimilative 'other' can only be described as a
process, thus a perpetual becoming-other. For developing a concept of becoming-family one has to ask
how one becomes-other in the first place. Even though, ontologically there is just a becoming,
nevertheless, one can distinguish between movements towards becoming-the-same or repetition of the
same, and becoming-other, or repetition of difference. Thus, whereas becoming is inevitable, there is no
guarantee of becoming-other when becoming-the-same seems to dominate from the perspective of the
observer. Therefore, even though the unconscious process of desiring-production produces repetitions
that appear to be the same, making oneself into the BWO and actively introducing difference seem to
be of the order of consciousness. This is why the conditions of becoming-other can be actively sought
for. What follows is five strategic points that Massumi suggest of conditions that would induce the
process of becoming-other, becoming-family.

Five strategic points for becoming

Massumi in his book outlines 5 strategic guidelines for becoming-other. He warns, however that
these are not 'theories about becoming', and thus should be evaluated and 'verified by the collectivity
concerned'.254 The strategic suggestion by Massumi are as follows:
1.Stop the world.
253 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 95.
254 Ibid., P. 103.
59
2.Cherish derelict spaces.
3.Study camouflage.
4.Sidle and straddle.
5.Come out.
I will be following these five strategic points presented by Massumi in order to map the trajectories for
becoming-family, becoming-subject-group, becoming-supermolecule, becoming-other.

1. Stop the world

Paradoxically as it may sound but becoming begins through an act of stoppage: “At least some of
the automatic circuits between regularized stimuli and habitual responses must be disconnected, as if a
crowbar had been inserted into the interlocking network of standardized actions and trajectories
constituting the World As We Know It.” 255 The beginning of becoming does not mean that prior there
was no becoming. In, fact the ontological position by Deleuze and Guattari as well as by Massumi is
that there is only a becoming, and never being as such.
However, as Torkild Thanem and Stephen Linstead observe, the organisation as such can move
towards a formation of organism or towards a perpetual reinvention of itself in line with desiring
production: “The idea of organisation which Deleuze and Guattari are so often seen to oppose derives
from their view of organisation and the organism which fixes the role and function of organs, locking
them into one particular role and disallowing multiple functions and multiple combinations of organs
into different desiring machines.256
Thus, the stoppage that Massumi proposes is the stoppage of the body becoming an organism. It is
the moment of repulsion on the body without organs. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari, mention
this moment of stoppage, as well when describing how the BWO gets assembled: “The automata stop
dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is
the unproductive, the sterile, the unengenderd, the unconsumable.”257
Thus, in order to disconnect some of the 'automatic circuits' that Massumi talks about there has to
be some suspension of the principle of reality. Stopping, however, should not be confused with literally
stopping doing anything. In fact, stopping is just a conceptual point, which is used for a convenience of
describing. It does not exist as such. One perceives de-facto that the regularized circuits were disturbed,
and thus one assumes certain stoppage and redirection 'point'. Hence, stopping means at the same time
disrupting which is not stopping literary, but in fact might involve all kinds of speeds of the bodies to
produce the disruption.
255 Ibid.
256 Thanem, T and Linstead, S. The trembling organisation: order, change and the philosophy of virtual. Deleuze and the
Social. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. P. 45.
257 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 9.
60
 This disruption is also similar to the Deleuzian concept of 'event'. Thanem and Linstead define it as
follows: “..event is different from what already exists, and as it sticks out from the mundane and the
regular, it marks a rupture or discontinuity in history.” 258 But since the event is also the return to the
virtual, it doesn't have one purpose or goal, but itself being a pure differential, survives only through
the process of differentiation: “But by opening up to the future, the event takes its differential nature
beyond the moment of its own realization, promising further differentiation.”259
The two authors also remark that the virtual is not in the opposition to the actual, as if 'less real', but
is actually more real than the actual.260 If actuality – the state of affairs – exhibits a network of molar or
rigid formations with exclusive disjunctions being made, than the virtual is what contains all the
multiplicity of possible becomings that were/are not actualised in a time/space. However, Thanem and
Linstead insist that the actual is not an image of virtual from which it has arisen, and that becoming
actual or 'actualisation' is itself the process of 'genuine creation'.261
It seems thus, that both phases of repulsion on the BWO, which is the return to virtual (full BWO),
as well as an attraction on BWO or the actualisation of the virtual are the processes of creation by
differentiation. Therefore virtual and actual aren't opposite spheres or universes, but the actual
embodies the virtual and the virtual come into an existence through actual: “The virtual and the actual
are coresonating systems. As the actual contracts a set of virtual states into itself at a threshold state, the
virtual dilates. When the actual passes a threshold, bifurcates toward a specific choice, and renounces
the other potential states, the virtual contracts them back and the actual dilates. 262 This movement is
immanent in nature, meaning, it does not have an outside which would be transcendent. Topologically
it can be illustrated as the surface of Klein's bottle 263 or Möbius strip264, where virtual and actual are on
the same surface or plane of immanence.
Becoming-family thus is an event in-itself. It is through event that group-becomes-family and it is
only within the differentiation process of the event that it endures. A fruitful illustration of the concept
of an event could be the art of improvisation. If one has had a chance of seeing or studying the art of
improvisational comedy, one knows that the most valued, as well as the most fun producing skill is the
ability to produce difference, given the very restricted initial starting situation. For example, when one
trains for improv.265, one of the exercises for improvisational skills is the following. A group of
participants are provided with one clue to start – imaginary plot, particular situation or a particular
258 Thanem and Linstead. (2006) Op. Cit. P. 51
259 Ibid.
260 Ibid., P. 52
261 Ibid., P. 53.
262 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 65.
263 See illustration 2, appendix.
264 See illustration 3, appendix.
265 Abbreviation for improvisational comedy
61
character. Then the improvisation game begins. Whereas it may usually start a bit chaotic at the
beginning if there are more than two people, soon one notices, that the plot, the situation and the
narrative becomes clearer and understandable. It takes shape and moves in a certain direction. The
hard, but also the most creative part is when in the midst of the narrative there is an unexpected change
introduced (eg.. characters stay the same, plot changes, or everything stays, but emotions are asked to
be modified, etc..) This introduction of a little 'body without organs' forces the actors (the desiring
machines) to reconnect differently. This process continuous differentiation within one established
situation, as well a continuous introduction of 'chance' or unexpected change is unsurprisingly what
provides thrills to the audiences, as well as – if one has participated himself/herself in these workshops
– to the participants themselves. This is the desiring-production at its purest. It is also in some sense an
experience of an event, albeit in a close and semi-regulated environment.
When Massumi speaks of stopping habitual circuits of responses, he refers to something like a little
improvisation with the perceived reality itself. The lesson to be taken out of improvisational classes is
that any introduced disturbance into the repetitive mechanisms starts virally to attract more members
and more desiring-machines. What one ends up is a viral machine or a viral family that operates by
disrupting the normal mechanisms (beings-towards-death). Becoming family, one might say is
becoming an improvisational comedy group in a theatre of the worldly stage.
However, it is not merely about the capability of disruption. It is also about the capability of
'survival' within the existing formations (Massumi, 104). Paradoxically, Massumi notes, it can be done
by continually improving the formations themselves. How is it than that it is not a contradictory move
to the former of disruption?
Slavoj Žižek observes, that what sustains an ideology today is not a conscious identification with it,
but rather, a mutual consent to keep a sceptical distance from it. 266 This prevailing ideological distance
is best illustrated by the attitude that: 'I know what I am doing (exploiting others, working in a mind
adumbrating job..), but I still do it'. This supreme cynicism is what according to Žižek, sustains the
ideology of Capitalism: “Totalitarian [global capital] ideology no longer has this pretension [of being
taken seriously]. It is no longer meant, even by its authors, to be taken seriously – its status is just that
of a means of manipulation, purely external and instrumental; its rules is secured not by its truth-value
but by simple extra-ideological violence and promise of gain.” 267 In other words, you are allowed to
think and have your opinion as much and as radical as you want, as long as you clock in and clock out
each day, and cause no public disorder.
Thus, the improving of the formation that Massumi refers to, seems to suggest a move towards

266 Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso. P. 25.
267 Ibid., P. 27.
62
actions of closing the sceptical gap and insisting on the premises of the formation itself. What Žižek
would say: in the democratic country demanding democracy at its face value. What for Žižek and other
thinkers close to him like Alain Badiou 268, this strategy of closing the gap is the primary politico-
philosophical agenda and thus identification with 'lost causes' – a becoming militant, for Deleuze,
Guattari and Massumi in particular, it is part of a strategy, that has always to work hand in hand and in
tension with the creative disruptions. As Massumi says: „These are two sides of the same coin, and they
should be practised in such a way as to reinforce rather than mutually exclude one another.” 269 (104)
The essential difference between Massumi and Žižek here is the one between the direction and
object of desire. Whereas, for Žižek, the disruptions should serve the purpose of working towards the
identified object, and thus seem to suggest nothing other than the same desire which lacks and pursues
its object of lack; for Massumi identification is always inclusive, and the object of desire is only an
effect, and real desiring production occurs on pre-subjective levels. Thus Žižekian subject always
pursues a utopian object. He/she lacks it and identifies through it. For Deleuzian subjectivity it is the
intensity of pursuit which is primary and where object and objectives are effects, and intensities on the
BWO, however, none being exclusive destinations.

2. Cherish derelict spaces

Consciously or unconsciously, but the habitual circuits, no matter how rigid they might appear,
seem to always diverge, deviate, break and reconnect again. However, the time-space between the
break and reconnection creates a zone of indeterminacy, which is abandoned for a while by molar
structures.270 Whereas from a perspective of a state (molar structure), a change in habitual normativity
can be perceived as monstrosity, and thus mechanisms of normalization are employed to rectify it; the
state itself, by becoming-state produces negative surpluses or simply its own 'shit' material which it
abandons and does not re-employ for utilitarian or other purposes (at least for a while): „The site of a
breach in the World As We Know It is dysfunctional for molar purposes, and is therefore perceived by
good/common sense as a simple negative: a lack of functioning, a wasteland.“ 271 This topological as
well as topographical 'wasteland' is the space where becoming-family obtains highest degrees of
potentiality and virtuality. In some sense derelict spaces possess the quality of intensifying the
becoming-family.
Massumi notes that these can be not only geographically delimited spaces, but also spaces of
thought, spaces of belief, spaces of politics.272 Space, thus is a topological term for an event. A French
268 For Badiou's view, see: Badiou, A. Infinite Thought. trans. by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum,
2005.
269 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 104.
270 Ibid.
271 Ibid.
272 Ibid., P. 105.
63
scholar Michel De Certeau distinguishes between place and space. For him place is any physical
location. However, what makes it a space is a singular co-creation of different forces that produce an
event. This is how De Certeau distinguishes a place and a space:
A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed
in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same
location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into
consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a
location that defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an
indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction,
velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It
is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the
effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporize it, and make it function
in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.273

De Certeau is also correct to note that place belongs to the quantifiable territory and thus state,
whereas space relies on time dimension, thus the temporality of an event, thus – 'the temporary
autonomous zone'274 – a term coined by Hakim Bey275.

