desiring machines

Let us consider the word "machines" as a VERB rather than a noun. The process
of desiring inherently engages in a process of machining. Machining is nested
or folded within the process of desiring.
 To think about "machining" as a process is not to stand outside the process
of invention, reify it, and project it backwards. How does an inventor invent?
Without knowing how the product will turn out, or how everything will fit
together. What is the process of tinkering, of fitting this thing into that,
of recipe-ing, of taking partial objects and encouraging their quirks or
talents to fit together into an assemblage that produces a flow? So we must
study the creative process of the inventor, and see how machines are made, and
then we can map this onto the process of desiring. The process of desiring
creates or collects an assemblage of elements or partial objects in order to
produce a flow. Imagine a tinkerer in a junkyard, taking the detritus of
others -- junked cars, etc., stuff that once served a function, and with a set
of tools like a welder, saw, etc., creating new objects, machines, sculptures,
casting off some parts, integrating others, surrounded by cast-offs, some of
which will become part of future machinings, etc.  Or imagine beginning with a
number of different materials with various sensory qualities and figuring out
ways to put them together to produce desirable effects : for example, collect
the bark of various trees and feel their qualities and imagine what you could
put together with them by actively experimenting with it :: this is how the
human race formed itself, this is how it formed its assemblages of huts-
villages-bows&arrows-gathering baskets, etc. Please underline the fact that
none of these things had ever existed before. The invention of a bark skirt is
an INCREDIBLE invention, the highest tech imaginable, because there was
NOTHING comparable! People experimented with the sensorimotor possibilities of
the objects and living things in their environment, and came up with creative
syntheses. We have become so reified we forget the possibilities of this. We
think that everything that can be invented has been invented. Deleuze and
Guattari suggest that we can return to this pre-form-ational inventive
creativity of our ancestors. This has implications for ecological
consciousness. When you go on a hike, collect some cast-offs of the bodies you
experience : sandstone bodies, tree bodies, bush bodies, etc., and continue to
experience, experience, experience them without preforming an idea of what
they can do. As you begin to gestalt this, connect your collection together to
see what effects it produces. What can be done with this? Then begin to invent
something without knowing what you are inventing, guided by the sheer pleasure
of the inventing process itself and the interesting intensities or flows of
sensation it is producing. This is the desiring process. This is "desiring
machines".

(un)leash