just dug up this part of a machine thread from mid 98:
>From: Unleesh@xxxxxxx
>Date: Sun, 31 May 1998 20:52:44 EDT
>Subject: Re: Re: machines
>
>This is beginning to sound like Richard Dawkin's idea of bodies as machines
>designed to carry genes along ... I'm not sure I buy into that notion ...
>
> It seems to me that multicellular organisms are more like colonies, that
>perhaps behave in some ways like machines ... an eye could be considered a
>"device" to capture light, but I think there's a more organismic answer ; at
>least one that is half way between an organismic and a more machinic answer.
>Certainly the machine METAPHOR or MODEL may be of use in highlighting certain
>aspects of things. But inasmuch as it links techne to nature and thus is
>capable of justifying the worst of capitalist commodity technology by
>somehow insinuating that it is perfectly "natural" I have every intention of
>resisting it. Don't get me wrong. In a schizo sense, I love the "cyborg" model
>because of the AFFECTS it produces. I don't give a shit whether cyborgs actually
>ever
>come to be on this planet. As an artist, particular models can produce
>particular effects. I can deterritorialize those models from the institutional
>settings in which they arose and resist those institutions ... I don't see a
>need to put millions of dollars into research to create some new alien way of
>being ... We are surrounded by alien ways of being ... Nature! ... Why
>privilege the machinic model? (I know, I asked, but I am directing this
>somewhat at Guattari, or his ghost in any case) Why not describe things as
>insectoid? Or at least "contraption-like"? Contraption has more of a slapped-
>together feel, something created by bricolage, which would distinguish it from
>those machines created through deliberate in-advance blueprintage...
>Again, I think there is some value in studying the way colonies coalesce and
>morph to gather, focus, and produce effects ... We could then perform a
>McLuhanite reversal, and based on the principle that tools are extensions of
>our biology, we could say that machines are way primitive, way lo-tech, way
>meager imitations of these colonial e/a-ffective coalescings ...
>Something to play with at least...
RE: models/machines
would anyone like to respond to the idea that while WE can obviously
treat it as a model, d&g apply it as if it were not just a possible
model but as "the case" (whatever that means...)??
somehow, the idea that d&g are postmodernistically offering "models"
doesn't seem right to me...
re: the word "machine": a lot of good points were made but what didn't
come out of this thread was:
1. the use of the term "machine' in Chance and Necessity by Monod, which
is cited repeatedly in AO and ATP; (see further on...)
2. the strong distinction between the technical (which would include
mechanistic ideas about machines) and the "machinic" , which is linked
to production, immanence & the disjunction/conjunction/synthesis of
flows.
also, I think Unleash's comments about cyborgs and the idea that a
machinic metaphor/model is somehow implicated in capitalisms commodity
fetishism emphasise a general lack of engagement with the whole
machinic side of d&g (this is not meant as a criticism of Unleash!): if
we take the idea of machines in d&g at all seriously, it seems to me a
pretty obvious conclusion that human beings have always been/are defined
in part by their cyborg-ism.
assuming (as I do) that it is the encounter with/creation of technology
that has produced the threshold between humans and other
primates/mammals (rather than some kind of "progress" or innate
superiority...) it only takes the removal of the boundary set by the
idea of machines as necessarily technical and discrete from us to make
all technology appear as a human-machine symbiosis... a cyborgism. why
assume that we have not been re-produced through technology? what
seperates us, keeps our flows seperate? clearly, nothing. machines
have never just be "tools" - they always react back upon the user, to
the extent that we are kidding ourselves when we imagine the "user" as
seperate. For all its faults, Mcluhan's recognition of this viz. the
printing press/the alphabet is important and relevant.
following from this (sketch), we are all "cyborgs" in that we all use
machines - and that encounter is not clearly demarked, not "safe", we do
not retain an unchanged "identity"; flows intersect, and produce.
if this cyborgism can be drawn from technical machines, how much more so
is this the case when we consider non-technical machines in the sense
d&g or Monod talk about them... biological and geological processes
understood as machines, which does not mean mechanically (although
obviously the repetiotion of homeostatic processes is important), but
"immanently productive" and therefore not needing a transcendent/not
needing a supplementary dimension to be explained by. isn't this what
they mean by the word machine?
(I think the word has a particular stigma in english, which (as was
pointed out in the original thread) is not so important in french; but,
on the other hand - surely the philosophical stigma comes partly from
Descartes' use of the term in french?! in that light it seems a peculiar
choice, certainly. My impression from Monod, however, is that the term
is used functionally, and unproblematically. It is descriptive, not
essentialist. it indicates what something(s!) does, not what it "is"....
)
- which is why - to pick up another strand of the thread - the use of
"flows" is not uncritical or metaphysical... machines produces flows out
of flows (of matter); energy is matter in motion/ matter is energy in
motion/ the word "is" is inadequate to a description of matter! "it"
flows! it changes! it becomes! matter is not fixed, the universe is not
undifferentiated homogeneity -- things are happening!! - the universe is
an event!
anyone?
dan h.99
--
hey! notice the new address for
machine @
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Field/1030/
aeon of horus @
http://www.tw2.com/staff/daniel/
Ware ware Karate-do o shugyo surumonowa,
Tsuneni bushido seishin o wasurezu,
Wa to nin o motte nashi,
Soshite tsutomereba kanarazu tasu.
We who study Karate-do,
Should never forget the spirit of the samurai,
With peace, perseverance and hard work,
We will reach our goal without failure.