T.A.Z. (also, 3. Study camouflage)

Becoming family is a becoming in the temporary autonomous zone (T.A.Z.). Bey does not define
T.A.Z. directly, since according to him that would necessarily end up in becoming a political dogma
(2). Nevertheless, similarly to what is being done with the concept of family here, Bey explains that he
'circles around the subject' (2), refusing to define it. Like Massumi, Bey believes that T.A.Z. can only
emerge within the 'cracks'276 of molar state order: “Babylon277 takes its abstractions for realities;
precisely within this margin of error the T.A.Z. can come into existence.” 278 Also, what Massumi
recognizes as the tactics of camouflage279, Bey suggests that one of the greatest strength of T.A.Z. is its
invisibility.280 Bey asserts that: “As soon as the T.A.Z. is named (represented, mediated), it must
vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once

273 De Cereteau, M. The practice of everyday life. trans. by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
P. 117.
274 Henceforth, abbreviated as T.A.Z.
275 Bey, H. T.A.Z.The temporary autonomous zone. Washington: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2011.
276 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 104.
277 Bey's Babylon seems to be analogous what State is in Deleuze's and Guattari's sense in Thousand Plateaus. See
“Apparatus of capture'
278 Bey. (2011). Op. Cit. P. 3.
279 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 105.
280 Bey. (2011). Op. Cit. P. 3.
64
again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle.” 281 It seems that T.A.Z. for Bey always
deliberately suspends its own definition. The conjunctive synthesis: “so that what it was” or “so it's
me”, does never reach a stable definition, since according to Bey that would mean getting to be
represented and thus recuperated back to the molar order. Massumi cautions that this non- or pre-
representational subjectivity: “..is a delicate operation, fraught with the danger that a group gaining
representation in such apparatuses of capture as government or media will be trapped into operating
entirely on their terms. It is all too easy to become what you are, and thus unwittingly condemn your
supermolecule to a molar death ('recuperation').”282 Therefore Bey also advises to stay away from 'area
of simulation'283 or any representational apparatuses.
T.A.Z. for Bey does not necessarily spring up spontaneously. Whereas one can recognize de facto
that one participated in one ('so that's what it was'), Bey suggests that the conditions for temporary
autonomous zones can be actively scouted for. If the method of cartography with its abstracted surface
representation belongs to State, the method of psychotopology is for Bey an alternative 'science'
mapping potential autonomous zones(4). Similarly, what Massumi wants to point out through
'cherishing of derelict spaces', Bey asserts that:

We are looking for 'spaces' (geographic, social, cultural, imaginary) with potential to flower
as autonomous zones – and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open,
either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by
the mapmaker, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential
T.A.Z..284

Here Bey seems to be borrowing from the tradition of situtationists that in 1960s France were
developing a concept of psychogeography and practices such as 'derive' 285286. Whereas the neglected
areas might be easier to identify, what Bey does not develop here is the question of how spaces escape
notice, other than through neglection? Massumi suggests that, given that there is a becoming of other
[T.A.Z.] as well as becoming of State, one needs only the change in velocity between the two that
becoming-other [T.A.Z.] would escape of being perceived by the state:
281 Ibid.
282 Ibid., P. 5.
283 Ibid., P. 3.
284 Ibid.
285 In Issue 1 of Situationists International, defined by Guy Debord as: “A mode of experimental behavior linked to the
conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. The term also designates a specific
uninterrupted period of deriving.” (“Definitions”. Situationist International Online. Trans. By Ken Knabb. June 1958.
Accessed: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html. Accessed at: 21 05 2013.
286 Please refer to the writings of Guy Debord and an anthology of Situationists International journal: Internationale
Situationiste. Issues 1-12. Accessed: http://libcom.org/library/internationale-situationiste. Accessed at: 21 05 2013
65
 Becoming concerns speed, but speed is relative. The velocity of becoming must only be
different from the reflex speed of the existing apparatuses of molar capture. Bodies-in-becoming
have no future if the perceptual capabilities of molarizing forces are enough in synch with them
to grasp them for what they are not (yet). Sometimes extreme slowness passes more easily
unnoticed.287

However, neither Bey nor Massumi spend much time in their writing for developing something
what could be the art of speed. The subject matter of the political importance of speed, however, is
taken up by Paul Virillio, which is credited by Deleuze and Guattari in Thousand Plateaus when
discussing nomadology. However, Virilio himself is interested in the State's employment of speed
tactics for imperial ends288. Nevertheless, what Massumi hinges on and what could complement Bey's
development of T.A.Z. is the tactical possibilities for changing speeds. One has to think about the art of
speed as finding the indeterminate thresholds where one becomes neither too fast nor too slow, but at
the threshold of velocity in order endure of being unnoticed.

The subjectivity of T.A.Z. or band-family

Hakim Bey suggests that the subject group of T.A.Z. is not modelled according to the nuclear
family, but according to an anthropological notion of band: “The nuclear family, with its attendant
'Oedipal miseries', appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the 'agricultural revolution'
with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Palaeolithic model is at one more primal and
more radical: the band.”289 The band for Bey is not a romantic notion excavated from the past. What is
different, however, between the band and the nuclear family is that the band is politically active unit, or
in Guattari's term, a 'subject group'. It is not a romantic notion since by the fact of being active, one of
its continuous aspects becomes the on going problematization and self-critique. What for Bey is a band
and for Guattari is a 'subject group', Paolo Virno develops similar concept of “the multitude” 290. Virno
is clear about the non-romantic understanding of the multitude when he insists that:

This [the multitude] is a plurality that at times is aggressive, and at times united, but never
reducible to the concept of the 'populous, a populous that, according to Hobbes, 'is somewhat
that is one, having one will' (Hobbes, Citizen: 135). Sometimes aggressive, sometimes united,
287 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 104.
288 For more on tactics of speed see Virilio, P. Speed and Politics. trans. by Marc Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotexte,
2006.
289 Bey. (2011). Op. Cit. P. 4.
290 Virno. P. Multitude. Between innovation and negation. Trans. by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson.
Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2008.
66
 prone to intelligent cooperation, but also to the war between factions, being both the poison
and the antidote: such is the multitude.291

Although Virno might be developing the concept of multitude as an alternative political

understanding of the whole socius, and he might appear to have a pretension for a political alternative
en masse, Bey is restricting himself to limited size groups, however, structurally remaining open: “The
band is open – not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of
love.”292 This ambivalent definition by Bey, can lead to an interpretation that Bey gets trapped into
what he tries to escape – another closed system.
However, it seems that the paradoxical requirement for the group being: love which understood in
a broad sense as a desiring-production seems to keep the group from being defined and restricted to
particular objectives, aims or persons, and keeps it as a group as long as it sustains itself as a desiring
machine or a 'subject group'. This implies that a physical band sustains itself as a band only for as long
as it 'loves'. In other words, for as long as it, as an assemblage, as the desiring machine unit,
participates in desiring-production. The moment when love for a partial object/objective is overtaken
by a narcissistic love for a band itself – this is a moment when band, although physically still intact,
becomes a 'subjected group'.
What Bey seems not to mention, and what Guattari insists upon, is that a group has to be able to
confront its own death.293 It seems that it should achieve it either through a dispersal or through a
mutation into something else, some other group. To give an example from empirical problematics of
contemporary nuclear family, it does not necessarily mean that what Guattari and others are arguing
here is a divorce when things do not work out 'as imagined'.
In fact, it seems that a divorce today has become a part of habitual circuits, and has no effect
whatsoever if the same Oedipal structure is continued to be pursued. In other words, the group might
initiate its physical death (dispersal) or it can initiate the death of a symbolic assemblage that it was,
however, retaining the physical bodies while becoming something else. In terms of dominating cultural
practices of the West, the first option seems to prevail, whereas the symbolic assemblage or Oedipal
triangle seems rarely to be questioned by the most – as soon as one 'union' is over, another search for an
exclusive couple is initiated – the true rein of 'the coupledom' 294 (Kipnis). The second option of
disassembling the familial symbolic assemblage while retaining physical persons seem to offer creative
opportunities of creating assemblages that interconnect and traverse private familial borders, and thus

291 Virno. (2008). Op. Cit. P. 40.

292 Bey. (2011). Op. Cit. P. 5.
293 Guattari. (1984), Op. Cit. P. 23.
294 Kipnis .(2001). Op. Cit. P. 1.
67
create desiring groups where the initial triangle becomes traversed and symbolic mandates circulate
through the network of connections.
Hakim Bey observes that the very mode of production of post-industrial capitalism seems to initiate
the decomposition of nuclear family form to meet its demands for more flexible, precarious and
shifting work requirements:

Breakdowns in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered 'stability' of the unit-home
and unit-family. One's 'band' nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and lovers, people met at
different jobs and POW-wows, affinity groups, special interest networks, mail networks, etc. The
nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret
implosion of split atoms – and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the
almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of
the band.295

Obviously, side by side with this emancipatory aspect of Capital's force of decoding, what Angela
Mitropoulos observes, there are strong tendencies towards a recoding and displacing limits of the
Capital. Although, as she observes, already in 1989 the statistics of the Bureau of National Affairs has
declared that: “..only 'about 4 percent of American families fit the stereotypical image of a father who
works outside the home and a mother who stays at home and takes care of children.” 296 Mitropoulos
insists that there is a resurgence of the promotion of familial 'values', through the state mechanisms like
social policies. Citing Lisa Duggan, Mitropoulos says: “In the broadest sense, 'marriage promotion' in
welfare policy aims to privatize social services by shifting the costs of support for the ill, young,
elderly and dependent away from the social safety net and onto private household.”297
Although this tendency might be specifically US related, however, it serves the purpose to illustrate
how Capital manages its cost reduction, bringing 'family values' through the back-door and employing
state apparatuses, this time in repressive and disciplining manner by targeting the most disadvantaged
groups.
However, even the other trend, that is the popular tendency to move away from the fordist family
form, and nuclear family in general, Mitropoulos observes, gets re-incorporated well within the Capital
calculus. One of the main observational points made by Mitropoulos in her book is that the last familial
'obligations', expressed well by the ethos of the image of fordist family, get displaced and made into
profitable services in the forms of affective labor (eg. paid nannies become moms and husband is
295 Bey. (2011). Op. Cit. P. 5.
296 Mitropoulos, A. (2012), Op. Cit. P. 193.
297 Ibid., P. 199.

68
served his dinner by a smiling and affectionate waitress.) 298 The change where the affectual labor starts
to really substitute the familial obligations is not in the physical service, but at the level of affects –
when capital pays for physical service and insists for a surplus 'gift' of 'love' that seems to become one
of the major commodities in the post-industrial society. In other words what Mitropoulos seems to
imply is that the 'gift' of love that fails within nuclear family, becomes a profitable commodity and a
surplus value of labor.
Kristin Swenson suggests that 'affective state apparatus' - the mechanisms of extracting surplus
value from the affects themselves – functions not as an external injunction to affectively comply, but
rather by controlling and managing the very build-up of 'personality': “The affective state apparatus
constitutes affect in a form that meets the contemporary demands of the labor force in contemporary
capitalism by constituting what was once considered a personality trait into an affective disorder in
order to treat the disorder and to alter the personality to be more 'prosocial', adaptable, and
communicative.”299 What Swenson suggests here is that affect in post-industrial capitalism is not left
out to be passively 'regulated' by market forces but becomes a locus of Foucauldian new type of
governmentality300 and is actively tackled through methods like bio-chemical interventions of brains by
to alter mood states, personality traits, that would produce a 'pro-social', 'normal' subjectivity. 301
Swenson concludes that : “..'personality', becomes a central location for value production.”302
Hence, whereas Bey shows the possibilities of subject group formations arising out of the decoding
consequences of Capital, Mitropoulos presents the other side of the coin: showing how the very same
dissolving effects of nuclear family can be turned into a profitable industries. Following Swenson, the
new affective labor force is constituted and controlled on the level of subjectivity itself. The decoded
ideological systems are being supplanted by direct biochemical interventions, to produce a familially
oriented subjectivity towards. In other words, where ideological mechanisms fail, pills become the new
promising and profitable solution.
However, it should not be understood that this is the end of Oedipal family. For Deleuze and
Guattari, following Lacan, Oedipus as a structure does not require a literal father, mother and 'me' in
the house. The same symbolic Oedipal coordinates can be successfully propagated through other social
mechanisms: daddy-the boss, mother – the nation and I, the law abiding citizen.
Probably the most interesting remark made by Mitropoulos, and in our context that could be
addressed to those who set as an objective and the 'frontier' simply the dissolution of the empirical

298 Ibid., P. 173-177.

299 Swenson, A. Kirstin. Affective labor and governmental policy: George W. Bush's new freedom commission on mental
health. Baltic Journal of Law & Politics 4:2. London: Versita, 2011. P. 11.
300 Ibid., P. 3.
301 Ibid., P. 7.
302 Ibid., P. 3.
69
nuclear family, sounds as follows:

Thus, the utopian version of the frontier does not imply escape so much as escape whose
sense is exhausted by and as individuation – and individuation in some very precise terms: as
self-possession, sovereignty, the ability to enter into contractual relations, to see oneself (one's
body, one's labour, one's relations with others) as a question of property ownership and
propriety.303

Similarly, Pierrre Klossowski, already in 1970s' correctly observed that: “..with all the means and
resources that constitute it, industry signifies an already complete break with the spirit of such [family
unity] laws, a long-ago completed upheaval of the customs and habits that the institutions still pretend
to preserve.”304 What, however, remains intact is the insistence of an image of stable subjectivity that
possesses and manages itself305 and is able to enter into a contractual relations. That is why for
Mitropoulos: “The contract is capitalism's most cherished axiom.”306
Hakim Bey's paradoxical 'contract' in the form of swearing to a bond of love 307 seem to have an
essential clause that seem to imply that once the bond of love is broken, the group as a subject group
ceases to exist. The paradox is that love and desire are meant to experience 'death' through a re-turn to
the BWO, and thus the bond is always meant to be broken again and again just to be reborn in other
forms. Thus, what one witnesses today in the nuclear family arrangements and their necessary
affiliations to the State is that love becomes doubly restrained: first, in the form of an exclusive couple,
and secondly in the form of juridical or/and theological contract that involves the big Other, the despot,
the 'daddy' to reinforce it.
However, the bottom line of capital's inner limits, is probably not the empirical nuclear family, but
as Mitropoulos suggest, the Ego itself. Thus, in expanding the notion of T.A.Z., one could assert that
temporary autonomous zones are junctions at which subject becomes-other. Deleuze and Guattari
speak of zones of intensities on the Body Without Organs; Bey speaks of temporary autonomous zones.
Through both of these the subjectivity seems to pass, continuously transforming into something else
and experiencing the intensities alongside the desiring machines.
By referring to Hakim Bey and the notion of T.A.Z., we have introduced one more complementary
concept as a tool for thinking of becoming-family. Although it is not the intention of this paper to
303 Mitropoulos, A. (2012), Op. Cit. P. 172.
304 Klossowski, P. Living Currency. Published in French under the title: La Monnaie vivante, Joelle Losfield: Paris, 1970.
Tr.: J.Levinson. Accessed at: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/93005854/Living-Currency>, 1970. accessed: 14 12 2012. P.
5.
305 Mitropoulos, A. (2012), Op. Cit. P. 172
306 Ibid., P. 19.
307 Bey. (2011). Op. Cit. P. 5.
70
address a comprehensive critique of contemporary family and its relation to Capital, it was necessary
however, to expose the relation, via Mitropoulos, of the notion of self-possessive subjectivity and the
principle of contract as intrinsically related in capitalistic production. Hence, becoming-family has to
be rethought not as a group(s) of contractually based relations, but based on desiring-production.
This brings us back to the question of how becoming-family works and to the strategies suggested
by Massumi:

4. Sidle and straddle

To sidle and straddle for Massumi is an action, that escapes the determinacy of structure while
remaining within its coordinates. The becoming-family disturbs the determining binaries, not by getting
rid of them altogether, but by navigating in-between. In political register, both gradual reformism and
radicalism are structurally representable poles. The former operates by assimilation of differential
elements to the structural positions and the latter defines itself as an inverse 'mirror' of the actual
structure.308 Both poles, according to Massumi lead to a molarization and capture of difference;
becoming - into the systems of representation. To sidle and straddle is the movement and action in-
between the two determinations of reformism and radicalism: “..one must move sideways, through
cracks in accepted spatial and temporal divisions.”309 Similar to the Massumi's example of
supermolecular formations of heated water molecules, the sideways movement does not imply a third
way or a synthesis of the two, but rather the unstable balance, when the two determinations are brought
into the 'communication'; assembled - as Deleuze and Guattari would call - in a 'war machine'.
Both poles of the binary: reformist-radical, provide a comfortable support and stable balance for
subjectivity. The former through the ability to identify with those of 'the same kind' and the latter
through the supposedly rebellious identities that are the opposite or inverse roles of the 'normal' types,
however, by their negative identification they are both dependent on normal types as well as recorded
and represented within the overall structure. The former and the latter reinforce each other and end up
in propagation of normalcy – the maximum stability and lack of active creativity.
The 'dynamic in-between' escapes capture and representation while at the same time maximally
employing and using the molar mechanisms, as in this case of 'reform-confrontation': “In establishing
actual-virtual circuits, an effectively revolutionary movement establishes many other circuits: reform-
confrontation, molarity-minority, being-becoming, camouflage-showing oneself, rationality-
imagination, and many permutations of these.”310 Thus to sidle and straddle, when becoming-family
would not mean the improvement and sustainment of Oedipal triangle nor the creation of radical

308 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 106.

309 Ibid.
310 Ibid.
71
artificial families or/and 'little churches'.311 Becoming-family would involve the tangent between the
two – the unstable balance between two determining poles.

5. Come out
For Massumi, as for Deleuze and Guattari there is no state of non-subjectivity. Every becoming is a
becoming of something into something else. The unstable balance ends up in subjectivities that
Massumi proposes should dare to expose themselves, and still 'survive'. 312 For Massumi these unstable,
intense subjectivities provide 'greater transformational potential' compared to molar subjectivities that
are structurally defined and in pursuit to match the definition. 313 Although Massumi does not elaborate
on this, it seems that the coming out is both necessary for the self-recognition, albeit it happens only
afterwords and as a residuum to the desiring machines, and without which one would risk of simply
being attracted to one of the determining poles by the mechanics of repetition of the same. Also,
coming out is the only way of connecting with other desiring machines, forming fractal deviations and
subject groups that surpass individual body.
Both, not coming out and coming out are risky and dangerous. Coming out is always a
confrontation and suspect for molar capture. Not coming out risks of becoming slowly assimilated.
Hence Massumi is correct in pointing out that: “Coming out is never complete. What is important is the
process..”314 The conjunctive synthesis or recognition: 'So its me' or 'So this is what family is' should
not be perceived as a goal arrived that one has keep hold of it, but rather, like a note, or a pitch in the
musical composition which is both, necessary and fleeting; singularity, yet which is not objectified and
totalized.
These outlined strategies are geared towards the group, and not an individual body. 315 For Deleuze
as well as Guattari: “..the individual is also a group.”316 Massumi asserts that: “The becomings of
typically individualist Standard Man..are almost always destined to fail, because they do not draw on
the power of actual population. 317 Guattari constantly insists that there is no individual fantasy that
structures reality, but always group fantasy, group desire. Therefore, Massumi is right to say that even
though these strategies can be used by one man – for there is already a group in one that can be
potentialized – the potential is higher when the group of people is involved. The issue here is not that
the belonging to the group has some intrinsic value. Rather, it is a pragmatic tactic that can allow easier
to challenge the agency of superego, that is already the agency that de-facto governs a bigger subjected
311 Deleuze, G. Desert Islands. And other texts, 1953-1974. Edited by David Lapoujade. trans. by Michael Taormina. Los
Angeles: Semiotexte, 2002. P. 265.
312 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 106.
313 Ibid.
314 Ibid.
315 Ibid., P. 103.
316 Deleuze. (2002). Opt. Cit. P. 193.
317 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 103.
72
group that one always finds oneself in. A person that on its own defies the interdictions of superego can
become easier spotted, recorded and represented: the madman, the eccentric, the schizophrenic, the
artist, etc.. What might have started as an escape route, if it hadn't resonated with anyone else, there is a
danger of very easily and quickly becoming a victim of one's own image that becomes a protective
shell, rather than a subjectivity with the increased potential and sensitivity.
The resonance of singularity in becoming-other is a condition for attracting others, and thus
becoming a group, as well as the condition for the singularity itself to remain open to the outside. For if
Deleuze and Guattari are correct in saying that desire is always a relation with an outside, than the only
way for it to remain flowing and not enclosed or trapped is to connect with other bodies. However, it is
important to stress that the argument here is not for a vulgar understanding of socialism, where group is
valued more than the individual. For Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Massumi, there is no individual
to begin with. As Deleuze comments about Guattari: “Guattari's formula, 'we are all groupuscles,'
indeed heralds the search for a new subjectivity, a group subjectivity, which does not allow itself to be
enclosed in a whole bent on reconstituting a self (or even worse, a superego), but which spread itself
out over several groups at once. The groups are divisible, manifold, permeable, and always
optional.”318
This is why, even though there might be a pragmatical sense for fostering inter-personal
connections as Massumi advocates for, the bottom line is that there is no priority of individual over the
group or group over the individual, since, as already has been asserted the individual is a group: a
group connecting to other groups. The question becomes the one not of ethics, but of pragmatics: given
the situation, which groups and what combinations can achieve maximum liberation of flows and open
maximum number of potentialities – which is nothing else but what Massumi refers to as the 'degrees
of freedom'.319 That a subject is not an individual unity, but is always self-dividing and connecting with
an outside, resonates with contemporary ideas in, and according Gleick, a paradigmatic turn in hard
sciences, such as physics, mathematics, biology. Such turn Gleick describes as switch of focus from
stable, observable and calculable phenomena to an unstable and chaotic processes:

Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists
inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the
atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuations of wildlife populations, in the oscillations of
the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side – these
have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities.320
318 Deleuze. (2002). Op. Cit. P. 193.
319 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 85.
320 Gleick, J. Chaos. Making a new science. New York: Penguin Group, 1987. P. 3.
73
 It was in the field of mathematics, that a new concept of fractal was challenging the Euclidian
mathematics and the worldview of fixed dimensions, and whole numbers.
The DeleuzoGuattarian subject, being itself a group, as well as always being within a larger group,
seems to resonate with the idea of fractal. Hence, I would like propose a concept of fractal family that
would be able to account for a fractal nature of subjectivity. Instead of ignoring the complexities, and
opting for a starting position, - albeit the imaginary - of an Ego, in-line with contemporary turn in hard
sciences - such developments as chaos theory or complexity theory, crossing disciplinary boundaries
and finding their application from biology, physics and mathematics to economics and engineering 321 -
I would like to suggest that fractal family cannot be defined and fixed by stable symbolic points,
forming a clear symbolic unit. Even though it might exhibit a reproduction of self-similarity, together
with Massumi I would agree, that similarity is only an effect of fractal which depends on the nature of
the observer to 'freeze' and thus produce a diagram of a fractal. Hence, the essence of fractal family is
not representable by diagram, however, it can be known only through diagrams and perspectives.
This view is structurally analogous to Spinoza's substance which is immanent or self-causing and
which can only be known through its modes and attributes, although substance is always primary:

By equating God and nature, cause and effect, Spinoza introduced the path breaking idea
that 'God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things' (Spinoza 1985, 428; Ethics,
part I, prop. 18). This is a conclusion that means no less than that which is assumed to be the
first cause is in truth an 'immanent' cause, a cause that is itself the effect of its own effects and
does not exist but in its own effects.322

Similar in its epistemological structure to substance, the fractal family can be known through its
attributes: “God – in other words a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses
eternal and infinite essence - necessarily exists.”323 Hence, attributes or diagrams of fractals do express
the essence of fractal family directly, however, they do not represent the essence the way a part could
represent the whole, because substance is not divisible: “No attribute of substance can be truly
conceived from which it would follow that substance can be divided.” 324 Deleuze explains this point in
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza as follows: “Attributes are like points of view on substance; but
in the absolute limit these points of view are no longer external, and substance contains within itself
321 The following definition is being referred from Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems> ; accessed: 15 05 2013.
322 Kordela. (2007). Op. Cit. P. 31.
323 Spinoza. (2000). Op. Cit. P. 82. (Proposition 11.)
324 Ibid., P. 84. (Proposition 12.)
74
the infinity of its points of view upon itself.” 325. Hence diagram seems express an essence of fractal
family, however, not as a part that expresses the whole, but as one particular - however, perfect and
essential in its own way - viewpoint of a fractal.
It follows that when thinking fractal family, it has to be thought along the lines of Spinozian
epistemology of three types of knowledge326. Meaning, that to 'adequately'327 know fractal family it is
not enough to rely on 'imaginary' first knowledge that produces diagrams, nor on a 'rational ' 328
knowledge, that produces the knowledge of fractal nature of the initial diagram, but to achieve an
'intuitive knowledge' 329 – something like a Spinozian love of God - love of fractal. Thus, a scientific
theory of fractals, presented below is only second type of knowledge, that does critique the uncritical
aspect of the representational and imaginary type of knowledge, 330 however, it remains partial without
a third type of understanding, which one way to understand it is as Casarino does suggesting that it is
nothing other than love as a surplus of itself, which also sounds analogous to DeleuzoGuattarian
notion of desiring-production. Casasarino explains this surplus love as follows:

..this love involves surplus at least in two ways. First of all, it involves all the 'perfections'
appertaining to love, in the sense that, as soon as we achieve it, not only do we experience such
perfections as an addition to our mode of being but also we experience them retroactively as
having been there always already in us.. Second, such an experience of love is accompanied by
'the idea of God as an eternal cause' – namely, by the idea of substance as immanent cause of
itself as well as of mode. But, as I have been implying all along, surplus is itself immanent
cause, or, more precisely, immanence as such.”331

Hence the fractal family concept is being presented here on the grounds of Spinozian epistemology,
and has to be thought in terms of the interdependence of all three types of knowledge.

325Deleuze, G. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. trans. by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1990a. P. 22.
326For a brief and concise presentation of of Spinoza's theory of knowledge, see Casarino and Negri In Praise of the
Common. (2008). P. 32.
327Casarino and Negri (2008). Op. Cit. P. 32.

328 Ibid.
329 Ibid.
330 Ibid.
331 Ibid., P. 33.
75
Fractal family (part one)

The term fractal was coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. 332 Fractal was used to describe a
level of dimension that did not fit the neat Euclidean understanding. In Euclidean geometry there are
three dimensions: a dot is 0 dimension, a line is one dimension, a plane has two dimensions and a space
has three dimensions.333 As useful as these abstractions might have been for a past two millennia,
Mandelbrot contended that they were not accounting for intermediate stages between the dimensions.
This led him to assert that there are fractional dimensions and instead of three, when one descends or
ascends in scale, one confronts infinite number of fractal dimensions.
Of course, when an observational perspective is taken and the measurement rod selected, one is
able to observe from a fixed position only one dimension. This perceived unitary image Massumi calls
a diagram: “The diagram is drawable, but only if the fissuring is arbitrarily stopped at a certain level
(produced meaning as evaporative end effect; monism as the redundancy of the inert double;
momentary suspension of becoming).”334 The image or diagram that one ends up with can be used for
various purposes, however, it is always a partial image. Famous Mandelbrot's example of this is the
question he posed: “How long is the coastline of Britain?” 335 His answer was that it is infinitely long.
But also: “In another sense, the answer depends on the length of your ruler.”336
Mandelbrot observed that the more you scale down, the more features you are able to capture and
the process of scaling down or up, in other words of following the fractal dimension seems to be
infinite. Thus any diagram, any representation, or generally, any unit of meaning is always partial, since
one needs only to descend or ascend a fractional dimension to perceive the fractal nature of what
initially appeared as a monistic unity.
Another property of fractal and the process of fractalisation that Mandelbrot observed, is its self-
similarity across the scales.337 The Koch curve illustrates it well.338 The pattern on one scale tended to
be repeated on the next scale. However, whereas in graphic representation of Koch curve, the pattern is
identical across the scale, in real life within each scale there manifests differential factor that modifies
the initial diagram chosen by the observer: “The claim was that the degree of irregularity remains
constant over different scales. Surprisingly often, the claim turns out to be true. Over and over again,

332 Gleick. (1987). Op. Cit. P. 98.

333 Ibid., P. 97.
334 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 22.
335 Gleick. (1987). Op. Cit. P. 94.
336 Ibid., P. 96.
337 Ibid., P. 103.
338 See illustration 4, Appendix.
76
the world displays a regular irregularity.”339
What one ends ups is not the neat picture of Koch's snowflake, but rather a process of mutation,
that has no final image and which is supported by an element of variation by chance: “If chance
variations are thrown in..the endless snowflaking will deviate into a truly random figure in which no
two segments are the same..”340 Thus, what really repeats over the scales - and what was Deleuze's
insight throughout Difference and Repetition - is not a diagram, but the difference-in-itself.
Furthermore, the element of chance is not limited to causing only small changes, but can also cause
mutational changes that happen instantly and effect the whole diagram. That is why Mandelbrot
asserted that fractal process can never be made entirely predictable.
While studying different types of data from economic price variations, to studying the level of Nile
river's height, Mandelbrot came to conclusion that there are two types of variations observable: the
ones that are smooth and predictable, and others that are discontinuous and random. 341 The former he
named the Joseph Effect and the latter – Noah Effect: “The Noah Effect means discontinuity: when a
quantity changes, it can change almost arbitrarily fast <...> The Joseph Effect means persistence. There
came seven years of great plenty throughout the land of Egypt. And there shall arise after them seven
years of famine..Despite an underlying randomness, the longer a place has suffered drought, the
likelier it is to to suffer more..”342
James Gleick summarises the interaction between the two as follows: “The Noah and Joseph
Effects push in different directions, but they add up to this: trends in nature are real, but they can
vanish as quickly as they come.” 343 Thus, although a fractal does move through scales in and produces
an effect of self-similarity, it seems that the self-similarity effect is an outcome of coarse perspective of
an observer, and not the inner quality of the fractal. In other words, what is prioritized in perception is
the perceiving of similarities, for the cost of smoothing out the fractal discrepancies.
Whereas for biological creatures this ability to abstract is both energy saving and a prerequisite for
any orientation in the environment, what gets obscured is a fractal nature of things. Deleuze in
Difference and Repetition, asserts that what gets obscured for the purposes of building representational
systems is the process of difference-in-itself, or the process of a fractal in the fractalising movement.
Like self-similar shapes of fractals, the differences can be accommodated in representational
systems, however, they are always anchored to some primary representational model or diagram. The
very process of fractalisation or the difference in-itself is not representable, Deleuze argues, precisely
because, the diagram can never be completed and always points to deeper levels, ad infinitum: “It is
339 Gleick. (1987). Op. Cit. P. 97.
340 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 23.
341 Gleick. (1987). Op. Cit. P. 92.
342 Ibid., P. 92-94.
343 Ibid., P. 94.
77
notable that extensity does not account for the individuations which occur within it. No doubt the high
and the low, the right and the left, the figure and the ground are individuating factors which trace the
rises and falls, currents and descents in extensity. However, since they take place within an already
developed extensity, their values is only relative. The therefore flow from a 'deeper' instance – depth
itself, which is not an extension but a pure implex.”344 It is one of the most important assertions in
Difference and Repetition, that what is ontologically primary is not a diagram and thus a
representational anchor or the beginning point, but rather the difference-in-itself: “All identities are
only simulated, produced as an optical 'effect' by the more profound game of difference and repetition.
We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to
the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass
through the negative.”345 One could thus speak of a fractal without an image in the process of
fractalising.
However, the fractal in-itself, like the 'difference in itself' cannot be explicated: “The vanishing of
difference is precisely inseparable from an 'effect' of which we are victims. Difference in the form of
intensity remains implicated in itself, while it is cancelled by being explicated in extensity.” 346 And
since one can always scale down or scale up fractally through dimensions, one is always, as Deleuze
says, in the middle of things.
For Massumi: “..a fractal has three levels or dimensions: the monism of its optical effect, the
dualism of its mode of composition and the void of its infinitely proliferating division.” 347 He goes on
to assert that the fractal exists only in the second level, since monism or diagram, by definition locks
the scale and fractal ceases to be and becomes an image. As well as, the proliferating division leaves no
actual substance whatsoever: “..an insubstantial cutting function that does but does not be.” 348 One ends
up, Massumi argues, with three levels that belong to the fractal, yet the two of them never become its
being.349 The fractal, thus, is the desiring machine, that oscillates between the becoming full Body
Without Organs – descending to the virtuality of differential, virtual intensities, and becoming an
organism – the fixed repetition of the same process of production – the diagram.
Massumi suggests that the three dimensions of the fractal: “..can be thought of as dimensions of
time: the future of fractal's reception (it can effectively be a plane if observed from the proper
perspective), and the abyssal past of its genesis.” 350 Perception and thought is, as Massumi asserts,

344 Deleuze, G. (1994). Op. Cit. P. 288.

345 Ibid., P. xvii.
346 Ibid., P. 287.
347 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 35.
348 Ibid.
349 Ibid.
350 Ibid., P. 33.
78
fractal in nature .351 However, the fractal subjectivity mis-recognizes its fractality, and like an image in
Lacanian mirror stage, the subject perceives to be a diagram.
The result of this is the desire that is based on fractal's lack of its own image and the endless pursuit
of it – the desire pointing to the monistic fantasy lying in the future dimension. What is at stake is the
neglect of fractal's potential to produce difference.
Massumi asserts there are two ways that fractal can become dead: either by being diagrammed, and
thus staying the same or by reaching its own threshold and becoming-other. 352 The former, however,
seeks to introduce the stoppage of the process, and thus ceases to be a fractal by becoming the same,
while the latter affirms the becoming-other, and thus ceases to be what one is. In other words, the
former dies through persistently stopping the process of becoming and the latter becomes something
else that one was before.
These two distinct fractal 'deaths', are two distinct logics of desire: the desire for sameness, and the
desire to affirm the difference. The former is paranoid about chance, and the latter is an active
affirmation of chance in a Nietzschean sense 353. Thus the resulting two poles of DeleuzoGuattarian
subjectivities: the paranoid and the schizophrenic. Given the ontological stance that fractality is
primary, the schizophrenic pole of desire is affirmative of life and dynamism, whereas the paranoid
pole is reactionary and conservative, seeking to diminish what the body or the force can do354.
For Deleuze and Guattari, in line with Spinoza, thought and perception is as real as matter in
extension, albeit, of different mode:

The assertion of substance allows Deleuze and Guattari to maintain that the proposition
that thought-perception is always real and of the outside applies even to fantasy: if a fantasy
has substance, it is a body, and its apprehension by another thought-body is as real as the
perception of an object, or body with extension (thought and perception have only 'intension',
or virtual reality; they are real but not objective).355

The subjectivity than is the fractal which is fractalising through affecting and being affected, not
only by bodies in extension, but also thought bodies, affectual bodies or simply what Deleuze and
Guattari call: affects and percepts. In other words, the subject fractalizes and becomes other, each time
it perceives and/or is affected by other bodies. A with Mandelbrot's Joseph and Noah effects, one could

351 Ibid., P. 37.

352 Ibid.
353 Refer to Deleuze's book on Nietzsche : Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy. 2nd Edition. trans. by Hugh Tomlinson.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
354 Ibid.
355 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 157.
79
say that on the level of consciousness, the changes can be perceived as continuous or as discontinuous
ruptures.
Apparatuses of memory and diagrams of language usually help to ensure the production of the
continuity effect, however, as Deleuze and Guattari assert, the conscious recognition, the conjunctive
synthesis “so that's what it was” or simply the conscious reflection comes always secondary. It is a
fractal picture/diagram, that surfaces only after the stoppage or capture of fractal processes or in
DeleuzoGuattarian lingo – processes of desiring production. If thought is a fractal body, as well as
matter in extension, as well affects, than the individual body is a locus where these different modes of
substance communicate and affect each other. This is an utterly open network of fractals towards the
outside: “..the apparent interiority of the figure is misleading.” 356 The way the body is capable of being
affected and to affect in return, thus ensuring fractal subjectivity is well described in the following
passage by Massumi:

The thinking-perceiving body moves out to its outermost edge, where it meets another body
and draws it into an interaction in the course of which it locks onto that body's affects
(capacities for acting and being acted upon) and translates them into a form that is functional
for it (qualities it can recall). A set of affects, a portion of the object's essential dynamism, is
drawn in, transferred into the substance of the thinking-perceiving body.. Thought-perception is
a foray by one body into another's essence in such a way that the second is carried outside
itself. Thought-perception reaches into things, launches them up through the atmosphere of
language, and in the same motion returns them, altered, into the depths of matter.357

The example could be – to what Massumi here implicitly refers as well - the performative
utterances, as first described by Austin. Austin was developing the idea that utterances have a potential
to transform the reality of matter in extension: “...the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the
doing of an action..” 358. As Massumi observes (in addition to this example, Austin uses an example of
naming a ship, for example359) during the wedding, when one says 'I do', nothing changes corporeally,
however, the subjects are transformed utterly. They are transposed and inscribed in another
significatory series, and submitted to different set of habitual patterns. The re-inscription and change in
the symbolic universe directly affects the materiality. Furthermore, the way Koch's curve depends on
the algorithm to draw a self-replicated image of the fractal, so does, according to Massumi, the social

356 Ibid., P. 22.

357 Ibid., P. 36.
358 Austin, J.L. How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendong Press, 1962. P. 5
359 Ibid.
80
performative utterance function in the same manner as an algorithm, ensuring the social reproduction
of certain fractal diagram:

The subject of the wedding is the social equation of which 'I do' is the de facto diagram (the
sign of the culmination of a process, an index from which a formal diagram, for example a
discursive diagram consisting of a series of logical propositions, could be developed). The
subject of the wedding is the abstract machine of marriage in its linear functioning, expressible
as a realm of possibility: the connecting in actuality of one body to another as part of a life
progression; the serialization of wedding after wedding over an implicit time span subsisting in
each present connection.360

The subjectivity thus is a network of social diagrams perpetuating the habitual recognition response
patterns, but also always open for unsuspecting chance events or connections with fractal machines,
that are the cause of the subject's fractal process of becoming.
To conclude, one either perpetuates the code or the diagram of the social machine, by the process of
repetition, and daily utterances of “I do”, or one can uncover the social diagram, and by reconnecting
its constituent parts, twist the code and introduce the fractal differences. In other words one could
propose that the fractal in process of fractalization is the desire in process of desiring production.
To summarize how the fractal works we can ascertain that:
1.Fractal complicates the common understanding of dimensionality and thus, the identity of objects, by
introducing the multiplicity in scaling and making any image or diagram relative.
2.Fractal process produces self-similarity, however, similarity is only a secondary effect produced by
the observer himself. Fractal is definable only as partial object: neither as its diagram, nor as its
differentiating function.
3.Fractal operates like desire: it is capable of moving towards the differential reduction and thus
towards the abyss of the virtual, as does the BWO, as well as it is capable of connections and
disjunctions in creating fractal objects on higher scales, that produce organisms/diagrams.
4.Thought-perception are bodies that function in a fractal way. Subjectivity is a temporal diagram as
perceived through a self-reflection or reflection by others, however, it is secondary, since subjectivity,
through potential of affecting and being affected by its constituent desiring machines - is fractal in its
essence.
What follows is the speculation of the conjunctive synthesis between the notion of fractality and the
concept of family.
360 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 40.
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Fractal family (part two)

It seems that there are at least two perspectives that can be taken. First approach is to think of a
family that is fractal and fractalising. Second approach is to think of a fractal, temporary captured in a
diagram - as an abstract 'family'. To pursue the former approach is to move towards the critique of
representational family together with the possibility of empirical examples and propositions for the
processes that could initiate and propagate the process of fractalisation. To take the second route would
be to propose the notion of a family operating as a discourse - the way Foucault lays out it in his
inaugural lecture at the College de France - The Order of Discourse361.
At this point I will pursue the first approach, since it might produce more pragmatic and productive
material in the creative investigations of the concept of family, however, it seems that analytically it is
the familial effect of fractals themselves that is the supporting analytic backbone for thinking humanoid
or other kinds of families in general.
How does the fractal family function? To start answering the question, I believe it is important and
convenient, in line with the Deleuzian remark of always finding oneself and being in the middle of
things - to place oneself in the middle and to pursue from there. In our case it seems that the middle is
the Oedipal triangle, and the nuclear family.
The functions: mommy, daddy, the child – are fractal diagrams. Like Mandelbrot's geometrical
fractals, these symbolic mandates, symbolic diagrams appear to reproduce themselves in a self-similar
fashion. The diagram functions through being recorded, memorized, and habitually repeated. For
diagram to be perceived as a diagram it requires the capacity to memorize and thus produce a mental
image of self.
In rock climbing to perform a complicated move, requires not so much strength, as a multiple
repetition of the same move, until the elements of micro timing, muscle contraction and endurance, as
well as micro rests, speed and other qualities reach the right combination to successfully execute the
move.
The climber thinks through moves. It is no surprise to discover that climbers call hard routes that
require to come back again and again – the problems or the projects. However, problems for climbers,
as well as for Deleuze and Guattari aren't something that should be minimized or ideally get rid of. For
climbers the problems of the terrain in connections with the assemblage of physical body and its
memory is the driving force of the climbing desire. There are infinite variations of rock terrain as well
361 Refer to “Foucault, M. The Order of Discourse. Untying the text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Edited by Robert Young.
Bostong: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. P. 48-79.
82
as infinite possible modulations and micro memories, micro diagrams of one's physical parameters.
Thus, each climber, as well as each route are unique. The route itself can be/is climbed in a unique
and singular fashion: what for somebody, certain moment gets solved by finger strength, for the other,
the balance of feet or the attention to rock's surface and discovering its not yet exploited potential (a
little crack to put one's finger, where others have missed it). Each route creates a series of diagrams that
are recorded in the memory as the most efficient ways to execute the route. However, the route can
never be exhausted in the possibilities of how to execute it.
Whereas, the route itself – the bolts362 and the 'top'363, are themselves a little diagram, one can
move out of it as well as move differently within it. In other words, one can interpret the route, and
introduce variations – little desiring machines, even within the same route. To compose a new variation
is to introduce a problem into the previous diagram (the memory of the executed route) or simply to
fractalise it.
If symbolic mandates are diagrams, within diagrams, within the social machines, one can then
either reproduce the diagrams and thus enjoy the stable balance (a state) or one can problematise and
investigate the fractal scales of the symbolic mandates – introducing instability and fractal deviance
that at least temporarily escape the capture. The familial mandates such as father, mother, child, wife,
husband are diagrams of patterns of behaviour that are expected to be reproduced. The fractal family
initiates the process of experimentation and problematization of each diagram, as well as the higher
scale diagrams that get formed by connections and disjunctions of a lower scale diagram.
The fractal family initiates the reverse process of diagrammatizing and descends in depth of a
diagram. As with Mandelbrot's definition of fractals, the process of descent in scale, introduces the
fractal dimensions as well as 'frees' and unbinds fractals with their potentials from the initial diagram,
to be used and connected differently.
The fractal family is a DeleuzoGuattarian war machine, that: “..is like a pure and immeasurable
multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and power of metamorphosis. He [the war
machine] unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a
celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine
against apparatus. (Thousand Plateaus, 388)
The fractal family, however, always starts in the middle finding itself continuously diagrammed –
as (re)presented as a passive image. This is how Massumi describes the passive subjectivity of
marriage:
The subject of the wedding is the abstract machine of marriage in its linear functioning,

362 Metal rings, screwed in the rock. Used for the climbers to clip their rope for safety.
363 The 'final' hold where it is considered the route ends, and if reached, means that the route was successfully climbed.
83
 expressible as a realm of possibility: the connecting in actuality of one body to another as part
of a life progression; the serialization of wedding after wedding over an implicit time span
subsisting in each present connection.364

In other, words, in marriage, nothing changes to the bodies that are 'joined', however, everything
changes, since it defines the restricted field of possibilities (now you are allowed to love only one man
or one woman, and that is your wife, husband. Further, make sure that love should last till the day you
die)
The fractal family, first of all does not (not necessarily) become the opposite – the non-family, for
as Massumi observes, the opposites are structurally determined, and are the two sides of the same coin:
“..the outside limits of marriage, singledom and divorce, are an integral part of every wedding, the
boundaries without which it would have no shape.”365 It means that singledom and divorce are just
another diagrams – empty symbolic mandates waiting as potentials for the newly-weds.
The fractal family moves imperceptibly, retaining the image of the diagram within the the threshold
points of its definition, however, using it only as a mask to initiate supermolecular activities – the
transversal connections across the fractal scales. This is what Guattari means by transversality. The
communication and connections are established across the scales, thus one is always required to use a
shifting perspective along the way, in the meantime acquiring capability of inter-scale perception – the
ability to perceive as well as to exist between the scales, as a fractal.
As with Massumian supermolecule and water example mentioned earlier, the movement between
the scales tends to produce an unstable balance – which becomes the condition for the increased
sensitivity. Thus, the fractal family, by twisting the code of the initial diagram finds itself on very
unstable grounds, however, it opens virtual potentialities – the fractal paths that were selected out and
long 'forgotten'.
When thinking fractal-family, it seems convenient to divide it into the human fractal-families and
non-human fractal families. The former concentrating on social dimension and interpersonal relations
within the socius. The latter, extending the first one, suggests non-human assemblages and relations
with non-human objects, that form desiring machines or assemblages. This distinciton is purely
artificial, for both categories are one and the same – the fractal family of partial-objects. In other words,
the term human, does not have an intrinsic qualitative superiority over any other objects or term. It is
still useful for practical purposes to separate the two, since humnan-fractal family refers to its political
dimension, whereas, non-human family, stresses more its aesthetic dimension.

364 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 40.

365 Ibid., P. 39.
84
 Example 1 (human fractal-families):
“Father”, “Mother”, “Wife”, “Husband”, “Child” - are empty signifiers that diagram the fractal
subjectivities. Every social formation uses its particular sets of empty signifiers as a method for coding,
precisely because they are general and empty, and thus easily applicable to multiplicities or partial
objects. No signifier or group of signifiers operate independently from the general social inscription.
The definition of father and mother is not a matter of a free choice of individuals, but rather part of a
code of social machine. The Oedipal triangle requires the desire to flow within these restricted
mandates: be Loved by thy mother, respect thy father, then continue the fractal division and the self-
similar replication: 'love thy husband, be loved by thy wife, be an authority to thy children'. When
father speaks as the father it is the social machine that is speaking, when mother speaks as a mother, it
is a social machine that speaks, when husband/wife speak as husband and wife these are social
machines that speak.
Fractal family de-familializes itself. It becomes a group, or a band as for Hakim Bey, or a pack as
for Deleuze and Guattari. It can start of by disconnecting the initial points of Oedipal triangle and use
them for creating new kinds of connections: Father-becoming-mother, child-becoming-father, mother-
becoming-child. Fractal family does not have the father figure, and the 'law of the father'. It also doesn't
aspire for the lost unity and abundance of motherly figure. Fractal family is the family of 'orphans':

For the unconscious of schizoanalysis is unaware of persons, aggregates, and laws, and of
images, structures, and symbols. It is an orphan, just as it is an anarchist and an atheist. It is
not an orphan in the sense that the father's name would designate an absence, but in the sense
that the unconscious reproduces itself wherever the names of history designate present
intensities ('the sea of proper names').366
The names: 'father', 'mother', 'wife', 'husband', 'wife', become disconnected from structural
determinations, and start to operate only as the names of intensities. Fractal family has nothing to do
with biological persons and everything to do with the partial-fractal-objects. It means that biological
body might contain assemblages of different types of 'proper names': the father is also the boss, also the
clown, also the child and the brother but also the star gazer. Likewise, it means that the 'father' name,
the husband/wife, etc., names are not restricted to a particular biological body: 'I am your father, but I
am also x's,y's,z's father; I am your husband, but also his and her husband'. Instead of: “..man and
woman..transformed by 'I do' into the sacred procreative partnership of husband and wife, in
accordance with the laws of God and the State <...> not the singles scene, not divorce, but as yet
unimagined ways of bodies moving together, beyond boredom, beyond religion and taxes, maybe even
366 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 342.
85
beyond 'love' (that most potent of all Western order-words).”367 The only thing that is in common in the
abstract brotherhood/sisterhood of fractals is the difference-in-itself.

Example 2 (non-human fractal families)

So far we have discussed fractal family as consisting of human subjects/objects. However, there is
no value hierarchy when it comes down to a partial objects and desiring machines. In other words,
human body, celestial body, flower, river, garbage, baby, reflection of oneself in the mirror, historical
figure – all these partial objects can be as intensely invested and form different desiring hierarchies
than the 'normal', culturally legitimate objects of investment and hierarchies, regulating of what and
how, as well as how intensely to desire. The figure of schizo in Anti-Oedipus is used to show this non-
human desiring relation with the outside:

'He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of
every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a
dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the
moon.'368 To be a chlorophyll – or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such
machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time before the
man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have
been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no
such thing as either man or nature, only a process that produces the one within the other and
couples the machines together.369

Schizo's greatest suffering – the inability to identify with one privileged object – becomes his/her
greatest bliss: the experience of nature as a process – the continuous movement and unfolding: no time
and ability for interiority, for the Ego to take hold. Only the intensive connections with the outside.
Lenz does not reflect on the beauty of nature as if standing and contemplating the object from the
observer’s point of view. There is no distance of observational Ego in schizo, that is why Lenz 'lives',
'becomes' the partial objects he is confronted with, and that is why Deleuze and Guattari insist that the
schizo engages in: „..a harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as
close as possible to matter, to a burning living centre of matter..“ 370 The 'living centre of matter' seems
to refer here to the fractal nature and process of becoming of every partial object.
Whereas a 'normal' mind that economizes and perceives only what is 'beneficial' to perceive, and
367 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 32, 40.
368 Buchner (1993). Op. Cit.
369 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 2.
370 Ibid., P. 21.
86
thus categorizes and hierarchizes the objects of perception, the schizophrenic mind fails to establish
perceptual hierarchies and its own positioning henceforth. This is the cause of his/her 'suffering', for
instead of balanced or postponed perception and enjoyment (the Freudian 'reality principle'), schizo
exposes himself/herself to the intensities that verge on the limit of unbearability.
It might be fruitful to discuss the family in terms of its constituent forces, as well to make a
proposition that fractal family is essentially the family of forces of which bodies are only signs: “When
two opposed forces enter into relation, the force that takes the upper hand in the combat leaves a
remainder. This remainder, which measure the relation between the forces, or the gap between them, is
also a measure of the power one force has over the other. However, the remainder is no longer a force
signifying itself for another force, for the action of the operator has ceased; part of the remainder may
form a precipitate constituting a sign, in residual form. Thus the sign emerges from the absence of the
operator, as a distant residue of force; it is at one the memory of the operator's activity and the result of
its cessation.”371 This implies, that physical bodies are signs referring the past activity of forces. For
that reason, constituting forces of family, as well as family of forces (assemblages) are of primary
interest here, and not the bodies. Nietzsche separates two major modes of force: active and reactive.
The former transforming, the latter conserving/sustaining.

Active/reactive forces

The non-human fractal family thus is the assemblage of intensive affects and percepts, together
creating a desiring-machine or a family of active-reactive forces, that has increased its power to affect
or be affected: „The more ways a body could be affected the more force it had.“ 372 Deleuze explains in
Nietzsche and Philosophy, that: „..active force asserts itself, it affirms its difference and makes its
difference an object of enjoyment and affirmation. Reactive force, even when it obeys, limits active
force, imposes limitations and partial restrictions on it and is already controlled by the spirit of the
negative..“373 The fractal family becomes an active force which affirms chance events and seeks the
will to power.
For Deleuze, interpreting Nietzsche, the will to power is a: „differential element“ itself. 374 Thus,
the will to power of active force, to dominate, to affirm, to evaluate, to affect and to be affected should
not be misinterpreted as 'having' and hoarding power, but rather, it is the will to seek its own limits of
potentiality and thus in the process transform itself into something else: „Every force which goes to the
371 Massumi, B. (1992). Op. Cit. P. 59.
372 Deleuze (2006). Op. Cit. P. 62.
373 Ibid., P. 56.
374 Ibid., P. 61.
87
limit of its power is..active.“375
If reactive forces prevail through separating active forces from what they can do 376, the active
forces, on the contrary, increase the potential of what the body can do. Since: „Every relationship of
forces constitutes a body – whether it is chemical, biological, social or political.“ 377 The fractal family
is a body of active forces that increase the power of the ability to affect, and the ability to be affected or
sensibility. On the register of human relationships, Holland, borrowing Mary Parker Follet's distinction
between 'power-with' and 'power-over', suggests a similar explanation and distinction as between active
and reactive forces: „Power-with emerges from the articulation of differences each of which contributes
positively to a whole that is thereby greater than the merely arithmetic sum of its parts. Power-over, by
contrast, operates by constraint and limitation: it is the power to say no or to limit others to the
imitation of pre-determined roles, and the power to command obedience.“378
However, whereas Holland finds the concept of power-with applicable to the specific processes and
definition of participatory democracy379, the Nietzschean active force as interpreted by Deleuze, is not
reducible to a romantic idea of cooperation and synergy. For it is essentially an aggressive force for
which cooperation might be just one aspect of it. When speaking of affects, which is a synonym word
for forces, Deleuze and Guattari insist on this essentially aggressive and unpredictable nature of the
relationships between them:

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects
are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of
another body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and
passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.380

This is why Deleuze always seem to stress the difference between pleasure and desire. For him
pleasure principle seems to oscillate towards the stable equilibriums – the economized intensities – the
reactive forces, whereas the desire always engages with the limits and thresholds, and thus there is
nothing pleasurable in a comforting sense of a word, but only intensive experiences bordering on the
limits (the Lacanian word would be jouissance):”Consciousness is essentially reactive; this is why we
do not know what a body can do, or what activity it is capable of..And what is said of consciousness
must also be said of memory and habit. Furthermore we must also say it of nutrition, reproduction,
375 Ibid., P. 59.
376 Ibid.
377 Ibid., P. 40.
378 Holland, E.W. Nomad citizenship and global democracy. Deleuze and the Social. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2006. P. 198.
379 Ibid.
380 Deleuze and Guattari. (1988). Op. Cit. P. 284.
88
conservation and adaptation.”381
All those spheres (consciousness, memory, habit) belong for Deleuze to the domain of Ego which
is a reactive agency. 382 Henry Miller, one of Deleuze's favourite literary authors, asserts: „We must die
as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related. 383
Hence, fractal family denounces conservatory and reactionary agency of an Ego. In order to move
fractally or rhizomatically384 Ego becomes an obstacle that is overcome by becoming un-self-
conscious, and thus outside-superconscious.
American writer, Henry Miller – writing about his own life, as well as reflecting on his attempts to
be a writer - illustrated very well in his autobiographical novels of what being super-conscious of the
outside meant. What follows is the exposition of some literary examples on the theme of un-self-
consciousness and outside-superconsciousness. In agreement with Deleuze and Guattari, I believe it is
instructive to seek art - in this case literary authors - for they seem to expose areas and zones of
intensities where regular argumentative structure of academic language, presenting blocks of meaning
(eg. the format of the thesis paper) becomes limiting. They are meant to be treated as illustrative
examples, and not the objects of literary analysis. Here is an expert from the book Plexus, which is
illustrative of Miller's literary character's relations to the outside and a subsequent attempt to 'fold it'
within the interiority of linguistic signs and writing.

381 Deleuze (2006). Op. Cit. P. 41.

382 Ibid., P. 41.
383 Miller, H. Sexus. New York: Grove Press, 1965. P. 337.
384 Please see Deleuze and Guattari “Thousand Plateaus”: Introduction, Rhizome
89
Henry Miller

If I went for a walk – and I was constantly seeking excuses to take a walk 'to explore', as I
put it – it was for the deliberate purpose of transforming myself into an enormous eye. Seeing
the common, everyday thing in this new light I was often transfixed. The moment one gives
close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome,
indescribably magnified world in itself. Almost an 'unrecognisable' world. The writer waits in
ambush for these unique moments. He pounces on his little grain of nothingness like a beast of
prey. It is the moment of full awakening, of union and absorption, and it can never be forced.
Sometimes one makes the mistake or commits the sin, shall I say, of trying to fix the moment,
trying to pin it down in words. It took me ages to understand why, after having made exhaustive
efforts to induce these moments of exaltation and release, I should be so incapable of recording
them. I never dreamed that it was an end in itself, that to experience a moment of pure bliss, of
pure awareness, was the end all and be all.385

'Close attention' seems to be the keyword here describing what I have called super-conscious of the
outside. One becomes 'an enormous eye'. An eye, that strains to its capabilities of perception and
extracts fractal differences and dimensions from all-too-familiar objects. It is not an object that stands
out, but rather the unique moment or the 'event' where one becomes affected, as well as affects in turn.
The circuit of: Blade of grass- Miller the eye – the reader reading the passage..
With every intense moment of super-consciousness, there is the moment of forgetfulness of an “I”.
The 'unrecognisable world', the 'transfixtion', the mystery, 'the pure bliss'– although not an often used
words in an academic papers, become necessary if one tries to describe the becomings – the fractality
of objects, within the fractality of space, finally leading to a fractality of self. The dichotomy of man-
nature becomes broken.
In the following example from the book Sexus, Miller, dwells on the nature of possessive love, and
its supporting emotion of jealousy. In these brief quote he denounces the common notion of love, that is
based on lack, and treats love as a positive force, that should not be restricted, but in fact multiplied and
spread. Thinking becoming-family or fractal family would mean precisely a loving relations, that do
not become possessive

385 Miller, H. Plexus. 2nd Edition. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. P. 40.
90
Henry Miller on love and jealousy

I didn’t give a fuck how many men were in love with her as long as I was included in the
circle. I felt sorry for Carruthers, sorry that he should be a victim of jealousy. I had never been
jealous in my life. Maybe I had never cared enough. The one woman I had desperately wanted I
had relinquished of my own free will. To have a woman, to have anything, as a matter of fact is
nothing: It's the living with a person that matters, or the living with possessions. Can you go on
forever being in love with persons or things? She could just as well admit that Carruthers was
madly in love with her – what difference would it make in my love? If a woman is capable of
inspiring love in one man she must be capable of inspiring it in others. To love or be loved is no
crime. The really criminal things is to make a person believe that he or she is the only one you
could ever love.386
In Sexus, Maude his wife, caught Miller with his lover in the marital bed, and the divorce followed.
It is only after a divorce - when Miller ends up having a threesome with his ex-wife and her house-mate
- that he observes a change in his ex-wife and the way she is capable to share him with someone that is
almost a 'stranger'. It is this temporary glimpse of Miller's that illustrates the family to come, the non-
familial family.

Henry Miller, after having sex with his ex-wife

And Maude...Having satisfied herself to her heart's content, she had probably realized for
the first time that it was useless to harbour a grudge against the other woman. If, she may have
told herself, if it were possible to be fucked like that whenever she wished, it wouldn't matter
what claims the other one had on me. Perhaps it entered her mind for the first time that
possession is nothing if you can't surrender yourself. Perhaps she even went so far as to think
that it might be better this way – having me protect her and fuck her and not having to get
angry with me because of jealous fears. If the other one could hold on to me, if the other one
could keep me from running around with every little slut that came across my path, if together
they could share me, tacitly of course and without embarrassment and confusion, perhaps after
all it might be better that way, fucked without fear of being betrayed, to be fucking your own
husband who is now your friend (and perhaps a lover again), to be taking what you want of
him, calling him when you need him, sharing a warm, passionate secret with him, reliving the
old fucks, learning new ones, stealing and yet not stealing, but giving oneself with pleasure and
abandon, growing younger again, losing nothing except a conventional tie...yes, it might be
386 Miller. (1965). Op. Cit. P. 51.
91
 ever so much better.387

The misinterpretation of these passages would be that this is the propagation of multiple sexual
partnerships. Of course it is that. But also, more importantly, it does not necessarily have to be that.
One of the essential messages in Miller's books seems to be the propagation of multiple love partners.
Miller in his biographical books constantly exhibits the quality of being unable to restrict love for
something or someone specific. Like the DeleuzoGuattarian schizo, he follows the intensities.
For us, the readers, it should be of no importance what the actually flesh and blood of Miller was
like, with his active as well as reactive sides. What matters is the family of affects and percepts or the
war-machine in a Deleuzoguattaarian sense that gets assembled through his literary persona. To
conclude the part, it is the essential (or the shadowy) aim of this paper to become also in its own
humble way a little family of concepts, affects and percepts.
For Aldous Huxley it is the Mescaline (known also as LSD), that enables to open the 'doors of
perception388'. Huxley states that the chemical imbalance caused in brains, by inducing substances, in
this case LSD seem to achieve the effect of disconnecting rigid connections of habitual thinking and
habituated potential for associations. This enhancing experience of LSD has been observed, and
became almost a cliché description of this hallucinogen. Nevertheless its fractalising effects and the
potential of enchanting the field of perception and affection cannot be denied.

Aldous Huxley. Mind altering substances

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him
and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in universe. The function of the
brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of
largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise
perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special which is
likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at
Large. But insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological
survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and
nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness
which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.389

387 Ibid., P. 242.

388 The title of Aldous Huxley's book
389 Huxley, A. The doors of perception and Heaven and Hell.5th Edition. New York: Perrenial Library, 1990. P. 22.
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 Huxley seems to sound a bit deterministically here regarding the function of brains with regards to
filtering perception. One of the main points Deleuze and Guattari makes in Anti Oedipus is that: what is
deemed 'useful' or 'practical', and thus causing the 'reduction of valve' - is established and controlled by
social-formation and social production. That is how the social formation produces a surplus: through
the reduction and channelling of perception and ability to affect and be affected, for the purposes that
seem to be (although maybe well-meant) entirely of the reactive nature.

It takes about 29 minutes

of staring at the blade of grass
to transfix oneself,
and cause the attention of the authoritative gaze..

Deleuze, however, goes one step further then Huxley and asks the question, by quoting William
Burroughs, if one could have 'the effects of drugs and alcohol', without their full actualization and
inscription on the body: “Imagine that everything that can be attained by chemical means is accessible
by other paths...' “390 For Deleuze, the mind altering substances, do nothing more, and nothing less than
provide a glimpse of non-alienated relations with bodies. Hence, the ambivalent nature of mind altering
substances – the opening of 'Mind at Large', as well as the actualization on the body through its degrees
of destruction. Here Deleuze seems to defend neither drug and alcohol usage nor the abstinence. What
he seems to suggest is that one could go further than the usage of mind altering substances, by avoiding
the 'actualization' on the body through a 'counter-actualization'.391 For Deleuze the event is virtual, and
actualization is always the 'betrayal' of an event 392 Counter-actualization, following the actualization
offers an opportunity for the event to to continue fractalising in other events, without 'coming down'
and stopping with a body:

The eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is also inscribed in the flesh. But
each time we must double this painful actualization by a counter-actualization which limits,
moves, and transfigures it. We must accompany ourselves – first, in order to survive, but then
even when we die. Counter-actualization is nothing, it belongs to a buffoon when it operates
alone and pretends to have the value of what could have happened. But, to be the mime of what

390 Deleuze, G. Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London:
Athlone Press, 1990b. P. 161.
391 Ibid.
392 Ibid.
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 effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification
with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only
chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualization. It is to give to the crack the
chance of flying over its own incorporeal surface area, without stopping at the bursting within
each body; it is, finally, to give us the chance to go farther than we would have believed
possible.393

It is effectively the plea by Deleuze to reverse the process of 'intoxication' by reversing the means
one has at the disposal to induce the effects of an event. From the intoxication being the temporary
cause of desiring-production that escapes the molar structures, to the tactics of twisting the molar
structure, becoming the cause of 'intoxication' that potentially does not have bodily hangovers at its
limits, but has a tendency to spread and infect others indefinitely:

We can not give up the hope that the effects of drugs and alcohol (their 'revelations') will be
able to be relived and recovered for their own sake at the surface of the world, independently of
the use of those substances, provided that the techniques of social alienation which determine
this use are reversed into revolutionary means of exploration.394

Fractal family becomes a locus and means for these explorations. Encompassing human and non-
human aspects, it modifies socially-alienated structures, producing a surplus of love that intoxicates
and fractalises in all directions...
Human fractal families and non-human fractal families seem to form conjunctive syntheses and
transversal connections. It is for this reason that when thinking of fractal family one has to think
simultaneously about these two dimensions. In other words, the binary distinction only helps to
diagram the processes which in themselves are not binary, but rather are found on different fractal
plateaus. The human fractal families could also be named a political plateau and non-human families,
an aesthetic plateau. These both however are one and the same thing. It is what Miller seems to insist
when he proclaims that: “..the art of living involves the act of creation. The work of art is nothing. It is
only the tangible, visible evidence of a way of life, which, if it is not crazy is certainly different from
the accepted way of life..For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is
suicidal.”395Life as an art has always a politico-aesthetic dimension, acting on both registers at the same
time. Fractal family is an action at both registers at the same time. Politics without aesthetical
393 Ibid.
394 Ibid.
395 Miller, H. Henry Miller on writing. New York. New Directions, 1964. P.100.
94
dimension leads to, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as 'artificial families'; 396 whereas aesthetics
without political dimension, as Miller says, 'is nothing'. Like man-nature, the political-aesthetic, is the
divisions that does not work when thinking fractally397.
To conclude the second part of this paper, we've seen that the Oedipal family is only a diagram of
what is the essentially fractal nature of any family. This diagrams are of a conservative and reactive
nature, that relies on self-consciousness, and is supported by the morality systems or/and axioms of the
State. To counter this, we have introduced the family of concepts like supermolecular, tribal, fractal,
subject-group, active-forces to develop a conception of a family that is radically opened to the outside
and that initiates and propagates flows of desire, rather than blocking it into the restricted dead ends.
The common notion of family is supported by the memory of genealogy of the bloodline. The
genealogy and memory of fractal family is 'biocosmic'. 398 The family of familial network, gets to be de-
familiarized. It becomes a pack, a tribe. The fractal nature of the individual body refers to the 'pack',
'swarm' within oneself that seem in their turn to form packs with an outside partial-objects, and
fractalize to the outside – in process of unfolding and undoing the reactionary Ego. Fractal family
remains always 'in the middle' – neither the diagram or representation, nor the regression into the void:
the two being the double poles of death (which is not an absolute end but only a limit for the
perspective of an observer). Non-restricted love, creation, sensation, that does not stop, but always is in
process – are but the modes of the same fractal process, that fractal family participates in. Fractal
family is not a state: it is not an inverse image of a 'regular' family, but rather, it is a becoming, it is
always escaping the state. It is always becoming more than a state.

396 Deleuze and Guattari. (1984). Op. Cit. P. 38.

397 To think fractally is to start not with a premises or axioms, but with partial objects at hand.
398 Ibid., P. 170.
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CONCLUSION

The contemporary Oedipal family presents us with a paradox. On the one hand - as a social unit of
Capital's formation – it proclaims its fundamental base to be love and a loving relationship. This holds
emancipatory potential; but this potential gets counteracted, on the other hand, by the imposition of
strict limits and controlling diagrams of what one is allowed to love and how one should love, and
when one should and how intensely love may be experienced.
This trapping of desire, according to Deleuze and Guattari, results in representing desire as always
lacking and, thus, as an ongoing chase for an ever-escaping object of desire on the pre-conscious level.
However, unconsciously, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that desire never lacks, and invests directly
into the social formation as a whole. The result of psychic investment into formation is a subjectivity
that is always lacking, but unconsciously fully invested, and 'loving' the social formation that it finds
itself in. Guattari states that the relationship between the subject and the social formation or the group
fantasy that one unconsciously invests can be either an active one – where 'subject group' always re-
negotiates its fantasmatic foundations (effectively, its own subject-hood as well) – or a passive one –
where subjected group passively internalizes the fantasmatic foundations and unconsciously desires
them, ending with the desire that desires its own repression399.
In the first part the thesis establishes that the Oedipal family is not a determining social unit that
gets projected upon the social formation. Rather, it is the social formation that gets simulated within the
Oedipal triangular confines. We have seen that the originality of Capitalistic social formation,
compared to the previous ones, is that instead of coding the socius, it functions by deterritorializing and
decoding it on the one hand, and, on the other, re-territorializing it by applying the axioms which
function through the methods of quantification (instead of qualitative codes). Nevertheless it still relies
on the archaic notions of 'contract', that in order to be justified need to rely in turn on the transcendent
notions of sovereignty with its supplementary repressive apparatuses that reinforce these contracts.
From the perspective of desiring production, the former quality of Capital erasing all the qualitative
restrictive symbolic structures including the family model itself seems to be profoundly schizoid and
emancipatory. However, the latter quality of being in need of the State apparatus to set its own inner
limits results in anti-production that becomes immanent to the production process itself. The State,
being the agent of anti-production, becomes secondary in Capitalist production serving the purpose of
absorbing the surplus of Capital.
399 Guattari. (2006). Op. Cit. P.420.
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 Therefore, as we have already seen, even though Capital in its post-industrial form does not require
a nuclear family code, it cannot dispense with the Oedipal triangle that produces obedient subjectivities
who respect the transcendent law (the name of a father) and seek the supposedly lost unity of
themselves (the mother). The by-product of this obedient and normalized subjectivity is a neurotic
subject.
The Oedipal triangle, which is the base diagram for the Oedipal family, produces subjectivity that
gets caught between these two poles of normal or molar position or neurotic position - experiencing a
perpetual lack in the desire. Following Deleuze's and Guattari's position that the proper revolutionary
tactics towards Capitalistic formation is not an antagonistic contra-subjectivity—that is, nothing but an
inverse state of the former—but pushing capital as well as its Oedipal diagram to its own logical limits.
This implies a subjectivity that is properly schizophrenic. Not schizophrenic in terms of illness, but as a
process that is in-line with legitimate syntheses of the unconscious, and thus causing desire to flow, and
not to get trapped.
This DeleuzoGuattarian critique of Capital is essentially affirmative and not reactionary in the
Nietzschean sense, implying bad conscience. Hence when re-thinking the concept of family that would
function as a desiring-machine, meaning that it would engage in desiring-production, one has to start
with what Massumi proposed as stopping the habitual circuits of stimuli and responses. It means that
the family has to de-familialize. The defamilialization would imply the disconnection of triangular
circuits, and of opening up and establishing desiring connections with the outside. It doesn't mean,
however, that the concept family becomes empty.
As we have seen, the concept family retains its endoconsistency through at least two other
supporting concepts. The two that I have suggested are the concept of love and the concept of group –
as a generic multiplicity. By using these supportive concepts, remade using the analytic tools presented
in Anti-Oedipus – the three legitimate synthesis of desiring-production I map out the constellation of
other supportive concepts as: 'subject-group', 'supermolecule', 'monster family', fractal-family',
'becoming-other', 'family of active forces', that endeavour - each adding its own potentiality – to circle
around the notion of family, that is based on the ontology of dynamism and not a system of
representation. Therefore, the purpose was not to produce another image of 'alternative' family, but
rather outline how becoming family would work, given the non-restrictive and inclusive nature of its
constituent concepts of love and group (multiplicity).
Insisting that becoming family is essentially a fractal – meaning that it is neither a diagram nor a
void, but rather operating in between – meant also that groups exist not only on an interpersonal level,
but also on intra-personal as well as supra-personal levels. Additionally, the group gets limited to
human relationships, but becomes inclusive of non-human relationships, and thus there arises also the
97
possibilities of non-human groups and families.
Becoming-family implies radical equality in difference. It is the Deleuzian notion of difference in-
itself that ontologically grounds all matter-in-extension and is the driving life-force itself. Therefore,
becoming family is any group's ability to affirm difference, meaning to face its own death as it is—as a
diagram—and to become something else.
In conclusion, in-line with the DeleuzoGuattarian notion of partial-objects, this work itself—a
philosophical engagement in the process of creating concepts—is necessarily fractal. This implies that
the intention is not to produce an intellectual object that is all-encompassing and systematic. Rather,
this work aspires to the fractal process itself, and remains distrustful of uncritical representative
models.
The method that Deleuze and Guattari describe in What is Philosophy?, is one of problematization
and complication, instead of clarification by resemblances and similarities. The method is not one of
producing a pre-packaged intellectual product, but the presentation of a viral diagram or a war machine
in a DeleuzoGuattarian sense, that is able to affect, and hopefully to stop some habitual thought circuits
and initiate the thinking process proper, which is one of problematization. It is a paradigmatic shift
from answering the question of what does it mean, to thinking how it would work, and what would
induce the process and desiring-production, instead of capturing it in the form of stable representation
and fixed subjectivities.
This process oriented paradigm is illustrated very well by the following quote from Thousand
Plateaus, which, without too much exaggeration, sums up this work as well: “The water point is
reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always
between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy
and a direction of its own.”400

400 Deleuze and Guattari. (1988). Op. Cit. P. 419.

98
 APPENDIX

Illustration 1: Stable and Unstable Balance

Source: <http://www.intechopen.com/source/html/22198/media/image5.jpg>. Accessed: 2013.04.05

99
 Illustration 2: Klein Bottle

Source:<http://iowahawk.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451eb3469e20148c733dce2970c-500wi>.Accessed,
12 04 2013.

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Illustration 3: Möbius Strip
Source:<http://www.philobiblon.com/isitabook/bookarts/mobius.jpg>. Accessed, 12 04 2013.

101
Illustration 4: Koch curve

<http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles2/102448/projects/720515/ae7b73fb07f4f3d71f74c5e24448a04d.j
pg>. Accessed 26 04 2013.

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